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8. March 2010

36 Comments

Going back to the land in the Age of Entitlement

This essay is rife with the type of self-indulgence I try to avoid, often unsuccessfully. It’s a summary of my life’s story. It begins by insulting the readers, before the end of this first paragraph, and it ends with an unavoidably maundering, self-absorbed synopsis of recent, personal events. I doubt it’s worth your time to [...]

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1. March 2010

16 Comments

Throwing off the shackles of debt

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 [...]

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22. February 2010

59 Comments

Prescription for (Killing) the Planet

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 [...]

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17. February 2010

14 Comments

Goatlets, updated

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 [...]

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14. February 2010

23 Comments

Viral collapse

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 [...]

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5. February 2010

46 Comments

Entropy revisited

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 [...]

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3. February 2010

21 Comments

City living in a post-peak world

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 [...]

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28. January 2010

23 Comments

Where do we go from here?

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 [...]

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25. January 2010

19 Comments

Wanted: two miracles

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 [...]

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18. January 2010

19 Comments

If it suddenly ended tomorrow, could you somehow adjust to the fall?

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 [...]

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