Year: 2011

Energy infrastructure of the post-carbon future

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The urban infrastructure of the post-carbon future will need to rediscover and utilize lost technologies and processes from history.

Integrated waste-to-energy combined heat and power systems can meet essential needs for food, clean water, public health and sufficient electrification for elevators and public transportation in a well-planned eco-city and provide a modest amount of energy for local light industry. When considering how much energy would be available, it would be misleading to look at total city energy use as planners do with today’s centralized utilities. Instead, it would be more helpful to examine how much energy you and your family could produce yourselves with a small, household anaerobic digester and gasifier and home combined heat and power system.

Food insecurity and the conflict trap

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In Food Insecurity and Violent Conflict: Causes, Consequences and Addressing the Challenges, uthors Henk-Jan Brinkman and Cullen S. Hendrix illustrate clearly that food insecurity is a “threat and multiplier for violent conflict”. Based on their fairly broad review of the research, in which more than 100 sources were referenced, “[f]ood insecurity, especially when caused by higher food prices, heightens the risk of democratic breakdown, civil conflict, protest, rioting, and communal conflict.”

Peak Moment 200: How the West has won (with transcript)

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“Is the world a better place because you were born?” asks author Derrick Jensen. He contrasts sustainable indigenous cultures who enrich their habitat with the current “dominant culture destroying everything.” He explores how industrial civilization is inherently violent, turning people into objects and the earth into stuff. His books include A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, What We Leave Behind and Endgame. [Part 1]

Joel Salatin: How to prepare for a future increasingly defined by localized food & energy

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Joel Salatin, proprietor of Polyface Farms and highly-visible champion of sustainable farming, thinks modern humans have become so far removed from a natural connection to the food they eat, that we no longer have a true understanding of what “normal” food is. In this interview, Chris and Joel explore what constitutes truly sustainable agriculture and the reasons why our current system has departed so far from it, as well as practical steps individuals can take to increase their own personal resiliency around the food they eat (in short: “find your kitchen”, source your food locally, and grow some yourself).

Coming round the Dark Mountain Part 1: Uncivilisation

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“We’re writers with dirt under our fingernails” states the manifesto, and what strikes you is that the new narrative is not some urban dystopia, a tale told by cynical city novelists, it’s directly rooted in the materials of nature. It shares a lineage with English visionaries, dissenters and poets, and yet feels new and modern, planetary, something we are all inventing together.

The economy: Possible scenarios for the future 3

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In Sacred Economy, Charles Eisenstein poses the seemingly outrageous idea that money should be sacred. In this he means that a good bit of the mess we’re currently in is because we have lost this sense of the sacred and the special – the connected and interdependent nature of transactions between people.

Princely advice

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I just read a speech given by Prince Charles at Georgetown University this past May. I’m normally not a follower of Royalty, but he did a great job of simply connecting global trends to the importance of building local food systems through the application of permaculture (though he didn’t call it permaculture).

Danger ahead: prioritising risk avoidance in political and economic decision-making

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Now that the financial and political components of the present system have discredited themselves, a fluid situation exists that might allow more viable options to emerge. Local green initiatives, in particular the Transition Towns movement, are gaining in strength and number(s), but do they have the potential to develop the capacity needed at a national level to transform societies’ energy and transport infrastructures?