Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
…a global ecological revolution worthy of the name can only occur as part of a larger social—and I would insist, socialist—revolution. Such a revolution, were it to generate the conditions of equality, sustainability, and human freedom worthy of a genuine Great Transition, would necessarily draw its major impetus from the struggles of working populations and communities at the bottom of the global capitalist hierarchy…
Speakers include James Howard Kunstler, John Darnell, Ph.D., David Pimentel, Ph.D., Michael Ruppert, Andrew McKillop, David Room, Catherine Austin Fitts, Pincas Jawetz, Jenna Orkin, and Jan Lundberg.
While the pundits analyze the fossil fuel subsidies and nuclear industry giveaways in the energy bill only just signed by President Bush, they miss the overall. From the standpoint of ecology, the primary strategy behind the bill is a simple one: Increase the rate of drawdown in order to shore up a world economic and social system that is suffering gravely from the effects of a global environmental meltdown.
From farm to plate, the modern food system relies heavily on cheap oil. Threats to our oil supply are also threats to our food supply. As food undergoes more processing and travels farther, the food system consumes ever more energy each year.
More than 16 per cent of the European Union’s land is affected by soil degradation, but in the accession countries more than a third is affected, according to the first Soil Atlas of Europe, published last week.
We are already living on an overloaded world. Our future will be a product of that fact; that fact is a product of our past. Our first order of business, then, is to make clear to ourselves how we got where we are and why our present situation entails a certain kind of future. [Chapter 2 from William Catton’s classic book Overshoot]
An authoritative study of the biological relationships vital to maintaining life has found disturbing evidence of man-made degradation. (The four-year assessment was designed by a partnership of UN agencies, international scientific organizations, and development agencies…)
Excerpt from William Catton’s classic 1980 book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Plus, a recent letter from William regarding his current book project.
It is implicit in Malthus’s writings that uncontrolled population growth, failing “moral restraint”, would stall near the natural limits of the food supply. Like many who have commented on population growth, Malthus did not understand overshoot.
Oil energy (gasoline and diesel) can be likened to the fruit of a cherry tree that bears but once in our tiny lifetimes.
Because the people of industrial nations did not recognize themselves as hunters and gatherers, they adhered to premises that were becoming more and more false. Franklin D Roosevelt spoke for all believers in those premises in the next-to-last sentence he ever wrote: “The only limits to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today”. [Chapter 3 from William Catton’s classic book Overshoot]
It is quite ironic: only a decade or so after the idea of the United States as an imperial power came to be accepted by both right and left, and people were actually able to talk openly about an American empire, it is showing multiple signs of its inability to continue.
