Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff – Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review
– Facebook faces campaign to switch to renewable energy
– Why my kids are pop-culture illiterate
– ‘Google Knows More about Us than the KGB, Stasi or Gestapo’
– Google chief warns on social networking dangers
To see how climate change will play out in the twenty-first century, look to the deaths and burning tyres in Mozambique’s ‘food riots’ to see what happens when extreme natural phenomena interact with our unjust social and economic systems.
As the effects of Peak Oil make themselves felt, they will go far beyond gas prices.
The Canadian auto industry employs around a half million people directly and indirectly, almost all of which is in Ontario. This isn’t just building and selling cars – there’s a massive manufacturing empire needed to mine the ore, make the steel and machine the parts that extends well beyond Ford or Toyota. So what do we do with two of the nation’s largest steel mills? …
If cycling is going to catch on as a major means of transportation, somebody’s going to have to start building new affordable and practical bikes. That’s where steel comes in.
Pulcinella was the most restless marionette in the old theater. He always had something to protest about. At performance time, he wanted to take a stroll. Or the puppet-master gave him a comic role when he had wanted something more serious.
“One day or another,” he confided to Arlecchino the Harlequin, “I’m going to cut my strings.” And that’s what he did, but it wasn’t during the day. One night he’d gotten a hold of a pair of scissors that the puppet-master had left behind. One after the other, he cut the strings tied to his head, his hands and his feet.
– The environmentalist’s paradox: we do better while the earth does worse
– Smile, You’re an Activist!
– The Weirdest People in the World?
– A Short History of Progress
Policy makers in Asia still execute piecemeal solutions to reduce the traffic externalities without considering long term impacts. This article tries to clear some of the misconceptions about transportation. Many research reports over the last decade have debunked some of the traditional approach towards solving transport problems.
The dictionary defines xenophobia as “fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.” It seems to be an endemic plague everywhere in the world. But it infects larger numbers of people only sometimes. This is one of those times.
As part of its focus on action in the present–the moment at which oil is peaking–as a time of opportunity for decisive action of historical consequences, the Transition Movement embraces the act of telling stories; stories are a crucial tool for this monumental change–as important, perhaps, as our new-found ability to darn socks and grow Kale. (Part 2 of “Existential Comfort in the Age of Hopkins and Greer”)
– The Peanut Solution (patents and famine)
– Can science feed the world? (Nature magazine special)
– How to feed a hungry world
– Food: An underground revolution (Research on roots)
– Seeing a Time (Soon) When We’ll All Be Dieting
– World Carryover Grain Stocks Fall to 72 Days of Consumption
– Growing fuel by the roadside
I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief. We humans have been given a privileged place in a world that is beautiful beyond description, and we are destroying it and destroying each other. I cope with that by building temporary psychological damns and dikes to hold back that grief. … If I weren’t politically active, I would lose my mind. The only way I know how to cope is to use some of my energy in collective efforts to try to build something positive.
(Interview with journalism professor at U of Texas)
A short history of the peak oil movement and reflections on wizards, Transition and the interstices of reason. Let us start with persona, since one goes to any prizefight to see the metaphorical battle of two created characters, embodying sides, virtues, faults.
In this Corna… John Michael Greer, owner (by a whisker over Bob Waldrop) of the finest beard in Peak Oildom, Archdruid, moral descendent of Toynbee and Gibbon, considerer of declines in centuries, not weekends. No Zombies for Greer – we are Rome, and we might as well deal with it, dammit.
in this Corna…Rob Hopkins, beardless founder of the Transition movement, permaculturist, endless energetic optimist and municipal leader, student of the first half of the British century, bent of reorganizing his community and the world to adapt to energy descent. If we could live without that energy once before, well, we can do it now, and let’s get at it.
-Land grabs, biofuel demand raise global food-security risk
-Commercial Organic Farms Have Better Fruit and Soil, Lower Environmental Impact, Study Finds
-Fears grow over global food supply
