Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Craig A. Severance We have a natural desire to find a way that we and our loved ones can be “safe” in the midst of the upcoming Peak Oil, Economic Collapse, and Climate Change cataclysms. This leads us to think of Arks or Fortresses, which simply won’t work. What then is a model for the coming times? The only model that can work is the decidedly unsafe and generous City of Light.
Posting will be intermittent over the holiday period. Normal posting will resume January 2 or 3 (ish). Happy Holidays from the EB co-editors Kristin, Bart, and Simone!
– Hans Noeldner: Peace on Earth / Human legs
– Dr. David Fleming: a tribute
– Songs of Petroleum – Jan Lundberg’s Autobiography
– Space Enough and Time: An Expat’s Siberian Experience
NASA research scientist Benjamin Cook explains how the Dust Bowl years of the American Midwest were not entirely a “natural disaster” and how lessons learned then prevented a sequel.
A mid-weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-China
Produce has been the low-hanging fruit for many people wishing to eat local. But local dry goods including wheat, the staff of life, is much more difficult to source in British Columbia. As demand grows, however, more farmers are experimenting with wheat production. What’s lacking, they say, is ready infrastructure to process that wheat — which is why clunkers like the Clipper are forced out of retirement.
Christopher Alexander, architect, thinker, designer, author of the seminal ‘A Pattern Language’ and of the more recent extraordinary ‘The Nature of Order’ series of books, has long been someone whose work I have admired greatly.
“… I finally realised that every one of these cultures had essentially a system of rules – though ‘rules’ is too strong a word because they were not binding. They weren’t being forced down somebody’s throat, but they were rules that everyone understood and which had to be used to get a good result.”
I’ve pondered whether to stop describing our vortex of dilemmas as a crisis of sustainability. “Sustainable growth” –and its derivative “smart growth”–has been a successful riposte to Meadows, et al.’s 1972 The Limits to Growth that has sapped vigor and anticipation from sustainability.
As 2010 ends, what really interests me aren’t the corrosions and failures of this system, but the way another system, another invisible hand, is always at work in what you could think of as the great, ongoing, Manichean arm-wrestling match that keeps our planet spinning. The invisible claw of the market may fail to comprehend how powerful the other hand — the one that gives rather than takes — is, but neither does that open hand know itself or its own power. It should. We all should.
At present America is abounding with demagogues professing an answer to the current economic difficulties and a restoration of the jobs and prosperity that is the American birth right. Restoring “prosperity” in the conventional sense of acquiring more and fancier things and ever increasing real incomes will, of course, be impossible as liquid fuels become more and more expensive.
– CERA’s Yergin: US gas demand should fall for good after ’06 peak
– The Global Oil Diet: a graphic view
– Subsidy Cuts in Iran
– Iran Stops Fuel Delivery, Afghanistan Says, and Prices Are Rising
Events from 2010 contain the seeds of transformation. None of the following stories is enough on its own to change the momentum. But if we the people build and strengthen social movements, each of of these stories points to a piece of the solution.
