Christmas Morning
It is the tiniest of sounds, yet it penetrates the collection of louder and deeper bleats that surround it.
Brian Miller
Lean Logic and Surviving the Future: Review
NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed. LEAN LOGIC: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It Edited by Shaun Chamberlin (Chelsea Green Publishing, September 2016, 623 pages, Hardcover $50.00) and SURVIVING THE FUTURE: Culture, Carnival, and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy A Story from Lean Logic Selected … Read more
Light posting over the holidays
A wonderful festive season to all of our loyal readers, old and new!
Live Without Dead Thyme: A Photo Tour of a Garden
I spent Saturday night under a 100 year old pear tree with David Holmgren, Su Dennett, and a spirited gathering of Victorian permaculturalists, for their annual summer solstice party. My household’s urban homestead doesn’t compare…
Housing and Community in a Megacity
In South Korea’s capital, space is limited and housing expensive. Sharehouse Woozoo has found a way to provide young people with affordable housing – and a sense of community.
Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Mary Berry in Conversation
The problem of sustainability is simple enough to state. It requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay—what Albert Howard called “the Wheel of Life”—must turn continuously in place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted. For this to happen in the stewardship of humans, there … Read more
All Money Should be Used for Public Good
We have empirical evidence that extreme options never win in this procedure. They always lose.
Baby Trees on the Winter Solstice
I planted them with the hope
That my foolish culture will soon desist in its
Suicidal efforts to sever the ties
Between humans and the Earth
Farewell to the Year
And so I come to my final blog post of 2016, and what a year it’s been. I’ve been asked by Dark Mountain to write a retrospective of it, which I hope will be up on their website soon. I’ll be offering some thoughts on the larger events of the world in that post, so here I’m mostly just going to offer a few nuggets focused on my specific theme of small-scale farming, and its future.
How to Make Hydropower More Environmentally Friendly
NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed. Hydropower provides 85 percent of the world’s renewable electricity, but comes with a hefty environmental price tag. Here’s what some are doing to fix that. December 20, 2016 — Humanity got its first large-scale electricity thanks to hydropower. On Aug. 26, 1895, water flowing over Niagara … Read more
EROEI estimates show PV to be a fully mature technology
Photo-Voltaics (PV) is an energy source where this problem has been more acute. Equipment and installation prices collapsed four or five fold since 2010, but published EROEI studies have not converged; in fact it appears they dispersed even further.
Proof Positive
That’s my topic for this newsletter — why proof is important in today’s social and political environment, what kinds of points need to be proved, and how the process of argumentation and evidence-gathering needs to proceed.
