Building Community

Peak Oil keynote by Randy Udall and sustainability conference call for participants

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Randy Udall’s humorous and poignant presentation on peak oil was published today, recorded at the Local Future conference. Local Future invites visionaries, activists, and leaders to apply to the 2011 International Conference on Sustainability, Transition and Culture Change: Vision, Action, Leadership. Confirmed speakers include Nicole Foss, Dr. Steve Keen, T.S. Bennett, Sally Erickson, Guy McPherson, Jan Lundberg, Gregory Greene, Kurt Cobb, Stephanie Mills and Aaron Wissner. [The Udall video is posted here.]

Peak Moment #202: Collapse of the titans

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Learn from the Soviets — personal relationships are the best currency, says Russian-born Dmitry Orlov, the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. The American empire is following the USSR into collapse, he asserts, with financial collapse happening first, followed by commercial and then political collapse. Dmitry, an America resident for several decades, suggests lowering our needs and expectations and replacing money transactions with barter and exchanges. [Transcript is online]

Wendell Berry’s weapons of mass destruction

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In 2002, talking like a modernist poet, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked Americans to pay heed to “known unknowns” to prevent terrorist disaster. Two years later, a real poet, Wendell Berry, advised us to take the “Way of Ignorance” to prevent ecological catastrophe. If Rumsfeld is a man who tormented people and words alike, Berry is a man who would set them both free. And that could be more dangerous to the status quo than any weapons imagined by Rummy.

INDIE GOGO Campaign: the straight talk introduction

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In this video, Post Carbon’s Executive Director, Asher Miller, provides the voice over for this sample of what will be the ‘Shared Future’ presentation. What you see is a short introduction, but it’s enough to give you a great idea of the visual storytelling style we’ll be employing. With your help (share our campaign, share this video if you please) and generosity, we’ll get there.

(If you would like to support Energy Bulletin, this is the way to do it.)

A new view of work

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In the “empty world” of the past, hard work was a public good with few negative externalities on society. In today’s “full world,” work has become a common-pool resource, vulnerable to over-exploitation. In the absence of social or cultural norms to take care of this common-pool resource, governmental intervention is the best option for preventing market failure and encouraging an optimal amount of work. Unfortunately, our work ethic is worsening the situation.

The Glass Bead Game

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The search for constructive visions of a world in the wake of peak oil can lead in strange directions, and one of the more unexpected is a science fiction masterpiece from the first half of the 20th century that few readers have even recognized as science fiction at all, offering a vision of the future that, however appealing, flies in the face of some of the most cherished claims industrial society makes for its own superiority. Unpacking a box of books from his own college days, the Archdruid explains.