Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
According to Bardi, small causes can lead to big effects in complex systems. The problem is that modern industrial society, as soon as it goes into a crisis, usually tries to solve the problems it faces by expanding its governance structures – in other words, it is doing a fatal “more of the same” instead to initiate a change.
In the present paper, we intend to show that when it comes to the topic of sustainability, a considerable amount of strong and motivating bottom-up civil society initiatives exist, working for positive social and environmental outcomes.
DeChristohper emphasizes that simply getting rid of Trump as first priority will not solve the environmental crisis. If the system wasn’t sufficiently self-correcting before, and if the status quo is irreparably broken, then it’s clear that some other change in strategy is needed.
I asked the Caliph what the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community can do about the moral issue of climate change. He said one of their auxiliary organisations is working on providing renewable energy to poor remote villages in Africa and Asia, as well as clean water projects. This group is apparently called IAAAE and I am going to ask them for an interview to learn more about their work.
In the modern world, our perceptions of reality are largely shaped by economic and financial considerations, and our policy conversations are largely built around intellectual categories and evaluative criteria that pertain to the economics discipline. Yet a long-term view shows that ‘The world in 2018’ is in a significantly different place than what economists typically claim, and than what many of us want to believe.
I have been running POST PRESENT FUTURE for almost a decade. It’s a simple project where I invite people to write a letter to their future – anything they want as long as it’s to themselves – which they receive in the post five years later. It’s like an alternative post service – just with a five-year delay.
The problem isn’t that this psychographic data were exploited at a massive scale. It’s that platforms like Facebook enable people’s data to be used in ways that take power away from voters and give it to data-analyzing campaigners. In my view, this kills democracy.
The days of constructive political debate and compromise in the legislative and executive branches of government are gone, leaving the courts as the primary venues in which the causes and consequences of global climate change are being debated, and stable solutions sought.
The death of a pedestrian during a test drive of a driverless vehicle calls into question not just the technology—which didn’t seem to detect the pedestrian crossing a busy roadway and therefore didn’t brake or swerve—but also the notion that driving is nothing more than a set of instructions that can be carried out by a machine.
The truth is that Jim made a practical choice. He had bought something he could afford. He wasn’t a pretentious jerk, a privileged snob, a hyper-critical college know-it-all, or a buffoon with delusions of grandeur. He was a hard worker who needed reliable transportation to get to and from work.
What do all these ideas have in common—a tax on carbon, big investments in renewable energy, a livable minimum wage, and freely accessible healthcare? The answer is that we need all of them, but even taken together they’re utterly insufficient to redirect humanity away from impending catastrophe and toward a truly flourishing future.
The “oil curse” refers to a long-studied phenomenon in which states that adopt petroleum as a significant foundation of their economy tend toward dictatorship. Of the top ten oil producing countries in the world, nine are oligarchies.
