This is one of the most intelligent compilation of ideas and future solutions that I have read. JGrace
by Chuck Burr
26 March 2009
The next ten years will not look like the last ten. They will be a shock to many people. Theories such as petrocollapse will become mainstream; the first world will begin to look like the second and third world.
If you want to see what the next decade will look like, look no further than France, Ukraine, and Iceland today. Last week one to three million people took to the streets of France for a second round of protests against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s handling of the economic crisis. Protests later turned violent as youths clashed with police.
I used to think it was just some melancholic germ of my own that made me see a slowly increasing American alienation, anxiety and inner sadness over the span of my 62 years. Now however, I’m pretty convinced there is a national pathology at work, one which author Arthur Barsky called the “pathology of American normalcy.” Sounds accurate to me. In fact, this psychic poverty has been around so long it has become something of a norm. Despite that we have not resorted to cannibalism, single payer health care, or god forbid, socialism, we long ago passed into the realm of what we like to call an “unhealthy society.” Might not America’s psychological malaise be the result of knowing deep inside that life can hold more meaning — be more joyful? More emotionally rewarding and fulfilling? In a word, healthier?
For those seriously interested in energy addiction recovery, the garden gate into the plant kingdom beckons wide. And as we remember and re-learn what-all it takes to feed ourselves, we’ll find soil building is only one part of the picture. Yet having ground to grow on, any kind of ground, is the third most important thing. Even crappy soil can be improved if you have the second most important thing, water. Carving up lawns is a great idea; strips of sod can be stacked back-to-back to make a superior compost called turf-loam. However, so many lawns are nothing but sponges saturated with herbicides and other toxic residues. The ground underneath must then be loosened, aerated and re-mineralized to grow anything decent out of it.
The first most important thing, the thing you need to have if soil and water are going to be of any use to you at all, is seeds. I must disagree with all the rapture around gold. Right now we need to be investing in seed supplies. We must OWN the seeds if we ever expect to be able to grow the plants. I don’t care if you don’t yet know your ass from an asparagus; BUY the seeds right NOW for the plants you’re going to want to eat.
Tour Scott McGuire’s “White Sage Gardens” in the back yard of his rental home — a demonstration site for suburban sustainability. He ponders, “How might a household produce and preserve a significant portion of its own food supply?” Composting, a water-conserving greenhouse, and seed-saving are all facets of this beautiful work in progress.
If this nation wants to survive without an intense political convulsion, there’s a lot we can do, but none of it is being voiced in any corner of Washington at this time. We have to get off of petro-agriculture and grow our food locally, at a smaller scale, with more people working on it and fewer machines. This is an enormous project, which implies change in everything from property allocation to farming methods to new social relations. But if we don’t focus on it right away, a lot of Americans will end up starving, and rather soon. We have to rebuild the railroad system in the US, and electrify it, and make it every bit as good as the system we once had that was the envy of the world. If we don’t get started on this right away, we’re screwed. We will have tremendous trouble moving people and goods around this continent-sized nation.
The last time I went to Ecuador, I spent some time thinking about how to help people. It didn’t take long to find the simple answers: Just get out there, ask people what they need and get it for them!
So I started filming these events, and today I’ve posted the first of many that you’ll eventually see posted on NaturalNews. You can watch the video here: http://www.naturalnews.com/025487.html
This first video is about Julia Maria, a woman living in a shack on the side of the road, literally sleeping with chickens in shockingly unclean conditions. While we couldn’t put a new roof over her head that day, we did find out what she needed (a mattress, some clothes, some shoes, and some food), we went out and got it, and delivered it to her.
Towards the end of this video, you can hear her asking for a cola, which we try to explain to her isn’t good for her health (we don’t bring people colas).
In the future, we’ll work to bring people fresh produce, but at the time of this filming, our gardens in Ecuador weren’t producing yet, so we got her what we could from the local stores (whole-grain bread and some fresh fruit).
What’s interesting about Ecuador, by the way, is that it’s so easy and affordable to make a difference in someone’s life. This is true anywhere, actually, but in Ecuador, a dollar goes a long way towards improving the life of a fellow human being.
“There’s no reason to believe it would not keep going up,” NCES statistician Gail Mulligan told USA Today.
A 2007 survey asked parents why they choose to homeschool and allowed them to provide several reasons. The following are the most popular responses:
Concern about the school environment, including reasons such as safety, drugs or negative peer pressure – 88 percent
A desire to provide religious or moral instruction – 83 percent
A dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools – 73 percent
Nontraditional approach to children’s education – or “unschoolers” who consider typical curriculums and standardized testing as counterproductive to quality education – 65 percent
Other reasons, such as family time, finances, travel and distance – 32 percent
Child has special needs (other than physical or mental health problems) that schools cannot or will not meet – 21 percent
Child has a physical or mental health problem – 11 percent
Parents who report that they homeschool to provide religious or moral instruction increased from 72 percent to 83 percent from 2003 to 2007.
Above all other responses, parents cited providing religious and moral instruction as the most important factor in the decision to teach their children at home (36 percent). The second most important issue was concern about the school environment (21 percent), while the third reason was dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools (17 percent).
Research has shown the positive effects of homeschooling through the years. While some critics say teaching children at home may stunt their social growth, Dr. Brian D. Ray, president of National Home Education Research Institute, reveals homeschooled students fare well or better than public and private school students in terms of social, emotional and psychological development.
“The home educated in grades K to 12 have scored, on average, at the 65th to 80th percentile on standardized academic achievement tests in the United States and Canada, compared to the public school average of the 50th percentile,” the report states.
Three studies also show that demographics, income and education level of homeschooling parents are generally irrelevant with regard to quality of education in a home setting. On average, homeschoolers in low-income families with less formal education still score higher than state-school averages.
A Nation of Farmers: I wanted to start by asking about something I’ve heard you say in other interviews.A lot of other people, even some of the cheery folks, tend to talk about peak oil specifically in really gloomy, sad terms.You tend to talk about it as a potentially positive development for humankind, and I wondered if you could talk about why.
Albert Bates: There are a few reasons behind that I think everybody at some point has to go through the process of having the realization.That may come as kind of a rude awakening, or it may come as “Aha, I told you so!”, but at some point everybody goes through it. It tends to deepen as time goes on, and people have their own periods of weeping and gnashing the teeth, but then you have to cope, you have to get up and do something about it. I think the more important thing is to have an attitude that something can still be done. You can’t exclude the possibility that the future is still malleable, that there is still an opportunity for positive change if we exert our capacity or our abilities to do that.
I think it’s important to paint a positive vision for the future to galvanize the kinds of changes that people are capable of, rather than to focus on the various dystopias, which is all too common in peak oil literature. We’re going to have to talk about energy and energy descent, and that’s ultimately about energy ascent — which is to say re-energizing. Re-energizing communities and culture, re-energizing the way we go through our lives so that we’re much more of our human selves, so that the separation that we’ve lost with nature is repaired. And that’s the key to realistically embracing the possibilities of our situation rather than being overwhelmed by the kinds of challenges that our situation presents us with.
26 March 2009
Jan 14th, 2009 | By 
