Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Gene Logsdon The weather has kept the ground wet through much of the Corn Belt but that mud doesn’t stop today’s machines of mass destruction when farmers get desperate enough to harvest anyway. They grind their way through the wet soil, leaving in their wake roiling, rolling gullies of ooze deep enough in the wettest areas to sink a Greyhound bus.
Ten thousand years ago, ancestors of today’s Coquille Indians lived along the southern Oregon coast from Coos Bay to Cape Blanco and along the inland valleys of the Coquille River drainage. A common misconception among European Americans is that Indians lived passively within their environment, “at one with nature.” On the contrary, aboriginal peoples actively managed their landscape for their own objectives, using the technologies available to them.
As global energy production peaks, our consumer-driven society is being forced to rethink its values and creatively adapt to a less energy intensive world. Richard Heinberg, senior fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and author of The End of Growth joins Luke to discuss the end of consumerism.
Can ecology, biology, mathematics and physics help us avoid (or at least predict) forthcoming troubles of the worst kind? An interview with scientist Len Fisher, Ph.D., author of the new book Crashes, Crises, and Calamities: How We Can Use Science to Read the Early-Warning Signs .
When civil society sleeps, we’re just a bunch of individuals absorbed in our private lives. When we awaken, on campgrounds or elsewhere, when we come together in public and find our power, the authorities are terrified.
After my talk in Norwich last week, I met a local authority emergency planner, who said that he had found the talk, and the Transition take on resilience, very illuminating. He pointed me in the direction of the latest “Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience”, the latest “national statement for how individual and community resilience can work”, published by the Cabinet Office in March of this year. It is a fascinating document, and is indeed the first official government document on community resilience that refers explicitly to the Transition movement, and as such deserves a post reflecting on it. It also offers a tantalising glimpse into what a government response to peak oil, climate change and economic contraction might look like if anyone had the imagination to create one.
In the last few years the IEA’s annual report has come to recognize that the next 25 years are unlikely to be anything like the last 25 and the report has become much more nuanced. Gone are the extreme predictions that the world will be consuming 50 percent more oil 25 years from now. In their place are forecasts that global oil production will depend heavily on what alternative policy paths are taken by major governments and how much ($38 trillion is necessary) will be spent to find and exploit fossil fuel resources in the coming years.
Sharon Kaiser, a supervisor and worker-owner at Evergreen Laundry, reports that her friends and family are eager to hear about what is happening inside Evergreen. “They want to know what they can do to be part of this,” she says. “It is a very positive thing for the community.” This expressed longing to participate in Evergreen’s model of sustainable wealth-building should not be underestimated. As Howard describes it, Evergreen is unleashing a powerful force: “the energy of people to become actors in history in their own lifetimes.”
Decentralization of the Occupy movement is as important as the decentralization of any other piece of our infrastructure. If the #OWS crowd popped up in small groups around NYC, they would be easier to raid individually, but not much worth it. If one goes down, there are sites still available to regroup and relocate. … Good communications could combine dispersed occupiers for various marches and individual protest demonstrations. Seriously, we need to be in little, flexible, creative bunches everywhere, not in one giant lump.
– The Importance of Creative Protest
– Mike Davis: Ten Immodest Commandments
– The Revolution Is Love – video by Charles Eisenstein (author of “Sacred Economics”)
– Jan Lundberg: How bad or hopeful is our situation as a culture and species?
Big Oil’s campaign for energy complacency is picking up steam. They say tar sands and fracking are bringing a new era of plenty. But whatever happened to peak oil?
In recent years, we have heard statements indicating that it is possible to decouple GDP growth from energy growth. I have been looking at the relationship between world GDP and world energy use and am becoming increasingly skeptical that such a decoupling is really possible.
