Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It isn’t always easy finding fresh, high-quality food in this country. Supermarkets with their long, complex supply chains usually offer unripe or subpar produce that leaves a lot to be desired. But the usual alternative methods of provision have distinct limitations. Luckily, technology provides one great answer to this dilemma, opening up an important new avenue for small-scale producers to connect to customers.
-Fracked: Why Chesapeake Energy’s Aubrey McClendon is in Hot Water
-What Chesapeake’s Woes Mean for Natural Gas: A Q&A With Arthur Berman
-Special Report: Chesapeake CEO took $1.1 billion in shrouded personal loans
-Special Report: Inside Chesapeake, CEO ran $200 million hedge fund
-Fuel to Byrne
-Marginal oil production costs are heading towards $100/barrel
-Book review: Steve Coll’s “Private Empire”
-If You Build Bike Lanes, They Will Ride
-Launching Copenhagens Bicycle Superhighways
-Vehicle Sales Surge in U.S. as $4 Gas Makes Mileage Vital
The linking of development policy, pursuit of wellbeing, and alternative indicators in a new economic paradigm is a strong step toward establishing a sane and sustainable civilization that focuses on meeting human needs with ecological efficiency. To get there, centuries of infinite-planet economic thinking have to be swept aside. Traditional development theory begins with the idea that some nations are underdeveloped — nations that don’t have a western, industrial, consumerist economy. It also supposes that all the nations of the world want that kind of economy and that they can have it. But all three presumptions are false.
A mid-weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
Getting back to reality, all we really know for now is that a number of groups around the world are, and have been for some time, reporting anomalous heat emanating from hydrogen loaded into certain metals and then heated or subjected to electro-magnetic pulses. The number, geographic breadth of these experiments, and the experience and academic stature of the researchers reporting these results make it unlikely that these results are part of a gigantic hoax or flawed temperature readings as many skeptics claim.
New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.”
Showing how the present has come into being but remains continually connected to the past allows us to create what Stewart Brand has called a “long now”—a perspective that allows us a more complex understanding of the long-term social, economic, and environmental challenges that all civilizations have faced.
What is it, then, to make oneself at home, within a community of living beings, as if one belonged? If it requires a word, I prefer indigenate. And where to start? As all good things must, with one’s self at home.
A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted.
It’s hard to think of any word more freely bandied about in contemporary political discourse than “democracy,” and harder still to think of one freighted with a heavier burden of wishful thinking, utopian fantasy, and entitlement. As industrial civilization staggers toward its end, however, today’s fashionable contempt for democracy as it actually exists may become a potent force driving societies in crisis toward far worse options.
