Heading Out (Dave Summers) is currently visiting China...perhaps these ideas will give us some inspiration for ideas here as well.

Solar heating of a kettle (30 min to boiling)

Powering Rural China

One of the concerns of the Qinghai Administration deals with the large number of herders that remain wandering the hills, as their herds migrate across the landscape. Apart from the concerns over over-grazing that the now-larger herd/flock size is starting to impact grassland stability, they are also concerned with the provision of power and easier physical access to the herder dwellings, and he provision of social services.

It has been about six months since we started the Campfire series on The Oil Drum. The intent was to host an outlet for those who were reasonably convinced that peak oil and energy descent begin now. The schedule is on Wednesdays to have 'practical' guest posts from 'experts' on various aspects of human capital (skills and knowledge) that might be useful for the community to learn and discuss. The Saturday slot was for some of the larger and more difficult questions we face as a society in an overshoot situation.

The 'guest post' larder since the start of Campfire has been on the bare side (with some stellar exceptions). Tonights post is a blank slate for you to articulate what 'practical' topics you would like covered in future posts. Since peak oil likely means more localization and a move towards self-reliance, essays and expertise on food/water/energy will clearly be of interest. But information on health, psychology, leisure, etc. in a post-peak world will be equally interesting.

I was recently asked to give a talk at "The Generation Green Tent" during the Summer Arts and Music Festival at the Benbow Lake State Recreation Area. Here's the text and supporting images for that talk.

Thanks for coming to my presentation. I am going to say some challenging things today. I don't know if you are going to be validated or view me as a heretic. In any case, if you are taking notes I am going to have eight main points to cover. Here it goes!

My wife is a physician and has a Masters in Public Health, and so I am going to start with an analogy inspired by her profession that I believe all of us can follow. A very telling study was done on the health of Native Americans on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. The Mexican population was quite fit, while the U.S. population had high rates of obesity and associated diseases, such as diabetes. I am going to make some judgments about the society that produced this discrepancy, and perhaps we can primarily assign the blame for the illnesses of these people on their sick environment. However, I don’t want to absolve individuals of all responsibility for their predicament because that is a disempowering thing to do.

Overcoming the obesity crisis of humanity requires paying off our ecological debt. This means accepting certain job losses and developing job gains in other areas. See full article for discussion.

What I am going to argue is that you are all capable, powerful individuals and that you are responsible for making great changes.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about Walkscore as a handy tool to estimate the walkability of a specific address anywhere in the US. There are a few limitations to the tool, but by and large it hits the mark in determining which areas have the potential to be great walkable communities where you don't need to own a car versus totally auto-dependent areas.

Now they have added a whole lot of new features, analysis and commentary to the site and it's worth a look.