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Love, Schmove – Just tell me how to build community with the guy who mows his lawn in his speedo!
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
… Let’s get down to brass tacks. How do you deal with the neighbors who not only do you not love yet, you can barely tolerate – and who haven’t expressed any particular desire to love you, unless you count letting their dog poop in your yard? How about the ones you already can’t stand – or they can’t stand you?
This is one of those things I feel reasonably proud of our ability to do – build community, not with members of an ecovillage carefully selected for like-mindedness (nothing wrong with it if you happen to live in one, but most of us won’t), but with real neighbors. I have a good relationship with my neighbors – we’ve shared a lot of things over the years, including childcare, a car, our washing machines, stress, gossip, meals, and time. I trust that I could get their help in a crisis – and I hope they trust that they would have mine – in part because we have helped each other through various things.
Does this paradise of neighborliness exist in a place where everyone shares our values and opinions? Not hardly. We cover the range of political opinions from far-left to far right to “don’t give a damn.” We cover a reasonable religious range – Protestants of several stripes – from AME to Lutheran to Evangelical – to Catholics, Pagans, Athiests, and us – the neighborhood Jews. As for visions of the future – well, at least one neighbor reads my blog (Hi Rick!) but most of them either don’t know what peak oil is, or politely think I’m a loon. We disagree strongly on everything from what should be taught in the public schools, what constitutes a good diet to whether Syracuse making the finals is a cause for celebration.
But what we do have is a good deal of common ground on other issues. It is just a matter of finding it – and generally speaking, we find it at fairly basic levels. We all eat, and higher food prices are pinching everyone’s purse.
(4 September 2008)
Sharon keeps it real. -BA
Oil prices, technology, and the cost of ignorance
Ron Wilson, Electonrics Design, Strategy, News (EDN)
Many opportunities exist to use a little understanding, a little technology, and a little capital to make a significant decrease in fuel consumption. But rest assured that these things will not happen.
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… it is worth asking whether quick, technically feasible applications of electronics could significantly reduce [oil] demand in the short term.
We are looking for feasible and fast solutions, so converting the entire Western world’s vehicle fleet to fuel cells is out. So is covering two Southwestern states with photovoltaic cells or building a set of experimental but full-scale fusion reactors. Relatively quick measures do exist, however, and, unsurprisingly, they focus not on fundamental changes in society but on increasing efficiency.
One example dear to the hearts of many commuters is traffic control. In much of North America and, from the little we have seen, industrializing Asia, the entire notion that you can enhance rather than impede the flow of traffic by properly regulating traffic lights is an as-yet-unmade discovery. The cost of this ignorance is horrendous. Estimates show that a third of the fuels vehicles in urban areas consume go to waste because of unnecessary acceleration, almost entirely after a traffic control or jam has slowed the vehicle. Technologically simple computerized sensor and control networks and known algorithms could cut this waste by a large factor. The amount of necessary capital equipment and labor would be trivial in comparison with the savings and within the resources of even state-level governments without huge national subsidies. The only shortage is in the skill to install and operate the networks and the knowledge to recognize the problem.
… Many such opportunities exist to use a little understanding, a little technology, and a little capital to make a significant decrease in fuel consumption. And, as noted, a small decrease in consumption can make a big difference in global inflation pressure. But rest assured that these things will not happen. Inefficiency is one of the costs nature imposes as the price of public ignorance of technology.
(4 September 2008)
Meet the greenshifters
Louise France, The Observer
For the first time in generations, more people are moving to the countryside than are leaving, chicken keeping is the UK’s fastest-growing hobby and for many self-sufficiency is no longer a pipe dream. Louise France meets four families who’ve gone in search of the good life
(7 September 2008)
It never hurts to be prepared for Armageddon: Be to go-to gal
National Post
In an emergency, you want to be the go-to gal with all the answers
Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front, by Sharon Astyk (New Society Publishers; $18.95) is subtitled One Woman’s Solutions to Finding Abundance for Your Family While Coming to Terms With Peak Oil, Climate Change and Hard Times.
A few suggestions from Appendix One:
– Urine is mostly sterile, and safe to add to plants. A person’s yearly output can fertilize more than one quarter acre. Dilute the urine in a 10 to one ratio and use it on your garden.
– Summer is a good time to toilet train children. Let them run around naked outside, where accidents won’t be a worry. You’ll do less laundry in the winter if you get this done now.
– Most weeds contain valuable fertility (which they took from your garden) and trace minerals. Dump them in a bucket of water, let it sit for a few days and then pour it over plants.
(6 September 2008)
Someone over there at the National Post (Canada) is peak oil-aware. This is not the first peak-oil sighting we’ve had from the paper. (The National Post has a conservative editorial stance.)
Sharon’s book (Depletion and Abundance) has just been released. We hope to have some reviews soon. -BA
Is it better to lease, hire or borrow than to buy?
Lucy Siegle, The Guardian
…While car clubs (such as www.citycarclub.co.uk) now operate across the UK, the majority of transumer schemes are still admittedly niche. The residents of Gotland island in Sweden, for example, use Electrolux’s pay-per-wash project. Instead of buying washing machines, the customer ‘borrows’ a new, eco-efficient washing machine and pays Electrolux for the service, not the machine. In green terms this not only cuts down on waste, but research shows that when the product remains with the manufacturer, there is an incentive to produce more durable goods…
(8 September 2008)
