I am putting Downpower on hiatus. I started it before I was really ready, because I had just redesigned my website and felt I should put everything up while I was at it. Well, that didn’t work out too well! Hopefully I will resurrect it again later; in the meantime, thanks for reading!

So much for keeping to my update schedule. 2008 has been pretty terrible to me so far; I kicked off the year with a nasty cold, and things went downhill from there. Anyway, I think things have pretty much stabilized, so I hope to get back on track this coming week. ‘Til then, I hope your year has been going better than mine!

Welcome to my brand new blog (and eventually zine), Downpower! Here’s what it’s all about:

As the end of the brief, intense Oil Age approaches, we are in for some big changes; this journal is the chronicle of my efforts to adapt to these changes. Downpower, of course, refers to the need to use less energy - but it also refers to the need for power to be distributed evenly in small amounts rather than piled in the hands of a few. I originally conceived of this as a print zine, but started it as a blog to give myself a little more impetus to keep up with it. I’ll be writing about how I got to where I am; my current thoughts, schemes, goals, and readings; some essays & informational writing, and a journal of my actual activities and progress, peppered with drawings and comics (though there may be more of those in the print version than here online, along with some handwritten bits). I hope to be able to provide some sort of inspiration, and to show that although it may not happen all at once, change is possible. I believe that if enough of us can change in time, we can have a relatively pleasant low-energy future of bicycles, edible landscapes and local community instead of a fascistic ecocidal death-fest.

I hope you’ll join me!