Solutions

Woody Tasch has thought a lot about money: what it does, how it moves, and how to connect people who have it with people who need it...But he found that even socially responsible investing couldn't do much to fix an economy that focused too much on extraction and consumption and too little on preservation and restoration.

-Female farmers find goats a good, but busy choice
-Chickens come home to roost in backyards around the USA
-Bite-Sized: Small cattle make big impression
-Saving The Bed-Stuy Farm: Choose Better Nutrition, Not Demolition

-Go forth and multiply a lot less
-The new wave of urban farming (and fresh food from small spaces!)
-Urban farms a fertile idea
-Summary Presentation for Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
-The next Industrial Revolution will be people-powered
-Sustainability and Social Justice: Do the Math
-Greening Portland - Your City How To

Many of the articles that discuss the causes and effects of humanity's unprecedented energy use are entirely theoretical, offering little practical guidance for the everyday reader. This essay offers respite to all the people who confront our collective energy problems with a furrowed brow and an expression that is puzzled by the continuous stream of theoretical insights that explain our current circumstances.

John Michael Greer has officially established himself as an institution within the peak oil community. Truly one of the finest minds working on the predicament of modern-day industrial civilization, he is so well-read in so many fields that he regularly gains access to insights that utterly elude his contemporaries. For this he is treasured by a growing number of loyal readers—and, I suspect, hated by equally many fellow bloggers who wish that they could be half as good.

Our current food systems are precarious and vulnerable to external ‘shocks’. A combination of one or more external factors, such as extreme weather conditions, global conflict or trade disputes could easily disrupt the continuity of food supplies unless we make fundamental changes to the way we farm, process, distribute and eat our food over the next 20 years.

-UN links climate with hunger
-Hungry for change
-The Links Between Food Security And Climate Change
-Agriculture in the Climate Change Negotiations, Platform Issue Paper
-The one thing depleting faster than oil is the credibility of those measuring it
-Promoting climate-smart agriculture

-Program could match Colo.'s next generation of farmers with land, expertise
-Feeding the city
-The Nitrogen Fix: Breaking a Costly Addiction
-Aid Groups, Farmers Collaborate to Re-Green Sahel

It is well over a decade now since environmental concerns became pressing enough to command attention in almost all realms of intellectual and practical affairs, and well over four decades since environmental ethics developed as a recognizable field of study in response to a growing set of global problems. Yet in contrast to this broad trend, environmental concerns have remained at the farthest margins of bioethics. As improbable as it seems, bioethics has remained tuned out and disconnected from the ecological realities of our current world.

In the Happiness Hypothesis , psychology professor Jonathan Haidt compares human brain/behavior to a man riding an elephant. There exists a complex choreography between our newer rational cortex (the 'man'), and our older, more primitive brain structures (the 'elephant').

This past week I read with fascination the posts by Sally Erickson on “The Culture of Pretend: How Psychotherapy Keeps our Communities Sick” and Kathy McMahon’s response “Bozos On The Couch: What Is ‘Good Therapy’ In A Time of Collapse?” As I’ve pondered these posts, I’m compelled to respond to several incongruities and offer missing pieces that I believe must be added to the discourse.

I read Sally Erickson’s post on Energy Bulletin, and as a clinical psychologist, I gotta tell you, I found it sort of depressing. It wasn’t her criticism of psychotherapy. I understand her point about psychotherapy not healing a sick culture. James Hillman made the same point in “One Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and The World’s Getting Worse.” But golly, if we’re here anyway, shouldn’t we have some role as Peak Shrinks while the world as we know it collapses around us?

-Building With Whole Trees
-From TED: Edward Burtynsky photographs the landscape of oil
-Straight Talk for the Planetary Era: A Trio of Book Reviews
-Eric Sanderson pictures New York -- before the City
-Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth sequel stresses spiritual argument on climate

The claim that market forces will inevitably take care of energy shortfalls due to peak oil is common enough these days. Unfortunately for such optimistic notions, there's reason to think that in an environment of economic contraction caused by geological limits to energy, market forces may well push money away from any investments that could help the situation.