Can We Earn a Living on a Living Planet?
It has been a tough couple of years in the effort to unite labor, community, and environmental groups, an alliance that has always been strained. The extractive energy sector—coal, gas, oil—has historically had strong union representation and well-paying jobs....
What Singapore Can Teach All Cities About Using Urban Green Infrastructure To Mitigate Megadroughts
Nanyang Technical University, Singapore. NASA’s new report on the likelihood of megadrought in the Central and Western United States is a harsh yet timely wake-up call for cities and the need for green infrastructure. It’s ironic but those taking the...
Love Water for Chocolate
As Valentine’s Day approaches, no doubt many of us have chocolate on our minds and taste buds. Delicious, dark, tempting chocolate that, eaten in moderation, may even be good for us. As we’ve learned in recent years, the cocoa...
India’s Food Security Threatened by Groundwater Depletion
The severe and ongoing depletion of underground water supplies in India poses a growing threat to the nation’s food security. Without serious efforts to stem the mining of groundwater, food production will decline, unleashing painful social and economic consequences...
Thanks, Bill.
I learned today of the passing of William Catton, author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1982), and Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse (2009). (For a biography of Catton, see Wikipedia ). I didn’t read Overshoot until around...
Why Local Matters, and Why It’s Inevitable
Below are the transcript and slides from a very short (~5 minute) presentation I gave at a recent Confluence Philanthropy gathering. Thank you Dana for the invitation and introduction. I want to talk a little about why place-based...
Winds of Urban Change
A conversation with Warren Karlenzig From the planned rewilding of London’s Upper Lea Valley to performance indicator software designed to manage 663 of China’s largest cities, Warren Karlenzig knows what he’s talking about when it comes to urban sustainability...
After the Peak
Nearly 17 years ago the modern peak oil movement began with the publication of “The End of Cheap Oil” by petroleum geologists Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère in the March, 1998 issue of Scientific American. Campbell coined the term “peak...
The Latest Oil Glut: Once Bitten, Twice Shy
Download It comes as little surprise that the author of a book entitled Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future is a critic of the natural gas industry and a proponent of peak oil theory. With...
Green Dreams – Future or Fantasy?
Download UK guest host Greg Moffitt from Legalise-Freedom.com interviews scientist David Fridley, from Berkeley National Lab and the Post-Carbon Institute. We will switch away from fossil fuels sooner or later, because they will run out. If it’s later, our kids get...