Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Energetic Kris Holstrom is the first Sustainability Coordinator for Telluride and a smart Colorado county. The action plan she developed encompasses energy efficiency and renewables, green building, food and water security, economy, and recycling/resource recovery.
Richard Heinberg, author of “Peak Everything”, reviews the accelerating events since mid-2007, including the credit crunch and fossil fuel price volatility, noting that we’ve missed most of the best opportunities to manage collapse. He asks, “how far down the staircase of complexity will our global civilization have to go until we’re sustainable?” His answer: when managed properly, with deliberate simplification, not as far as we might otherwise.
From the ASPO-USA 2008 conference: two long-standing peak oil awakeners: author James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency) and Post Carbon Institute Founder and President, Julian Darley.
Three generations of our family have worked, played, fought (the only verb that properly describes our hockey games), picnicked, swum, camped out, made out, and celebrated holidays around The Pond. Most of all it has been a haven where any of us could come when the need to be alone hit us, to sit and slip out of the consciousness of self and into the arms of a little wilderness that thrums and hums with enough activity to keep a naturalist occupied for a lifetime or two. It is not an accident that Thoreau gained inspiration for his best nature writing on the shores of a pond.
Responding to peak oil will require reshaping our communities. These two interviews, taped in September 2008 at the ASPO-USA conference, are with Megan Quinn Bachman of Community Solutions, and Bryn Davidson of Dynamic Cities Project.
Most current efforts at social change, in and out of the peak oil community, take their direction from ideologies that claim to point the way to a better world. Is an approach drawing on the insights of human ecology potentially a better gamble?
Richard Heinberg, author of Powerdown, makes plain the dire situation we’re in as declining oil supplies fail to meet demand. He notes there are no easy “supply side” solutions (like substitute fuels): we must reduce demand, initially through conservation and efficiency. Julian Darley, president of Post Carbon Institute observes that while personal action is very important, individuals can only do so much.
What has changed in the economy to cause such a surge in the number of microbusinesses that are staying micro over the last decade or so? Why, if there is so much evidence that microbusiness development work better than smoke stack chasing, do policy makers and economists still dismiss the smallest of businesses? What could President Obama do that would be a better use of taxpayer dollars than throwing them at huge corporations?
One response to the global crisis that is gaining enthusiastic momentum is the Transition Towns movement. Jennifer Gray, a pioneer in the Transition Initiative in the UK and cofounder of Transition US, describes it as “a community-led response to the twin crises of peak oil and climate change. It’s … positive, pro-active [and] engages the whole community in building resilience into their world.”
Kathleen Nolan was a co-creator (with 5 others) of Bellingham Cohousing, based on a neighborhood design of private homes and shared buildings, managed by residents in participatory decision making. Their 5.74 acre plot originally had one farmhouse, which they modified to become the shared community building with dining, kitchen, laundry, craft, office, guest, and other rooms.
In his book, The Long Descent, John Michael Greer observes that our culture has two primary stories: “Infinite Progress” or “Catastrophe”. On the contrary, he sees history as cyclic: civilizations rise and fall.
Landscape architect Owen Dell has a vision: transforming suburban neighborhoods into shared “foodsheds” with food-bearing and native plants, and even chickens. Neighbors can start by finding edible plants already growing in their yards, maybe remove fences, plant what works best in each location.
