Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Are current corporate-dominated international institutions inadequate to the task of meeting the multiple planetary survival challenges they themselves have helped create?…Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute (postcarbon.org), talks about the factors contributing to the stalemate in the Copenhagen climate summit, the other ‘game ending’ challenges confronting the current economic system, and the bottom-up steps necessary to move to a post-carbon economy.
The Speerville Flour Mill is a locally-owned and operated business in New Brunswick that has for over 25 years been supplying the Atlantic Provinces of Canada with local, organically grown grains and foods. The mill supports dozens of organic grain farmers in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. One of those farmers is Andrew Kernohan of Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. In September 2009, Deconstructing Dinner visited Speerville and Andrew’s farm while touring throughout the provinces.
One way of looking at our current set of predicaments is that we’ve been on a binge, consuming energy considerably faster than it can be captured and stored by Earth’s ecosystems. While fossil fuels once appeared limitless (and still do to deniers of peak oil), and though we’re literally bathed in energy (in the form of sunlight), the disappearance of the fossil-fuel storehouse accumulated over millions of years isn’t something that can be replaced with anything nearly as convenient as fossil fuels.
According to In Defense of Food author Michael Pollan, “…the advent of “nutritionism” has vastly complicated how Americans see food, without doing very much for our health. Nutritionism arose to deal with genuine issues – addressing chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and many cancers – but now seems to be obscuring and perpetuating the real problems of the American diet”, says Pollan. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California on January 27, 2010.
-Citizen Renaissance
-TN green crusader puts ecovillage message to work worldwide
-The Case for ‘Gray Power’
-Scientist in climate row speaks out
-Copenhagen Failed, Mexico is Already Doomed – What’s Next?
-Negative Energy
-Climate consensus under strain
Long before we could pronounce Betty Friedan’s last name, Americans from my generation felt her impact. Many of us born in the mid-1970s learned from our parents and our teachers that women no longer needed to stay home, that there were professional opportunities awaiting us…Those of us with academic promise learned that we could do whatever we put our minds to, whether it was conquering the world or saving the world. I was personally interested in saving the world. That path eventually led me to conclude that homemaking would play a major role toward achieving that goal.
-Still Far Away and on a Dark Mountain
-Washington, we have a Problem
-How Can We Talk About Transformational Change Without Losing Hope?
Humankind has reached a fork in the road. The business-as-usual path implies robust economic growth with a rise in the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to anthropogenic climate change…Considered alternatives invariably lay out a vision of the future in which emissions steadily decline while economies continue to grow. Is such a vision realistic? This essay questions standard assumptions underlying this “have your cake and eat it too” view.
Picture this: A remote Indian village in the Ganges delta a few hundred years ago. The farmer starts his day by letting his flock of ducks into his irrigated fields. The water from the river brings with it, besides nutrients and alluvium, some unwanted (for the crops) pests too. But that is not a problem–the ducks will keep the pests in control. Not only that, they will turn those pests into manure and drop it right inside the pool of collected water to be anaerobically decomposed under the water.
Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, is not your typical economist. He gets peak oil…And now, in his bestselling book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he argues that oil prices, temporarily dampened by the deepest post-war recession on record, will soon be vaulted to new highs as the economy begins to recover, which in turn will thrust the world into yet another recession right on the heels of this one.
I was speaking today with a mom at my sons’ school. She was concerned about a teacher who was doing such a poor job that even his students were complaining that they weren’t learning enough…This collective economic angst, I believe, is what Caitlin Flanagan played into in “Cultivating Failure,” an article that lambastes school gardens in the January/February 2010 Atlantic. But to separate the angst from the facts, it is necessary to first look at the angst and then the facts.
