Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Lately I’ve been encountering articles and news stories touting the need for revolution in the wake of a gansterized U.S. financial system and a government that has itself become a criminal enterprise. I sense that many bloggers and their readers are salivating with anticipation that someone or something will light the fuse of a revolutionary cannon that will eviscerate the present system and replace it with something more just and humane.
Some stories makes so much sense when you read them that you wonder why you didn’t see them coming. One such story appeared recently in the New York Times — Wall St. Hiring in Anticipation of an Economic Recovery.
In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway take us on a fascinating trip down what they call Tobacco Road. Take the journey with them, and you’ll see renowned scientists abandon science, you’ll see environmentalism equated with communism, and you’ll discover the connection between the Cold War and climate denial.
Luke Skywalker had to master the ways of the Force to save the galaxy. We face a similar challenge — mastering the ways of energy, which are surprisingly counterintuitive to people raised in current ways of thinking — in order to make use of the limited options still open to us in an age of declining energy supplies.
-Why the tech revolution isn’t a template for an energy revolution
-Right Wing Thought Police – An Analysis
-The Iranian Threat
Why are we as societies creating a world that we as individuals abhor? It’s a mind-bending question.
Let us imagine human beings climbing up a rather steep and precarious tree, boosted up by fossil energies into a place we simply could never get to without them. The problems we are facing right now all originate in our fundamental inability to voluntarily set limits – that is, at no point did most of us even recognize the basic necessity of stopping at a point at which we could get down on our own, without our petrocarbon helpers.
This post is a continuation of “Transition in the Big City,” a description of how Transition ideas are being applied in Los Angeles. Part I discussed issues of scale, the formation of the city hub and pods, and the structure we use today.
On a hot Saturday in mid-July in my corner of the country, when everyone else is cavorting on Million Dollar Beach at Lake George, or plying the aisles of the home Depot, or riding their motorcycles in faux-outlaw hordes, I like to slip away to the neglected places where nobody goes. I seek out the places of industrial ruin – there are many around here in the upper Hudson Valley, and they are mostly right along the river itself, because there are many spots where the water tumbles and falls in a way that human beings could capture that power and direct it to useful work.
As I mentioned, when we finished our home and moved in last Christmas, the fields in front of our home were mud and builders’ rubble. Now we have four garden beds in, built only in the last eight weeks, we have planted a number of trees for fruit, nuts and firewood, but have not yet begun building our greenhouse and chicken run. Having these things does not make a family completely self-sufficient, for there is no such thing, nor would it be desirable.
-Food prices to rise by up to 40% over next decade, UN report warns
-Just Not Made that Way
-How Goldman gambled on starvation
-Nitrogen and Phosphorus: The Future of Toilet Design Hangs in the Balance
-Eating to Live or Living to Eat?
Peek behind the scenes at Peak Moment TV’s home base. Janaia Donaldson shows guest host Ivey Cone the solar power system, woodstove for heat (and winter waffles), and super efficient refrigerator. Choosing to reduce their footprint, she and Robyn Mallgren, Peak Moment videographer, don’t feel deprived at all. Janaia discusses what led them to leave the Bay Area, what it’s like to live on 160 acres of forestland, which they’ve preserved “in perpetuity” as a wildlife sanctuary, and shows us some of the members of the natural community they live in.
