Year: 2011

The most important news story of the day/millennium

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The most important piece of news yesterday, this week, this month, and this year was a new set of statistics released yesterday by the Global Carbon Project. It showed that carbon emissions from our planet had increased 5.9 percent between 2009 and 2010. In fact, it was arguably among the most important pieces of data in the last, oh, three centuries, since according to the New York Times it represented “almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution.”

Getting it together: The Empowerment Manual (review)

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Released in 2011, with an introduction that references this year’s dramatic Tahrir Square and Wisconsin protests, Starhawk appears to have anticipated the broad and unabashed presence of public group processing endeavors in the social movements shaking up the “world order” today.

Storage Nation

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It’s hard to know where to begin a rant about the materialistic mess that our culture has made of Christmastime in the United States. An easy target is the Thanksgiving midnight-madness sales at big-box retail stores. And there’s always those devious marketers who use nostalgia toturn December into a month of mass consumption. But there’s one industry that, more than any other, epitomizes materialism and our seemingly limitless propensity to consume: self storage.

Escaping Thought Traps and Creating Democracy for a Small Planet

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“Solutions to global crises are within reach,” says Frances Moore Lappé. “Our challenge is to free ourselves from self-defeating thought traps so we can bring these solutions to life.” In EcoMind, Lappé helps facilitate a much needed shift. She argues that much of what is wrong with the world, from our eroding soil to our eroding democracies, results from ways of thinking that are out of sync with human nature and nature’s rhythms. Humans are doers, she says….It turns out that gap between the world we long for and the world we thought we were stuck with can be bridged after all—if we can learn to think like an ecosystem.

The second wind of the worldwide social justice movement

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The first round of the social justice movements took multiple forms across the world – the so-called Arab Spring, the Occupy movements beginning in the United States and then spreading to a large number of countries, Oxi in Greece and the indignados in Spain, the student protests in Chile, and many others.

The degree of success may be measured by an extraordinary article by Lawrence Summers – remarkable, considering that he has been personally one of the architects of the world economic policy in the last twenty years that has put us all in the dire crisis in which the world finds itself.

Occupy the Million Dollar View

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Now that the current phase of the Occupation movement—one that involved camping out in public places—is drawing to a close, thoughts turn to other, even more effective venues and exploits. Occupying the front lawns of mansions owned by the 1% would certainly send a message, although a very brief one, since trespassing happens to be illegal.

And then it hit me: Occupy flotillas floating up to crash swank exclusive seaside gatherings.

Recognizing good science when you see it: climate change seen by depletion scientists

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Many people involved with peak oil studies don’t often interact with serious climate science and their view of it remains linked to the distortions presented in the mainstream media.

However, a good scientist can always recognize good science when he sees it. It has been the case of Colin Campbell, founder and honorary chairman of ASPO, who stated to the audience “I am convinced” after having heard the talk on climate change by Van Ypersele at the ASPO-9 Brussels conference. It was the same for several colleagues at a recent Basel energy conference after they heard the excellent climate talk by Ian Dunlop.

The Local Food Shift Meets Occupy Boulder

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…This turns out to be one of the key aspects of relocalization, new forms of local investment that “catalyze the transition from a commerce of extraction and consumption to a commerce of preservation and restoration.” This means, especially, investing in local farming, and in the enterprises that are needed to support a healthy food and farming system. Woody Tasch is teaching us about “Restorative Economics,” following the core principles of carrying capacity, cultural and biological diversity, sense of place, care of the commons, and nonviolence. This may be one of the most significant economic visions to land on this planet in recent decades. It’s radical, truly revolutionary, and you need to read it. Fortunately, you’ll love reading it. It’s pure inspiration, and highly poetic.