Act: Inspiration

An Interview with David Orr, author of ‘Down to the Wire’. Part 1-3

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David Orr was in the UK recently, and the two of us were part of a panel at an event organised by the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. After the event, we retired to the bar of a rather grand London hotel, and chatted for an hour about energy, climate change, the Precautionary Principle, Transition and whether or not we are beyond talk of ’solutions’.

Peak Moment 165: Finding Excitement Creating a Life-Sustaining Society

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Lavendar farmer Dana Illo and her partner Catherine Johnson will infect you with enthusiasm. They’ve turned their initial response to resource declines from “it’s horrible and overwhelming” into “we can create new ways of doing.” Dana is bringing Dragon Dreaming to her community. This organizing model starts by having a group totally buy into a specific dream, like being locally food self-sufficient. Then in every cycle of implementation, members Dream, Plan, Do and — just as importantly — Celebrate! Why not have fun while we build community and security?

The Festival of Life in the Cracks

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Weeds growing up through the cracks in the pavement is a fractal assertion of life revealing itself through the cracks of civilization. My neighborhood is indicative of that, and this year’s Festival of Life in the Cracks (March 10) coincided with a meteorologically beautiful day, one of the first of spring’s blessings of warmth and sunshine.

Americans Increasingly Unworried About the Environment

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People grasp what their drinking water has to do with them. Overwhelmingly, I think they do not fully grasp what global warming has to do with them – and that’s a rhetorical failure…At the same time that highly effective movements are arranging million person demonstrations in the streets, most of the people who will actually tell their congressfolk whether to vote for change were watching Law and Order SVU.

What is the Minimum EROI that a Sustainable Society Must Have? Part 1: Surplus Energy and Biological Evolution

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EROI theory is rooted in the biological principle that in order to survive each species on earth must procure more energy from its food than it expends attaining that food. From this basic principle the importance of energy surplus became evident, as food sources needed to “pay” not only for metabolism but also for reproduction and storage for leaner times. Part 1 of this three part series presents a brief history of the concept of surplus energy and how it has influenced both biological and human evolution.

How to make your own low-tech vertical farm

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Vertical farming has become a popular idea, but what is mostly forgotten is that the energy required for the operation and construction of vertical farms largely negates the ecological advantages. This also applies to small-scale systems, like those of Philips (a concept) or Inka Biospheric Solutions (a product).

Ponzi Nation

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Every great American boom and bust makes and breaks its share of crooks. The past decade — call it the Ponzi Era — has been no different, except for the gargantuan scale of white-collar crime. A vast wave of financial fraud swelled in the first years of the new century.  Then, in 2008, with the subprime mortgage collapse, it crashed on the shore as a full-scale global economic meltdown.  As that wave receded, it left hundreds of Ponzi and pyramid schemes, as well as other get-rich-quick rackets that helped fuel our recent economic frenzy, flopping on the beach.

The Survival Mindset

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But lately I’ve been asking myself a different question. What are the best mental patterns of thinking for surviving tough times? There are a variety of ways to look at this issue, and one is looking at who survives when bad things happen in the wilderness, or in dangerous recreational pursuits and why. I’ve taken some of the ideas outlined by Gonzales and added some of my own here.