Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In the 1990s Jay Hanson’s web site predicted with uncanny accuracy key trends of the early 21st century with respect to energy, the environment and geopolitics. What did he learn that most of us still don’t know, and what does he foresee ahead of us?
Molly Brown sees Peak Oil as both a challenge and an invitation to create a better world. After awakening to Peak Oil, she explored her own responses — inner attitude and outer action. Personal changes include creating a vegie garden and bicycling. Noting that individual survivalist mentality is insufficient (“we are all interconnected”), she helped form a local group to awaken and prepare her community.
A weekly round-up from a UK perspective.
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.
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.
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.
Population Australia’s ‘big threat’
Japan workers urged: Go home and multiply
Peak oil? Global warming? No, it’s ‘Boomsday!’
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?
The Transition Movement comes to America
Watch This Video: City-Based Ecovillages
Powerdown toolkit #1- climate and peak oil
This Great Squeeze: Surviving the Human Project is the latest film from Colorado-based Tiroir a Films. This sequel to their 2006 offering, Energy Crossroads: The Burning Need to Change Course, looks to dig deeper into how the concurrent processes of resource depletion, climate change, ecosystem destruction and our consumption-oriented economic model are threatening to destroy both our planet and possibly our very civilization. I would say in large part that it succeeds.
This past week the New Yorker published “The Dystopians” by Ben McGrath… Sitting with this piece for the past seven days has been unsettling, not because I personally wanted more air time, but because of the article’s paucity of references to the female perspective regarding the collapse of civilization
Climate adaptation for resilient communities
Controlling our history: encyclopedias vs Wikipedia
Powerdown toolkit
