Shit Happens
Where will you go when the sewers clog up? Where will you go when the porcelain finally cracks? Where will you go when the Toilet Duck quacks its last?
Building Community
The great biofuels debate – Oct 27
-Biofuel Displacing Food Crops May Have Bigger Carbon Impact Than Thought
-Biofuels rather than electric cars to meet renewables target
-Tanzania Suspends Biofuels Investments
-Who says it’s green to burn woodchips?
-Carbon advantage of biofuels may be overstated
Economic dominoes continue to fall
Passing the world oil peak has had, and doubtless will continue to have, relatively little impact on the long-term price of gasoline. The economic implications of getting through the first half of the Oil Age have been much more significant, a trend that seems likely to continue until the collapse is complete.
Deep thought – Oct 27
-Salon interviews the late Adam Smith
-What Jane Jacobs Can Teach Us About the Economy
-Welcome to 2025
-Carolyn Baker reviews Daniel Elgin’s “The Living Universe”
-Bill Moyers: How Can the U.S. Be an Empire and a Democracy at the Same Time?
Peak Moment 153: How Do I Invite You to Grow Food?
Jenny Pell’s infectious enthusiasm will sweep you up into creating a future that’s beyond sustainable — to one that’s “additive.” This lively permaculturist suggests that you belong where you live and get (re)connected to your “chain of inputs and outputs”. She invites us to to regain skills, especially in food production, and to participate in creating abundance, which is “the only way forward, the only way for the human family to survive.”
Midwest farmer speaks on rural crisis, financial collapse
“We need to break up the big banks. We need banks that understand good farming practices, soil stewardship … and look at the long-term picture for the good of the environment and not just short-term profits.”
Copenhagen Is Supposed to Fail. DIY!
Much passionate concern is flying around regarding the United Nations meeting on climate this December in Copenhagen. We hear it from honest activists and from politicians who sound trustworthy on this most crucial matter. An example is Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of Great Britain, who deserves a prize for eloquence in warning us of climate change.
Self-jiving nation
The scene in the White House these days must be a sort of Opera Bouffe, in which an earnest and rather grave young man moves from one roomful of lesser officials to another in which all agree to pretend that they have prevented the nation from falling into something they call “the abyss.” At the end of Act I, a young deputy FDIC commissioner in the Little Mary Sunshine mold gets down on one knee, belts out a show-stopper about the glories of a bright and shining “tomorrow,” and the audience goes out for intermission to discover that the city has been burning down around the theater all night.
Response to Greer’s “Strange Bright Banners”
It was a little surprising to have our popular work “The Power of Community” tied together with Nick Griffin, the head of Britain’s neo-fascist British Nationalist Party and David Korten, whose book The Great Turning, John characterizes as “among the most antidemocratic books of recent years’.
Gardening in a Changing Climate
When I worry about climate change, I often think first about human consequences. But the line between human losses and nature’s losses is pretty fine – literally a tree falling in the forest question. That is, if the sugar maples that turn my region into a blaze of red, the hemlocks that overshadow my creek disappear, who loses me or nature? The only answer is “yes.”
Deep thought – Oct 23
-When Black and White Aren’t Black and White
-Vatican thumbs up for Karl Marx after Galileo, Darwin and Oscar Wilde
-Honey and Salt
-How to deal with climate change grief
ODAC Newsletter – Oct 23
This week ODAC welcomes the publication of two important reports. In its excellent Heads in the Sand report, Global Witness provides one of the clearest summaries of the peak oil issue to date, including a trenchant critique of the IEA’s position…
