Getting Fossil Fuels Off the Plate
My grubby little town was full of young men in big trucks and muscle cars who had come north to make their fortunes in the oil fields. During oil booms they kept the bars hopping and the hookers busy,...
Remapping Relationships: Humans in Nature
It seems that the more a society sees itself as cerebral, with clever technological and material innovations, the more its bonds with, and recognition of, the significance of nature processes and ecosystems recede. The ability to create artificial environments...
Hydrocarbons in North America
The sheer scale of our dependency on nonrenewable, energy-dense “fossilized sunshine” is often lost on those who believe that renewable energy sources can supplant hydrocarbons at anything like today’s level of energy consumption. Thus it is prudent to examine...
Peak Nature?
As it has grown in numbers and technological might, the human race has become a force of geophysical proportion, on par with the asteroid that struck the Yucatan during the Cretaceous era, dethroning Tyrannosaurus rex. Extinction is final. Yet...
Tackling the Oldest Environmental Problem: Agriculture and Its Impact on Soil
Now there’s the reality of climate change. We’ve gone into overshoot and we are in economic trouble. We look to more economic growth, but once economics and population growth absorb all of the renewables and all of the efficiency,...
Toward Zero-Carbon Buildings
Despite its persuasive momentum, the green building movement signifies a mere initial advance toward a low-carbon future. Even as we acknowledge that green facilities must be the building blocks of the resilient cities of tomorrow, we face significant barriers...
The Competitiveness of Local Living Economies
Economic localization offers the key to solving a growing number of global problems, including peak oil, climate disruption, and financial meltdowns. Yet the perception remains that this solution is very costly, because local goods and services supposedly are more...
Transportation in the Post-Carbon World
Successful post-carbon transitions will benefit from understanding the dynamics of transport revolutions. We define a transport revolution as being substantial change in a society’s transport activity–moving people or freight, or both–that occurs in less than twenty five years. This...
Human Health and Well-Being in an Era of Energy Scarcity and Climate Change
Climate change and the threat of energy scarcity now pose serious challenges to our “health system,” specifically health care services and public health services. This is a chapter from The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises...
The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises
Anthony Perl Asher Miller Bill Ryerson Bill Sheehan Brian Schwartz Chris Martenson Cindy Parker Daniel Lerch David Fridley David Hughes David Orr Erika Allen Gloria Flora Hillary Brown John Kaufmann Joshua Farley Michael Bomford Michael Shuman Peter Whybrow Richard Gilbert Richard Heinberg Rob Hopkins Sandra Postel Stephanie Mills Tom Whipple Warren Karlenzig Wes Jackson William Rees Zenobia Barlow
How do population, water, energy, food, and climate issues impact one another? What can we do to address one problem without making the others worse? The Post Carbon Reader features essays by some of the world’s most provocative thinkers...