Painting By Numbers?
A living culture wouldn’t — doesn’t — refuse abstractions. It simply provides abstractions, like numbers, with a proper and limited focus and scope.
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Back to the future through mixed farming
So it’ll be a case of back to the future with mixed farming as a key component of the food system (not everywhere, because we’re talking local context, not one size fits all solutionism … but mixed farming in its endless local variants will loom large).
AI: The information economy becomes ever more energy and resource intensive
The information economy was supposed to be light on physical resources compared to the old industrial economy. Turns out it’s not.
Surviving the Future: The Deeper Dive 2024
Autumn has always been my favourite season, and over recent years it brings additional succour, signalling time to start preparing in earnest for the winter’s Deeper Dive.
The Day of the Dead
It is the Day of the Dead. It is the end of yet another season of growth and the beginning of another season of decay. The spiral is turning… It is time to honor our debts to time. Without fear…
Cheap Climate Grace
We’ve tried tackling climate change through models that prop up the economically and morally crippled structures of the past, let’s try an approach that looks to the future with courage, vision, and imagination.
Rick Steves: What Americans Can Learn From Europe’s People-Friendly Places
I live in a beautiful community, and it’s so clear to me that beautiful communities don’t just happen.
Global Energy Transition: Race to the Bottom
Existing sampling technologies used to determine mineral density on the seabed estimate volumes 3-5x greater than all known land-based reserves. Yet studies on the environmental effects of creating plumes of sediment that will settle and cover (and smother) organisms on the sea floor or the effects of ploughing up large areas of the sea floor indicate that for all practical purposes, the damage is permanent.
Finding safe paths through suburbia
The post-WWII suburban settlement pattern assumes and reinforces car travel as the default transport choice for its residents. Do such settlements have a future when the temporary energy bonanza of the past 100 years falters? And can residents of suburbia begin to create that future today?
The Importance of Political Decentralization: Reflections from the Balkans
Everything about the dominant modern form of social organization tends towards centralization. Capitalism and the nation-state tends to take power away from local communities and concentrate it in the hands of narrow elites.
The Beetaloo gas field is a climate bomb. How did CSIRO modelling make it look otherwise?
If it is allowed to proceed, this single project could undo all of our efforts to cut emissions. Beetaloo and Middle Arm are a climate bomb. They will produce vast volumes of emissions which cannot be offset.
Rāhui and the Art of Marine Conservation
A rāhui is, in essence, an area of land or water with a temporary limit on collecting a resource, such as a particular fish or fruit. In time, once the resource has had time to replenish, the rāhui is lifted.
