Culture & Behavior

When Technology Fails (book review)

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Rarely in the specialized milieu of industrial civilization does one encounter a Renaissance man or woman-someone who is well-versed in a wide spectrum of disciplines and who can expound upon them in writing that is both articulate and engaging. So when I discovered Mat Stein’s phenomenal When Technology Fails: A Manual For Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving The Long Emergency…

Down the Rabbit Hole

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Rod Dreher has a fascinating observation…He talks about watching an interview on CNBC with Taleb and Roubini: Roubini and Taleb were both trying to make their case for why what’s wrong with the economy is radical, is fundamental, goes to the very base of all our economic assumptions.…The more I think about his point, the more I think that it epitomizes something fundamental about the intellectual shift we have to make – and about how hard it is to make it.

Toward Ecosophy

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Underlying the common casual assumption that some way out of peak oil will be found are the presuppositions and value judgments some social critics have called “scientism,” centered on faith in the omnipotence of human reason over nature. What options do we have for moving toward a less self-defeating worldview as the limits to humanity’s supposed “conquest of nature” come within sight?

Reality Report: Ecological Economics (rebroadcast)

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If an economic system is built on myths that aim to defy the laws of physics and ecology we should not be surprised to see it fail. Perhaps we can use this crisis to begin asking the right questions and redesign with human needs and planetary realities in mind. The Reality Report interviews Professor Joshua Farley of the Gund Institute of Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.

Reality Report: Michael Klare and the geopolitics of resource consumption

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In this show, Jason Bradford and Professor Michael Klare discuss the geopolitics of resource competition. Nations are engaging in a dangerous zero sum game as they jostle over finite supplies of fossil fuels, including the positioning of opposing advanced weapons systems in unstable parts of the world.

Reality Report: David Holmgren and FutureScenarios.org (Part 1)

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The Reality Report interviews David Holmgren. David co-invented permaculture over 30 years ago and has been a practitioner and teacher ever since, both at his home in Australia and as a consultant around world. In 2002 he published the book Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability that reviewed permaculture in the context of peak energy. More recently, David created a web site called Future Scenarios, see www.futurescenarios.org. This interview is based on that web site and was recorded on July 14, 2008.