Monthly Archives: September 2016

Global Cooling Threatens Life on Earth

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ice-age

I know. Not what you were expecting. (Photo by Serendigity/Flickr)

While the planet’s air, water and land are heating to dangerous levels because of human pollution, the world’s trade is cooling off, slowing down and coagulating in the deepening chill, threatening the well-being of every country and virtually every person. I remember very well in 2008 watching the most powerful members of Congress emerge from a come-to Jesus meeting conducted by the Treasury Secretary on what was about to happen to the world’s financial institutions and America’s economy. They had the pale faces and staring eyes of people who had just been introduced to the angel of death.

The world of trade and finance is confronting such a moment now, and is every bit as much in denial as it was in 2008. This time it’s not America’s Lehman Brothers tottering into an early grave and pulling half the world in with it; it’s Deutsche Bank. Continue reading →

RIP Bruce Charles “Bill” Mollison: 1928-2016

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mollison-credo

I never knew Bill Mollison. I have known of him for only a few years. But his vision has touched — in fact, transformed — the core of my being. As long as I live I will honor him for a vision that has vastly improved the way I understand and react to the world, a vision that could have vastly improved the world itself, had we listened to him in time.

Mollison, along with David Holmgren and others, was a principal founder of the  Permaculture movement, a way of looking at agriculture with emphasis on symbiosis among plants, including trees and other perennials; the soil, with its myriad components and organisms; and the climate with its gifts of rain, wind and sunshine. This contemplative way of farming — permanent agriculture — has since its advent in Australia in 1968 morphed into a way of looking at life itself — permanent culture. Continue reading →

We Must be Mushrooms

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mushrooms

When you’re a mushroom, you don’t expect anybody to tell you the truth.

We must be mushrooms, because they keep us in the dark and feed us nothing but crap. The dominant media, the government, needless to say the politicians — they all lie to us, all the time, when it matters and when it doesn’t, in big things and small.

Take a small thing. The other day, all the websites and channels were vibrating to a version of the headline: “Driverless Uber Cars Debut in Pittsburgh.” It was, to read the headlines and the first two-thirds of the articles, the dawning of the age of the driverless. That’s the “narrative” right now, that a day after tomorrow the highways will be gorged with cars driving themselves while happy commuters take drugs and watch movies, or whatever. Continue reading →

Dystopia for the Rich and Famous

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The reason there aren’t many people on the beach on Margarita Island is that it’s hard to enjoy the beach when you have no food or water. But welcome to Venezuela. (Wikipedia Photo)

The reason there aren’t many people on the beach on Margarita Island is that it’s hard to enjoy the beach when you have no food or water. But welcome to Venezuela. (Wikipedia Photo)

Every New Year’s Eve, there are people who travel to the easternmost promontory of whatever rock they live on, in order to be the first of their flock to experience the arrival of the New Year. I suspect a serious party deficiency in the upbringing of these people, but in every unmet need there is an opportunity for obscene profit. Thus: Now you can be among the first to experience  Armageddon, aka the collapse of the industrial age, up close and personal, from the vantage point of a five star resort hotel. Hurry, this opportunity is available for a limited time only — until the mobs burn down the hotels.

The place is Margarita Island — I swear I am not making this up — a sub-Caribbean island perch for jet-setters just off the northern coast of South America. It has a population of 600,000 people who have learned to take great care of a few thousand visiting, sun-bathing, hard-drinking  millionaires at a time. Its great misfortune is to be a part of Venezuela.

Continue reading →

Oil Company Carnage Continues

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deepwater-horizon

When an oil well like Deepwater Horizon explodes, the images are unforgettable. When the entire industry starts to collapse, it’s hard to see and to remember.

In a recent essay I proposed the existence of a new human subspecies – homo sapiens ephemera — that is smart (thus sapiens) but severely afflicted by attention deficit disorder and long-term memory loss. Thus ephemera may understand, for example, the connection between a burning fuse at his feet and an imminent explosion, but almost immediately forgets it, goes on to something else, and is surprised by the blast. Nowhere is this behavior more evident than in the U.S. oil patch, whose collapse, predicted here and elsewhere for years, is now described by none other than Moody’s Investors Service, quoted in Bloomberg News as “catastrophic” and perhaps “the worst bust of any industry this century.”

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World Trade Lost at Sea

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container-ship

Containers crammed with electronics, clothing and other potential Christmas presents are stranded at sea by the bankruptcy of one of the world’s largest shipping lines. Theres more to come. (Phot by NASA)

It’s hard to describe globalization to a mayfly in a manner that will hold his interest. It takes a gifted storyteller to interest a creature with a 24-hour lifespan in anything that’s out of sight, or takes longer than a couple of hours to play out. In this he is much like the modern American, who has little appetite for any story that takes more than 140 characters to tell, about an event that takes more than a few hours to unfold. (As to why the American consumer of news acts and thinks more like a mayfly (Ephemeroptera) than a homo sapiens, well, that’s another question, for another time.)

But the fact is that homo sapiens ephemera simply cannot grasp the fact that a long, slow-burning fuse, however boring it is to watch, almost always leads to a terrible explosion. By that time, ephemera has forgotten the fuse and is always surprised. (“Wow, no one could have seen that coming,” he says.)

Continue reading →