Carl Etnier

Failure as prelude to success, in climate change policy and other areas

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“Evolution is cleverer than you are,” said biochemist Leslie Orgel, and author Tim Harford takes the theme and runs with it in his book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. The best ideas come not from smart individuals, he argues, but by trying out many different ideas and culling out the less successful ones. Continuing the theme of learning from failure, Kurt Cobb talks about his 2009 article, “We Must Make a Lot of Mistakes Quickly,” which was written about the urgent task of drastically upgrading energy efficiency in buildings but applies to many other areas. He discusses tradeable energy quotas, an alternative to a carbon tax or cap that could make the US economy more globally competitive while leveling out inequalities in wealth and income.

Training Cows

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I am personally not enchanted with the idea of training horses because if one wants to use animal power in place of a tractor, I’m prejudiced in favor of cows or oxen. Cows and oxen, I believe and shall try to show, are better geared to the smaller homestead farm.

Why I care about the Koch brothers more than heirloom tomatoes

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“Why do you write about politics so much? Why so negative? Why not more stories on Permaculture?” are questions we sometimes get from readers on Transition Voice. And these are often followed by a statement that Transition is really about “positive actions in the local community.” I’m a fan of community canneries, local currencies and saving energy at City Hall. I’m just not ready yet to join Voltaire’s Candide in withdrawing from the world to cultivate my garden.

Worlds collide in a luxury suite

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Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we’ve just been given? The extraordinarily powerful head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a global organization that has created mass poverty and economic injustice, allegedly assaulted a hotel maid, an immigrant from Africa, in a hotel’s luxury suite in New York City. Worlds have collided. In an earlier era, her word would have been worthless against his and she might not have filed charges, or the police might not have followed through and yanked Dominique Strauss-Kahn off the plane to Paris at the last moment. But she did, and they did, and now he’s in custody, and the economy of Europe has been dealt a blow, and French politics have been upended, and that nation is reeling and soul-searching.

Work and ecology: Less is more

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Work, for an individual or a society, begins with the effort required to modify or eradicate the ecology that’s there and replace it with something else. For most of history, this is in fact exactly what was meant by the word work. Even more specifically: in most places it meant cutting down forests and then hoeing, plowing, planting, weeding, and harvesting fields. In another word, farming. That was the first work and it is still the one that is prior to all others.

The case for a disorderly energy descent

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The energy descent from peak oil production imposes decades of contraction in the global economy. An orderly contraction, particularly in the US, is not likely for a number of reasons. The decline of the oil civilization is a phenomenon and spectacle of such complexity that understanding it requires a systems perspective. This summary of the case for a disorderly contraction and its core drivers demonstrates the capacity of systems tools to show the interlocking feedback structure that shapes how this momentous change plays out over time.

Book Review: Basics with a Twist

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I’m not one for cookbooks but Basics with a Twist by Kim Sanwald has truly inspired me to transform my cooking with the same zeal and enthusiasm as Julie had when she went through Julia Child’s classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But the book is also an inspiring memoir of the author’s complete change of life after 36 years as a manager of a dental office in the city to become a truck farmer in rural Cloverdale.