Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The argument is being made that “food sovereignty” is an organising principle so demonstrably strong that it has the potential to transform economic power. Can we really invest in it as the ecological principle to take us into the 21st century?
In Extraenvironmentalist #39 we speak with Steve Keen about how neoclassical economics controls the ways our governments think. Steve draws on themes from the second edition of his book that exposes neoclassical economics and its faulty logic, Debunking Economics.
Jennifer Baichwal joins us at the 95′ mark to talk about her newest film, Payback, based on Margaret Atwood’s book about debt and debtor relationships.
Four weeks after the Elgin G4 well sprung a leak above the production platform in the North Sea, Total has spudded the first of two relief wells as backup in case the attempt to kill the well from above doesn’t work. It will take 6 months to drill the wells, however, and an estimated 200,000 cubic meters of gas has been released so far – reportedly enough to heat all of Aberdeen for a decade. In this post, I will provide some additional background on the history of this project and what Total E&P UK’s plans were prior to the leak and subsequent shutdown of all production.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-the Iranian confrontation
-the EU’s debt crisis
-Argentina nationalizes YPF
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
Each year in April, the Goldman Environmental Prizes are awarded to six activists, one from each of the six inhabited continental regions. This year’s winners have overcome tremendous odds and threats to their lives to lead effective protests and carry out brilliant strategies. The inspiring winners give me hope that, on the economic front, we can energize an enormous protest movement in the United States.
I find that I’ve written a lot over the last couple of years about ownership — and by extension, about land and property. Not enough, it turns out, as I read the news this week that the activists who had occupied an education and environment centre in the Forest of Dean, to try to prevent Gloucestershire Council from selling it off, have been evicted. Legally, of course, it is the Council’s to sell. The argument of this post is that it shouldn’t be.
The Deepwater Horizon was all about peak oil. And climate change. And economic collapse. How soon we forget.
Since its beginnings, the sleeper-awakes scenario has been one of the most commonly used frameworks for introducing fictional utopias and dystopias–yet somehow it doesn’t feel overdone. The reason, I suspect, is that the sleep is incidental to the story, the true focus being the new world order and how it compares with the old. That’s certainly the case with Patricia Frank’s Falling Through Time, the story of a woman who travels into the future and takes us on a sort of guided tour of it. Her name is Summer Holbrook, and she’s a prominent advertising executive who goes missing while vacationing in Alaska. After suffering a spill down a glacier crevasse, she freezes, falls into suspended animation and is found and rescued by a band of expeditioners in the year 2084.
For nearly a century local investing has been essentially illegal, and Wall Street has monopolized all the investment options for the average investor. Thanks to the JOBS Act that President Barack Obama recently signed into law, local investing in job-creating small businesses is now legal.
Out of desperation for the climate, many prominent environmentalists converted to the religion of nuclear (fission) power between 2008-2011. Maybe this is a good time to rethink those deathbed conversions.
Virtually every public and corporate space I visit — lift, office lobby, grocery store, doctor’s office or petrol station, every space — has overhead speakers and a piped-in sound system, which has no reason to exist but seems to grow louder each year. Most places play the same twelve songs over and over, but the choice of music is not the main issue. The problem is that most people I know have ceased to notice this background and talk over it — again, more loudly each year.
No other society has ever performed this kind of giant experiment on themselves over generations, so no one has ever measured the long-term effects. I do know, though, that between the earphones, the MP3 player and the earplugs, a normal life is getting expensive.
Eco-spirituality is about helping people experience “the holy” in the natural world and to recognize their relationship as human beings to all creation, she said. However, eco-spirituality isn’t just a philosophy or a prayerful way of life. For Sister Ginny Jones, it has been a passionate call to action.
