Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Elizabeth Grossman With contaminated water from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear complex continuing to pour into the Pacific, scientists are concerned about how that radioactivity might affect marine life. Although the ocean’s capacity to dilute radiation is huge, signs are that nuclear isotopes are already moving up the local food chain.
Rob Hopkins describes our fossil-fuelled industrialised lifestyle as an addiction. We’re addicted to oil. And that presents humanity with a major dilemma: we find ourselves stuck inside a destructive self-replicating system with very few ideas of how to get out of it. We can either get together and find ways to liberate ourselves, or face the consequences of a planetary meltdown. Tough call either way.
Reviews of three novels set in the wake of the oil age:
– Player One by Douglas Coupland
– Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
– Afterlight by Alex Scarrow.
A new study from Cornell suggests that the production of natural gas from shale using fracking techniques generates more greenhouse gases than burning coal. The report has generated coverage by New York Times, BBC, Wall Street Journal, Houston Chronicle, as well as a response from the NG industry. (Article extracts and links)
UPDATE: Link to the embargoed report
We cannot expect to maintain a steady state economy at present levels because present levels are deep into planetary overshoot.
I don’t believe we’ll be able to change our basic economic relationships until we change the ways we get our food and shelter. And I don’t think we’ll be able to change those until we change the stories we tell about our place in the world.
Public process as it exists today is not a desirable commons-based, inclusive, creative, bottom-up assertion of ideas by the people—although that is what it pretends to be. It’s actually an expert-driven, one-way dissemination of ideas from the top.
We need to rebuild the kind of mass movement that marked 1970: bodies, passion, and creativity are the currencies we can compete in. It’s not impossible.
The ‘holy grail’ in terms of the construction of new sustainable buildings is homes that reach the highest level of energy efficiency, whilst also using as high a proportion of locally sourced materials as possible, what we might call ‘The Local Passivhaus’. Two buildings, recently completed in Ebbw Vale, known as ‘The Lime House’ and ‘The Larch House’ have moved this concept forward significantly.
The Heirloom covers a lot of intellectual ground without leaving a small geographic area. In addition to casting a penetrating look at our present and potential future, it serves as a coming-of-age story for young Ben Naiche, who is torn between the rapidly vanishing techno-world and the rapidly vanishing remnants of his native heritage.
– Hiding From Shame, Addicted to Optimism
– Hedges: Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System
– Stiglitz: Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%
– The Blowback World of Chalmers Johnson
– Swans and Zombies: Neoliberalism’s Permanent Contradiction
– Shell’s outgoing UK boss has seen oil firm’s role shift in a changing climate
– Edward Burtynsky’s Oil Exhibition Shines
– Energy and Security Issues in the Red Sea Transforming as the Age of Gas Begins in Earnest
– Fukushima Daiichi and Decision Time
– Fukushima Nuclear Disaster at One Month: The Explosion of Nukespeak
