Chris Vernon – Net Energy, Energy Scenarios & Climate Change from Feasta on Vimeo.
Tuesday, 28 July 2009
Chris Vernon of The Oil Drum, in Dublin
I'm posting selected talks from the FEASTA conference one by one -- apologies to all those who don't have broadband.
Monday, 27 July 2009
Bia Linn
FADA held the grand opening of our community garden last Saturday, and everything went well. I had done a radio show, press releases and a lot of phone calls to spread the word about this, and I think it paid off – crowds of people came, our network of interested people increased, and everyone seemed to have a great time.
Local poet Des Egan unveiled the wooden sign saying “Bia Linn” (“Our Food”), hand-carved by one of our members. One of our members, a mushroom farmer, gave a presentation on growing your own mushrooms, while another, a nun who has worked in Africa, spoke about Fair Trade. Still another spoke about edible flowers, and I spoke about permaculture. Photographers came from the local newspapers, and The Girl got her picture in the paper.
I was especially pleased with The Girl – as soon as other children started arriving, she led them around the garden in a hand-held chain, telling them, “These are peas – I’ll show you how to take them out of the pods. These are tomatoes – don’t eat the leaves.”
Finally, two musicians set up in the middle of the garden and began playing a mix of traditional and modern folk music and couples danced in the middle of the garden. Picture a young woman singing an Irish-sounding version of Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ About a Revolution,” surrounded by greenery, as children laughed and chased each other between the garden beds. That was our day, and it was good.
Local poet Des Egan unveiled the wooden sign saying “Bia Linn” (“Our Food”), hand-carved by one of our members. One of our members, a mushroom farmer, gave a presentation on growing your own mushrooms, while another, a nun who has worked in Africa, spoke about Fair Trade. Still another spoke about edible flowers, and I spoke about permaculture. Photographers came from the local newspapers, and The Girl got her picture in the paper.
I was especially pleased with The Girl – as soon as other children started arriving, she led them around the garden in a hand-held chain, telling them, “These are peas – I’ll show you how to take them out of the pods. These are tomatoes – don’t eat the leaves.”
Finally, two musicians set up in the middle of the garden and began playing a mix of traditional and modern folk music and couples danced in the middle of the garden. Picture a young woman singing an Irish-sounding version of Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ About a Revolution,” surrounded by greenery, as children laughed and chased each other between the garden beds. That was our day, and it was good.
Tuesday, 21 July 2009
Feasta talk - The Future of our Food Supply
Bruce Darrell – The Future of our Food Supply from Feasta on Vimeo.
Another good talk from the FEASTA conference, by Bruce Darrell.
Monday, 20 July 2009
We were there
I didn’t realise until tonight that this was the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing,* which risks being remembered in the same way we remember other anniversaries like the Woodstock festival, or the “malaise” speech, or even the Berlin Wall coming down.
This event holds an altogether calibre than any of those things, or indeed anything else in history. This was the first time that humans – or any species on Earth, or anywhere else that we know of – travelled through space to land on an alien world. That world may be barren and uninteresting, but that only makes the footprints we left there eternal, a reminder to anyone coming by in a million or billion years from now, “We lived here, and we made it this far. That was the kind of people we were.”
Sorry if this sounds melodramatic, but I’m serious – there was never anything like it, and may never be again. That deserves a moment of remembrance.
I hope that we can pull together enough energy to reach further -- to go to Mars, cast CFCs or some other greenhouse gas into its atmosphere to warm it, and introduce life, if there is none there already. I would love to not see our species keep all its genetic eggs in one planetary basket. Or, those few trips to the Moon might be all there was.
For some reason, even before I remembered the date, The Girl asked me about this very thing:
“Will you and I go into space someday, Papa?”
Oh, I wish, I said, but it takes a lot of work to get someone into space, and we’ve only been able to do it a few times.
“Why?”
Well, I said, it’s quite far to go, and it’s straight up. You know how tired you get even after climbing all the steps. It’s much farther up than that, and there are no steps.
“If I could go, I would want to take a candle, because it’s so dark.”
It is dark, but there are stars, I said, deciding not to go into the issue of air in space.
“I’d like to meet some aliens!”
So would I, I said. But even if we can’t meet them, maybe someday we’ll talk to them.”
“How can we do that?” she asked.
Well, I said, the same way we talk to people on a mobile phone – we can send signals.
“But we don’t even know their house number!”
True, I said – we'll have to call different stars, and see if there's anyone home.
“How will they even know what we are saying?”
Good question, I said. They probably don’t speak English – but two plus two is four everywhere, and everything in the universe is made of the same stuff we are. So we have something in common.
“Do you think someone is listening?” she asked.
I suspect someone is, I said. Maybe someday we’ll hear from them. I hope so.
Moon rise over Australia. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.
*I started to write "moon walk," but ... um ... no.
Thursday, 16 July 2009
Island
We saw this and other islands from a boat in Lough Corrib, near where "The Quiet Man" was filmed. We were told the island, large enough to support a few people, has lain abandoned since the 1930s and became forested again.
It occured to me that all Ireland, and much of Europe, Asia and North America, was covered with dense forests like these. I was also struck by how quickly everything returned to normal.
Wednesday, 15 July 2009
Orlov speaking at Feasta's New Emergency Conference
Dmitry Orlov – Seizing the Mid-Collapse Moment from Feasta on Vimeo.
I like this far less than his other talk, but this is the one for which FEASTA has video.
Saturday, 11 July 2009
Gorse hedges
Gorse is one of the commonest scrub plants here -- thorny, tough, and inedible to almost everything, so it is rarely trimmed by grazing. On the Curragh, the rolling plains a few kilometres from us that has been used for horse racing since the Romans, giant gorse clumps rise like mushrooms four metres tall over the fields.
On the other hand, it has lovely yellow flowers all year long, and it makes an effective barrier for animals, so it's a popular hedge. Although I've never tried it, I'm told you can make it into a nice wine as well.
Sunday, 28 June 2009
More Thomas Berry
Sorry about the break there -- posting will be lighter than usual this week.
The following is from a 1993 conversation with Father Thomas Berry at his home in North Carolina. John Lane and Thomas Rain Crowe interviewed him for Appalachian Voices magazine.
JL: What was this area of the Piedmont like in 1920, when you were growing up, when you were a boy?
TB: Well, there was much more animal life! Frogs, deer, and birds in particular. That’s one thing I remembered. Never ran into many wolves, as they were pretty well gone at that time. I did walk in the woods a great deal when I was a child. Already, the woods and nature were the most important things in my life.
By the time I was ten or eleven years old, I had a feeling that something was wrong. I didn’t, of course, have the least idea of what this was all about, but I grew up with the feeling that I couldn’t trust the developing industrial world in which I was living.
… JL: There is a doctrine that’s developing in some evangelical churches that’s called “cultural mandate” about subduing the earth. Have you heard about this and have you thought about it? Is that a disturbing development to you?
TB: I’ve heard about it. To subdue the Earth? There are churches wherein this is a developing doctrine now. It’s about subordination rather than finding a way to become better stewards. We need to be finding more ways to learn. In fact, the more precise translation of the contemporary Biblical passage which modern man is familiar and that says “And man shall have dominion over all the land” is really closer in translation to “And man shall be steward to the land.”
I would say that this whole direction by the contemporary church is a total misreading of the Christian religion as well as all other religions. All religions are founded on our experiences with the earth and the universe. St. Thomas, a great thinker in the Catholic tradition, lived in the thirteenth century, but is still a wonderful teacher, and his teachings are still available to us. He always said that the universe symbolizes the hopeless perfection in things.
One can look at it this way: From the standpoint of existence, the divine is primary, and the universe is derivative. On the order of human knowledge, the universe is primary and the divine is consequential. The very nature of religion robs itself of the perception that the universe is not self-explanatory ...
JL: So, how do we read this landscape that’s being decimated by developers as a creative landscape? Rather than wanting to “redeem” it and at the same time not wanting to save it? I don’t know if you’ve seen or heard the recent “news” on the failure of environmentalists. “The death of the environmental movement,” some have said.
TB: They are saying, the opposition that is, that the environmental people are missing the point somewhere. That is quite terrible. They (the nay-sayers) are missing the point of the larger issue. And one of the ways they are missing the point is that they don’t understand how the human mind functions.
Humans can be described as “that being in whom the universe reflects on itself in a conscious mode of self-reflection.” We humans actually enable the planet Earth because we are members of the planet Earth. We enable the Earth to reflect on itself.
We’re doing a terrible job with what knowledge we have. It’s not that the knowledge is wrong. It’s that we don’t know how to use it. This is one of the basic failures of science. Science does not instruct us on how to use science.
JL: Talking about children is a good place to ask some questions about population. When you were a child growing up in North Carolina, there were less than two billion humans on the planet. And as predicted, the world’s population rose to 6.5 billion in about twenty five years. This all happening in your lifetime. The South is the fastest growing region in the country. Can the South survive? Can we, as Southerners, survive this population boom?
TB: I don’t think we can. It would be very difficult to survive with that much population. It goes against all odds with regard to carrying capacity. And it’s here that religion has been at fault. Especially the Catholic religion--which has failed extensively in not paying attention to the decline of the natural world, and in this way it’s losing its own foundations, because the biblical world is thoroughly cosmological. Rituals are cosmological. They presuppose the universe.
I was in a monastery for ten years. I didn’t even come home to Greensboro, where my family resided, during that time--between the ages of twenty to thirty. In the monastery, we’d celebrate dawn with prayers and meditations. And we’d celebrate the mid-day, and celebrate the early evening. At vespers, we’d celebrate the early evening, and then the late evening, which was wonderful! Then I’d get up at two-o’clock in the morning and I’d have these experiences with hymns that would be sung according to the time of day and seasons of the year. The whole of that monastic literature was woven into the cosmological cycle. The scriptures, the book-of-songs was thoroughly cosmological.
Thanks to Tennessee's amazing Albert Bates for reminding me of this interview.
The following is from a 1993 conversation with Father Thomas Berry at his home in North Carolina. John Lane and Thomas Rain Crowe interviewed him for Appalachian Voices magazine.
JL: What was this area of the Piedmont like in 1920, when you were growing up, when you were a boy?
TB: Well, there was much more animal life! Frogs, deer, and birds in particular. That’s one thing I remembered. Never ran into many wolves, as they were pretty well gone at that time. I did walk in the woods a great deal when I was a child. Already, the woods and nature were the most important things in my life.
By the time I was ten or eleven years old, I had a feeling that something was wrong. I didn’t, of course, have the least idea of what this was all about, but I grew up with the feeling that I couldn’t trust the developing industrial world in which I was living.
… JL: There is a doctrine that’s developing in some evangelical churches that’s called “cultural mandate” about subduing the earth. Have you heard about this and have you thought about it? Is that a disturbing development to you?
TB: I’ve heard about it. To subdue the Earth? There are churches wherein this is a developing doctrine now. It’s about subordination rather than finding a way to become better stewards. We need to be finding more ways to learn. In fact, the more precise translation of the contemporary Biblical passage which modern man is familiar and that says “And man shall have dominion over all the land” is really closer in translation to “And man shall be steward to the land.”
I would say that this whole direction by the contemporary church is a total misreading of the Christian religion as well as all other religions. All religions are founded on our experiences with the earth and the universe. St. Thomas, a great thinker in the Catholic tradition, lived in the thirteenth century, but is still a wonderful teacher, and his teachings are still available to us. He always said that the universe symbolizes the hopeless perfection in things.
One can look at it this way: From the standpoint of existence, the divine is primary, and the universe is derivative. On the order of human knowledge, the universe is primary and the divine is consequential. The very nature of religion robs itself of the perception that the universe is not self-explanatory ...
JL: So, how do we read this landscape that’s being decimated by developers as a creative landscape? Rather than wanting to “redeem” it and at the same time not wanting to save it? I don’t know if you’ve seen or heard the recent “news” on the failure of environmentalists. “The death of the environmental movement,” some have said.
TB: They are saying, the opposition that is, that the environmental people are missing the point somewhere. That is quite terrible. They (the nay-sayers) are missing the point of the larger issue. And one of the ways they are missing the point is that they don’t understand how the human mind functions.
Humans can be described as “that being in whom the universe reflects on itself in a conscious mode of self-reflection.” We humans actually enable the planet Earth because we are members of the planet Earth. We enable the Earth to reflect on itself.
We’re doing a terrible job with what knowledge we have. It’s not that the knowledge is wrong. It’s that we don’t know how to use it. This is one of the basic failures of science. Science does not instruct us on how to use science.
JL: Talking about children is a good place to ask some questions about population. When you were a child growing up in North Carolina, there were less than two billion humans on the planet. And as predicted, the world’s population rose to 6.5 billion in about twenty five years. This all happening in your lifetime. The South is the fastest growing region in the country. Can the South survive? Can we, as Southerners, survive this population boom?
TB: I don’t think we can. It would be very difficult to survive with that much population. It goes against all odds with regard to carrying capacity. And it’s here that religion has been at fault. Especially the Catholic religion--which has failed extensively in not paying attention to the decline of the natural world, and in this way it’s losing its own foundations, because the biblical world is thoroughly cosmological. Rituals are cosmological. They presuppose the universe.
I was in a monastery for ten years. I didn’t even come home to Greensboro, where my family resided, during that time--between the ages of twenty to thirty. In the monastery, we’d celebrate dawn with prayers and meditations. And we’d celebrate the mid-day, and celebrate the early evening. At vespers, we’d celebrate the early evening, and then the late evening, which was wonderful! Then I’d get up at two-o’clock in the morning and I’d have these experiences with hymns that would be sung according to the time of day and seasons of the year. The whole of that monastic literature was woven into the cosmological cycle. The scriptures, the book-of-songs was thoroughly cosmological.
Thanks to Tennessee's amazing Albert Bates for reminding me of this interview.
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
FADA update
The group is doing well here in County Kildare. We unveiled our new community garden recently -- "Bia Linn," or "Our Food" -- and bit by bit we have accumulated tools, earth, plants, seeds and people. Some members of our group came in with wood and nails, and hammered together garden beds. One person brought a water barrel, one a composter, several brought laundry-sized planting tubs. Bord na Mona, the Irish fuel company, donated tonnes of topsoil, and our chair carved a wooden sign for the entrance.
My FADA colleague Ciara Bennett has done an amazing job organising the facility, and already, just a few weeks into the project, the place is covered in beans, peas, cucumbers, pumpkins, cabbages and blackcurrant bushes. Ciara was on the local radio station's chat show talking about it, I also did an interview for the news, and we've had several newspaper articles and columns already.
We will be hosting another Feile na Samhna (Halloween Festival) this year -- the last one was a great success, bringing many area residents in to meet local beekeepers, weavers, growers, alternative teachers, and so on. It managed to combine the festive (puppet shows for the kids, craft workshops, dancing, indie films) with the serious (talks and community discussions of peak oil, climate change and the coming hard times). Those things might seem incompatible, but they blended well -- a student theater group, for example, presented short plays about post-peak life, like James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand, but sunnier.
Other people in FADA will be refining the 2020 show -- a fake newscast from County Kildare in the future, after a small but critical mass of people have made a few simple changes. It's a funny and inspiring antidote to the doomer view of the future -- I'll post it here when it's ready. I'll also post the new web site here as soon as it's done.
My FADA colleague Ciara Bennett has done an amazing job organising the facility, and already, just a few weeks into the project, the place is covered in beans, peas, cucumbers, pumpkins, cabbages and blackcurrant bushes. Ciara was on the local radio station's chat show talking about it, I also did an interview for the news, and we've had several newspaper articles and columns already.
We will be hosting another Feile na Samhna (Halloween Festival) this year -- the last one was a great success, bringing many area residents in to meet local beekeepers, weavers, growers, alternative teachers, and so on. It managed to combine the festive (puppet shows for the kids, craft workshops, dancing, indie films) with the serious (talks and community discussions of peak oil, climate change and the coming hard times). Those things might seem incompatible, but they blended well -- a student theater group, for example, presented short plays about post-peak life, like James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand, but sunnier.
Other people in FADA will be refining the 2020 show -- a fake newscast from County Kildare in the future, after a small but critical mass of people have made a few simple changes. It's a funny and inspiring antidote to the doomer view of the future -- I'll post it here when it's ready. I'll also post the new web site here as soon as it's done.
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Orlov postscript
It appears that, as I was posting my notes from Orlov's talk, he was posting the actual talk. You can find it here:
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/06/definancialisation-deglobalisation.html
or
http://energybulletin.net/node/49243
and praise for it here:
http://sharonastyk.com/2009/06/16/why-dmitry-orlov-is-absolutely-positively-the-best-peak-oil-writer-ever/
http://theredmullet.blogspot.com/2009/06/definancialisation-deglobalisation.html
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/06/definancialisation-deglobalisation.html
or
http://energybulletin.net/node/49243
and praise for it here:
http://sharonastyk.com/2009/06/16/why-dmitry-orlov-is-absolutely-positively-the-best-peak-oil-writer-ever/
http://theredmullet.blogspot.com/2009/06/definancialisation-deglobalisation.html
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