Items of Interest, 22 March 2010

Shaukat Qadir, How the Pentagon Supervised Raymond Davis' Release and How the CIA Took Its Revenge


Gregory Button, Downplaying Disaster: Informational Uncertainty in the Wake of Japan's Nuclear Crisis

Hirose Takashi and Douglas Lummis, What They're Covering Up at Fukushima

Anatomy of a nuclear crisis: A chronology of Fukushima
David Biello, Yale Environment 360
Even now, 10 days after the crisis began, the situation at Fukushima is still not under control. The disaster is clearly worse than the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, yet not as grave as the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which spread radioactive material over large portions of Europe. A chronology of how the Fukushima crisis has unfolded demonstrates that even a country as advanced as Japan — and as practiced in dealing with natural disasters — was unprepared for an earthquake of this magnitude, the largest in Japan in 1,200 years.



Won’t Innovation, Substitution, and Efficiency Keep Us Growing?
Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute

An ecology of building: Making a house in a world without frontiers
Jim Bannon, An Ecology of Home

Permaculture: Deconstructing a Definition
Lisa Fernandes, Resilient Homes blog
Nobody knows how to define "permaculture." Everyone thinks they should be doing it. Lisa Fernandes starts the process of deconstructing one of the most common definitions for a system that thousands are touting as a response to peak oil and climate change.

Foundation Concepts: Thinking Resilience
William Rees, Post Carbon Institute
"Resilience thinking” is one response to the foregoing questions. “The bottom line for sustainability is that any proposal for sustainable development that does not explicitly acknowledge a system’s resilience is simply not going to keep delivering the goods (or services)." Resilience science is based on the simple premise that change is inevitable and that attempts to resist change or control it in any strict sense are doomed to failure. Resilience science is also systems science.