Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Rob Avis Over the last few years, I have been formulating my opinion on how to approach investing and what do to with extra cash…Mulling all of this over (and with the help of a good forest analogy) I’ve recently developed a few key principles that I believe will help to guide good investment strategy.
Last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report suggested that the normal aftermath of an age of reason is a return to religion—in Spengler’s terms, a Second Religiosity—as the only effective bulwark against the nihilistic spiral set in motion by the barbarism of reflection.
Framing a project or a business as "sustainable" no longer serves us. The dominant use of the word has ceased to mean what some of us orginally intended and, in fact, the term has been co-opted and watered down in many cases. Labelling something "sustainable" may even alienate potential allies, or at least people with whom you might want to get along. What do we really mean? What do we really want? Let’s find the new language set that can help us get there.
The cooperative movements represent large, diverse alternatives to the dominant private-ownership model and the cooperative ideal has resurfaced many times during the history of modern industrial development.
…industrial agriculture is not more efficient at producing food, it’s more efficient at eliminating farmers. If the goal isn’t to pull people off the land but to produce the most food, then small-scale, locally-adapted, diversified farms are the way to go.
The following analysis uses “well completion information” contained in a newspaper called the Bakken Weekly, a paper covering western North Dakota. The Bakken Weekly started providing well completion information for North Dakota counties in the Bakken region in early 2012. The analysis below is for 2012/2013 from the week of April 1, 2012 through the week of Oct. 28, 2013.
Grow Appalachia is changing the way people throughout rural Appalachia relate to food.
"Antifragile" is a word you can’t find in the dictionary. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author and student of probability and risk, coined the word because, after looking at languages across the world, he could not find a word which describes the ability to improve with stress rather than merely resist it as the word "resilient" implies.
The discovery of new lands to exploit, and new energy sources, helped reinforce the notion that human societies can always find a way around limitations upon its growth.
One of the least helpful habits of modern thinking is the common but really rather weird insistence that if something doesn’t belong all the way to one side of a distinction, it must go all the way to the other side.
Trade watchdog groups have warned that the TPP and TTIP could constrict local and national governments’ ability to protect and promote their local economies – a fact that should inspire localists around the world to join the movement against these treaties.
Why is it that human civilization has been unable to take the steps required to forestall the devastating consequences of climate change, which may even include societal collapse, when faced with a scientific consensus that it is a very real phenomenon and requires urgent action?
