Janeen Madan

Low-Input seed starting

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Which is all just a reminder of how seed starting, as most of us do it, is a heavily energy intensive process. It can involve lights, heating mats, plastic containers, lots of purchased seed starting mixes and various liquid substances that make your house smell vaguely of rotting fish for a week after you use them. All of these substances have to be transported to you. How do you get along without all those things, either if you have to or if you want to? How do you use less of them, at least?

Growth of wood biomass power stokes concern on emissions

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The only way that biomass achieves carbon neutrality is if growing forests sequester — that is, absorb from the atmosphere — as much or more carbon dioxide than is released in the burning process…It takes only seconds to burn a tree’s worth of wood, and decades for that tree to grow back and sequester the same amount of carbon.

Culture and behavior: Remapping relationships: Humans in nature

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The ability to create artificial environments (air conditioning, heating, lighting) and chemically alter natural materials (processed food, plastic) perhaps gives the illusion that humans are capable of meeting their needs with minimal imputs from nature. The flawed logic suggests that if humans are only tangentially dependent on the natural world, functioning ecosystems lose importance.

Energy funds, energy flows

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The recent report from World Wildlife Fund insisting that the world can transition to renewable energy while maintaining current developed world lifestyles and abolishing Third World poverty is simply one more in a long series of loudly heralded cornucopian fantasies well detached from the hard realities of the industrial world’s predicament. The sheer amounts of cheap energy that modern civilization has to hand has blinded too many people to the fact that “vast” and “infinite” are not synonyms — and that blindness has significant implications for the near future.

The Power of the Permablitz

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The permablitz is a short but intense transfer of beneficial energy where members of the community come together to implement a project or landscape installation designed to provide more resources or energy than it consumes, commonly a permaculture design. Operating on a give-help-and-then-be-helped basis, these fun-filled and informative events overcome many of the pronounced barriers facing individuals for implementing regenerative designs and structures.

Digging out the truth about Saudi oil

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A senior Saudi Arabian oil official said in 2007 that the kingdom has 388 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil reserves, about 45 percent more than official public estimates. But about the same time, a retired Saudi Aramco executive met with U.S. diplomats in Dhahran, and asserted that Saudi figures in general are wildly overblown, and that his country is headed for a production peak around 2020, followed by a slow decline, according to new Wikileaks cables. The issue is pivotal.