Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Would my closet be in danger of unsustainable growth headed for collapse? I could not tell yet whether my new obsession, despite having been a doorway to my intuitive self, would prove to be a distraction from serious spiritual work or money making endeavors. Sometimes you just get what you need.
He’s finally done it. Barack Obama has taken the tantalizing trail to a notoriously slippery slope. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last week, the President promised, “federal agencies (will) ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth.” In other words, we will have our cake (the environment) and eat it too (for economic growth), and federal agencies will be there to dish it all up.
We are cultivating a hunter-gatherer garden, modifying but not eradicating the forest ecology. Not so different from what the Wampanoag and Narragansett did, but more suited to our greater numbers. We are growing wildlife and insects and biological diversity. We are bringing wilderness home. We buy less food. We need fewer fields. Who will say to us or our children or our grandchildren in 50 years that this place isn’t wilderness?
This survey offers you an enjoyable way to learn just how well you are doing in the nine domains of happiness identified by researchers around the world. Groups like Transition can use the survey to asses community well-being now and in the long term.
In a report meant to be both inspiring and reassuring, the WWF ambitiously declares that the world can switch to 95% renewable energy sources by 2050. The Scenario depends largely on increased efficiency and regulated flows of energy through a great system of interconnection. People are remarkably absent. The ostensible reason is that the report is focused on what is “technically possible,” which is more about joules and btus than about human behavior.
It is worthwhile to recall history as we ponder Tim Murray’s proposition that we direct our “energy into stopping economic growth” rather than saving “the environment piecemeal” through conservation efforts. It’s enlightening to go back to Thomas Jefferson just to gain some perspective on what happened when the market economy was fertilized with the industrial revolution.
[I] wrote about things that deeply affected me on a global and planetary level and what Transition was doing at a local level to configure the world that had got so out of balance: seedling swaps and community gardens, Transition Circles, Bungay Community Bees, all our decisions to use less energy, eat differently, come together in small bands and work to build a low-carbon culture.
Dmitry Orlov, engineer and author, warns that the US’s reliance on diminishing fuel supplies might be sending it down the same path the Soviet Union took before it collapsed.
A very large part of the reason why contemporary American society so often defeats itself by chasing after fantasies of limitless growth is a learned blindness to the behavior of whole systems. It’s hard to think of a challenge more necessary or less popular than learning to measure our expectations against the realities, and especially the limits, of natural systems; the Archdruid suggests some resources for the job.
In the closing months of the first decade of the twenty-first century, what does the world need most?
Days before this talk, journalist Naomi Klein was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, looking at the catastrophic results of BP’s risky pursuit of oil. Our societies have become addicted to extreme risk in finding new energy, new financial instruments and more … and too often, we’re left to clean up a mess afterward. Klein’s question: What’s the backup plan?
– Analyst sees little Egypt oil and gas impact
– Q&A: Suez Canal
– U.S. envoy tells Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step aside
– Egypt’s Unrest May Have Roots in Food Prices, US Fed Policy
– Soccer clubs central to ending Egypt’s ‘Dictatorship of Fear’
– The Egyptian people tend to the streets that are now their own (video)
