Culture & Behavior

Ants, angels and armor: further conversations on human nature

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“We’re the ants patiently carrying sand a grain at a time from under the castle wall. We work from the bottom up. The knights up there don’t see the ants and don’t know what we’re doing. They’ll figure it out only when the wall begins to fall. It takes time and quiet persistence. Always remember this: They fight with money and we resist with time, and they’re going to run out of money before we run out of time”

(Discussion with “Peak Shrink” Kathy McMahon, “Ecological Footprint” originator Bill Rees and Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace International.)

An open letter to Peter Kent, Canada’s Minister of the Environment

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On December 12, from the foyer of the Canadian House of Commons, you irrationally rationalized why it is a good idea for Canada to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol. I would like to congratulate you on your cheeky display of hyperbolic satire — there was so much cognitive dissonance and misleading rhetoric in your statement that it couldn’t possibly have been serious! I can’t wait for the day when you reveal that your government’s position is one big elaborate hoax designed to taunt the world into acting on climate change. I want to point out where your satire was effective but also give you a little bit of advice on how you could have made your statement even better.

As economic growth fails how do we live? Part I: The four horsemen of the economic apocalypse

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As The Big Engine That Couldn’t has faltered for several years, it is becoming increasingly clear the economy is running off the tracks. Both investors and the public are beginning to realize the long-revered goal of endless economic growth is failing. Anger and fear are widespread, as the livelihoods and hopes of ordinary Americans are being destroyed. Anger runs among the “99%” over economic injustices that favor the “1%”. Fear, however, may run among 100% over this question: How do we live when economic growth fails?

Announcing the publication of two new Energy Descent Action Plans!

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Like buses, you wait for ages for Energy Descent Action Plans to come along, and then two come along at once. This month sees the publication of two new EDAPs, from Llambed in mid-Wales, and Dunbar in East Lothian, Scotland. These two high quality pieces of work represent two communities taking the idea of an EDAP and rooting it to their place, their community, their challenges.

Occupy the food system

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Farmers have been through this before — our lives and livelihoods falling under corporate control. It has been an ongoing process: consolidation of markets; consolidation of seed companies; an ever-widening gap between our costs of production and the prices we receive. Some of us are catching on, getting the picture of the real enemy.

Occupying Post-Collapse America: What if the industrial death-urge lived on?

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The Occupy movement is a start. But the stakes are rising. The earth is dying. The biocidal industrial economy, while coming apart at the seams, still rages on. …And what if the industrial disease DOESN’T die with collapse? What then? And what does that imply for resistance movements?

‘A Story of Transition in 10 Objects’ all gathered together in one place

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As part of the promotion of The Transition Companion, Emilio Mula made these 10 short films of different stories from the book. The recent BBC series ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ beautifully told the story of the evolution of human history illustrated by 100 objects chosen from the British Museum’s collection. We used a similar approach to tell the story of the emerging and unfolding Transition movement, which in its short life has spread to 35 countries around the world from its humble beginnings in Kinsale, Ireland.

Deepwater Horizon: Lessons from Petroleum Engineering and the Roman Empire

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Why did the Deepwater Horizon blow up last year, kill 11 workers, and cause the massive oil eruption into the Gulf of Mexico? You’re likely to get different answers if you talk separately to a petroleum engineer or an anthropologist. When they team up, it gets really interesting. Anthropologist Joseph Tainter (author of The Collapse of Complex Societies) and petroleum engineer Tad Patzek talk about the new book they’ve co-authored: Drilling Down: The Gulf oil debacle and our energy dilemma.

Father Christmas, homesteader

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The whole story, of course, made more sense when it was gaining popularity in the 19th and early 20th centuries; most children were familiar with sleighs or lumps of coal, and hung their stockings by the chimney anyway, to dry. The oranges we received in our stockings were meaningless to us in the 1970s but precious to our forebears; they were from exotic lands. In “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” Mama was in her kerchief and I in my cap because the houses were cold. Children a century ago would not have found such details cryptic, any more than they would stables and mangers.

A psychological carbon tax

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There’s plenty of understanding that efficiency measures can sometimes (often) fail if they fall victim to Jevon’s Paradox. The common response is that we need to couple efficiency measures with a carbon tax or similar policy that give people both the means and the incentive to decrease energy consumption. But let’s look at the underlying goal of a carbon tax: to change behavior. How does it change behavior? By penalizing undesirable behavior (financially). The downside to a carbon tax is that it requires overcoming many political hurdles that don’t seem likely to be overcome anytime soon. What are the alternatives?