Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Carolyn Baker I live in Boulder, Colorado where the buzz among eco-activists who attended a recent lecture by Vandana Shiva is her chilling statement that if the human species continues on its present destructive trajectory, it has no more than 100 years of life on this planet. At about the same time this bomb was dropped on Shiva’s audience, Keith Farnish’s amazing book Time’s Up: An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis arrived in my mailbox for review…
The question shouldn’t be when can you predict all of this is going to fall apart; it’s a recognition that it inevitably will fall apart, and we either prepare for it, in both physical terms, but also I think in moral terms.
For more than half a century, neoclassical economics has provided the basis for the vast majority of economic advice offered to governments by their paid advisers. A great deal of that advice has been disastrously misguided, and the problems with the neoclassical synthesis that feed into that torrent of bad advice make the same outcome all but unavoidable in dealing with peak oil.
A weekly round-up including:
– Production and prices
– China
– Quote of the Week
-Neri Oxman: Design is Truly Alive
-The launch of the economical environmentalist
-Where Home Is, The Heart Isn’t
-PopTech’s America Reimagined: Bringing Brains Together at the Coolest Conference You’ve Never Heard Of
-Odense: Masterplan for sustainable mobility
-Empty homes: Properties with potential
-Metropolitan Glory
-Greenest Place in the U.S.? It’s Not Where You Think
-Gardener: Urban pioneer Greensgrow Farm leads by example
-Quick and Not So Dirty: No-Sweat Composters
-How High Speed Rail Can Spread Across the U.S.
-“Agriburbia” sprouts on Colorado’s Front Range
The party isn’t over — at least not yet. For the last year, relatively low oil prices have helped us all cope with the economic collapse. We’ve paid less for gasoline than we have for years. And businesses have paid less for running their factories, planes and product transportation. But last week we began hearing the music die down and waiters moving guests out the door.
Talk about heresy. What if food production should not be part of either a capitalistic or a socialistic economy. The first commandment of agriculture states that you must put back into the soil the fertility you take out of it. That being so, the only real profit from food production is how good the food tastes and how well it sustains health and well-being.
In More Like A Depression Every Day, I described strong deflationary pressures in the American economy despite the Shock & Awe fiscal & monetary stimulus being applied. The flow of free money is supposed to counter deflation by boosting both asset values and government spending. Economist Nouriel Roubini, otherwise known as “Dr. Doom”, notes that this “wall of liquidity” is inflating asset values, not just in the United States, but all over the world.
Before 1999 I had never grown a thing in my life except for chia-pets. I then bought a house in North Carolina which had an existing smallish garden of cherry tomatoes, spinach and blueberries, which over the next 4 years, I turned into a 360 square foot garden with numerous geometric shaped raised beds. This introduction to gardening was more of an art form to me – I didn’t care about the end result so much. Fast forward 10 years and I have a larger, more serious garden…
Critique of October, 2009 issue of Scientific American essay: Squeezing More Oil from the Ground
