Staff

The Alter Breton Plan

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Politics is a frustrating job. Most of the time you battle windmills and spend an indecent amount of time discussing what you know to be non-issues because they happen to matter to some faction you need to stay in office…A few days ago, my party released an energy plan for Brittany – the Alter Breton Plan – which got some attention from the local press. The Alter Breton Plan is basically a green tech plan, to use Holmgren’s terminology, but the most important thing is the way it came to fruition, for it tells a lot about the way we peak oilers can act in the world of politics.

The show must go on

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It is a sign that the world may be upside down when French tourists in Las Vegas take pictures of themselves in front of the Paris Las Vegas hotel and casino complex which includes a half-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower. And, yet this is not the strangest behavior I observed recently during a trip to southern Nevada, an area that along with the much of the West is suffering through the worst drought on record.

My Pet Goats

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This summer I’ve had the opportunity to plant, cultivate and harvest two 30×40-yard gardens on a small, sustainable farm. What I didn’t plan on was falling in love with the goats there and gaining some insight into a spirituality of food.

Settling

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If we are to work on a community level, we’re going to have to use the old community and neighborhood organizing strategies, rather than a series of showings of End of Suburbia or How to Boil a Frog (don’t get me wrong, I really think very highly of these movies). That is, that we are going to have to be able to enlist people at very low levels of commonality, rather than at high levels of education about the future of the world if we’re to get enough bodies on the ground to do what is needed. And that these communities need to be built, well, yesterday.

Our House Frog Liked Beethoven

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When the hummingbirds run out of sugar water in their feeder right outside our kitchen, one of them flies up to the window and gently bumps it. Doesn’t run into it as if by accident, but hovers right at the pane and deliberately bumps it. The hummer seems to be saying: “The feeder is empty, you dolts. Get with it.” And they never bump the window unless the feeder is empty. They know. How do they know?

Watching Myths Unwind

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I want to step back from our gargantuan dilemmas of 2009 and reflect on the East German intelligentsia I interviewed in 1990-1992 at the time of the unification of Germany…these East Germans faced the destruction of their national myth, which held that socialism was the true victor over Nazism and that capitalism’s demise was inevitable. In America unquestioned belief in growth has inspired us throughout our history, yet it is going the way of the East German’s mythology.