Rebekah is spending the week nerding out on all things solar at Solar Power International 2010 in Los Angeles. She's picking one item as the "cool solar thing of the day" and blogging on Huffpo about it.

Henry Red Cloud is a respected Lakota elder and a fifth-generation...

We had an amazing trip this summer doing research for a new book. Along with visiting sustainability activists of all types, we had the opportunity to stay a few days in Glacier National Park, one of the most beautiful places in the world. We even got to see a mountain...

A few months back we wrote here on Huffpo about the concept of zombie economics. Basically, the idea is that fundamental contradictions inherent in our consumerist economy, like attempting to achieve infinite growth in a finite world, were resulting in an economic system that would stagger from one...

With the new budget forecasts coming out of the Obama administration showing deficits until the cows come home, it's time to face a troubling truth that we tried to forget in the prolonged sigh of relief of his presidential victory. There is no money for universal

Back in the last millennium, we had a hankering to get our fingernails dirty and tell the Man to shove it, so we took a small inheritance and purchased some acreage out in the woods with the idea of living a modicum of an independent life.

Much of our initial...

We recently had the pleasure of taking the battle against fossil fuels out of the home and into the workplace. The Abundance Foundation, a local non-profit focusing on all aspects of sustainability, was in cramped quarters with the space they share with Piedmont Biofuels, the fine folks down...

The early morning summer sun streaks the window. The thunder overnight was a lot of hubbub about nothing: the rain gauge registers not a drop. Outside the peach tree, burdened with ripening fruit, calls out for water from the rain barrel. The poultry chirps plaintively, wanting release from their coop...

We recently had the pleasure of spending a month in Paonia, Colorado, the (small but beautiful) hometown of the nonprofit Solar Energy International (SEI), and favorite gathering place of sustainability nuts like ourselves.

Rebekah was teaching a class specifically tailored to women learning how to design and install...

When something has been around for one hundred years, as GM has, you can get to know its personality pretty darn well. And if there's one thing we should consider as the debate rages up on high about propping up this addled dotard, it's GM's long string of criminal, that's...

While newspapers and websites have been filled with stories of doom and gloom, little noticed by the mainstream media is an unprecedented surge in the economies of the other ten or twenty million species' economic indicators. Some of these economies have been more or less stuck in a protracted bear...

If there's ever been a riper time for abandoning the idiotic "drug war," we can't think of it, yet the mainstream press has nothing to say on the subject. The cons are overwhelming, and honestly too numerous to list. The most obvious is that the Mexican government may very...

Something fundamental is wrong with our system of political economy, and we need to fix it. It's not just that we're spending more than we make in terms of money, it's that we've been consuming more than we produce on an ecological level as well. The overall long-term results are...

In our last blog we wrote about some of the inherent contradictions of neoclassical economics that make it a bad fit for our civilization in the long run. To recap these fallacies briefly:

- Infinite increases in consumption are possible in a finite world;
- Capitalism is efficient at...

Last week's gyrations on Wall Street come as little surprise to most folks who have taken a critical eye towards our economic system. What you are seeing is the first death rattle of our truly unsustainable economy. We've been told for a long time that our way of life is...

All eyes are on coastal Louisiana once again, as Gustav roars ahead. While our thoughts and worry center on the human inhabitants in the path of the storm (Rebekah's maternal and paternal families live scattered throughout Louisiana and Mississippi), we haven't failed to notice the oil rigs and oil ports...

With record oil profits again in the news and candidate Obama proposing a windfall profits tax to help with winter heating woes, now seems a good time to revisit some old ideas on how best to spend these excess profits. We're all in favor of socking it to Exxon-Mobil and...

What the general public largely does not realize is that there are two separate yet related biofuels movements operating in the United States. The first is agribusiness: large scale biofuels production from giant companies like Cargill and ADM, with supporting cast members like Monsanto. Based entirely on industrial agriculture, using...

Lost amongst all the "solutions" to the energy crisis lies the fact that the energy crisis is simply one component of a much broader ecological crisis. Addressing the energy issue in isolation and attempting to solve only this one aspect could easily exacerbate many of the other ecological problems we...