Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The latest World Energy Outlook from the International Energy Agency came with a double warning. On the one hand, oil prices could soon spike to $150 once more, on the other, the world is barely five years away from sealing its fate on climate change.
In Extraenvironmentalist #28 we speak with Richard Heinberg about his most recent book The End of Growth which uses data on global economies and international energy supplies to argue that the paradigm of economic growth has ended forever. Richard says that while our economies will still grow in the future, they’ll be constrained to lower and lower rates of growth that won’t be able to support money systems and financial obligations
When my neighbour brought his horse to the farrier – horseshoe-fitter, pronounced like “carrier” – I sat in to watch and learn, and the farrier seemed happy to answer my many questions. He looked like a teenager, with a face you’d expect to see in a drive-through window, but he wrestled the stallion’s legs and shaped the hot iron like a man who knew his business.
Writers from a century or two ago described recognizing particular barrels, nails or saddles as we would recognize someone’s handwriting, and the craftsman’s reputation hung on the quality of their work. When everyone knew where products came from and could identify the makers of the superior and inferior work, they could reward the hardest-working and most skilled craftsmen with their business – what used to be called capitalism, before the word came to mean the system we have today.
“Shut Down: A Story of Economic Collapse and Hope” paints a convincing picture of how an ill-planned government housecleaning of insolvent banks started on Monday morning could set in motion a chain of events that would bring down the whole of American and world civilization by Wednesday night.
First-time author WR Flynn, a retired law enforcement officer living near Portland, Oregon who traveled in Eastern Europe and the USSR, and in 1985, spent a month in Cuba working on a communal farm, has written a didactic novel clearly to make a point. Namely, that our powerful and seemingly solid society is actually frighteningly brittle and vulnerable to the slightest financial shock.
– Occupy movement plans spring offensive as momentum stalls
– Matt Taibbi: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests
– Starhawk et al: Open letter to the Occupy movement: why we need agreements
– Vandana Shiva: The 99 Percent
– At Occupy Protests, Bearing Witness Without Preaching
Think about it! We’ve been presented with a win-win opportunity to build on the Occupy Movement. And — really — don’t we all share the “Occupy” vision of a kinder, more sustainable world?
If together we could see everyone as part of the 100%, rather than as “we-versus-them” confrontational camps, then perhaps we can all actually make a difference.
Not that long ago, the notion of an archdruid speaking at a national conference on peak oil would likely have occurred only to humorists and anti-environmental zealots. Over the week just past, as the industrial world showed unnerving signs of lurching into crisis, that preposterous scenario did indeed come to pass. The Archdruid offers his reflections on the event.
It struck me that Transition says to people “take this model and do it where you are”, whereas Occupy suggests coming together to suspend your life while you explore, with others, the question of what’s the best thing to do now. Transition is about building that into your own life, right now, drawing on the experience of many others. You might say that Occupy suggests occupying, for example, Wall Street, while Transition suggests occupying your own street, putting up runner beans and solar panels rather than tents. There is great richness in this diversity of approaches. I was left mulling the question I should have asked Frannie from the information tent, when people arrive and say “I don’t have the time to be here at Occupy, but what can I do in my own life, at home, in my street?” It would be fascinating to know the answer they receive.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
The United States isn’t broke; we’re the richest country on the planet and a country in which the richest among us are doing exceptionally well. But the truth is, our economy is broken, producing more pollution, greenhouse gasses and garbage than any other country. In these and so many other ways, it just isn’t working.
Here is the single biggest question to consider about the economic, energy and environmental unwinding we are facing – what will the economy look as we go?
The crude industrial processes that powered our world for a century or more leave us with depletion, fragmentation, and decay. Living systems can show us the way to recover and sustain the damaged systems upon which life depends.
