Climate & environment – April 9
-Eaarth by Bill McKibben (Review)
-Copenhagen Three Months Later
-We all want to change the world
Staff
Food and agriculture – Apr 9
-Why We All Need to Demand Organic and . . . Worship the Worm (book review)
-Rooftop Gardens and Community Plots Welcome City Bees
-Enduring Farms: Climate Change, Smallholders and Traditional Farming Communities
-She yanks their food chains
Transition Museums? what’s up with that? – Apr 9
-Is it time for Transition Museums?
-Tales from the plot
-‘How We Used to Live’: bringing Transition and oral history together
-Oral History Transcripts (Bristol Floating Harbor)
Radical Ass-kicking Home Economics (part 2): Fermentation & How to Wines and Vinegars
Lacto fermented sauerkraut will cure what ails you, tastes great, and the delightful smell will clear a room of normal people.
The twilight of the machine
It’s as indicative as it is ironic that the most popular ideas for a response to the impact of resource depletion on our gargantuan and increasingly unstable technologies involve building even more gargantuan and unstable technologies
A faceoff between two cultural icons, Rosie the Riveter and HAL 9000, points toward another approach.
Maoist rebels and India’s resources
– Deadliest Maoist raid highlights Mittal, Posco India challenge
– Maoists represent a greater threat to India than the Islamist militants
– Maoists threaten Gandhi’s legacy
– Gandhi, but with guns
Peak oil notes – Apr 8
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Droughts
-Eruption in Kyrgzstan
The End Of Suburbia — Really!
As Bill Bonner would say, 98% of everything you hear (about housing, retail spending, etc.) is merely noise. Only the underlying trends are important, if you can identify them. I believe we can spot one: It’s The End of Suburbia. I’ll return to this hypothesis at the end of this post.
Haiti, U.S. ag policy reform, and Bill Clinton
What have Haiti’s recent calamities taught U.S. decision makers about foreign policy with regard to agriculture? Haiti imports nearly half of the food consumed there–and 80 percent of its rice, the national staple. In the past two years, the country has undergone two major shocks: the global spike in food commodity prices in 2008, and this year’s devastating earthquake. In both cases, the dearth of domestic food production, combined with the complete absence of rice reserves, translated to widespread hunger and misery.
Nana Upstairs, Grandpa Down the Hall: The Extended Family and Its Future
When Eric and I first wrote a letter to Eric’s grandparents, asking them to consider living with us, the response was very mixed. Grandma and Grandpa’s generation of friends and family were mostly very pleased and thrilled – given the bad lot of options available to many of them, finding a compatible home with their grandchildren looked pretty good. Most of them had cared for their parents, and so somewhere inside them, this seemed like a normal relationship. Some of my friends were frankly jealous – they’d lost their own grandparents, and wished for something like what we were going to have.
Easter Island : A Case Study in the Response to Resource Depletion
This is a case study in which you are invited to answer the question, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?”
The MAHB, the culture gap, and some really inconvenient truths
A group of social and natural scientists and scholars in the humanities is starting the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB, pronounced “mob”). The admittedly ambitious aim is to change human behavior to avoid a collapse of global civilization.
