PETROL! Demonstrations and Sums...

There's some crazy stuff going on in the world... here in the UK we have the Extinction Rebellion movement, peacefully demanding that governments take urgent action against climate change and mass extinction...

A brilliant peaceful movement - how would we react to a 25% fuel price rise though?

 ...while in France we have less peaceful demonstrations against the price of petrol and diesel. Macron has increased taxes so that people will be encouraged to switch to electric cars, the French are now paying £1.30 a litre.

0.03 pence for the equivalent of an hour of human labour! that's far too much!

SUMS - WHAT'S A GALLON OF PETROL WORTH IN HUMAN TERMS?
I knew that petrol/diesel is a very compact form of energy and cheap for the power that you get out of it so did some sums to see what we're getting in terms of the work that a human being can do. It's a very rough calculation, please check it yourself, partly because it's hard to put a figure on how much work a human being does, how many hours a week they're going to do etc, but I worked out that when you buy petrol it's the equivalent of buying human labour for £0.03 pence an hour. To put it another way, if you got a job pushing a car, how far do you think you might be expected to push it for £1.30? Would you pay £1,500 for a gallon of petrol? (That's its equivalent value at minimum UK wage in human terms). Sums and more petrol stuff here.
THE UNDERLYING ISSUE..
...is transport. That's mainly powered by fossil fuel worldwide and there's no practical strategy for any transition to completely renewable powered transport anywhere. We have lots of renewable electricity here in Scotland but our lives still revolve around using petrol and diesel for moving us and all the stuff we consume about. It's so ridiculously cheap in terms of the quantity and portability of the power you get out of it that it's difficult to make an easy transition away from it.
ONE WORLD FUTURE FARM
So that's why making the transition to zero fossil fuel is a key issue for us. The post-oil way of life is very different but we intend to show that it can be done.

Free Remote Group CranioSacral Energy Treatment 15th Nov 2018

FOCUS - HEALING FOR GAIA

Photo from the Gaia Trust

I host these remote group sessions every Thursday, more about them here: for tomorrow's session I'm going to focus on healing for Gaia. It's easy to forget in our busy lives that we we're clinging to a wonderful rock, one huge organism on a crazy journey through an immeasurably more huge and unfathomable Universe. What's the best way for each of us to use our time towards the radical changes we need to make?
Please support our project here, thank you!

!! WE CAN DO IT !!

As one of the newspaper commentators wrote recently, we are the first generation to realise that our industrial way of life is threatening all life on Earth, and also the last generation that will be able to do anything about it.

The problem is our industrial way of life...

It's the eleventh hour, the world is changing fast around us, many of us feel or are actually trapped in an industrial way of life, but many of us can be part of the solution. Ruth and I and our friends here in Perth, Scotland are launching our One World Future Farm project today on 11.11.18 and invite like-minded friends all over the world to help us get started and to learn with us as we put our plans into practice.
THE PLAN...
Our basic plan is to buy a farm and to develop a complete post-industrial way of life there which:

• regenerates natural wealth
• provides our needs and incomes through that
• creates homes for ten families for every one family that lived there before
• makes the transition to zero fossil fuel use
• captures excess carbon from the atmosphere
• demonstrates what can be done locally so that successful patterns can followed globally

HELP!
Ruth and I have no money to buy a farm let alone to develop it so we are asking for your help to get started. We expect we will need something in the order of £1 million, large amounts are welcome but small amounts are most welcome too. We would love people all over the world to feel a part of our project - £1 for One World!

11.11.11.18 - Declaring Peace with Nature

There's a poignant moment in one of Bill Mollison's films when he says, talking about the array of machines, fuel and chemicals used in industrial agriculture, "When did we declare war on the Earth?"

"When did we declare war on the land?"

So I suppose 11 am on the 11th of November 2018, a hundred years since the end of the First World War, would be the perfect moment for humanity to end its war with Nature. In 2018, at last it seems to have become generally understood that continuing our industrial way of life will lead inevitably to environmental catastrophe and mass extinction. But what do we do instead?
We are a group of friends and families living in and around Perth, Scotland, who are developing a project based on a peaceful, regenerative approach to living and working on the land. Within our group, we have a wide range of practical experience of living and working on many different eco-projects in the UK and Portugal, and have an understanding of the basic patterns of working with Nature. We'll be using this blog to set out our ideas, and to chart our progress. We believe, and intend to show, that there is a healthy, fulfilling post-industrial way of life which can regenerate natural wealth, provide people with their basic needs, occupations and incomes, while capturing carbon and making the transition to zero fossil fuel use and zero waste production.
Please help our project along with a donation here, thank you!