Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Mainstream economists and environmentalists share something in common. Both tend to tout efficiency — think better light bulbs — as the solution to climate change and all our other environmental problems. But the little-understood Jevons Paradox intervenes to overwhelm any progress that comes from improved efficiency.
In a recent article I summarized arguments for reversing the trend toward globalization of economies and cultures, aiming instead for the flourishing of communities rooted in their bioregions (i.e., regions defined by characteristics of the natural environment rather than human-imposed borders). For readers receptive to those arguments, the fundamental follow-up question is, “How?”
In arid and semi-arid regions, retaining rainfall where it falls is not an ecological luxury. It is a prerequisite for long-term water security, climate stability, and social resilience.
Conversely to Hansel and Gretel who left breadcrumbs to find their way out of the woods, we find ourselves now stranded in our civilized, industrialized, digitized cage and needing to find the trail back into our Wilderness.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate shares reflections on what we take for granted in life at multiple scales: from personal health to meaningful work to relative ecological stability.
SMPLE-KOIN will be introduced in this essay as a spiritual ‘thought experiment’ with economic implications, one designed to facilitate a real-world revaluation of how important material and financial wealth is to human prosperity.
So the new year has arrived, and the world’s power dynamics are shifting in a new Cold War. A revolutionary U.S. government has revived the Monroe Doctrine, gunboat diplomacy and the primacy of oil. In so doing it has kicked old-fashioned notions of law and sovereignty in the shins with a Putin-like swagger.
We must move from a finance that demands private benefits at scale, as purely transactional and extractive, to finance systems grounded in particular places and cooperative relationships, all closely aligned with living systems.
Cavalier and dismissive behaviour in the face of overwhelming evidence of impending danger is something which characteristically emerges from ‘normalcy bias’ (defined as the “tendency to underestimate the possibility of disaster and believe that life will continue as normal, even in the face of significant threats or crises”).
The bounty brought by rainfall, fertile soil, and biodiversity cannot truly be expressed through quantitative proxies, prices, algorithms, or markets because this “wealth” doesn’t exist in static, objectified forms or essentialist identities
As the natural resources that the modern world depends on become more and more scarce, countries will more and more resort to openly violent methods to secure access to those resources.
And you, fellow reader, what other words would you delete or add to sustain this conversation — and more importantly, the very cause for which it stands?
