Act: Inspiration

Peak Moment #172: The pee and poo show

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Laura Allen gives an intimate tour of a home-built composting toilet in her Bay Area urban home. The nitrogen-rich composted “humanure” is used to fertilize the lush edible-food garden, and doesn’t waste precious drinking water like flush toilets. The co-founder of Greywater Action shows the throne-like toilet compartment whose distinctive feature is a urine diverter. Pee and poop are collected in separate containers beneath the toilet, and are accessed outside the house. Sterile pee is watered in at the base of plants, while poop is collected in barrels and aged for a year or more until it has composted fully. What a way to go!

Shale Gas: a review of PBS coverage of “Gasland”

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Two months ago the PBS show, “NOW,” examined the issue of hydraulic fracturing and its apparent environmental and health impacts. PBS built its story around the exceptional efforts of Josh Fox, the maker of the recent award-winning documentary, “Gasland.”

Is humanity inherently unsustainable?

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What makes a mild-mannered biology professor call for a planned collapse of the economy? Canadian scientist Bill Rees would know. He was an inventor of the ecological footprint concept, and has been measuring our impact on the planet for decades. Now he’s worried about survival. Ours and all living systems.

Changing society’s behavior to use less oil and other resources

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I used to deal with billionaires, managing their money, and some of them had $100,000,000, and all they wanted to do was to get to $200,000,000, and then quit. And then they got to $200,000,000, and they got to $500,000,000, et cetera, and I noticed at the same time that the clerks who were making $25,000 a year were just as happy as these billionaires. (YouTube and transcript from former editor of The Oil Drum)

Recovery of what? We need a new way of assessing growth

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The British economy is officially, technically growing. Growth figures in the region of 0.2% confirm that it is out of recession. But what does this even mean? After months and months, in which funny money was flowing off the printing presses of its central bank and its formerly neo-liberal state came to represent more than 50% of GDP, we can be forgiven for viewing such statistics as a hall of mirrors.

White nights and chicken skin

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Some days earlier we were debriefing from a speaking engagement at Tartu University, sitting in an open air café, when one of the students took up the argument about human nature and cultural inertia and said it would never be possible to get people to change their habits quickly enough to avert catastrophic climate change and die-off. We remarked that as long as there was a scintilla of hope, we could do no less than to keep trying to shift the paradigm.

Resilient gardening – Part I

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Hail. Gale-force winds. Torrential rains. Blistering sun. Droughts. Late freezes. Flooding. Squash bugs, deer, squirrels, raccoons, tomato hornworms, spider mites. In any year, gardening can be a sheer exercise in will. With increasingly unpredictable weather, and zones that are already shifting North, it becomes almost an exercise in prayer.

Deconstructing Dinner: Whole Foods Market targeted by organic advocates/local food system development spotlight/carnivore chic

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The U.S.-based Organic Consumers Association is the largest of its kind in the United States – representing thousands of supporters of organic food. Over the past year, the organization has taken a strong stance against grocery giant Whole Foods Markets, calling upon them to “walk their talk” and increase their support for organic products…In November 2008, farmer, entrepreneur and member of the NFU Kim Perry shared the successes to date and the actions taken within the region to generate support for a resilient local food system…A revisiting of our July 2008 interview with Toronto author Susan Bourette of “Carnivore Chic – From Pasture to Plate, The Search for the Perfect Meat”.

Women’s role in a warming world

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In June climate negotiators will reconvene in Bonn, Germany for an interim meeting to discuss the working text of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, the international treaty that aims to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent climate change’s worst effects. A relatively new aspect of this conversation is how women can help adapt to climate change and their unique circumstances when it comes to the issue. They are severely affected by climate change yet underrepresented and not engaged in solutions.

Some Transition thoughts on the energy bits of the Queen’s speech

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So the Queen’s Speech has set out the policy priorities for the new government, but were the policies announced a cop-out or do they set out a wartime mobilisation scale of response to climate change and peak oil? These reflections are based on the article about the speech that appeared in yesterday’s Guardian.