Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Perhaps the route to real change, long-lasting and deep change, isn’t through deepening polarity, but through a re-weaving of what has been torn apart, a seeking of common ground, an appeal to universal values, creating a safe space where people can sit together and not feel judged, and through the creation of viable, nurturing and life-affirming alternatives that have a strong and broad sense of ownership.
– Ken Greenberg On How Jane Jacobs Was Right (Book Review)
– Great places: dense, wired, and sustainable
– What’s So Great About Portland?
– Expanding Bike Programs Makes Sense in a Time of Shrinking Budgets and Soaring Gas Prices
– Bicycling and the art of being broke
– Wealthy Nations Maxed Out on Travel?
– How drivers can put a brake on the world’s petrol crisis
– New report and map chronicles the visceral reality of 47,000 preventable pedestrian deaths
As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.
There was a step forward this week for recognition of peak oil in the UK political agenda. Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has agreed that the Department for Energy and Climate Change and ITPOES (UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security) should work more closely together on peak-oil threat assessment and contingency planning.
The causes of the fall of the Soviet Union are thought to be inefficiency and the Soviet response to the Reagan Administration’s military buildup of the early 1980s. However, a more plausible explanation is the decline in Soviet oil production caused by peak oil. This gives the world an example of a modern economy confronted by peak oil and what lessons we can learn from it.
We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source — if not the source — of two of our biggest recent wars.
In a new book, Charles Saylan, co-founder and executive director of the California-based Ocean Conservation Society, and his co-author pose a key question: What can the U.S. educational system do to improve students’ understanding of the environment and its importance in their lives?
The capitalist-saturated American culture gives way to holidays only begrudgingly. Under corporate dominance, Americans vacation and take time off from work very little compared to the rest of the industrialized world. When we do have a holiday, it’s equally steeped in the capitalist ethos, with garish sales loudly urging us to consume, gorge and grab ACT NOW deals. But it’s exactly this paradigm that’s pitched growth to an unsustainable end and set us adrift intellectually and culturally. This Memorial Day reject the buying and spending frenzy. Reject the go, go, go mentality. Embrace instead a process of renewal, relaxation, connection. Take that precious day off, that lovely three-day weekend as an invitation to your higher self, guilt not necessary.
The year 2008 will be remembered as a major turning point in industrial history, for it was the first year when the world got a taste of the unpredictable price spikes that come from inadequate oil supplies.
In the oil business few endeavors promise more bluster than a pipeline. And TransCanada’s grandiose and troubled proposal to ship 1.1 million barrels of Canadian bitumen to the U.S. Gulf coast ably illustrates a good batch of petroleum hubris.
For a long time we have been able to be the audience to history, to live our lives theoretically. We can watch everything on our screens, at arm’s length. But now history is coming into our streets and into our lives and we need to know how to act, or support those who act on our behalf. If we cheer for those bold protesters in Tahrir Square, in Wisconsin, for the thousands of campaign groups that Paul Hawken wrote about in Blessed Unrest, we need also to cheer for those who occupy Fortnum and Masons and the Royal Bank of Scotland, who protest against the corporations who threaten those fragile eco-systems on which we depend.
