Culture & Behavior

The Oceans are Coming Part III – Staying Afloat

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Had Noah built his ark and the Great Flood never materialized, he would have felt very, very silly indeed! Noah could thank God for such an accurate weather forecast. In the biblical story, once the waters receded, God told Noah that there won’t be any more Great Floods, and some of us may still find comfort in this bit of divine dispensation, but rising ocean levels are a fact that more and more of us will be forced to take into account as we redraw our coastal maps.

The problem of community

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John Michael Greer has a superb piece up about our reluctance to seriously consider real community and organizational strategies. I think it is well worth reading for anyone interested in this question of community – because we have to ask ourselves, if this is the tool we’ve got, why do so few of us want to do the work? Why are so few of us able to do the work?

Haiti’s Overshoot of Habitat Capacity, Energy Constraints and Preceding Environmental Disasters Amplifies Nature’s Fury

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As others have pointed out, many of Haiti’s problems have been related to its population density, associated environmental degradation and its need for cheap energy. Now, with the worst earthquake shaking the Caribbean in 200 years, we must sadly add another chapter to the Haitian book chronicling the linkage between its human and ecological disasters.

The Costs of Community

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Discussions of community in peak oil circles, as elsewhere, tend to focus exclusively on the benefits to be gained from participation in community, and rarely discuss the costs — a point that may have more than a little to do with the very limited success of communitarian projects so far. Given that community organization is one of the few tools able to cope with significant features of our present predicament, it’s high time to grapple with both sides of the equation.

Climate & environment – Jan 14

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-The year climate science caught up with what climate scientists have been saying privately for years
-Where on earth is it unusually warm?
-Britain’s cold snap does not prove climate science wrong
-Coral Can Recover from Climate Change Damage, New Research Suggests
-The resurgence of El Niño means that 2010 could yet be the hottest year on record
-The sinking Sundarbans
-Major Antarctic glacier is ‘past its tipping point’

Peak Moment 159: It’s the End of the World as We Know It (transcript added)

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Taped in late 2005 before Peak Moment began, this conversation feels eerily prescient about the effects of the 2008 financial collapse. William Stewart reflects on the shadow side of the fossil fuel bonanza, which enabled hyper-individualism and mobility that have shredded our connections to community and place, along with increased violence and dysfunction. Likening our oil-dependent culture to an addict who must first bottom out, he suggests there may be a silken lining after collapse: the possibility of more communal and connected ways of life.

Review: The American West at Risk by Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson and Richard W. Hazlett

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The American West at Risk’s 13 chapters examine some of the major human-caused environmental problems now threatening the 11 contiguous Western states…Citing trustworthy, peer-reviewed studies in support of its arguments, and written by three trained scientists, this book has every claim for credibility—and is an enlightening and gripping read for scientists and laypeople alike.

Matters Arising From The Great Freeze of 2010

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Been a fascinating few days here in the UK in terms of the weather…It had been so long since we actually had a really actual snowy winter that thick snow has become the stuff of legend, banished to Doctor Who Christmas Specials and the top of Christmas cakes. Then it snowed, and boy did it snow, and almost immediately all the headlines were of ‘misery’ and ‘chaos’.

Piece by Piece

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…Our society likes big shiny solutions. It likes answers. It likes to focus on THE SOLUTION that makes everything better, and we tend to think that anything less than THE SOLUTION is giving up and copping out. But sometimes there isn’t a THE SOLUTION and even when there is, while some people are looking at THE SOLUTION, a bunch of other people have to be on the ground fixing what’s happening already.