Hi everyone,

Now that this site has been running 12 months I've been thinking more and more that it might be time to pass on the Admin role to a new person.

Basically I haven't been able to commit the time needed to promote Post Carbon initiatives in the Northern Rivers or add the content to this site as I originally intended. Unfortunately my situation won't be changing in the near future either.

So I'm throwing this over to the group, if anyone wants to take on this role please send me a message.

Charles

I now have a copy of The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times by Albert Bates. I'll try and summarise what is worth putting using the blog headings. On the back cover it says the book lets you have your catastrophe and eat it too. That's a good start, for my money.

More details about this book are at
http://www.amazon.com/Post-Petroleum-Survival-Guide-Cookbook-Changing/dp/0865715688/ref=pd_sxp_grid_i_2_1/002-4908753-7216049

Does anyone have any other texts they want to summarise here with what they find pertinent? There is a whole bunch of stuff at http://www.relocalize.net/resources if you have an interest.

Last night I had an interview about PCNR with Giovanni from the terrific radio program 'The Generator' which is broadcast on Bay FM out of Byron Bay on Monday mornings.

More info about The Generator is here: http://www.ebono.org/thegenerator/index.xml

And The Generator's page on the Bay FM site is here: http://www.bayfm.org/test/pages/show.asp?i=443

If you can't tune in on 99.9FM at 9am on Monday, it's also streaming at that time from the BayFM site.

Hopefully this will mean more people will be visiting the site and subscribing. Giovanni has said he will also be sending me any news he gets on the grapevine, which will find its way onto this site as well.

I'll have to add that I'm involved with Bay FM in another non-PCNR role. I put a show on air on Thursday nights, but that's just for fun and kicking back.

The publicity for this site is just about to go up a level: a press release is about to go out to local media, so fingers crossed there will be more people visiting this site and adding thoughts and ideas. The press release is also going back to the wonderful admin people behind Relocalize.net, who are keen to see if it can be added to the publicity kit (with de-localised edits) for other sites to use.

A little bit of hindsight has made me realise that the questions in this site's forum can be a bit daunting to add to. By breaking the forum into these 10 categories I'd hoped they might be easier to think over and contribute. That includes adding questions as well as answers.

This week I discovered there are now more books being written about surviving and thriving in a Post Carbon world, which is excellent news. One that caught my eye is The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times by Albert Bates. Has anyone read this? Or is there anything similar you can recommend? There are many additional titles in the Resources and Publications section of this site as well. I'll be going through this section and adding what I can summarise under the topics in this site's forum where it can be locally applied.

So I'm wondering if anyone has read any of these books or articles or found any other websites that can provide the information we are looking for, ie practical strategies to establish alternatives to services and products that will cease to be available. Any summaries of information from these sources are welcome under the 10 forum categories, or you may want to add your own thoughts or add a new category.

Well I've sent the invite+link for this site to 40+ names a few days back and I've had no response. I'm still hopeful that with the right structure and perhaps a bit more publicity this site can work. Admittedly I'm a bit daunted by the idea of making Post Carbon Northern Rivers (PCNR) an awareness raising body; as I put in the statement of intent I'd prefer this site to be a way to enable concerned people to come together and share questions and info about what can be done locally in response.

So I will stick with this angle for the time being. My hope is to one day have a wiki here that can be printed (via a Creative Commons licence perhaps) and distributed before it becomes impractical. In the absence of any suggestions re structure I've used the topics from the Relocalize Forums at http://www.relocalize.net/forum and added Health as well. These may grow into wiki sections with time. Hopefully referring to these headings in this site will encourage a response. I'll also see what I can do to increase the publicity about this site.

In the meantime if you want more encouragement to get involved check out http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/OriginalArticles/ThrivingPartOne.htm...

And remember it's ok to post here even if you're only starting to think through the enormity of this issue. That's why this site was set up -- many questions need to be asked before we can work out what the answers might be.