You know what a stream looks like. It has a pair of steep banks that have been scoured by shifting currents, exposing streaks and lenses of rock and old sediment. At the bottom of this gully—ten to fifty feet down—the water rushes past, and you can hear the click of tumbling rocks as they are […]
A Zone of One’s Own
How many times have you seen a vegetable garden tucked away in the back of a yard, choked with weeds and lurking with unharvested zucchini the size of baseball bats? Instead of being outside the kitchen window where those weeds and past-due vegetables would alert someone washing dishes, the garden has been hidden. And since […]
The Origins of Peak Oil Doomerism
Many people in the Peak Oil community chafe at the label of doomer, but a lot of us do have an apocalyptic bent. Although plenty of Peak Oil commentary is sober analysis, a survey of the major websites and books quickly brings up apocalyptic titles like dieoff.org, oilcrash.com, The Death of the Oil Economy, The End of […]
Seeing the Garden in the Jungle
Lately I’ve been lucky enough to teach permaculture courses on the Big Island of Hawai’i at La’akea Gardens. And at each course an odd thing happens. First, let me point out that La’akea generates all its own solar electricity, collects its water from rooftop catchment, uses composting toilets, recycles greywater, sheet mulches copiously, and has […]
Finding a Sense of Surplus
It’s easy to grasp the wisdom in the first two of permaculture’s three ethical principles. The benefits of “care for the earth” and “care for people,” are obvious, and it’s not a difficult step to put those principles into practice. But then comes that third, more challenging principle, “share the surplus.” That’s where some of […]
Apocalypse, Not
The phrase “the end of the world as we know it” has been uttered so often in the last decade that some Peak Oil advocates simply use its acronym, TEOTWAWKI. This awkward shorthand was once employed by Y2k catastrophists, and that heritage alone—the most unnecessary “sky is falling” panic in my lifetime—is enough to make […]
Another Kind of Genocide
Review of Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience, a book by David Theodoropoulos Avvar Books, Blythe CA. 2003. 237+xiv pp. Paper. $14.50 One of my favorite ways of setting off small explosions is to tell a group of gardeners that I don’t dislike invasive plants. Since the polarization over the natives-versus-exotics issue is fierce, the discussion […]
Cities, Peak Oil, and Sustainability
In mid-August I drove to a party in the country outside of Portland, Oregon. Twenty miles of freeway took me to a two-lane road that wound ten miles up steep forested hills and down through remote valleys. As the roads grew narrower and less traveled, I began to wonder how, if gas hits $5 or […]
Peak Oil and Urban Sustainability
In 1994, my wife and I left Seattle and moved to rural southern Oregon. One of our many reasons for leaving the city was to finally pursue the dream of self-reliance: to create a permaculture homestead that would trim our resource use and let us tap in more fully to nature’s abundance. And in the […]