Media & Communications

Paint it Black: Oil activism

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Hey kids, the circus is in town. One day, the Los Angeles Times announces the Gulf gusher is plugged. They got that news from Coast Guard clown Admiral Thad Allen. The oil didn’t get the message, it kept gushing out of the hole. BP had stopped pumping mud 16 hours previously, but nobody told the government. Even so, 24 hours later, Allen, acting as cheerleader-in-chief, said the same thing, on National TV. Meanwhile, any fool on the Net could see the oil continuing to gush out, if you could find the right camera.

From scream to dream: the inspiring influence of Herman Daly

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Each fall at one of America’s oldest universities, a substantial portion of the freshman class enrolls in Economics 101 and then proceeds to participate in a bizarre ritual. The night before the first midterm exam, when students should be tucked away in the dusty corners of the library reviewing their supply and demand curves, or perhaps even lying in bed dreaming about their first exam, something quite curious happens.

What Price Pelican?

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Our energy subsidy from the stored sunlight in fossil fuels is gigantic. The chemical and kinetic energy embodied in the thick gooey condensed organic matter from past eons is, for all human intents and purposes, indistinguishable from magic. Once in a while, like now, we see the downsides to our dependency on this elixir, in this case the ecological degradation of increasing areas of the Gulf of Mexico ecosystems, and collateral damage to other species.

Media flirting with peak oil following Gulf spill

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The ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil disaster is bringing the mainstream media a little closer to the peak oil debate. It’s been out there on the business pages for a while, but it is beginning to make its way into news pages – via comment columns, and in a roundabout way, of course. It’s still at the flirtatious stage, but its beginning.

Urban farms don’t make money – so what?

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Over on Earth Island Journal, Sena Christian has an excellent, rigorously reported article about the tough economics of urban farming. She focuses on some of the more famous city farms of the Bay Area, where EIJ is based — City Slicker Farms, People’s Grocery — but she also discusses projects like Milwaukee’s Growing Power. And she finishes the piece with a farm I’d never heard of before: Greensgrow, in Philadelphia.

Rethinking Transition as a Pattern Language: an introduction

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Yesterday I posted a document which contained the first rough attempt at sketching out a new way of communicating Transition, using Christopher Alexander’s ‘pattern language’ approach. Over the coming weeks and months I will be blogging more about this, but in advance of the 2010 Transition Network conference (only a week to go!), I thought it might be helpful to give some more background on this. What is a ‘pattern language’ and why might it be a better way of communicating Transition? Here are some initial thoughts.

Under pressure to block oil, a rush to dubious projects

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In response to the widening disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, government officials have approved a plan to intercept the oil by building a 45-mile sand berm. But scientists fear the project is a costly boondoggle that will inflict further environmental damage and do little to keep oil off the coast.

Magical Thinking

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Tune into most online discussions of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the broader crisis of industrial civilization, and one thing you’re sure to hear is a flurry of abstract plans and rhetorical claims. What lies behind these is magical thinking — and if you’re going to practice magic, the Archdruid suggests, take the time to learn how to do it right.