Media & Communications

Video review: The Road and 2012

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Hollywood images of the future tend to be pretty grim: most video stores even have a single section now entitled “science fiction / horror,” since any future they show is likely to be horrifying. Just the last few years have given us The Book of Eli, The Road, 2012, I Am Legend, Children of Men, 28 Weeks Later, Resident Evil, Terminator films and series, and even WALL-E, the first post-apocalypse children’s movie.

Cultural hegemony

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2010 might very well be seen in retrospect as the year when Peak Oil became, if not exactly mainstream, at least something of a subject for the powers that be…Yet very little of it transpired into mainstream press and we can be quite sure, as Matthieu Auzanneau himself acknowledges, that a lot of water will run under the bridges of Paris before any kind of policy is implemented to address the problem. And there are unfortunately very good reasons for that.

Out of our Ego Houses, into the Collective Intelligence

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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.

Bill McKibben: The surprising reason why Americans are so lonely

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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.

Cycle-touring: a vision of post-peak holidays?

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This post was inspired by single bicycle holiday: an Easter cycling adventure around the Spanish Pyrenees. While the experience proved that cycle holidays can be fun (its primary purpose), it soon became clear that the single case study could provide a basis for practical advice and broader discussion. The former (stuff, planning, safety, money) may be of use to aspiring low-energy holidaymakers. The latter (energy analysis, viability) may be of interest to those who want to think about low energy futures.

How Bjørn Lomborg deceives the public

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In a piece in USA Today Bjørn Lomborg, Danish author of the much criticized book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, recycles claims that “many key environmental measures” are getting better. As you sift through the piece, you will see that his “key environmental measures” relate almost exclusively to the health and well-being of humans. And, this is what he uses to build a three-fold strategy to deceive the public.