Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff – EIA shale predictions need closer scrutiny, peak oil group says (ASPO-USA)
– Cassandra in the 21st century: ASPO-Italy 5 in Florence on Oct 28
– Saving energy: reliability of national energy flows (PDF) (Jean Laherrère of ASPO-France) – UPDATED
– Jeff Rubin: Peak Oil Is About Price, Not Supply
– Soaring prices push Queen close to ‘fuel poverty’
– The ‘Informal Economy’ Driving World Business
– Rethinking GNP: From welfare to cost
– The Third Industrial Revolution — an interview with Jeremy Rifkin
– The Shocking, Graphic Data That Shows Exactly What Motivates the Occupy Movement
It says here in the paper that it takes 125,000 new jobs every month just to keep up with population growth. No wonder we have so many people holding down unnecessary jobs. There aren’t enough real jobs to go around and besides, we are replacing people with machines as fast as we can to do the real jobs. Rather than trying to eliminate pretend jobs for the sake of efficiency as is now being proposed (lots of pretension in that too), we should be thinking up better quality pretend jobs — imaginative new positions in useless work that are more beneficial to society than the usual run of useless work.
– NY Daily News: Voices from Zuccotti: Marsha Spencer, 56, Seamstress
– We Are the 99% (as we gather together) – gospel anthem from Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir
– Voices from Zuccotti: Daniel Zetah, 35
– New Interview With The Marine Who Took On 30 Wall Street Cops
– Ralph Nader: Occupy Wall Street on the Move
– Rise of the Planet of the People
– Occupy Wall Street: Outing the Ringers (video – awesome 3-Card Monte analogy)
I am not by nature a squirrel. I don’t get a big feeling for hoarding or collecting stuff (though I do, like many coastline dwellers, have a habit of pocketing stones and quirky things from the beach). And yet this is the time when it is smart to be thinking ahead and stocking up with summer’s abundance. Some wise Transitioners have been at this for months: plaiting onions, bottling raspberries, cooking up vats of green tomato chutney and damson jam, drying rosehips and borlotti beans. Along their hallways and windowsills sit pumpkins of various colours and sizes, seeds carefully collected in a drawer, dried herbs and chillies swinging from the ceiling.
What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems — its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere — goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?
Today sees the launch of three exciting new developments and outputs from Transition Network, the results of many months of work, that finally emerge blinking into the daylight. We are sure that they will greatly deepen your understanding of Transition, bring depth and richness to your work, re-inspire and energise you. They represent a radical shift in how Transition is understood and communicated.
-Fertiliser cost warning
-The Food Crisis Strikes Again
-Occupy the Food System!
-Women Farmers Feed the World
Sue doesn’t believe in what she calls the “myth” of climate change. And she’s not interested in the peak oil conversation. She follows a couple of conservative talk show hosts and does what she does because of what they’ve forecast for our economy. The outward signs of my life read much the same as hers, but my motivation comes from concern about environmental degradation, energy scarcity, and the economic implications of both. I’m progressive and listen to public radio. Yet Sue and I can work side-by-side because we’ve taken the time to listen to each other, to learn about and understand our different perspectives. We’ve chosen not to argue the details, but to welcome each other to the work that aligns to address our shared concerns.
The idea of the “energy trap” is that an increasing number of Americans are caught between the cost of gasoline and a systemic inability to stop driving their cars. In the last 60 years America has become a “motorized society” in which most of our citizens have become totally dependent on daily travel by car for their existence. Take away our cars and most of us would be hard pressed to reorganize our lives to provide for the essentials of life – earn an income, and provide food, shelter, and education for ourselves and our families.
Robert Anton Wilson pointed out some years ago that people who say “you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution” are usually part of the problem. The habit of thinking in binaries–that is, in hard oppositions between antithetical concepts–has deep roots in the human mind, but it leads to certain predictable difficulties, among them a particular kind of vulnerability to the sorcery practiced by the advertising and marketing industries. If we’re to see past the haze of arbitrary binaries to a less polarized future, a glance at other ways of thinking is probably worth our while.
