The question was asked at the Barbastro Peak Oil Conference. If we are justified in poisoning people in order to produce combustible liquids and gas, why don’t we jump to the ultimate consequence and turn human corpses into oil? Swift’s Modest Proposal returns, with increased poignancy.

A cluster of news stories, whiffing slightly of hope, crossed my virtual desk over the last couple of days. Their scope varies from the global (UN) to the regional (U of Guelph, ON) to the very local (town of Sedgwick Maine). But their conclusions are harmonious: food sovereignty is a hot issue, agribusiness propaganda is [...]

I’ll be lazy and just grab three feature articles from a mainstream “left” site for now. I figure most readers know the outline of the story, but wanted to acknowledge it publicly anyway. The consensus is true enough: the death toll in Haiti’s recent severe earthquake was far higher than it would have been in [...]

Politics, said Bismarck, is the art of the possible. Yet we are living in a time when politics as widely practised is quite the reverse: the art and worship of the Impossible, namely of the impossible dream of fostering infinite greed, infinite accumulation, infinite “growth,” on a finite planet; of fighting infinite war to control [...]

We’re all familiar with the myth: we learned it in school. It goes something like this: Once Upon a Time, in the 1960′s, a crew of brilliant whitefellas in lab coats Saved the World by revolutionising farming and eliminating world hunger. Their new, advanced mechanical/chemical farming methods — vast areas of monocrop, heavy tractors, giant [...]

Stan Cox is on a roll over at CommonDreams.org; in a percipient and timely essay he reminds us that simply cultivating our back (or front, in defiance of the HOA) yard is not enough to fix the corporate version of agriculture. Our dependence on staple “commodity” crops like grain and oil-seeds (hard to grow on [...]

[Thanks to T Millions who wrote to us asking for more commentary on vermicomposting, particularly as applied to humanure and local "health security"] It might be the ultimate kapu. After all, everything from child molestation to necrophilia to bestiality to gang rape is now routine fare in online porn, and anyone who’s genuinely upset by [...]

Over at IA Stan has posted link to a video about abuses in the US meat industry. Here’s a thread to discuss it…

Open thread for discussion (if any) of Insurgent American article. Something to be Enthusiastic About: thinking about Demand Reduction

(From a diary at European Tribune:) We may have to pack light to make it through the next century, or indeed the next millennium. If we have to pack light, what do we really need to preserve that essential ability to feel enthusiasm, a genuine pleasure in life? Most of what I own I don’t really need or am not truly attached to; this is something you find out not only when packing for a journey, but when packing to move (which I’m doing now, and that’s another story). Is it worth packing and paying for the larger size of truck and toting the heavy boxes? Maybe not. Maybe I can live just fine without it. I suspect that the same applies to us (affluent Westerners) as a culture; much of what we have isn’t really all that wonderful — not worth throwing away a perfectly good planet or killing people for, anyway — and we could be quite happy with a lot less material cruft and a much lower energy budget.

So I’m proposing the question — to myself and to us all: suppose you’re packing light for a long journey; suppose you don’t have infinite energy to haul heavy baggage around; suppose you don’t have infinite suitcases to pack tons of junk into; what would you stuff into the backpack and take on the train, and what would you leave behind and hardly miss as soon as the journey started?