Light Posting 8th to 22nd October
By Resilience.org Staff, Resilience.org
Due to editorial holiday, there will be light posting from 8th to 22nd October. Regular posting will resume on the 23rd.
Three Deprivation Narratives
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
I’d like to think that it should be possible for everyone in the world to have safe and comfortable shelter (including access to tolerably warm bathing water) and an adequate diet (I’m not so sure about the color TV)...
New Deals, Old Bottles
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
Let me begin by saying that we leftists do often struggle with the issue of the environment. One member of our tribe recently told me proudly on Twitter that the left was ‘against nature’ (yes, really), and it’s true that historically we’ve had a bit of a thing about trying to keep the messy world of the natural, the organic and the rural at arm’s length...
Half-Earth, Half-Baked?
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
After nineteen chapters of amiable good sense, Wilson suddenly goes full ecomodernist, as if some devilish Breakthrough Institute hacker finally figured out how to make him stop his anti-Anthropocene agitating by messing with his neurons like a cordyceps fungus attacking one of his beloved ants.
The Vaishya Gambit
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
So ironically, perhaps the only chance for a truly liberal politics of friends and not enemies now lies in reconstructing a vaishya localism. But perhaps I’m being too pessimistic…?
The Transition from Capitalism to Feudalism
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
Historians have spilled a lot of ink on the question of how capitalism supplanted feudalism, but what will happen in the future if by design, default or disaster our present capitalist society is supplanted by a lower energy alternative with more people devoting themselves to the agrarian arts?
Magic Economics
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
Economists do like to weigh in on normative issues of this kind nonetheless – and here is where, for me, they cease being potentially useful mechanics and start to become priests, magicians or quacks.
Comparative Disadvantage
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
Comparative advantage is still routinely invoked as a justification for free trade today, so it remains sadly necessary to explain why it’s a poor foundation for contemporary economies.
Population: What’s the Problem?
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
My question isn’t a rhetorical one intended to suggest that human population levels aren’t a problem. I don’t doubt they are. But it seems to me much less clear than a lot of people seem to think exactly what kind of problem they are, and what – if anything – could or should be done about it