Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The conclusion of the 1972 Limits to Growth study by the Club of Rome still stands 40 years later. The environmental and social costs of increased production are growing faster than the benefits, increasing “illth” faster than wealth, thereby making us poorer, not richer.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Sanctioning Iran
-Europe on hold
-Instability spreads
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
Just as the growth-based prosperity that our broader culture has liked to attribute to its own good virtues can easily be seen as a product, first, of colonial expansion and then of the unleashed abundance of coal, oil, and natural gas, so also have our chief political beliefs developed under similar circumstances. Individual liberalism, and thus freedom as we have largely known it, are also the products of abundance, often an ill-begotten sort of abundance. Individual liberalism’s main dictum, that you can do whatever you want, up until the point where it does harm to another, made sense as a principle political good only in a world of relatively unlimited space, whether geographical space for migration and resource exploitation, or the less defined space that appeared available to unlimited economic expansion and all the waste and destruction that goes with it.
– Faces of Russia’s protest movement
– What If We Occupied Language?
– The ‘Arab spring’ and the west: seven lessons from history
– Occupy Y’All Street: Three Generations Try To Escape Poverty Through Occupy Columbia (South Carolina)
– Daily Mail: Carrots in the car park. Radishes on the roundabout. The deliciously eccentric story of the town growing ALL its own veg
– Buying Local Yields More Jobs, Stronger Communities
– Ralph Nader: Recommended Holiday Reading for the Caring, Agitated Mind
By now, most people know that ‘Occupation’ as a tactic was not invented by 2000 of us at Zuccotti park on September 17.
The occupation is a powerful tactic for a number of reasons: it foregrounds the political issues of everyday life and public space, it produces a positive communitarian solution to the problems it critiques, it is highly visible and struggle is continuous in a way that radicalizes its participants. It has been used throughout history in fights for social justice, peace, and revolution, but now its moment has truly arrived, and there are many more occupations to come.
“Compassion is our new currency,” was the message scrawled on a pizza-box lid at Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan — held by a pensive-looking young man in Jeremy Ayers’s great photo portrait. But what can you buy with compassion?
Quite a lot, it turns out, including a global movement, and even pizza, which can arrive at that movement’s campground as a gift of solidarity.
– Egyptian Military Advisor: Protesters Should “Be Thrown Into Hitler’s Ovens”
– Krugman: Will China Break?
– China’s epic hangover begins
– China’s top paper praises settlement of village dispute
– Greek woes drive up suicide rate to highest in Europe
– Fragments of a Defunct State (haves vs have-nots in Russia)
The leading tagline of the Occupy Wall Street movement reads: “Protest for World Revolution.” This is an ambitious claim, to be sure. And in most respects it seems to ring quite true: the movement has successfully taken root not only in cities and towns throughout the United States but also in major urban centers around the world…But the Occupy movement has been notably absent outside of North America and Europe….What accounts for the failure of Occupy to capture the imagination of the global South, which comprises precisely the people whose lives have been most brutally affected by the recent global financial crisis? And in what sense can Occupy claim to be a world revolution if it leaves out – and in some cases even alienates – the vast, non-white majority of humanity?
– Thank You Anarchists
– Occupy the North (North England)
– With the Occupy Seattle Encampment Closed, Where Do They Go Now?
– Occupy Highlights Authoritarian Behavior by Police
We need to break the intellectual spell under which we live. The last few decades have been dominated by the premise that privatizing all economic resources will produce endless riches. Which was kind of true, except that the riches went to only a few people. And in the process they melted the Arctic, as well as dramatically increasing inequality around the world.
Jay Walljasper performs the greatest of services with the book All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. It is—choose your metaphor—a bracing slap across the face or the kiss that breaks an enchantment. In either case, after reading it, you will be much more alive to the world as it actually is, not as it exists in the sweaty dreams of ideologues and economics professors.
– NYT: Defying Police Crackdown, Kazakh Protests Continue
– The Massacre Everyone Ignored: Up To 70 Striking Oil Workers Killed In Kazakhstan By US-Supported Dictator
– Kazakhstan: Riots Not Prelude to Arab Spring
– Seeing Revolution Everywhere: the ‘Kazakhstan Spring’ That Isn’t
