Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
People have said it to me directly over the years, in person and in email. It’s impossible. How can you even think about Transition in Los Angeles? It’s too big. Within Transition circles we counsel each other to “start where you are.” Well, where I am is in the middle of Los Angeles, the eleventh largest metropolitan area in the world, 10 to 12 million people. This is my home town. This is where we started.
Every alternative energy solution is manufactured with fossil fuels. Without fossil fuels there are no alternatives; renewable power is not renewable once fossil fuels are gone. Look at the alternatives as transitions back to what once worked.
When protest is successful, on those rare and remarkable and wondrous occasions when resistance is possible, it is successful not because of the pure, clear political persistence of actors who carry signs or passively protest or fight legal battles. Instead, it is successful because political protest is chained not to doors or trees but to the emergence of a new way of life. This way of life is not perfect or sufficient, but the overwhelming emergence of something new and different in ordinary and daily ways is a hallmark of almost every successful political protest.
Advocates of the steady state economy should be working more closely with the cutting-edge organizations fighting global corruption because the corruption and its attendant bribery of public officials is undermining governance around the world….We don’t want to return to the same spot we were in, only to have a new round of speculators crash the economic system and undermine governance. It is important, therefore, to force decision makers in Congress and the Executive Branch to think about a paradigm shift and what a steady state economy would look like.
Having read enough books with Hubbert curves and charts of barrels-per-day to last us until the second Bristol Palin administration, we’re now into powerful stories that explore peak oil through suspense, romance and humanity. But so you won’t feel guilty having so much fun at the expense of the whole premise of industrial civilization, we’ve thrown in some more fact-y tomes too. Peak oil stalwarts from James Howard Kunstler to Richard Heinberg to Robert Hirsch made the list along with some surprising newcomers.
Novels are good ways to impart information and put it into a social context. This one covers all the basics relating to our current predicament concerning peak oil without getting into an apocalyptic futuristic vision that has tempted so many writers.
– Why Bolivia Stood Alone in Opposing the Cancún Climate Agreement
– Is the Wikileaks Saga the Biggest Crypto-Environmental Story of 2010?
– Thinking Dialectically About Solidarity
– How nonprofit journalism is changing the ‘news ecosystem’
– Washington Post’s big story: Monitoring America: Your Local Neighborhood’s ‘Global War on Terror’
A mid-weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-China
– Hans Noeldner: Peace on Earth / Human legs
– Dr. David Fleming: a tribute
– Songs of Petroleum – Jan Lundberg’s Autobiography
– Space Enough and Time: An Expat’s Siberian Experience
NASA research scientist Benjamin Cook explains how the Dust Bowl years of the American Midwest were not entirely a “natural disaster” and how lessons learned then prevented a sequel.
As 2010 ends, what really interests me aren’t the corrosions and failures of this system, but the way another system, another invisible hand, is always at work in what you could think of as the great, ongoing, Manichean arm-wrestling match that keeps our planet spinning. The invisible claw of the market may fail to comprehend how powerful the other hand — the one that gives rather than takes — is, but neither does that open hand know itself or its own power. It should. We all should.
I’ve pondered whether to stop describing our vortex of dilemmas as a crisis of sustainability. “Sustainable growth” –and its derivative “smart growth”–has been a successful riposte to Meadows, et al.’s 1972 The Limits to Growth that has sapped vigor and anticipation from sustainability.
