Transition Culture has moved
I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
Showing results 16 - 19 of 19 for the month of April, 2006.
A copy of the latest edition of “Inquiring Mind” somehow arrived in my hands the other day, and a fine publication it is too. The subject of the Fall 2005 edition, Volume 22 No. 1, is Earth Dharma, and it pulls together many of the leading writers and thinkers exploring the interface between environmental thinking and Buddhism. Contributors include Joanna Macy, Gary Snyder, Paul Hawken and Helena Norberg-Hodge.
I was particularly touched by
Forfas, Ireland’s national policy advisory board for enterprise, trade, science, technology and innovation today releases its long-awaited study on the potential impacts of peak oil on the Irish economy A Baseline Assessment of Ireland’s Oil Dependence – key policy considerations. Forfas operates under the auspices of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. Robert Hirsch collaborated on the study, so how adequately does it address the challenges that Ireland will face?
Yesterday’s Independent’s Business section contained an article by Simon English called Opec ‘doing all it can’ for oil prices which offered another insight into the fact that the peak is very near. It is an interesting feature of peak oil that many of the most interesting articles and insights on the subject are to be found in the business sections of the newspapers. Certainly the business section was always the part of the paper that I avoided like the plague, a sort of seedy and barely comprehensible world that really I’d rather not know anything about. Now it is one of the first places I look for
The terrible case of Charles Martin, the Ohio man who shot a neighbour’s son to death for walking on his lawn has shown us the flipside of our cultural neurotic obsession with lawns, those neat, tidy, manicured, and ultimately useless landscapes. This man was so enraged that someone would walk on his grass that he reached for his shotgun. Lawns are a classic example of our dysfunctional society. Here is a form of land use, described by Stephen Morris as ” the Marine haircut of the plant world”, that uses more energy, pesticides and herbicides (and in some places, water) than agriculture, yet is entirely useless. Where our oil-poor ancestors would have had potatoes and chard, we have lawn. I am delighted to be able to announce to you though, Ladies and Gentlemen, that the Days of the Lawn are numbered.
