Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Interview on Radio Ecoshock

Yesterday, Alex Smith interviewed me for Radio Ecoshock. The interview can be downloaded here, and will eventually go out over actual airwaves on quite a number of local stations. We talked about things that the government could potentially do to make collapse survivable (but probably won't), why collapse is almost inevitable (not enough energy; downscaling means bankruptcy), what happens when foreign creditors and investors demand their pound of flesh, and how we can try to live our lives and do what we want anyway.

2 comments:

Jim said...

CNN uses the "c" word!

Is America's suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare?
By Lara Farrar
For CNN

(CNN) -- When Shaun Yandell proposed to his longtime girlfriend Gina Marasco on the doorstep of their new home in the sunny suburb of Elk Grove, California, four years ago, he never imagined things would get this bad. But they did, and it happened almost overnight.

"It is going to be heartbreak," Yandell told CNN. "But we are hanging on."

Yandell's marriage isn't falling apart: his neighborhood is.

Devastated by the subprime mortgage crisis, hundreds of homes have been foreclosed and thousands of residents have been forced to move, leaving in their wake a not-so-pleasant path of empty houses, unkempt lawns, vacant strip malls, graffiti-sprayed desolate sidewalks and even increased crime.

In Elk Grove, some homeowners not only cut their own grass but also trim the yards of vacant homes on their streets, hoping to deter gangs and criminals from moving in.

Other residents discovered that with some of the empty houses, it wasn't what was growing outside that was the problem. Susan McDonald, president of a local neighborhood association aimed at saving the lost suburban paradise, told CNN that around her cul-de-sac, federal agents recently busted several pot homes with vast crops of marijuana growing from floor to ceiling.

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Hadashi said...

Can I just say that the last point you made on the interview was spot on-it's the incremental personal-sized responses we make that are important. You bemoaned the fact that not many people seem to read anymore. My problem is that I have tended to read too much, to the degree that I've largely burned out.

Still, the amount of information and depth of idea that you can gain from the written word is so much greater than anything gleaned from listening to the radio or watching the box (even if the media wasn't 'filtered').