Return of the Walkman?

...(Sport WM-FS397, to be exact). Here’s an “exploded” view: The BBC, back in 2010, gave a 13 year-old a Walkman to review. Here’s what the kid said: It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassett...

Read…

Organic Seed Growers Webinar

...(and the impact of those foraging ranges on crop isolation), bee-friendly farming practices, development of pollinator habitat on working farms, accessing USDA technical and financial resources for pollinator conservation, and more. Speakers: Eric Mader, The Xerces Society Saturday, February 1, 2014 3:30-5:00PM: Managing Seed-Borne Diseases in Seed Production Production of high-quality, pathogen-free seed is particularly important in organic seed...

Read…

The Elysium Delusion

...x things on earth, let’s all get the hell out–it’s the ultimate form of suburban flight. NASA’s 1970s era version of Elysium The heyday of space colonization futurism was the 1970s. But space station fantasies have reappeared in popular culture recently. At the end of the recently released movie Elysium [spoiler alert] the evil French speaking space colonists (who look like Armani clad Santa Barbarans) have their computer reset by Matt Damon who,...

Read…

Age of Apocalypse

...toxic spills, and mortgage payments, opening the way to a simpler life of farming, maintaining shelter, and maybe defending one’s family . . . This is why the return to simplicity offered by the most extreme scenarios is providing so alluring to so many of us. The apocalypse meme also recalls Freud’s observation the the fear of death paradoxically results in a condition of pathological inaction that mimics death. It’s an impulse, in my opinion, t...

Read…

Initial Thoughts on the Age of Limits 2013 Conference

...Global Eco Village Network and the author of The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change, The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook. He blogs at The Great Change. In the wake of the conference, what we find ourselves most interested in thinking about and talking about with others is not the validity of the concepts of peak oil, climate change and economic collapse, or the gritty details of it, but the culturally loaded ideas that...

Read…