A Petrocollapse Timeline
"We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us. " —Jimmy Carter, Speech to the Nation, 1977 Since the early two thousand oughts we pessimistas have been trying to discern the shape of the backside of Mr. Hubbert’s curve. John Michael Greer has made a strong case for catabolic

Thanksgiving in Fallujah
"The enemy has got a face – he's called Satan." — Commander, 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, Battle of Fallujah When uranium comes out of the ground, it gets elementally separated from its ore at a mill somewhere near the mine. At the mill they crush and dissolve the rock in an acid, alkaline or peroxide solution. Since uranium is one of the heaviest elements, it settles quickly to the bottom

Day of the Dead
The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise. We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the

Number 59’s Wall
"If the legends fade, who will teach the children?"— Te-lah-nayYesterday we finished up our second financial permaculture summit in Hohenwald, our county seat, and some of the participants took up an invitation to visit The Wall. The Wall came to pass from a series of events in the Nineteenth Century, beginning with the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which was opposed by our local