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by Jan Lundberg
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 Our old home The Passat
I'm happy to announce that my first book, my autobiography, is completed. You can order it now and receive it immediately via Amazon.com. A new e-book version is about to become available which supersedes the version released earlier in December.
Songs of Petroleum is about to get in-depth reviews.
Enjoy the passages and photos below and read a brief description of the book by Albert Bates, author of the awesome new book The Biochar Solution.
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by Jan Lundberg
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This commentary contains a recap of the new Agreements as
well as these sections:
• Do your neighbors care?
• Witnesses, keep it real
• Oil reality
• Factor: indigenous people (includes Bolivia's dissent)
There is no reliable scientific assessment on just where we are vis-à-vis global climate destabilization. We can do better by acting on clear trends and options. |
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by Sarah (Steve) Mosko, PhD
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Americans today are generally aware that we consume far more energy per capita than most of the world’s peoples, over four times the world average and double that of regions like Japan and Europe which enjoy a similar standard of living. Most of us reflect on home gas and electric bills plus the fuel pumped into our cars’ gas tanks when judging our personal energy footprints. |
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by Dan Hamburg
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 The grave challenge of our time is not to reform the current system but to replace it. As our nation’s founders prescribed in the Declaration of Independence, when “any Form of Government becomes destructive” of the ends of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” it is not only our right, but our duty “to alter or to abolish it.” |
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by Jan Lundberg
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Instead of extended family, human warmth, village society and closeness to nature, we lucky moderns have gone down a path strewn with material things increasingly designed for the junk heap. What is dawning on climate scientists, biologists and many more of us is that we as a species are headed for our own junk heap.
While I'm painfully aware of sea level rise, our bodies' contamination with plastic, falling sperm counts and profusion of cancers, I reject that our present path is our fate. Is it time to say "Screw civilization"? |
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by Jan Lundberg
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When Nestlé buys mineral water companies and mass markets the "product" in plastic, solely for fantastic profits, this trend cannot be reversed by laws. Laws against wrongdoing and greed at the top are hard to pass and harder to enforce. "Owning" watersheds was so foreign to the native Americans that the European invaders reaped an advantage we can call the warped mind disengaged from heart. Yet, in the long run, which culture is sustainable? Only one of them respects natural laws that, among a few other basics, revere water as the source of life for all.
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by Jan Lundberg
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Food, Water and War
Many who see the main title of this essay may readily turn off to the concept conveyed. The idea appears negative, never mind the need for the public to consider more deeply certain issues. Other readers of the title may see it as good tidings, for the making of an omelette requires breaking some eggs -- providing the extinction referred to is of modern culture and not of such a reader. |
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by David Cundiff, MD
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 David Cundiff emerges as the man of the hour for anyone interested in the connection of health, medical costs, and the socioeconomic basis of the U.S.'s spiraling affliction of many interrelated crises. To achieve this, his new book The Health Economy:
Changing the Culture of Waste and Preventable Disease proposes bold, sensible restructuring of government spending and taxing to bring about greater citizen control over health, community and the direction that the nation is going in. - editor |
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by Albert Bates
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Editor's note: climate writer Albert Bates, author of the 1990 book Climate in Crisis (introduction by Al Gore), has captured the feeling many of us have about yet another international climate meeting:
“For the veterans, who are less like drunks and more like near-suicidal PTSD sufferers, a dramatic reduction of energy consumption in a complex society is quite unlikely, absent some catastrophic event.”
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by Jan Lundberg
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 I was discussing with a salty old colleague the possibilities of Sail Transport Network here in Portland, Oregon. It's not the perfect environment for all-wind power, but there are ways of greatly reducing petroleum for trade and transport over land and water now, before petrocollapse. One idea that relates to sail power and community-building is to help the homeless population while enhancing the whole public good.
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by Kate Bodi
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This report starts with the U.S. and concludes with a presentation by a witness to Argentina's financial collapse and community-based response a decade ago.  It shouldn’t take a worst-case scenario such as the complete economic and political collapse of Argentina in 2001 to teach us how to reduce our collective vulnerability to economic and political stressors. However, neither should we ignore history’s narrative on community resiliency amidst past disasters.
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by Carlos Perez de Alejo
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In the midst of mounting economic insecurity, fueled by widespread unemployment, foreclosures and budget cuts, many people are seeking alternative models to business as usual. From community gardens to bartering networks, grassroots efforts are sprouting up across the country. One of the main pillars of this growing trend is an international institution with over 160 years of experience in local, sustainable economic development: a cooperative. |
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