Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Christine Patton Peak Shrink has an interesting post on The Tyranny of Positive Thinking, a review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In it, she expresses the same frustration I’ve felt when dealing with our cult of positivity.
Should climate activists and feminists support campaigns to slow population growth? Laurie Mazur says that alliance will strengthen the movement. Ian Angus strongly disagrees …
Even more useful than the books or activities, though, is the principle behind libraries, that we and our neighbours can pool our resources and hold things in common that all of us occasionally need. Most of the Western World, however, adopted this principle for books and then stopped, never extending it to other obvious areas of life.
-Public safety means more than just cops
-Dominican Authorities Approve Container Cities For Haiti Housing Relief
-Detroit homes sell for $1 amid mortgage and car industry crisis
-Digital designer shows what future towns could look like
-A March Round-up of What’s Happening out in the World of Transition
-Transition on ‘One Planet’ on BBC World Service
-Transition Sunshine Coast delivers EDAP
-“Genuine resilience results from expanding the human footprint”. Discuss
A popular idea at the moment to address climate change is biochar – essentially taking organic materials, charring them, and burying them in the soil…Now, the biofuel story has given me a bit of a horror of ideas that sound cool to environmentalists, are fine on a small scale, but are a disaster when scaled up by industrial society. So I wanted to do a few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations of the limits of this approach.
On Friday, journalist John Fleck made a great point, comparing coverage of two new pieces in Science. One is about the latest potential climate disaster: methane venting from the seafloor in the Arctic. The second is about a promising new climate solution: using behavioral science to influence energy use. Not surprisingly, the disaster got tons of coverage. The solution got none. This is entirely typical. As Fleck says, “The problem space gets more attention than the solution space.”
-Green fuels cause more harm than fossil fuels, according to report
-Chemists create biofuel from plant waste
-Seeking a More ‘Poplar’ Biofuel
-Are we really going to let ourselves be duped into this solar panel rip-off?
-Solar panels are not fashion accessories
-There is no ‘green treachery’ in questioning this solar panel rip-off
I accept George Monbiot’s £100 solar PV bet
Despite the incessant media repetition that the economic situation is getting better, there is growing evidence that the economy is in fact growing worse. Where all this leaves oil prices is not yet clear.
Time Magazine recently had an article (Why the Tea Party Movement Matters) that looked at the latest manifestation of populism in the United States, with widespread discontent at the state of the US economy and the US political system, particularly the lack of transparency evident in many government initiatives ranging from the bail-out of the financial system to proposed changes to healthcare, along with discontent about costly wars in the middle east that seem to be never-ending.
-Arctic arch failure leads to sea-ice exodus
-World’s temperature record to be re-analysed
-In India, a Clear Victor on The Climate Action Front
-Is Arctic methane on the move?
-Methane Releases from Arctic Shelf May Be Much Larger and Faster Than Anticipated
-Climate scientists must be ruthlessly honest about data
