If you'd like, I'm what you'd call an ex-(aspiring) filmmaker, an early vanguard of what promises to be, in one way or another, an eventual mass exodus from the film and television industries. I won't go into my reasoning behind film and television's future demise here, but suffice to say, if left to its own devices, the future of film and television is in the hands of peak oil … [Read more...]
Reviews
Reviews of books, films, TV shows, and websites.
Consumer worldview not as entrenched as you think
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...]
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...]