We are killing ourselves quick fast and in a hurry. The worst of it is that we are such an adaptable animal most of us will not even see it coming.
Even if there in not a complete meltdown things will get tougher and tougher to survive.
LOL not wanting to freeze is a big concern, but we have learned from our ancestors the best way to do that. They made the sacrifice for us, we need to take advantage of that skill set.

We are the most intelligent creatures on the face of the earth, it is our duty to protect all others.

Hi Kay,

I think what Gifino is trying to say is not about personal opinions. I am completely with your on all of your conceptual methods. However there is a problem. The govt. isn't. It is illegal to go without taxes and "ownership" of land. Unfortunate and constricting as this fact may be, it is inescapable. Unless the community is living undercover than there is always a risk of discovery and persecution. How will we evade this without doing so illegitimately?

Professor, that's why I use history as a tetpmale; our current crisis is different in scale from past cases of overshoot and collapse, but it's not different in kind. Cherokee, feed the chickens. Their droppings will put your compost into overdrive. Marielar, one of my concerns about biochar is precisely that most presentations of it, at least, are pulling one ingredient out of the very complex mix of terra preta, and treating it as a universal remedy. That strikes me as the usual sort of oversimplification our society likes so much, and gets into so much trouble from. John, now that's a sensible approach. Bill, the 2011 date is new, but there's been a lot of discussion in the last decade about the limits to coal being much closer than comfortable stereotypes placed them. Richard Heinberg in Peak Everything, if I recall correctly, put peak coal around 2040. Dan, selecting traits with narrow applicability isn't the only thing natural selection can do. Place a species in an environment that throws lots of different stressors at it, and the variants that survive will be those that are good at surviving lots of different stressors. That's how we evolved; we're among nature's supreme generalists, right up there with rats and cockroaches, because we evolved during a period of extreme environmental variability that put a premium on the ability to adapt to just about anything nature might throw our way. Gary, I'm not suggesting that green wizardry can bring about a gentle landing. I'm suggesting that there's not going to be a gentle landing. The Hirsch report showed us that any effective response to peak oil had to get under way 20 years before the peak; it's now five years after the peak. The "immense changes in both attitude, understanding, and behavioral changes on a global scale" you're calling for wouldn't arrive in time even if there were any realistic hope that they're going to happen, which they're not. That's the rationale behind the Green Wizardry approach; while the rest of the world twiddles its thumbs or demands massive systemic reforms that are not forthcoming, those of us willing to get to work can at least do something useful. As for industrial-scale biochar, that's another one of those paper solutions that look great until you run the numbers. Our species is already using far too much of the world's biomass, and that sort of massive biochar program would require using a great deal more -- or putting yet another use for crops in competition with human food, as ethanol and biodiesel are already doing. There's also the additional demand for energy and resources to build those factories, produce and distribute the biochar, etc., etc., which would have to be met out of existing (and rapidly depleting) stocks, all of which are already overcommitted -- and all this when the benefits of biochar as such have yet to be proven to any sort of reasonable standard. Policy details may matter, but daydreams don't.

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