Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It has often been said that we would only be able to see peak oil by looking in the rear view mirror. It’s well past time for a head-check, so this post provides a quick look back at production over the last five years and at some of the predictions I and others have made.
Is the central assertion of this book – that world economic growth is over – already disproved? How else to explain China’s continued exuberant expansion, or signs of recovery in the U.S. in 2010?
With a very small number of animals on a homestead, the whole tenor of livestock management differs from that of the commercial farm. You get to know your few animals well as individuals, and you become almost friends with them. Chore time becomes pleasurable. If you have hostile animals, you can get rid of them and buy others. And, if after a while you cannot find gentle animals, nature is telling you something.
The implications of the Hughes report are disturbing. Without dramatic reductions in consumption of fossil fuels from outright conservation to energy efficiency (he strongly recommends more co-generation and targeting fuels to their highest-value applications), the rapid exploitation of shale gas will only confirm Eric Sevareid’s law: “the chief cause of problems are solutions.”
Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted, according to an FAO-commissioned study.
And that means you have to try adapting in place, as though you really needed to. Try for a week to give up the car. Try for a weekend to turn off the breakers and the gas and live without fossil fuels. Set a limit on your kilowatt hours or you consumption of gasoline for the month, and stick to it. Don’t make it an easy one – push your limits. Cut your budget to the bone and then cut some more, as though you had no choice – and see how you do. Even your mistakes will teach you something about what you need.
-Canada’s Quebec province opens up north for mining
-Arctic nations eye region’s potential
-Oil prices, poor countries and policy responses
Ivette Soler’s new book The Edible Front Yard: The Mow-less, Grow-more Plan for a Beautiful, Bountiful Garden is lush with pictures and full of design advice, color combinations, attractive edibles, and hardscaping ideas. Ivette (a.k.a. The Germinatrix), a garden designer and writer, insists on beauty and style in her front-yard edible landscapes and gardens. She advises “Beauty matters…your front yard is a greeting to the world.”
More and more I’m finding that it’s good to know people who can do things, and these people are of two sorts: those who can do things you don’t know much about and those who know more than you about what you know. From both you can learn.
The steady stream of scandals, outbreaks of disease and regulatory crack-downs that is part and parcel of the industrial food system has made food safety a major global issue. Our growing reliance on corporate food and farming concentrates and amplifies risk in new and unprecedented ways, at scales never seen before, making intervention more necessary than ever to ensure that food does not make people sick. But behind all of the talk and action lies another agenda.
A bio-diverse culture needs us to be diverse, which is to say we need to be intrinsically ourselves – rooted in place and within our skills – and working as part of the whole. Coming from a broad frequency band, rather from a narrow, seperated point of view. This is a new way of working in the world: one that combines a modern city intelligence with an ancestral knowledge of the land.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The Mississippi flood
-The IEA’s monthly report
-China’s problems
-In Washington
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
