Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-How can we grow more food locally? Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible Todmorden speaks in Bath (video)
-Australia’s “Grain and Graze” Farming Method Provides Peak Oil and Climate Change Resiliency
-Organic agriculture: deeply rooted in science and ecology
-Effects of input management and crop diversity on non-renewable energy use efficiency of cropping systems in the Canadian Prairie (report)
No explanation of the environmental crisis gets more exposure than the claim that it is all caused by overpopulation. The view that really doesn’t get such coverage is the anti-capitalist alternative, the argument that the crisis is caused by a social and economic system that has waste and destruction built into its DNA.
-Catalyst Online Edition: Oil Crunch (video)
-Fleeing Vesuvius, the US Edition
-Imagining a world without oil
The trading floor with coke, hookers and fistfights is gone, but speculation has only gotten worse in the era of peak oil.
In just a century, we’ve become almost entirely dependent on cheap oil. We rely on oil for just about everything, in fact the global economy is reliant on its free flowing supply. So what would happen if the well started to run dry and demand outstripped supply? Some oil industry experts think we’ve already hit Peak Oil and we should brace ourselves for the imminent Oil Crunch.
Read the transcript of our first ever live webchat. Lots of lively ideas from readers and panelists alike. Hope to see you with us next time.
Read the transcript of our first ever live web chat. Lots of lively ideas from readers and panelists alike. Hope to see you with us next time.
Revolutions in human ecology might usefully be grounded in a sense of humanity’s deep past, for that is where our power arrangements began.
The two sciences have markedly different philosophies. Agriculture is interested in making farming a money-profitable business. Archeology is interested in finding out why profitable farming invariably leads to wrecked civilizations.
Since the crisis of industrial society is being driven by social and economic habits that foster the extravagant use of energy and other resources, it would seem to be obvious that using much less of these things ought to be the foundation of any reasonable response. The fact that so many proposed responses advocate doing almost anything imaginable but using less energy and other resources points straight toward the tangled heart of contemporary nihilism, and suggests a way out.
We want to know: Is an alternative future possible—one rooted in small fishers, small farmers, and the teeming biodiversity of the islands? For starters we want to know: Can small fishers become a pillar of a new economy as this country begins to run out of oil and gas?
Put these things together — a tone of hopelessness in the mainstream progressive media, a largely useless outpouring of outrage in the indymedia, a giving up of citizens on the viability of centralized representative governments, reactionary responses to black swan events instead of constructive ones, the ratcheting up of existing systems to prolong the period before tipping points, and a naivete about the powerlessness of even the most powerful in modern complex systems — and what do we have?
