Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Gene Logsdon Farmers like to sing while they work because they think no one can hear them. They especially like to sing on the tractor where the motor noise improves their singing by drowning out the raw edges of their voices. They also think the motor drowns out their renditions from the neighbors’ ears but just the opposite is true. Their hearty wails carry better than the motor noise and scare cows and neighbors several hundred acres downwind.
In the classic game Risk, your goal is to dominate your rival players by killing them off and conquering their territories until your Empire stretches across the globe. In Monopoly, the “world’s favorite family game brand” (according to publisher Parker Brothers), your goal is to dominate your rival players through economic obliteration until they are penniless while you literally own everything. In a way, the combination of Risk and Monopoly perfectly mirror two of the most destructive pillars of our society: runaway capitalism and unflinching imperialism.
The city of Boulder, Colo., has won the right to take its power supply—and carbon emissions—away from corporate control. The change for Boulder came in November when voters passed two ballot measures that allow the city to begin the process of forming its own municipal power utility.
My personal journey into home energy reduction began with taking stock of past energy use as reported on my utility bills. I quickly migrated toward reading the meters directly to gauge the impact of particular activities. What I learned from our gas meter shocked me, and ultimately led to our single-biggest energy-saving behavioral shift. I’ve already ruined any hope of suspense in the title of the post, but just how bad does something have to be before I’ll resort to a word like “evil? And how bad are your own demons? Ah—now you can’t wait to find out!
-Rolling Stone Responds to Chesapeake Energy on ‘The Fracking Bubble’
-Why Not Frack? – Book & Film review
-Fracking: The New Global Water Crisis – Report
-Kept in Dark by BC’s Oil and Gas Commission
-A Fresh Scientific Defense of the Merits of Moving from Coal to Shale Gas
I hastened to buy Local Dollars, Local Sense by Michael Shuman, because I was attracted to the title and had high hopes for the emphasis on localization. Shuman’s book represents a small step in a needed direction, but I was yearning for much deeper.
Reading The Affluent Society is a revitalising and empowering shot in the arm for anyone questioning in any way what JK calls the "conventional wisdom". The book, first written in 1958 and then reissued as a new edition in 1998 is an astonishing tour de force, debunking and deconstructing the tenets of the "central tradition" of economics.
You’re probably doing your part to conserve water, especially if you live in a drought-stricken area. But water is in short supply across the globe because of people’s increasing demands for it—a huge problem for cities, agriculture and industry that will only get worse with climate change.
– NPR: Occupy May Seem To Be Receding, But Look Closer
– ‘Port Huron’ Turns 50 as Occupy Turns 5 (Months)
– Journal for Occupied Studies
– George Lakey: Mass actions or focused campaigns?
– Staughton Lynd: A Letter To Other Occupiers
Not only are high levels of growth an undesirable goal and an utterly insufficient rubric for assessing the ‘common wealth’, it is also simply not possible to return to the annualized GDP growth of the post-war ‘golden age’.
I’ve returned from a sobering United Nations-led tour of six tsunami-damaged communities and two radiation-impacted cities in Northern Japan. The obvious conclusion: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident is forcing Japan to go green, including the launch of a new renewable energy national feed-in tariff that starts in July. Meanwhile the governor of Fukushima, Yuhei Sato, told us that renewables will be the “key factor” in the revival of his cesium-laden prefecture.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, grains account for more than half of the calories consumed by people in developing countries. Yet, over the last few decades, grain production has been narrowed to only a limited number of varieties – wheat, for example, has over 200,000 varieties, yet only a few genetic lines are being used. Such dependence on a limited number of crops has proven problematic, especially because of rising food prices, climate change, and health concerns.
