Building Community

Review: JM Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future

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Greer is at his most stimulating when he offers ways of rethinking our ideology and shifting towards more adaptive thinking. I particularly liked his insight on the tragic hero vs. the comedic hero. One dies for ideology while the other manages to come through somehow largely through adaptive survival.

A radical in the Age of Denial

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It’s all about community. The age of cheap fossil fuels allowed us to forget that. But communities are making a comeback, and we’ll need strong ones if we’re to get through the years ahead with minimal human suffering. We’ll also need tremendous doses of compassion, creativity, and courage.

Deconstructing Dinner: Agroinnovations Podcast with Paul Stamets, Rob Hopkins, and Richard Manning

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Today’s episode features segments from Agroinnovations featuring well-known figures like Paul Stamets – a mycologist (aka mushroom specialist) from Olympia, Washington, the U.K’s Rob Hopkins who has popularized the Transition Town Movement and Montana journalist and author Richard Manning, who possesses a keen interest in the history and future of the American prairie and agriculture.

On roadkill, seasonal foraging, and getting by with a little help from my tribe

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If I had waited until this week to gather the food, I’d be in trouble. It took myself and a group of eight people at the wilderness skills school TrackersNW more than a day to turn a few buckets of acorns into flour in September. We had to crack the shells with a hammer, extract the nutmeat with our fingernails, grind it, boil it twice in a big vat to get the bitter astringent properties out, and then strain it and dry it.

Inserting Peak Oil into the Conversation

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Part 1 of KrisCan’s Peak Oil conversation with Richard Heinberg about the limits to growth, the GDP measuring claims on our resources and the importance of communicating with our policy makers. He talks about the need to move away from the idea of continuous growth and begin to measure quality of life as a marker of success.

How to Set Up and Run a Bicycle Repair Company

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Many of the articles that discuss the causes and effects of humanity’s unprecedented energy use are entirely theoretical, offering little practical guidance for the everyday reader. This essay offers respite to all the people who confront our collective energy problems with a furrowed brow and an expression that is puzzled by the continuous stream of theoretical insights that explain our current circumstances.

Solutions & sustainability – Nov 19

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-Go forth and multiply a lot less
-The new wave of urban farming (and fresh food from small spaces!)
-Urban farms a fertile idea
-Summary Presentation for Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
-The next Industrial Revolution will be people-powered
-Sustainability and Social Justice: Do the Math
-Greening Portland – Your City How To

Review: The Ecotechnic Future by John Michael Greer

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John Michael Greer has officially established himself as an institution within the peak oil community. Truly one of the finest minds working on the predicament of modern-day industrial civilization, he is so well-read in so many fields that he regularly gains access to insights that utterly elude his contemporaries. For this he is treasured by a growing number of loyal readers—and, I suspect, hated by equally many fellow bloggers who wish that they could be half as good.

How Relocalization Worked

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One of the most rarely used resources for relocalization projects is the fact that our species has been this way before — the twilight years of many other civilizations featured the breakup of centralized economic arrangements and the rise of a new localism. Can insights from past examples offer us guidance in the present case?