Staff

Holiday posting

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Posting will be intermittent over the holiday period. Normal posting will resume January 2 or 3 (ish). Happy Holidays from the EB co-editors Kristin, Bart, and Simone!

Iceberg economies and shadow selves

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As 2010 ends, what really interests me aren’t the corrosions and failures of this system, but the way another system, another invisible hand, is always at work in what you could think of as the great, ongoing, Manichean arm-wrestling match that keeps our planet spinning. The invisible claw of the market may fail to comprehend how powerful the other hand — the one that gives rather than takes — is, but neither does that open hand know itself or its own power. It should. We all should.

Building up the ‘grain chain’

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Produce has been the low-hanging fruit for many people wishing to eat local. But local dry goods including wheat, the staff of life, is much more difficult to source in British Columbia. As demand grows, however, more farmers are experimenting with wheat production. What’s lacking, they say, is ready infrastructure to process that wheat — which is why clunkers like the Clipper are forced out of retirement.

Sustainability: From ‘terminally nice’ to ‘nice and rough’

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I’ve pondered whether to stop describing our vortex of dilemmas as a crisis of sustainability. “Sustainable growth” –and its derivative “smart growth”–has been a successful riposte to Meadows, et al.’s 1972 The Limits to Growth that has sapped vigor and anticipation from sustainability.

An interview with “Pattern Language” author Christopher Alexander

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Christopher Alexander, architect, thinker, designer, author of the seminal ‘A Pattern Language’ and of the more recent extraordinary ‘The Nature of Order’ series of books, has long been someone whose work I have admired greatly.

“… I finally realised that every one of these cultures had essentially a system of rules – though ‘rules’ is too strong a word because they were not binding. They weren’t being forced down somebody’s throat, but they were rules that everyone understood and which had to be used to get a good result.”

The peak oil crisis: the time of the demagogues

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At present America is abounding with demagogues professing an answer to the current economic difficulties and a restoration of the jobs and prosperity that is the American birth right. Restoring “prosperity” in the conventional sense of acquiring more and fancier things and ever increasing real incomes will, of course, be impossible as liquid fuels become more and more expensive.

Twilight of the chicken tenders

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The current American food system can be expected to unravel as the limits to growth begin closing in. Somewhere between the gourmet notions that dominate too much of today’s “slow food” and the mass-produced product that passes for fast food, a new incarnation of traditional working class cuisine is waiting to be born.