By David Wengrow, Aeon
Civilisation is a way of talking about human history on the largest scale. From the cave paintings of Lascaux to the latest MoMA exhibition, it binds human history together.
By Jeremy Lent, Patterns of Meaning
In the face of climate breakdown and ecological overshoot, alluring promises of “green growth” are no more than magical thinking. We need to restructure the fundamentals of our global cultural/economic system to cultivate an “ecological civilization.”
By Samuel Miller McDonald, Activist Lab
The “oil curse” refers to a long-studied phenomenon in which states that adopt petroleum as a significant foundation of their economy tend toward dictatorship. Of the top ten oil producing countries in the world, nine are oligarchies.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
Anyway, this is all vaguely relevant to my present theme, which is some thoughts on Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization: A History (MIT Press, 2017). It’s hard to keep up with Smil’s output, since he seems to produce about three books every year, but I find him an interesting writer.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
But how did we get from the Palaeolithic foraging of my last post to the very apogee of mixed agrarianism shown in the picture? I’m glad you asked. To answer it, I need to go to way back when and return to my main historical thread by looking at some of the tensions within…
By Ramon Elani, The Dark Mountain Project
If people just hear that humans are destroying the environment, they aren’t given much incentive to act or even think much.
By John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report
People raised in urban environments come to treat their mental models as realities, more real than the often-unruly facts on the ground, because everything they encounter in their immediate environments reinforces those models.
By John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report
People in civilizations tend to cut themselves off from the immediate experience of nature nature to a much greater extent than the uncivilized do. Does this help explain why civilizations crash and burn so reliably, leaving the barbarians to play drinking games with mead while sitting unsteadily on the smoldering ruins?
By Andy Russell, Autonomy Acres.com
We can take the next step in our evolution, a step towards the Permacene.
By Christy Rodgers, Dark Mountain Project
It seems obvious: to be fully alive you have to interact directly, respectfully and in physical proximity with a variety of other fully living things as much as possible. There is no substitute.
By Resilience.org Staff, Resilience.org
Chris Hedges and Greg Grandin both call on Melville's Moby-Dick to bring us commentary on the crisis of our civilization.
By Toby Hemenway, Pattern Literacy
My wife and I went semi-nomadic in 2010, traveling the mountain West for almost two years. Not having a settled home was eye-opening, and taught me a lot about one of my perennial themes: how much humans lost when we became domesticated by agriculture.