Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– Bicycling and the art of being broke
– Wealthy Nations Maxed Out on Travel?
– How drivers can put a brake on the world’s petrol crisis
– New report and map chronicles the visceral reality of 47,000 preventable pedestrian deaths
A battered and highly unstable world economy is probably at the peak of global energy and food production, and declines may be imminent. Yet our tightly interconnected and globalised civilisation, and the economy that maintain it require increasing such production to remain functional. As a result, Ireland is unlikely ever to come out of recession, and the world is not in the middle of a financial crisis but at the edge of a civilisational one.
We urgently need to re-assess where we are, the assumptions that underpin our interpretations of the world, what is likely to happen, and how we might move forward.
In a new book, Charles Saylan, co-founder and executive director of the California-based Ocean Conservation Society, and his co-author pose a key question: What can the U.S. educational system do to improve students’ understanding of the environment and its importance in their lives?
For a long time we have been able to be the audience to history, to live our lives theoretically. We can watch everything on our screens, at arm’s length. But now history is coming into our streets and into our lives and we need to know how to act, or support those who act on our behalf. If we cheer for those bold protesters in Tahrir Square, in Wisconsin, for the thousands of campaign groups that Paul Hawken wrote about in Blessed Unrest, we need also to cheer for those who occupy Fortnum and Masons and the Royal Bank of Scotland, who protest against the corporations who threaten those fragile eco-systems on which we depend.
As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.
Ever since the arrival of fossil fuels and electricity, human powered tools and machines have been viewed as an obsolete technology. This makes it easy to forget that there has been a great deal of progress in their design, largely improving their productivity.
So, if apocalyptic messages seems premature to us and we are unable readily to empathise with people we don’t know in far distant lands, what, short of enforced regulation or first-hand experience of impacts, could possibly mobilise us en masse to become sustainable?
The recent flurry of media stories about last weekend’s failed prophecy of the Rapture — think of it as a dry run for 2012 — raises several points relevant to the peak oil movement as the end of the age of cheap energy starts to catch the attention of the mainstream. The most intriguing is the possibility — dismissed by a great many peak oil writers just now, but by no means impossible — that the movement toward radically less energy use that’s so desperately needed in the industrial world right now might actually become a popular fad. Could that actually happen, and if it did, what might the implications be?
We want a world as it should be: a world where people quit fouling their own nest, where money isn’t the only object, a world where people consider the planet we are leaving to our children.
– Nation Down To Last Hundred Grown-Ups
– The Ecology of Magic: An Interview with David Abram
– Children growing weaker as computers replace outdoor activity
– How the Illusion of Being Observed Can Make You a Better Person
Turn a century-old Seattle house into an efficient, energy-producing home using repurposed materials. Owner-builder Jim Bristow’s creativity extends to reclaiming dead spaces, jacketing his house with exterior insulation, and modernizing the kitchen with sleek previously used cabinetry and low-power LED lights. But he’s not stopping there. Along with maintaining a prolific front yard vegie garden, this green-minded guy is working with neighbors and the city to construct a storm water drainage and traffic circle at the nearby street intersection.
Not only do we “seem to be a verb”, but more precisely we are transitive verbs whose job it is to maintain bounded order in order to export chaos into the environment by the alchemical transmutation of energy “gold” into the “dross” of dissipated heat. This may seem to be an inadequate job description for such “highly evolved” creatures as Homo Sapiens Sapiens, one step below the angels (our hubris has always tripped us up). But there is a bit more to the job description than that. Unfortunately, we seem to have misread it.
