Mike Small on the Power of When Lots of People Do Stuff
You may feel as though your efforts, working in your local Transition initiative or doing other community resilience work, is just a drop in the ocean. Yet there is a huge power in it, especially when you look at...
Majora Carter at CEP 2013 National Conference
Highlights from the keynote speech Majora Carter gave at the dinner of CEP’s 2013 National Conference, “Pursuing Results: Effective Foundation Practice.”
Profiles in Sharing: Janelle Orsi – The Sharing Economy Lawyer
By Cat Johnson, Shareable I’m sitting in a cafe in downtown Oakland, just up the block from a HUB coworking space and a stone’s throw from a BART station. The wooden tables are full and sharing them is the...
Water Stress Threatens Future Energy Production
When we flip on a light, we rarely think about water. But electricity generation is the biggest user of water in the United States. Thermoelectric power plants alone use more than 200 billion gallons of water a day – about...
Chandeliers, the President of France, and the future of economic growth: a report
Last week I attended an extraordinary occasion in Paris, which felt momentus and historic, but in the somewhat confused and mixed way these things often do. Hosted in the incredible, palatial National Assembly, with its statues, chandeliers and gold...
A Red List for Ecosystems: Will it Aid Conservation?
The Aral Sea in Central Asia, in 1989 (L) and 2008 (R). Images courtesy of NASA. The most devastated ecosystem I’ve ever seen is the Aral Sea in Central Asia. Once the world’s fourth largest lake, the Aral spanned an area...
The Peak Oil Crisis: China at a Turning Point
This spring, I spent three weeks traveling around China and needless to say, I, along with every other visitor, was impressed by the economic progress the Chinese have made in the years since the Cultural Revolution. Tens of millions...
Alaska’s Coal: Flashpoint for Coming Climate Battles
If there is any place on planet Earth where we should dig in our heels against expanded coal mining, it is surely Alaska. Imagine the environmental travesty of ships by the hundreds laden with coal dug from pristine Arctic...
Fracking’s Threats to Drinking Water Call for a Precautionary Approach
At least one aspect of fracking’s risks to drinking water became a little clearer this week. A study led by Rob Jackson of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,...
Knitting your own MRI scanner, or not
John Paul Flintoff’s article about Transition and The Power of Just Doing Stuff that appeared in the Guardian two weeks ago seemed to hit the right note, and has been popping up all over the place. It also led to the book being...