Society

Peak Moment 162: Innovation Bears Fruit for Family Farm

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Tour the century-old organic Chaffin Family Orchards where even the animals are “farm hands.” Visit chickens in their egg-mobile, scratching for bugs and pooping fertilizer in the heirloom stone-fruit orchards. Goats chomp off low branches from the olive trees, so no fuel or human labor is needed. This certified predator-friendly enterprise includes 200 acres of olive trees plus various fruit and nut trees; sheep, goats, broiler and egg-laying chickens. They distribute only locally through fruit and meat CSAs (community-supported agriculture), growers markets and a farmstand, providing fresh foods that burst with flavor and nuance.

How to talk to your friends about climate change

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I have found solace in the words of Dmitry Orlov and many others, and there are two reasons for this. One is that the voices of truth relieve our anxiety that the liars are right and we are crazy. The truth, however awful, is safe and real. The other reason we can embrace the truth is that it allows us to move past denial into action.

Farewell to the moon

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It is a strange moment when you see an once cutting edge technology die. Of course, the common wisdom of our age – the so-called myth of progress – claims it cannot happen. Technologies may be made obsolete, they can turn out to be impasses, but it is unthinkable for a whole avenue of progress to simply close down. That is exactly what has happened, however, when President Obama canceled the Constellation Program, and that tells a lot about the fate of technology in a energy poor future.

The peak oil crisis: revisiting the electric car

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If one thinks of the vast amount of infrastructure the developed world has to maintain – buildings, roads, water, sewage, trash disposal, public safety, power and communications lines – one soon gets the idea that even a relatively short range electric vehicle is going to be an awful lot better than an oxcart in preserving and rebuilding the facilities we currently rely on for food and shelter during the next 100 years or so.

This Presupposition of Passivity

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Much of the conversation about community on the peak oil blogosphere in the last few weeks has tacitly assumed that Americans had their communities taken from them by circumstances, if not by some sinister cabal. In fact, of course, most Americans actively walked away from their communities, and continue to do so. Maybe it’s time that we ask why.

Community in Time and Space

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It is true that people worked long hours in the past – but the pattern of those hours was radically different. Community thrived when more people lived and worked embedded in their community. Now most Americans spend a third of their waking hours in a workplace community, often completely unconnected from the community proximate to their home…Instead of belonging to connected social institutions, if they are members of community organizations, they are probably members of completely different ones.

Secret Handshakes

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Very little seems to connect the quest for community in today’s declining industrial societies with the mostly empty and mostly forgotten lodge halls that still dot America’s older cities and towns. Appearances deceive, though, for the old fraternal lodges — themselves the product of an earlier quest for community — offer some useful pointers for the present, as well as a cautionary lesson of no small importance.