Energy Bulletin

- In Transition 2 (trailer of new Transition film)
- The New Hippies
- Time for Transition in Falls Church
- Simplicidad para tiempos difíciles
- Backyard chooks (chickens) cracking the egg market in Australia

In response to a growing realisation that neo-liberal capitalism is morally and literally bankrupt, Britain’s political leadership have provided three visions of ethical capitalism for us to aspire to. So, is there such a thing as ethical capitalism? And why is this question being asked now?

Mitt seems to believe what most Americans believe, which is that those on social welfare programs are doing just awesome, while the real victims are middle class Americans. This is a pretty funny idea, but it isn't just Mitt's. The notion that lower and middle class Americans are struggling more than the truly poor is not an uncommon one by people who look on social welfare programs with hostility. If there's anything really different about his assumptions it is the very funny classing of the desperately poor with the extremely rich as having a lot in common.

Last December, after more than 40 years teaching at the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) at the University of British Columbia, Bill Rees gave his last lecture as a full-time professor. As one of his last students, I found his class captivating, and in following up with many of his former students, realized they felt the same way. His career defined the modern science of sustainability, and touched the lives of many, inspiring individuals to devote their lives towards adapting our species to live responsibly on this planet.

Public anger at the 2008 Wall Street bailout, concerns about debt, and a deep and pervasive fear that another financial crash is just a matter of time create an important moment of opportunity for a long overdue public conversation about the purpose of financial services and the necessary steps to assure that the financial sector fulfills that purpose.

Why would a fisher care about the forest? The person to ask is Shigeatsu Hatakeyama, an oyster farmer from Kesennuma in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture. We can learn a great deal from Hatakeyama. He is one of those rare types of people who can see beyond the day-to-day preoccupation of how to make a living — in his case, with an oyster farm — and instead embrace the world around them.

The recent political struggles between Hollywood and networked culture underscore a profoundly disruptive fact: exclusive ownership rights are no longer as valuable as they once were. What really matters is the flow. Increasingly, knowledge and other intangible things are more valuable when they can circulate -- when they can be freely copied, shared and modified via open platforms.

A call is going out to every British citizen who wants the financial sector to clean up their act. Move your money from the big banks to local, ethical or mutual alternatives and send them a message in a language they'll understand.

As the saying goes, it is always darkest right before it goes completely black.

Rejoice in this: Seeds of futurity require the darkness within soil to dream.

America stands at a historic inflection point. The economic engine that carried our nation out of World War II, to then outperform the Soviets, is incapable of meeting the challenge of the twenty-first century. While the United States and some other Western economies are in the throes of a rare and disruptive debt crisis, the global economy is in the midst of three additional challenges: rapid economic inclusion, ecological depletion, and a resilience deficit. Though distinct, these four crises are inseparable in practical terms, forming a singular strategic test facing the United States. Simply put, the post-Cold War international economic system is fundamentally unsustainable.

Urban farmer. Heirloom. Food security. Methane digester. These are just a few of the terms you'll find in the Lexicon of Sustainability, a series of portraits that speak the language of a growing movement.

The financial crisis and the Occupy movement have challenged Left-Right distinctions and prompted calls for an entirely new economic order.

The next Marx will produce not a manifesto for the middle class. Rather, the new synthesis will fuse economics and environmentalism in a way that fundamentally reorients both disciplines. Marx pioneered political economy; Marx 2.0 will pioneer planetary economy. It’s not just about greening capitalism, as if enough solar cells and Prii will save the world. Our current economic system has reached its planetary limit.

Scientists seem to be discovering that they can't stick to the old ways any longer. After all, the quality of a paper doesn't reside on the seal of a commercial editor, it is guaranteed by the peer reviewing process. And scientists are doing peer reviewing, not editors. So, scientists tend to publish more and more in "open access journals", which just didn't exist up to not long ago. There is now an "open science movement", and a movement to boycott Elsevier, singled out among the many scientific editors as an especially bad one.

I should be in the woods at this time of year. Instead, because of the unusually warm winter and heavy rains that have left the ground saturated and soggy, rather than frozen and covered with snow, and because I managed to do something to my shoulder chopping wood. (I turn forty this summer, and my assumption is that the two different minor injuries I sustained in about two weeks were the official "the warranty on your body has expired and it will all go to hell now" notice.) I mostly haven't been, but they call me. This is the season of trees on a farm.

The most obvious and promising sign of the new agriculture is the leadership that women are taking in the movement. Women have always played the key role in farming but at least in the last two centuries in America, they have rarely gotten credit for it.

Where will computing go in the coming years? I thought I should find out, so I watched a roundtable and other talks and interviews on the subject (warning: it's pretty dry stuff). I came away underwhelmed. I struggled to figure out what these guys were seeing that I wasn't. I'm not sure I've figured it out. Eventually I came back to the one key issue that's missing from their roundtable conversation---and that of most conversations among engineers in the computing world---limits, both ecological and material.

But to connect with the plants is to connect with the rhythm of the year, to locate yourself in time and space. It is to connect with the neighbourhood you find yourself in and discover, that even though your world has apparently shrunk because of economics and peak oil, it has in fact grown hugely. It has by your attention to detail, brought memory, fragrance, belonging back into your life, as you notice the limes in the churchyard, the sage in the library garden, the butterburr along the highway. Each plant a small universe with its own story to tell, its own medicine to bequeath.

Every week during the growing season, my husband and I cart our family’s grassfed meats to market. We sell pork chops for $11 a pound; ground beef goes for $7.50. Every week, we meet someone who tells us the prices are too high. In fact, at those prices, the average net income for our family members has maxed out at $10 per hour. But part of our job is to hold our chins up and accept weekly admonishment for our inability to produce food as cheaply as it can be found in the grocery store.

For millennia, humans have been interacting closely with nature and building up a wealth of knowledge about effective use and management of local resources critical for securing food, clothing and shelter. As a result, sustainable production systems have emerged over history in many parts of the world, forming so-called “socio-ecological production landscapes” (SEPLs). These landscapes embody many aspects of the green economy concept and provide not only useful indications of how humans and nature have harmoniously interacted in the past, but also guidance on how to transition to sustainable societies built on green economies.

-Rails-to-Trails Conservancy Busts Myth That “Nobody Walks” in Rural America
-What’s the Best Way To Get Users To Embrace Mass Transit? - Make it pleasant? Or make it efficient?
-House Transportation Bill “a March of Horribles”