Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Amanda Kovattana Derek’s book is a far cry from anything so conventional. He aims to inspire with his ideas, ideas that may well earn his book a place in tiny house history. What he ends up doing is reconstructing the mind into accepting what constitutes shelter. (Also “Build Your Own House”)
This is the story of two very different cities. One is a city whose past is steeped in historic achievement, and recent failure. The other is a city whose horrific past has gotten desperately worse, but whose future… well, who knows? Though world’s apart, these places embody a common metaphor for an elusive global possibility.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-China’s Growth
-India
-Quote of the Week
-Briefs
All those earnest health policy analysts laboring over the pros and cons of a Public Option have made an unacknowledged ethical decision about how to allocate resources –distribute medical care and, in fact, life chances. They intellectually/ethically are constrained from asking Mitroff and Silvers’ question.
The history of modern humankind has undergone two major energy transitions, marked by the invention and development of agriculture and the discovery and exploitation of oil. The two energy transitions partition human history into three phases: hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and industrial. Faber et al. (1996) refer to these phases as “Paradigmatic Images of the World,” because they describe the common structure of societies throughout the world. The most important question is “what is the next paradigmatic image of the world?”
At this juncture in the industrial age, we have two tired, one-armed lifeguards and a handful of victims. All eyes are on Greece — fittingly, the birthplace of western civilization — but Greece, which naturally turned to Goldman Sachs to try to hide its debt, is one tiny canary in a coal mine the size of Earth.
-Watching China Run
-The Recession is Dead, Long Live the Recession: Life Without Jobs
-How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
-Why GDP Is No Measure of Quality; and What We Can Do About it
-Athens protest: ‘We are at war with them, as they are with us’
-America’s Food-To-Fuel Problem
-EU biofuels significantly harming food production in developing countries
-Burn Up the Biosphere and Call It Renewable Energy
-Palm oil deal ‘a threat to the rainforest’
The reason such sloppy critiques of climate science have gained so much traction with the public has less to do with their scientific logic–which is almost nonexistent–and more to do with human psychology.
As a matter of public policy, it would make perfect sense to provide seed money for what is bound to become a new high-growth industry segment: serving the needs of the permanently unemployed.
There is Successful Farming, Progressive Farming, Organic Farming, Natural Farming and an awful lot of Wishful Farming. I would like to add to the list one more kind: Impossible Farming.
We burn through more of it per capita than any other country; and our appetite for it can only be sated with massive imports. No, not oil–I’m talking about nitrogen fertilizer. With only 5 percent of the world population, the U.S. consumes nearly 12 percent of the globe’s annual synthetic nitrogen fertilizer production. And we’re producing less and less of it at home–meaning that, as with petroleum, we’re increasingly dependent on other nations for this key crop nutrient.
