A Slightly Late Post, March 2010

To those who are just now joining this blog, I want to say a big “Thank you.” The Well Run Dry is a blog that deals with declines in the energy available to modern industrial society, the environmental destruction caused by this society, and its resulting economic contraction. It is partly a discussion of problems caused by energy decline, environmental degradation and economic collapse. It is also partly a calling-out of some of the rich and powerful people responsible for making our predicament worse than it need be. And it is partly a diary – how one man (me) wakes up to our situation and searches for strategies for coping with all of it. Hopefully in thinking of strategies I can come up with things that help all of you.

Normally, I try to post each weekend (Saturdays preferably, though sometimes I get a post in on a Friday night and sometimes I am delayed until Sunday afternoons). There are also times when I am able to publish two posts per week. This weekend I participated in a tree-planting organized by Friends of Trees, a Portland environmental nonprofit organization. Having recently purchased a very cool “hybrid” camera (one that records both high quality still images and high quality videos), I shot some videos of the tree planting, as well as short interviews with some of the staff. This weekend's post would have featured those videos, as well as a brief explanation of Friends of Trees and the impact of their efforts on building resilient neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, when I tried to upload the videos to Youtube, my computer kept disconnecting from the Web (and the upload process seemed to take forever), so I never completed this weekend's post. I am now looking into other video hosting sites like Vimeo or the Internet Archive. Hopefully, sometime before my next birthday I'll have those videos up on the Web. ;) I've also got to learn how to turn my videos into a more polished production... Meanwhile, if you want to see some other videos I recently shot, look up the “Portland Fix-It Fair” on Youtube. The Fix-It Fair is an annual series of workshops hosted by the City of Portland to promote resilient, sustainable neighborhoods.

I also have more interviews for you all to enjoy. One interview I did last week dealt with urban farming; I'll try to have the transcript up shortly. And I'll be writing a “diary” entry about coping with slow times at my company, and thoughts on appropriate strategies for people dealing with continued underemployment. Stay tuned...