Top 10 songs for the steady state
In the spirit of keeping things light-hearted, I thought it would be interesting to compose a top-ten list of songs with a steady state theme.
Building Community
Beyond drip irrigation to water fields in dry land areas: An interview with David Bainbridge
One of the most vital things is a closer look at traditional systems around the world – traditional knowledge is better suited to local conditions. And because we continue to ignore this, lots of valuable things are being lost.
What studying nature has taught us
Fewer and fewer children get to explore the outdoor world and experience the thrill of watching birds or finding a turtle on the other side of a rotting log. Fewer children know about weeding a garden, let alone the special feeling of coming home a bit scratched up and sunburned after a long afternoon of exploring a local creek. Getting your feet wet and hands dirty is fun. There is something ineffably joyous about interacting with the natural world, but, more and more, that bliss is generationally bound, a gift today’s children won’t receive.
300 years of fossil fuels and not one bad gal: Peak oil, women’s history and everyone’s future
Post-Carbon and Heinberg are telling a critical story – but the actors they need to engage, all the hands they want on deck are not engaged, because they aren’t part of the tale. That needs to change.
My transcendental Christmas caroling experience
Sometimes I worry about our future without cheap overabundant energy and all the other challenges we face, but I wasn’t worried last night. It was so wonderful to have a heart opening experience right here in my neighborhood with such a diverse rag tag band of merry makers. No electricity or technology required.
By lanternlight in rural Asia
How do ‘developing’ countries prioritise energy goals? How should they in the face of climate change? These countries, with per capita energy consumption and CO2 emissions which average one-sixth those of the ‘industrialised’ world, are not primarily responsible for climate deterioration, but on the other hand they are the most vulnerable to climate change impacts because, says the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) they have fewer resources to adapt – socially, technologically and financially.
For the majority of the populations in these countries climate change issue is not a priority concern compared with problems of poverty, natural resource management, energy and livelihood needs.
Food & agriculture – Dec 17
– The Accidental Orchardists
– Gene Logsdon: Fertilizer prices putting manure in the limelight
– Rosie Boycott: The crucial role cities can play in protecting the honeybee
– Australia: Renewing our focus on food
– Wild Permaculture Forest Gardening on the BBC (Video)
Energy – Dec 17
– With Peak Oil Looming, Gulf States Consider Ending Fossil Fuel Subsidies
– Coal Interests Fueling Gingrich’s Cash-Burning 527
– When energy comes to a Senegalese village, do people get more healthy, wealthy and wise?
– Poor people’s energy outlook 2010
The Great Lakes are a commons
After three days, the group articulated a powerful and unifying mission: “For the Great Lakes watershed to be declared and lived as a commons, public trust and protected bioregion”
“All That We Share” isn’t enough
All That We Share is an exciting and exasperating book. The excitement comes from the many voices arguing to place “the commons” at the center of planning for a viable future. The exasperation comes from the volume’s failure to critique the political and economic systems that we must transcend if there is to be a future for the commons.
Six impossible things before breakfast
In which I uncover the most compelling reason to stay put in my California home, track my about face from a knowledge driven quest for truth to an intuitively informed one, and contact the dead. …
California is the most conducive place for believing, as Lewis Carroll put it, six impossible things before breakfast.
Thinking like a creator – Transition and a pattern language
Christopher Alexander’s masterwork of environmental design, written with several other architects and academics over eight years, lays out a practical and imaginal map for human dwellings and settlements. It’s a peculiarly European response to North America (Alexander is Austrian, educated in England, worked in Berkeley, California). A sudden release from an old cluttered history into a new unexplored world. The feeling you can start all over again with the best of everything you left behind.
