Year: 2011

Willi Paul interviews Craig Mackintosh – Worldwide Permaculture Network (WPN) launches!

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Is there a global permaculture revolution rising now? Well, there better be. The other kinds of revolution aren’t pretty. Revolution, I believe, is going to become an increasingly popular word. But often revolutions merely pull things down, without offering meaningful replacements. Over the last few years the level of interest in permaculture has skyrocketed. People are increasingly realizing the world is running out of options, but many are also realizing that this is exactly what permaculture gives to the world – options.

A patch of somewhere else

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When people list history’s most world-changing inventions, they usually include fire, or guns, or computers. Rarely do people mention something so ubiquitous to us that it has become, literally, invisible – glass and transparent plastic. In the Renaissance, though, when glass began to be sheeted and shaped in quantity and with skill, it created a boom in civilisation; microscopes and telescopes opened up the breadth of the world to science, spectacles doubled men’s intellectual lifetime, and windows allowed for the creation of the first greenhouses.

Bringing wilderness home

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We are cultivating a hunter-gatherer garden, modifying but not eradicating the forest ecology. Not so different from what the Wampanoag and Narragansett did, but more suited to our greater numbers. We are growing wildlife and insects and biological diversity. We are bringing wilderness home. We buy less food. We need fewer fields. Who will say to us or our children or our grandchildren in 50 years that this place isn’t wilderness?

Is the modern anti-tax movement a product of increasing complexity?

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The historical animus that Americans supposedly have toward taxes has been largely manufactured to facilitate the propaganda machine of the modern anti-tax movement. This means that the long hiatus between the Whiskey Rebellion and Proposition 13 must be considered the norm in American history and that some recent change in American circumstances must be responsible for the modern anti-tax movement.

Brave new world fuelled by clean economical energy possible and imperative by 2050

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All of the world’s energy needs could be provided cleanly, renewably and economically by 2050, according to a major new study by WWF. Two years in preparation, The Energy Report breaks new ground with its global scope and its consideration of total energy needs including transport, and making adequate and safe energy available to all.

Fantasies of hyper-globalism: the WWF’s Energy Report

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In a report meant to be both inspiring and reassuring, the WWF ambitiously declares that the world can switch to 95% renewable energy sources by 2050. The Scenario depends largely on increased efficiency and regulated flows of energy through a great system of interconnection. People are remarkably absent. The ostensible reason is that the report is focused on what is “technically possible,” which is more about joules and btus than about human behavior.

John Lewis University

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So ownership matters; but so does control. Why leave the management of the universities in the hands of those who have managed to best compete in the internal bureaucracy? Why not move beyond the trust model towards a fully-fledged multi-stakeholder co-operative? Who is better placed to decide the strategy for the university, and the content of its curriulum? A manager, or the academics and their students?