Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– NPR: Ex-Shell CEO and Peak Oil Researcher Face Off Over America’s Energy Future
– WaPo: Has the United States beaten peak oil? Not so fast.
– Much ado about Hotelling: Beware the ides of Hubbert (Hubbert curve is a major determinant for oil prices)
– ¿Cuánto petróleo hace falta para extraer un barril de petróleo? (Charles Hall intervista)
– Roland Vially, géologue à l’IFP : “les hydrates de méthanes pourraient constituer une nouvelle source de gaz à l’horizon 2030”
The Simpler Way consists of a website and booklet which provide detailed practical advice on how to live a ‘simpler life’ of reduced and restrained consumption. More importantly, it invites readers to contribute their own thoughts, experiences, and practical tips, so that we can all share and expand upon our collective wisdom.
The Simpler Way represents a life with less clutter, less waste, and less fossil fuel use, but also a life with more time for the things that truly inspire and bring happiness.
“I’ve been concerned by the extent of ‘burn-out’ I’ve come across – in particular states of exhaustion, the development of cynicism and despair. But also the opposite of these in the form of a kind of ‘pollyanna-ish’ defensiveness where people convince themselves that all is solvable, either through technology or through local community action. “
“Both of these tendencies have increased post-Copenhagen, along with a tendency for campaigners sometimes to blame each other rather than the powerful actors in the political system. This is a common response amongst groups experiencing failure – you begin by minutely examining the reasons for the lack of success and end by attacking each other or alternatively withdrawing altogether.”
No individual or organization is always going to be right when it comes to projections of future oil production. What we should expect is that in general, an individual or organization should more often than not be within some reasonable range of the actual future production level. Unfortunately, the U.S. DOE/EIA’s projections are too frequently off by a substantial amount.
Want to grow food and live the sustainable lifestyle but lack the space? Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living, by Rachel Kaplan with K. Ruby Blume, a glossy bible for self-sufficiency in the city, will have you tearing out your driveway to sow a garden, and diverting gray water to irrigate it. The book’s beautifully presented and amply illustrated projects are all geared toward typical city-sized lots, and interspersed with case studies of actual homesteads and working urban farms, like the two-acre rooftop farm in Brooklyn, where greens grow amid rooftop vents.
Obviously getting by without fossil fuels (owing to impending shortages of oil, natural gas and coal) will be an incredibly rude shock for all of us. Our current telecommunication, transportation and retail infrastructure, as well as our current system of industrial agriculture, are based on the abundant availability of cheap fossil fuels. On the plus side, Fleeing Vesuvius is full of a number of specific strategies, currently being tried in Ireland and elsewhere, for building resilient communities to withstand this transition to a non-fossil energy society.
Last weekend, my wife and I went for a Valentine’s weekend away to the Makanda Inn, a straw-bale/green building B&B in Makanda, southern Illinois. As far as I’ve been able to determine at present, there are only a handful of straw bale hostelries of any kind in the world, and this is the closest to where we live. Here are a few pictures and a few impressions of our stay (with a focus on the themes of this blog).
“We have no need for “biocentrism,” “anthropocentrism,” or for that matter any “centrism,” nor for any ideology that diverts popular attention from the social sources of the ecological crisis.”
Oil prices gained this week, touching $120/barrel on Thursday, in response to rising tension over Iran including two key developments. One was Tehran’s announcement that Iranian made nuclear fuel rods had been loaded into a research reactor for the first time…
Re-localisation is often cited as a primary objective of local currencies. The recently launched Bristol Pound state their key objectives as: to support local independent traders (“keep our High Street diverse and distinct”), and to boost the local economy “spending Bristol Pounds stops money leaking from the area”. These are objectives shared by all local economies (and arguably by any sub-economy with an identifiable identity such as a developing country).
-Monsanto guilty of chemical poisoning in France
-The Corn Ethanol Lobby’s Land Grab
-Ohio could get specialized middle, high schools on farming
-Composting For Kids Is More Fun With Wrigglers
I like to think of utopia as the space where idealism meets reality. Over the years, I have found few radical social change projects that met reality without failure or conflict, especially within a capitalist economy. Transformative projects often fail to take off and end up disillusioning their founders and volunteers. The Bike Kitchen model is one of those unique exceptions that we can try to learn from.
