Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In Africa and elsewhere, burgeoning population growth threatens to overwhelm already over-stretched food supply systems. But the next agricultural revolution needs to get local — and must start to see rising populations as potentially part of the solution.
-The Return of the Multi-Generational Family Household
-Energy trumps the environment, poll finds
-Study: health tends to improve during recessions
-The Ecological Revolution! (review)
-How the Corporations Broke Ralph Nader and America, Too
-10 Lessons for the Climate Movement
-Alex Steffen’s Optimistic Environmentalism: The Bright Green City
-Looting Main Street
-Walled In
One of the pleasures of blogging is that the dialogue which it sometimes provokes, and my recent post reflecting on the health care vote and the apparent breakdown of ‘normal’ political processes produced a couple of thoughtful responses which seemed to me to take the discussion on.
For all those dismayed by scenes of looting in disaster-struck zones, whether Haiti or Chile or elsewhere, take heart: Good acts – acts of kindness, generosity and cooperation – spread just as easily as bad. And it takes only a handful of individuals to really make a difference.
During the pre-recession years of the 21st century, we experienced wide-ranging nonrenewable natural resource (NNR) scarcity on a global scale for the first time. Supplies associated with an overwhelming majority of the global energy resources, metals, and minerals that enable our industrialized way of life failed to keep pace with increasing global demand during the 2000-2008 period, resulting in global NNR supply shortfalls.
Economic history compressed into one sentence: "As societies have grown more complex, larger, more far-flung and diverse, the tribe-based gift economy has shrunk in importance, while the trade economy has grown to dominate nearly every aspect of people’s lives, and has expanded in scope to encompass the entire planet." As society dramatically simplifies itself in the wake of fossil fuel depletion, will we revert to some form of gift economy? Or will we catch and steady ourselves on some intermediate rung on the ladder of economic development?
I was very struck by a piece by Steve Randy Waldmann at Interfluidity yesterday, entitled Capital Can’t be Measured. He is basically arguing that modern financial institutions are sufficiently complex that the concept of their “capital” is subject to measurement errors of the same order of magnitude as the capital itself. This rang true to me, and put into words something that had nagged at me in reading about financial reforms, but had not come clearly to the surface of mind.
Last month in “Forty Shades of… Less Brown?,” I described the principle of increasing marginal brownness. This principle establishes that the process of economic growth invariably entails an environmental “browning,” even though some growth regimes are less brown than others. The idea is to use the brown portion of the color spectrum in framing discussions of economic growth. Otherwise it is too easy to fall for the seductive and dangerous rhetoric of “green growth.”
During the period of my life when I was a professional smart-ass (ie, my adolescence), I used to complain to my mother that even the day after she went grocery shopping, there was never any food in the house, only the component ingredients of food. As I teenager I wanted to eat like my peers who seemed to have an endless supply of chips and soda around. To have to come home from school and actually scramble eggs or make a sandwich seemed horribly unfair. My mother and step-mother expressed little sympathy.
Parents love their childless friends, often their only source of grown-up activities like, say, uninterrupted conversation. Or drinking and shooting pool (mmm…). Plus they’re good babysitters! Unchilded people love having relationships with kids. Children love hanging out with adults who are independent and adventurous; they need uncles and aunties. Human communities are ecosystems, and in all ecosystems diversity is the key to health and resilience.
