Water

These fish and shellfish are delicious, healthful, and can be eaten with a clean conscience. Still, there's something missing in my line-up in recent years, and my customers and I miss it terribly: local, wild salmon. Not long ago, Chinook salmon pulled from our cold, clean offshore waters, constituted up to 50 percent of my business. Today: zilch, nothing. That's because there hasn't been a commercial salmon season in California and Oregon for the last two years.

The National Intelligence Council has released a report on the expected effects of climate change to the Caribbean region. This 21 page report is entitled Mexico, The Caribbean and Central America: The Impact of Climate Change to 2030: Geopolitical Implications (NIC Conference Report, Jan. 2010). The report is authored by a team of private researchers under the Global Climate Change Research Program contract with the CIA’s Office of the Chief Scientist.

- The Femivore’s dilemma
- Sharon Astyk: Poultry is a feminist issue?
- Global hunt for phosphates is on
- Vandana Shiva: Water wisdom

A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-China's foreign trade

-Matt Simmons: Oil shortage spills into water
-Photographer Burtynsky recent focus on water rooted in political power, control
-Water and the War on Terror

-Health: the challenge of improving nutrition
-Small family farms in tropics can feed the hungry and preserve biodiversity
-Jonathan Safran Foer: the truth about fish farming
-Scientists unite to combat water scarcity; solutions yield more crop per drop in drylands
-Potatoes, Not Just Pistons, Take Root in Detroit
-She Farms
-New Investments in Agriculture Likely to Fail Without Sharp Focus on Small-Scale 'Mixed' Farmer

-Does Facebook deserve the hell it’s catching from Greenpeace?
-Saudi Arabia to export solar power soon, US says
-Energy expert Lovins brings conservation message
-The new wave: Harnessing the power of the ocean

-Feinstein's Water Bomb
-School districts ax teachers, blame state for financial meltdown
-No money? No library certification in Hull
-Recession Tightens Grip on State Tax Revenues

-American Blitzkrieg: loving the German war machine to death
-This isn't Falklands II
-Yemen's water crisis eclipses al Qaeda threat

-How Wrong Is the IPCC?
-Bill Gates: the Most Important Climate Speech of the Year
-Team Finds Subtropical Waters Flushing Through Greenland Fjord
-Oil firms drop group lobbying for US climate bill

-War at Home: The Local Eco-Warriors Making a Big Noise
-Brock Dolman on water: "Basins of relations: reverential rehydration revolution"
-Pathways to Re-Localisation with Joel Salatin
-Die Transition Towns-Bewegung – Städte und Menschen im Wandel
-Environmentalists launch low-carbon 'churches in transition'
-Could chicken manure help curb climate change?

One way of looking at our current set of predicaments is that we've been on a binge, consuming energy considerably faster than it can be captured and stored by Earth's ecosystems. While fossil fuels once appeared limitless (and still do to deniers of peak oil), and though we're literally bathed in energy (in the form of sunlight), the disappearance of the fossil-fuel storehouse accumulated over millions of years isn't something that can be replaced with anything nearly as convenient as fossil fuels.

It is widely acknowledged that greenhouse gas emission-fueled climate change is having a profound and negative impact on fresh water systems around the world. ... What is less understood is that our collective abuse and displacement of fresh water is also a serious cause of climate change and global warming.

Frankly, when I first learned about peak oil, I was a bit freaked out. But after time, a little too much wine, a lot of research, and some productive action, I recovered, and went on to slowly change my attitude, expectations, and lifestyle to accommodate a radically different reality from the one I previously knew.