Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Joanne Poyourow Eat/Pray/Love movie advertisements are now appearing all over my local part of Los Angeles. I haven’t read the book or seen the movie and I’m not planning to. But the stark graphics of the advertising campaign pump the words EAT – PRAY – LOVE into my head on a regular basis.
A few years ago, at Seed Savers in County Clare, I helped sculpt, pound and pat a house together.
Looking at the news, most current stories have a common thread. Wars over oil; oil spill; catastrophic flooding in Pakistan and record cold waves in the Southern Hemisphere; wheat prices up on drought in Russia; forest and peat fires from the heat; economies cratering from higher energy costs and banking bubbles; states, provinces, and municipalities teetering on bankruptcy; unemployment skyrocketing; right-wing militant groups finding traction; civil rights trampled as authoritarianism hardens; and billions still being spent to keep people in the dark on peak oil and climate change.
In the analysis underlying our paper “New Perspectives on the Energy Return on (Energy) Investment (EROI) of Corn Ethanol,” we performed four major analyses relating to the EROI of corn ethanol. In this part, we will discuss two additional research areas from the paper.
Matthew R. Simmons, founder of the Ocean Energy Research Institute in Rockland, Maine, passed away suddenly on Sunday. He is survived by his wife, Ellen, and their five daughters. Mr. Simmons was also former chairman of Simmons & Company International. Details of services are pending. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Ocean Energy Research Institute.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-The Macondo well
-In the Congress
-Peak Coal?
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
Every year the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL) holds an annual conference where legislators from all over the US gather for updates on major public policy issues facing the nation. This year the organization found that issues surrounding our country’s future energy supply were becoming of such paramount importance to state governments that it set up a task force to study the issues; produced a report on meeting the energy challenges; and devoted a whole day prior to the annual meeting to an ―Energy Policy Summit‖ where some 15 speakers gave presentations on various aspects of energy.
The idea that the genius of the place and farmer and local economy might arise together to produce something enormously valuable, not just even if its merits are not universal, but because its merits are not universal, is a very strange one in modern culture, and particularly in modern agriculture. Instead, the show ring and the meat processor and the idea that “bestness” is a universal, rather than a specific, have produced an overwhelming pressure towards there being, say, one kind of milk cow – Holstein-Friesien, and a small smattering of a few other secondary varieties, all pretty much with one kind of dairy body conformation. It has reduced the number of livestock varieties dramatically, as many breeds have died out over the years.
Even in the midst of their own gloom over Hurricane Katrina’s destruction where homes and neighborhoods were crushed and where there was little infrastructure and not much support from state or federal government, music helped many evacuees rebuild their lives with a strong hope in the future and a deep connection to a place they loved.
– What collapsing empire looks like
– Will our kids be better off than us?
– How BP harnesses music to its message
– Governments go to extremes as the downturn wears on
– Battle looms over huge costs of public pensions
– How facts backfire
– An evolutionary biology story of stuff
– Transforming cultures from consumerism to sustainability
What if, a friend of mine proposed, we are not approaching a point that will tip us into a grand ecological catastrophe which we are called upon to prevent? What if we are in the middle of that catastrophe and it began some time ago?
