Innovative development will house 45 families, a farm, businesses
Brian Lewis, The Province
Published: Sunday, August 17, 2008
Original article

One of the Fraser Valley’s better kept secrets is the picturesque village of Yarrow, where even today it feels more appropriate to drive down its main street in nothing newer than a ’56 Chevy.

However, just across from “Hank the Barber” on Yarrow Central Road, you’ll find a unique development project that’s capturing attention from as far away as Kansas and California. Read the complete Post.

The Era of Catastrophe? Geologists Name New Era After Human Influence on the Planet
By Mike Davis, Tomdispatch.com. Posted August 11, 2008.

A striking report from the front lines of science suggests we’re officially entering a period in which humanity may simply outrun history itself.

Editor’s note: This TomDispatch article has been edited for length. You can read the original here.

1. Farewell to the Holocene

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column. Although the idea of the “Anthropocene” — an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force — has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.

At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised. This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend … and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory. Read the complete Post.

‘Think Less………Act Locally’
The Rise of Localization
By Russell Precious

VPO note: the author refers to “localization” vs. “relocalization” because he doesn’t believe we’re returning to something that existed in the past, but rather moving towards something entirely new.

“The most personal reaction to landscape, to people, to ways of living, is that which is rooted in the local.” Wallace Stegner

In recent years it has been increasingly presumed that civilization was firmly entrenched on the path to some sort of nirvanic global village, a vision held equally by those representing both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’—albeit based on different principles and expected outcomes. The right viewed it more as an economic paradise of ever expanding markets and greater prosperity while the left saw it as a truly democratic world wide web of shared information and a diminishing gap between wealth and poverty.

Few have been willing to address the herd of elephants in the room that are poised to derail these presupposed outcomes. What are these elephants, and how did they (and we) get here? Read the complete Post.

by Rex Weyler
From his “Deep Green” column
Original article

As the era of cheap liquid fuels draws to an end, everything about modern consumer society will change. Likewise, developing societies pursuing the benefits of globalization will struggle to grow economies in an era of scarce liquid fuels. The most localized, self-reliant communities will experience the least disruption.

Oil is a fixed asset of the planet, representing stored sunlight accumulated over a billion years as early marine algae, and other marine organisms (not dinosaurs) captured solar energy, formed carbon bonds, gathered nutrients, died, sank to the ocean floors, and lay buried under eons of sediment. Like any fixed non-renewable resource, oil is limited, and its consumption will rise, peak, and decline.

World oil production increased for 150 years until the spring of 2005, when world crude oil production reached about 74.3 million barrels per day (mb/d), and total liquid fuels, including tar sands, liquefied gas, and biofuels reached about 85 mb/d. In spite of the efforts since, and tales of “trillions of barrels” of oil in undiscovered fields, liquid fuel production has remained at about 85.5 mb/d for three years, the longest sustained plateau in modern petroleum history. Discoveries of new fields peaked 40 years ago. Read the complete Post.

Quote from Bloomberg:

U.S. farmland values are at a record high even as the rest of the country suffers the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression, with the highest crop prices ever pushing up agricultural real estate.

The value of all land and buildings on farms averaged $2,350 an acre at the start of this year, up 8.8 percent from a year earlier, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said today in an annual report.

Surging corn, wheat and soybean prices boosted values in the Northern Plains, which includes Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota, by 15.5 percent, the biggest increase in the country, according to the report.

The report also tracks rates for land that’s rented for farming. Rents for farmland rose 13 percent last year to $96 an acre while pasture fees rose 8.3 percent to $13 an acre. Because of high demand for additional farmland and the high cost of buying, farm-rental prices may rise 20 percent to 30 percent in 2009, said Murray Wise, chief executive officer of Westchester Group Inc., a farm-asset management company based in Champaign, Illinois.

– Bloomberg

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Of course the denialists laughed when we said farm land would rise and urban land would drop in price.

But given a new realization that you cannot eat your lawn and food needs to be grown nearby, the relocalzation and peak oil impacts do kick in here.

See urban land price slide in Winnipeg intro slide set at www.plancanada.com/SSP5.

RB