Year: 2011

Ten years on the road, part two

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The beauty of the natural world is a sublime enjoyment we got for free, and this made the pleasure from having possessions pale by comparison. We decided never to let things become our masters. We began to comprehend the great age of the earth, evident every time we walked on rocks or ocean shore, and this made us see the insignificance of our lives. But we were content.

When one of us had a life-threatening illness, remembering our years on the road, mentally reliving the exciting things we did and the inspiring landscapes we saw, gave a comfort nothing else could have given. We are a part of the great and endless circle of life, nothing more, but nothing less.

Peaking – May 6

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– Alaska’s Peak Oil Realities
– Iraq halves oil output (target) as reality replaces ambition
– Peak oil appears in NPR blog
– EU Plans Measures to Tackle Resource Crunch
– Neue DERA-Kurzstudie zu schweren Seltenen Erden: Entwicklung “Grüner Technologien” durch kritische Versorgungslage gefährdet

The grass isn’t greener

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Obviously, the bright green, manicured lawn is a human invention – Mother Nature certainly doesn’t use a lawnmower. So where did the grass lawn come from? Why do we work so hard to keep it green?

Economic Resilience #5. A multiplicity of financial vehicles

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Previously in this discussion of what we can do about economic contraction, we reminded each other than the economy is basically the sum total of transactions between people. At that same basic level, “money” is simply the markers we use to record those transactions. There is no mandate that transactions between people can only be counted via one kind of marker. In fact, plenty of perfectly valid and life-supporting transactions can be accomplished without any markers at all.

Will we pass 10 billion?

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As much as I would love to see anti-retroviral drug access expand in Africa, and continued lifespan increases across the globe, I’m not at all sure that I think these presumptions, particularly the assumption of continued economic expansion and access to the trappings of middle class life for more people are realistic. To the extent that population growth has depended on fossil fuel growth and the economic expansion it fuels, we must ask what the future of population is in a world of material limits.

Facing the dirty truth about recyclable plastics

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Perhaps the most dramatic example of how oil and water don’t mix can be found in the middle of the planet’s great oceans and seas in the form of litter gyres, rotating currents laden with countless bits of floating debris, mainly plastic and Styrofoam, all of which were pushed to the middle of these great bodies of water by the currents that circle them.

Putting on blinders – the EIA budget cuts

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At some point in the future, perhaps even that soon, politicians and Administrators are going to complain “but nobody told us!!” and rush to blame the industry yet again. But the truth is that there was a group that was keeping the records, and who could tell those with the responsibility to fix it that there was a problem. And the Administration just closed it down. We will regret that lack of information and the warning messages that it would have brought.