Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Michael Yates There used to be a lot of men and women like our friend. Thin, wiry, fit, able to do hard physical labor outdoors, to hike, ski, swim. Every now and then, we see an older man or woman, walking proud and erect, slim and trim. In the west, the man might have on boots, a cowboy hat, denim shirt, and stiff blue jeans. Like our late friend Val from Tucson. Today, such people look strange and out of place. Modern America is the land of the unfit.
The first half of this essay sketched out the unfamiliar terrain that’s beginning to open out in front of the peak oil community as the concept of hard energy limits seeps back out into public awareness, after thirty years of exile in the Siberia of the imagination where our society imprisons its unwelcome truths. One probable feature of that landscape is the rise of revitalization movements among people in the industrial world.
John Michael Greer has officially established himself as an institution within the peak oil community. Truly one of the finest minds working on the predicament of modern-day industrial civilization, he is so well-read in so many fields that he regularly gains access to insights that utterly elude his contemporaries. For this he is treasured by a growing number of loyal readers—and, I suspect, hated by equally many fellow bloggers who wish that they could be half as good.
Permablitz: An event in which volunteers use permaculture principles to transform a suburban garden into a place that produces its own food.
Are we at the beginning of an epic Depression, or at the bottom of a nasty recession with brighter days only months away? … These reasons for concern pale in importance before the deeper, more profound and systemic problems of our time.
The post-oil novel began as a little-known aberration within the speculative fiction genre. But it’s now hitting bestseller lists, generating comment in major papers, and garnering increasing acceptance from the mainstream of speculative fiction. Frank Kaminski takes a spirited, authoritative look at this blossoming subgenre
Strangely compelling video-art featuring a peak oil survivalist.
My talk tonight is about the lack of collapse-preparedness here in the United States. I will compare it with the situation in the Soviet Union, prior to its collapse.I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and I have tried to put my observations into a concise message. I will leave it up to you to decide just how urgent a message it is.
The world’s grain supply for human consumption is being eroded by three different factors: meat, heat and biofuels.
The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community /
Portrait of a Perfect Economic Storm /
How Likely Is Collapse? /
Surviving Hard Times; It’s Not for Sissies /
North Korea & Cuba: Peak Oil Preview /
It Takes Energy to Make Energy / More…
Fossil fuels, especially oil in the form of gasoline and diesel, are essential to every stage of the nuclear cycle, and CO2 is given off whenever these are used. (Photo essay)
"Try to image an airplane suddenly losing its engines. It was really a crash"… A crash that put Cuba into a state of shock. There were frequent blackouts in its oil-fed electric power grid, up to 16 hours per day. The average daily caloric intake in Cuba dropped by a third.
