Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Over the past century, our cities have been shaped — literally — for the benefit of the automobile and oil industries. Today, with global oil reserves headed toward irreversible decline, we need to face the challenges of the imminent post-oil reality.
David’s talk focused on understanding how the decline in availability of inexpensive fossil fuels will impact society, and then segued into permaculture’s positive potentiality in the impending Energy Descent world
During the week of World Environment Day, it seemed possible that the eco revolution did exist, had surfaced briefly like a submarine, full of imaginative problem solvers….Richard Heinberg was also encouraging. “It only takes ten to twenty percent of the population knowing what is going on for the rest of the country to be okay”, he told us. [Detailed, on-the-ground report about the recent UN conference in San Francisco.]
“People living in San Francisco or London may look at these images of deforestation or melting Arctic ice, and wonder what it has to do with them. That these changes are the result of other people’s lifestyles and consumption habits hundreds and thousands of kilometres away. But they would be wrong.” (Downloadable chapters and images available.)
An idea mapping in PowerPoint for the proposed Vancouver Peak Oil Planning Symposium. Theme: crafting local responses to global oil and gas depletion through design, policy, and culture. [Flash version now available 5/25]
… Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., … argues that with half of federal farm subsidies currently “flowing to six states to produce 13 commodities that in the main we don’t need, like corn, wheat, cotton, and rice,” there’s a dramatically superior alternative.
We should, says Blumenauer, “use that money to build sustainable agriculture, create a farmer’s market in every community, help farmers protect our land and water, preserve our viewsheds, foster land banks and control erosion.” …
Megan Quinn is the Outreach Director of Community Service, Inc. Community Service is a non-profit organization founded in 1940 that has advocated for small, local communities as the most fulfilling, healthy way to live. Its lastest program, The Community Solution, seeks to bring about the re-emergence of the small community and a more agrarian, low energy-use way of life, as the solution for “Peak Oil.”
An approximately 6,000-square-foot yard provides generous space for a bustling urban farm. From the street it is impossible to tell that the property holds everything from apple trees to tomato vines, rabbits to goats, and chickens to domesticated pigeons.
Striking in its omission is debate about the largest creations of our species: cities. Could it be the most basic solution is redesigning them for people instead of cars? Presto, both [global warming and peak oil] solved in the same stroke and in a more fundamental way than by just trying to tune up the same old infrastructure, always trying to get a little more juice out of the planet, a little more sprawl-inducing mileage out of our cars.
We are all on this Petroleum Tour in most ways, every day of our lives. We are oblivious that our daily support system of petroleum props up our lifestyles and survival — or we pretend otherwise.
Thackara is interested in more than analyzing efforts and predicting trends. He wants design to help create a better future. But many trends and opportunities to build what’s necessary for that future converge in the local.
Social critic James Howard Kunstler has railed for years against the twin evils of bad urban design and suburban sprawl. Based in Saratoga Springs, the author of The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere warns that our beloved cars — and the subdivided landscape they drive us to — are leading American culture down a four-lane highway to destruction.
