Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Wood stoves can provide a household with thermal energy for cooking and for space and water heating. Wood stoves equipped with thermoelectric generators also produce electricity, which can be more sustainable, more reliable and less costly than power from solar panels.
This has been a long tour through the Wonderland of fake solutions to climate change, ideas designed to splash a coat of green paint on Business As Usual so that certain private interests can keep getting richer…and so the rest of us need not be bothered with changing our habits or lifestyle. This won’t do.
There is no time left for barking up one wrong tree after another; no time to waste in false solutions. Hence this series pointing out the fallacies behind such proposals as electrifying everything, carbon trading, geoengineering or switching to “gas—the clean energy fuel!”
A home-based lifestyle of self-reliance, minimal and slow travel does not provide protection against getting a virus as infectious as COVID-19, but it provides a base for social distancing and isolation that is stimulating and healthy rather than a place of detention.
The biggest challenge with all these cases is the lack of high-quality habitat in the first place. Neither Gordon nor Young were particularly optimistic about using animal soundscapes as a panacea for an enormous, multifaceted problem.
Maybe that’s the most important thing that I’ve learnt in the past fifteen years: material things don’t make us happy. People need one another. Experiences, building something together, meeting each other – that’s happiness. And we’re being robbed of that because other stuff has taken its place. So yes, I envision a much happier world.
Hear the language of the emergency? Is it to galvanise progressive change or engender fear? I’ve been in a few emergencies. I’ve even been in a house on fire. Clear thinking and quick strategic action were required. Fear and panic are highly contagious and are not helpful in an emergency. I’m noticing even committed permies around me are doubting whether our methods and principles are enough to avert catastrophe.
It’s an amazing experiment to leave a lawn alone for a couple months and to watch what happens. Nature comes back fast. Trees, flowers, and all the critters return.
Solberg calculates that 75 percent of energy use and costs for heating could be eliminated in commercial, health care and residential buildings through AHR, even in the frosty Midwest. He points to a new health club in Edina, Minnesota, which is already saving on construction costs and projected to see 50 percent lower operating costs.
A successful Saami-led, salmon rewilding project on the Näätämö river in Arctic Finland illustrates the success of partnership between Indigenous knowledge and western science on environmental questions, say the authors of a recent paper, but outdated perceptions and prejudices means these kinds of partnerships elsewhere still too often fail.
NOW the Path Forward is an educational website based on Moodle (http://moodle.org). It’s purpose is to grow solutions under an open source umbrella and use the educational tools such as wikis for collaboration. In this scenario, the teachers are actually teacher/moderators and the students are student/collaborators. Do not think of the courses in a traditional sense, but rather as work space. Participants can contribute at any level they prefer. Lurking is allowed.
Bright, experienced and committed folks have been developing and refining them for a very long time: solutions waiting for the general populace to acknowledge that the nature and urgency of the crises that threaten our existence requires systemic change.
