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Fiction: Sixty Days, Next Year

Fiction: You’ll have to excuse me, but I don’t usually keep a diary. These events began before I understood what was happening, and where it was all headed. It was only later, after it was all going on, that I thought that maybe I should be keeping some sort of record–as if no one else was. We live in The Information Age, or did. Now it’s just The Dim Ages. Welcome to my world.

In the Capital of the Car, Nature Stakes a Claim

DETROIT- PAUL WEERTZ lives less than 10 minutes from downtown, but the view from his window is anything but urban. On a warm day this fall, the air was ripe with the smell of fresh-cut hay and manure. In the alley behind his house, bales of hay teetered and listed where garbage cans once stood. Chickens scratched in the yard, near a garage that had been turned into a barn. Mr. Weertz drives a Ford — not a sleek sedan but a rebuilt 1960 tractor.

Gas Hydrates – Will They be Considered in the Future Global Energy Mix?

For the first time, an international research program involving the Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey has proven that it is technically feasible to produce gas from gas hydrates. Gas hydrates are a naturally occurring “ice-like” combination of natural gas and water that have the potential to be a significant new source of energy from the world’s oceans and polar regions.

St. Matthew Island — Overshoot & Collapse

The story of St. Matthew Island’s reindeer population from 1944 (29) to 1966 (42), featured in today’s Anchorage Daily News, is a potential metaphor for our times.

For many generations of reindeer, St. Matthew Island was literally a land of plenty. The reindeer population on the island exploded following its introduction. By 1963, the population had grown to more than 6000 reindeer. Two years later, 99% of that herd had died of starvation, having destroyed the environment that sustained them, depleting their primary energy source.