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Showing posts from June, 2018

why one earth?

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It's important for all 7 billion of us to live within one earth equivalence. We only have one planet.  Except for the Blue sky space billionaires, we're stuck here.  One earth is all we have. More than one earth is unsustainable.  We currently use about 1.7 earths overall .  The USA uses about 4-6 earths, Europe about half that.  This is unsustainable   Last time I checked we only have one of these 'earths'... somethings gotta give.  How can we adapt our current lifestyles to living within our means - one earth equivalence? My applied ethos 1 is walking my talk. If I’m going to tell others that it’s best to live within one earth, the least I can do is live within one earth myself. It’s easy once my heart aligns with Gaia and once I understood the frailty of our current systems and structures and how utterly unsustainable they are. One concept illustrating this is ‘earth overshoot day’: it’’s currently August 21 for the USA. Earth Overshoo

beyond off-grid

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when people introduce me and say 'fred lives off the grid', While I appreciate the intro,  I always want to say: 'I'm WAY beyond off-grid'... and if a conversation engages around it, I like to throw in the moniker: 'I live off the dreadmill' ... let me explain. Our society loves path dependence. The history of humans is written on it. Path dependence implies we continue down the current path even though we know better paths – because it's convenient and we 'need to pay the mortgage/rent'.  And of course, many industries profit enormously from the current path.  it. Take oil, fast food, big box stores, etc.  I like the sound bite ' we didn't sto p using  whale oil for lighting because we ran out of whales'   And so too, we are blazing new paths not because we're running out of resources (which certain groups want you to believe) as much as there are better options on the horizons (uber, AI, self-driving cars, robotics,