Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Everyone should listen to this BBC report on the “price of biofuels.” It digs into a key question: what does Europe’s appetite for biodiesel mean for people and ecosystems in the countries that produce the feedstocks?
-Giant gravel batteries could make renewable energy more reliable
-Regulators Approve First Offshore Wind Farm in U.S.
-Colorado Shows How It’s Done
-Windmill Boom Curbs Electric Power Prices for RWE
-Peak at the polls
-Saudi Arabia global oil exports to wane post-2010
-Drilling and spilling for all the oil that’s left
-Gulf oil spill ‘five times’ larger than estimated
-Flight disruptions in Europe a Foretaste for Period of Oil Decline
-The Imminent Crash Of Oil Supply: Be Afraid
-Peak oil predictions
Financial reform is the Congressional political issue of the month. Democrats say their bill will place essential controls on Wall Street to prevent abuse and a repeat of the financial crash. Republicans say it will encourage further Wall Street risk-taking by giving the big banks a guarantee of a future taxpayer bailout if reckless decisions trigger another financial crash.
-Mainstream Green Groups Cave In on Climate
-Reclaiming Earth Day: With Climate Chaos on the Horizon, the Environmental Movement Needs Traction
-A New Climate Movement in Bolivia
-Earth Day™ — Tastes Great, Less Filling
-The Open Veins of Climate Change
Communal life – our tribal past – valued the group over the individual. We left our communal past to put the individual’s benefit (and especially material benefit) before the common good, in the process losing much of our memory of community.
Community may suffer from overuse more sorely than any word in the dictionary. Politicians left and right sprinkle it through their remarks the way a bad Chinese restaurant uses MSG, to mask the lack of wholesome ingredients. But we need to rescue it; we need to make sure that community will become, on this tougher planet, one of the most prosaic terms in the lexicon, like hoe or bicycle or computers. Access to endless amounts of cheap energy made us rich, and wrecked our climate, and it also made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors.
-Food Preservation 101: Putting Canning In Perspective
-In Connecticut, Community-Supported Agriculture Gaining In Popularity
-Gardening by community growing in appeal
-A garden on every block
-Cuba’s urban-ag revival offers limited lessons
-The Triangle: The South’s Locavore Gem
-The AKG Sustainable Living Project podcast episode #4 transcript- Rain Water Harvesting
-Ancient orchards restored to save fruit and wildlife
-Community Land Sharing
-Global biofuel drive raises risk of eviction for African farmers
Our high-tech products increasingly make use of rare metals, and mining those resources can have devastating environmental consequences. But if we block projects like the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, are we simply forcing mining activity to other parts of the world where protections may be far weaker?
In the first part of this series, I reviewed a series of reports from March supporting the peak oil view, and warning that world oil production very well may go into terminal decline by 2015 or sooner…On March 25 the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) joined the officially worried, with a report in French newspaper Le Monde titled “Washington considers a decline of world oil production as of 2011.”
The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC, for its Spanish acronym) ended on Thursday in Cochabamba and every airport I’ve stopped in (more than a few now) has been filled with people heading home with new energy, new direction, and excitement to get back to work. But before the movement moves on I want to share some last reflections that we’ll be taking forward.
Virginia farmer Joel Salatin has become one of the most well known names in the world of alternative farming…In February 2010, Joel was interviewed by Lauren Berlekamp of the Erie Wire. Joel spoke to Lauren about his unique and seemingly common-sense approach to farming…Also featured on the episode, a great talk delivered by Toronto’s Judy Rebick. Rebick is the Canadian Auto Workers-Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University…In November 2008, Rebick spoke at the annual convention of Canada’s National Farmers Union and encouraged farmers there to take advantage of what she referred to as the ‘perfect storm’, whereby the dominant top-down social and economic models are collapsing – clearing the way, as she believes, for a bottom-up and community-centred approach to begin better serving our needs.
