Author: steve
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The sustainable city of Porena: THE VIDEO
This is the video based on the novel “Inventing for the Sustainable Planet”
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Mr Oil is already making a long, slow exit. You might not be seeing it though…
Since the end of the First World War, oil has been flowing into almost every aspect of our daily lives: as fuel, as basis for chemicals, as plastic, fabrics etc. In fact today, it is hard to think of a product that does NOT contain a large portion of oil or oil energy. Oil is…
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The World’s oceans are littered with plastic
This amazing film gives remarkable insight into how plastic refuse circulates in our oceans. This plastic flotsam is a threat to our Very Beautiful Place and should give us cause to stop and think about the systemic malfunctions that allow release of such valuable materials into the biosphere.
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Story from the future: City without cars
Summer, 2029: Taking a walk around the sustainable city of Porena is like taking a step back in time. Porena is the first city to go sustainable and car-less. Now most cities are walking cities, thanks to the peaking of oil production. As I walk around the city, it is hard to imagine how bold…
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Age of Stupid
As temporary NING-master for the Transition Sweden movement, I was invited to a pre-screening of Franny Armstrongs drama-documentary-animation hybrid ”the Age of Stupid” The film revolves around an archivist in 2055, living in a devastated world, reviewing material from 2008 and asking why people did not react sooner. The film is a masterpiece of craftsmanship,…
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White paper on Powerdown
POWER DOWN … the main business challenge of the 2010’s. What organizations need to know about the impact of liquid fuels on communities as oil prices hike and availability wanes. For officers in the public and private sector alike, this paper describes 16 main aspects of the coming energy situation. Organisations need to consider these…
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Video envisioning: Units of Trust
Imagine it were possible to, instead of just consuming, invest your money in local sustainable enterprises. As long as your money is with these enterprises, they provide you with your daily needs at a lower cost. You would need to work less and less as time goes on, with more time over to do what…
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Eco units provide Naoki Shiomi’s Half Farmer/Half X lifestyle
The concept of the Half-Farmer/Half-X lifestyle was first proposed in the mid-1990s by the Japanese Naoki Shiomi, who now lives in the city of Ayabe in the north part of Kyoto Prefecture. The basic idea is that people pursue farming, not so much as a business but to grow food for their own family, while…
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Why we need a change: this is not your ordinary recession
My recent visit to England shows a country nose-diving into a new kind of recession: one that has no end. As the reams of newspaper articles laying out dismal prospects for 2009 appear before us, there is an underlying belief in that the recovery will come in a few or at most ten years, and…
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Going for a bigger blog
Regular readers may know that I have kept work on INVENTING separate from my consulting work with A Very Beautiful Place. Recently, realised that the two really do fit well together so I’m migrating my main blogging over to AVBP.net I came to the realisation that peace and sustainable development go hand in hand. And…