Recommended Reading

[David MacLeod]

Small Scale Aquaponics: From Fish Poop to Seafood Dinner - Peak Moment TV with Janaia Donaldson
Tour a closed-loop water system where one critter’s wastes become another’s food. Inside a steamy greenhouse, Jeremy Roth of Aprovecho Center’s Aquaculture Project shows us fish tanks containing tilapia just like you might order in a restaurant. Water from the tanks is pumped through troughs where pond plants take in the nutrients from the fish. Plant material is then returned to feed the fish in their tanks. The nutrient-rich water is also diverted to nourish veggies like chard, tomatoes, and water chestnuts rooted in a shallow gravel bar. In this cycle, aquaponics yields generous quantities of high quality protein from a very small footprint.

**Look for Janaia Donaldson and Robyn Malgren filming for Peak Moment TV at the Whatcom Skillshare Faire!**

Peak Oil Demand = "Peak Oil" by Richard Heinberg
A new phrase has entered our energy lexicon—peak oil demand. The essential idea: prophets of doom who warned about a looming global petroleum shortfall (“peak oil”) were wrong; instead of a downturn in supply, we’re instead seeing the shrinkage of demand for oil. A non-problem just solved itself! Nothing to see, folks; move along.

What’s wrong with this framing of our energy situation? Plenty...

Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Futu...
The change in our public conversation about energy is predicated on new drilling technology and its ability to access previously off-limits supplies of crude oil and natural gas. In the chapters ahead, we will explore this technology—its history, its impacts, and its potential to deliver on the promises being made about it. As we will see, horizontal drilling and hydrofracturing (“fracking”) for oil and gas pose a danger not just to local water and air quality, but also to sound energy policy, and therefore to our collective ability to avert the greatest human-made economic and environmental catastrophe in history...

Albert Bartlett: On Message About Exponential Growth to the End by ...

Albert Bartlett might have been another obscure physics professor had he not put together a now famous lecture entitled "Arithmetic, Population and Energy" in 1969. The lecture, available broadly on the internet (Preview) , begins with the line: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

The logic is surprisingly simple and irrefutable. Exponential growth, which is simply consistent growth at some percentage rate each year (or other time period), cannot proceed indefinitely within a finite system, for example, planet Earth. The fact that human populations continue to grow or that the extraction of energy and other natural resources continues to climb does not in any way refute this statement. It simply means that the absolute limits have not yet been reached.

Bartlett, who died this month at age 90, gave his lecture all over the world 1,742 times or on average once every 8.5 days for 36 years to audiences ranging from junior high students to seasoned professionals in many fields. His ability to stay on message for so long about something so important should make him the envy of every modern communications professional...