Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
More and more I’m finding that it’s good to know people who can do things, and these people are of two sorts: those who can do things you don’t know much about and those who know more than you about what you know. From both you can learn.
What we need are generated cities, not fabricated!
– SF’s Bike to Work Day May 12
– Peak oil? Now it’s peak cars
– The Book Bike
– Philadelphia’s Two-Wheeled Revolution in Progress
What if you had three weeks to prepare for a life-changing disaster? A severe ice storm, earthquake, flood, or something similar? Wendy Brown says that preparing for disaster leaves us better equipped for the changes that are happening right now. Carl Etnier interviews Brown about her book, Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs: The thrivalist’s guide to life without oil.
– Biggest US airlines have combined 1Q loss over $1B
– The wooden bike – an engineering marvel, a recipe for saddle sore
– Stop signs don’t work for bicycling
– Riled about rail: Why all the anger over high speed trains?
First Earth: Uncompromising Ecological Architecture by David Sheen is meant as an inspirational film about earthen buildings, and especially what they call “cob”. Cob is the oldest and easiest way of building from earth.
I don’t believe we’ll be able to change our basic economic relationships until we change the ways we get our food and shelter. And I don’t think we’ll be able to change those until we change the stories we tell about our place in the world.
The ‘holy grail’ in terms of the construction of new sustainable buildings is homes that reach the highest level of energy efficiency, whilst also using as high a proportion of locally sourced materials as possible, what we might call ‘The Local Passivhaus’. Two buildings, recently completed in Ebbw Vale, known as ‘The Lime House’ and ‘The Larch House’ have moved this concept forward significantly.
Vandana Shiva speaks about a Village City, but I’m sure what she really means is a city of VillageTowns. You get the best of three kinds of life in one. You have the intimacy of a village, the magic of the city, and a real influence like in a small town.
Architecture is not an aloof and isolated subject; it is a part of the wholeness of place and buildings. Unfortunately Norwegian bureaucrats and architects have for some decades now had the idea of contrasting “old” and “modern”. The result is that almost all the beautiful wooden hotels of Fjord Norway from late 19th and early 20th century are destroyed through exceptionally ugly modernistic extension work — watching it is like getting glass splinters in your eyes.
However, when we look at the global economy from the point of view of a long-term decline in global net oil exports, it seems very likely that, to paraphrase a famous quote, what can’t be funded and maintained won’t be funded and maintained; and that the funding and maintenance problem will probably continue to become most apparent in the short term in American suburbia and exurbia.
Maximilian Sunflowers (Helianthus maximiliani) should be a part of almost any permaculture landscape for a variety of reasons but, if you need kindling on your place, it is a must-grow plant.
