Homegrown Life: Spring’s boom of wild edibles
If we don’t watch ourselves, we’ll fail to pause and experience one of the most beautiful and fulfilling times in this annual cycle of seasons we call a year: spring’s boom of wild edibles.
Bryce Oates
To young people, justice is a key ingredient in good food
Our generation is coming of age with the starkest income disparity since the 1920’s, with climate change already making major impacts on our environment, with student debt creeping towards $1 trillion, with progress on race and gender issues stagnating. We did not create this mess. We are pissed, so we are connecting the dots and we are skilling-up.
Flex-Fuel Humans
If you’re one of those humans who actually eats food, like I am, then a non-negligible part of your energy allocation goes into food production. As an approximate rule-of-thumb, each kilocalorie ingested by Americans consumes 10 kilocalories of fossil fuel energy to plant, fertilize, harvest, transport, and prepare….But much like household energy, we control what we stick in our mouths, and can make energy-conscious choices that result in substantial reductions of energy consumption. I now call myself a flexitarian, a term acknowledging that my body is a flex-fuel vehicle, but also that I need not be rigid about my food choices in order to still make a substantial impact on the energy front.
Wendell E. Berry Lecture: “It all turns on affection”
The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power.
Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.
A tide of oil and greed
Antonia Juhasz’s book Black Tide is a devastating indictment of the oil and drilling industry that was responsible. But she doesn’t stop there. She’s also included damning evidence of the role of U.S. politicians, government agencies and regulations that all failed to protect the people and environment of the Gulf.
Climate – Apr 25
-Climate change is a human rights issue – and that’s how we can solve it
-Climate Change Has Nothing to Do With Al Gore
-Natural and human-made CO2 differentiation possible thanks to new monitoring technique
-U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Headed Up Again
-MPs warn UK pollution outsourcing
-Climate Factsheets
“Food sovereignty” as a transformative model of economic power
The argument is being made that “food sovereignty” is an organising principle so demonstrably strong that it has the potential to transform economic power. Can we really invest in it as the ecological principle to take us into the 21st century?
An update on global net oil exports: Is it midnight on the Titanic?
While slowly increasing US crude oil production is very important, the dominant trend we are seeing is that developed oil importing countries like the US are being gradually priced out of the global market for exported oil, as global oil prices doubled from 2005 to 2011, and as developing countries like the Chindia region consumed an increasing share of a declining volume of global net exports of oil. (webinar on Thursday April 26)
‘In Transition 2.0′ reviewed by Charlotte Du Cann for STIR magazine
It’s a small story. These are all small stories. You might not know they are happening or take much notice of them. But if you were curious, you would discover how that lettuce came to be growing in such an unlikely neighbourhood; why everyone in the carnival was wearing clothes made of rubbish; why the elders of the village were teaching the young people to plough; why Joel Prittie, ex double-glazing salesman, knocked on 1100 doors in the rain in Manchester. If you pulled these stories together, you would notice they all had a common thread. That’s the moment you realise it’s a big story. The story in fact. The story of how people are coming together in the face of difficulties and making another kind of future.
That’s the story of Transition 2.0.
Party politics
Political parties are dizzyingly diverse, ranging from the little disciplined American electoral machines to the totalitarian para-bureaucracies of the so-called socialist states. They all emerged during the nineteenth century from parliamentary factions, revolutionary more-or-less secret societies and even lobbies.
The flow of cheap and abundant energy that flooded our society after the Industrial Revolution triggered a fantastic wave of growth and complexification in all organizations, and political parties were no exception. As more resources were available in the society at large, political parties could divert more and more of them to feed their internal bureaucracy.
Money and wealth: How to heal the disconnect
The truth is that the English still believe that their bank manager is at his desk, drinking sherry, umming and aahing about their overdrafts. In fact, he has long since been replaced by risk software. That’s our national failing. It is endearing in a way, but it’s also dreadfully frustrating. Because it means we’re stuck in the oldest fantasy about money that there is. We imagine that it’s real. And in some ways, this is the source of the crisis in the euro-zone as well. In England, our politicians never argue about this issue — who creates money, where it comes from, what it means — for the reasons I say. But in America, it’s always been the heart of political debate.
Renewable power rhythm: The rhythm of power availability in the post-prosperous way down world
Rather than cover what the way down will be like in this post, I wanted to share my thoughts on what one important aspect of life might be like once we reach “down”. That is, the time after decline is finished, when the fossil fuels are gone and society is running almost completely on renewably sourced energies. I explore how peoples’ behaviors may change once they are driven by flow-limited energy sources rather than storage-driven sources in the post carbon world? Flow-limited sources cannot be controlled and stored easily so society will be more effective if it adapts to the rhythm and availability of energy.
