We are very excited to let you know that as part of our work preparing people for a lower energy future we are bringing Nicole Foss (Stoneleigh) international energy and finance analyst, to WA in February/ March 2012 .

Stoneleigh’s work presents a comprehensive analysis of energy, finance and the interaction of the two from a big picture perspective. Our world is facing a series of interlocking crisis of which energy and finance have the shortest time frame. Nicole Foss (aka Stoneleigh) offers a road map of what is coming and why, and also what people can do individually and collectively in the face of this most significant of predicaments.

Nicole has been chronicling and interpreting the on-going credit crunch as the most pressing aspect of our current multi-faceted predicament. Her website The Automatic Earth integrates finance, energy, environment, psychology, population and real politick in order to explain why we find ourselves in this state of crisis and what we can do about it. Nicole was previously editor of The Oil Drum Canada, where she wrote on peak oil and finance.

Nicole  has recently come back from intensive tour in Europe and the US. She spoke at the UK 2010 Transition Town conference and many people across the world have connected with her work through this particular talk entitled Making Sense of Economic Crisis in an Age of Peak Oil.

If you have not come across Nicole Foss’s work before we have attached some links you may find useful. These include a link to her website and blog, and an audio of the above talk. We have also attached a short bio and links to a recent interview.

Blog  http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/

Audio – Making Sense of economic crisis in an age of peak oil   http://sheffield.indymedia.org.uk/2010/06/453356.html

Interview and bio  www.financialsense.com/contributors/nicole-m-foss

And here are some details about her WA tour

Making Sense of Economic Decline in an Age of Peak Oil A Discussion with Nicole Foss

Friday February 24^th 7pm  Fremantle Town Hall $10

Tuesday February 28th Margaret River

Wednesday February 29th Albany

Thursday March 1st Manjimup

Sunday March 11^th 10am – 4pm  All Day Ecoburbia Conference  Fremantle Town Hall $20

Nicole Foss is one of those all too rare big-picture people who understands and explains the links between the many factors now threatening the existence of human civilisation – resource depletion entwined with economic failure and increasing inequity.

Join us for a graphic presentation and question and answer session when Nicole will outline the direction and characteristics of a new environmentally sustainable economy and what this means in our everyday lives.  She will discuss what is coming, why it is coming, what you can do about it, and how urgent it is that you do it now. She will deliver a psychological inoculation to pull people away from incomprehension and fear and prepare them to work with their communities to create a brighter (though lower energy) future.

Nicole is academically well qualified, first with degrees in biology, neuroscience and psychology and later degrees in international law and post-graduate diplomas in air and water pollution. While living in the UK she was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, where she specialised in nuclear safety. After years writing about peak oil and finance as editor of The Oil Drum Canada, Nicole is now co-editor of The Automatic Earth where she chronicles and interprets the ongoing credit crunch as the most pressing aspect of our current multifaceted predicament.

For more information or to RSVP to the Fremantle events please contact Shani Graham stay@thepaintedfish.com.au 0417 941 991

Blog by Tim Darby

I never wanted to have kids.  I guess I had a pretty tumultuous adolescence (is there any other kind?) and
spent a fair chunk of the later half of my childhood fighting, evading or pointedly ignoring my parents, so my image of parenting, viewed in terms of time, money, emotion and energy appeared to give a rather poor return for investment.

Also I have (if I let myself go here) a fairly bleak picture of our future as a society and as a species (see Coming … ready
or not).  I see us at the point of convergence of resource depletion, environmental degradation, increasingly
inhospitable climate, inequity and all the while a financial rollercoaster (plummeting down) that will leave us under sourced to adequately address any of these issues.  All this leaves me doubting the wisdom of producing more kids and even more uncertain about my
ability to provide for them in our uncertain future.

So as I said, I never wanted to have kids.  In fact, a few years ago I decided to put my money where my mouth is (well . . . not my mouth exactly . . . ) and get the snip (see The Snip).

So when I told my mum I was expecting the pitter patter of tiny feet she was ecstatic, confused and then suspicious in rapid succession.  Had my little operation failed?  Had the new Messiah arrived in South Fremantle?  Had my long term, loving and loyal girlfriend jumped the fence?  No, the explanation is both simple and (so far) wonderful.  Goats!

In June this year, following an initiative of EMRC Earthcarers, my partner, Shani, and I undertook the Plastic Free Challenge; a month long
endeavour to eliminate plastic packaging from our lives (see ?)  Between our chooks, bees, fish, rabbits and vegie gardens, we were able to make a pretty serious dent in our plastic consumption.  The one thing we really struggled with was milk.  I’m a bit of a fiend for dairy and
it all comes packaged in plastic.  So partly motivated by this dilemma, we decided to get a goat.  Did I say a goat?  As it turns out,
goats are very social animals so you need to have at least two for them to behappy (and quiet!)

The decision about what sort of goats to get was easily made.  We live on a 200m2 block in the suburbs, so for us small is beautiful.  Enter the
mini goat.  As far as I can gather, mini goats are not actually a breed so much as a size, originally attained by mixing a Nigerian Dwarf with a Nubian.  Strictly speaking they have to be under a certain height at a certain age and measured regularly, possibly by a vet with papers and pedigrees and so on.

For our purposes we just wanted a little goat that could fit in our little yard.  Did I saw our yard?  Well, actually our neighbour’s yard.  Luckily I live in the best street in Australia so when I realised that even the miniest goat would be too big our yard, I was able to find a couple of neighbours willing to lend us under-utilised yard space to accommodate the latest additions to our menagerie.

In preparation for our goats’ arrival I spent some time researching goats, milking goats and mini goats.  What I discovered was that there are probably more thoughts, theories and stories about goats than there are goats themselves.  The three most commonly held beliefs seem to
be:

1.Goats stink (and so does their milk)

2. Goats will eat anything (especially your washing)

3. Goats will escape from anywhere

Doesn’t sound like a particularly endearing series of characteristics, does it?

Nevertheless, we decided to give it a go and were fortunate enough to find a mother goat who was just weaning her kid (so she was ready to start milking straight away) and a baby that was just old enough to leave its mum for a bottle (so she would bond with us and be well socialized).

Welcome to Hulbert Street Spice (2 years old) and Sunday Clive (1 weesk old).
Three months down the track I could hardly say I’m qualified to dispel thethree big goat myths.  (Try Mythbusters for that one).  However, one the basis of my limited experience, I have found none of them to be true.

1. Our goats smell really nice.
Sometimes when we’re milking them or giving them a brush, I give them a big sniff (is that weird?) and find the smell quite light and kind of
reassuring. Sunday still smells a bit milky, like a puppy.  The milk we get from Spice (about a litre a day) is almost indistinguishable from cow’s milk.  Maybe a little bit sweeter and richer and it doesn’t separate like cow’s milk. (Apparently male goats spray themselves with urine to make themselves more appealing to the girls.  Not something I’ve tried myself.)

2. Our goats are quite particular about what they will eat.

They pretty much always like hay and goat muesli but when we take them out for a walk, they will bypass apparently lush
pasture and then stop to nibble on one runty thistle.  Fortunately, they usually seem to like coastal tee tree which is a weed in our area.
I’ve taken to early morning dumpster diving at the local grocers which provides a plethora of cast-off greens that go to the goats, rabbits, chickens or compost (in order of fussiness).  One thing I have noticed is that our goats are very curious and a bit like puppies, always thinking that whatever you are eating (or reading) must be the absolute cat’s pyjamas of culinary delight.

3. Our goats don’t seem to really want to escape from anywhere.

We have developed a habit of taking them for a walk in the evenings, so about 5pm every day they bleat to be let out for a
walk.  We take them for a wander, munching along the way, to an empty block at the end of our street where they wander around, sniffing and nibbling whilst we have a cup of tea and a bickie.  After about half an hour (or two cups of tea) Spice starts insisting that she gets taken home again and, once on the way, rushes for home like one of those rent‑a‑ponies at a kids riding school.

As I said, it’s early dates yet but so far, despite the bad press that goats get, our experience has been absolutely fabulous.  They have even made peace with most of the neighbourhood dogs, with the notable exception of a Portuguese water dog that lives over the back fence (do they have goats in Portugal?) who seems quite keen on the idea of eating Sunday.

The dog’s owner, Jenny, is a lovely lady who has decided to stop feeding her hound on goat meat so as to reduce the pet’s link between food and goat.

Like I said, the best street in Australia.

Start your night with an early dinner at the Upmarkets (Old Shangai Food Hall) and then meet the Freo Bug crew at 6.15pm  for a ride to Moore and Moore. Make sure you have lots of bright lights and clothing as it will be dark, and we want to be seen!
Meet at Moore and Moore at 7pm and let’s see how many car bays we can fill up with bikes!
Then join your fellow bike enthusiasts a chat and a cuppa (M&M will have cuppas and some simple food available) before the first ever Freo Bike Talent Show.

Please bring your favourite bike photo for a massive bike photo brag board
 The movie Beauty and the Bike will be screened at 8.30pm and it runs for about an hour.

I generally admire people who manage to be punctual but when I got the call telling me that the sales rep would be late it didn’t actually bother me at all, in fact it actually put a smile on my dial. You see I didn’t want to see a sales rep at all. I don’t want to be “sold” anything. When I had called the company selling insulated roller shutters I was hoping for someone with a job description like “product information provider”. I wanted someone who would tell me about the shutters, their strengths, weaknesses, cost and availability . . . .  and then bugger off and leave me to make up my own mind.

So anyway when I got the word that the sales rep would be late I breathed a sigh of relief, slipped into something comfortable ( in this case my trusty old nail-bag ) and went to work replacing a couple of split floorboards.

As I knocked in the first nail I was reminded how much I enjoy using good quality tools. Like my old hammer – it’s well balanced and feels just right, like an extension of my hand. (Call me a romantic if you must)  When I was at Uni I learned about a bloke (architect I think) who became famous for saying things like “form follows function”  (nice piece of alliteration) and  “functionality is beauty”.

I think the idea was that if you make something really well, based on what it was intended to do then the resulting form should have an intrinsic beauty of its own without the need for decoration or embellishment.

Take my old hammer for instance – an ancient Estwing with a leather handle that I bought secondhand and used for years until it disappeared from a building site I was working on. To replace it I bought a cheap nail gun….Yes I know. It was imported from China and was only cheap because it made by exploiting the mineral resources from somewhere and the sweatshop labour from somewhere else and shipped to Australia using a very crude and polluting grade of diesel. I know. I admit it. Bad, bad, bad….but just think how quick it would be!

Well as it turned out the only really quick thing about it was how quickly I took the thing back when it blew a gasket and stopped working the first time I tried to use it.

I guess I must have been in a hurry because when I took it back to the large franchise hardware shop where I bought it (I won’t mention any names but everyone seemed to be dressed up in Christmas colours) they offered me credit and I made the unusual decision to buy a new hammer. The hammer I chose from the glittering array looked pretty similar to my old Estwing but cost about a quarter of the price. Seemed like a bargain, but as my mate Greg says “cheap now, expensive later”. I took it home and started work. By the time I had denailed a couple of four by twos the claw of the hammer was so torn up it couldn’t  pull a splinter out of your thumb.

On my third trip back to the nameless hardware franchise I happened to go past a garage sale where, much to my delight I discovered another old Estwing ( better luck than I deserved ) and I’ve been using it ever since.

Now every time I drive in a nail I think “You Beauty!!” See what I mean? Functionality is beauty.

Just at that point in my daydreaming I was interrupted by the arrival of the sales rep. She arrived amidst a cloud of lipstick and hairspray in a tight skirt and heels high enough to give you altitude sickness. I’m not sure if it was the skirt or the heels but as she came through the front door she managed to trip over, spilling the contents of her handbag all over the floor and ripping her stockings.

I picked her up and made her a cup of tea while she gathered up her gear and started on a heartfelt story of how she really, really, really wanted to help us out by offering us a super amazing never to be repeated discount which we could get just by putting one of her signs at the front of the house, but the offer was only good for the day, and only if I signed up right away, and by the way where was my girlfriend ‘coz she needed to sign it too.  . .

O.K. As luck would have it my girlfriend was not available so I figured we would just have to survive another day  without her amazingly generous, never to be repeated offer.

As she struggled towards the door I noticed that the coins she had spilt from her handbag were still lying in a pile on the floor. Maybe the hairspray had affected her eyesight? Maybe she was so generous that since we weren’t able to take advantage of her generous offer she was leaving me all her change? Maybe she was such a successful sales rep that loose change was just a burden to her?

In any case, I scooped up the coins and handed them to her. Blushing she explained that she had abandoned her coins because she had glued 4 inch glittery resin extensions onto her fingernails which meant she couldn’t pick up anything that small from a flat surface.

Then she tottered off down the street.

As I opened the windows and doors to let the air clear I went back to my daydreams about form, function and four inch nails.

MMmmm…. Maybe my hammer should get together with her nails!