Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The signs up all over the airport and various places elsewhere in town are calling it Hopenhagen, but everybody I know is calling it Cop-enhagen, which seems far more appropriate. The international media have been giving this lots of coverage, and rightly so.
-This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity
-Oil sands emissions polluting waterways, study finds
-Brown offers £1.2bn in a bid to break climate deadlock
-A Second Life For Orbiting Carbon Observatory?
-Sunspots do not cause climate change, say scientists
-Cooling the Asphalt Jungle
-‘At this rate, Copenhagen will be a disaster’
Okay, so President Obama didn’t run for office to help out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street – or so he said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” show Sunday night. But maybe it didn’t seem like such a bad idea once the election was over.
From modest beginnings as a permaculture class project at a college in Kinsale, Ireland, the Transition movement has spread its message of community resilience and low-carbon living around the world.
Our villages and cities are dying because of intense development. Everywhere in México, the same force is at work. It weakens our villages, sickens and kills their inhabitants. It destroys our communities and makes a mockery of our traditional commons.
To stop the climate crisis, we’re going to have to build a fairer world.
Klimaforum, the people’s conference, has started slowly. Maybe a 1000-2000 of us in many different locations feeling our way into perhaps the defining moment of our life and times which this conference represents and reflect the hopes an fears of our generation in a way that no other I have even been to does. There is a tension and an intensity that I have never felt before.
So, if the question is why can’t we seem to get our shit together when it comes to climate change? then most of the answers I hear seem to fall into one of three categories. It’s because we (or our leaders) are: stuck in distraction and/or denial, greedy, unprincipled and maybe even psychotic or evil or just too stupid to go on living.
Some of us think America is in Big Trouble. The often sarcastic way I cast doubt on government unemployment statistics today may strike you as negative in the extreme, and in a way it is. But the real dilemma we face is simple: are we going to address deep structural problems in our economy? Or are we going to keep lying to ourselves about those problems? How long are we going to pretend they don’t exist?
Many of the issues discussed on this bandwidth are large, long term, and threatening. Consider the three primary society-wide topics of analysis and discourse: climate, energy and the economy. It is my belief these 3 are linked by an underlying cultural growth/debt imperative running into a planet with finite sources and sinks…If you find yourself in a debate about any of these issues you’ll find apathy or you’ll find cognitive biases underlying a polarized opinion.
-Cultivating Resilience: The Shelburne Falls Food Security Plan
-think global : eat local
-The Local Price Premium
-Nitrous oxide concerns cloud future of biofuels
-Regreening Africa
-Community Food Enterprise: Local Success in a Global Marketplace
-Grow $700 of Food in 100 Square Feet!
-N.J.’s food pantries and politics: Hungry people need food– end of discussion
As world leaders meet at Copenhagen to avoid taking action about climate change, it’s crucial to recognize that the industrial world’s repeated failure to confront the limits to growth is woven into the foundations of our collective life. In this first part of three, the Archdruid explores the political barriers that make a failure to meet the challenge of climate change the only option on the table.
