Rebecca Leber

As Exxon CEO calls global warming’s impacts ‘manageable’, Colorado Wildfires shutter climate lab

by

As researchers at Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) joined 32,000 other Coloradans in fleeing the fires, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations about the “manageable” risks of climate change. “… “As a species that’s why we’re all still here: we have spent our entire existence adapting. So we will adapt to this,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.”

World made by hand

by

The Hatch model is truly one of sustainable business practices. It relies on the knowledge bank of its past artisans to hand down to future workers. And it depends on its workers in a way that will never be undercut by the lure of cheap labor in far flung locales. By doing everything by hand, locally, and on a human scale (along with that nearly 150 year old reputation) Hatch can be assured (barring some unforeseen occurrence) that its services will be needed even as the world economy shrinks back and high-tech work dies for lack of the energy to produce it.

Graduating the Class of 2012

by

Class of 2012, greetings! It’s a deceptively glorious day, even under this tent in the broiling heat of an August-style afternoon in mid-June on this northeastern campus. And yes, let’s admit it, the heat, the sun, the clearness of the azure blue sky stretching without a cloud to the horizon, the sense of summer descending with a passion, it’s not quite as reassuring as it might once have been, is it? I suspect that few of you, readying yourselves to leave this campus, many mortgaged to your eyeballs (some for life no matter what you do), and heading into a country on edge, imagine personal clear skies to the horizon.

A Sustainable Idea: Create State-owned Banks

by

At some point personal behavior changes aren’t enough. To become sustainable, we need large-scale investments, which require capital. How can we get access to the financial tools necessary to build a sustainable world? The answer may be through public banking, and one state, North Dakota, points the way.

Alternative voices from Rio+20

by

Direct from the alternative presentations at the Rio Plus 20 conference, you will hear two short hot speeches on the economy that’s never counted, and the assault on a new science of planetary boundaries. Then we’ll journey to Australia. The self-sufficient John Morgan tells us about his 9 star home that needs no furnace or air-conditioner. But first, a group of 21 scientists, from very different fields of study, produced a special briefing for the Journal Nature, ahead of the meeting of world leaders in Rio de Janeiro for the second Earth Summit. They concluded Earth, our planet home, could be heading for a massive shift, a new state not seen for millions of years.

A farmer who actually farms

by

Life is so much a matter of contrasts. Last week I wrote about a large scale farmer of several thousand acres who drives his computer 9 hours a day while his brother and hired help to the actual farming. In stark contrast, shortly after I talked to him, an old friend stopped by to tell me that, after nearly forty years, he was retiring from small scale dairying. He tried to be upbeat about it but I could tell that he was sad too. He will keep on farming his 200 acres and maybe raise a few steers. Old dairymen never die, they just quit milking cows.

Schools in Transition: mapping watersheds

by

How connected to your local place do you feel? Do you know where the nearest flow of water is? —I don’t mean down the drain!…Each one of us lives in a watershed and in the future we are likely to need to rely on our local bio-regions (that’s another way of talking about a watershed) and communities much more for the resources we need, and for the social, cultural and community bonds needed to sustain our wellbeing.

Growth in global oil market slows

by

Global oil consumption increased by 0.7 percent in 2011 to reach an all-time high of 88.03 million barrels per day, according to new research conducted by the Worldwatch Institute for its Vital Signs Online service. This rate of increase was considerably slower than in 2010, when oil consumption rose by 3.3 percent following a decline of 1.3 percent in 2009 due to the global financial crisis.

Save the Euro – who for?

by

The strongest force holding the Euro together is the political force of creditors. Were the currency to collapse, much of the debt would collapse with it. So the question is, who are we saving the Euro for?

The Cussedness of Whole Systems

by

There’s an interesting divergence between the extreme complexity of the predicament that besets contemporary industrial civilization, on the one hand, and the remarkable simplicity of the failures of reasoning that have sent us hurtling face first into that predicament, on the other. Nearly all of those failures share a common root, which is the inability—or at least the unwillingness—of most people in the modern world to pay attention to the natural cussedness of whole systems.