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Hooked on Growth (audio)
Jason Bradford, The Reality Report via Global Public Media
The Reality Report hosts David Gardner, President of Citizen-Powered Media and producer of the documentary Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity. We discuss what is it like to challenge a core belief of our society, and why is it more important than ever to do so.
Jason Bradford hosts The Reality Report, broadcast on KZYX&Z in Mendocino County, CA.
(6 February 2008)
Rolf Nordstrom discusses depletion scenarios
Don Shelby, WCCO Radio 830
Don Shelby talks with Rolf Nordstrom, Executive Director of the Great Plains Institute on energy and environmental issues. Topics include peak oil, depletion scenarios and climate change.
Wednesday is E Day on The Don Shelby Show — devoted to Energy and Environment. Last week’s show introduced the peak oil concept to his Minneapolis, St. Paul radio listening audience. This week’s show covered geothermal heating.
(29 January 2008)
Contributor Wag the Dog writes:
The show featuring Rolf Nordstrom can still be downloaded as an MP3 from this URL:
podcast.830wcco.com/wcco/884694.mp3
Feeding People (audio)
KMO, C-Realm Podcast Episode 76
In this episode KMO talks with Gyrus about this crunch time in human history. Later we hear from author Colin Tudge on how to feed a global population of 9 billion and feed them well for the long haul.
Show notes: kmo.livejournal.com/335090.html
The excerpt I read on the topics of Nutritionism and the Problem of the Fixed Stomach comes from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan.
At the end of the program, I read part of my correspondence with Digital Crusader Eric Boyd which was sparked by Stuart Staniford’s essay, The Fallacy of Reversibility: Why Peak Oil Actually Helps Industrial Agriculture. Another former guest of the C-Realm Podcast, Sharon Astyk has written an excellent response to Staniford.
(6 February 2008)
The Big Picture: Climate Chaos
Jamais Cascio, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology
…Climate Chaos and… Resource Collapse
Of all of the big drivers for the next two decades, climate chaos and resource collapse have the most complex interaction. On the surface, it’s clear that each can make the other worse: agricultural collapse can push people to tear down rain forests faster (both reducing a carbon sink and putting even more carbon into the air by burning); greater storms & droughts can produce massive refugee movements, overwhelming local resource bases; drivers and industry looking for an alternative to oil pushing for biofuels, driving up the cost of food; desperate communities choosing survival over the careful maintenance of ecosystem services. It’s a truly vicious cycle.
But look more closely, and one can see that many (not all, but many) of the solutions for one issue have a positive impact on the other. Smarter agricultural practices boost food production, improve soil, and sequester more carbon. Improving urban and transportation models (from bicycles & buses to electric cars) to fight global warming avoids a “peak oil” disaster. Climate and resource activists alike extol the virtues of localism. The need to deal with one of these issues can make dealing with the other easier and faster.
Response model: Look for economies of scope, those opportunities where a single solution approach can handle seemingly unrelated problems.
(4 February 2008)
The Organic Apocalypse
Tom Junod, Esquire
When was the last time you saw something at a Whole Foods that really, really disturbed you? Besides the prices, I mean?
Exactly. You didn’t.
Which is why it’s weird to go to Whole Foods and see a book about the end of the world. No, strike that — a book about human extinction, a book described by its own blurbsters as “mordant” and “terrifying.” But there it is, in a kiosk full of cookbooks, alongside smiling Mark Bittman and smiling Padma Lakshmi, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us.
…Of course, as end-of-the-worldism becomes more and more respectable in educated circles, a new class of racetrack touts has arisen, standing at the rail and rooting their hobbyhorses on to Armageddon. In addition to Weisman, there’s James Howard Kunstler, Peak Oil’s angry prophet; there is Rebecca Solnit, whose meditation on the ruins of Detroit in Harper’s last summer celebrated “a landscape that is not quite postapocalyptic, but that is strangely — and sometimes even beautifully — post-American”; there is truthout.org, the Internet’s relentless direct-mail bad-news machine, which occasionally softens its drumbeat of body counts and White House fiascoes with such e-mail headlines as NAOMI WOLF: THE END OF AMERICA MAY HAPPEN; there’s even, on the lunatic fringe, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which proposes we just get it over with and stop reproducing.
None of this is to say that none of this is going to happen. It’s just to say that if and when the end of “our way of life” does happen, it’s going to suck. Post-American, post-human, whatever: The prospect of weeds and wolves taking over New York City is no more consoling than the prospect of angelic trumpets blowing it down. And so, despite Weisman’s assurance that eventually “the asphalt jungle will give way to a real one,” let’s not kid ourselves. The apocalypse may be upon us, but it’s never going to be comfort food.
(7 February 2008)
