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 [...]
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 [...]
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Book Review: The Living Landscape: How to Read and Understand it Patrick Whitefield Permanent Publications 2009 334pp 48 color photos When I first saw in the recent Permaculture Magazine that Patrick Whitefield had written a book on reading the landscape I became very excited and thought, “That’s probably a book David Holmgren would have liked [...]
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 [...]
The Real Perils of Human Population Growth by David and Marcia Pimentel The present world population of 6.7 billion is projected by the United Nations to increase to 9 billion and may rise to as many as 11 billion by 2050. Even if a worldwide policy of two children per couple (instead of the current [...]
Thursday, December 11, 2008
The Long Descent- A Users Guide to the End of the Industrial Age John Michael Greer New Society Publishers 2008 John Michael Greer has written a fascinating and engaging, but also contradictory and perplexing account of how he sees the industrial age ending. His primary thesis is that collapse will not come as a sudden, [...]
Thanks to Adam Grubb (Fenderson), founder of Energy Bulletin for sending me the link to David Holmgren’s new site Future Scenarios- Mapping the cultural implications of Peak Oil and Climate Change, which is launched today. You can read the press release here. The site is an important new resource developing the ideas of permaculture co-founder [...]
[Update: See John Feeney's excellent response to Monbiot here.] A few people have pointed me to George Monbiot’s recent article on population in the Guardian. While it is welcome that Monbiot addresses the issue I wanted to reply because I found it really disappointing, failing to join the dots and in some ways misleading. The [...]
Consciousness for Sustainability The discussion of the “Back to Nature” series has been looking at developmental models of human behaviour, with a view to seeing what light, of any, such approaches can shed on the perplexing question: Why do so many people seem to be in denial, or to be unable to grasp the reality [...]