Money, simplicity, and embracing new paradigms: Quaker tuition follow-up
My recent piece on the cost of tuition at the Friends Seminary in Manhattan has gotten enough play to warrant a response. So here goes.
Media & Communications
Freedom through Frugality
Montpelier resident Jane Dwinell has followed the method in Your Money or Your Life to live frugally and retire in her mid-fifties. She celebrates and elaborates on the method in her new book, Freedom through Frugality. Annie McCleary is coordinator for Transition Town Montpelier, part of the worldwide Transition movement, which helps Vermonters take control of their food, energy, and other resources, while moving from oil dependence to community resilience.
Communications – A new narrative
How do you tell a downstory? Downstories are hard to find in our culture. There are plenty of upstories that don’t work out that act like scary cautionary tales (if you don’t make it to the ball, you never get out of that fireplace and will always wear rags). But how do you go about telling the story of Transition, of the energy descent we have to make as individuals and as a people? How do you turn the coach back into a pumpkin and the princess back into someone who can tend a fire?
The new food movement: politics and pleasure
Food has become – to use an older phrase now being recycled by contemporary activists – the “edible dynamic” at the heart of mainstream economic and environmentalist debates.
Business Development: The Cavalry’s on the Way
Regardless of the industry, "Most companies tend to use the same standard systems and more and more companies arrive at a situation where time and cost have been reduced to a minimum." It is bitterly ironic that so much success could lead to an ultimate failure to find further paths toward innovation and earnings.
Another bite out of life
But one thing is for sure. The malfunctioning at the nuclear plant is but one of the bites out of life stemming from the human failure to recognize, much less plan for, the high price and growing risks of economic growth.
Cities, Towns, and Suburbs: Local goverment in a time of peak oil and climate change
Many responses to peak oil urge individual and community solutions, ignoring government. They argue that since government hasn’t done anything to address the problem, citizens and businesses must take matters into their own hands. Some even argue that government is part of the problem, particularly federal and state governments. This attitude is shortsighted.
Confronting climate collapse
How we think about climate destabilization has a great deal to do with how we talk about it. For example, we do not face merely a “warming” of the Earth, but rather a worsening destabilization of, well, almost everything. We are rapidly making a different and less hospitable planet, one that Bill McKibben calls “Eaarth.”
Turning storm water into productive water
Today, cities face substantial barriers to effective water management due to the sheer extent of non-permeable surfaces such as pavement and concrete. During rain events, the main function of these impervious surfaces is to concentrate and dispose of water as quickly as it arrives, sending it to storm sewers where it inevitably ends up in creeks, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Not only is this poor water management, but unfiltered water can cause major damage to ecosystems!
Commentary: Will we be able to maintain & replace our energy & transportation infrastructure in a post-peak oil world?
However, when we look at the global economy from the point of view of a long-term decline in global net oil exports, it seems very likely that, to paraphrase a famous quote, what can’t be funded and maintained won’t be funded and maintained; and that the funding and maintenance problem will probably continue to become most apparent in the short term in American suburbia and exurbia.
The quants and the poets
If, a century ago, the keenest talking heads of the age (who would that have been, I wonder: Chesterton, Shaw, Belloc, Jo Chamberlain?) had battled it out amongst themselves about the future of infrastructure and energy, what would that debate have looked like?
Japan’s peak oil dry run
For large parts of eastern Japan that were not directly hit by the tsunami on 11 March 2011, including the nation’s capital, the current state of affairs feels very much like a dry-run for peak oil. This is not to belittle the tragic loss of life and the dire situation facing many survivors left without homes and livelihoods. Rather, the aim here is to reflect upon the post-disaster events and compare them with those normally associated with the worst-case scenarios for peak oil.
