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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Can ecological economists stop the mainstreamers before it’s too late?
John Feeney , Culture Change
…Mainstream economists are trying to kill us. They don’t think of it that way, but they should. The standard policies promoting endless economic growth of the conventional sort are destroying the ecosystem. Converging and interacting with other threats such as population growth, peak oil, and excessive per capita consumption, such policies and the economic growth they promote are hastening a looming global ecological collapse. And when influential economists push ecocidal policies when they could instead play a central role in protecting the ecosystem, how is that not homicide?
Cue the white hats
A ray of hope, though, comes from that transdisciplinary group of economists, ecologists, and others whose work falls under the heading, “ecological economics.” Those concerned with the environment today need to understand how this group compares to their mainstream counterparts. Herman Daly, one time economist for the World Bank and now one of the most influential ecological economists, has argued persuasively that the mainstream or neoclassical model sees the economy as “everything,” with the ecosystem being merely one element within it. Because this acknowledges no physical limits, it allows for the irrational notion of endless growth.
The ecological economics camp pushes for a fundamental revamp of economic theory to account for the limits of the ecosystem and the economy’s being a part of it, as dependent upon it as any other aspect of human culture. They want an acknowledgment that economic growth, as it’s typically understood, cannot continue indefinitely on a finite earth. They want it understood that such growth is unsustainable and destructive to our natural life support system.
John Feeney, Ph.D., is a psychologist turned environmental activist. He is based in Boulder, Colorado, where he writes on ecological topics at his website, Growth is Madness! growthmadness.org
(21 July 2007)
Technophilia, Virtual Communities and the World of Ends
Dave Pollard, How to Save the World
A lot of my friends and readers are technophiles. They believe that social networking and other technologies can make the world a much better place. I’d like to believe it, but I don’t.
The industrial economy is rigged. It is not a ‘market’ economy or a ‘free’ economy. It is designed to reduce us to mere, insatiable consumers — of politicians’ promises with our tax dollars, of overpriced, imported crap products, of ‘education’, of packaged information and entertainment ‘products’, of health treatments etc. We are given just enough cash and credit to keep us addicted, and we are isolated from serious social interaction to make us compliant. No great conspiracy. That’s just how the world works best when the objective is to maximize profit and GDP.
We are not people in this economy. We are consumers, taxpayers, students, audiences, patients. Numbers. Demographics.
The natural economy, the one we keep striving towards because it’s, well, natural, is inherently social, which is one of the things we like about it. It engages us as customers, citizens, learners, participants, as peers in the collective enterprise of living and making a living. It disintermediates the robber barons, the corrupt politicians, the boring teachers, the mindless media, and healthcare professionals who profit from our illness. They are not needed in a natural economy. There is no place for them.
…Ultimately we will have to abandon the illusion that we can be part of a global, virtual, ever-changing ‘electronic’ community, that we can be citizens of the whole world, that social networks and technology can change the world. Eventually we have to come back to place, to true community, and make it work, face to face.
(19 July 2007)
Using Ecolanguage to explain complicated systems
Lee Arnold, YouTube
[Fourteen intriguing YouTube animations. I don’t see any on peak oil, but related ones include:
Waste, Cycles & Pollution
Long-Term Farm Problem
-BA]
Animated FLOWS, to show where stuff GOES !
“A living, flowing graph to show how things work and how they are interconnected.”
Start with any video. There is no need to memorize.
Is it art, or is it science? –It is LANGUAGE. Ecolanguage is a new kind of moving-symbol language to show more connections, faster.
…Videos #1 to #7 lay out the basics of a new language, and the others show it applied to different topics.
Why try to do this? Because the world is in trouble! We need a common understanding. We need a way to combine ecology and economics in the same image. It must start simply, it must be based on real things, it must accelerate learning, and it must be easily translated.
LEE ADAM ARNOLD, a pedantic doodler, (born in 1953, Camden, New Jersey, USA,) worked as a plumber while studying independently. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
(20 July 2007)
Recommended by Dave Pollard in a 2005 post (Ecolanguage and the Destiny of Humankind)
Lee Arnold has invented an intriguing symbolic ‘language’ that can be employed in animations to show how complicated systems work. The elements in the language are shown above, and were inspired by a concept for symbolic representation of energy flows developed by Howard T. Odum. Lee has added some rigour to the symbol set and extended it to show economic and information flows as well as physical ones, and further extended it to make animations based on the set more intuitive.
A recent statement from originator Lee Arnold:
It was developed over many years, out of a concern for the global environment. I studied systems philosophy from a different angle than usual — a representative basic bibliography is listed down the side, at youtube.com/leearnold. The books by US ecologist Howard T. Odum (brother of Eugene) and the great British biological philosopher Gregory Bateson were very important to me.
Ecolanguage is adapted after Odum, who in turn had used the standard IEEE electrical diagram symbols, changing some for his own purposes in order to draw ecosystems. I changed several things again.
Ecolanguage standardizes meanings and accelerates comprehension, partly by taking advantage of visual motion. Also: (1) it uses some motions again and again, to become a part of its regular grammar, and (2) it makes the most basic hexagonal pattern into a part of syntax: always standing for “organization,” i.e. directed organization (whether loosely or tightly directed,) at ANY level of nature and society.
Howard T. Odum, mentioned as a source of inspiration for Ecolanguage, is one of the spiritual godfathers of the peak oil and sustainability movements. -BA
Back from the Future
Scrapping Institutional Education in Favour of Community Apprenticeship Learning
Gustavo Esteva, personal website
(date?)
Recommended by Dave Pollard (“How to Save the World” blog at Salon). He writes: in a recent post
A long but brilliant article by Gustavo Esteva, Oaxaca Zapatista adviser and friend of Ivan Illich, explains why sustainable intentional communities and self-managed community-based learning go hand in hand, and why the latter is needed before the former is possible.
Short bio of author Esteva by David C. Korten:
Gustavo Esteva is an independent writer, a grassroots activist and a deprofessionalized intellectual.
He works both independently and in conjunction with a variety of Mexican NGOs and grassroots organizations and communities. He has been a key figure in founding several Mexican, Latin American and International NGOs and networks.
Though not an economist by training, he received Mexico’s National Prize of Political Economy for his contribution to the theory of inflation, and though not a sociologist was President of the 5th World Rural Sociology Congress. He also served as President of the Mexican Society of Planning, as Vice-president of the Inter-American Society of Planning, and served as Board Member and Interim Chairman of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.
In his early career, he held senior positions in both private business and government, and was destined for a distinguished career within Mexico’s establishment. He decided, however, that solutions to people’s problems could come only from the people themselves and has since dedicated himself to their service….
Another essay by Esteva: “Rupturas:” Turning Points
Spanish language website
-BA
Fuel for Thought
James Surowiecki, New Yorker magazine
…Americans may want to buy the biggest and most environmentally damaging vehicles available, but polls show that, given an option, some three-quarters of them vote for dramatic increases in fuel-economy standards—increases that may well force automakers to sell fewer (or at least smaller) S.U.V.s. We buy gas guzzlers but vote for gas sipping. This isn’t because people are ignorant about how higher fuel-economy standards would affect them personally; polls that explicitly lay out the potential trade-offs involved still find support for tougher standards. And it isn’t as if voters and car buyers belong to two different groups; one recent survey of pickup owners found that seventy per cent strongly favored tougher requirements. The curious fact is that many people buying three-ton Suburbans for that arduous two-mile trip to the supermarket also want Congress to pass laws making it harder to buy Suburbans at all.
What’s happening here? Back in the nineteen-seventies, an economist named Thomas Schelling, who later won the Nobel Prize, noticed something peculiar about the N.H.L. At the time, players were allowed, but not required, to wear helmets, and most players chose to go helmet-less, despite the risk of severe head trauma. But when they were asked in secret ballots most players also said that the league should require them to wear helmets. The reason for this conflict, Schelling explained, was that not wearing a helmet conferred a slight advantage on the ice; crucially, it gave the player better peripheral vision, and it also made him look fearless. The players wanted to have their heads protected, but as individuals they couldn’t afford to jeopardize their effectiveness on the ice. Making helmets compulsory eliminated the dilemma: the players could protect their heads without suffering a competitive disadvantage. Without the rule, the players’ individually rational decisions added up to a collectively irrational result. With the rule, the outcome was closer to what players really wanted.
The same phenomenon is, to some extent, at work in the fuel-economy debate. People believe that bigger and heavier cars are safer in a crash (forgetting that, often, bigger cars are also more likely to crash). And people like the fact that driving a higher-horsepower car makes you look better at the stoplight. So our desires as individuals to protect ourselves and to outclass our neighbors encourage us to buy bigger and bigger vehicles with more and more horsepower. And the market doesn’t create counter-incentives that would push us in a responsible direction, since someone who drives a Hummer doesn’t suffer the effects of pollution and global warming any more than someone driving a Prius does, and isn’t charged more for the extra environmental damage.
(23 July 2007)
