Banff Transition

Post Carbon Institute: Excerpt from Richard Heinberg’s new book The End of Growth, which is set for publication by New Society Publishers in July 2011.

“There are seldom-acknowledged factors external to financial and monetary systems that are effectively choking off efforts to restart growth. These factors, whose impacts are worsening over time, were briefly alluded to in the Introduction; here we will unpack them in more detail, discussing limits to oil and other energy sources, as well as to food, water, and minerals. We will also explore the increasing cost of industrial accidents and environmental disasters—and why, in the wide wake of global climate change, those costs are likely to escalate to the point that disaster avoidance and recovery will constitute a major portion of future government and private spending.”

 

Casaubon’s Book: “The food crisis is manifestly just that – a crisis. At the same time, there’s another side to this coin. Rising food prices are to some extent good for farmers…. How do you balance the merits and demerits of food prices? One way would be think historically, because in purely historic terms, it is entirely normal to spend a lot of your income on food.”

 

Open Source Ecology: “Open Source Ecology is a movement dedicated to the collaborative development of tools for replicable, open source, modern off-grid ‘resilient communities.’ By using permaculture and digital fabrication together to provide for basic needs and open source methodology to allow low cost replication of the entire operation, we hope to empower anyone who desires to move beyond the struggle for survival and ‘evolve to freedom.’”

 

ClubOrlov: “A lot of people just don’t have the right character to deal with collapse. They’ll be running around trying to fix things. That’s the opposite of what they should be doing.”