Society

The art of producing sustainable consumer goods: basketry

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We tend to think of technology as rock and metal – from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, from pyramids and statues to Viking swords and pirate cannons. We think of the things that survive to be placed in museums, in other words, and tend to neglect the early and important inventions that ordinary people used every day but whose materials did not survive centuries of exposure.

The Structure of Empires

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The challenge of making sense of empires in general, and thus of the impending decline and fall of America’s empire, is made a good deal more challenging than it has to be by the haze of doubletalk and of simplistic us-vs.-them analyses. One way to clarify the way that empires work is to pay attention to who benefits from them–a matter that turns out to be considerably more complex than a casual glance might suggest.

Ideas to cut your trash waste by 80%

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Each piece of trash was once a resource – a tree that was clear-cut into a junk-mail envelope, a barrel of oil turned to a plastic package, a mountain turned to an aluminum can. With lives lasting only a few days to a few months, each piece of trash is a sad waste of the resources needed to grow, process, and transport it. When you decrease your waste, you can cut the energy and resource use needed to turn the environment into trash, while also cutting the methane emitted by waste rotting in a landfill.

Art into Action

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In Extraenvironmentalist #36 we discuss art and activism with Steve Lambert. Steve describes how his work as an artist has allowed him to create temporary utopias that prompt people to question the fundamental assumptions of society. We ask Steve how his varied work experience has helped him understand our education system and barriers to reform. What if the people around us aren’t lazy and are just optimizing where their agency can have an effect?

Climate and the psyche

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“I’ve been concerned by the extent of ‘burn-out’ I’ve come across – in particular states of exhaustion, the development of cynicism and despair. But also the opposite of these in the form of a kind of ‘pollyanna-ish’ defensiveness where people convince themselves that all is solvable, either through technology or through local community action. “

“Both of these tendencies have increased post-Copenhagen, along with a tendency for campaigners sometimes to blame each other rather than the powerful actors in the political system. This is a common response amongst groups experiencing failure – you begin by minutely examining the reasons for the lack of success and end by attacking each other or alternatively withdrawing altogether.”

Makanda Inn Visit

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Last weekend, my wife and I went for a Valentine’s weekend away to the Makanda Inn, a straw-bale/green building B&B in Makanda, southern Illinois. As far as I’ve been able to determine at present, there are only a handful of straw bale hostelries of any kind in the world, and this is the closest to where we live. Here are a few pictures and a few impressions of our stay (with a focus on the themes of this blog).

The nature of empire

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The twilight of cheap abundant energy is in many ways the dominant theme of global politics in our time, but another factor is coming to play an important role as well — the waning of America’s global empire. Impolite as it may be to mention the relation between America’s gargantuan military budgets and global network of bases, on the one hand, and the vastly disproportionate share of the world’s energy, materials, and industrial products Americans receive, on the other, the reality of America’s empire and the course of its decline have to be factored into any sense of the future ahead of us, and to do that, the nature of empire as a social, political, and economic reality has to be explored.