Working where the rain doesn’t fall
With small-scale forestry, subsistence farmers can unlock the potential of their otherwise unproductive, fallow land.
Education
Clown fest (updated)
Given the prevalence of high quality content and thought of a few years ago, the blending and parroting of the major themes that a casual perusal of the resource/energy/finance blogosphere reveals today reminds one of the time shift in the movie Idiocracy. A psychiatrist might label this phenomenon ‘information anhedonia’. An economist would say we’ve reached ‘decreasing informational returns from the marginal blog entry’. I’ll just call it ‘clown-fest’.
Agroinnovations #100: Regenerative permaculture
In this 100th episode of the Agroinnovations Podcast we are joined by Darren Doherty, a permaculture designer and consultant who is an expert in keyline design, broadacre permaculture, and agroforestry.
ASPO-USA conference Oct. 7 – 9: agenda now available
ASPO-USA’s 6th Annual Peak Oil Conference will honor its traditional core focus with a full agenda and world-class speakers who understand the global peak oil energy crisis and its complex socioeconomic and geopolitical impacts. (Registration is still open.)
A green school with a view…of dignity
“A school has to be more than beautiful and ‘green.’ It has to respect students’ dignity, and feel like a safe and peaceful place where people care.”
Transition as a pattern language: visioning
The future can be a scary place. For many people, not being able to imagine a lower carbon world is a huge impediment to designing and realising it. If our communities suffer from a similar collective failure of the imagination, Transition will be impossible.
Cooperation law for a sharing economy
What do you call a lawyer who helps people share, cooperate, barter, foster local economies, and build sustainable communities?
Bring me the woodburning stove of Alfredo Garcia….
If everyone installs woodburning stoves, might we end up back in the age of smogs? Are we better to explore group solutions, anaerobic digestion for example, which might still be able to supply us with gas (albeit to far more efficient homes than at present) or other large scale renewables, rather than all fracturing down into small off-the-grid bubbles?
Edible landscapes and Entergy argues for federal preemption (transcript added)
Darrin Nordahl, the author of Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture, has chronicled the growing movement to put edible plants in public spaces–like Vermont’s vegetable garden on its State House lawn. Also, Ray Shadis, a consultant to the New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution, will respond to the question: “Can the state of Vermont regulate Vermont Yankee without falling foul of federal preemption law?”
The good food movement is now a revolution
“There are enough people talking about growing food, but not enough growers.” Suddenly, my mostly sedentary Brooklyn life was filled with kale planting, chicken feeding, delivering produce to restaurants via bicycle, and picking up buckets of coffee grounds from local cafes for composting.
Ten birds that will not land: Some thoughts on school, the simple life, and independence
What is the nature of “independence”? We talk about it like it can actually be achieved and that it’s a good thing. What if neither is true?
Transition & responses – Sept 21
– a Look at the Example of Detroit
-Lessons From a Low-Impact Week
-Free Geek – Computers for the Community
