Society

The hidden costs of Tiger Water

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This jequitiba tree in Brazil moves hundreds of gallons of water up into its canopy every day. It does so without pumps, without electricity, and without recourse to the concrete reservoirs and sewage treatment plants on which most modern cities depend.

The jequitiba is a joyous marvel to behold, of course — but it would also be an practical inspiration to the world’s designers and city builders, faced with imminent energy descent, if only we were minded to notice.

Sustainability & Rio+20 – June 24

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– Al Jazeera interviews Hopkins and Heinberg on sustainability and Rio+20
– Sharon Astyk: Yet Another Last Chance to Step Up that We Blew…Ho Hum
– The Shifting Boundaries of Sustainability Science: Are We Doomed Yet? (3 articles on sustainability in PLoS journal of biology)
– New book: Planetary Sustainability Plan in “The Blueprint: Averting Global Collapse”

The REAL reason conservatives always win

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For Energy Bulletin, this article should be titled, “The REAL Reason Cornucopians Always Win.” The author is a former associate of George Lakoff, and shares his commitment to analyzing framing and political discourse. He writes:

“Progressives need to engage in a values-based strategy that builds trust across the issue silos. We need to focus on building communities of shared identity that bind us together.”

The Buffalo Commons: Redefining how we think about place, politics, and policy

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One of my working hypotheses has been that commons discourse has great power because it is able to function as an open platform. It is both general and specific. I frequently compare the commons to DNA because both are under-specified design structures that evolve and adapt in relationship to local circumstances. A certain ambiguity and incompleteness in the language of the commons is precisely what enables people to infuse it with their own specific values, needs and aspirations. And this is what makes the commons both universally appealing and particular in its manifestations.

How to apply resilience thinking—In Australia and beyond

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Resilience, in the context of the earth’s ecosystems, is defined as the capacity to absorb a shock, reorganize, and continue to function as before. This basic ability is often taken for granted by the global economy, and yet evidence is mounting that crucial ecosystems are in decline. Without a rethinking of how we use the earth’s resources and the development of an approach based on resilience, many of those declines may be irreversible.

Is Barack Obama morphing into Dick Cheney?

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“As shown through his stepped-up drone campaign,” Aaron David Miller, an advisor to six secretaries of state, wrote at Foreign Policy, “Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.” When it comes to international energy politics, however, it is not Bush but his vice president, Dick Cheney, who has been providing the role model for the president. As recent events have demonstrated, Obama’s energy policies globally bear an eerie likeness to Cheneys, especially in the way he has engaged in the geopolitics of oil as part of an American global struggle for future dominance among the major powers.

A 150-Year Experiment: Colleges that serve everyone

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The historic land-grant tradition of higher education in the United States shares notable similarities to the emerging interest in the “commons”. Having researched scholarship regarding land-grant institutions and recently becoming aware of strategies for a commons-based society, I am struck by their common mission, and commitment to the public interest. This article is intended to introduce land-grant institutions, which celebrate their 150th anniversary this year to the “commoners” in hopes of bringing together advocates for the advancement of our communities and society.

Dark Ages Redux: American politics and the end of the Enlightenment

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We are witnessing an epochal shift in our socio-political world. We are de-evolving, hurtling headlong into a past that was defined by serfs and lords; by necromancy and superstition; by policies based on fiat, not facts.

Much of what has made the modern world in general, and the United States in particular, a free and prosperous society comes directly from insights that arose during the Enlightenment.

Too bad we’re chucking it all out and returning to the Dark Ages.

What if . . . . the people had a change of heart?

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That’s when you see the past and the future in your own hands. How everything hinges ultimately on our own efforts: Who will dig the land, who will shape the land, what is it worth, and in what spirit will this work be done? Up until the 1950s half the population in Suffolk worked on the land; now it’s 0.5 percent. The country has become something we understand at arm’s length, a Suffolk of industrial agriculture, fringed with nature tourism and leisure. And yet in our hearts, somewhere, we know there is a deeper relationship we have with our homeland, and if we were wise, we would be seeking it out.