Year: 2011

Don’t Panic!

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Talk about stockpiling food brings home the seriousness of the situation, the potential for disorder to descend on our society with terrifying speed. The threat of chaos and awareness of how close it is, triggers panic, an instinct to flee, to jump around, lose all sense of place and direction. Oooft. Stop and breathe. The scary thing about Transition is that so many well-informed, intelligent individuals share the conviction we’re on extremely dangerous ground. It would be such a relief to be able to dismiss it as a paranoid delusion.

Toilet paper preparedness vs. true resilience

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A back-up propane stove and an outhouse are not testimonials to resilience. They are merely some extra tools to draw upon if your home is blessed by a massive stroke of good fortune that leaves it standing while those around you are destroyed. No amount of toilet paper, backyard vegetable plots, or canned tomato sauce could help a household suddenly flooded with eight feet of water. That is not to say these things aren’t extremely important. Our “toilet paper preparedness” kept us safe and comfortable so that resources could go to help those who were not. It empowered us to help folks around us. But canned produce, outhouses, and a backyard garden are merely surface-level survival tools. Surviving a true community disaster requires resilience at a far more profound depth.

Fracking Gas = Climate Crash

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For years, governments, industry, and TV ads told us natural gas is the safe bridge fuel while we move away from dirty coal and oil. Cornell University scientist Robert Howarth wondered “Is that true?”…Program includes 27 minute speech by Professor Robert Howarth of Cornell at ASPO USA 2011, November 2nd in Washington D.C. recorded by Carl Etnier of Equal Time Radio, Vermont…Then a follow-up interview this week with Robert Howarth, to fill in his hurried climax of the speech…that methane emissions, when calculated over 20 years…could add up to at least 44% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States!

European banks in the United States

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This paper by Hyun Song Shing, Global Bank Glut and Loan Risk Premium, has already been flagged by Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen a couple of days back, but with rather brief commentary. I found the paper absolutely eye-opening and wanted to alert my readers to it with more emphasis – if you hadn’t already gotten this perspective somewhere else it’s very important to take it on board in thinking about the world.

Harvesting crops in the mud and snow

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The weather has kept the ground wet through much of the Corn Belt but that mud doesn’t stop today’s machines of mass destruction when farmers get desperate enough to harvest anyway. They grind their way through the wet soil, leaving in their wake roiling, rolling gullies of ooze deep enough in the wettest areas to sink a Greyhound bus.

Why Occupy has taken off

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The Occupy movement, unlike the peak oil/climate/Transition movement (?) is a bottom-up not a top-down approach. That appeals to the younger people and many of the older ones as well. What they are doing is not coming in the form of ‘delivered wisdom’ from the ‘experts in the field’ with their laundry list of what we ‘must’ do.

Native American forestry combines traditional wisdom with modern science

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Ten thousand years ago, ancestors of today’s Coquille Indians lived along the southern Oregon coast from Coos Bay to Cape Blanco and along the inland valleys of the Coquille River drainage. A common misconception among European Americans is that Indians lived passively within their environment, “at one with nature.” On the contrary, aboriginal peoples actively managed their landscape for their own objectives, using the technologies available to them.

A Solar-Powered Car?

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If you like the sun, and you like cars, then I’m guessing you’d love to have a solar-powered car, right? This trick works well for chocolate and peanut butter, but not so well for garlic bread and strawberries. So how compatible are cars with solar energy? Do we relish the combination or spit it out? Let’s throw the two together, mix with math, and see what happens.

Community resilience, Transition, and why government thinking needs both

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After my talk in Norwich last week, I met a local authority emergency planner, who said that he had found the talk, and the Transition take on resilience, very illuminating. He pointed me in the direction of the latest “Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience”, the latest “national statement for how individual and community resilience can work”, published by the Cabinet Office in March of this year. It is a fascinating document, and is indeed the first official government document on community resilience that refers explicitly to the Transition movement, and as such deserves a post reflecting on it. It also offers a tantalising glimpse into what a government response to peak oil, climate change and economic contraction might look like if anyone had the imagination to create one.