Cool ideas – April 7
-TAKE ACTION on conserving home energy (with a sexy helping hand)
-How to Design a Neighborhood for Happiness
-In Africa’s largest slum, a cooker that turns trash into fuel
-A Mad Scientist’s 50 Tools for Sustainable Communities
Year: 2011
Peak oil notes – April 7
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
Fight of our lives: Moore’s Law vs. Murphy’s Law
I live in Sonoma County, California, where officials declared last year that 90 percent of county roads will be allowed to deteriorate and gradually return to gravel, simply because there’s no money in the budget to pay for continued repairs. Perhaps someone who lives on a one of these Sonoma County roads will mail-order the latest MacBook Air (a shining aluminum-clad example of Moore’s law) for delivery by UPS–only to be disappointed by the long wait because a delivery truck has broken its axle in a pothole (a dusty example of Murphy’s law).
Superbugs in India – April 8
– Guardian: Superbug gene rife in Delhi water supply
– WSJ: WHO Calls for Action on Superbugs
– India Tribune: Lancet study finds waterbugs in New Delhi
– Antibiotic resistance: Bacteria are winning the war
– Lancet: Dissemination of NDM-1 positive bacteria in the New Delhi environment and its implications for human health
Economic Contraction
Just like peak oil and global warming, economic contraction is a “game changer.” As the economy we now know crumbles, the far-reaching repercussions will sculpt every aspect of our future. In my opinion, any long-term plan — Transition EDAPs included — must anticipate that it will unfold amidst a world of economic contraction. We have to plan for it, and put alternative financial tools in place to weather it, or it will undermine all of our other efforts.
Money, simplicity, and embracing new paradigms: Quaker tuition follow-up
My recent piece on the cost of tuition at the Friends Seminary in Manhattan has gotten enough play to warrant a response. So here goes.
Can the commons move from the margins to the mainstream?
Why is it that the commons is so often excluded from official policy discussions about how to manage resources and improve people’s lives? This strikes me as a serious void in our public conversations, one that we desperately need to correct.
Dwindling energy resources will put the economy at risk
Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics of the University of Missouri at Columbia John Ikerd argues that humans cannot wait much longer to address the reality that economic growth is unsustainable—because the world is running out of energy resources. “We simply can’t continue to grow at the rate we’ve been growing in the past.”
Communications – A new narrative
How do you tell a downstory? Downstories are hard to find in our culture. There are plenty of upstories that don’t work out that act like scary cautionary tales (if you don’t make it to the ball, you never get out of that fireplace and will always wear rags). But how do you go about telling the story of Transition, of the energy descent we have to make as individuals and as a people? How do you turn the coach back into a pumpkin and the princess back into someone who can tend a fire?
The new food movement: politics and pleasure
Food has become – to use an older phrase now being recycled by contemporary activists – the “edible dynamic” at the heart of mainstream economic and environmentalist debates.
The Cuckoo that won’t sing. Sustainability and Japanese culture
Here, I discuss what we can learn from Japanese culture in terms of sustainability, referring in particular to the “Edo Period” from about 1600 AD to mid 19th century. The Japanese society of that period is one of the few historical examples we have of a “steady state” economy. How did the Japanese managed to attain that? Here I am suggesting an explanation on the basis of the old Japanese story of “the cuckoo that won’t sing.”
Pasture Plants That Poison
…an old remedy for internal parasites in livestock is to soak black walnut hulls in their drinking water. If you think that sounds far-fetched, a much publicized control for internal parasites in humans is black walnut tincture, made from soaking particles of black walnut hull in vodka. Think I’m kidding, don’t you. Google it.
