Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Charlotte Du Cann How can we reconnect when we are so deracinated, out of synch with the natural world, when the countryside is parcelled into properties, when the wild things are only allowed on reserves, or else live perpetually on the run? Transition breaks you out of your bubble. And whether this bubble is a fantasy about the earth as spiritual paradise, a view, a pleasure dome, it challenges us to be real about the place we utterly depend on to be alive.
May Day is a day of liberation — a day to be seized and celebrated, a day to remember who was shot down on it and who fought for it. It’s a day to join those who fought and fight for liberation, to imagine what its most delicious and profound possibilities might look like.
A couple of weeks ago I spoke at TedxExeter, a fantastic occasion with many great speakers (have a look at their website as more and more of the films from the day go online). I spoke for the first time in detail about Totnes as a case study, and what, after 6 years, we can draw from the experience of Transition Town Totnes. I hope you enjoy it.
-Fracking ‘Health Challenges’ to Be Examined by U.S. Advisers
-Restrict shale gas fracking to 600m from water supplies, says study
-Reporting of fracking and drilling violations weak
-Lancashire schoolgirl wins chance to address MEPs with anti-fracking video
-Chesapeake plugs blown Wyoming well
-Drillers May Frack First, Disclose Later Under Draft Plan
It is somewhat ironic that it was Keynes who said that politicians tend to be in the thrall of a defunct economist because his shade is haunting our council chambers at this budget-setting season, but sadly he is one of those ghosts that remains unseen and unheeded. John Maynard was a man with an aphorism for all seasons,and that most appropriate for today’s economy was his ‘paradox of thrift’.
Recently Ugo Bardi raised the matter of methane and the fact that compared with geological history, the present level in the atmosphere of this potent “greenhouse-gas” is exceptionally high. We see methane bubbling from the arctic margins. We know the present level is around 1800 parts per billion (1.8ppm); more than 2.5-fold the pre-industrial level. We know this rise has been sudden and that most of it occurred in the 20thC up to about year 1990, and that interestingly for a rapidly oxidised molecule, this high level has been sustained, and lately has begun to increase again. After a brief discussion with Ugo, I decided to attempt an update of my own knowledge.
Understanding the nature of our energy basis is critical to understanding where we are headed as a civilization. Unless people have received unusual education to break their conditioning to expect and desire growth, most people are so schooled and immersed in the growth story that they do not realize that there may be other possible futures, especially in the US where growth has been so consistent and rapid. In this period of global resource transition, peoples’ beliefs are separating into a growth continuum of three general belief systems or world views that inform our lives and trace a trajectory for our future.
“As empires rise and fall and powerful nations grow and then contract, the farmers, the yeomen, the small landholders, the shopkeepers, and the local manufacturers keep on going. […] as often as not, they are sources of technological and cultural innovation and, from a sustainability perspective, they innovate largely in direct connection with the land and with each other.”
Here’s a crazy but true fact: negative externalities are the norm — not the exception — in our current economic setup. Failure to recognize this fact has created a wild divergence between theory and practice when it comes to managing harm caused by economic activity.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-the Iranian confrontation
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
Five forces have helped enable long-term economic growth, we are now reaching limits in all of them. Thus, while these factors have tended to create growth in the past, the same factors cannot be relied on to produce growth in the future. In fact, they may lead to a turn around in the not-too-distant future.
For nearly 25 years now, the idea that it might be possible to extract unlimited amounts of energy from the nucleus of a hydrogen atom at low temperatures has been pretty much in disrepute. When major laboratories were unable to detect nuclear reactions on their work benches back in 1989, the whole notion of what was then called “cold fusion” was debunked as junk science and for most remains so to this day. Fortunately however, a few scientists kept plugging away on just how one could get heat from the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. Now their efforts seem to be paying off.
