The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Germany Begins Felling 120,000 Trees From ‘Fairy Tale’ Forest to Make Way for Wind Turbines BY   CHRIS MORRISON The windmills are spinning golden subsidies in the central German ‘fairy tale’ forest of Reinhardswald, but the payment is the partial destruction of the 1,000 year-old ancient wood itself. Work has started on the clearing of up to 120,000 trees in the forest, the setting for many of the Brothers Grimm mythical stories, to provide access for an initial 18 giant wind turbines around the Sababurg ‘Sleeping Beauty’ castle. Who is opposing this massive destruction of the ancient forest teeming with wildlife with trees over 200 years old? Certainly not the Green party, now in power at national and local level. In fact the project is being led by local Hesse Green Minister Priska Hinz who is  reported to have said : “Wind energy makes a decisive contribution to the energy transition and the preservation of nature. It is the only way to preserve forests and important ecosystems.”

  An Unfamiliar World John Michael Greer Last month’s post  on the future of warfare in the deindustrial era mentioned in passing one of the most significant factors changing the world we know to one that most of us have never even imagined. That factor is demographics: in particular, the immense shift now under way from growth to contraction in human numbers worldwide.  Nearly everyone alive today grew up hearing about the population boom; it requires a major shift in mental gears to adjust to the imminence of the population bust. A twentieth century problem. It fascinates me that so few people have grasped that this is happening, and even fewer have any sense of what it implies.  I still field comments tolerably often from readers who are convinced that overpopulation is the biggest threat our species faces. (Admittedly most of those readers belong to my generation, and we grew up in a media culture saturated with such ideas.)  That human population is near a peak and will be declini

  All Species Are thriving But Man The real threat is environmentalists, bureaucrats and politicians ELIZABETH NICKSON When I moved to the country at the age of 48 I was exhausted and sick. I spent most afternoons in bed, reading and resting and watching bad TV. I’d grown up in the country, but at 17, moved to the cities for education, and lived in Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, New York and London, about 6 years in each, adding Paris because I worked there so often, I almost rented an apartment. More like a closet with a bed in Le Marais. “Some of us are bound to the earth,” a friend writes from her five acres in Ireland, which she is trying to rewild. I never felt completely well in the cities, I was trading youth and strength for enough knowledge to get out and make a living, a life, before I got cancer or heart disease, which is essentially how I thought of it. Another year, I’d say to myself, stick it out for one more year. I live now embedded in nature. My first house had a specta