Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Stewart Lansley In the last thirty years, a rising share of the global economic pie has been colonised by the world’s rich. It is this concentration of income that is the real cause of the present crisis. It created the conditions for the 2008 Crash and is now driving us into an era of near-permanent slump.
The ecosystems around Kanazawa’s urban area have played an important role in giving shape to the physical form of the city in terms of its functionality and aesthetics, and in sustaining its lifestyles. The city’s rise as a flourishing cultural centre was made possible by the diversity of the surrounding ecosystems — from forests to freshwater, to plains and marine environments — which provided it with an abundance of resources and services. As the city’s space was being molded in response to climatic factors, and based on local socio-cultural categories, specific resource uses and practices for managing the biodiversity of these surrounding ecosystems emerged.
Speth talks to us about his new book, America the Possible: Roadmap to a New Economy, in which he calls for deep reforms to break our single-minded fetish with economic growth, invoke environmental sanity, and wrest financial power away from Wall Street and back to Main Street.
From the rainforests of central Africa to the Australian outback, indigenous people armed with GPS devices are surveying their territories and producing maps they can use to protect them from logging and other outside development.
In most East African countries access to electricity is very low. Besides electricity, there is a basic need for energy. In Eastern African countries most of the energy consumed is produced from traditional solid biomasses, such as the burning of wood.
The search for combustibles begins early in the morning, includes several hours of walking, and, in cases where no trees are to be found, digging for roots with bare hands; in some regions this activity is accompanied by the constant danger of violent and sexual assaults. In areas where there is no wood left for burning, cow dung or other waste is used for fuel.
I believe that Obama understands peak oil and for years I’ve been hoping that he would finally take leadership on energy. But if Ezra Klein is right, then even if Obama were a card carrying member of ASPO-USA, in today’s partisan hell, the most powerful man on Earth might be nearly helpless to make any difference on peak oil.
As a contribution to this ongoing refinement of the concept, I recently formulated five axioms (self-evident truths) of sustainability. My goal was simply to distill ideas that had been proposed previously and put them into a concise, easy-to-understand form.
At the homepage of the Stock Market Guide, (a service provided by the Swedish magazines Private Business and Business Weekly), is an excerpt from Gunnar Lindstedt’s article “Dark cloud over new oil” that was published in this week’s edition of Business Weekly. The headline they chose to use was “Threat of diesel rationing”. The following is a translation of the text.
Collapse is a scary word, and some people doubt it is even relevant to us. Obviously we are facing some major challenges in this century. Does that mean collapse? What is collapse, exactly? When societies have collapsed, what actually happened? How bad is it? Are there ways of reducing the badness? While historic events can’t give a totally accurate picture of the future, they can at least give us some ground to stand on.
