Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has given the strongest indication yet that the coalition government is actually considering the possible impacts of peak oil. “We will have a world where there may be lots of shocks, we may well have oil price rises which are similar to the ones that we had in the 1970s, a doubling”, he told a fringe meeting of the Lib Dem conference…
The original Luddites were those who were angered at the notion that they ought to sacrifice their livelihoods and starve to death in order to serve “progress.” They demanded that technology be bounded by recognition of human needs.
“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.”
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.
-Prospects for a viable food future
-Introducing the Permaculture Designers’ Manual, Chapter 1: Introduction to Permaculture
-Why We Need a New Green Revolution to Stop Hunger
-Food Sovereignty: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community
-UN warned of major new food crisis at emergency meeting in Rome
"Mining’s Final Frontier" takes a golly-this-could-be-really-neato look at underwater mining. That’s right…underwater mining. As in smashing the seafloor to pieces, sucking it up, then filtering for precious metals. China and Canada are all over it like monkeys on an overturned trailer full of bananas as they, and many other nations line up to be the first to "smash and suck" their way to their God-given share of the earth’s bounty.
What do you call a lawyer who helps people share, cooperate, barter, foster local economies, and build sustainable communities?
It’s time to transcend issue-oriented politics and build community… “I felt that I was glimpsing the future of community organizing in America—organizing based not on hot-button issues, but on building relationships through deep personal sharing and active listening. “
Our ancestors experienced the myriad relationships involved in food production on a small, local scale. Until recently, we had lost that sense of relationship-an awareness, however fleeting, that the most heartfelt food chain is not the biological one, but the one that connects us with the community of life on earth.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
These cooking devices rely only on power from the sun and are built entirely with materials indigenous to Bolivia. It is the kind of solution that embodies many of the elements necessary to really get to work solving climate change—local, small-scale, incorporating indigenous knowledge and materials, and with simple, easy-to-use technology.
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?
