Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As Scotland asserts its identity and its autonomy, environmentalists are working to restore its denuded landscape – planting native forests, creating wildlife corridors, and reintroducing species that were wiped out centuries ago.
Two real-world tests performed in the Netherlands and in the UK confirm our earlier analysis that small wind turbines are a fundamentally flawed technology. Their financial payback time is much longer than their life expectancy, and in urban areas, some poorly placed wind turbines will not even deliver as much energy as needed to operate them (let alone energy needed to produce them).
Dmitry Orlov’s “Reinventing collapse” is as actually a real downer, but Orlov’s intelligence, black humor and very Russian naturally cynical attitude – “to a Russian, ‘hard worker’ sounded a lot like ‘fool'” – makes the book a very pleasant reading experience. The book is full of resigned shrugs regarding the possibility of preventing the absolutely-certainly-coming societal collapse. We’re not talking about saving the world here – the best we can hope for is saving our own skins!
Feeling burned out at work? Stressed, tired, crabby, anxious and possibly sick? This time of year, around Labor Day, seems to be a good time to talk about it.
Regarding our Fate here in the United States, the writing was on the wall when Americans, actual living & breathing human beings, were labeled and treated as units of consumption. Officially, we are consumers. Apparently, Americans are evaluated solely on whether they are spending enough money. Consuming boosts Gross Domestic Product, and GDP is the only thing that counts. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got the money or not. The virtue of Thrift, of living within your means, got tossed out the window a long, long time ago.
I deal with social ethics: issues of equity, justice, fairness, and democracy. Frankly, GE fails when measured against most of these values. GE, like all high-techs, is inherently anti-democratic. Computers, for example, can be democratic in their usage because anybody can buy into it in a consumer society. But they’re not democratic in terms of development, which is under the control of a very small number of people. Similarly, GE is under the control of small numbers of highly educated people and incredibly wealthy organizations.
Autumn typically is rain-free here. This year, we’ll take advantage of the dry weather to harvest abundant poop from the goat pen and apply it directly to the then-recently harvested potato patch. Potatoes are heavy feeders, so the patch could use the nutrients. By the time we plant next spring, the compost will be working its magic. Nonetheless, we won’t plant potatoes there, though we haven’t decided which nitrogen-fixing plant to work into the rotation.
In May 2010, Deconstructing Dinner travelled to Vancouver Island where two international conferences on ethnobiology were being hosted. Ethnobiology examines the relationships between humans and their surrounding plants, animals and ecosystems. Today, more and more people are expressing an interest to develop closer relationships with the earth. This leaves much to be learned from the research of ethnobiologists, and in particular, from the symbiotic human-earth relationships that so many peoples around the world have long maintained. On this part III of the series, we listen to two presentations that share research into the relationships between indigenous peoples and marine life in what is now called British Columbia and Alaska.
There is in Greer no sense that we are a singular people standing at a singular moment where history has opened up to provide us with breath-taking possibilities: “Human societies, like fence lizards, are organic systems, and they respond to changes in their environments in much the same way” (85); “history is an ecological phenomenon, governed by the same laws as other processes in nature” (241). Thus we aren’t going to be confronted with a fork in the road, the road less travelled made famous according to the predominant misinterpretation of the Frost poem, with a moment to act or not, as the opening lines of The Handbook suggests.
I hear all the time the idea that one doesn’t want to be dependent on other people — the idea is expressed in our society by the idea that we should all save a lot of money, invested in the stock market, to make us “independent” if we get old, or less than perfectly able bodied. But of course, the stock market makes us dependent too — dependent on markets and governments and other people to invest where we have. People talk about independence as emerging from their ability to pay people to help meet physical needs if they become old or disabled — imagining that an employer-employee/resident-caregiver relationship is inherently more equitable than a family dependency.
Last Friday, in Totnes Civic Hall, saw the historic launch of the Totnes Renewable Energy Society (TRESOC). A key piece in the relocalisation of Totnes and district, TRESOC offers members of the community the chance to buy into their own renewable energy company.
Jobs, yes, but what kind? While Obama proposes to build highways (with some runways and railbeds thrown in), and the national GOP continues to say “no,” what are local politicians doing? Some crucial economic steps could be taken only by the feds, but is there anything to be accomplished meanwhile on the state or county levels?
