A meditation on Meat: a benign extravagance – Sept 9
-I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly
-A benign extravagance
-The water footprint: the hidden cost of our meat consumption
Staff
Transport – Sept 9 (updated Sept 10)
-New book “Spinning Our Wheels” from Community Solutions
-Bicycle Coalition shows off real pedal power pulling a pro-green two-wheeled move
-Transportation Kinetics
KrisCan interviews energy analyst Chris Nelder
In this seven part KrisCan interview with energy analyst Chris Nelder, they cover topics ranging from the consequences of the moratorium from the Macondo well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico to the legitimacy of Cap and Trade; how U.S. offshore oil drilling will affect domestic oil supply in the coming decade and how policy in America curtails the incentivizing of an energy transition to more renewable sources.
Large scale land investments do not benefit local communities
In April 2010, more than 120 farmers’ groups and non-governmental organizations all across the world signed a statement declaring their opposition to the guiding principles endorsed by the World Bank, the FAO, IFAD and UNCTAD on “responsible” land investments.
Thorium reactors — The new free lunch
A week ago, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the UK newspaper the Telegraph demonstrated that he is a staunch advocate of Free Lunches in his Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium -“If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years…”
The Egg Hunter
This year’s favorite hideout is a pile of hay I put in the machine shed “temporarily” when rain was threatening and I didn’t have time to add it to the outside stack. The photo shows one of these hay pile nests (yes, those are old crosscut saws hanging on the wall behind the nest along with my broadcast seeder, called by some modern garden farmers a “hand-cranked thingie”).
Further reflections on ‘The Big Society’
We have a guest post today, from Jules Peck, originally posted at Citizen Renaissance.com. We have had some initial explorations of this here at Transition Culture already, but Jules offers some useful additional insights into what the Big Society agenda might mean for Transition, and vice versa. Our thanks for allowing us to publish his piece here.
Deconstructing Dinner: Local food fraud, an investigation
An exclusive behind-the-scenes investigative report taking an in-depth look into alleged local food fraud. In May 2010, Deconstructing Dinner received a tip from a farmer in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia who alleged that a local business who sells eggs to 18 retailers and restaurants and who was marketing their product as being predominantly from their own farm, was not true. According to the tip, the “farm” was not a farm at all, and housed no chickens on the property!
A symbolic solar road trip to reignite a climate movement
As I write this piece, we’re in the midst of a (biodiesel) road trip to Washington, D.C., towing behind us an unwieldy piece of history: a solar panel off the roof of the Carter White House. It’s decades old, though it still makes hot water just fine. In a sense, we’re traveling backward—which in another sense is what I think we’re going to have to do for a while in the U.S. climate movement.
Coal and oil: the dark monarchs of global energy (student thesis)
About 90% of the global coal production originates from only 6 countries. Some of them, such as the USA show signs of increasing maturity and exhaustion of the recoverable amounts. However, there is a greater uncertainty about the recoverable reserves and coal production may yield a global maximum somewhere between 2030 and 2060.
Reflections from alongside the threshing machine
Last weekend I was at Embercombe, about 20 minutes drive from Totnes, for the West Country Storytelling Festival…Food production is becoming a key part of its work, and it now has a wonderful vegetable garden, orchards, field scale veg and, of particular interest to me, some small scale cereals production. The day I was there, they were threshing (or attempting to thresh) some of what they had grown, and I thought I would share some of the conversations that took place by the threshing machine.
Climbing a dark mountain: Thoughts on a new culture
I’ve recently finished reading Dark Mountain issue 1, the first publication of the global artists’ collective of the same name, of which I am a member. It’s an astonishing collection (work of 37 different authors) of appreciation and reflection on our civilization’s beginning collapse, and I recommend it without hesitation to anyone who has reached the point of understanding that our unsustainable civilization culture can’t be saved, and is trying to cope with that terrible knowledge.
