Greece, the UK, and the EU – debt boils over – Apr 12
-Greece and the Fatal Flaw in an IMF Rescue
-UK household savings lowest in 40 years say ONS
-Sovereign debt crisis at ‘boiling point’, warns Bank for International Settlements
-Greece and the Fatal Flaw in an IMF Rescue
-UK household savings lowest in 40 years say ONS
-Sovereign debt crisis at ‘boiling point’, warns Bank for International Settlements
Let’s suppose we have two societies; call them, oh, Relocalista, and Singularitaria. The Relocalistas are a nation of vegetarian gardeners and farmers – they live entirely by the produce from their intensive raised bed gardens and fields, which they carefully double-dig with iron spades which they obtain from their village blacksmiths by bartering some of their garden produce with him or her; I speculate that the Relocalistas would insist on having female blacksmiths too. … Meanwhile, Singularitaria is an entirely automated civilization – there are no people at all.
(Reply to John Michael Greer)
We cannot expect our government leaders to help society transition off of heavy oil dependence on account of their being controlled by “big business” interests. Therefore, it is up to average citizens to create the reforms that lead into localized economic and social development.
One thing that has always intrigued me about elephants is how the people who drive them manage to control the beast without a harness. There have to be ways, since it can be done, but it cannot be simple. So elephant driving may be seen as as a metaphor for controlling complex systems. What you’ll find below is a talk that I gave on this subject at a recent meeting in Italy. It is not a transcription, but a version written from memory that tries to maintain the style and the sense of what I said.
Lacto fermented sauerkraut will cure what ails you, tastes great, and the delightful smell will clear a room of normal people.
-Eaarth by Bill McKibben (Review)
-Copenhagen Three Months Later
-We all want to change the world
-Why We All Need to Demand Organic and . . . Worship the Worm (book review)
-Rooftop Gardens and Community Plots Welcome City Bees
-Enduring Farms: Climate Change, Smallholders and Traditional Farming Communities
-She yanks their food chains
-Is it time for Transition Museums?
-Tales from the plot
-‘How We Used to Live’: bringing Transition and oral history together
-Oral History Transcripts (Bristol Floating Harbor)
A group of social and natural scientists and scholars in the humanities is starting the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB, pronounced “mob”). The admittedly ambitious aim is to change human behavior to avoid a collapse of global civilization.
When Eric and I first wrote a letter to Eric’s grandparents, asking them to consider living with us, the response was very mixed. Grandma and Grandpa’s generation of friends and family were mostly very pleased and thrilled – given the bad lot of options available to many of them, finding a compatible home with their grandchildren looked pretty good. Most of them had cared for their parents, and so somewhere inside them, this seemed like a normal relationship. Some of my friends were frankly jealous – they’d lost their own grandparents, and wished for something like what we were going to have.
It’s as indicative as it is ironic that the most popular ideas for a response to the impact of resource depletion on our gargantuan and increasingly unstable technologies involve building even more gargantuan and unstable technologies
A faceoff between two cultural icons, Rosie the Riveter and HAL 9000, points toward another approach.
With the recent exoneration of Phil Jones in the UEA ‘ClimateGate’ kerfuffle, the key lesson emerging from the whole thing is not that the science of climate change is somehow profoundly flawed, but rather that scientists are flawed human beings rather like the rest of us, subject to pomposity, ego, vanity, ill-temper and rudeness.