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 [...]
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, 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, [...]
Book Review Reinventing Collapse- The Soviet Example and American Prospects Dmitry Orlov New Society 2008 When I met Bill Mollison at the International Permaculture Convergence in Croatia three years ago, all he wanted to talk about it seemed was cannibalism. He had traveled in Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union and told me [...]
Book Review Crash Course- Preparing for Peak Oil by Zachary Nowak Green Door Publishing 2008 Peak Oil is upon us, and collective action on a large scale seems unlikely. Technical solutions are chimerical. Each of us must decide what the future may hold and begin working on a plan to face that future. When Zachary [...]
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Bantry beekeeper Tim Rowe delivered his first public talk last Monday night in Bantry on a topic that has been preoccupying him for some time- the consequences of overpopulation. This fascinating and enlightening talk took us through the issue facing the world as the human species runs riot and reaches more than 6.7 billion in [...]
[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 [...]
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Bursting point: the world’s unsustainable population from the latest edition of Sustainability Magazine by Graham Strouts www.zone5.org “It is a simple logical truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death-rates. It is hard [...]