Culture & Behavior

Gardening on forest time

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Gardening in the forest requires a much different approach than vegetable or landscape gardening…Unlike a vegetable garden or a flower garden or a field of wheat or corn, a forest garden can provide all the necessities of a human economy, especially at the small scale of a homestead or village. History confirms this. But to reap these harvests requires an economy that is in most of its features the opposite of the economy that we have now and that organizes our world.

After the great quake, living with earth’s uncertainty

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In my layman’s cosmology, the anthropic principle says this: our existence implies that the universe must take the shape it does or we wouldn’t be here to perceive it. A universe with even minutely different physical laws wouldn’t include us (which isn’t to say that such universes don’t exist).

Some fight back: review of Joe Bageant’s “Rainbow Pie”

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Nobody writes about class in America and about America’s unacknowledged class war like Joe Bageant. Dubbed the “Sartre of Appalachia,” Joe writes about America’s largest, yet invisible to most, class — 60 million poor, undereducated white laborers. These are the folks who as Joe notes are on the other side of “the shower line” — those who pull off their sweaty work clothes and take their showers after their back-breaking day’s physical labor as opposed to those who shower and dress far more finely before heading off to work.

(Joe Bageant died March 26, 2011.)

Tainter’s law: where is the physics?

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Joseph Tainter’s interpretation of the cause of the collapse of civilisations is that social structures generate negative returns when they become too complex (see graph). We could call this relationship as “Tainter’s law”. But what is it exactly that generates this behavior? In this post, I’ll try to make a simple model that explains the law.

Plastics now and forever!

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We use more and more plastics every year. Much of it ends up in the oceans and eventually in the continent-sized North Pacific Subtropical Gyre – or one of the other four world ocean gyres. Plastics is over time broken down into smaller and smaller pieces that work their way further and further down the marine food chain. The long-term effects are unknown and there are similarities with our carefree use of fossil fuels 50 and 100 years ago.

Managing the 21st century’s sustainability crises (program 192)

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“ There are no real solutions, there are only responses.” So say the expert contributors in The Post Carbon Reader, pointing to society’s complex, interdependent systems squeezed by growing demand and declining resources. Co-editor Daniel Lerch tells us renewable energy will never be able to replace fossil fuels. Thus resilience — the capacity of a system to withstand disturbance while retaining its fundamental integrity — needs to replace sustainability as a guide to action.

How many zeroes are there in a trillion? On economics, neoliberalism and economic justice

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These are despairing times for ever increasing numbers of people around the globe who are fighting for jobs, food and shelter. The fundamental questions of economic justice are violently propelled back on the world’s agenda after a lost decade of ubiquitous security and terrorism concerns.