Culture kitchen: Empowering community through food
Culture Kitchen is a San Francisco start-up on a unique mission to connect local experts at ethnic home cooking with food lovers who are interested in the people and the stories behind the food.
Year: 2011
The peak oil crisis: a September recap
The release of the International Energy Agency’s Oil Market Report for September is a good time to review the status of our ongoing crisis for the report updates the IEA’s latest thinking on the prospects for global oil.
Water, oil and food – a crisis for Saudi Arabia and the world
A water crisis is unfolding in Saudi Arabia that could have profound implications for both the Saudi people and for the rest of the world.
The Glass Bead Game
The search for constructive visions of a world in the wake of peak oil can lead in strange directions, and one of the more unexpected is a science fiction masterpiece from the first half of the 20th century that few readers have even recognized as science fiction at all, offering a vision of the future that, however appealing, flies in the face of some of the most cherished claims industrial society makes for its own superiority. Unpacking a box of books from his own college days, the Archdruid explains.
When wind power works for people and production
Wind power isn’t only about industrial scale turbines. Restoring wind powered mills, like Callington Mill in Oatlands, Tasmania, offers a way to increase tourism, local food and local economies while creating jobs and building resilience. A win-win-win!
This is the house Transition built
What is the house? Is it a dream we hold, a fairy palace, a shelter from the storm, perched on a hill, overlooking the sea, somewhere down a farm track or a long drive edged with lime trees? Or is it a nightmare, the haunted house, the house of childhood secrets we fear to reenter, the slum and the council estate we long to escape from, the little boxes on the hillside we are loathe to see?
Knitting a new future
Here, in the middle of urban Los Angeles, knitting is a pretty elitist hobby. It might be a “reskilling type of thing” good for necessary clothing-making somewhere out on a farm where there are plenty of goats and sheep. Or if I took to raising angora rabbits. Because when the serious hiccups in the economy come, when the darker transportation issues of peak oil set in, the boutique yarn stores I patronize today likely won’t be around anymore.
Growing through the storm
How can we adapt mentally, and socially to Peak Oil, climate change and an economic bust at the same time? 3 interviews with solutions: interviews: “Peak Oil Shrink” Kathy McMahon from Vermont on unexpected lessons from Hurricane Irene. Urban homesteader Jules Dervaes – food self-sufficiency on a city lot. Richard Heinberg on coping with the End of Growth – will fertilizer shortages mean “Peak Food”? What are Common Security Clubs and “Resilience Circles”?
Uncle Sam does(n’t) want you: America’s reserve army of labor marches through time
As has always been true, the coexistence of idling workplaces and cast-off workers remains the single most severe indictment of capitalism as a system for the reproduction of human society. The arrival of a new social category — “the 99ers” — punctuates that grim observation today.
Exchanging currencies – Sep 13
-Germany and Greece flirt with mutual assured destruction
-Make foreign currencies legal in UK
-RMB: steaming ahead in Africa
-BerkShares boost the Berkshires in Massachusetts
The Mondragon bank – an old model for a new type of finance
The coming energy crunch will lead to volatile prices and an overall long-term economic contraction…A new type of institution is needed to handle non-debt finance. It should help promoters plan their projects and then find outside investor-partners in return for a share of each project’s income rather than its profits.
Have frackers pushed their luck too far?
Over the past week, I’ve heard from serious observers of the U.S. shale gas industry — from investment analysts, think-tank scholars and others — that we seem near a tipping point in the heated debate over the companies’ drilling methods: If there is another serious accident or two in which shale gas drillers appear to have polluted a water aquifer, look for significant regulatory curtailment of the industry, as one investment analyst put it.
