Year: 2012

A life of abundance without money

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Daniel Suelo, 51, has spent the morning gorging himself on young green shoots of tumbleweed and fixing a rack to the back of his new (gifted) bike with a spool of bailing wire. Suelo gets around on a bike or by the flick of his thumb, on discarded spools of bailing wire and other useful throwaways, and on the generosity of others. Money has been absent from his life ever since he gave away the last of his savings twelve years ago, a move he says brought an authenticity and richness to his life that wasn’t there before.

A write-up of the 2012 Transition Network conference. The best yet.

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Transition folks from around the world gathered last weekend at Battersea Arts Centre for the 6th annual Transition Network conference. In a week when the Arctic ice reached its smallest ever extent, scientists warned that the world’s weather could be on the verge of running amok and it was suggested that Saudi Arabia, always meant to be the ‘swing producer’ on whom the rest of the world could depend for reliable oil supplies, may become a net importer of oil by 2030, the theme of the conference was, appropriately, ‘Building resilience in extraordinary times’.

The close tie between energy consumption, employment, and recession

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The number of jobs available to job-seekers has been a problem for quite a long tine now—since 2000 in the United States, and longer than that in Europe. If we look at the percentage of the US population who are employed, it is now back to 1984 or 1985 levels. I have run into a number of clues about what is happening. In this post, I’d like to discuss what I am seeing.

Blow-by-Blow PV System Efficiency: A Case Study for Storage

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A short while back, I described my standalone (off-grid) urban photovoltaic (PV) energy system. At the time, I promised a follow-up piece evaluating the realized efficiency of the system. What was I thinking? The resulting analysis is a lot of work! But it was good for me, and hopefully it will be useful to some of you lot as well.

Blow-by-Blow PV System Efficiency: A Case Study for Storage

by

A short while back, I described my standalone (off-grid) urban photovoltaic (PV) energy system. At the time, I promised a follow-up piece evaluating the realized efficiency of the system. What was I thinking? The resulting analysis is a lot of work! But it was good for me, and hopefully it will be useful to some of you lot as well.

A write-up of the 2012 Transition Network conference. The best yet.

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Transition folks from around the world gathered last weekend at Battersea Arts Centre for the 6th annual Transition Network conference. In a week when the Arctic ice reached its smallest ever extent, scientists warned that the world’s weather could be on the verge of running amok and it was suggested that Saudi Arabia, always meant to be the ‘swing producer’ on whom the rest of the world could depend for reliable oil supplies, may become a net importer of oil by 2030, the theme of the conference was, appropriately, ‘Building resilience in extraordinary times’.

The man who started a fire (Christopher Alexander Lecture at Berkeley, California)

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As said in the introduction to this lecture held in spring 2011, Christopher Alexander has started a fire that keeps on burning, spread by the “wind” throughout the world. But in the wake of this fire there’s no ash, but only beauty and true living structure. As in the new cosmology of Alexander, matter is not inert anymore — it has spirit, revealed in the field of centers. This means that beauty is seen as a fact of the wholeness found in nature and the universe.

Hopeful Harvest: Food and agriculture as a foundation for peace in Northern Afghanistan

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This apparent disconnect between the symptoms of a failed state and the remedies suggested by what is seen to constitute its healthy counterpart makes it difficult to imagine a way out of failed-statehood. We contend that it is necessary to rethink what a failed state is, to understand, at a rather more practical, grassroots level, the drivers of failed or successful societies.

Hierarchy and money in a global hall of mirrors

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Many authors have written about alternative forms of money, so I don’t need to canvas the topic. But I’m still thinking about the digitization of money and its role in our current monetary predicaments. I recently watched a movie about time as an alternative currency, and I also attended a local lecture on time-banking. These thoughts converge for this post about traditional and alternative forms of money as an illustration of the hierarchy of money. Our economic information systems evolve with increasing complexity to match the complexity of our economies.

Report from a meeting in China about the pipelines for oil export from Canada’s oil sands

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One of the reasons that I am in China just now is that Uppsala University is discussing increased collaboration with the Chinese University of Petroleum in Beijing, CUPB. It is Professor Feng of the School of Business Administration at CUPB that leads research on Peak Oil at that university. He has just organised a workshop with the theme “The Impacts of Peak Oil”.