Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The main pushback of substance I’ve had to my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future is that this era of clean energy abundance indeed is upon us, making manufactured food feasible and confining my arguments for agrarian localism and a small farm future to the dustbin of history. I doubt that, and in this post I’ll try to elucidate some of those doubts.
If the grounded sense of beauty Momaday derived from Kiowa cultural expressions is to play a role in shaping our response to social and ecological collapse, it will need a territory that can sustain it.
If we put all our efforts into creating a system of electric heat, what we’re going to produce is very little warmth for most people, a whole lot of wasted resources and toxic trash — and no capacity to produce any energy at all within a few decades.
The heat and extreme climate records of 2023 shocked scientists. So where are we heading? Given current trends, the world will zoom past 2°C of warming and the Paris climate goal of limiting warming to 1.5-2°C.
What if… the Transition movement could play a part in putting justice at the heart of the ‘transition’ we’re working towards, in our communities and beyond?
By developing the commons paradigm and discourse, its practices and ethical values will have many valuable impacts, not just in the agriculture and food sectors, but more universally.
On this episode, economist Steve Keen offers a deep forensic history of why modern economic theory has neglected the role of energy in productivity – and why this “Energy Blindness” is now a major blindspot in how our culture views the present – and the future.
Due to its incorporation of a simple “neural network” loosely analogous to the human brain, the perceptron of 1958 is recognized as a forerunner of today’s most successful “artificial intelligence” projects – from facial recognition systems to text extruders like ChatGPT.
The longer we wait to act, the higher the cliff, the more painful the landing, and the more difficult the transition to a steady state economy.
We can only say very generally that something on which we mutually depend for our survival and well-being is a commons, and through our implication into a commons, we are called forth to action, toward the need to collaboratively govern this commons together (be it digital, urban, educational, atmospheric, etc.). But beyond this, their logics are diverse.
With devastating extreme heat and storms and floods, 2023 was the first year 1.5°C warmer than the 1850-1900 baseline, and both Antarctic sea-ice loss and record northern hemisphere sea-surface temperatures were way beyond the ranges projected by climate models.
Deep winter has given me enough time to take a long pause to appreciate what I have. At this moment. Whatever I have right in front of me.
