Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Hives grow through successive divestures or spin-offs: They swarm. When a colony gets too large, it becomes operationally unwieldy and grossly inefficient and the hive splits. Eventually, risk is spread across many hives and revenue sources in contrast to relying on one big, vulnerable “super-hive” for sustenance.
The evidence has become quite persuasive that humans are bumping into interrelated natural limits to growth that spell big trouble no matter what we do. We appear to be in the grip of multiple interrelated crises that are converging into an overall crisis.
Strange as it may seem, humans seem to have evolved in a way that we have a need for external energy, such as energy from burning wood or fossil fuels. While the evidence is not 100% certain, it appears that we learned to use fire long enough ago that it is now necessary for our food to be cooked…There are other evolutionary deficiencies as well: How do we deal with our lack of fur? How do we deal with our evolutionary dental problems? How do we deal with “survival of the fittest”?…In this post, I will explain how these and other evolutionary issues relate to mankind’s need for external energy, such as wood, or gasoline, or electricity.
It started with a conversation that became a manifesto that became a book that became a festival that became a movement. Three years on the Dark Mountain Project is still hard to define. It is both a cultural response to a collapsing world, and a network of people who gather to makes sense of that collapse. At its core is a shared recognition that the stories we have inherited are are no longer making sense of our lives, and a new narrative for the times we are living in needs to be forged.
Since Alaska is sucking pretty hard on the fossil fuel teat, it is the last place one would expect permaculture to take hold. But there are glimmers of a new day on the horizon.
Batteries fail—as certainly as death and taxes. Rechargeable batteries at least offer the possibility of repeating the cycle, so are in this sense more like recurrent taxes than death. But alas, the story cannot repeat indefinitely… Add to their inevitable demise an overall lackluster performance in battery storage technology, and we have ourselves the makings of a blog post on the failure of batteries to live up to their promises.
As the most gizmocentric culture in recorded history, America was probably destined from the start to end up with a military system in which most uniformed personnel operate machinery, and every detail of making war involves a galaxy of high-tech devices. That seems like a huge advantage to most Americans; in practice, it may not be. With the able assistance of Arthur C. Clarke and the Principia Discordia, the Archdruid explains.
Building things by yourself, especially with leftover material, has this air of post-peak self-reliance. But, often, that supposes the existence of industrially made products. When you need wood, for instance, you can get planks or beams from a store or, more in a post-peak style, you use material taken from discarded furniture. But in both cases, the wood you use has been industrially processed.
Suppose, instead, that you live in a remote village in the mountains, a place like Valboncione, in Italy.
In August 2012, the Center for a New American Dream presented a free webinar about how to start up a new tool library in your community. Topics included obtaining funding, finding a location, tracking tools, navigating through legal issues, and more. The webinar featured speakers from successful tool libraries around the country.
While I’m sure this is true of some of the workers and strivers of the present, the overwhelming justification for education at every level is that you will need it to get a job – education will cost you now in loans, time spent doing activities that look good on college applications, tutors, SAT prep, etc…. but it will return to you your investment many times over. The problem of course, is that as education’s costs have risen and the economy has been less stable, this has become less and less true for most people.
Darwin tells us we must evolve or die, and current circumstances bring that choice into stark relief. A lot of people evidently think that fitness and selfishness are the same…Yet it is our abilities to innovate socially and to cooperate in order to increase our collective fitness that have gotten us this far…
These days, the United States is in conventional terms far and away the world’s most formidable military power, and nearly all discussions of the implications of peak oil for national security and the future of war take US predominance as a given. History warns, though, that military power is not a single uncomplicated variable, and sudden shifts in military technique — shifts that involve radical simplification as often as they involve technological progress — have frequently brought to defeat to the theoretically stronger side. As the world stumbles toward the Peak Oil Wars, the possibility has to be taken into account that the US may face military defeat, not in spite of its military advantages but because of them. The Archdruid explains…
