Future & past – May 2
– Will China’s peak herald the “peak human”?
– Live long. Stay healthy. Join the immortals
– Immanuel Wallerstein: The world system after 1945
Society
Can dictators solve our problems?
As our difficulties increase, a new crop of dictators or quasi-dictators in various realms of our society will emerge, offering to solve our problems. Increasingly, I think we will let them try.
Happiness, simplicity and apocalypse – May 1
– Happiness theory at center stage in Soros economic conference
– The ‘I’m-happy-I’m-green’ consensus won’t placate our lust for novelty
– Simplicity Institute report shows that less can be more
– Prophets of the Environmental Apocalypse
– Venezuela Comes Sixth in Gallup “Wellbeing” Survey
I, Consumer?
Where have all the people gone? Not to mention the citizenry, human beings, neighbors, inhabitants, individuals, men, women, adults, children, workers, employees, employers? Suddenly, everywhere, gone, all of them. Their places taken by consumers.
Control, and other illusions
Civilisation is a story. It is a story about where we have come from and where we are going. There are many ways to tell that story, but one version has been very much the dominant one in the West for the past couple of centuries. We know this story: it’s the one about modern, urban industrial culture’s ineffable superiority over all others; the one about human evolution leading inevitably to this point. It’s the one about winning the war against nature, being the only species which thinks and loves and dreams; it’s the one about machines and circuitry and ingenuity and progress. And it’s true, in some ways, at least as far as it goes. But it may not be going much further.
Transportation – April 28
– Biggest US airlines have combined 1Q loss over $1B
– The wooden bike – an engineering marvel, a recipe for saddle sore
– Stop signs don’t work for bicycling
– Riled about rail: Why all the anger over high speed trains?
Breaking the real population taboo
No explanation of the environmental crisis gets more exposure than the claim that it is all caused by overpopulation. The view that really doesn’t get such coverage is the anti-capitalist alternative, the argument that the crisis is caused by a social and economic system that has waste and destruction built into its DNA.
There’s Something Happening Here…
Put these things together — a tone of hopelessness in the mainstream progressive media, a largely useless outpouring of outrage in the indymedia, a giving up of citizens on the viability of centralized representative governments, reactionary responses to black swan events instead of constructive ones, the ratcheting up of existing systems to prolong the period before tipping points, and a naivete about the powerlessness of even the most powerful in modern complex systems — and what do we have?
The world we make
..we live in a world that we are connected to at every moment, and that world has a future that I and my family will have to live in. Soon. To ignore those two crucial facts–that we belong to the world and that the world has a future–is a form of irresponsibility so large that it overwhelms my much smaller responsibility to do my best to satisfy my family’s desires. So large that it compromises and threatens the integrity of the world.
From the Pleistocene to the Motor City: Revolutions in human ecology
Revolutions in human ecology might usefully be grounded in a sense of humanity’s deep past, for that is where our power arrangements began.
The uses and abuses of ‘happiness’
One question that needs to be asked is – do the happiness proponents and their public spokespersons know what they’re doing?
Oakland lighting the climate path
Local initiatives like the Oakland Energy and Climate Action Plan aren’t enough to tackle the climate crisis. We need national and international regulations requiring deep, scientifically grounded emission reductions, and we need strict systems of enforcement. But before that can happen, people need to see that getting off fossil fuels isn’t a dour punishment. Done right, it can be a kind of gift. Oakland, once again, is leading the way.
