Building Community

What is the Minimum EROI that a Sustainable Society Must Have? Part 1: Surplus Energy and Biological Evolution

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EROI theory is rooted in the biological principle that in order to survive each species on earth must procure more energy from its food than it expends attaining that food. From this basic principle the importance of energy surplus became evident, as food sources needed to “pay” not only for metabolism but also for reproduction and storage for leaner times. Part 1 of this three part series presents a brief history of the concept of surplus energy and how it has influenced both biological and human evolution.

How to make your own low-tech vertical farm

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Vertical farming has become a popular idea, but what is mostly forgotten is that the energy required for the operation and construction of vertical farms largely negates the ecological advantages. This also applies to small-scale systems, like those of Philips (a concept) or Inka Biospheric Solutions (a product).

Ponzi Nation

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Every great American boom and bust makes and breaks its share of crooks. The past decade — call it the Ponzi Era — has been no different, except for the gargantuan scale of white-collar crime. A vast wave of financial fraud swelled in the first years of the new century.  Then, in 2008, with the subprime mortgage collapse, it crashed on the shore as a full-scale global economic meltdown.  As that wave receded, it left hundreds of Ponzi and pyramid schemes, as well as other get-rich-quick rackets that helped fuel our recent economic frenzy, flopping on the beach.

The Survival Mindset

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But lately I’ve been asking myself a different question. What are the best mental patterns of thinking for surviving tough times? There are a variety of ways to look at this issue, and one is looking at who survives when bad things happen in the wilderness, or in dangerous recreational pursuits and why. I’ve taken some of the ideas outlined by Gonzales and added some of my own here.

The Economic Potential of Local Building Materials

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A while ago now I was in London for the launch of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment’s ‘Building a New Green Economy’ conference, where I was a speaker alongside Tim Jackson, David Orr and Stewart Brand. You can read about the event here, and films of our talks will be posted soon. I mention it today because I want to draw your attention to the report launched at the conference, Sustainable Supply Chains that Support Local Economic Development, available to download here.

From counterculture to cyberculture: the life and times of Stewart Brand

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Fred Turner’s book looks at the influence Bucky Fuller had on a range of people, in particular Stewart Brand, who helped create first the hippie counterculture and the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies, then later the cyberculture that grew up around the San Francisco bay area.

Church in Our Times: Spirit and Security in the Face of Reality

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We’ve been hearing for years that the mainline Protestant churches are on the wane in the United States, emptying out in an increasingly atomized society. And Catholicism has been clearly weakened by recent internal events. Is the Christian church only a force on the Right in the United States?