Staff

Citywatch: Occupy movement identifies food movement common inspiration and options

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Move over, Bill Shakespeare. The whole world is no longer just a stage, and we merely players with our entrances and exits. Today’s world is otherwise occupied, as people in over 1000 centers around the globe play their role, take their entrances and exits around platforms, portals and places— the Three P’s of 21st century movement politics—as in Occupy Wall Street. The city-based food movement is based on many similar principles, so city officials and food advocates should take a close look and wave their jazz fingers when they see an idea that can be adapted.

Peak oil – Oct 28

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– EIA shale predictions need closer scrutiny, peak oil group says (ASPO-USA)
– Cassandra in the 21st century: ASPO-Italy 5 in Florence on Oct 28
РSaving energy: reliability of national energy flows (PDF) (Jean Laherr̬re of ASPO-France) РUPDATED
– Jeff Rubin: Peak Oil Is About Price, Not Supply
– Soaring prices push Queen close to ‘fuel poverty’

Occupy Earth: nature is the 99%, too

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What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems — its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere — goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?

Pretend jobs

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It says here in the paper that it takes 125,000 new jobs every month just to keep up with population growth. No wonder we have so many people holding down unnecessary jobs. There aren’t enough real jobs to go around and besides, we are replacing people with machines as fast as we can to do the real jobs. Rather than trying to eliminate pretend jobs for the sake of efficiency as is now being proposed (lots of pretension in that too), we should be thinking up better quality pretend jobs — imaginative new positions in useless work that are more beneficial to society than the usual run of useless work.

Announcing a revolutionary leap forward in the Transition model…

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Today sees the launch of three exciting new developments and outputs from Transition Network, the results of many months of work, that finally emerge blinking into the daylight. We are sure that they will greatly deepen your understanding of Transition, bring depth and richness to your work, re-inspire and energise you. They represent a radical shift in how Transition is understood and communicated.

Stranded resources

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A few weeks back, I made the case that relying on space to provide an infinite resource base into which we grow/expand forever is misguided. Not only is it much harder than many people appreciate, but it represents a distraction to the message that growth cannot continue on Earth and we should get busy planning a transition to a non-growth-based, truly sustainable existence. To prove what a distraction it is, I will distract myself again this week with another space post. This time, true to the brand, I will do the math on why the infinite resources of space appear to be of questionable use to our human enterprise.

The trouble with binary thinking

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Robert Anton Wilson pointed out some years ago that people who say “you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution” are usually part of the problem. The habit of thinking in binaries–that is, in hard oppositions between antithetical concepts–has deep roots in the human mind, but it leads to certain predictable difficulties, among them a particular kind of vulnerability to the sorcery practiced by the advertising and marketing industries. If we’re to see past the haze of arbitrary binaries to a less polarized future, a glance at other ways of thinking is probably worth our while.

The peak oil crisis: the energy trap

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The idea of the “energy trap” is that an increasing number of Americans are caught between the cost of gasoline and a systemic inability to stop driving their cars. In the last 60 years America has become a “motorized society” in which most of our citizens have become totally dependent on daily travel by car for their existence. Take away our cars and most of us would be hard pressed to reorganize our lives to provide for the essentials of life – earn an income, and provide food, shelter, and education for ourselves and our families.

Individual statements in support of ASPO-USA’s letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu

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Statements from petroleum geologists and analysts supporting ASPO-USA’s call for “Truth in Energy”regarding the possibility of a near-term oil crisis and long-term oil shortages:

Robert L. Hirsch (co-author of “The Hirsch Report”), Tom Whipple (former CIA analyst), Lt. Col. Daniel Davis (U.S. Army), Art Berman and Jeffrey J. Brown (petroleum geologists), as well as Jim Baldauf and Jan Lars Mueller of ASPO-USA.