In December of 2019, my best friend Kit took me and my partner to the place where she grew up, in the remote Thora Valley, in the pristine forested foothills of Eastern Australia’s Great Dividing Range. As we drove down Darkwood, the single road into the Thora, Kit told us stories of floods and mouldy […]
Ten reasons to be concerned about 5G
Once cast, 5G’s inescapable net will have consequences on everything from the night sky down to the cells of our bodies. With two legal cases against 5G roll-out getting underway in the UK,[1] here are just ten of many reasons why 5G is such a bad idea – and not one of them has anything […]
Convenience, Community, and Late-Stage Capitalism
Yesterday I went to the post office to mail a package to my daughter overseas. She’s been in the military for years, so I’m familiar with the process. Hauling the big box on my hip, I greeted the post mistress and asked her for a customs form. “Oh, you have to do that online now,” […]
Our Robot Overlords
A consequence of the current pandemic is an increase in computer use. Almost everyone’s feeling it: students are doing classes by Zoom, employees are online for team meetings, musicians are performing to their phones, consumers are ordering food, clothes, and a hundred other things to be delivered, television shows recorded in front of live audiences […]
The Folly of Farm-Free Food
“Beware of simple solutions to complex problems. That is a crucial lesson from history; a lesson that intelligent people in every age keep failing to learn.”[1] Having wisely counseled thus just 5 years ago in a trenchant critique of ecomodernism, environmental journalist George Monbiot’s recent op-ed in The Guardian surprised a lot of people. In […]
Iowa, Pseudo-Events, and Hyperreality
The Iowa caucus affair last night was a masterclass in hyperreality. The relevant facts are as follows. It was the long-anticipated kickoff to the primary season in an ever-expanding election cycle that now seems more or less co-terminous with the president’s four-year term. Iowa has an outsized place in this process, as it traditionally holds […]
Dammed Good Questions about the Green New Deal
Hydroelectric power from dams might be the thorniest issue that proponents of the Green New Deal (GND) have to grapple with. Providing more energy than solar and wind combined, dams could well become the key backup “renewable” if it otherwise proves impossible to get off of fossil fuels fast enough. Rivers and lakes are an […]
What is ‘Energy Denial’?
The fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day of 1970 will be in 2020. As environmentalism has gone mainstream during that half-century, it has forgotten its early focus and shifted toward green capitalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than abandonment of the slogan popular during the early Earth Days: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” The unspoken motto […]
Land Without Bread: the Green New Deal forsakes America’s countryside
Days after the heart-stopping Notre-Dame Cathedral fire in April, Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg trained her eyes on the United Kingdom’s parliament and chastised its meager response to climate change. “I want you to panic,” the baby-faced sixteen-year-old quietly instructed the adults in the room. “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the […]
Variety, Survival, and the Revenge of the Luddites
Since human creativity will have to move in new directions as the Industrial Revolution runs down, you may be wondering what kinds of technology are suited to a sane life. You may picture what is called nowadays a low-tech lifestyle. Despite its popularity among cutting-edge thinkers and designers, a low-tech lifestyle is hardly avant garde. […]