Climate & environment – April 9
-Eaarth by Bill McKibben (Review)
-Copenhagen Three Months Later
-We all want to change the world
Media & Communications
Food and agriculture – Apr 9
-Why We All Need to Demand Organic and . . . Worship the Worm (book review)
-Rooftop Gardens and Community Plots Welcome City Bees
-Enduring Farms: Climate Change, Smallholders and Traditional Farming Communities
-She yanks their food chains
Transition Museums? what’s up with that? – Apr 9
-Is it time for Transition Museums?
-Tales from the plot
-‘How We Used to Live’: bringing Transition and oral history together
-Oral History Transcripts (Bristol Floating Harbor)
The End Of Suburbia — Really!
As Bill Bonner would say, 98% of everything you hear (about housing, retail spending, etc.) is merely noise. Only the underlying trends are important, if you can identify them. I believe we can spot one: It’s The End of Suburbia. I’ll return to this hypothesis at the end of this post.
Haiti, U.S. ag policy reform, and Bill Clinton
What have Haiti’s recent calamities taught U.S. decision makers about foreign policy with regard to agriculture? Haiti imports nearly half of the food consumed there–and 80 percent of its rice, the national staple. In the past two years, the country has undergone two major shocks: the global spike in food commodity prices in 2008, and this year’s devastating earthquake. In both cases, the dearth of domestic food production, combined with the complete absence of rice reserves, translated to widespread hunger and misery.
Nana Upstairs, Grandpa Down the Hall: The Extended Family and Its Future
When Eric and I first wrote a letter to Eric’s grandparents, asking them to consider living with us, the response was very mixed. Grandma and Grandpa’s generation of friends and family were mostly very pleased and thrilled – given the bad lot of options available to many of them, finding a compatible home with their grandchildren looked pretty good. Most of them had cared for their parents, and so somewhere inside them, this seemed like a normal relationship. Some of my friends were frankly jealous – they’d lost their own grandparents, and wished for something like what we were going to have.
How much oil is left: (interview with Richard Heinberg)
One of the world’s foremost educators on Peak Oil, Richard Heinberg, in an exclusive interview for MMNews: “We are currently seeing the end of economic growth as we have known it.” Further on, he talks about the financial / economic crisis, monetary changes vis-à-vis a shrinking energy supply, and the Century of Declines: “Peak Everything.”
Easter Island : A Case Study in the Response to Resource Depletion
This is a case study in which you are invited to answer the question, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?”
The twilight of the machine
It’s as indicative as it is ironic that the most popular ideas for a response to the impact of resource depletion on our gargantuan and increasingly unstable technologies involve building even more gargantuan and unstable technologies
A faceoff between two cultural icons, Rosie the Riveter and HAL 9000, points toward another approach.
Peak oil notes – Apr 8
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Droughts
-Eruption in Kyrgzstan
What is the Minimum EROI that a Sustainable Society Must Have? Part 3
In this final installment of the Minimum EROI series we calculate the minimum EROI required from our energy sources to support the current transportation infrastructure of the U.S.
Book Review: ‘Solar’ by Ian McEwan
With the recent exoneration of Phil Jones in the UEA ‘ClimateGate’ kerfuffle, the key lesson emerging from the whole thing is not that the science of climate change is somehow profoundly flawed, but rather that scientists are flawed human beings rather like the rest of us, subject to pomposity, ego, vanity, ill-temper and rudeness.
