Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Tom Whipple After a $7 a barrel fall between late January and mid-February, oil prices have rebounded by about $4.50 a barrel and are now in the $63-67 range. Both major oil price benchmarks, WTI and Brent, saw the second straight week of gains.
Despite my somewhat snarky title, which is based on my assessment that Half-Earth is missing a key strategic component, E. O. Wilson’s book is engaging and even inspiring. Wilson makes a compelling case that our planet is facing serious and accelerating species loss, that human beings are the primary cause of this phenomenon, and that, most importantly, we are capable of doing something about it.
As we at the Real Bread Campaign always say, not all loaves are created equal. We believe that there are ways to make bread better for us, better for our communities and better for the planet.
In Pennsylvania, the democratic system isn’t broken. It’s dead. And regardless of political affiliation, Pennsylvanians are correct in having lost faith in our government.
A global perspective – where true costs cannot be fobbed off on the poor and colonized – is necessary for gaining a meaningful and accurate picture of the relationship between wealth, growth, development and environmental integrity and sustainability.
Billions of people around the world need more energy than they can afford, while billions of others can buy far more energy than is required to meet their needs. Global 100-percent renewable scenarios are based on these distortions…
A handful of cultural associations obtained concessions to use garden lots, opening them to the public. These associations, federated within the “FĂ©dĂ©ration des Murs Ă PĂŞches,” organize a cultural festival every year as a strategic effort to build a strong network of citizens who are ready to oppose future urbanization of the site.
There are two stories commonly told about robots these days. One is that, in the not-too-distant future, some enormous percentage of jobs currently being done by people will be taken over by computers, and the workers will be left twiddling their thumbs. The other is that, like past periods of technological change, job markets will simply evolve, and new, better things will arise for us to do. The truth is neither – and everything in between.
A consistent theme in my articles is the charts reveal that economic disruptions, such as ructions in the stock market, tend to follow periods of marked instability in the price of oil, and further, that the economy at large appears to be acutely sensitive to sudden changes in the cost of energy – as mirrored by the longest lines on the chart above.
A CUMA is an agricultural equipment co-op that provides farmers the use of large, expensive machinery, and decreases the cost to access up-to-date equipment. As an organization, a CUMA is group of farmers involved in the same sector (grain farming, dairy, etc.), who pool equity based on the type of equipment they need.
As inequality and environmental degradation worsen, the search is on not only for alternative development models but also for alternatives to development itself. Post-development challenges the idea that all countries must develop along Western capitalist lines according to these dictates.
Wealth and power concentrate not because those we confront are wicked (though there are one or two). Their escalation, in the absence of a political movement to restrain it, is an intrinsic feature of complex human societies. It occurred even in the world’s first cities, in southern Mesopotamia.
