Guy McPherson's blog

by Peter Kim Business for agriculture is roaring. Roughly 70 million tons of apples are produced every year, competing with the production of some of the largest tech products. Many companies are taking advantage of the growing sustainable energy industry, which adds pressure to local and small businesses. This unique graphic helps illustrate the comparison [...]

by John Rember 1. For most of my life, I’ve been a teacher of rhetoric, which means that I’ve taught writers how to take difficult or unpopular ideas and get them across to people who don’t want to think about them. Usually those people were my students, and the most difficult and unpopular idea I [...]

by John Day What is your energy descent plan? To develop personal, family and community energy descent plans, we need to have an idea of the overall context. The overall context is very hard to sort out, because there is no continuous curve to extrapolate. We have to look to what has been done in [...]

I’ve long accepted the words of Hunter S. Thompson in The Proud Highway: “We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of True Romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do [...]

by John Duffy at Grow Food, Raise Hell Since the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City and around the US and the globe, there has been a constancy of criticism coming from the entrenched establishment and its would-be supporters. It’s easy enough to ignore the banality and mindlessness of the [...]

Self-indulgence is only one of many advantages associated with having a blog of my own. In a rare attempt to avoid drawing further attention to myself, I’ll not list the others. At least, not now. As regular readers know by now, I’m a lifelong educator. In fact, the most common insult hurled my way by [...]

by Mark Motive at Plan B Economics The world is experiencing the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression. So why is oil hovering around $100/bbl? And as a gold investor, why should you care about oil? Some might point to developments in the Middle East as the reason for high oil prices. However, I [...]

I delivered two TED-style talks at the 2011 International Conference on Sustainability, Transition and Culture Change in Bellaire, Michigan. The presentations embedded below were delivered to the few dozen people remaining at the conference on its fourth day, Sunday, 13 November. The first video clip describes my personal journey in the usual, self-indulgent manner, and [...]

by Sandra Long Originally, this essay was intended to be a cozy, feel-good list of suggested activities to help make spending time with disparate individuals within our communities more mutually beneficial, satisfying, and productive. Indeed, the word “community” is rooted in the Latin words “munus” (the gift) and cum (together, among each other). Many peoples’ [...]