Update Aug 25th: Brilliant talk by Hans Rosling, in which he explains “Child survival is the new Green”. Book review PeopleQuake by Fred Pearce Eden Project Books 2010 Pbck; 342pp There is a scary book I have a half-share in with a neo-Malthusian friend which contains graphs of the exponential growth curves in population for [...]
Book Review: Whole Earth Discipline An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand Atlantic Books 2009 316pp “Civilization is at risk, but civilization is the problem”. Stewart Brand is one of the iconic founders of the environmental movement, an original old hippy whose influence on the boomer generation should not be understated. With his latest book Whole [...]
Saturday, January 9, 2010
After three weeks of sub-zero temperatures and snow and ice in many parts, Ireland, like much of the rest of Europe, is experiencing considerable difficulty in continuing its post-industrial lifestyle. Supplies of salt for the roads are stretched, and also gas supplies with industry being told to use coal or oil instead. So far the [...]
Friday, December 18, 2009
Peak Water Civilisation and the World’s Water Crisis Alexander Bell Luath Press 2009 Hardback 208 pp If oil supply peaks and begins to decline times will be hard. Standard of living will decline and people may go hungry but they will be able to adapt by powering down and making do with less. If water [...]
Thursday, November 26, 2009
The flooding was so bad around the city and county of cork last week that I was wondering whether I would actually be able to travel to Kinsale on Tuesday to do my comradely duty and picket the college. As it turned out, the road through Bandon, which had been closed by the floods, was [...]
Tom has just blogged here about a sweepstake he initiated five years ago with myself, Rob Hopkins, Tom’s partner Ruth and a couple of other friends. We each made a prediction on what we thought the price of oil would be in five years time. My first thought when Tom told me the five years [...]
The view expressed in recently reviewed books like Holmgren’s Energy Scenarios and Chamberlin’s The Transition Timeline is that peak oil will be followed by a long, slow decline- Energy Descent- rather than an abrupt collapse. For an alternative view, Dmitri Orlov, author of the acclaimed Reinventing Collapse puts the case for sudden collapse very well [...]
Book Review- Future Scenarios How Communities Can adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change David Holmgren Chelsea Green 2009 When I first saw David Holmgren’s Future Scenarios talk and slide at a permaculture design course in Slovenia in 2005 I was still quite new to the concept of peak oil and listened transfixed at what [...]
Energy Descent Pathways – Post Carbon Cities, Transition Towns and Eco Villages This is the introduction to week 8 of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Center in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on [...]
When Technology Fails- A Manual for Self- Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency Matthew Stein Chelsea Green 2000, 2008 494 pp Matthew Stein’s massive survival manual When Technology Fails packs into one volume everything you need to survive “The long Emergency”- (a phrase later used by Kunstler in his 2005 book of that name [...]