Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff – Quinoa’s Global Success Creates Quandary at Home (Bolivia)
– Ethiopia at centre of global farmland rush
– Perennial Crops, Sustainable Agriculture: A 21st Century Green Revolution (Wes Jackson)
– Can poor Kenyan fishermen can improve themselves without destroying local coral reefs? (audio)
– Nunavut plans to promote local foods
Even now, 10 days after the crisis began, the situation at Fukushima is still not under control. The disaster is clearly worse than the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, yet not as grave as the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which spread radioactive material over large portions of Europe. A chronology of how the Fukushima crisis has unfolded demonstrates that even a country as advanced as Japan — and as practiced in dealing with natural disasters — was unprepared for an earthquake of this magnitude, the largest in Japan in 1,200 years.
Nobody knows how to define “permaculture.” Everyone thinks they should be doing it. Lisa Fernandes starts the process of deconstructing one of the most common definitions for a system that thousands are touting as a response to peak oil and climate change.
It is irresponsible to ask people to rely on the calculation of small probabilities for man-made systems since these probabilities are almost impossible to calculate with any accuracy. Natural systems that have operated for eons may more easily lend themselves to the calculation of such probabilities. But man-made systems have a relatively short history to draw from, especially the nuclear infrastructure which is no more than 60 years old. Calculations for man-made systems that result in incidents occurring every million years should be dismissed on their face as useless.
– Thomas Homer-Dixon: Our Fukushima moment
– Amory Lovins: With Nuclear Power, “No Acts of God Can Be Permitted”
– Roger Smith: Paul Goodman on nuclear power
– Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: World energy crunch as nuclear and oil both go wrong
As nuclear Japan melts down, America has the same reactors, the same government policy of withholding vital information (“to prevent terrorism”) about nuclear risk. Radio Ecoshock finds the key audio clips from nuclear critics long banished to the media wilderness – plus interviews with Nicole Foss from “The Automatic Earth” (who is a trained and published nuclear expert!) and Shawn Patrick from Greenpeace. These are American reactors from GE, all promoted as “fail-safe” answers to future energy. Now we see (again) what happens when reactors go wrong. Will the Japanese people now demand renewables? Could this tragedy lead to a burst of clean energy innovation?
It’s not that you are discounting yourself – it’s that the personal you with all its small indulgences, its interiorities and subjective biographical events is turned inside out suddenly and asked to be someone else. Someone who acts within the bigger picture. Your own Spring uprising.
– Radiation Spread Seen; Frantic Repairs Go On
– A Hunger for Information
– Plant’s Design, Safety Record Are Under Scrutiny
– Monbiot: Japan nuclear crisis should not carry weight in atomic energy debate
– Jonathan Schell: From Hiroshima to Fukushima
The earthquake and subsequent tsunami disaster in Japan have prompted speculation about the world’s nuclear future, the pressures on oil, and issues around economic collapse. Here’s our round-up from some of the top thinkers in the peak oil movement.
The earthquake and tsunami which ripped apart the northern half of Honshu in Japan on Friday has caused a massive humanitarian disaster and a nuclear emergency which may still develop into a major catastrophe. The wider knock on effects could be a backlash against nuclear power, and further global economic instability as a result of damage to what is the world’s 3rd largest economy. Meanwhile in Libya the civil war raged on, and in Bahrain protests became bloody as the government turned to military force and outside help to retain power.
We are all Japan. The earth’s axis shifted 6.5 inches and each day is now 1.8 microseconds shorter. On an energetic level — acknowledged only by the wisdom of “alternative” medicine — we all felt that. Our psyches know. It was a quake felt round the world, literally.
When we design machinery that is dangerous and prone to failure we try to reduce risks by tight regulations, specifics, and centralised control. Of course, these strategies are expensive and therefore are best implemented over large scales. So, we are raising the stakes by building bigger and more expensive systems in order to hedge the risk of failure. In the case of nuclear energy, the result is the concentration of power production in large plants. That strategy seems to work, within limits: on the average, the safety record of the nuclear industry is not bad. But when something goes wrong with a nuclear plant, it tends to go wrong in a big way, such as with Chernobyl and Fukushima.
