Movement and media – Jan 31
Changes at Post Carbon
New issue of Culture Change
Some observations on social media
Society
Global – Jan 31
Governments across Europe tremble as angry people take to the streets
Arctic’s thaw brings security risks for NATO
Gulf’s green claims awash in a desert of deception
Reality Report: Interview with Jay Hanson
In the 1990s Jay Hanson’s web site predicted with uncanny accuracy key trends of the early 21st century with respect to energy, the environment and geopolitics. What did he learn that most of us still don’t know, and what does he foresee ahead of us?
Housing & urban design – Jan 30
A City Made of Waste
Independence vs Splendid Isolation
EntropyPawsed Uses “A Pattern Language”
Frugal is the new black
This new year brought another new feeling for me too, of having come to the end of a long string of questions. I’d spent so many years in hot pursuit of answers that I was suddenly at a standstill looking around wondering where I was headed or had I, in fact, arrived?
Peak Moment 128: Finding Opportunity in Peak Oil
Molly Brown sees Peak Oil as both a challenge and an invitation to create a better world. After awakening to Peak Oil, she explored her own responses — inner attitude and outer action. Personal changes include creating a vegie garden and bicycling. Noting that individual survivalist mentality is insufficient (“we are all interconnected”), she helped form a local group to awaken and prepare her community.
Peak Moment 139: The Transition Movement comes to America
One response to the global crisis that is gaining enthusiastic momentum is the Transition Towns movement. Jennifer Gray, a pioneer in the Transition Initiative in the UK and cofounder of Transition US, describes it as “a community-led response to the twin crises of peak oil and climate change. It’s … positive, pro-active [and] engages the whole community in building resilience into their world.”
The pond at the center of the universe
Three generations of our family have worked, played, fought (the only verb that properly describes our hockey games), picnicked, swum, camped out, made out, and celebrated holidays around The Pond. Most of all it has been a haven where any of us could come when the need to be alone hit us, to sit and slip out of the consciousness of self and into the arms of a little wilderness that thrums and hums with enough activity to keep a naturalist occupied for a lifetime or two. It is not an accident that Thoreau gained inspiration for his best nature writing on the shores of a pond.
Fireside chat with Julian Darley
In this Sustainable Business Alliance speaker series, Julian Darley talks with Bay Area business owners about the impact Peak Oil is having on their business and community.
The ecology of social change
Most current efforts at social change, in and out of the peak oil community, take their direction from ideologies that claim to point the way to a better world. Is an approach drawing on the insights of human ecology potentially a better gamble?
Peak Moment 124: Creating Our Own Neighborhood – Bellingham Cohousing
Kathleen Nolan was a co-creator (with 5 others) of Bellingham Cohousing, based on a neighborhood design of private homes and shared buildings, managed by residents in participatory decision making. Their 5.74 acre plot originally had one farmhouse, which they modified to become the shared community building with dining, kitchen, laundry, craft, office, guest, and other rooms.
Peak Moment 122: An Inside Look at an Emergency Survival Kit
If an emergency forced you to evacuate your home, would you be prepared? Matt Stein, author of When Technology Fails, shows what to pack in your 72-hour emergency survival kit — and why.
