Tom Whipple

Immodest Proposals

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After an extended discussion of the reasons why constructive change is effectively impossible in today’s America, there’s more than a bit of irony in proposing possibilities for constructive change. Still, this week’s Archdruid Report focuses on one such change as a way to cast light on the widening mismatch between the assumptions that undergird our daily lives and the imperatives of existence on a finite planet.

Of Coal Stoves and Goat Herders: Getting Out of the Vicious Circle

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Energy Bulletin ran this excellent piece from the New York Times on a crisis facing Mongolian Goat Herders who are attempting to deal with unstable world markets, climate change and overgrazing. I was fascinated by the clear way that the author of the piece lays out the vicious circle that they’ve entered into, and I was struck by how useful an example it is of the kind of ecological vicious circle that we face all the time…

Hope, hopelessness and faith

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For those involved in issues of sustainability, peak oil, climate change, and relocalization it might be better to feel a certain hopelessness in our situation. For hope implies dependence on forces outside ourselves. Once we abandon that hope, we can get down to the tasks at hand, the tasks that need to be done–for which we need to ask no politician or government official permission–tasks that we can get started on today. In this way hopelessness concerning the current political and economic arrangements becomes an ally.

The Political Ecology of Collapse, Part Three: The Bomb at the Heart of the System

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The failure of the Copenhagen climate talks has been blamed on everything from Chinese intransigence to Barack Obama’s failure to live up to the messianic fantasies projected onto him. Behind the rhetoric, though, lies the uncomfortable reality: the political systems of America and most other industrial nations are pinned in political cul-de-sacs that make them incapable of constructive change.

Film review: The Century of the Self

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Illuminating and infuriating. I had no idea I could blame so much on Freud. This four part BBC series tells the story of how American consumerism was created as well as the fear of communism and how the human potential movement was co-opted into focus groups that, later, rendered politicians, especially liberal politicians, impotent while creating a citizenry catered to by boutique politics.

Home-grown oatmeal

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Oatmeal is a healthful food and now there’s an easier way to grow and process your own. The problem has always been the hulls which grip the groats so tightly that getting them off is difficult.