Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Chris Vernon It is now all but impossible to limit global warming to less than +2°C from pre-industrial temperatures. The hope offered by fossil fuel limitations and ecnomic slowdown is fading. We now have to consider life in a 4 °C warmer world.
Last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report attempted to raise a question that, as I see it, deserves much more discussion than it gets these days. Most currently popular ways of trying to put pressure on the American political system presuppose that the politicians will pay attention if the people, or the activists who claim to speak in their name, simply make enough noise. The difficulty is that the activists, or for that matter the people, aren’t actually giving the politicians any reason to pay attention; they’re simply making noise, and the politicians have gotten increasingly confident that the noise can be ignored with impunity.
If the end is indeed near – say, within the next 50 years — it will quite likely come in the form of extreme drought and/or nuclear contamination. A couple key maps help us flesh out these possibilities. …So is there something we can do about this?
For most of a year now, my posts here on The Archdruid Report have focused on the nature, rise, and impending fall of America’s global empire. It’s been a long road and, as usual, it strayed in directions I wasn’t expecting to explore when this sequence of posts began last winter. Still, as I see it, we’ve covered all the core issues except one, and that’s the question of what can and should be done as the American empire totters to its end.
The topic of last week’s post, the likely fate of Israel in the twilight years of American empire, makes a good example of more than one common theme. As I commented in that earlier discussion, Israel is one of several American client states for whom the end of our empire will also be the end of the line. At the same time, it also highlights a major source of international tension that bids fair to bring in a bumper crop of conflict in the decades before us.
My, how things have changed since the Pilgrims tasted their first cranberries in their Plymouth colony! Until 1816, cranberries were a thoroughly wild food; something gathered, not grown. But the discovery that allowed us to cultivate cranberries – adding a thick layer of sand on the soil where they grow – is now creating trouble in cranberry country. As it turns out, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, requires the same sort of sand as cranberries.
Last week’s post on the logic of nuclear deterrence in an age of decline got what was, all things considered, a much less irrational response than discussions of nuclear war generally field.
We are in the early stages of a great unraveling, an epic collapse of the largest human civilization this planet will ever know. How are we to make sense of it? Maybe this little diagram can help.
I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read about the importance of developing resilience. It’s mentioned all over the web and for good reason, as it’s a critical coping mechanism. Most of those articles however, are directed at developing resilience within the adult population. Seldom, do we talk about how parents can and should create resilience in children, particularly when there are many parents out there who are doing the exact opposite of what’s required.
In this post, I will summarize what the recent scientific literature says are the key impacts we face in the coming decades if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path.
-Keystone XL: Texas Farmer Battles TransCanada’s “Tainted Money”
-Nonviolent Protester of Drone Wars Sentenced to Federal Prison
-Third anarchist jailed for refusing to testify before secret grand jury
Jump on that bike and power up the blender for your morning smoothie! Matthew Corson-Finnerty shows several machines he has developed while at Aprovecho Center in Oregon. Watch us pedal power an electricity generator, a grain mill, a blender, and a straw-chopper. Matthew notes there’s “considerable difference between the power that one person can generate, and [what’s] generated by a fossil fuel engine or a coal-fired plant to provide electricity.”
