David Orr

I often read John Michael Greer, the Archdruid. He's a smart and thoughtful guy who worries about some of the same things I worry about, though he tends to have decided they are all hopeless, whereas I tend to see society as having a lot more options than he perceives.

A year ago, my business partner, Caitlyn Galloway, and I started Little City Gardens.

People grasp what their drinking water has to do with them.

-Detroit Wants To Save Itself - By Shrinking
-Orange officials sue couple who removed their lawn
-Obama’s Nuclear Blind Spot
-Tory budget ‘walks away' from renewable energy, environmentalist says

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Weeds growing up through the cracks in the pavement is a fractal assertion of life revealing itself through the cracks of civilization.

These fish and shellfish are delicious, healthful, and can be eaten with a clean conscience.

The National Intelligence Council has released a report on the expected effects of climate change to the Caribbean region. This 21 page report is entitled Mexico, The Caribbean and Central America: The Impact of Climate Change to 2030: Geopolitical Implications (NIC Conference Report, Jan. 2010).

An ecosystem is no more nor less than the sum of individual responses of diverse cooperating or competing organisms to stimuli from events in their environment.

-After Smart Grids, Smart Sewage?
-A real bottler
-Lexicon of Change: The Rise of Transition Culture

EROI theory is rooted in the biological principle that in order to survive each species on earth must procure more energy from its food than it expends attaining that food.

-Malaysia begins caning women for adultery
-Fred Pearce: overpopulation worries are a potentially racist distraction
-1325 implementation - Where is Secretary-General's leadership?

But lately I’ve been asking myself a different question. What are the best mental patterns of thinking for surviving tough times? There are a variety of ways to look at this issue, and one is looking at who survives when bad things happen in the wilderness, or in dangerous recreational pursuits and why. I’ve taken some of the ideas outlined by Gonzales and added some of my own here.

A while ago now I was in London for the launch of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment’s ‘Building a New Green Economy’ conference, where I was a speaker alongside Tim Jackson, David Orr and Stewart Brand. You can read about the event here, and films of our talks will be posted soon.

Vertical farming has become a popular idea, but what is mostly forgotten is that the