Culture & Behavior

The Rumbling of Distant Thunder

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After well over a decade of peak oil events, it may come as a surprise to see one break new ground. Still, last weekend’s “Age of Limits” conference managed that, by focusing steadfastly on what happens when current efforts to evade the limits to growth inevitably fail — and in the process, it allowed a glimpse at certain unexpected realities in and around the peak oil movement. With an uneasy eye toward dark clouds, the Archdruid explains.

Values and the next generation

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…perhaps the next generation will work to coordinate and jointly design interventions, communications, and campaigns that discourage values such as money, image, and status and that instead provide many opportunities to pursue values such as personal growth, close connections to other people, and contributions to the larger world.

Real Homes: Small, frugal, and green

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It’s a perfect time to take a look at what it means to own a home, to make a home, to rent a home. This is an opportunity to take the best from the old ways of doing things, and from the new, and to define “home” in a way that doesn’t place unsustainable burdens on resources, both natural and fiscal.

Oil addiction generates denial

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Whenever the U.S. supply of imported oil is threatened with interruption (or if the U.S. economy should recover much), the global marketplace bids up the oil price, and the politically sensitive price of gasoline will rise in step and depress consumer spending. Whenever the world oil price is high enough, it can cause an economic crisis. In this case global demand may contract sharply, as it did in 2009. The price can never rise for long above what the global oil market can bear.

The great chemical reaction: life and death of Gaia

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CaSiO3 + CO2 -> CaCO3 + SiO2

The silicate weathering reaction is what keeps “Gaia” alive – better said, it is Gaia. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that Gaia is a goddess and that, somehow, she cares about us. No, it is more correct to say that Gaia doesn’t give a damn about us – which is what you’d expect from a chemical reaction, after all. It is us who have been tampering with this chemical reaction and it will be us who will have to face the consequences.

In the end, we can’t hope to force the planet to do what we want it to do. So, we must learn to live with the flow of the Earth’s cycles. For that, we must know a little chemistry. But more than chemistry, we must learn our limits, otherwise we won’t survive for long.

My town in Transition (transcription)

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My role in Transition started in 2005 when a friend and myself started showing some films about peak oil, about the idea that we are reaching the end of an age of cheap energy and all that that has made possible. We’re entering a time of increasingly volatile energy prices and that what we need to do with focus, determination, optimism and a sense of possibility is design the way that we’re going to get away from that.

When we started, I was imagined it was an environmental thing. More and more I see it as a cultural thing. [Transcription of a TEDx Talk]

Conceptualizing post-capitalist economics

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Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein is a well-researched discussion of the history of money, capitalist economics and the worldwide movement for economic relocalization. Part I explores the profound effect the institution of money has on human thinking and psychology, as well as direct links between our monetary system, the current economic crisis and the impending global ecological crisis. Parts II and III explore possible alternatives to a debt-based monetary system that has outlived its usefulness.