Act: Inspiration

Transition: Meeting the Challenge of Energy Descent

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…Where we are now is at the beginning of a transition from an industrial growth culture to a culture of descent. This transition will be characterized by much cultural chaos, and then we will be declining or descending to a far more sustainable low-energy culture. Regarding this, David Holmgren says, “We have trouble visualizing decline as positive, but this simply reflects the dominance of our prior culture of growth…The real issue of our age is how we make a graceful and ethical descent.”

It’s Too Late, Baby, Times Up!: A Book Review

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I live in Boulder, Colorado where the buzz among eco-activists who attended a recent lecture by Vandana Shiva is her chilling statement that if the human species continues on its present destructive trajectory, it has no more than 100 years of life on this planet. At about the same time this bomb was dropped on Shiva’s audience, Keith Farnish’s amazing book Time’s Up: An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis arrived in my mailbox for review…

The recession is dead … long live the recession!

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The world’s first peak-oil recession has come to a close, according to third-quarter numbers invented by the federal government. Apparently dumping trillions of dollars onto big banks, insurance companies, and automobile manufacturers interrupted the plummeting descent of American Empire. The stock markets skyrocketed expectedly. Predictably, so did the commodities markets.

Path to a peace economy

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I start with a basic truth. A persistent pattern of violence against people, community, and nature is inherent in the institutional structure of our existing economy. You don’t treat a cancer with Band-Aids, and we can’t resolve our current economic crisis with marginal regulatory adjustments. It is time to rethink and restructure.

Economic dominoes continue to fall

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Passing the world oil peak has had, and doubtless will continue to have, relatively little impact on the long-term price of gasoline. The economic implications of getting through the first half of the Oil Age have been much more significant, a trend that seems likely to continue until the collapse is complete.