the last oil shock
and,
collapse
and,
the coming economic collapse
and,
blood and oil.
these books will get you thinking!
lance white.scotland

Thanks for your recommendations. This is so useful. I’m a fellow bookaholic, and presently have several hundred Peak Oil-related books on my Amazon Wish Lists. How to prioritize them is always a challenge.

The Harding book is now on my “must read this year” list. Ditto the Bates book. I had been quite put off by the the “cookbook” title, thinking he was treating Peak Oil too lightly, but I’ll accept your endorsement.

Most influential books for me for 2006:

David Holmgren–”Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability”. This takes permaculture to a whole new level, broadening, deepening, and generalizing its ideas to provide a guide for managing what he calls “energy descent”.

Jacke & Toensmeirer–”Edible Forest Gardens: Ecological Vision and Theory for Temporate Climate Permaculture”. A massive work, very expensive, but well worth the investment of time and money. It’s given me a radically different perspective on gardening, which I plan to put into practice. It also provides a detailed exposition of the process of permaculture design. A similar, but much shorter book, more oriented to the UK, is Patrick Whitefield’s “How to Make a Forest Garden.”

I’m glad Dylan, in his post above, mentioned Starhawk’s “The Fifth Sacred Thing”. I’ve been meaning to read it for years, and finally started recently. It’s exptremely well written, and portrays a utopian/dystopian future world that’s quite inspiring and thought-provoking. It integrates Starhawk’s permaculture training as well as her pagan beliefs.

Good fiction can inspire and enlighten in ways that nonfiction can’t. Unfortunately, realistic and positive fiction about the near future is disappointingly sparse. The science-fiction community in general seems proccupied with techno-worship. Those SF novels that focus on the Earth’s near-future seem pretty depressing, e.g. James’ “Children of Men”, or Butler’s “Parable of the Sower”. I’ve heard that Jim Kunstler is working on a post-peak novel. There’s always Callenbach’s “Ecotopia”, now pretty dated, but still interesting. Joanne Poyourow has self-published a novel about building a sustainable world, “Legacy”, which manages to integrate just about every sustainability-related concept and practice around. Unfortunately, it’s very poorly written.

I’d love to hear about any solution-oriented speculative fiction that has inspired folks.

For inspiration:
“gaviotas, a village to reinvent the world”-alan weisman
fantasy/vison
“the fifth sacred thing” -starhawk
and down to earth survival:
“into the forest” -Jean Hegland

Marshall Rosenberg has several books listed on Amazon, and on the website of Center for NonViolent Communication. (www.cnvc.org).
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Create Your Life, Your Relationships, and Your World in Harmony with Your Values by Marshall B. Rosenberg and Arun Gandhi.

Also, the name of this classic does not do it justice, as the work goes so far beyond parenting:
Parent Effectiveness Training: The Proven Program for Raising Responsible Children by Thomas Gordon. They also have a website w. more titles: http://www.gordontraining.com.
Worth checking out.

Every bioregion will have to figure this out to some extent for the unique ecological system they live within — is there agricultural soil, how much rainfall vs irrigation required, how hot or cold does it get, can the infrastructure be rolled back enough to adapt, etc.

Carbon Negative Bio fuels and Fertility Too

Man has been controlling the carbon cycle , and there for the weather, since the invention of agriculture, all be it was as unintentional, as our current airliner contrails are in affecting global dimming. This unintentional warm stability in climate , has over 10,000 years, allowed us to develop to the point that now we know what we did and that now we are over doing it.

The prehistoric and historic records gives a logical thrust for soil carbon sequestration.
I wonder what the soil biome carbon concentration was REALLY like before the cutting and charcoaling of the virgin east coast forest, my guess is that now we see a severely diminished community, and that only very recent Ag practices like no-till have started to help rebuild it. It makes implementing Terra Preta soil technology like an act of penitence, returning misplaced carbon.

http://www.computare.org/Support%20documents/Fora%20Input/CCC2006/Energy%20Paper%2006_05.htm

As Lehmann at Cornell points out, “systems such as Day’s are the only way to make a fuel that is actually carbon negative”. and that ” a strategy combining biochar with biofuels could ultimately offset 9.5 billion tons of carbon per year-an amount equal to the total current fossil fuel emissions! “

Sharon

Sharon