A worldview is a basic way of interpreting things and events that pervades a culture so thoroughly that it becomes that culture's concept of reality — what is good, what is important, what is sacred, and what is real. It is so invasive that it is invisible. It is simply assumed to be true apart from any inquiry into its validity. If a worldview maintains that the emperor is … [Read more...]
Books
The best books on peak oil, climate disruption, economic crisis, and the ways to deal with each as a society and on a personal, family, or community level.
Plenty of trouble: Feeding a climate changed world after peak oil
Nothing is more precious than balance, stability, and sustainability. Today, we’re hanging by our fingernails to a skyrocket of intense insane change, and it’s the only way of life we’ve ever known. Joel Bourne has spent his life riding the rocket. He grew up on a farm, and studied agronomy at college. But sharp changes were causing many farmers to go bankrupt and taking over … [Read more...]
Inspiration for the burned-out localizer
While Marx predicted that socialism would follow capitalism, Richard Heinberg predicts the next thing will be localism. "All roads appear to lead eventually to localism; the questions are: how and when shall we arrive there, and in what condition? (And, how local?)," Heinberg writes in his latest book, Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels. (We received a review copy of … [Read more...]
With ten billion coming, sustainable is not enough
Stephen Emmott is a chief techno-wizard at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. His brilliant young scientists are doing research in complex natural systems. Their objective is to invent miracles. They want to program ordinary cells to perform photosynthesis, so we can produce food from sunlight, without plows and seeds. Agriculture can't feed ten billion. The goal is … [Read more...]
Dollars are worthless without crude oil
In my previous post I drew some parallels between energy and money – and more specifically, energy and banking – and pointed out that when money is at stake, the presence of energy is likely lurking somewhere in the shadows. It was mostly hypotheses and observations I was throwing around about energy and banking, but when it comes to energy and money, one can hardly overstate … [Read more...]