Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Around 3 billion people, or half of the world’s population, rely on unsustainable biomass based energy sources, including wood, and around 1.6 billion people still lack access to electricity. With an Integrated Food Energy System (IFES), FAO believes that people will have access to sustainable and reliable energy.
Civilisation is a story. It is a story about where we have come from and where we are going. There are many ways to tell that story, but one version has been very much the dominant one in the West for the past couple of centuries. We know this story: it’s the one about modern, urban industrial culture’s ineffable superiority over all others; the one about human evolution leading inevitably to this point. It’s the one about winning the war against nature, being the only species which thinks and loves and dreams; it’s the one about machines and circuitry and ingenuity and progress. And it’s true, in some ways, at least as far as it goes. But it may not be going much further.
-How can we grow more food locally? Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible Todmorden speaks in Bath (video)
-Australia’s “Grain and Graze” Farming Method Provides Peak Oil and Climate Change Resiliency
-Organic agriculture: deeply rooted in science and ecology
-Effects of input management and crop diversity on non-renewable energy use efficiency of cropping systems in the Canadian Prairie (report)
In the past 20-30 years, the concept of “outsourcing” has stripped most of our local communities of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker – the craftsmen, merchants, and artisans who have skills and know-how to provide the basic goods and services we need for everyday living. Even in these times of economic contraction, supporting our local businesses is essential, because with the transportation limitations that will come with the end of cheap oil, local will become our mainstay.
We want to know: Is an alternative future possible—one rooted in small fishers, small farmers, and the teeming biodiversity of the islands? For starters we want to know: Can small fishers become a pillar of a new economy as this country begins to run out of oil and gas?
Robert Pollin, Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute addresses the debate over the federal budget and deficit, counter-posing the need for economic policies that would, in the long term, shrink the deficit through massive job creation, cutting the bloated war budget, and a new social compact that would meet peoples needs and stabilize the economy by limiting the Wall Street speculative casino through a financial transactions tax.
..we live in a world that we are connected to at every moment, and that world has a future that I and my family will have to live in. Soon. To ignore those two crucial facts–that we belong to the world and that the world has a future–is a form of irresponsibility so large that it overwhelms my much smaller responsibility to do my best to satisfy my family’s desires. So large that it compromises and threatens the integrity of the world.
I think most of us ought to be preparing for a life without electricity, regardless of whether we are concerned about natural or structural disruptions in the electrical grid.
Put these things together — a tone of hopelessness in the mainstream progressive media, a largely useless outpouring of outrage in the indymedia, a giving up of citizens on the viability of centralized representative governments, reactionary responses to black swan events instead of constructive ones, the ratcheting up of existing systems to prolong the period before tipping points, and a naivete about the powerlessness of even the most powerful in modern complex systems — and what do we have?
Revolutions in human ecology might usefully be grounded in a sense of humanity’s deep past, for that is where our power arrangements began.
“You have to decide what it is you are going to stand for,” Day explains. “Water is essential to life. We live in the water of the womb of our mother before we come into the world. We are birthed from water, our bodies are primarily water and we can’t survive without clean water. At some time in your life you have to take a stand.”
“Jobs” as we know them today — paychecks from large corporate employers — are a very recent phenomenon in human history. Within our new understanding of the future economy, this form of earning a living is not too likely to continue.
