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Showing posts from April, 2012

You Need to Reduce Your Impact with a Factor of 120!

In response Trainer points out that if the rich economies grow at 3% until 2070, and by that stage the poorest nations have attained similarly high living standards – which seems to be the aim of the global development agenda – total world economic output and impact could be 60 times larger than it is today. If we assume that sustainability requires that fossil fuel use and other resource consumption must be half of what they are today (and the greenhouse problem would probably require a far larger reduction than this), then what is needed is something like a factor 120 reduction in the per unit impact of GDP, not merely a factor 4 reduction. - Ted Trainer

A Timbered Choir

for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake
of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.

at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories
where the machines were made that would drive ever forward
the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;
I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered
footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments
of those who had died in pursuit of the objective
and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according
to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget
that they…

Chilean Documentary: Preparing Pucon for Post-Growth Realities

Pucon in Transition is a wonderful documentary giving voice to the local people involved in a Transition project. Subtitled in English.


Naturligvis kan heller ikke fermacellplater måle seg med heltrepanel, men er et godt alternativ til "reine" gipsplater, med 80 % gips og 20 % cellulosefibre. Også et godt valg som diffusjonsbrems.

The Majority Rules, Even for Toddlers and Chimps

A new study offers some news for parents: even toddlers have a tendency to follow the crowd. That sensitivity isn't unique to humans either; chimpanzees also appear more likely to pick up habits if "everyone else is doing it." ... - Listen Up, Parents: For Toddlers (and Chimps), the Majority Rules

Today we have turned into an insane flock of mindless consumers heading for the cliffs. How to make the majority permaculturists?

What's striking me, in the kindergarten children have no role models, except other children. A result of the modernists segregation of function and people. Is it any wonder that the world has gone insane?

All this is a result of fragmentation and complication, the opposite of complexity. How to make the crowd understand the meaning of life is complexity, and that complexity can save our civilization?

Økonomisk vekst vil svi av jordkloden!

Det er ikke kun drivhuseffekten som vil varme opp jordkloden, økonomisk vekst i seg selv vil medføre fatale konsekvenser. La oss se hva som kan skje med en årlig vekst på 2,3 prosent:
Om kun 400 år, så lenge som Fantomet har regjert i de dype skoger, vil vi forbruke like mye energi som den samlede solinnstrålingen.Om 1400 år vil energikonsumet tilsvare det som stråler ut fra soloverflata, men på jordklodens mye mindre areal. Da nytter det ikke lenger med sandaler for ikke å brenne tærne i sanda!Om 2500 år vil vi svi av like mye energi som hele vår galakse sammenlagt, med sine 100 milliarder stjerner. Dette vil få selv sola til å blekne! Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist, by Tom Murphy

Jeg minnes en sang fra bedehuset, som lyder som følger: Himmel og jord skal brenne, høyder og berg forsvinne... Vel, forhåpentligvis får vi stoppet dagens hjernevaskede konsumentsamfunn før vi kommer så langt. Noen som fikk lyst til litt "degrowth"?

En herlig lavteknologi vedkløyver!

Tenk hvor flott denne vedkløyveren kunne fungere med et vasshjul. Her trengs hverken diesel eller traktor.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University)

leavergirl Says:

April 8, 2012 at 4:00 pm
Øyvind, I just read Scott’s Seeing like a state, where he describes in great detail how the mad modernist planners and gigantism cultists readily collaborated back and forth between America and the Soviet Union. A brisk movement of ideas and people. Here is a mad mad story for ya: the major American proponents of gigantic modern farms were offered a sweet deal by Stalin: practically unlimited land, and nearly unlimited numbers of intimidated muzhiks to work for you, and the crushing power of the state behind you! So they got together in a Chicago hotel and in two weeks designed the soviet state farm (sovchoz). (And no, it does not have a happy ending.) - James C. Scott on Wikipedia

Renegade Economist with Positive Money

Switching from School Institutions to Learning Practices

In a society which emphasizes teaching, children and students - and adults - become passive and unable to think or act for themselves. Creative, active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching.

Instead of the lock-step of compulsory schooling in a fixed place, work in piecemeal ways to decentralize the process of learning and enrich it through contact with many places and people all over the city: workshops, teachers at home or walking through the city, professionals willing to take on the young as helpers, older children teaching younger children, museums, youth groups traveling, scholarly seminars, industrial workshops, old people, and so on. Conceive of all these situations as forming the backbone of the learning process; survey all these situations, describe them, and publish them as the city's "curriculum"; then let students, children, their families and neighborhoods weave together for themselves the situ…

Kristiansand pinsemenighets nye menighetshus, neppe en gave til Gud

For en tid tilbake var jeg innom mine foreldre og tok som vanlig en titt på Vårt Land. Her kunne jeg lese at pinsemenigheten i Kristiansand skal få bygge nytt gudshus, men at dette har blitt redusert fra tolv til seks etasjer. Dette var en god nyhet, men det ville selvsagt vært en enda bedre nyhet hvis planene var blitt redusert til ingen etasjer.

Meningen var å bygge et signalbygg, det blir kanskje ikke det signalbygget man ønsket seg, men det store spørsmålet er alikevel hva man ønsker å signalisere med bygget?

I en video vi lastet opp til Permasolutions nylig, ble det lagt igjen en megetsigende kommentar:
In the future Christopher Alexander will be remembered in the same breath as Galileo and Descartes. He has provided scientific proof that all physical matter is holy and demonstrated an empirical connection between the built environment and the human soul. Mer om Alexanders funn kan lastes ned her: Empirical Findings from The Nature of Order

I slutten av forelesningen, under spørs…

Short Documentary: Feeding the Soul at Jones Valley Urban Farm

In the heart of downtown Birmingham, Alabama lives a small three acre block where big things are happening. Feeding the Soul takes a brief look at the Jones Valley Urban Farm and highlights some of the incredible ways that this small farm is not only giving back to the city of Birmingham but is setting an example for the entire world to follow. Filmed over the course of the 2008 summer harvest, we witness the hardships and triumphs of a farm that's anything but ordinary.

Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo

One of Europe's leading intellectual historians deconstructs liberalism's dark side.  In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.   Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order. - VersoRead more at Verso Books!

Related books:
Classical Liberalism, by Charles Siegel. Free download as HTML and Pdf.