Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“We’re writers with dirt under our fingernails” states the manifesto, and what strikes you is that the new narrative is not some urban dystopia, a tale told by cynical city novelists, it’s directly rooted in the materials of nature. It shares a lineage with English visionaries, dissenters and poets, and yet feels new and modern, planetary, something we are all inventing together.
Humans may pride themselves as being the best evidence for intelligent life on Earth, but an alien observer would record that the (un)sustainability conundrum has the global community floundering in a swamp of cognitive dissonance and collective denial…
Predictions about the future very often turn into a force shaping the future they try to predict, and not always with the expected results. A glance back over the trajectory of an older movement that thought it knew which way the future was headed has lessons of some importance for the peak oil movement. Brushing the dust off a stack of old pulp science fiction magazines, the Archdruid explains.
A typical efficient car in the U.S. market gets about 40 MPG (miles per gallon) running on gasoline. A hybrid car like the Prius typically gets 50–55 MPG. In a previous post, we looked at the physics that determines these numbers. As we see more and more plug-in hybrid or pure electric cars on the market, how do we characterize their mileage performance in comparison to gasoline cars? Do they get 100 MPG? Can they get to 200? What does it even mean to speak of MPG, when the “G” stands for gallons and a purely electric car does not ingest gallons? This post addresses these questions.
For a long time, I had in mind the idea that when things start going bad, they tend to go bad fast. We might call this tendency the “Seneca effect” or the “Seneca cliff,” from Lucius Anneaus Seneca who wrote that “increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”
This post is both my own experiences of living through Hurricane Irene on Sunday, 8/29/11, and a few thoughts about what is truly dangerous and what kills people in this type of storm. Most of the “news” clips are deaths from Hurricane Irene. These dramatic photos are all Hurricane Irene today, in Western MA (and one from Southern VT). I hope they give you sober reflection. Let’s be careful out there, those of us on the Eastern Seaboard of the USA. Even as the sun shines, most of the dangers of a hurricane happen AFTER the winds and rains die down.
What draws most antique lovers is not antiquity itself, I suspect, but craftsmanship, the hours of care and lifetime of skill imbued in the final product. A chair, a knife, or even a toy made before the energy needle often meant an investment of many hours of work by someone who had trained for years to master their craft. Such handiwork might last centuries – we have a desk two hundred years old, for example – and if the work breaks it can be repaired or the pieces replaced.
In early writings about the Transition movement, one of the guidelines was to “Let it go where it needs to go.” Don’t attempt to control the growth of your budding initiative or local group. Allow it to develop — “organically” if you will — however it needs to. Given the unique dynamic between individuals on our initiating core teams, given the particular issues in our local communities, given the preexisting status of transition-oriented activity around us, what needs to happen next in one locale has been quite different from what needs to happen next in another.
If you live in the Eastern US, particularly, but not exclusively the eastern coastal US, you need to be prepared for quite a storm…We don’t always get a heads up like this about a potential threat – so many come unexpected upon us. When we do, it behooves us to remember that there’s a lot we can do to keep safe, secure and be ready – and that lives depend on us taking action. The actions are simple, and easily become part of our basic routine – just like keeping school records or feeding the pets. But now is the time – whether you live in Irene’s path or not, to make sure your preps are ready – so that you don’t have to ask for help unless you really need it, so you can help others, so you can make sure that resources go to the most vulnerable.
I have a confession. I don’t read books anymore. Or rather I read books very rarely, and as I began this blog this morning I wondered was this just me, or was it a symptom of our age?
The future of the university hangs in the balance and the instinct to defend it against a wholesale attack seems to be an obvious response. But what is it that so many rush to defend? Could it be that rather than seize our placard shields, we should instead rejoice in the downfall of the institution? Or should we perhaps seize this opportunity to search for ways to re-imagine the university and radically transform its inner workings, to look at the actual functioning of the university, to question the kind of subjects it produces and the form of market-led ‘common sense’ that it reproduces?
Why don’t all of us country people (and I’m thinking especially of the imaginative and innovative readers of this blog) amuse ourselves by designing, and perhaps even building, the MOST COMFORTABLE OUTHOUSE IN THE WORLD. I am talking about an outhouse that even the Queen of England would die to have in her backyard. Can you imagine how we could change our cultural attitude toward shit with a photo of the Queen seated on her plush satin-covered outhouse throne, with a shining little cut glass chandelier overhead, surrounded by richly brocaded interior walls and exterior walls of beautiful soapstone?
