Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-Scrumping for apples
-Grass-fed beef: One steer’s organic journey from ranch to dinner
-In Search of Wildlife-friendly Biofuels: Are Native Prairie Plants the Answer?
-6 Facts About Native Bees
-Cuba Pins Hopes On New Farms Run for Profit
-The Other Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis in Global Land Use
Evolution demands short-term thinking focused on individual survival. Most attempts to overcome our evolutionarily hardwired absorption with self are selected against. The Overman is dead, killed by a high-fat diet and unwillingness to exercise. Reflexively, we follow him into the grave.
It is John McPhee, that fabulous writer about the geology of the United States, who has given me the insight as to what the “true” purpose of humankind is….to alter the landscape and the atmosphere to such a degree that we bring about wholly new conditions on Earth.
A couple of weeks ago Jerry Mander and I were discussing the best word to use in the heading for the back cover copy of a new short book being co-published by International Forum on Globalization and Post Carbon Institute, Searching for a Miracle: “Net Energy” and the Fate of Industrial Societies (I wrote the main text, Jerry wrote the Foreword). Jerry liked the word “conundrum,” while I argued for “dilemma.” We were in basic agreement, though, about a word we didn’t want: “problem.”
“A peak of conventional oil production before 2030 appears likely” and “there is a significant risk of a peak in conventional oil production before 2020…”
-What Makes Europe Greener than the U.S.?
-My dream of a zero-waste Goa
-Get Your Community Resilience Toolkit Today!
-From Turbines and Straw, Danish Self-Sufficiency
-The Return of the American Prairie
We know oil prices peaked in the third quarter of 2008–in fact in July 2008. But what else peaked about the same time? It turns out when you look at the data, lots of things…
A weekly round-up including:
– Production and prices
– Replace the dollar
– The Peak Oil Market
-The First Review of ‘Local Food’
-Eat Locally Grown Food All Year
-Rethinking the Front Yard: Cities Make Room For Urban Farms
-Growing a Revolution
-Smaller cities seen leading the way in urban agriculture
-Planting The Seeds For Sustainability
-Peak oil before 2020 a ‘significant risk’, say experts
-Era of cheap, easy oil is over, warns study
-UKERC Report Exposes Bankruptcy of Government’s Position on Peak Oil
-Peak Oil: The End Of the Oil Age is Near, Deutsche Bank Says
This post introduces the U.S.-based Mobilization for Climate Justice, as well as similar critiques and activism associated with this Climate Justice coalition. As I indicate, the organizers in and around that coalition also address a range of energy & carbon issues (including tar sands pollution, and biofuel land grabs) — along with interrelated and more apparent global warming concerns. Their approach to these ecological issues is based on prior environmental justice critiques and activism, as well as wider opposition towards corporations, and other international market structures.
How secure is our civilization’s accumulated knowledge? It is a question that, in a fundamental sense, transcends many life-and-death concerns (threats of sickness, natural disaster, or military invasion) that prompt us collectively to spend fortunes on insurance, health care, and weaponry.
