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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Slum cooker protects environment, helps poor
Barry Moody, Reuters
Kenya’s huge and squalid slums don’t have much of anything, except mountains of trash that fill rivers and muddy streets, breeding disease.
Now Kenyan designers have built a cooker that uses the trash as fuel to feed the poor, provide hot water and destroy toxic waste, as well as curbing the destruction of woodlands.
After nine years of development, the prototype “Community Cooker” is close to being rolled out in overcrowded refugee camps as well as slums around the country where the filth encourages diseases including cholera.
(2 April 2009)
TOD: What are YOU Changing (*if anything), Individually, Locally, Nationally, etc?
The Oil Drum: Campfire
TOD editor Nate Hagens sets the stage:
Last week we asked a rhetorical question if you knew what would happen in the future, what changes would you make in your behaviour, lifestyle, activism, etc., if any. As a follow up, please share (briefly) what you are doing to adapt or mitigate the economic/energy/environmental changes on the horizon. If you are doing nothing, please share the reason(s) why. (There are no right answers, or at least not ones we will know are right until well into the future).
(4 April 2009)
More personal than the usual TOD discussion. -BA
Walking restores the world and humanity
Bill Bunn, Culture Change
There is only one way humans are made to move. They are basically made to walk. There are many other ways to get around. You can canoe, for instance. Or paraglide. Or jog or swim. But these modes of transportation are not the staple of human mobility. Walking is unavoidable, a necessity for those with two working legs.
The entire scheme of nature, and the human’s place within it, is built around the understanding that humans use their legs to move. It’s a great unspoken assumption. The earth expects humans to walk.
Wildlife expects humans to walk, and it has trouble with other forms of transport. North American drivers kill one million animals each day, nearly 12 animals per second. 400 million animals are killed by drivers in North America each year. Almost two million deer are killed on North American roads yearly.
According to National Institute for Urban Wildlife and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 50 to 100 million birds are killed each year by vehicles. Research reports that road kill is a significant factor in the decline of amphibians. Motorized transport dramatically reduces insect populations.
Though humans invented vehicles, we have trouble understanding them, too. The 210 million vehicles on North America’s four and half million miles of roads cause 47 thousand human deaths a year. But, how many mammals, birds, amphibians and humans would be hurt or killed if humans only walked?
All creatures, including the human, understand walking. Walking is a primal transport, embedded in the human psyche, expected by the world’s creatures, and the land itself, evidence of an ancient arrangement between humans and their world.
(30 March 2009)
Post Carbon Newsletter #48, March 2009
Staff, Post Carbon Institute
There’s no lack of solutions being proposed for the global economic crisis. Ideas similarly abound on how to best solve the energy, climate, food, water, and other various resource crises facing the world today.
No matter what the proposal, however, the devil’s in the details. In this month’s newsletter we feature a number of articles that explore the complexity of solving these unprecedented global challenges…
…But to start off, we’d like to share with you some exciting developments underway at Post Carbon Institute.
The Post Carbon Manifesto
Post Carbon Institute has evolved its mission in response to the rapidly unfolding global economic and environmental crises. We’re looking beyond peak oil to the wide diversity of challenges facing humanity: among them, the depletion of fresh water and arable land, the steady increase of global population (and with it, consumption), and of course, the regularly-worsening predictions for climate change.
With Post Carbon’s new direction, we aim to be the leading think tank for the great transition now upon us — the transition to a post-growth, post-oil, climate-changed world. Read our new Manifesto, which succinctly outlines our view of the problems and solutions at hand.
New Fellows and Board Members
As part of our new direction, we’re adding more experts to our team and producing new reports and books to help people make sense of the global transition.
The Food and Farming Transition
How can we continue feeding humanity in a future of declining resources and environmental crisis? Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg and Fellow Michael Bomford have authored a new report tackling this complex problem. The Food & Farming Transition: Toward a Post Carbon System explores the growing vulnerabilities of the U.S. food system, and the steps needed to transition to a system no longer dependent on fossil fuels.
(Mar 2009)
