Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kurt Cobb During the coming decade companies that include Amazon, SpaceX and OneWeb are seeking to launch well over 100,000 satellites to service wireless networks on Earth. Many more satellites may follow after that. The wonders of wireless communications blinded us to the risks of filling the sky with so many satellites.
Last month, the world’s 4th largest oil company—BP—predicted that the world will never again consume as much petroleum as it did last year. So, have we finally hit peak oil? And if so, what does that mean for our economy and our world?
The role of scavenger in nature is to find that which others have discarded or which no longer has life. In the human world, the more desperate the times, the more scavenging people are likely to do and the less stuff there will be to go around. That’s when scavenging may cross the line into theft.
Underneath all the disorder we see in our pandemic-plagued economic, social and political lives is the crumbling of key assumptions about what we call modernity, a period of “enlightenment” that has supposedly freed us from the past.
There remains a hope that once we get past the economic and social effects of the pandemic, all of us will be able to return to something resembling normal life before the pandemic—even if it is a “new normal” marked by heightened vigilance and protection against infectious disease … But the date for this recovery to a new normal seems to keep getting postponed.
Retrosuburbia provides the patterns and models that need to be replicated across our residential heartlands to achieve a scale of impact.
Rob Dietz: Steady-state economics is a sustainable alternative to mainstream or neoclassical economics, which assumes perpetual growth of production and consumption. Such an economy keeps material and energy use within ecological limits, and the unsustainable (and unrealistic) goal of continuously increasing income and consumption is replaced by the goal of improving quality of life for all. In short, the focus is enough rather than more.
A city near Beijing is being designed with rooftop farms, 3-D printing facilities and ample space to work from home – to protect residents against future pandemics. Vicente Guallart, whose Barcelona-based firm of architects won a contest to design the community, said: “We cannot continue designing cities and buildings as if nothing had happened.”
The Plurinational State, which prior to the coup in Bolivia had begun to be erected (with the defects inevitable in any pioneering trial), is a mirror in which our countries must look at themselves… The Abya Yala [the Americas] is then to be lived as a Great Homeland, open to supportive and ecological cooperation with all the peoples of the world.
We are in the midst of an unmitigated natural disaster here in Oregon and on the West Coast. I struggle to find the words to express what’s happening and the toll it’s taking – on our natural treasures, on homes and businesses, and on our collective psyches.
A prominent journalist is pushing the idea that the United States embark on a program to triple its population. He completely ignores the environmental implications.
All of the negative effects of the resource curse are now on display in North Dakota and may well get worse. Of course, what North Dakota is experiencing, many resource-rich places around the world are also experiencing in one form or another.
