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2. February 2012

95 Comments

Toward an economy of Earth

We need to develop a new economy because the current version is not working. The industrial economy is destroying every aspect of the living planet. And, as it turns out, we need a living planet for our own survival. In this essay, I briefly describe the horrors of the current interconnected, globalized, planet-destroying house of [...]

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28. January 2012

9 Comments

Comedian Louis CK comments on civilization

Louis CK’s hysterically funny commentary on civilization is presented without further comment.

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26. January 2012

32 Comments

Open thread

With thanks to Peter Kim for his thoughtful and atypical contribution, I am offering this space for commentary on items unrelated to his post.

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20. January 2012

48 Comments

Comparing apples to Apple

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 [...]

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14. January 2012

60 Comments

Last Days, Last Words

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 [...]

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9. January 2012

48 Comments

Personal choices in uncertain times

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 [...]

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4. January 2012

53 Comments

Taking a hike

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 [...]

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28. December 2011

64 Comments

Occupy: Embrace what you are!

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 [...]

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23. December 2011

73 Comments

Identity crisis

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 [...]

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18. December 2011

73 Comments

Peak oil, the new boom-bust cycle and gold

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 [...]

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