Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Why would a fisher care about the forest? The person to ask is Shigeatsu Hatakeyama, an oyster farmer from Kesennuma in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture. We can learn a great deal from Hatakeyama. He is one of those rare types of people who can see beyond the day-to-day preoccupation of how to make a living — in his case, with an oyster farm — and instead embrace the world around them.
Last December, after more than 40 years teaching at the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) at the University of British Columbia, Bill Rees gave his last lecture as a full-time professor. As one of his last students, I found his class captivating, and in following up with many of his former students, realized they felt the same way. His career defined the modern science of sustainability, and touched the lives of many, inspiring individuals to devote their lives towards adapting our species to live responsibly on this planet.
Public anger at the 2008 Wall Street bailout, concerns about debt, and a deep and pervasive fear that another financial crash is just a matter of time create an important moment of opportunity for a long overdue public conversation about the purpose of financial services and the necessary steps to assure that the financial sector fulfills that purpose.
Mitt seems to believe what most Americans believe, which is that those on social welfare programs are doing just awesome, while the real victims are middle class Americans. This is a pretty funny idea, but it isn’t just Mitt’s. The notion that lower and middle class Americans are struggling more than the truly poor is not an uncommon one by people who look on social welfare programs with hostility. If there’s anything really different about his assumptions it is the very funny classing of the desperately poor with the extremely rich as having a lot in common.
– Science: Live Chat: Peak Oil—Is the Well Running Dry? (NEW)
– Michael Lynch: The Unfounded Fear of the ‘Peak Oil’ Monster
– Science: Technology Is Turning U.S. Oil Around But Not the World’s
– Once, men abused slaves. Now we abuse fossil fuels
– Thomas Homer-Dixon: Our peak oil premium
– The End of Elastic Oil
– Power paradox: Clean might not be green forever
– How Much Energy Does Energy Efficiency Save?
In response to a growing realisation that neo-liberal capitalism is morally and literally bankrupt, Britain’s political leadership have provided three visions of ethical capitalism for us to aspire to. So, is there such a thing as ethical capitalism? And why is this question being asked now?
Scientists seem to be discovering that they can’t stick to the old ways any longer. After all, the quality of a paper doesn’t reside on the seal of a commercial editor, it is guaranteed by the peer reviewing process. And scientists are doing peer reviewing, not editors. So, scientists tend to publish more and more in “open access journals”, which just didn’t exist up to not long ago. There is now an “open science movement”, and a movement to boycott Elsevier, singled out among the many scientific editors as an especially bad one.
The financial crisis and the Occupy movement have challenged Left-Right distinctions and prompted calls for an entirely new economic order.
The next Marx will produce not a manifesto for the middle class. Rather, the new synthesis will fuse economics and environmentalism in a way that fundamentally reorients both disciplines. Marx pioneered political economy; Marx 2.0 will pioneer planetary economy. It’s not just about greening capitalism, as if enough solar cells and Prii will save the world. Our current economic system has reached its planetary limit.
The myth of the machine, the theme of last week’s Archdruid Report post, has implications that go well beyond the usual terms of discussion in the peak oil scene. One of those implications, which I mentioned briefly last week, unfolds from the way that so many people who are concerned about peak oil fixate obsessively on the hope that some kind of machine will solve the problem.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
As the saying goes, it is always darkest right before it goes completely black.
Rejoice in this: Seeds of futurity require the darkness within soil to dream.
A call is going out to every British citizen who wants the financial sector to clean up their act. Move your money from the big banks to local, ethical or mutual alternatives and send them a message in a language they’ll understand.
