Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Can ecology, biology, mathematics and physics help us avoid (or at least predict) forthcoming troubles of the worst kind? An interview with scientist Len Fisher, Ph.D., author of the new book Crashes, Crises, and Calamities: How We Can Use Science to Read the Early-Warning Signs .
– New Yorker: The origins and future of Occupy Wall Street
– John Robb: The HIDDEN logic of the Occupy Movement
– Juan Cole: How Students Landed on the Front Lines of Class War
– Bloomberg, Kelly Finally Piss Off The Media
– Biggest Week Yet for Occupy Wall Street Coverage
When civil society sleeps, we’re just a bunch of individuals absorbed in our private lives. When we awaken, on campgrounds or elsewhere, when we come together in public and find our power, the authorities are terrified.
– The Importance of Creative Protest
– Mike Davis: Ten Immodest Commandments
– The Revolution Is Love – video by Charles Eisenstein (author of “Sacred Economics”)
– Jan Lundberg: How bad or hopeful is our situation as a culture and species?
In recent years, we have heard statements indicating that it is possible to decouple GDP growth from energy growth. I have been looking at the relationship between world GDP and world energy use and am becoming increasingly skeptical that such a decoupling is really possible.
After my talk in Norwich last week, I met a local authority emergency planner, who said that he had found the talk, and the Transition take on resilience, very illuminating. He pointed me in the direction of the latest “Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience”, the latest “national statement for how individual and community resilience can work”, published by the Cabinet Office in March of this year. It is a fascinating document, and is indeed the first official government document on community resilience that refers explicitly to the Transition movement, and as such deserves a post reflecting on it. It also offers a tantalising glimpse into what a government response to peak oil, climate change and economic contraction might look like if anyone had the imagination to create one.
In the last few years the IEA’s annual report has come to recognize that the next 25 years are unlikely to be anything like the last 25 and the report has become much more nuanced. Gone are the extreme predictions that the world will be consuming 50 percent more oil 25 years from now. In their place are forecasts that global oil production will depend heavily on what alternative policy paths are taken by major governments and how much ($38 trillion is necessary) will be spent to find and exploit fossil fuel resources in the coming years.
For college graduates in their 20’s or 30’s facing few job prospects and excessive student debt, graduate school can seem a promising way to sit out the recession. It’s far from a sure bet, though: there’s no guarantee of future employment, it only adds to the mounting debt post-undergrads face, and it consumes time and resources that could be better devoted to making things. But there are alternatives. Don’t Go Back To School is a project by author, NYU instructor, and Yale graduate school dropout Kio Stark exploring other ways to facilitate post-undergrad learning.
As global energy production peaks, our consumer-driven society is being forced to rethink its values and creatively adapt to a less energy intensive world. Richard Heinberg, senior fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and author of The End of Growth joins Luke to discuss the end of consumerism.
-Come together: Could communal living be the solution to our housing crisis?
-US millionaires say ‘raise our taxes’
-Brightfarms reduce supply chain … to about 10 vertical metres!
-Can a Clothing Factory Stay Competitive While Paying Workers a Living Wage?
The work of mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros continues Christopher Alexander’s work on the nature of architectural order, with more development of specifically scientific aspects. A basic point both make is that natural, biological, and urban systems have a great deal in common. In particular, they all function in complex, varying, and adaptive ways on many different levels. For that reason, they can’t be designed in any very comprehensive way but must largely be allowed to evolve through variation and selection.
– Economists Say Europe Facing ‘Lost Decade’
– Eurozone Crisis Q&A
– Why Iceland Should Be in the News, But Is Not
– Resources for Understanding the Crisis in Greece
