Society

A petro prayer

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3 Praise Be to GOD for 3-D seismic X-ray vision of the greasy flanks of Ghawar the Great, permitting freer access to her hidden treasures;
4 For horizontal drill bores and accessory attachments with which to better probe her deepest recesses, liposuctioning her jet fuels that carry us to concrete-reinforced Middle Eastern vacation colonies;

Children

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Many people understand times will get tougher. Most people also have kids. Yet publications that discuss peak energy, the environment or the economy rarely talk about children, or how to train them for the world they foresee. Whether you have kids or not, it’s a useful exercise – it means thinking seriously about what the world might look like in ten or twenty years, beyond a blurry pastiche of Hollywood apocalypses.

Portland Spaces: Collectively Green

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The Bouwes house is part of a wave of forward-thinking building that is redefining Cully, a sleepy and sometimes forgotten northeast Portland neighborhood, as a miniature hotbed of sustainable construction…At the same time, and not coincidentally, Cully is in the grip of a social lifestyle revolution of middle-class, multigenerational families creating a new breed of society. At the moment, that revolution is playing out in the Bouweses’ dining room.

Red Cliffs and collapse

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A vital task peak oil activists unfortunately tend to overlook: how to make sure that when current polities fail, they won’t be replaced by a reincarnation of the petty kingdoms of England. That certainly does not mean encouraging every wild secessionist scheme – some are reasonable project, as in Scotland, Wales or Catalonya but most others are just recipes for disasters – but encouraging decentralization, growth of regional identities and empowerment of local authorities, so that, when the time will come, we won’t need a Battle of the Red Cliffs to avoid fighting the one of Badon Hill.

To plan for emergency, or not? Heinberg and Hopkins debate

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At the Transition Network conference, Richard Heinberg gave an online presentation looking at the concept of Emergency Planning for Communities … For a while now, Richard and I have been discussing the tension between longer term planning for resilience and the more immediate and pressing responses demanded by sudden and rapid change. It is still an ongoing discussion, but … What follows is the series of email exchanges we have had since late last year.