Guy McPherson's blog

Words to give by

I’m fussy about the words I use. Words matter, after all. For example, anarchy is not chaos, though you’d never be able to distinguish the two based on anything presented by the mainstream media. As a further example, I’m averse to any form of the word “sustain” because we don’t and we can’t. I’ve distinguished [...]

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The myth of sustainability

I’m couchsurfing Michigan and somebody posted one of my 15 presentations (so far) on YouTube. It’s an updated version of my September 2011 presentation in Middleville, Michigan and I’m presenting here without further comment. ___________ A few recent interviews associated with my tour of Michigan are posted below: Walking away from empire, Kristine Morris for [...]

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Mike and Karen’s Excellent Adventure

by Mike Sliwa and Karen Sliwa We are retiring so we can travel. That’s the official story we generally tell people if we don’t feel like explaining the whole collapse of civilization spiel. Our close friends and those sympathetic to what we’re trying to accomplish get the real story. We know this might be considered [...]

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A radical in the Age of Denial

I received an email message from somebody who seeks my participation in a “save Arizona” panel (his name has been obscured to protect the guilty): Interesting blog site, Guy. Sorry to learn about your separation from UofA, I think. I really don’t know the school very well. You are a bit of a radical in [...]

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Unwinding

If Ben Bernanke and the fools at the Fed actually thought the industrial economy was recovering, they'd jack up interest rates. When the prime rate is up around 5%, you'll know the industrial economy is back on track. Alternatively, you can monitor the extinction rate of non-human species.

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A transcript from today’s panel discussion

Thanks to a couple long-time readers for attending today's panel discussion, which I described briefly a couple days ago. One of you asked me to post the transcript, so I've cleaned up my notes and posted them below.

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Scale

The many miles and frequent pauses reveal to any sentient animal the sheer lunacy of the living arrangements we've built for ourselves. Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels. Then we ratcheted up the madness to rely on businesses that use, almost exclusively, a warehouse-on-wheels approach to just-in-time delivery of unnecessary devices designed for rapid obsolescence and disposal.

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