One of the key beliefs we have in this society is that we must always be growing. This is an economic belief, of course, but I often notice it reaching into other areas of our lives---into the personal, the professional, even the daily. We believe in growth, and we believe in progress, and we believe … Continue reading America the Exhausted

Back when I wrote my old blog, Of The Hands, I spent a fair amount of time discussing the concept of voluntary poverty. During the time I wrote that blog, I worked on a small-scale, off-grid (more or less) vegetable farm for room and board. A side job as a farm hand provided me as … Continue reading The Ways of Contraction: Compounding Consequences

Last week, I began the process of laying out three key realities that promise the United States a continuing era of decline and contraction. It may surprise some that I started with America's impending loss of its global empire, rather than a focus on peak oil and other realities of energy and resource depletion, considering … Continue reading The Ways of Contraction: More Begets Less

As this blog lines out my thoughts on the world at hand, our responsibilities to it, and the better and worse ways we can live within it, a number of assumptions are going to be . . . well, assumed. This is, so far as I’m concerned, inevitable. I am not interested in simply rephrasing … Continue reading The Ways of Contraction: A Failing Empire

One of the challenges with writing and speaking about the sort of troubled future I believe we face is that it's so easy to focus on the negative aspects of that future and bog down in examining the hefty ecological bills coming due. Granted, I think that's necessary to a large degree; not so we … Continue reading Clear-Eyed Futures: An Introduction