Before you heap praise on someone’s cooking, even for something as delicious as porcupine pot pie, you might want to consider the effects of ego inflation and the downsides of a hyper-individualistic culture. In this episode Asher, Rob, and Jason wonder if individualism (not to mention all those other “-isms”… capitalism, socialism, communism) is simply the product of a relatively short period of expansionism, and what of our values must be kept or discarded as we enter a new era of contraction and bureaucratic breakdown. While expressing a profound desire to retain the progress humanity has made on numerous fronts (don’t sleep on 21st-century dentistry), they make sure to insult one another just enough for proper ego containment.
- Gut health and time with hunter-gatherers
- Jason Bradford’s The Future Is Rural: Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification
- William Ophuls wrote Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity in 1977. Here is a book review.
- The Limits to Growth, one of the historic (1972) environmentalist publications
- Red Dawn, the quintessential Cold War movie (with apologies to Rocky IV)
- Transition Towns movement
- Stephen Quilley wrote a 2013 article in the journal Environmental Values that draws on the work of Ophuls — “De-Growth Is Not a Liberal Agenda: Relocalisation and the Limits to Low Energy Cosmopolitanism.” He examines the “…tensions, trade-offs and possibilities for a socially liberal, culturally cosmopolitan and science-based civilisation under conditions of degrowth and metabolic contraction.”
- Stephen Quilley’s personal blog, “Navigators of the Anthropocene“
- Nate Hagens wrote a 2019 paper in Ecological Economics: “Economics for the future — Beyond the superorganism”
- Joseph Tainter, the author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, wrote a 2000 paper entitled “Problem Solving: Complexity, History, Sustainability,” that describes the simplification of the Byzantine Empire.
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