Naomi Glass

OrganicLea: Professional Radicals

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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.

Mumbo Jumble: The underwhelming response of the American economics profession to the crisis

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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.

$5 Gas = Long, Hot, Crazy Summer

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Here in northern California gasoline is now retailing for $4.20 a gallon. Prices haven’t been this high since mid-2008. Forecasts for $5 per gallon gas in the US this summer are now commonplace. What’s driving prices up?

Throwing out the free market playbook: an interview with Naomi Klein

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I don’t think climate change necessitates a social revolution. This idea is coming from the right-wing think tanks and not scientific organizations. They’re ideological organizations. Their core reason for being is to defend what they call free-market ideology. They feel that any government intervention leads us to serfdom and brings about a socialist world, so that’s what they have to fight off: a socialist world.

The impacts of biofuel production in developing countries

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In recent years African countries have enjoyed interest from abroad, thanks in part to a great amount of available land apparently ideal for cultivating crops for providing food security and for the production of biofuels. However, insufficient legal protection for the local population often leads to the signing of contracts that deprive these people of their source of subsistence…And if the locals are in fact consulted at all on the matter, they can typically count on a campaign of misinformation from the government.

Taming the zoning monster

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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.

My great hope for the future

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So far on Do the Math, I’ve put out a lot of negative energy—whatever that means. Topics have often focused on what we can’t do, or at least on the failings or difficulties of various ambitious plans. We can’t expect indefinite growth—whether in energy, population, or even growth of the economic variety. It is not obvious how we maintain our current standard of living once fossil fuels begin their inexorable decline this century.

Occupy: changing the rules

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In the case of Occupy it has changed the political rules of engagement, for the moment. But we’re still at the early stages of an eighty-year economic crisis and a forty-year political crisis. Such crises can take a decade or more to unfold. For now, Occupy has opened up some possibilities.

The recipe for change in a post-carbon world (review of Fleeing Vesuvius, Part 5)

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Parts 5 and 6 of Fleeing Vesuvius are entitled “Changing the Way We Live” and “Changing the Way We Think.” Both are about solutions. They propose broad strategies for supporting large numbers of people in downsizing their energy guzzling way of life.

A pile of straw at the bottom of the cliff

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There is an old Russian saying: “If I had known where I would fall, I would have put down some straw there.”

At last year’s ASPO-USA conference, I wanted to correct what I see as a major flaw in the narrative of Peak Oil: the idea of a gentle, geologically-driven decline in oil production, which seems quite unrealistic. But I also wanted to look beyond it and sketch out some plans that would work after oil production dives off a cliff.

If we start setting aside a “Peak Oil Tithe” around when Peak Oil occurs, and if we deploy all that we’ve stockpiled when the fossil fuel economy can no longer support us, the resulting post-collapse economy is quite a lot smaller than the fossil fuel economy, but still large enough to support a significant portion of the current population, albeit at a much lower standard of living.

Fracking bans that can stand

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In New York State, some 82 towns and counties have passed ordinances outlawing fracking, a natural gas drilling method known for causing severe water pollution. Another 35 have ordinances in the works. But until last week, no one knew quite what would happen when those ordinances were—inevitably—challenged by drilling companies.

Now, in a resounding win for activists, two different state Supreme Court justices have upheld fracking bans in two different New York towns.