Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Carol Browner, the former director of White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy for the Obama administration, has a simple and direct message: the United States should win the global race for clean energy.
Gas prices are on the rise again, which means the “man on the street” will complain to local news reporters about greedy oil companies and foreign cartels, and energy-illiterate pundits and politicians will cry for domestic drilling with wild abandon. But is gasoline, now approaching $4 per gallon in Ohio, really expensive?
Obviously the world is so broken, in so many ways, that there is endless patching, mending, fixing to do and no one person can make much progress. Yet, as I have reflected over the years I’ve noticed that there is room to be human and an acceptance of the imperfect in this way of thinking and acting. There is, as in the Japanese concept of shibumi, a virtue in simplicity, modesty, and everydayness.
The increasingly self-conscious pursuit of fun has reshaped the ethos of what life was all about. As early as 1958, the psychoanalyst and writer Martha Wolfenstein suggested that society was seeing the rise of a new “fun morality”: an explicit social imperative to have fun all the time, in all areas of life. However, far from being positive, Wolfenstein saw this fun morality as problematic. It created a source of anxiety in which one felt “ashamed” and “secretly worried” that one wasn’t having as much fun as one ought to be.
In September 2010 I joined a team of latter-day explorers in the Netherlands on a quest to discover what American communities can learn from the Dutch about transforming bicycling in the United States from a largely recreational pastime to an integral part of our transportation system. We were in search of the “27 percent solution”—the health, environmental, economic, and community benefits gained in a nation where more than a quarter of all daily trips are made on bicycle, according to Patrick Seidler, vice-chairman of the Bikes Belong Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to getting more people on bikes more often.
It’s a policy fierce enough to cause great suffering among Iranians — and possibly in the long run among Americans, too. It might, in the end, even deeply harm the global economy and yet, history tells us, it will fail on its own. Economic war led by Washington (and encouraged by Israel) will not take down the Iranian government or bring it to the bargaining table on its knees ready to surrender its nuclear program. It might, however, lead to actual armed conflict with incalculable consequences.
Why, in the face of massive evidence that constant expansion of production and extraction of resources is killing us, do governments and corporations keep shoveling coal for the runaway growth train?
In most environmental writing, one of two explanations is offered – it’s human nature, or it’s a mistake.
Lloyd’s of London, the world’s biggest insurance market, has become the first major business organisation to raise its voice about huge potential environmental damage from oil drilling in the Arctic.
The City institution estimates that $100bn (£63bn) of new investment is heading for the far north over the next decade, but believes cleaning up any oil spill in the Arctic, particularly in ice-covered areas, would present “multiple obstacles, which together constitute a unique and hard-to-manage risk”.
“Leaves are easy,” Josiah tells me. “It’s the staples we need to look at.” I’m putting together a story on the Urban Food Landscape for the upcoming Transition Free Press. There are all manner of innovative veg growing enterprises in the cities: inner city and peri-urban farms (including Norwich FarmShare which he has helped set up), Abundance projects, collectives like Growing Communities in Hackney, Transition allotments and school gardens. We’re growing chard and lettuce in cracks and crevices, burying potatoes in barrrels, filling salvaged basins and gutters with seedlings in our back yards. But what about the big stuff? Our daily bread.
Moving the global economy off its current decline-and-collapse path depends on reaching four goals: stabilizing climate, stabilizing population, eradicating poverty, and restoring the economy’s natural support systems. These goals–comprising what the Earth Policy Institute calls “Plan B” to save civilization–are mutually dependent. All are essential to feeding the world’s people. It is unlikely that we can reach any one goal without reaching the others.
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently released full-year 2011 world oil production data. In this post, I would like show some graphs of recent data, and provide some views as to where this leads with respect to future production.
Atamai Village is an attempt to respond intelligently to the risks and opportunities outlined in other chapters of this book. Atamai villagers hope that the evolving responses in their settlement, in whole or in part, will be useful for many others, including those in urban areas. The response needs to take into account the need to mitigate climate change and adapt to low or zero fossil fuel use, the constraints of sea-level rise over the next century, the need to step outside, as much as possible, the mainstream financial system and the importance of a local steady-state economy within the biophysical limits of the region.
