By Kara Stiff, Low-Carbon Life
There’s no substitute for a mattock and a couple of good shovels, which leverage human effort into great effects with a negligible environmental impact. I love the wood stove, the solar shower, the solar oven, the laundry rack, the ceiling fans and most especially, my new solar dehydrator.
By Bart Anderson, Resilence.org
Technology is getting too complicated and user-hostile. Even the high tech people are complaining. / Why Nothing Works Anymore / 3 ways tech has gone astray / Buy a real Analog Oscilloscope PLEASE!
By Damaris Zehner, Integrity of Life
There is a fundamental truth that these prophets of cutting-edge technology are not considering: fossil fuels are running out. It was inevitable that they would. Nothing that could only be created under unique conditions over millions of years can be expected to renew itself during the brief span of the Industrial Revolution.
By Damaris Zehner, Integrity of Life
There are many signs that in our use of electronic technology we’ve reached the point of damage in the physical realm. I contend that we are reaching that point in the intellectual realm, too – when to know something means to be able to type, click, skim, and forget.
By Vassilis Gkisakis, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Will hi-tech save agriculture from its otherwise intractable problems? Certainly technological stakeholders want it to appear so, as digitisation increases both in the fields and in the policy documents and future plans for the sector.
By Frank Kaminski, Mud City Press
John Michael Greer acknowledges that his aim with Dark Age America is an ambitious one. The book is his attempt to sketch out the likely course of industrial society over the next 500 years, with a particular emphasis on the United States. These days, the word progress has come to mean deterioration far more often than improvement. This is the central tenet of The Retro Future,...
By Frank Kaminski, Mud City Press
When the average person thinks about technology, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t a family dog or cat. Nor would one likely consider a flock of chickens, a packet of seeds or a sack of potatoes to be examples of technology. But technology thinker Dmitry Orlov, in his book Shrinking the Technosphere, argues that that’s exactly what they are.
By Douglas Rushkoff, Richard Heinberg, Team Human
Playing for Team Human today is Post Carbon Institute fellow Richard Heinberg. Richard is the co-author of Our Renewable Future and most recently, the manifesto, There’s No App For That. On today’s show Richard and Douglas challenge the idea that technological “progress” is a panacea for solving systems-level crises like climate change.
By Brian Miller, South Roane Agrarian
Of course, GPS is a remarkable technological feature. It gets us to a destination without getting lost, without having to wonder where we are. Yet, cocooning ourselves in a cushion of geographical illiteracy also breeds a listless lack of awareness, demanding nothing more from us than an abiding self-interest.
By Kirkpatrick Sale, Resilience.org
Human-scale technology is not some dream or illusion: it exists. And that makes the present age unique. We now know that it is possible to achieve a technology for a wide range of human actions and still be kept within human dimensions and human control, without doing violence to the planet’s resources or ecosystems.
By Practical Action, Staff, Share The World's Resources
Technology is at the heart of human development. It enables people to produce food, access water and energy, and keep in good health. But access to technology and its benefits are not fairly shared, argues a new report from Practical Action.
By Dinyar Godrej, New Internationalist
If you thought technology was politically neutral, think again. Dinyar Godrej argues for a fairer and more social vision.