Collapse & crisis – Apr13
Stewart and Lee Udall: A message to our grandchildren
NPR: Are we doomed? Why civilizations like ours fall
Failing ecosystems the mother of all bubbles
Recession, depression, collapse: What’s fear got to do with it?
Culture & Behavior
Manufactured foodscape
It has been a truism from the beginning of civilization that cities require stocks of grain, surpluses that can last a year or even two to sustain them through drought or war. In the last two decades, the champions of the globalized trade system have turned that truism on its head and foolishly convinced governments and their leaders that food production and storage can be largely left to the marketplace. All that is changing rather quickly.
Green car checklist
The species homo automobilicus would much rather wait for technological silver bullets than adopt lifestyle changes – especially as regards unlimited personal motorized mobility.
Food crisis – Apr 9
Food price rises threaten global security – UN
Paul Krugman: Grains gone wild
Riots in Haiti and Africa as food prices skyrocket
Fear of rice riots in Far East
Food prices rise beyond means of poorest in Africa
Master Conservers
For those who lived during the last round of energy crises, grain shortages and the surging price of crude oil bring back memories of the Seventies. Some of the responses to that earlier time of troubles may offer useful tools for the round now looming over the industrial world.
Deep thought – Apr 8
Neighborliness, innovation and sustainability
SciAm: The economist has no clothes (Brother, can you spare a planet?)
A Manhattan or Apollo Project for energy? No!
Business Week: Is this our Malthusian moment?
Turner talks of global change, cannibalism
Resilient communities: A guide to disaster management
There are plenty of marginalized “alternatives” advocates who for decades have been researching and promoting low-energy ways of doing things that will make perfect sense in a post-petroleum environment. What if these folks could be mobilized and coordinated, their knowledge made readily available to local officials and the public at large, in preparation for the imminent period when existing systems start to fail in ever more obvious ways?
Seven fat cows, seven thin cows: hoarding and storing the seeds of deliverance
Whatever anyone can say about Pharoahs, the one in the Bible story of Joseph seems to have a laudable sense of obligation to his own populace – a sense of obligation that wildly exceeds the leaders of many nations, who have allowed grain stockpiles to collapse in times of comparative prosperity.
Perils of the green life – Apr 6
Recyclers suffer from clutter
Are you a cloth bag snob?
Living off the fat of the land: grease theft
Cheap solar panels and dodgy installations
The peak oil crisis: the transition
While waiting for the price of gasoline to get so high that we can’t afford to drive anymore, there is still some time to ponder just how the great paradigm shift of the 21st century is going to work out.
Transport – Apr 3
Truckers protest high fuel prices
Life without transport by oil is closer than we think
Former Exxon insider: People driving their cars to the end of the oil age
Aloha Airlines halting passenger service
Heinberg on ‘resilient communities: paths for powering down’
The first public airing by Richard Heinberg of a new concept he has been developing: a Resilient Communities Action Plan.
