Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez

Whither environmentalism?

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There’s room in the movement for everyone who cares, whether their bent is for deadly serious de-industrialization, “fun and sexy” protests, technological innovation, or even, yes, going out walking.

Don’t stand there asking what to do! Look around, roll up your sleeves and get busy! Offer your talents to the task. If you can write, start writing and share your thoughts with ever wider circles of readers. If you can farm, start an organic CSA. If you are an engineer, you should be focusing on renewable energy.

Technological progress for dummies

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The fact that you can’t make something from nothing, that you can’t have your cake and eat it too, is really a matter of common sense. Or it should be. The problem is that common sense is not very common any more. It’s been vanquished by disingenuous marketers, truth-bending politicians, and scholarly “smart-dummies” (generally smart, specifically dumb on technological progress) who have legions thinking there is no limit to economic growth. But surely it’s not far below the surface. Surely there is latent common sense to invoke.

The perennial search for perennial grains

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Why perennial grains? Primarily to eliminate the fuel, fertilizer and herbicide required for planting, cultivating and growing plants which must be seeded each year – also known as annual crops. And of course there are other reasons why staying out of the pasture would be a good thing – with topsoil loss being chief among them. Essentially all of our current grain crops – wheat, corn, oats, barely, rye, millet – require seedbed preparation, weed control and fertilization in order to become established and yield a crop – all within a few months. The hope is that perennial crops, while they might yield far less, would require a lower energy investment per pound of food produced.

So, what’s the status on this perennial grain effort?

A reading list for Mr. Monti

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I’ve spent the last couple of weeks immersed in a pile of texts on what actuaries, physicists, and mathematicians have to say about the relationship between the economy and energy. [My homework is a talk I’m giving in Philly at the end of the month at a seminar about architecture and energy.] I haven’t finished the talk yet but I thought, as an exercise, that I’d share with you (and Mr Monti) the ten best writers of my reading list.

Twitter will set you free to Occupy

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Mason’s new book, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: the New Global Revolutions, surveys activist actions and encampments from Tahrir to Syntagma Square in Athens to Zuccotti Park and finds that each one was driven by a group of overeducated and underemployed young people jacked into technology like no revolutionaries since The Matrix.

Restoring Fortuna to the lexicon of the rich

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Fortuna was the Roman goddess of chance and thus entreaties to her were an attempt to insure good luck in any venture….Acknowledging Fortuna means acknowledging that luck is partly responsible for my station in life. It means I’m obliged to help my fellow citizens who’ve been hurt by nothing other than misfortune. And, it means that I’ll be entitled to help if misfortune lays me so low that I cannot get back up without some assistance.

United States – Jan 8

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– Foreign Affairs: Globalization and the Threat to the West (an elite change in direction?)
– Republican Climate Hawks Sighted in New Hampshire (video)
– Matt Taibbi: Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow Begins
– Obama’s Pentagon Strategy: A Leaner, More Efficient Empire
– Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs

It takes a village to raise a vegetable

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“Farmers need a shitload of support,” says Amy Lounder, an organic farmer who runs Avon River CSA (community-shared, or community-supported, agriculture) in Centre Burlington, N ova Scotia. “And not just financial support but support in a lot of different ways, like support in information, of learning how to problem solve.”