Culture & Behavior

Virtue, fashion and climate change

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The current system will consume what we have in resources and erode what we have in skill until there is a catastrophe close to home enough for power to know that it must react, or lose power. Distant catastrophes have no effect. Moreover the market, contrary to the doctrine, sends no signals. The primary engine is oil and oil prices are protected. The other significant marker is food price and European and American economies have protectionist (cheap) food policies. So supply and demand are most deeply hidden where they are most important. Important scarcities are concealed, while frivolous drivers of spending are made extra-ordinarily visible!

Peak Moment 199: Peak oil blues – we’re all bozos on this bus

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“My own reaction seemed so crazy to me,” says psychologist Kathy McMahon of her response to Peak Oil. Wondering if she was the only “wacko”, she started the Peak Oil Blues blog to explore her own and readers’ responses. As the “Peak Shrink,” Kathy formulated a delightfully tongue-in-cheek “Panglossian Disorder” — an unrealistic optimism about the future.
(UPDATE – transcript now online)

UK riots’ resource and cultural roots: an in-the-trenches report

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Youngsters are running riot around the country. Some of us, who work in education and on the ‘street’, predicted and warned of this possible eventuality. It has happened. Our kids have been trained to consume; have been thwarted by lack of progression and aspiration. …. The middle classes didn’t bother about the ‘ghettos’ of housing estates where such behaviours have been going for years, and, us, working in these areas, just knew that eventually something would kick off. Well, it has.

Riots, disaster, and recovery – Aug 12

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-An open letter to David Cameron’s parents
-Why we need to stop trying to ‘save the planet’ and just realise our place in it
-New Zealand quake: Christchurch ‘to be garden city’
-Riots are no reason to surrender our rights
-Shopocalypse Now
-The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom
-Can the Aftermath of Disaster Be Beautiful?

Salvaging Health

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Contemporary American culture has a self-defeating fondness for turning every issue into a conflict between absolute opposites denouncing one another in moral terms, and that’s heavily influenced one of the dimensions of everyday life that all of us have to deal with–the question of health care. The current standoff between the medical industry and alternative healing is subject to an unexpected wild card, though, because the two sides differ drastically in their vulnerability to the effects of peak oil.

Communicating the financial crisis in 7 easy steps

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Young people in Greece and Spain are worried, angry, and questioning the financial power structure that is causing economic hardship in their countries. The financial system has shown over the last few years that it has the potential to wreak havoc in all of our lives. How do we make sure that we find good ways to talk about this topic, especially as it is so timely and important, so that it becomes part of the Transition message?

President Obama’s (hoped for) “Amaze Speech”

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Fellow Americans, this evening I have a special message for you. It’s an unprecedented and surprising message, but ultimately it will resonate with your common sense, good will, and patriotic spirit. It turns out that the recessionary cloud we’re under does have an extremely valuable silver lining. I know; it sounds like something only a politician would say, but wait. I think you’ll be surprised to hear my explanation.