Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We found our original premise holds. While the mainstream media focus on Washington and Wall Street, we found the real agents of change are on Main Street, where they are testing and perfecting some amazing innovations.
Going for a drive along a nearby street isn’t my usual idea of a good conversation starter or a way to get to know someone, but it was all for a good cause, so I gave it a try—and ended up seeing the internal workings of my main street for the first time.
– Chris Nelder: Is peak oil dead?
– Oil, politics and resource wars (interviews with Robert Hirsch, Michael Klare … )
– The Unfinished Story of Iraq’s Oil Law: An Interview with Greg Muttitt
– Will Drought Cause the Next Blackout?
Climate hawk Bill McKibben has a terrific new piece in Rolling Stone, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” It is getting monster social media numbers of the kind usually reserved for pieces on HuffPost about Kim Kardashian in a bikini: 66k FaceBook likes and an astounding 6300 retweets.
Modern economics assumes that human beings are fundamentally self-interested. This essay will challenge that assumption, drawing in part on the ideas of Karl Polanyi, Marcel Mauss, Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni. By contrast with the idea of the self-interested homo oeconomicus (central to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations), my argument is that humans are more relational, ‘gift-exchanging animals’ who are naturally disposed to cooperate for mutual benefit. In the following I will attempt to show how such an alternative anthropology can translate into a ‘civil economy’ and transformative policy ideas: rebuilding our economy and embedding welfare in communities.
– Canadian Couple’s Kitchen Garden Targeted By Authorities
– The world is closer to a food crisis than most people realise
– Small Farmers Creating a New Business Model as Agriculture Goes Local
– Online Solution for Home Gardeners to Profit from Bumper Crop
– Murdoch Censorship Gives the Lie to ‘Freedom of Speech’ Claims
– Journatic worker takes ‘This American Life’ inside outsourced journalism
– Forgive us our Press Passes (audio)
– Aggressive Cluelessness: Then and Now
– The most honest three and a half minutes of television, EVER… (from HBO)
– John Perkins: Occupy the Dam: Brazil’s Indigenous Uprising
– Appalachia Turns on Itself (over coal)
– ‘Deep Green Resistance’ — how not to build a movement
How do cities concentrate energy and materials spatially? What is the relative emergy basis for modern cities, agrarian towns, and rural spaces? Do city dwellers use more or fewer resources than suburban or rural dwellers? Are big cities more sustainable in descent, as some propose, and how do we maximize empower in the future for our cities?
The worst possible course of action for a government to take, when consumer spending is falling and businesses won’t invest, is precisely the course adopted and doggedly clung to by our own government.
California, which imports over 25% of its electricity from out of state, is in no position to lose half (!) of its entire nuclear power capacity. But that’s exactly what happened earlier this year, when the San Onofre plant in north San Diego County unexpectedly went offline. The loss only worsens the broad energy deficit that has made California the most dependent state in the country on expensive, out-of-state power.
What does the Higgs boson have to do with the establishment of a sustainable economy? The discovery of this subatomic particle required a Herculean effort, involving billions of dollars, over 1,000 physicists, and thousands of craftsmen to construct and operate an almost incomprehensibly complex machine — the Large Hadron Collider. The same kind of diligent, prodigious effort is needed to construct and operate a new economic system for all nations of the world.
