Eric Zencey

The financial crisis is the environmental crisis

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In May of 2009, U.S. federal legislation created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, charged with investigating the causes of the financial crisis that led to the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression. The Commission’s report is due in January. But don’t get your hopes up; they’re more than likely to get it wrong.

Peak Moment 186: Your money, your life, your happiness

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People examine their assumptions about money, decide what is “Enough,” get out of debt, and free up life energy to invest in what matters most to them. Vicki discusses applying these same tools to relationships with our time, opportunities for creativity and exchange, building community, and her ten-mile food diet.

Peak oil and a changing climate

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The scientific community has long agreed that our dependence on fossil fuels inflicts massive damage on the environment and our health, while warming the globe in the process. But beyond the damage these fuels cause to us now, what will happen when the world’s supply of oil runs out? In a new video series from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Nicole Foss, Richard Heinberg and other scientists, researchers and writers explain.

31 Books – The Resilient Gardener

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It is rare for me to read a book that does all three things – that fills that middle gap by offering me genuinely new and engaging ideas, is local to its place but thoughtful about how information gleaned in one environment might connect to another, is written by someone who does have limits on time and energy and occasionally desire to do it perfectly, and finally, is conscious of the need to garden in response to difficult times. That’s why Carol Deppe’s _The Resilient Gardener_ is such a gift.

They’ll serve cocktails at the oil crash

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Douglas Coupland’s vision of an oil-crisis apocalypse in his novel “Player One” is so frightening because it seems so plausible. Would you like to be holed up in a tacky cocktail lounge of an airport hotel when oil hits $250 a barrel, the planes stop flying and the power goes out? And that’s just the beginning.

The tarpaper shack principle

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Plenty of proposals for dealing with the end of the age of cheap oil assume tacitly that energy and resources will be available for massive new projects. Since shortages of energy and resources are precisely what’s at issue just now, this is at least open to question. A less speculative approach might start with those technologies that can be made on a less lavish basis — say, the resources available in a 1930s Hooverville, of the sort many of us may be inhabiting before too long. The Archdruid suggests one example.

Needing to know what we need

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A market economy is designed to meet needs so that resources are efficiently used and utility is maximised, but how do we know what we need? In a world where some societies suffer from consumption-related “status anxiety” while in others people die from starvation it is difficult to find empirical justification for the theoretical position that markets ensure allocative efficiency. The environmental crisis adds an extra dimension to this question: as a closed system the earth has finite resources and a limited capacity to absorb the waste products of industrial society.

Building collaborative lifestyles

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A recent study found that a quarter of people have no one to turn to in times of crisis, and another quarter have only one person. The growing effort to build a collaborative culture can help change that — particularly the new technology available for neighborhoods, technology that allows people to share with each other.