Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Fred Turner’s book looks at the influence Bucky Fuller had on a range of people, in particular Stewart Brand, who helped create first the hippie counterculture and the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies, then later the cyberculture that grew up around the San Francisco bay area.
Most people across the pond probably haven’t noticed but Western Europe was hit by a particularly murderous storm at the end of February. In the French department of Vendée, the waves, associated with high tide, broke through two centuries old sea walls and flooded residential districts, killing 35 and forcing hundreds to evacuate the area. Closer to home – at least mine – the sea overran the sea walls north of Saint-Nazaire, flooding many coastal villages and devastating the salt flats around the historical town of Guerande.
-Crunching the Numbers ($$$) on Bike Commuting
-Want to Foster Walking, Biking and Transit? You Need Good Parking Policy
-Streetfilms: Fixing the Great Mistake of Planning for Cars
-Korea unveils the ‘future of transport’ — the Online Electric Vehicle
-Streetfilms: Seattle’s Link Light Rail — The Start of Something Big
-New York Plans Transitway on 34th Street, but It’s Not BRT, for Better or Worse
To my amusement, a slate colored junco hopped into a little pool of snow melt and splashed and fluttered around joyously. Looked like joy anyway. I had to laugh right out loud. It was hardly warm enough to go out without a coat on, yet here was this tiny bird obviously enjoying an outdoor bath. Why couldn’t I go for a dip too? Life just ain’t fair.
Even more useful than the books or activities, though, is the principle behind libraries, that we and our neighbours can pool our resources and hold things in common that all of us occasionally need. Most of the Western World, however, adopted this principle for books and then stopped, never extending it to other obvious areas of life.
Could it be that “thinking positively” is contributing to our blindness and inaction around energy issues, environmental degradation and economic devastation? I’ve hammered this point home in a number of posts, the most widely read being “Do You Have a Panglossian Disorder?.” Now, a trenchant social observer provides a clear outline of how that may well be so, elaborating on the ‘dangers of positive thinking.’
What if we suddenly had access to unlimited clean energy? Would that be a good thing, or would we simply use it to complete the biocidal program of industrial civilization? This little thought experiment suggests that our problem as a civilization is not lack of energy – it is lack of imagination, humility, and empathy. The core is rotten. We must find a better way.
-Titanic and the Lusitania disasters reveal difference in survival instincts
-Finding a cure for the insidious cancers of “hope” and “faith”
-Depression’s Upside
The collapse of the globalized society we now inhabit will be exceedingly uneven geographically and one that is spread over many years. And, I believe that that collapse has already started to appear.
Nobody knows what will happen when an oil-producing member of the global economy in the middle of the Middle East implodes into worthlessness,… and then runs out of water, but in Yemen, we are going to find out.
Speaker: Jane Anne Morris, corporate anthropologist, and author of ‘Gaveling Down the Rabble: How Free Trade is Stealing Our Democracy’.
-Lakoff on Real Reason vs False Reason
-Letters from Amok: The State of the World in Pen and Ink
-The ICPR Primer
