Year: 2011

Gardening on forest time

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Gardening in the forest requires a much different approach than vegetable or landscape gardening…Unlike a vegetable garden or a flower garden or a field of wheat or corn, a forest garden can provide all the necessities of a human economy, especially at the small scale of a homestead or village. History confirms this. But to reap these harvests requires an economy that is in most of its features the opposite of the economy that we have now and that organizes our world.

Fitting the name to the named

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Some say it is senseless to advocate a steady state unless we first have attained, or can at least specify, the optimal level at which to remain stationary. On the contrary, it is useless to know the optimum unless we first know how to live in a steady state. Otherwise knowing the optimum level will just allow us to wave goodbye to it as we grow beyond it—or as we “degrow” below it.

Energy efficiency to the rescue

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At the same time, it’s important to have a realistic understanding of efficiency’s limits. Boosting energy efficiency requires investment, and investments in energy efficiency eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. Just as there are limits to resources, there are also limits to efficiency. Efficiency can save money and lead to the development of new businesses and industries. But the potential for both savings and economic development is finite.

After the American Dream

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…I have suggested that revolts in so-called developing countries can be predicted not only by the fraction of educated youth who are unemployed and other factors, but also by the fraction of household budget spent for food. Now we might ask of developed countries: to what extent will voters tolerate extreme inequality if the standard of living of a large majority of them no longer gradually rises or at least seems to remain stable, but actually declines noticeably?

After the great quake, living with earth’s uncertainty

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In my layman’s cosmology, the anthropic principle says this: our existence implies that the universe must take the shape it does or we wouldn’t be here to perceive it. A universe with even minutely different physical laws wouldn’t include us (which isn’t to say that such universes don’t exist).

Some fight back: review of Joe Bageant’s “Rainbow Pie”

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Nobody writes about class in America and about America’s unacknowledged class war like Joe Bageant. Dubbed the “Sartre of Appalachia,” Joe writes about America’s largest, yet invisible to most, class — 60 million poor, undereducated white laborers. These are the folks who as Joe notes are on the other side of “the shower line” — those who pull off their sweaty work clothes and take their showers after their back-breaking day’s physical labor as opposed to those who shower and dress far more finely before heading off to work.

(Joe Bageant died March 26, 2011.)

Film review: “The Economics of Happiness”

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The film’s power lies in the sections voiced by ordinary people, the Chinese teenager talking about how he loves America because everyone is happy there, the two Detriot urban food growers standing by their vegetable beds, and the two Ladakhi women looking, bemused and upset, at the lonely residents of a London old peoples’ home.