resource depletion
sastyk | September 21, 2012In 2011 I wrote an essay about how the convention of escape undermines our thinking about the environmental crises we are facing. A kind reader of mine emailed to tell me about how she uses that essay "Outrunning the Boom" in her classroom, and her wonderful students responded with this video. Apparently, outrunning the boom is way cooler than I knew. No wonder I'm not winning the rhetoric war ;-)! H/T to Anna - Thanks!
sastyk | October 16, 2011From David Leonhardt at the New York Times, a good, if very partial explanation of why the overall future of the US and the Global North generally doesn't look as promising as the 30s. See if you can guess what's missing from the article.
Still, the reasons for concern today are serious. Even before the financial crisis began, the American economy was not healthy. Job growth was so weak during the economic expansion from 2001 to 2007 that employment failed to keep pace with the growing population, and the share of working adults declined. For the average person with a job, income growth…
sastyk | January 21, 2010A friend of mine, Colin Beavan (aka No Impact Man) once observed that cutting your energy usage should be as easy as rolling off a log - that as long as it is always easier to use more resources, and the path of least resistance heads towards taking the car or turning up the heat, we're destined to struggle. And he's right.
However, in another way, he may be wrong. While I agree with him that we can do a lot of things to make energy reduction a lot easier for people (think, using one really obvious example, how many people are simply afraid to ride their bikes in traffic, and who could be…