Chasing solutions – May 20
Jamais Cascio: How many Earths? (the real key to sustainability)
Chasing utopia, family imagines no possessions
Symbols can overshadow substance
Get ready to rethink what it means to be green
Culture & Behavior
Dysfunction – May 19
Flying cars
The Surge (in lame excuses)
When cars compete with people for food
Farmer-hunter-gatherer
We’re still sending out the cultural message “we’re different from the old agrarian roots” even though that’s become painfully obvious. The difficulty, of course, is that we may need to be rather more like the old people.
To teens in the first decade of the 21st century
While hard work and discipline are essential to the successful life, true success is not in an award, or bank account balance. It’s in the number of real friends you have, and intangibles such as your ability to enjoy life in deep and profound ways, and to have stood for something far greater than your own comfort, convenience, and bank account.
Crisis & collapse – May 18
Expert warns climate change will lead to ‘barbarisation’
Thomas Homer-Dixon interview
The Onion: Everything falling apart, reports Institute
The same new ideas
A crucial role in shaping the future will be played by cultural conservers – individuals who choose to take on the task of learning and preserving some part of the cultural legacy of the past, and passing it on to the future.
Hard times – May 18
Soaring bills leave families just £50 a week
Saving for survival: New Zealand traditions
Astyk: Tinkerbelle economy starts to falter
What if gas cost $10 a gallon?
Remember Malthus? He’s back for good
His ideas have been the inspiration since 1798 for anyone concerned about over population and food scarcity. Relegated to history’s back shelf in the 1960s by agriculture’s Green Revolution, his forecasts are back, with a vengeance.
Dysfunction – May 17
Obesity contributes to global warming
Why puberty at an ever-younger ages?
Environmental results of the Gold Rush
Not as green as they claim to be
Peak oil – May 17
High steel prices: A preview of peak oil
Peak Oil doomsters debunked, end of civilization called off
Peak oil: alive and well at Sprott
Peak oil Australia
Visible hands
As “The Long Emergency” begins to unfold, it’s becoming evident that we’re going to need to relearn to use our hands to do immediately useful work, become more self-reliant and less dependent on the marketplace to sort things out.
Oil, food and agrotherapy
It is a good time for an increasing number of people to return to the multiple benefits and pleasures of growing at least part of their own food by gardening and farming. In addition to satisfying the need to eat and drink, farming can also help deal with depression, passivity, and other forms of psychological suffering. It can help treat both the body and the soul.
