Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In uncertain economic times, people are going to be less interested in something that’s intellectually interesting or idealistic, and they’re going to be much more interested in something that will help them to keep going and feed themselves and take care of their family…
Reduce your consumption. Increase your awareness. Use berms/swales/mulch. Use infiltration as well as storage techniques. Build healthy soil. Change your plant palette. Bucket in the shower. Greywater-plumb your laundry (and consider guerilla greywater too). Use found materials as shade devices. And use rain barrels. Do all of the above in combination, and move into the gardens of the future.
First of all, we have a very fragile economy that could come apart, almost at a moment’s notice. Then we have the political situation in the Middle East, which is forcing oil prices up and which could in turn cause the economy to come apart at the seams at any moment. So putting all those things together, it’s a very, very volatile situation. I think 2011 is going to be an interesting year… in the Chinese sense…
My own argument, which I’ve been making for some years, and which has come to have some little currency in at least some areas of agricultural planning, is that we should turn it around and presume failure. That is, we should ask ourselves “what strategies are most effective and least risky in failure situations…given that systems failures happen all the time.”…It creates, in the end a different way of looking at our world, and one, I would argue, we desperately need.
As I entered the Fred Flinstone structure that characterizes the convention center in Palm Springs, I was intensely curious about what kind of people would come to The Prophet’s Conference on 2012. It was odd enough that I was there. Such an expedition into the high dessert for a weekend of lectures by speakers dispensing insight into the Mayan prophecy required serious wu wu credentials.
I did have a journalist’s curiosity and, having reported mostly from the doomer’s corner concerning planetary demise, I thought there might be interesting parallels in the prophecy corner.
We need to evaluate the potential for a nuclear future in light of the disaster in Japan. This was not unpredictable, and should have been accounted for in any realistic assessment of nuclear potential. It cannot realistically be described as a black swan event.
Human behaviour can easily turn what should be a one in one hundred thousand reactor-year event in to something all too likely within a human lifespan. Nuclear power may allow us to cushion the coming decline in fossil fuel availability, but only at a potentially very high price. (Excerpts)
– Heinberg in Totnes: “The End of Growth” (video)
– What is “Gross National Happiness” ? (video)
– In China, to get rich is not always glorious
– What the Fight Against Measles Can Teach Environmentalists
Localism, as has been discussed here in the past, is the idea that central government should be made smaller for ideological reasons, and that power is dispersed to local councils and communities instead. While in some areas of life this is really important, and key for a successful Transition, in terms of climate change, it is a disaster.
That is a much bigger project even that conversion to small farms and agro-ecology. That requires that we care about other people enough to make changes and sacrifices, that we take the right to food seriously.
It’s been nearly six months since BP Plc.’s runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, which caused the largest unintentional offshore spill on record, was finally deemed “effectively dead.” And those six months have brought almost as many books on the disaster. Cavnar’s book has a particular ring of authenticity, and I suspect that’s because he’s the only one of the above authors to have spent a career in the oil and gas drilling business.
One could argue that the principles common in addiction recovery hold much wisdom for a transition process. To truly “recover” from an addiction one must go through the transition of recognizing first that one’s way of life is not working—the compulsion with the behavior or substance is getting in the way of one’s relationships, health, future well-being, and growth. In other words, one recognizes their desire to consume is insatiable and destructive, and a change is needed.
Being more efficient in using resources means that we are able to create more complex structures that use those resources faster. It is the so called “Jevons paradox” in its strongest form.
