Society

You built that: 3 top strategies for resilience

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President Obama aroused the GOP’s ire for reminding business owners of the obvious point that their success relies in part on roads and bridges built at public expense. But the rest of us would do well not to place too much faith in big government in the uncertain times coming with peak oil, climate change and economic collapse.

Peak Moment 221: Human-powered machines – Can pedals power the world?

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Jump on that bike and power up the blender for your morning smoothie! Matthew Corson-Finnerty shows several machines he has developed while at Aprovecho Center in Oregon. Watch us pedal power an electricity generator, a grain mill, a blender, and a straw-chopper. Matthew notes there’s “considerable difference between the power that one person can generate, and [what’s] generated by a fossil fuel engine or a coal-fired plant to provide electricity.”

Heroic endeavor: The seed farm

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About an hour north of Philadelphia, nestled in the rolling terrain of South Mountain, lies The Seed Farm, a nonprofit organization working to grow a new crop of farmers in the Lehigh Valley. The Lehigh Valley, the colloquial name for Lehigh and Northampton counties, is home to the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton. Over the past 20 years, the agrarian landscape has changed dramatically as suburbia has sprawled out from the city centers — the result of poor planning, not unlike many other areas across the nation. Notably, the Lehigh Valley lost more farmland than any other region in the state of Pennsylvania, primarily due to its easy commute to New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia.

How it could happen, part two: Nemesis

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This second part of a five-part series uses the tools of narrative fiction to explore some of the ways in which America’s current global empire might come apart. As war begins in East Africa, the United States finds itself abruptly thrown on the defensive by China and its African allies, and attempts by Washington to retake the initiative trigger a spiral of international crisis that threatens to spin wholly out of control.

Cities and Suburbs in the Energy Descent: Thinking in Scenarios

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The vulnerability of cities and suburbs in the post-petroleum era has been the object of much debate because their present organization makes their operation so energy-intensive. The debate heretofore has tended to swing between two extremes. One claims that these forms of social organization on the land are so unsustainable that their populations will be forced to abandon them gradually as the energy descent progresses. The other extreme entertains dreams of massive programs of public transportation to save suburbia. It also relies heavily on technologies like high-rise agriculture and on the efficiencies of population density to save cities. This is the vision of the eco-cities movement. Neither of these scenarios makes much sense.

Mike Freedman on his new film Critical Mass

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Unsung Films watched Mike Freedman’s Critical Mass this year when it screened at the Biografilm Festival in Bologna, Italy. On approaching the filmmaker with a short review of his documentary, we ended up with a great deal more: a 3000-word interview taking readers deep into the story of how Freedman’s film came together, how it affected him – both personally and professionally — and what we should expect in the years to come.

Growing up dystechnic

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I came out of school at the age of 17 highly literate but almost completely dystechnic. Since there is no word for the manual equivalent of illiterate I have had to coin one, and ‘dystechnic’ is the best I can do.