Anthea Hudson

Great Real Food

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They say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Well, our food system is broken, and it does need fixing…fast. The cogs of the 21st century global food system turn, but are in need of (sustainable) oiling to help transition smoothly towards a viable and secure food future. The Real Food Store in Exeter, Devon, is helping to unstick some of the global food system problems at a local level.

Urban Minds

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In Extraenvironmentalist #48 we speak with archeologist Paul Sinclair about the Urban Mind project. Paul discusses a new field of archeological research that is discovering the role of urban gardening throughout history and during wartime in ancient cities…Donnie Maclurcan of the Post Growth Institute tells us how we can start building a post-growth world…Last of all, John Michael Greer joins us to answer listener questions and to talk about David Korowicz’s FEASTA study, Trade Off: A Study in Global Systemic Collapse.

The weather may not be the problem

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Weather-related contrasts are occurring here in my own Ohio backyard where it barely rained at all from May to August. Close to our farm stand two cornfields just across a narrow road from each other. One has nearly normal corn and the other (in one of the photos) has drought-stricken corn. I know personally both farmers who planted these two fields and both are very competent. The soil in both fields is the same. Fertilizer applied was about the same. Rainfall was the same. This contrast appears all over the county, all over the state, all over the Corn Belt. What is going on here?

Social Innovations for Economic Degrowth

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At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in a peculiar situation: although hardly anyone would deny the deep ecological crisis facing humankind, we seem to be caught in a net of assumptions that impede a practical solution. Having acknowledged that we need to reduce consumption of energy and materials drastically, we still often think that adjustments within the current system of production and consumption will accomplish this formidable task…At the same time, it is widely recognized that the results of the dominant approaches to solving the ecological crisis are far from satisfying. Degrowth obviously entails a fundamental transformation of economic structures. But what precisely are the necessary steps?

Obols or No Balls

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While policy-makers struggle to increase the flow of money in stagnant national economies they fail to see that it is not the quantity of the money that is the problem but its quality. The imperialist currencies of dollar and euro were designed to serve the interests of elites, so we should not be surprised that they do nothing to support the livelihoods of citizens of countries the world over. In The Ecology of Money, Richard Douthwaite suggested a sophisticated multi-layered currency world, where different types of money played different roles. Although ignored at the time, this may be just the sort of proposal we need now to resolve the crisis in the global economy, and particularly the crisis in the Eurozone.

Humans seems to need external energy

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Strange as it may seem, humans seem to have evolved in a way that we have a need for external energy, such as energy from burning wood or fossil fuels. While the evidence is not 100% certain, it appears that we learned to use fire long enough ago that it is now necessary for our food to be cooked…There are other evolutionary deficiencies as well: How do we deal with our lack of fur? How do we deal with our evolutionary dental problems? How do we deal with “survival of the fittest”?…In this post, I will explain how these and other evolutionary issues relate to mankind’s need for external energy, such as wood, or gasoline, or electricity.

Aaron Wissner interviews Robert Rapier after ASPO 2011

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Following last year’s ASPO conference, I was interviewed by Aaron Wissner of Local Future, which is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to issues of energy, the environment, and sustainability. Aaron just made that interview available, and instead of an R-Squared Energy TV episode this week, I thought I would share this interview with readers.

The Dark Mountain Project: In search of a new narrative

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It started with a conversation that became a manifesto that became a book that became a festival that became a movement. Three years on the Dark Mountain Project is still hard to define. It is both a cultural response to a collapsing world, and a network of people who gather to makes sense of that collapse. At its core is a shared recognition that the stories we have inherited are are no longer making sense of our lives, and a new narrative for the times we are living in needs to be forged.