Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Ellen Cantarow This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains…But for once, this story isn’t about tragedy. It’s about a resistance movement that has arisen to challenge some of the most powerful corporations in history.
The indifference of the Metropolitan Police to the murder of Stephen Lawrence rightly led to private soul-searching and public examination of procedures, and we have to hope that our country and particularly our police service is better as a result. But there is a more insidious form of racism that goes unquestioned and causes the death of far more people. This is the racism of an economic system that values the lives of the poor differently from the lives of the rich.
A while back there was a study that suggested that it is more expensive to be poor in the US in some ways, than it is to be rich. And to anyone who has actually been poor, this probably made perfect sense.
Mark Twain is reported to have said: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” What most environmentalists think they know for sure is that oil, coal and natural gas are all abundant-so abundant, in fact, that many environmentalists believe they are forced to make a Hobson’s choice of natural gas as a so-called “bridge fuel” to a renewable energy future.
This article is about a simple, singular idea, yet the significance of the idea to modern society is profound and far-reaching. Here it is: In the near future anything heavy will become intensely local while at the same time the limits to things that are ‘light’, ideas, philosophies, information will travel even further than today—literally and figuratively. This is a new paradigm for humanity and it has huge implications for the complete reordering of society.
For thousands of years before refrigerators and packaged food, people across the world needed to make food last through the winter. Starches present no problem; dried, grains like wheat and rice can last decades. Vitamins, found in fresh plants and lasting only a short time in the body, present more of a challenge.
Luckily, there are several ways to get fresh vitamins all through the winter, first by fooling the vegetables, as it were, into thinking they’re not dead yet.
– Salon on urban gardens: The future of food?
– Solutions Series Guides: chickens, greywater, rainwater harvesting …
– European banks fuelling food price volatility and hunger
– The Paradox of Cuban Agriculture
– Food as a Commodity
It’s counterintuitive that suppressing volatility in human affairs would actually make the world a more dangerous place. But that is precisely the thesis of a recent article by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Blyth which appeared in Foreign Affairs.
– YES Magazine: Corporate Rule Is Not Inevitable
– Wall Street Journal: The New American Divide
– SOPA, PIPA Stalled: Meet the OPEN Act
– Bill Moyers is back: Crony Capitalism
The Australian Daily Telegraph published today a story on a leaked government report (BITRE 117) which (optimistically) calculated peak oil around 2017, followed by permanent decline. The report raises questions to be answered by the Federal Government.
Twenty years ago, German physicists erected a home that demonstrated how little energy a building would need if built with, among other things, thick insulation and airtight walls. The so-called “Passive House” (or “Passivhaus” in German) was soon replicated throughout the continent.
– The Occupy movement in London: three months on
– Occupy Wall Street’s Next Phase: Avoid Cooptation in Election Season
– 2002-2012: Remembering the Social Movements that Reimagined Argentina
– Goodbye Lenin?
