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Revisiting Relocalization
Jason Bradford, The Oil Drum
Sometimes a new message can’t be heard or a new idea understood because compelling reasons for change are not apparent enough. If the old ways of doing things still bring enough money into bank accounts, keep cars filled with gas, roofs over heads, lights on with the flip of a switch, and plates heaped with food, then why bother doing anything differently?
But with Thomas Friedman, popular promoter of globalization, questioning the prevailing economic paradigm and reports that India is doing better than other countries because it is less connected to the global market and has a strong locally-oriented agrarian economy, I thought this essay written nearly a couple of years ago could finally resonate.
What do readers think? Are you finding that resistance is weakening when you try to bring up subjects that were formally considered wacky? Is disillusionment an opportunity? Will everybody now hang on my words because I have basically made some great calls over the past few years, as in: “Get out of the stock market because it is a bubble,” “Energy and food prices are soon going to skyrocket,” and “Don’t permit that new suburban subdivision because you will have trouble selling new homes soon?”
Introduction
Here are a few of my predictions: Many trends of the last century or more, made possible by cheap and abundant energy sources, are going to be reversed. These trends include population growth, centralization of political and economic power, vastly increased quantity of global trade, and mass tourism.
I am not giving dates of when these indicators of a shift from global to the more local will occur, except to say sometime during the 21st century, likely during the first half even. My initial point of view is not from any particular group with a political or social agenda, but as a scientist who makes deductions based on the laws of physics and ecology.
However, information from the natural world does eventually have political and policy implications that I am aware of, and have opinions about. The ability of a culture to accept information and respond timely and rationally will likely hinge on the entrenched mindsets of the populace, institutional norms, and their ability to willingly change expectations, organizational structures, and behaviors. Perhaps with prudent planning, measures of quality of life or conditions of happiness may not decline.
(25 April 2009)
What Are Friends For? A Longer Life
Tara Parker-Pope, New York TImes
In the quest for better health, many people turn to doctors, self-help books or herbal supplements. But they overlook a powerful weapon that could help them fight illness and depression, speed recovery, slow aging and prolong life: their friends.
Researchers are only now starting to pay attention to the importance of friendship and social networks in overall health. A 10-year Australian study found that older people with a large circle of friends were 22 percent less likely to die during the study period than those with fewer friends. A large 2007 study showed an increase of nearly 60 percent in the risk for obesity among people whose friends gained weight. And last year, Harvard researchers reported that strong social ties could promote brain health as we age.
(20 April 2009)
Limits to Growth Model Worth Another Look
EROI Guy, The Oil Drum
There are only finite resources in the world, but population continues to grow. How will this situation resolve itself? This was a question a group of scientists (Meadows et al), commissioned by the “Club of Rome,” attempted to answer back in 1972, in a book called Limits to Growth. The model they presented predicted growing resource scarcity, increasing pollution, and eventual population decline, all prior to 2100.
Charles A. S. Hall and John W. Day revisit these predictions in an article published this month in American Scientist called Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil. Their analysis indicates that the predictions from 1972 were surprisingly accurate, considering how long ago they were made:
(25 April 2009)
Japan honours ‘Limits to Growth’ science author
AFP
Japan on Thursday awarded its top science prize to a US researcher who decades ago predicted that rapid economic and population growth on a finite planet would lead to the collapse of civilisation.
Professor Dennis Meadows led a research team that in the 1972 study “The Limits to Growth,” using a computer model called World3, forecast that on current trends humanity was headed for doom by 2100.
Meadows, of the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the lead author of the study, which became a best-seller but was also attacked as alarmist and opposed to technology and progress.
(23 April 2009)
Earth to aliens: let’s talk
Simon Webster, Sydney Morning Herald
No one’s going to want to take over the planet, writes Simon Webster.
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SCIENTISTS from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence have been sitting by the intergalactic phone for almost 50 years. And they still haven’t worked out what to say when it rings.
… In a bid to determine what message, if any, we should send to inquisitive aliens, a new project is inviting people to send in their ideas. Contributions can be entered online at http://messages.seti.org from May 15.
“Help!” may well be the No.1 suggestion, though the scientists are hoping for something a little more positive.
Not that project boss Douglas Vakoch wants messages to be sanitised. He says anything we send into space should reflect the reality of life on Earth.
“I think the greatest thing we have to offer is to be honest about our current level of development, to highlight that we’re not sure that we’re even going to survive the next century . . . but that we have enough faith that we will continue to exist that we are making an effort to reach out to other civilisations,” Vakoch says in New Scientist this month.
… “An acknowledgment of our flaws and frailties seems a more honest approach than sending a sanitised, one-sided story,” he writes in New Scientist. “Honesty is a good starting point for a conversation that could last for generations.”
It would also protect us from alien invasion. No one’s going to want to take over the planet if we tell them what condition it’s in.
(26 April 2009)
Suggested by Michael Lardelli.
