Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Ronit Ridberg Dena Hoff talks about La Via Campesina’s vision of social change, and how the agricultural challenges faced around the world are not always so different from those faced in the U.S.
In our local neighborhood in Los Angeles, for the third year running, we are hosting a group purchase of bare root fruit trees. It started on a whim. I was ordering bare root fruit trees for my own yard, and thought perhaps a few others might wish to piggyback on my order. I posted it on our local Transition email loops and suddenly my order had exploded to 21 trees! We qualified for extra volume discounts at the supplier, and the box that arrived on my doorstep the following January was so big that it could easily have contained one of the Lakers basketball players!
Sometimes ‘climate change’ can seem like an abstraction. That is, until you see it in action, as we have this summer in Pakistan, in the mountains of China, in Ladakh, and in the overheated peat bogs of central Russia. Working to create a safe climate future doesn’t mean we don’t need to try and help the victims of the climate crisis along the way. When our comrades and colleagues issue a call for assistance, we do everything we can to respond.
A great deal of the discussion of post-petroleum food production misses the fact that in societies before oil — and thus arguably in societies after oil — food was produced by two distinct systems. The last century saw the dismantling of one of those; the present century will have to see its reconstruction.
Matt Simmons was arguably the most influential individual on this side of the Atlantic to warn about the coming peak-and-decline of world oil production. Beginning in 2001, when he published his ground-breaking white paper on the world‘s giant oil fields, Matt alerted presidents, politicians and whoever else would listen that our energy joyride was headed for deep trouble. He drove himself tirelessly, riding the speaker circuit at breakneck speed, visiting some 25 countries to deliver over 400 fact-filled energy talks to industry, investment, academic, and general interest audiences.
Then, suddenly, he was gone.
In “The Story of Here Begins” I asked myself the question: Setting aside the issues of the wide world for a second, who and what are right here under my nose? Well, from the top of Water Tower Hill, one answer is abundantly clear: My little ten-mile world is filled with cars. Lots and lots and lots—a god king hell of a lot—of cars. A large slice of the blame for a century’s worth of wrong turns can be laid at the feet of this one invention. More than any other single toy in the playroom of technology, it has enabled us to go completely crazy—and to get there in air conditioned comfort and style!
This week on Crop To Cuisine, we go into the garden in search of cocktails with Paul Abercrombie, Author of “Organic, Shaken and Stirred”. Pakistan is in the midst of the worst flooding disaster in history. The WFP speaks with us about the realities on the ground and what people can do to help. And our series on the most popular beverage in the world continues, From Crop To Cup. All of that, headlines in food and farming, and more.
A good case can now be made that the year 2007, when this book originally appeared, was indeed the year, if not of “peak everything,” then at least of “peak many things.” Since then we have begun a scary descent from the giddy heights of consumption achieved in the early years of this century.
Not until I was well into writing my new book, Holy Shit: Managing Manure To Save Mankind, which is about how to manage manure for soil enrichment, did I realize that cats, dogs and horses are a very significant source of valuable fertilizer that we are mostly throwing away. Or, as our friends’ cat, Django, indicates in the photo above, flushing it down the toilet.
When it comes to controversial issues, population is in a class by itself.
In the days following Simmon’s death some 400 obituaries appeared on the web, on television broadcasts and in hard copy publications around the world. Some of these were written by people and organizations who understand the threat of peaking world oil supplies and praised Matt for his leadership in analyzing and publicizing the issue. Others were written by hostile skeptics who sought to play down his significance or focused on those instances in his voluminous pronouncements where he was wrong.
In this post I present an analysis of how OPEC oil supplies have responded to changes in crude oil prices during the last 10 years. My objective was to estimate OPEC’s probable marketable crude oil capacities as of May 2010, based on responses of OPEC oil supplies to price changes.
