It might just be the feeds that I follow in Google Reader, but I have been inundated with blow-by-blow posts, articles, pictures and video of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. I don’t want this to be yet another post on the oil spill, and although it is seriously enough to put the average pro-oil man […]
Category Archives: Transitions
The Kootenay Cone of Silence
Aside from what you read on the internet, life in the Kootenays just keeps on rollin’ on. Who would know that a whole ecosystem was being destroyed in what could be described as a technogenic catastrophe down in Louisiana right now, a nasty byproduct of the lifestyle we’ve pursued as a society. The various bailouts, […]
Projecting the Future for Civil Society
I’m slowly whittling my way through the pile of great books on my desk, I haven’t done a book review for a while, so here goes. Survival + is 390 pages of well reasoned thoughts on the economy, resource depletion, climate change and how these things are likely to impact your household, communities and the […]
Possibility
What changes when you realize that your life, and those of people around you, are unsustainable, not just the myriad of consumer decisions we can make, (prius over a F350, reusable vs plastic, etc), but deep down, what really changes? We just returned from a road trip where we travelled over 2,600km in two and a bit […]
Gambling the Future
Kunstler hits the nail on the head in his weekly post: Housing starts may still be weak, but the “gaming” industry is making great strides in places like the old Puritan commonwealth of Massachusetts, so soon we’ll have a virtually automatic economy of leisure-and-entertainment paid for by creaming off a small percentage of the quarters […]
Now Let’s All Just Pretend That Everything Is Good…
The suspension of disbelief required to have continued faith in the status quo, is becoming more difficult to justify with every passing day. News headlines proclaiming strength in financial markets conveniently smooth over the possible wrinkles in the theories, inherent instabilities in growth projections, the shuffling of funny money assets to create an appearance of profit.
Boomer Housing Denial
Have you noticed the disconnect between reality and expectations for housing options in the Baby Boomer crowd? A recent AARP study, for example, found a massive disconnect between perceptions of aging and its reality. The vast majority of people surveyed expressed optimism that they would not only be in good physical health in their later years, […]
Peak Oil Vignette 5 – Hope and Reality
Walking from the large brick building that used to house the airport terminal operations, but now was given new life as a fruit farming centre, Janie scanned the snow line on the mountains surrounding the valley. The flat land around what was once known as the West Kootenay Regional Airport was once a living farm. In fact, […]