Media & Communications

Review: Falling Through Time by Patricia Comroe Frank

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Since its beginnings, the sleeper-awakes scenario has been one of the most commonly used frameworks for introducing fictional utopias and dystopias–yet somehow it doesn’t feel overdone. The reason, I suspect, is that the sleep is incidental to the story, the true focus being the new world order and how it compares with the old. That’s certainly the case with Patricia Frank’s Falling Through Time, the story of a woman who travels into the future and takes us on a sort of guided tour of it. Her name is Summer Holbrook, and she’s a prominent advertising executive who goes missing while vacationing in Alaska. After suffering a spill down a glacier crevasse, she freezes, falls into suspended animation and is found and rescued by a band of expeditioners in the year 2084.

The modern soundtrack

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Virtually every public and corporate space I visit — lift, office lobby, grocery store, doctor’s office or petrol station, every space — has overhead speakers and a piped-in sound system, which has no reason to exist but seems to grow louder each year. Most places play the same twelve songs over and over, but the choice of music is not the main issue. The problem is that most people I know have ceased to notice this background and talk over it — again, more loudly each year.

No other society has ever performed this kind of giant experiment on themselves over generations, so no one has ever measured the long-term effects. I do know, though, that between the earphones, the MP3 player and the earplugs, a normal life is getting expensive.

Co-Op Nation: Interview with Gar Alperovitz

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The truth is we really don’t know how to truly manage a cooperative economy successfully on a national or regional scale yet. If anything, we should be learning from the experiences in the global south to help clarify what might work here, but we should also be sensitive to our own unique cultural situation. What worked in Kerala, or Porto Alegre, or Mondragón may not work automatically in the U.S. We also need to be willing to critically evaluate those experiences. The design of “the next system” is, in my opinion, still to be worked out.

To finance change, finance has to change

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In an era of growing worldwide disdain at any mention of their ilk, did you ever wonder how bankers might feel? Would you believe that there are some amongst them who put central focus on ethical values? And that their banks have ended up delivering higher returns than some of the world’s biggest financial institutions?

Context is everything

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Quite a number of readers suggested I respond to James McWilliams’ piece in the New York Times “The Myth of Sustainable Meat.” McWilliams has garnered quite a bit of attention by critiquing the idea of local food, and in some cases, some of his analyses, as far as they go, are right. For example, McWilliams is quite right that if everyone in America eats as much beef as they always have, but converts to grassfed beef his figures are roughly correct.

In this case, the call for sustainable egg production I made last week (in response to a rather better New York Times article, in fact) would seem to be insanely misguided. After all, as several readers pointed out, eggs would be more expensive, and we probably couldn’t eat as many of them. Woah – so that means eggs are totally unsustainable, right?

Commentary: The world is finite, isn’t it?

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Yesterday I gave a presentation to a group of distinguished business leaders. In my presentation, I tried to show that the global rate of production of petroleum and the associated lease condensate is at an all-time high or a "peak" that at a greatly expanded scale looks like a "plateau." I used my published, peer-reviewed extensions of King Hubbert’s approach to support my arguments.

I received a significant push back from several members of the audience.

 

Ask the fellows who grow the beans

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“Leaves are easy,” Josiah tells me. “It’s the staples we need to look at.” I’m putting together a story on the Urban Food Landscape for the upcoming Transition Free Press. There are all manner of innovative veg growing enterprises in the cities: inner city and peri-urban farms (including Norwich FarmShare which he has helped set up), Abundance projects, collectives like Growing Communities in Hackney, Transition allotments and school gardens. We’re growing chard and lettuce in cracks and crevices, burying potatoes in barrrels, filling salvaged basins and gutters with seedlings in our back yards. But what about the big stuff? Our daily bread.

Getting the market to tell the truth

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Moving the global economy off its current decline-and-collapse path depends on reaching four goals: stabilizing climate, stabilizing population, eradicating poverty, and restoring the economy’s natural support systems. These goals–comprising what the Earth Policy Institute calls “Plan B” to save civilization–are mutually dependent. All are essential to feeding the world’s people. It is unlikely that we can reach any one goal without reaching the others.