Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The two statements – Ezra Silk of the Climate Mobilization’s 100-plus page Victory Plan and Bill McKibben’s essay “A World at War” – have led to a healthy and vigorous debate about these ideas and their potential to play a role in the US response to the greatest global challenge of the 21st century.
Authors Richard Heinberg and David Fridley in their recent book Our Renewable Future make the case for a society that runs on 100 percent renewable energy. But they don’t pull any punches, giving us both the good news and the bad news.
A few days from now, 2016 will have passed into the history books. I know a fair number of people who won’t mourn its departure, but it’s pretty much a given that the New Year celebrations here in the United States, at least, will demonstrate a marked shortage of enthusiasm for the arrival of 2017.
It is the tiniest of sounds, yet it penetrates the collection of louder and deeper bleats that surround it.
NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed. LEAN LOGIC: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It Edited by Shaun Chamberlin (Chelsea Green Publishing, September 2016, 623 pages, Hardcover $50.00) and SURVIVING THE FUTURE: Culture, Carnival, and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy A Story from Lean Logic Selected … Read more
The problem of sustainability is simple enough to state. It requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay—what Albert Howard called “the Wheel of Life”—must turn continuously in place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted. For this to happen in the stewardship of humans, there … Read more
We have empirical evidence that extreme options never win in this procedure. They always lose.
I planted them with the hope
That my foolish culture will soon desist in its
Suicidal efforts to sever the ties
Between humans and the Earth
And so I come to my final blog post of 2016, and what a year it’s been. I’ve been asked by Dark Mountain to write a retrospective of it, which I hope will be up on their website soon. I’ll be offering some thoughts on the larger events of the world in that post, so here I’m mostly just going to offer a few nuggets focused on my specific theme of small-scale farming, and its future.
NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed. Hydropower provides 85 percent of the world’s renewable electricity, but comes with a hefty environmental price tag. Here’s what some are doing to fix that. December 20, 2016 — Humanity got its first large-scale electricity thanks to hydropower. On Aug. 26, 1895, water flowing over Niagara … Read more
Photo-Voltaics (PV) is an energy source where this problem has been more acute. Equipment and installation prices collapsed four or five fold since 2010, but published EROEI studies have not converged; in fact it appears they dispersed even further.
That’s my topic for this newsletter — why proof is important in today’s social and political environment, what kinds of points need to be proved, and how the process of argumentation and evidence-gathering needs to proceed.
