Culture & Behavior

Pluto’s Republic

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One of the enduring tropes of Western intellectual culture, dating back to Plato’s time, is the notion that there must be some way to force people to make the right collective decisions whether they want to do so or not. Magic — the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will — is one of many resources that have been applied to this end. The thought of doing this as a way of dealing with our society’s abject failure to respond intelligently to peak oil, though, leads into a thicket of overfamiliar problems.

Some thoughts on diversity, leadership and patience in Transition

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I must own up to something at the start of this: I have a bias. I have an agenda. I am not impartial. I see things through a complicated lens of culture, class, and gender. I am a mature male of African, Native American and European heritage, a son of the Americas. I decided at an early age that all of that, despite what was happening in the outside world, would be at peace with me.
[The author is a writer, educator, activist, poet – and a Transition trainer.]

The ongoing stumble

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… all crashes are relative. My acquaintances back in the USA tell me that they struggle every day in this economy of high unemployment and fuel prices; I believe them, but I also mention that our unemployment is much higher, and we pay the litre-and-euro equivalent of $8.00 a gallon. Today’s Irish, meanwhile, remain wealthy compared to the Irish of 20 years ago, who might, in turn, have been in the wealthiest half of the world. Yet people lived hearty lives in all these times and places, even when most of them had less money than the underclass of the modern West. Americans’ suffering comes not just from a lack of money, but from a lack of training.

Why the metamovement will ultimately fail

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There have been, belatedly, attempts to connect the “We Are the 99%” Occupy Wall Street protests with the protests in the Mideast against anti-democratic regimes and in Europe against unemployment, austerity and government inaction. What is unique about the newest US protests (at least since the ill-fated anti-globalization protests of a decade ago), and perhaps the reason why it took so long for them to get media and public traction, is that they are anti-corporate more than anti-government.

Environmental education begins with hope

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Some say that the best way to learn is to teach. In my second year as a college environmental educator, I have learned much more about my subject matter—namely the increasingly tenuous ability of nature to meet the needs of seven billion human consumers. But I have also come to learn the barriers to understanding and acting upon the signs of planetary peril, including climate change, peaking oil production, water depletion and toxics in our food.

The Hubbert hurdle: revisiting the Fermi Paradox

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We have a well known problem called the “Fermi Paradox”. If all those extra-terrestrial civilizations exist, then could they develop interstellar travel? If there are so many of them, why aren’t they here?

Tim O’Reilly may have been the first to note, in 2008, that the Hubbert curve may be relevant for the Fermi paradox. Because of the non linearity of the curve, no matter what resources are being used, a civilization literally “flares up” and then subsides, being able to maintain the highest level of energy production only for a very short time. This phenomenon that we might call “The Hubbert Hurdle” may be very general and make industrial civilizations in the galaxy to be very short-lived.