Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It started with a conversation among members of a women’s farming group in Affe Tidiane, a small village in the Kaolack region of central Senegal. “The leader of the women’s group said we should have a meeting and ask everyone what they wanted to do,” says Helen Fallat, a Peace Corps volunteer working in the village in 2007 and 2008. “I thought that sounded simple enough.”
With the global oil markets tight and prices rising, any new source of demand could easily have an outsized impact on oil prices in the next few months, right down to what you pay for gasoline at your local pump. As the global energy markets become tighter and tighter, a flood on the other side of the world is enough to trigger off a shock wave that will be felt everywhere.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Paying the Iranians
-World Food Prices Enter ‘Danger Territory’ to Reach Record High
-The city that grows
-How will growing cities eat?
-Peak Fertilizer?
It was a sizzling Saturday morning in December when members of the low low-income Brasilândia community of 247.000 people in São Paulo, gathered with great expectancy for the official unleashing of ‘Transixion’ Brasilândia. Led by the initiating group created earlier in May with representatives from the arts community, environmental groups, health workers, educators, local authority and members of Stickel Foundation, the first part of the morning was dedicated to celebrate a remarkable chain of achievements.
People examine their assumptions about money, decide what is “Enough,” get out of debt, and free up life energy to invest in what matters most to them. Vicki discusses applying these same tools to relationships with our time, opportunities for creativity and exchange, building community, and her ten-mile food diet.
The scientific community has long agreed that our dependence on fossil fuels inflicts massive damage on the environment and our health, while warming the globe in the process. But beyond the damage these fuels cause to us now, what will happen when the world’s supply of oil runs out? In a new video series from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Nicole Foss, Richard Heinberg and other scientists, researchers and writers explain.
– How I learned to stop worrying and love the Saudis
– Bolivia: Morales Repeals Decree Raising Fuel Prices
– Tax on Carbon: The Only Way to Save Our Planet? (James Hansen)
– Crafting Energy Security in the 21st Century: A German View of the Challenge
– Cattle Network: Peak Fertilizer?
– How Google is like bananas (dangers of monocultures)
– Researchers find “alarming” decline in bumblebees
– Memories of the 1877-8 Chinese Famine
– Portlandia – The Dream of the 90s is alive in Portland (video)
– Peak Travel may have arrived
– La Revolucion Blanca (video)
– Be Happy It’s An Order (music in Turkey – video)
– Magic and Findhorn (My Dinner with Andre)
– Postcard from the Future
Douglas Coupland’s vision of an oil-crisis apocalypse in his novel “Player One” is so frightening because it seems so plausible. Would you like to be holed up in a tacky cocktail lounge of an airport hotel when oil hits $250 a barrel, the planes stop flying and the power goes out? And that’s just the beginning.
It is rare for me to read a book that does all three things – that fills that middle gap by offering me genuinely new and engaging ideas, is local to its place but thoughtful about how information gleaned in one environment might connect to another, is written by someone who does have limits on time and energy and occasionally desire to do it perfectly, and finally, is conscious of the need to garden in response to difficult times. That’s why Carol Deppe’s _The Resilient Gardener_ is such a gift.
