Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Peak Oil, Climate change and the Greater Depression will pose many challenges to our way of life but let’s get real, for a moment: Golden Hordes aren’t one of them. At least not now. Economic depression brings with it a host of serious problems, and I think you can say quite confidently, without being a chicken little, that most of the world is in a Greater Depression.
Unless and until we mobilize a mass movement to take down and transform the U.S. legal, political and economic systems upholding the fiction that corporations possess the same constitutional rights as individuals, along with other hallmarks of corporate power, it is fruitless to blame green consumers for the failure to spur large-scale meaningful change.
First I should confess to a strong bias toward the content of this book. As readers of my blog, Question Everything, will realize, I have been moving inexorably toward the same conclusion as the author, so you will perhaps forgive me if you think I may be suffering from a lack of sufficient critical thinking. Put bluntly, I think this is a book every thinking human being should read, and then consider for themselves.
It’s all about community. The age of cheap fossil fuels allowed us to forget that. But communities are making a comeback, and we’ll need strong ones if we’re to get through the years ahead with minimal human suffering. We’ll also need tremendous doses of compassion, creativity, and courage.
Today’s episode features segments from Agroinnovations featuring well-known figures like Paul Stamets – a mycologist (aka mushroom specialist) from Olympia, Washington, the U.K’s Rob Hopkins who has popularized the Transition Town Movement and Montana journalist and author Richard Manning, who possesses a keen interest in the history and future of the American prairie and agriculture.
-H2OIL
-Paul Ehrlich interview
-What is Land For?
-Sustainability and spirituality
-The Hubbert Peak Theory of Rock, or, Why We’re All Out of Good Songs
-Giant Monsters
-Human Well-Being and Economic Decision-Making
-The Dark Side of the Bright Side
Greer is at his most stimulating when he offers ways of rethinking our ideology and shifting towards more adaptive thinking. I particularly liked his insight on the tragic hero vs. the comedic hero. One dies for ideology while the other manages to come through somehow largely through adaptive survival.
Part 1 of KrisCan’s Peak Oil conversation with Richard Heinberg about the limits to growth, the GDP measuring claims on our resources and the importance of communicating with our policy makers. He talks about the need to move away from the idea of continuous growth and begin to measure quality of life as a marker of success.
If I had waited until this week to gather the food, I’d be in trouble. It took myself and a group of eight people at the wilderness skills school TrackersNW more than a day to turn a few buckets of acorns into flour in September. We had to crack the shells with a hammer, extract the nutmeat with our fingernails, grind it, boil it twice in a big vat to get the bitter astringent properties out, and then strain it and dry it.
-Female farmers find goats a good, but busy choice
-Chickens come home to roost in backyards around the USA
-Bite-Sized: Small cattle make big impression
-Saving The Bed-Stuy Farm: Choose Better Nutrition, Not Demolition
Many of the articles that discuss the causes and effects of humanity’s unprecedented energy use are entirely theoretical, offering little practical guidance for the everyday reader. This essay offers respite to all the people who confront our collective energy problems with a furrowed brow and an expression that is puzzled by the continuous stream of theoretical insights that explain our current circumstances.
