Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Rob Avis In good ol’ permaculture fashion, we set out to enhance sectors and conditions that would improve our growing season (sunlight, heat) while minimizing those that we considered detrimental (cold, hail, frost). We quickly determined that a passive solar greenhouse was just what we needed and we set out to design one for our backyard.
One reason that we have a culture dedicated to the myth of perpetual economic growth (a dedication that produces a pile of consequences such as climate chaos, financial fiascos, ecosystem eradication, and dismal disparity between the haves and have-nots) is that students are learning fictitious “facts.” College students in the most common majors are repeatedly told that unlimited economic growth is a good thing, with no thoughtful analysis of the costs of growth.
In urban situations, space is limited, there may be little or no access to land, and various regulatory restrictions when it comes to gardening or backyard animals. We want to share some of the concepts that people have used in urban settings which allow them to circumnavigate these obsticles. Below is a list of some solutions practiced by various groups in cities across the nation. It is a mix of approaches, ranging from gardening to co-parenting, going across of aspects of sustainability.
Our bee problem is quite the topic of conversation these days–at social gatherings, in meetings, over coffee. I could say and have—for example at Christmas dinner when apologizing for my not-quite-stellar pumpkin bread—that last summer the CSA grower from whom I get my produce planted five hundred pumpkin plants and only got three pumpkins (so I had to buy canned, rather than processing my own). No pollination, he thought. And just the other day an acquaintance mentioned that friends who live in a tony suburb north of Chicago had, also last summer, had their own pollination troubles in their vegetable garden. Why? she wondered.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the Global Economy
-China’s coal production
-The Australian floods
-BP and Rosneft
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
If we can achieve this type of gathering, meeting place, at each and every transition convergence then we are well on the way to transition in our times.
-Shale gas: a provisional assessment of climate change and environmental impacts (report)
-Shale gas moratorium in UK urged by Tyndall Centre
-Warning over UK shale gas projects
-Opponents to Fracking Disclosure Take Big Money From Industry (NEW)
Poverty itself, the absence of money to spare, is not the enemy, Paul Goodman told us. We should be more precise and define the problem as economic insecurity, the threat of utter destitution, the constant specter of misery and ruin.
PurBlood stocks took a tumble today after tepid sales during the second quarter and amid criticism of vampire elitism, falling $1.45 to close the day at $24.67 per share. Anthony Baker, blood activist and head of the non-profit organization Blood Equality, released this statement: “The very name PurBlood implies there is something wrong with the blood of some of us humans. We demand equal vampire treatment for all humans, regardless of what we eat, what we’ve been exposed to, what drugs we take, or what we’ve been doing for the last thirty years.”
I’m sure we all have our own pet scenarios, and many experts have excellent and credible reasons for believing one of those is more likely than others. I would argue that as a movement, however, peak-oil activists do better to focus on the common outcomes of high, low or fluctuating oil prices, than to try to predict which path energy prices will take. The end-results matter most.
If you expect a model – any model – to be able to predict the future you are going to be sorely disappointed. The Hubbert model is no exception, but many models can tell you enough about the future that you may prepare for it.
It’s not the apocalypse. And it’s certainly not the Death Star or the planet Tatooine. But The Windup Girl is a compelling vision of our industrial world as it could be in a low-energy future. Paolo Bacigalupi’s techno-political thriller imagines how, in the time after peak oil and economic collapse, global trade could return via airships and GMOs.
