Missing the slums for the cities
Cities in Asia are hubs of production, innovation and wealth, funnelling into themselves immense resources, water, energy, food, drawing in from nearby districts and far-off provinces families and entire communities.
Culture & Behavior
Garlic, chainsaws, and Victory Gardens
These days the economic news resembles nothing so much as a bad horror movie, with trillions of dollars of bad debt rising from the crypts of banks worldwide to wreak havoc on the living. Like vampires and zombies, undead financial paper can be held at bay with the appropriate tools; the Archdruid explains.
The wages of complexity
While accusations continue to fly back and forth about who is to blame for the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and investigations commence into the recent wild one-day gyration in the American stock markets, the real culprit stands quietly and in plain sight in the corner: Complexity.
Energy descent action plans for cities: some thoughts…
The subject under discussion is EDAPs (or Community Resilience Plans… or whatever you want to call them), and how one does them for cities, or even if one does them for cities…
Peak Fish and the biodiversity crisis
We were recently reminded yet again that regarding the Earth’s biodiversity crisis, we need to get used to failure.
Climate progress
Hayward is apparently completely unaware of the growing realization by everybody else that his monomaniacal quest for cost-cutting, corner-cutting, and profits was the proximate cause of this disaster, which, it must be pointed out, killed 11 people.
The need for growth
Yesterday, a friend sent me over this graph, which shows the levels of carbon dioxide emitted by the USA over the last twenty years. As the accompanying report explains, it shows that 2009 was an “exceptional” year – exceptional in that emissions levels fell by more than they had fallen in a single year since 1949. The reason? The economic crash.
Is there rehab for this oil overdose? Black tar has just taken on a whole new meaning
It’s been almost a month since the sirens of the Deep Water Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico lacerated the night with tortured warnings of impending doom. Chief electronic technician Mike Williams, who nearly perished in the catastrophe, recounted in excruciating detail on CBS’s 60 Minutes on May 16 the horror of that night and the appalling negligence that contributed to the worst human-made disaster in recorded history.
How green are the ‘childless by choice’?
Laura S. Scott has surveyed and interviewed more than 170 people for her Childless by Choice Project. “I’m keenly interested in the process of decision-making,” she says. “How do we get from assuming parenthood for ourselves to the point where we’re saying, “No kids, thank you!’?” She shares what she’s learned in a new book, Two Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice, and in a forthcoming documentary.
This evolutionary choice
What to do? You’re in an organization or process you see isn’t working, but you suspect or know that people involved are assuming that change is impossible. Not an abstract question by any measure. Like me, you may frequently find yourself there.
Greece on edge of the abyss
For several months now the eyes of world are focused on Greece, the “weak link” in the eurozone economy, as the country is fighting to survive against bankruptcy over soaring deficits (standing at 14% of GDP), astronomical debt (at a whopping 130% of GDP), and—more important than anything else–a collapsing productive sector. In many ways, the Greek saga has been worth following because the economic aspects involved merely represent the mirror image of everything we have associated politics with in the age of financialization.
How we wrecked the oceans
Like the Indo-Aryan God Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson is here to turn your comfortable, complacent Mental World upside-down. He’s able to do that because we are destroying the Physical World—in this case, the Earth’s Oceans.