Gene Logsdon

Acquiring knowledge by accident

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We learn our lessons more by chance than by deliberation. Or maybe it is more to the point to say that we learn by living. For sure, what we learn from experience sticks with us longer than what we think we learn in classrooms. I can’t remember how to do algebra problems involving two unknowns but I will never forget what happened when I was dumb enough to touch a frosty piece of iron with my tongue.

The haybox factor

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Many of the implications of peak oil can be summed up in one simple if highly unwelcome way: most of us in the industrial world are going to be much poorer for the rest of our lives. That bleak prospect, however, opens up unexpected possibilities; poverty is a familiar condition, and ways to cope with it are within reach. The Archdruid sketches out one option.

Robert Hirsch on “The Impending World Energy Mess”

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Robert Hirsch made waves as the 2005 author of what became known simply as the Hirsch Report, the first study funded by the US government on peak oil and its consequences. The experience of writing that report left him shaken at the consequences of peak oil. Now he says that in the next 2-5 years we’ll see world oil production permanently decline, a phenomenon “unlike anything faced by modern civilization.”
(audio interview about Hirsch’s new book)

What lies at the core of Pattern Language, and why should we care?

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Many individuals involved with Transition, including Rob Hopkins, have become fascinated with the work of Christopher Alexander and his development of pattern language. [He noticed] that any built environment is like a language in that the patterns communicate problems we confront in our environments but also contain within them the solutions. … Often overlooked is what Alexander calls the “luminous ground” on which the pattern language theory is built.

Dr. Gabor Maté on the stress-disease connection, addiction, attention deficit disorder and the destruction of American childhood

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Interview with the Canadian physician and bestselling author Gabor Maté: “The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. Essentially, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions. People no longer live in communities which are still connected to one another.

What does it matter?

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When protest is successful, on those rare and remarkable and wondrous occasions when resistance is possible, it is successful not because of the pure, clear political persistence of actors who carry signs or passively protest or fight legal battles. Instead, it is successful because political protest is chained not to doors or trees but to the emergence of a new way of life. This way of life is not perfect or sufficient, but the overwhelming emergence of something new and different in ordinary and daily ways is a hallmark of almost every successful political protest.

Advice to students: understand money, localize

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A coal industry CEO told students at a small Quaker boarding high school to prepare for jobs in coal mines and power plants, rather than study philosophy or become community organizers….He preached high technology as the answer to humanity’s energy woes—technology created and owned by large multi-national corporations, which are designed to amass enormous monetary and physical wealth by exploiting natural resources and human labor.

Steady state economics and the new Congress

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Advocates of the steady state economy should be working more closely with the cutting-edge organizations fighting global corruption because the corruption and its attendant bribery of public officials is undermining governance around the world….We don’t want to return to the same spot we were in, only to have a new round of speculators crash the economic system and undermine governance. It is important, therefore, to force decision makers in Congress and the Executive Branch to think about a paradigm shift and what a steady state economy would look like.