Welcome to my personal blog covering my adventures in and opinions on homesteading/smallholding, self-sufficiency, climate change and related issues.
Trevor Larkum, January 2020
Welcome to my personal blog covering my adventures in and opinions on homesteading/smallholding, self-sufficiency, climate change and related issues.
Trevor Larkum, January 2020
We don't just drive or heat with fossil fuels—we are eating them. Oil and gas prices are at record levels, and this is going to have a big impact on our diet in very short order because we don't just drive or heat with fossil fuels—we are eating them. Traditional US Homestead -
Her Harvard thesis offers a bleak outlook on the course of civilization but sustainability expert Gaya Herrington tells Louise Boyle that the worst-case scenario is not inevitable. ‘We need to completely re-envision what our role is in the world’ When her study – confirming a 1970s prediction that humanity’s unquenchable desire for economic growth would hit a wall
Only rarely does a book truly change the world. In the nineteenth century, such a book was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. For the twentieth century, it was The Limits to Growth. Not only did this best-selling 1972 publication help spur the environmental movement, but it showed that the underlying dynamics of the modern industrial world
With the current pandemic, the damage to food production and supply chains has already been set in stone. It’s just a matter of time before the full effects of these unfortunate events trickle down to cause a shortage of food in your local area. As a crisis gardener, you want to hedge against this
I was ten years old when The Limits to Growth first saw print. I have a dim memory of seeing a newspaper article or two about it, but I had other things on my mind in 1972—my parents got divorced that year, and an already difficult childhood promptly got much worse—and several years passed
I’ve been reflecting of late about the way that our habitual expectations about change blind us to the way that change actually happens. One of the most important of these is the frankly weird but pervasive notion that the future is a single place, where only one kind of thing happens. It’s always “The Future,”
It sounds radical but 150,000 people Britons have already cut the cord and become self-sufficient As energy bills soar and Britain braces itself for a winter of discontent, there is one family who aren’t worried. Matthew and Charis Watkinson, and their children Elsa and Billy, have managed to evade the national energy crisis by becoming
The shortage of tanker drivers has sparked a run on the pumps – and the only question now is what we’ll run out of next On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol.
Our food supply is in crisis. First there was the panic buying at the start of the pandemic, stripping the shelves of everything from pasta to pinot noir. Now the shops are looking bare again as Brexit and Covid combine to drastically reduce the workforce, and industry chiefs are warning that shortages could last well
How an unexpected Twitter tiff with the renowned climate scientist Michael Mann helped me rethink climate activism. When I tweeted my reply, I had no idea that I would be on the receiving end of friendly fire. I was scrolling through my feed, looking for thought-provoking news and commentary (because that’s the only reason