adam, 560 words, 8 comments, Mencius, Specialization, Environment, Worldchanging, Vinay Gupta, John Taylor Gatto, Neurosurgery

A key theme in environmentalism is industrial and agricultural self-reliance, interpreted as a strong ethical relationship between yourself and the energy and materials you consume and produce.  This expresses itself in a heavy focus on localism, village trading and life, to the point of personally producing and maintaining a sizable chunk of one's clothes, tools, and growing a large chunk of your own food.  This exists even in the bright green consensus reality of technoprogressive environmentalists; Vinay Gupta of Worldchanging wrote recently of being Unplugged, and previously of a Global Sustainable Peasantry.

I imagine Mencius asking: How do you have an Unplugged neurosurgeon?

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adam, 238 words, 9 comments, Military, Environment, Global Warming, Worldchanging, Mongol Hordes

Dave Foley, of the stylish architectural practice Holland and Foley , comments at Worldchanging :

[...] There's one thing that's hard to do with efficiency and renewable energy: project military power.

He's wrong: efficiency and renewable energy would make America's fun new imperialism more sustainable. (more)

Scrymarch, 449 words, 4 comments, Global Guerrillas, John Robb, Worldchanging, Sovereign Mob, Networked Terrorist

Global Guerillas is John Robb's blog, expounding the theory that the asymmetrical warfare practised in Iraq and elsewhere is organised along the same lines as open source software.  Intertwined technological and political innovation is a house theme at SSR, so let's pause and contemplate this for a moment, or at least string together jargon in an appealing but fragmentary way. (more)