Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Julie Ristau Commoning represents a “third way”—not locked into the profit-driven mechanics of the market nor solely dependent on government agencies—that enables everyday citizens to actively make decisions and take actions that shape their future of their communities. Although most folks who do it, probably don’t call it “commoning”— they simply think of it as “common sense” or the “common good”.
It’s okay to warn or complain, but one of the attractive habits in American civilization is to ask: well, what’s your plan? In his recent book World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, Lester Brown offers one.
We are not running out of oil yet. We have, however, reached an apparent limit to the amount of oil that we can produce every day. That is because newly discovered fields are, at best, replacing supply from older declining and depleted fields.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-the Saudis besieged
-China’s National People’s Congress
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
It’s worth noting that the energy content of the human food supply is about a sixth of the energy content of the human fuel supply (about 86 mbd of liquid fuels, equivalent to somewhere in the neighborhood of 120-130mbd of ethanol). This is the core problem with converting food to fuel – we are taking from a small pool to try to make up for deficiencies in a large pool, and we will have a much bigger effect on the level of the small pool than the bigger pool.
A society is not as simple as a balloon but it can easily explode in revolutions, collapse, breakdowns, civil wars and all sort of rapid and unpredictable changes. Societies, it seems, are fragile, at least in terms of the stability of their governments. This behavior looks normal to us because we have seen it happening many times. But, just as for balloons, it is difficult to explain exactly why societies “explode.”
– McKibben, Greenpeace, RAN: We need big, brash, nonviolent climate protests. Are you in?
– Facebook and Twitter are just places revolutionaries go
– Controversialization: A Key to the Right’s Continuing Domination of Public Debates
– 2011 is 1848 Redux. But Worse
As an academic economist I find I am living in interesting times. Yes, really. The profession is in crisis, and much blame is being laid at the door of those who teach politicians how the economy works, and who engage in research to support this teaching. The fact that the financial crisis was predicted only by dissident economists, and the lamentable failure of mainstream economists to explain what has happened, much less provide solutions, has led to severe criticism.
– Fisk: Saudis mobilise thousands of troops to quell growing revolt
– Steve LeVine: The specter of flaming oil ports
– The Arab Spring
– Yemen: Scale of rebellion ‘impossible to predict’
There are reports that the unrest in the Middle East has spread to the Sultanate of Oman. While at the moment there have been only one or perhaps two deaths, small in number relative to the larger number of fatalities in countries like Libya, such a milepost, nevertheless, is sadly likely to indicate that the situation will get much worse. … Oman is not a member of OPEC, but contains the largest oil reserves of any country outside that group in the Middle East.
Traders have adopted a new yardstick for oil security, and it’s influencing the abrupt climb of oil prices. Call it the Flaming Oil Port Index. It’s a notional appreciation of how many more OPEC countries may see fighting, taking their oil production with them.
Ok, you know about edible landscaping – you’ve replaced your burning bush with blueberries and your spireas with elderberries. You’ve trained that grapevine over the arbor. Now you are eying that space on your front lawn where the perennial border is (or should be or used to be or is in your head). You want flowers. You need flowers because they make you happy. Maybe you have to grow flowers there if you grow much of anything but grass, because of neighbors or zoning laws. Can you grow an ornamental flower garden that is totally edible? Yes. Yes, you can!
