skip to Main Content

When — not if — TSHTF

As I’ve said and written too many times to count, the Greatest Depression is just getting started. The stock markets have experienced a bear-market rally analogous to the 48 percent rally of 1929-1930. But contemporary unemployment figures indicate serious structural damage to the industrial economy, and even mainstream pundits have started to figure it out: “Most of the jobs lost will never come back.”
Duh.

Read More..

Investing in Durability

Durability has always been a wise investment. Now is the perfect time to make a personal investment in durability, for myriad reasons. For one thing, most sellers still think fiat currency is valuable.
Read More..

Illegitimi non carborundum

I love the Socratic aspect of academia, and it’s the part I do best. I supervise nine independent-study projects this semester, with a total of ten students. Most of them have spent a weekend at the mud hut, or soon will. Indeed, I’m just back from the mud hut, where I spent the weekend with one of the students, the poet in resident at the renowned University of Arizona Poetry Center. He called the trip “transformative.” I meet regularly with all the students, probing and pushing until they do more and better work than any of us thought possible. Ditto for the small, hard-working herd of graduate students I advised and mentored during two wonderful decades.

Read More..

Community, community, community

As we pass from the industrial age to the post-carbon era, the mantra of real-estate agents comes to mind. But the important factor isn’t so much “location, location, location” as “community, community, community.” The latter can be created in any location. Well, except for those locations the United States bombs into the stone age. It’s tough to build community when the U.S. military is carpet-bombing the ‘hood.

Read More..

The Greatest Depression, Briefly Described

We've built a set of living arrangements that relies on infinite access to a finite resource. That set of ill-conceived living arrangements is comprehensive, including capture and delivery of water, production and delivery of food, construction of shelter, the systems of health care, education, and finance, our sense of community (or absence thereof), and thousands of attributes we take for granted on a daily basis.
Read More..

A friend in need …

Nearly three years ago, I rounded up 30 people for a conversation. The goal: create a community of friends who would survive and perhaps even thrive during the post-carbon years ahead. The conversation lasted about 18 months, after which we were down to 3 of us (counting my dog).

Read More..
Back To Top