Culture & Behavior

Review: A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

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User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization shows how our major crises share the same root causes and thus can be solved only by taking into account their complex interactions. Ahmed acknowledges that in this age of specialization it’s understandable for issues like climate change and oil depletion to be studied and discussed separately—indeed, he observes that this mode of inquiry into the causes of specific phenomena has enabled many of our greatest scientific advances. But it’s also, he argues, beginning to seem like an increasingly antiquated method, preventing experts from seeing the whole picture and the public from receiving consistent information.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

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And that means you have to try adapting in place, as though you really needed to. Try for a week to give up the car. Try for a weekend to turn off the breakers and the gas and live without fossil fuels. Set a limit on your kilowatt hours or you consumption of gasoline for the month, and stick to it. Don’t make it an easy one – push your limits. Cut your budget to the bone and then cut some more, as though you had no choice – and see how you do. Even your mistakes will teach you something about what you need.

Transition Themes Week #5 – High Speed Broadband Connection

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A bio-diverse culture needs us to be diverse, which is to say we need to be intrinsically ourselves – rooted in place and within our skills – and working as part of the whole. Coming from a broad frequency band, rather from a narrow, seperated point of view. This is a new way of working in the world: one that combines a modern city intelligence with an ancestral knowledge of the land.

Entropy, peak oil, and Stoic philosophy

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Marcus Aurelius didn’t know about entropy, but he had very clear how the universe is in continuous flow. Things change and this is the only unchangeable truth. I think this is our destiny and what we have to do. Likely, we won’t be able to save the world we know. Probably, we won’t be able to avoid immense human suffering for the years to come. Yet, we must do our best to try and – who knows – what we’ll be able to do might make a difference. I think this is the lesson that Marcus is telling to us, even from a gulf of time that spans almost two millennia.

Harvesting Utah’s urban winds

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Utah’s first commercial wind power project, located in the city of Spanish Fork, faced stiff opposition at every turn. Developers had to deal with changing and inconsistent city and state policies, siting and pricing roadblocks, a fickle investor, and resistance from nearby residents—virtually all at the same time. The success story in Spanish Fork provides some lessons for how to get urban communities to accept and encourage local wind energy development.