Yesterday, a friend sent me over this graph, which shows the levels of carbon dioxide emitted by the USA over the last twenty years. As the accompanying report explains, it shows that 2009 was an "exceptional" year - exceptional in that emissions levels fell by more than they had fallen in a single year since 1949. The reason? The economic crash.

Cities in Asia are hubs of production, innovation and wealth, funnelling into themselves immense resources, water, energy, food, drawing in from nearby districts and far-off provinces families and entire communities.

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Cars promise mobility, and in a largely rural setting they provide it.

While lying awake late at night worrying about what kind of world my children will inherit, I find it helpful to come up with schemas for the most obvious and inevitable of the large societal problems.  It makes them seem slightly more manageable to place them in order of importance, or time.

Oil prices fell below $70/barrel this week before recovering slightly.

Sometime within the next two weeks the free-flowing Deepwater Horizon well could surpass the second largest oil spill in history. Indeed, if we assume the highest independently measured estimates of the leak's flow rate, Deepwater Horizon may have already released 84% of the total petroleum that was dumped into the Gulf of Mexico by the Ixtoc I, a similar rig blow-out that occurred in 1979.

One of the most stunning outcomes of the now month-long oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the utter reversal of corporate images it has generated.

-Transit as a Development Tool, but in Whose Interest?
-Better Bikeways: Guerrilla Improvements and DIY Signage
-What's not to like about high-speed rail? The case simply hasn't been made

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Recommendations stemming from the recently announced independent Presidential Commission on the tragedy will likely have much influence on the course of deepwater drilling and thus the availability of oil in the future.

We were recently reminded yet again that regarding the Earth's biodiversity crisis, we need to get used to failure.

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The subject under discussion is EDAPs (or Community Resilience Plans… or whatever you want to call them), and how one does them for cities, or even if one does them for cities...

-China, not U.S., will be tar sands’ market
-Tar Sands in Your Tank - report by Greenpeace UK
-Investors reject Royal Dutch Shell oil sands review

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Laura S. Scott has surveyed and interviewed more than 170 people for her Childless by Choice Project.

-Growing problem needs radical ideas
-Grasshoppers Garden: What To Read
-Use of local food boosts hospital funds
-Derbyshire village to develop own food label

Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene.

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