What I’m planning on writing about soon:
What are you thinking about? |
Navigation
Collapsniks
Albert Bates (US)
Andrew Nikiforuk (CA)
Brutus (US)
Carolyn Baker (US)*
Catherine Ingram (US)
Chris Hedges (US)
Dahr Jamail (US)
Dean Spillane-Walker (US)*
Derrick Jensen (US)
Dougald & Paul (IE/SE)*
Erik Michaels (US)
Gail Tverberg (US)
Guy McPherson (US)
Honest Sorcerer
Janaia & Robin (US)*
Jem Bendell (UK)
Mari Werner
Michael Dowd (US)*
Nate Hagens (US)
Paul Heft (US)*
Post Carbon Inst. (US)
Resilience (US)
Richard Heinberg (US)
Robert Jensen (US)
Roy Scranton (US)
Sam Mitchell (US)
Tim Morgan (UK)
Tim Watkins (UK)
Umair Haque (UK)
William Rees (CA)
XrayMike (AU)
Radical Non-Duality
Tony Parsons
Jim Newman
Tim Cliss
Andreas Müller
Kenneth Madden
Emerson Lim
Nancy Neithercut
Rosemarijn Roes
Frank McCaughey
Clare Cherikoff
Ere Parek, Izzy Cloke, Zabi AmaniEssential Reading
Archive by Category
My Bio, Contact Info, Signature Posts
About the Author (2023)
My Circles
E-mail me
--- My Best 200 Posts, 2003-22 by category, from newest to oldest ---
Collapse Watch:
Hope — On the Balance of Probabilities
The Caste War for the Dregs
Recuperation, Accommodation, Resilience
How Do We Teach the Critical Skills
Collapse Not Apocalypse
Effective Activism
'Making Sense of the World' Reading List
Notes From the Rising Dark
What is Exponential Decay
Collapse: Slowly Then Suddenly
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Making Sense of Who We Are
What Would Net-Zero Emissions Look Like?
Post Collapse with Michael Dowd (video)
Why Economic Collapse Will Precede Climate Collapse
Being Adaptable: A Reminder List
A Culture of Fear
What Will It Take?
A Future Without Us
Dean Walker Interview (video)
The Mushroom at the End of the World
What Would It Take To Live Sustainably?
The New Political Map (Poster)
Beyond Belief
Complexity and Collapse
Requiem for a Species
Civilization Disease
What a Desolated Earth Looks Like
If We Had a Better Story...
Giving Up on Environmentalism
The Hard Part is Finding People Who Care
Going Vegan
The Dark & Gathering Sameness of the World
The End of Philosophy
A Short History of Progress
The Boiling Frog
Our Culture / Ourselves:
A CoVid-19 Recap
What It Means to be Human
A Culture Built on Wrong Models
Understanding Conservatives
Our Unique Capacity for Hatred
Not Meant to Govern Each Other
The Humanist Trap
Credulous
Amazing What People Get Used To
My Reluctant Misanthropy
The Dawn of Everything
Species Shame
Why Misinformation Doesn't Work
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The Right to Die
CoVid-19: Go for Zero
Pollard's Laws
On Caste
The Process of Self-Organization
The Tragic Spread of Misinformation
A Better Way to Work
The Needs of the Moment
Ask Yourself This
What to Believe Now?
Rogue Primate
Conversation & Silence
The Language of Our Eyes
True Story
May I Ask a Question?
Cultural Acedia: When We Can No Longer Care
Useless Advice
Several Short Sentences About Learning
Why I Don't Want to Hear Your Story
A Harvest of Myths
The Qualities of a Great Story
The Trouble With Stories
A Model of Identity & Community
Not Ready to Do What's Needed
A Culture of Dependence
So What's Next
Ten Things to Do When You're Feeling Hopeless
No Use to the World Broken
Living in Another World
Does Language Restrict What We Can Think?
The Value of Conversation Manifesto Nobody Knows Anything
If I Only Had 37 Days
The Only Life We Know
A Long Way Down
No Noble Savages
Figments of Reality
Too Far Ahead
Learning From Nature
The Rogue Animal
How the World Really Works:
Making Sense of Scents
An Age of Wonder
The Truth About Ukraine
Navigating Complexity
The Supply Chain Problem
The Promise of Dialogue
Too Dumb to Take Care of Ourselves
Extinction Capitalism
Homeless
Republicans Slide Into Fascism
All the Things I Was Wrong About
Several Short Sentences About Sharks
How Change Happens
What's the Best Possible Outcome?
The Perpetual Growth Machine
We Make Zero
How Long We've Been Around (graphic)
If You Wanted to Sabotage the Elections
Collective Intelligence & Complexity
Ten Things I Wish I'd Learned Earlier
The Problem With Systems
Against Hope (Video)
The Admission of Necessary Ignorance
Several Short Sentences About Jellyfish
Loren Eiseley, in Verse
A Synopsis of 'Finding the Sweet Spot'
Learning from Indigenous Cultures
The Gift Economy
The Job of the Media
The Wal-Mart Dilemma
The Illusion of the Separate Self, and Free Will:
No Free Will, No Freedom
The Other Side of 'No Me'
This Body Takes Me For a Walk
The Only One Who Really Knew Me
No Free Will — Fightin' Words
The Paradox of the Self
A Radical Non-Duality FAQ
What We Think We Know
Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark
Healing From Ourselves
The Entanglement Hypothesis
Nothing Needs to Happen
Nothing to Say About This
What I Wanted to Believe
A Continuous Reassemblage of Meaning
No Choice But to Misbehave
What's Apparently Happening
A Different Kind of Animal
Happy Now?
This Creature
Did Early Humans Have Selves?
Nothing On Offer Here
Even Simpler and More Hopeless Than That
Glimpses
How Our Bodies Sense the World
Fragments
What Happens in Vagus
We Have No Choice
Never Comfortable in the Skin of Self
Letting Go of the Story of Me
All There Is, Is This
A Theory of No Mind
Creative Works:
Mindful Wanderings (Reflections) (Archive)
A Prayer to No One
Frogs' Hollow (Short Story)
We Do What We Do (Poem)
Negative Assertions (Poem)
Reminder (Short Story)
A Canadian Sorry (Satire)
Under No Illusions (Short Story)
The Ever-Stranger (Poem)
The Fortune Teller (Short Story)
Non-Duality Dude (Play)
Your Self: An Owner's Manual (Satire)
All the Things I Thought I Knew (Short Story)
On the Shoulders of Giants (Short Story)
Improv (Poem)
Calling the Cage Freedom (Short Story)
Rune (Poem)
Only This (Poem)
The Other Extinction (Short Story)
Invisible (Poem)
Disruption (Short Story)
A Thought-Less Experiment (Poem)
Speaking Grosbeak (Short Story)
The Only Way There (Short Story)
The Wild Man (Short Story)
Flywheel (Short Story)
The Opposite of Presence (Satire)
How to Make Love Last (Poem)
The Horses' Bodies (Poem)
Enough (Lament)
Distracted (Short Story)
Worse, Still (Poem)
Conjurer (Satire)
A Conversation (Short Story)
Farewell to Albion (Poem)
My Other Sites
Excitement… I was offered the job of food security coordinator (6 hrs/wk) here (Powell River). So now 6 hours weekly of my time will be defrayed, allowing me to spend lots of time learning to grow food, trying to start up community gardens, develop better food production, processing, storage, & distribution mechanisms here in town. It’s going to be a year in the Gift Economy for me… I’m very happy about the opportunity, even though I’ll be just barely making enough to scrape by.
I’ve been on a rant about why Americans would use precious resources to heat/cool their stuff in self-storage units and why anybody would dream up this idea to begin with. It really torks me off. Does anyone else think this is crazy, too?
What’s holding us back? Recipricating huggers.;)Experienced based decision making sounds good.
re: heat/cool stored stuff. I suppose in different humidities wood and paper degrades so climate control would maintain.
I’m with you Evan. That’s just the tip of the iceberg in what Americans do to tork me off. Another good one is. They water their highways, sidewalks and streets! Now don’t get me started.
Haven’t people always lived in some kind of “shelter”, even if its composed of straw and mud, adobe, or something else?Calearth.org SuperAdobe construction is quite interesting, though it requires some lime or cement for the “super” portion of superadobe. Tested and approved for the highest earthquake zone in California. Portland cement requires a significant energy input into the kiln used to make it, and unless one has lime locally, there’s be some transportation requirements.I’ve walked around inside the several different plans on their site in Hesperia, CA, (about 1/1/2 hours driving distance from my home) — very interesting construction methodology. I actually kind of love the dwellings and the structural concept which is much different from standardized building methods typically used in the U.S.They may be preferable in warm, desert climates over colder ones. Check out their ‘Emergency Shelters’.
Janet:That’s okay, fire away. I’m American born and raised and I still don’t understand “us”. What is this need to have more and then Store it. It’s crazy. I’m convinced that we could save a ton of energy if we eliminated climate controlled storage and close all businesses early on Saturday and all day on Sunday. The Germans do this and people are not rioting in the streets. I proposed this to our mayor’s office and they politely told me it wouldn’t work. It used to work about 20 years ago. Everything was closed on Sunday and people found other things to do. Okay, so that’s a different rant.
I had a long discussion with my son on the topic of wild places to live where you can live without shelter and we came to the conclusion that there are still, indeed, such places. How about Big Bend National Park in Texas — it’s 800,000 acres of wilderness with surrounding wild lands and climate varying with altitude. Graham
You mentioned in this post what will happen to civilization in the end. I think a lot about this matter, and I think the best possible outcome would be for civilization to continue indefinitely, but be reformed. If it ends, there will surely be environmental disasters of large proportions. They might take a long time to healbtw—I am Graham’s son.
Graham:We spend a lot of time in Big Bend and it has its extremes in temperatures. You would want some type of shelter. There is a woman in West Texas that teaches people to make very simple dwellings with adobe, and to me that makes the most sense. It’s very environmentally friendly, comes from the immediate area, simple and very beautiful. We dream of living in that area some day. Evan
I’m thinking about lowering the GVWR for which one needs a commercial driver license to 7500lbs.