Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff Brent oil briefly touched $128/barrel on Thursday as pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme continued, the latest development being demands from Israel on the US to be more explicit in its threat of military action. The sharply rising prices are already impacting the weakened economies of Europe and the US making some wonder whether sanctions intended to hurt Iran could be backfiring…
The movements of 2011 like Occupy and Arab Spring gave new life to the whole tradition of nonviolent action and revolution. It may be the nature of such nonviolent movements that they come as a surprise, because at their very root seems to be a sudden change in the hidden sphere of the human heart and mind that then becomes contagious. It’s as though below the visible landscape of politics, whose permanence and strength we characteristically overestimate, there’s this other landscape we rather pallidly call the world of opinion.
Fleeing Vesuvius finishes with an Epilogue (Part 7), in which different authors give practical suggestions about preparing for the eventual collapse of our present energy intensive economic system. The items reflect a wide range of perspectives and priorities.
The content of “On The Future of Food” (a speech given in May of 2011 by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales at Georgetown University and recently published by Rodale Press) shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the Prince or sustainable agriculture. The two have been connected since at least 1985, when HRH converted his farmland to organic, wildlife-friendly practices…That he is so personally knowledgeable on the subject—as well as being in a position to influence discourse and policy at such a high level—gives him some clout to tell us what is wrong in the food system and what can be done about it.
– Q&A: What’s Going on With Gasoline Prices?
– Chris Nelder: A model of oil prices
– Facing the Facts on Fossil Fuel (series from the former president of Academy of Science and the Royal Society of Canada
– A Dynamic Function for EROI
One can write off the decline of higher education as simply one more aspect of the global chaos in which we are now living. Except that the universities were supposed to play the role of one major locus of analysis of the realities of our world-system. It is such analyses that may make possible the successful navigation of the chaotic transition towards a new, and hopefully better, world order.
The oceans may be acidifying faster today than they did in the last 300 million years, according to scientists publishing a paper this week in the journal Science. “What we’re doing today really stands out in the geologic record,” says lead author Bärbel Hönisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
“We know that life during past ocean acidification events was not wiped out–new species evolved to replace those that died off. But if industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about–coral reefs, oysters, salmon.”
The energy markets have been shaken by the instability of Middle East oil and the vulnerability of nuclear power. Against the backdrop of European crisis and and high U.S. unemployment, what does this changing energy landscape mean for national and global economies in 2012? Daniel Lerch presents as part of the Great Decisions Series of the World Affairs Council of Oregon, January 2012.
For the last several years I’ve been working on the invention of “Urban and Suburban Right-to-Farm Laws” and have had some notable successes including a legal conference on the idea and a few municipalities that have implemented them. This is one of the reasons I think this is so incredibly important – zoning presumptions simply can’t be allowed to prevent people from using less and meeting their own needs.
OrganicLea stands out as an inspiring urban food project that grows everything: food and communities. While many sustainable and food-focused programs are limited by the fact they only have volunteer staff, Organic Lea’s vision to create jobs provides a practical transition from hobby radicals to “professional radicals”. If the food sector and organics are not automatically a promotion of equality, inclusion, mutual aid, and cooperation, then OrganicLea definitely is.
Neoclassical economists, having worked hard to convince the world that everything was hunky-dory circa 2005, and concurrently having invented the rationales and the theories behind the financial time bombs that went off across the landscape, don’t seem to have suffered one whit for the subsequent sequence of events, a slow-motion train wreck that one might reasonably have expected would have rubbished the credibility of lesser mortals.
One concern is how import-dependent Japan might cope with the advent of the peak of oil production and a possible oil price crunch. Paul Stevens at Chatham House, one of the world’s leading think tanks, argued in 2008 that an oil crunch could occur when the oil price goes over US$200 per barrel with severe macro-economic impacts….While other reports place the peak of world oil production at a later date between 2015 and 2020, the timing is academic when considered in the context of whether Japan would have the time to respond effectively in terms of reorganizing its entire food system.
