TransitionTowns, Resilience, and Community
Last night I went to an initial Transition Towns meeting in a nearby town of 10,000. Transition Towns is a loosely organized movement to help local communities build a vision that helps it respond to a...
View ArticleThe Banality of Evil; the Banality of Waste
Tonight I made myself a make-do meal at a friend's house, where I'm staying mostly alone, during an extended visit to Washington DC. But that make-do meal became tinged -- almost became metaphoric --...
View ArticleFull Godwin, complicity, and ECSTASY
My diaries are often dark and foreboding, mapping the elements of impending ecosystem and economic collapse, in the hope that they can help inform the prioritization of policy attitudes within the DK...
View ArticleOil Disaster as Metaphor
Some are calling it a "river of oil" now, instead of an oil spill. "Spill" makes it sound like the oil rig exploded, then "spilled" some oil, which is now creeping toward the coast. Instead, the broken...
View ArticleGulf Gusher -- how bad can it be?
The news media, unsurprisingly, generally tell the news, not the implications. They don't want to get hyperventilating -- that's not what journalists do, after all -- they just report. Consequently,...
View ArticleNew Northwest Passage: eco-lyrics on Stan Rogers
Stan Rogers' Northwest Passage -- an achingly beautiful song about striving and glory and loss -- is nearly anthemic to Canadians. If you're American, you may have heard it as well. If you haven't, a...
View ArticleSacrificing Amsterdam
No, not sacrificing the city -- sacrificing my time in Amsterdam. I made a very difficult decision yesterday. I'm fortunate to have become, over a couple of decades, a fairly big fish in certain small...
View ArticleAfter the shores turn black and begin to stink
Help me out here, amateur and professional economists. We have been hearing that the Gulf Gusher damage may be "beyond human comprehension." The carnage is iceberg-like, with the hidden undersurface...
View ArticleGulf gusher: a sort of requiem
The oil and gas rush out of the pipe: a force we believed we could master. The oil explodes into droplets, then reforms into gobs, then into droplets once again. The oil rushes, then relaxes, and...
View ArticleEven worse: shallow oil pipelines in dying wetlands
So I'm mesmerized in horror, watching the hypnotic gush of the live feed. I'm groaning over the ocean life that will die unnoticed in the deep, after ingesting toxic dispersants and more-toxic oil. I'm...
View Articleeco-PANIQuiz for June 21-27: Funning the horror
Though provided weekly on our site, I only occasionally post these Pre-Apocalypse News and Information Quizzes here. But there are some good ones this week, which you might enjoy.
View ArticleOne year, two years ago in ecocollapse
I recently worked up a "see one year ago, two years ago" gizmo for the news story database underlying our "humoring the horror of environmental collapse" website. What's perhaps most alarming is how...
View Articleeco-PANIQuiz for week ending July 4: Laughing at danger
This week's Pre-Apocalypse News and Information Quiz might provide a bit of levity on this Monday. If you can't laugh, you can't learn. Did you hear the one about ballast water in the Mediterranean,...
View ArticleOn the death of 17 chickens
Last night, we got the call from our nearish neighbor, who has the specially modified nail gun that shoots blunt force trauma at 80 psi. It was late afternoon -- "how about tonight?" she said. We were...
View ArticleEco-PANIQuiz for week ending Aug 8: GMOs, Toads, CO2, and Dams
As I've done other times, I'm reposting our weekly quiz -- some funny and scary stories during the last week. Enjoy!
View ArticleChortling the end of the world: this week's PANIQuiz
It was a tough week in Tomorrowland, where everyone is above average, because the averages keep plummeting "faster than expected." For a bit of Monday fun -- and for those 6 billion or so not paying...
View ArticleExpensive, inconvenient, and scratchy: solutions are easy
In response to a comment in a recent post of mine, I replied, "I think lots of us know what we have to do -- change radically -- but far too few are actually doing it. Problems abound, but so do...
View Article26 square miles of toxic cloud
and wait -- there's more! 22 miles long, 1.2 miles wide and 650 feet tall -- about 60 stories -- 3000 feet underwater! That's no plume, that's a massive toxic cloud that shows no sign of abating. BP's...
View ArticleBioaccumulation: the gift that keeps on giving
Bioaccumulation. It's what's for dinner. And lunch, and breakfast. Its danger depends a bit on whether you're flora or fauna, insect or mammal, baby or oldster -- and, of course, what you've...
View ArticleRolling the dice with evolution
A new study by J. Alroy, just published in Science (subscription required for full text), has been getting some reporting by other sources. It's mildly entitled "The Shifting Balance of Diversity Among...
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