Guy McPherson's blog

by Guy R. McPherson, Keith Farnish, Dave Pollard, and Sharon Astyk
Indebtedness is a form of servitude, usually involuntary, and, in extreme cases imprisonment. Consider, for example, current rates of interest, usurious compared to what savers earn on their savings in the same banks that charge that interest. Many religious organizations loath interest rates as immoral [...]

Prescription for the Planet was written by Tom Blees and published in 2008. It was recommended to me, with a strong sense of urgency, by a couple friends. It is written in a very compelling style, which is too bad because it suckers people into the kind of wishing thinking for which we’ve become infamous [...]

It’s a boy! And a girl! And another girl!
One of the three goats we’re tending had triplets last night. This morning, Ruby and the as-yet-unnamed kids are doing well. Our infrastructure has passed another test. More importantly, we were witness to the miracle of life. And not just once, but three times.
That’s right, I used [...]

According to economists, the beauty of globalization is worldwide access to materials and cheap (or free) labor to bring the materials to powerful countries. We provide garbage, pollution, and low wages — or, in the “best” cases we enslave workers — and we obtain materials and finished goods. This is the rising economic tide that [...]

You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game. Those kernels are my favorite descriptors of the Three Laws of Thermodynamics. Respectively, the clauses mean (1) energy is conserved (First Law), (2) entropy never decreases, thus precluding perpetual motion machines (Second Law), and (3) it is impossible to cool [...]

This headline at today’s version of Energy Bulletin caught my eye: Are cities sustainable in a post-peak oil world?
The editors at Energy Bulletin, reflecting contemporary culture, clearly do not understand sustainability. At every level, from the individual through the culture and even through the species, ours is a transient existence. We should be focused on [...]

Some doors are closed. We will no longer observe long-term growth of the industrial economy. In fact, any growth reported by the government or media is suspect at this point, and probably a result of the age-old fudging-the-numbers trick. We have entered the age of contraction. The days of access to the inexpensive fossil fuels [...]

The cover of William Catton’s 1980 book, Overshoot, includes the following definitions:
carrying capacity: maximum permanently supportable load.
cornucopian myth: euphoric belief in limitless resources.
drawdown: stealing resources from the future.
cargoism: delusion that technology will always save us from
overshoot: growth beyond an area’s carrying capacity, leading to
crash: die-off.
Most people to whom I speak do not believe these definitions [...]

We’ve all played the “what if” game, and specifically the one with a timeline. What if I had six months to live? Would I live differently? Would I see somebody, or some place? How would I “make my peace” with the world and those I love?
Let’s kick it up a notch. It’s not one of [...]