Matthew Wild

The world after abundance

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Twice now, in the fall of 2007 and the spring of 2010, the price of oil has risen past $80 a barrel, and each time a multinational debt crisis followed. Coincidence? Possibly, but it may also be a signal that the core thesis of The Limits to Growth — that the costs of growth on a finite planet will eventually rise faster than growth itself, and force the economy to its knees — may be about to demonstrate its validity the hard way.

White nights and chicken skin

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Some days earlier we were debriefing from a speaking engagement at Tartu University, sitting in an open air café, when one of the students took up the argument about human nature and cultural inertia and said it would never be possible to get people to change their habits quickly enough to avert catastrophic climate change and die-off. We remarked that as long as there was a scintilla of hope, we could do no less than to keep trying to shift the paradigm.

Some Transition thoughts on the energy bits of the Queen’s speech

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So the Queen’s Speech has set out the policy priorities for the new government, but were the policies announced a cop-out or do they set out a wartime mobilisation scale of response to climate change and peak oil? These reflections are based on the article about the speech that appeared in yesterday’s Guardian.

Irony In Garden Farming

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It says in the books that hens have to eat commercial mash to lay a profitable number of eggs. All the farming tradition they know about or been taught says you have to feed mash. Momma fed mash so don’t you dare insult her memory. Ditto for papal infallibility.

An Even Bigger Spill Looming?

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While the nation’s eyes are turned towards the oil tipped waves and tar balls washing up on the shores of the Gulf Coast, an altogether different energy disaster looms in California—one that might be even more damaging for the environment and our economy in the long run.

Deepwater Horizon: This is what the end of the Oil Age looks like

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The cheap, easy petroleum is gone; from now on, we will pay steadily more and more for what we put in our gas tanks—more not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a failed foreign policy that spawns foreign wars and military occupations, and in the lost integrity of the biological systems that sustain life on this planet.

Sustainable medicine: an issue brief on medical school reform

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This issue brief calls for changes in medical school culture, primarily curriculum, research and clinical practice, as a conscious response to the simultaneously ongoing fiscal/economic crisis and what E.O. Wilson has termed the Bottleneck of ecological dilemmas, shown most prominently but not exclusively as the worldwide peak in crude oil production. Together these forces will reconfigure modern society, particularly health care.

The work ahead

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May hits us like an ice water dousing on a drowsy morning. It is simultaneously shocking and deeply refreshing. Winter’s leisurely breakfasts are suddenly a thing of the past: Bob and I scarcely have time to join each other for a cup of coffee before we find ourselves on our hands and knees weeding asparagus, donning nets to check on the beehives, pounding posts to trellis new grape vines, digging holes for new fruit trees, or heading down to the farm to make sausage before the farmer’s market starts.

An Interview with Peter North

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Pete North’s new book “Local Money: how to make it happen in your community” will be formally launched at the 2010 Transition Network conference and will be available to order here at the end of this week. The latest book in the Transition Books series, “Local Money” is a comprehensive overview of local currencies, and how to plan and implement such a scheme.