Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Analyst, author and founder of the Earth Policy Institute Lester Brown discusses how unprepared the world really is for the growing effects of climate change. “Economists doing supply and demand projections are largely unaware” of the scale of the resource crises facing the world, Brown says, and “food is going to be the weak link for our civilization as it was for so many earlier civilizations.”
Reduce your consumption. Increase your awareness. Use berms/swales/mulch. Use infiltration as well as storage techniques. Build healthy soil. Change your plant palette. Bucket in the shower. Greywater-plumb your laundry (and consider guerilla greywater too). Use found materials as shade devices. And use rain barrels. Do all of the above in combination, and move into the gardens of the future.
Rivers and streams are being overdrawn, aquifers are being depleted, both surface water and groundwater are being polluted, and sources of flowing surface water–snowpack and glaciers–are receding as a result of climate change.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Budget struggles in Washington
There is powerful information waiting to be unleashed in water data. If it were set free it would force us to re-think how we use, develop, sell, transfer, and dispose of water. Rather than focusing on the miles per gallon our cars get, we might consider how much water per mile that fuel’s production required. Rather than arguing over how much energy is being used to produce water, we would give credit to how much water is required to produce energy. Rather than focusing on whether our food is grown locally, we would consider how much water it took to grow that food in our locality.
Were the Egyptian people that bravely took to the streets to overthrow a tyrannical regime taking part in the world’s first peak oil revolution?
The permablitz is a short but intense transfer of beneficial energy where members of the community come together to implement a project or landscape installation designed to provide more resources or energy than it consumes, commonly a permaculture design. Operating on a give-help-and-then-be-helped basis, these fun-filled and informative events overcome many of the pronounced barriers facing individuals for implementing regenerative designs and structures.
Ohio, the home of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and site of the world’s largest oil-producing provinces in the late 19th century, is again at the center of the action in domestic fossil fuel production as a controversial drilling technique, known as fracking, is draining Ohio’s remaining oil and gas reserves. With global oil production peaking and the number of new large oil finds dwindling, is increased domestic production in Ohio and other states through fracking a vital contribution to our energy security, or a fate to be fought?
– Water: On Women’s Burdens, Humans’ Rights, and Companies’ Profits
– Peak Water: What Is it — and Are We There Yet?
– Scientists warn California could be struck by winter ‘superstorm’
In a world where tap water is catching fire near hydrofracking sites from Colorado to New York State, natural gas drillers say it’s not their fault. And when the provocative documentary GASLAND got an Oscar nod in January, the drillers were livid. But whether you believe the film is inspired expose or a putrid pile of propaganda, it may be a villain who doesn’t even make an appearance in the story — resource depletion — that winds up bursting today’s gas bubble.
-‘Barefoot’ grandmothers electrify rural communities
-Lucy Neal on Transition and the Arts
-Why Seattle will stay dry when your city floods
– Small town launches its own stimulus: a local currency (NEW)
There is powerful information waiting to be unleashed in water data. If it were set free it would force us to re-think how we use, develop, sell, transfer, and dispose of water.
