The Archdruid talks planning

It's worth a look at John Michael Greer's latest post which is a meditation on planning in the face of a large number of unknowns: precisely the situation which we are all faced with now, and which will be with us for the foreseeable future.

In order not to waste our time and our limited resources this is, in my opinion, the one crucial area where we have to get our thinking right.

Tuesday night's meeting

I need to try and summarise what happened at the meeting. It was too windy to have it in the garden, so we moved inside the Community House. Thank you to the Writing Group who happily moved into the kitchen to make way for us!

There were fifteen of us, some of whom had been at the first meeting in October. I wasn't sure what to expect and had been prepared to split us into two groups, one to deliver my background lecture to and one to continue into on into personal action using a planning document (the Vulnerability Assessment sheet available for download in the Links & resources column).

In the event the meeting ended up being about the meeting! It took a very long time to get around the room and for everyone to introduce themselves. And then the meeting went in search of a purpose for itself. I put in my two bobs worth, which was that I want to be primarily an information provider and not the convenor of a group which has some other purpose. I agreed to provide members of the group with my lecture notes which I have linked to on this site so anyone can access them. Then other people can go off and talk to other groups too, which is a necessary first step in this business. Feel free to alter the content to suit, but acknowledge the sources.

We agreed to have another meeting on the 12th of February, 7:00pm at Foster Community House where hopefully the group will be able to set some useful goals for itself. Thank you everyone for coming along and having the interest to try and do something concrete to deal with the big changes we are all going to have to face.

The waves of history as seen from Prince Edward Island

Here's an interesting post from Robert Paterson on Canada's Prince Edward Island with a long view of the financial crisis. Some nice analogies in there...

He's much gentler on our political leaders than I am. He says they have no choice but to try and maintain business-as-usual until the dam finally breaks. On reflection I think he is right. However if we are to survive we must not make the mistake of following our doomed leaders. They may have no choice but to desperately patch the machine which made them what they are. But we do have choice (if we are able to step back from our own doomed investments). We must get to work and build the new working paradigms.

Quickie financial lesson

An easily understood explanation of the beginnings of the current financial crisis...

Club Orlov post+next meeting

A new guest post over at Club Orlov is worth a look. Chris, an Australian living in the Philippines, talks about how Peak Oil might play out in poorer countries: in fact he believes they may have some advantages over advanced industrial nations.

He gets a little testy with me over a comment I've posted but it has provoked some interesting discussion!

Also our next meeting is Tuesday evening from 6:00 pm on at Manna Community Garden behind Foster Community House: bring your dinner if you're coming early. The weather looks as if it will be OK outside.

I'll be bringing along a few books for those who may be interested in further information. My idea is that if we have a lot of people who weren't at our first meeting I will run through the basic information with them while everyone else works on some analysis and planning: I'll have some material ready for you all to work with.

When I get time I'll post some reviews of the more interesting and pertinent books I've been reading lately too.

John Robb's musings on solutions to the world financial crisis

The question now becomes, what will these "solutions" that mitigate the effects of the "coming" Depression look like? The natural reflex is to assume that our nation-states will formulate a response. However, that doesn't appear to be a well founded assumption since this global problem is MUCH bigger, faster and more complex than they can handle. Further, nation-states have been in decline for nearly 35 years as they gradually ceded elements of sovereignty to a now dominant global marketplace (which was built to help America's ideological solution triumph over Communism during the Cold War).

Read more....

Podcasts of the October Forum temporarily unavailable

Nick Franklin from Radio National has kindly provided me with recordings of our meeting at Foster Hall on October the 14th, but I'm having server issues at the moment so they're temporarily unavailable.