Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Sharon Astyk John Michael Greer has a superb piece up about our reluctance to seriously consider real community and organizational strategies. I think it is well worth reading for anyone interested in this question of community – because we have to ask ourselves, if this is the tool we’ve got, why do so few of us want to do the work? Why are so few of us able to do the work?
It has been 18 months since we all worried very much about high oil prices. Starting in July 2008 gasoline prices took an historic plunge dropping from a U.S. average high of $4.11 a gallon all the way down to $1.70 in January 2009.
Oil prices began the year with a rally, reaching nearly $84 a barrel as temperatures across much of the northern hemisphere required the heating to be turned up a notch.
As others have pointed out, many of Haiti’s problems have been related to its population density, associated environmental degradation and its need for cheap energy. Now, with the worst earthquake shaking the Caribbean in 200 years, we must sadly add another chapter to the Haitian book chronicling the linkage between its human and ecological disasters.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-China’s Economy
I get a lot of emails from people who want to get out of the city. Sometimes the reasons are really good ones – they don’t like cities or the ones they live in, but were drawn there by the promise of salaries and jobs, but now see other options opening up in rural areas or small towns. Maybe they always dreamed of land and space to be self-sufficient, or maybe it was a new dream – but now they want to explore it.
-The year climate science caught up with what climate scientists have been saying privately for years
-Where on earth is it unusually warm?
-Britain’s cold snap does not prove climate science wrong
-Coral Can Recover from Climate Change Damage, New Research Suggests
-The resurgence of El Niño means that 2010 could yet be the hottest year on record
-The sinking Sundarbans
-Major Antarctic glacier is ‘past its tipping point’
-Oil Demand Seems to be Moving Up – Are Higher Prices around the Corner?
-To Slow Growth, China Raises an Interest Rate
-Chinese Transportation Growth
-US raises concern over China oil policy
The economy is subordinate to nature and not vice versa.
Discussions of community in peak oil circles, as elsewhere, tend to focus exclusively on the benefits to be gained from participation in community, and rarely discuss the costs — a point that may have more than a little to do with the very limited success of communitarian projects so far. Given that community organization is one of the few tools able to cope with significant features of our present predicament, it’s high time to grapple with both sides of the equation.
…Now I know that cultural assumptions, even well-established ones, can be overturned, which is why I am excited about State of the World 2010. It calls for one of the greatest cultural shifts imaginable: from cultures of consumerism to cultures of sustainability…It advocates rethinking the foundations of modern consumerism—the practices and values regarded as “natural,” which paradoxically undermine nature and jeopardize human prosperity.
Ken Meter, one of the top experts on community food systems in the US, discusses how local food networks thrive and how they can help strengthen economies. Meter is president of the Crossroads Resource Center in Minneapolis. Carl Etnier hosts.
