Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kurt Cobb A new paper by a long-time sustainability academic and consultant says that minor tweaks in our current system won’t help us. We are likely headed for societal collapse and need a radical new way of thinking about the future. The first necessary casualty is hope–hope that we can keep things largely the way they are.
The main problems with tech mirages: 1) They destroy or undermine existing businesses, weakening them to the point where they collapse and then those tech mirages collapse themselves leaving society without the service supplied by the businesses they destroyed and/or 2) they distract from what we really need to do to adapt to the twin crises of climate change and resource depletion.
A few weeks ago I wrote about black-and-white movies like Stagecoach, and how they often dealt with our modern, 21st-century problems in a way that modern media does not. Someone might ask: So What? If a movie made nine decades ago had a timely message, how does that affect my problems now? The question motivated me to write about the stories we tell each other about *class*.
What is most important, to live with as small a carbon footprint as possible or to prioritize collective action to change laws, rules, and incentives? For me, this is not the right question to ask.
With the dawn of industrialization, democracy in work went into reverse. What’s important here is that most people know little or nothing of this history or cannot conceive of it in terms of loss of liberty. They simply accept the arrangements in their jobs as somehow ordained in a nominally democratic society, as how work must necessarily be organized.
I just finished reading David Wallace-Wells’ book,”The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.” When asked whether focusing on predictions of doom  is productive or just numbing, Wallace-Wells responded: complacency poses a greater risk to our species than panic. A little panic can be a good thing, especially if you have become complacent.
If you’re in the mood for some good deindustrial fiction, I recommend checking out these books by Ann M. Pino.
We have eliminated the species around us with reckless abandon and without concern for whether we can survive without them. An alarming new study suggests a rapidly accelerating decline in worldwide insect populations. Can we survive without the insects of the world?
As long as there have been humans, we have taken the parts of plants we don’t eat and thrown them back onto the soil again, knowing it would turn back into soil to create more plants. Until we modern people came along, that is.
Phosphorus is a key ingredient in modern fertilizers and essential for all living organisms. Will we have enough to feed the world in the decades to come?
Old black-and-white movies set an example for people to follow. In an era when we interact more with screens than with people, and when few people remember how to work together or build a better society, examples are what we need more of.
As long as investors continued to plow money into U.S. shale oil companies, the industry seemed unstoppable. But with the flow of those funds all but stopped, has the U.S. shale oil industry entered a death spiral?
