Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Amanda Kovattana In which I uncover the most compelling reason to stay put in my California home, track my about face from a knowledge driven quest for truth to an intuitively informed one, and contact the dead. …
California is the most conducive place for believing, as Lewis Carroll put it, six impossible things before breakfast.
Christopher Alexander’s masterwork of environmental design, written with several other architects and academics over eight years, lays out a practical and imaginal map for human dwellings and settlements. It’s a peculiarly European response to North America (Alexander is Austrian, educated in England, worked in Berkeley, California). A sudden release from an old cluttered history into a new unexplored world. The feeling you can start all over again with the best of everything you left behind.
– Steve LeVine: Big Oil’s big optimism
– If efficiency hasn’t cut energy use, then what?
– U.S. Called Vulnerable to Rare Earth Shortages
– Wallerstein: Mr. Putin Makes an Audacious Offer (to Europe)
– Inequality and Economic Collapses
– Rising oil prices, the recession and a new world order
– Oil or Terrorism: Which Motivates U.S. Policy More?
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-China
Are you planning to “build community” next year to help your community face the problems of economic downturn and energy decline? Here’s a simple, time-efficient, way to start: take advantage of your existing neighborhood newsletter to promote your ideas.
The financial collapse of Ireland, coming as the latest in a string of disasters, hardly shocks global public opinion. For people engaged in the development debate, however, it is resonant with meaning.
The infrastructure required for a more localised and resilient future, the energy systems, the mills, the food systems and the abbatoirs, has been largely ripped out over the past 50 years as oil made it cheaper to work on an ever-increasingly large scale, and their reinstallation will not arise by accident. They will need to be economically viable, supported by their local communities, owned and operated by people with the appropriate skills, and linked together.
Something extraordinary happened in our city, Sopot in Poland: four out of five candidates for city mayor declared that they would like to introduce participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting means that citizens are directly involved in deciding what the funds from the city budget are spent on. It is a great opportunity to make a turn towards sustainability, and for Transition initiatives or permaculture groups it is a tool to suggest concrete projects to achieve it.
Global Public Media’s Julian Darley speaks to David Hughes, geologist with Natural Resources Canada, about global and North American oil and natural gas supply issues.
This report is a synthesis of the current state of knowledge on energy resources and global climate and environmental change. The findings clearly indicate that the convergence of peak energy resources and dangerous anthropogenic climate and environmental change will likely have a disastrous impact in the near- and long-term on the quantity and quality of human life on the planet
[Excerpts from a free online book from a group at University of California at Santa Barbara.]
-Kicking the habit: why gardeners need to ditch their addiction to oil
-Leaked document shows EPA allowed bee-toxic pesticide despite own scientists’ red flags
-Saving our Soils and How the Old Peach Tree was Brought Back to Life
-Want to See My ASPO Conference Talk About Food?
-Urban Farming, Community Resilience and the Death of the Motor Industry in Detroit (Video)
-Planning Charitable Gifts to Your Favorite Food Organizations? Double Your Impact by Donating Dirty Stocks
