Culture & Behavior

How to wreck a planet 101

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Here’s one simple fact without which our deepening energy crisis makes no sense: the world economy is structured in such a way that standing still in energy production is not an option. In order to satisfy the staggering needs of older industrial powers like the United States along with the voracious thirst of rising powers like China, global energy must grow substantially every year. Even if usage grows somewhat more slowly than projected, any failure to satisfy the world’s requirements produces a perception of scarcity, which also means rising fuel prices. These are precisely the conditions we see today and should expect for the indefinite future. It is against this backdrop that three crucial developments of 2011 are changing the way we are likely to live on this planet for the foreseeable future.

poppyland

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In 2006 I began a book that traced the relationship between flowers and the human imagination, those circular and winding tracks that are buried deep inside. It’s a record of a 10 year exploration into the linguistics of wild medicinal plants and a description of a practice I developed with Mark that began with some questions: Can we enter the flower’s territory on its own terms, beyond our monocultural control of the “environment”? What effects do their fragrance, their medicine, their shapes have on our imaginations, on our memories? How do they enter our dreams?

Wisdom of the land- The essence of Hawaiian sustainability

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Dr. Scott Fisher, Director of Conservation for the Hawaiian Islands Trust, speaks to us about his work at the Waihe’e Refuge, a 277 acre protected site on the island of Maui.  Dr. Fisher talks about traditional Hawaiian land stewardship, sensitive island ecosystems, biodiversity on Maui, and the importance of malama ‘aina (care for the land).  

Kurzweil: the movie

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In “Transcendent Man” it is a sadder than usual Ray Kurzweil who appears on the screen. The 2009 documentary film about Kurzweil, an acclaimed inventor and futurist, shows that the laws of entropy are at work on his body. He undergoes open heart surgery during the course of the film even as he continues to espouse the belief that technological developments over the next 30 years will make human immortality a reality.

Dear Stephen King: an open letter to one American who really could scare the rest of us into action

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Given your influence and the speed with which you can turn out a blockbuster, Mr. King, you might take my feeble attempt to point out the error of our ways, turn the truth of it into fiction and a few million Americans into Committees of Correspondence, planners of a new Declaration of Independence, this time from the global economy and the Powers that run it and get the lion’s share of the benefit out of it.

Nuclear Fusion: the elusive genie

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The recent announcement by two Italian researchers of a new method of attaining energy from nuclear fusion has brought back hopes of an easy and inexpensive way of generating energy. It is almost if the nuclear genie that Walt Disney had created in the 1950s is back with new promises of energy “too cheap to meter.” But what exactly do we expect from fusion? Why do we think it could solve our problems? Perhaps, these possibilities have been much overrated.

A comment on: “Public Health Concerns of Shale Gas Production”

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A recent Post-Carbon Institute paper, “Public Health Concerns of Shale Gas Production,” (contained in: Natural Gas Report Supplements: Public Health Agriculture & Transportation) is plagued by irony: the authors’ (Brian Schwartz and Cindy Parker) commitment to protect public health nonetheless defaults into placing business interests ahead of the public interest.

There is no wealth but life

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Finally, in a move that became inevitable once bogus methods of valuing nature were invented by economists with the very same mental framework that produced sub-prime lending and credit-default swaps, a price has been put on the natural beauty of our land. Our country has been degraded into an accounting unit; our beautiful land has been marketised.

From King Coal to carbon tax: A historical perspective on the energy and climate-change debate

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Current climate and energy policy debates in the United States rarely involve historians. If you search the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 synthesis report, you will not find the words history or historical. Even so, history pervades climate and energy policy discussions. History guides policy choices, inspires proposals for action, and structures institutional development.