Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
While Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and President Bush discussed Taiwan, currency rates and North Korea on December 9, a more important and far-reaching development in U.S.-China relations was going on far from the White House.
DETROIT- PAUL WEERTZ lives less than 10 minutes from downtown, but the view from his window is anything but urban. On a warm day this fall, the air was ripe with the smell of fresh-cut hay and manure. In the alley behind his house, bales of hay teetered and listed where garbage cans once stood. Chickens scratched in the yard, near a garage that had been turned into a barn. Mr. Weertz drives a Ford — not a sleek sedan but a rebuilt 1960 tractor.
The Cuban experience with an artifical ‘oil peak’ gives some hope for how a society can re-organise around organic agriculture to avoid the worst possible consequences.
With national grain production down for the fifth consecutive year, China is quickly digesting its grain reserves, which could result in a shortage by 2005, experts warn.
As Peak Oil and its effects become a raging national controversy it’s time everyone reads the story that puts the most serious implications of Peak Oil and Gas into perspective. Your biggest problem is not that your SUV might go hungry, it’s that you and your children might go hungry.
Fuel ethanol distilled from crops such as corn and rapeseed could be the solution for countries seeking an outlet for huge agricultural surpluses.
Sustainable development based on prevailing patterns of resource use is not even theoretically conceivable.
Do we really need to embark upon another risky technological fix to solve the mistakes of a previous one? Instead, we should be looking for solutions that are based on ecological and biological principles and have significantly fewer environmental costs.
Even the most productive sustainable systems imaginable would never sustain large-scale cities, a global economy, and Western material affluence even if all the conventional energy conservation strategies were to be adopted. This is a bitter pill to swallow for Westerners raised on the notion of material progress.
