Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
One of the pleasures of blogging is that the dialogue which it sometimes provokes, and my recent post reflecting on the health care vote and the apparent breakdown of ‘normal’ political processes produced a couple of thoughtful responses which seemed to me to take the discussion on.
One of the single greatest concerns of climate scientists is that human-caused warming will cause amplifying feedbacks in the carbon-cycle. Such positive feedbacks, whereby an initial warming releases carbon into the air that causes more warming, would increase both the speed and scale of climate change, greatly complicating both mitigation and adaptation.
During the period of my life when I was a professional smart-ass (ie, my adolescence), I used to complain to my mother that even the day after she went grocery shopping, there was never any food in the house, only the component ingredients of food. As I teenager I wanted to eat like my peers who seemed to have an endless supply of chips and soda around. To have to come home from school and actually scramble eggs or make a sandwich seemed horribly unfair. My mother and step-mother expressed little sympathy.
– Kellogg’s six-hour day
– Why are there no young people in the room?
– Political strategy, macro and micro
– First Transition Town in Pennsylviania
Could it be so that one of Sweden’s most popular sportsmen knows about Peak Oil?
We are heading toward economic, political and social collapse, and every day that passes brings it closer. But we just don’t know when to stop, do we?…In short, what on earth is our problem?
It was with some fear and trepidation that Alexis Rowell, a Camden Borough councillor and the author of the upcoming Transition Guide to Local Authorities (LA), and I arrived in a deeply conservative part of the country, Norfolk, to do a day with them on peak oil, climate change and the Transition town model and practice.
We first learned about Gaviotas, the legendary sustainable Colombian village, in 2004, while working in our home state, New Mexico. The two of us helped found a group called La Mesita, “the small table,” composed of three educators, a renewable energy scientist, a water-rights attorney, and a community organizer. We decided to start a project that would involve teenagers in organic agriculture and renewable energy in Ribera, a rural village in the north of the state. We believed that reviving northern New Mexico’s agricultural and cultural traditions could help the region confront both its environmental crises, like unsustainable water use, and its deepening social problems, such as rural drug abuse and teen pregnancy.
Spring has sprung, which means it’s time to stop hiding from the environment and start consuming it. Even now, months before the berries arrive, there are plenty of tasty morsels to be had in forests and by streams.
-Push to Eat Local Food Is Hampered by Shortage
-Dwindling Food for Thought
-How a Band of Youthful Entrepreneurs Are Resuscitating an Ailing Vermont Town With a New Economy Based on Local Foods
-Restoring natural capital in degraded landscapes
-Urban farming touted as tool for neighborhood revival
-Project aims to turn empty Dallas plots into vegetable gardens
-A Damascus farmer’s ideas on sustainable urban agriculture are breaking new ground
-Mayor’s agriculture plan soon to bear fruit
A Bloomberg poll of leading US economists found that 79% were “shocked” or “dismayed” by the recently-readjusted Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that labor productivity in the United States plunged by 13.8% in 2010. Asked how they felt about the corresponding sharp decline in U3 unemployment – from 10.1% to 6.3% – 31% of these economists said improved employment numbers were “welcome”, but 88% considered the correlation (between falling productivity and falling unemployment) “counterintuitive” or “irrelevant”. All agreed that the top priority must be to return to increased productivity and healthy economic growth as rapidly as possible.
