Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The term “loosely connected systems” popped out during a talk with a friend about the Transition Town phenomenon. Curious, I traced the concept back to a paper by Karl E. Weick during the heydey of systems thinking i 1976. It appears to be a perfect organizational architecture for Transition
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Ecocentrism, far from being a side issue, needs to be “the non-negotiable heart” of good human society. It is practical because it prevents us from destroying ourselves, as we are currently doing. It is ethical because it prevents us from destroying everything else at the same time, as we are also currently doing. And it is in a whole different league from discussions about which particular technology we use to run our computers.
Dmitry Orlov’s “Reinventing collapse” is as actually a real downer, but Orlov’s intelligence, black humor and very Russian naturally cynical attitude – “to a Russian, ‘hard worker’ sounded a lot like ‘fool'” – makes the book a very pleasant reading experience. The book is full of resigned shrugs regarding the possibility of preventing the absolutely-certainly-coming societal collapse. We’re not talking about saving the world here – the best we can hope for is saving our own skins!
In the last few weeks, there has been an upswing in articles emanating from prestigious commentators, such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Fortune magazine, which attempt to debunk the notion that the world’s oil supplies may start to fall in the next few years.
I’m a homeschooler, but it isn’t only homeschoolers that struggle with the question of how you frame our ecological situation for children in ways that are honest, not too frightening, engaging, and age-appropriate.
Two real-world tests performed in the Netherlands and in the UK confirm our earlier analysis that small wind turbines are a fundamentally flawed technology. Their financial payback time is much longer than their life expectancy, and in urban areas, some poorly placed wind turbines will not even deliver as much energy as needed to operate them (let alone energy needed to produce them).
There is in Greer no sense that we are a singular people standing at a singular moment where history has opened up to provide us with breath-taking possibilities: “Human societies, like fence lizards, are organic systems, and they respond to changes in their environments in much the same way” (85); “history is an ecological phenomenon, governed by the same laws as other processes in nature” (241). Thus we aren’t going to be confronted with a fork in the road, the road less travelled made famous according to the predominant misinterpretation of the Frost poem, with a moment to act or not, as the opening lines of The Handbook suggests.
In May 2010, Deconstructing Dinner travelled to Vancouver Island where two international conferences on ethnobiology were being hosted. Ethnobiology examines the relationships between humans and their surrounding plants, animals and ecosystems. Today, more and more people are expressing an interest to develop closer relationships with the earth. This leaves much to be learned from the research of ethnobiologists, and in particular, from the symbiotic human-earth relationships that so many peoples around the world have long maintained. On this part III of the series, we listen to two presentations that share research into the relationships between indigenous peoples and marine life in what is now called British Columbia and Alaska.
-I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly
-A benign extravagance
-The water footprint: the hidden cost of our meat consumption
-How to Stem a Global Food Crisis? Store More Water
-Six Steps For Avoiding a Global Water Crisis
-Life and Death on the Colorado River
-Pakistan Flooding Because of Farms?
A week ago, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the UK newspaper the Telegraph demonstrated that he is a staunch advocate of Free Lunches in his Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium -“If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years…”
I’ve recently finished reading Dark Mountain issue 1, the first publication of the global artists’ collective of the same name, of which I am a member. It’s an astonishing collection (work of 37 different authors) of appreciation and reflection on our civilization’s beginning collapse, and I recommend it without hesitation to anyone who has reached the point of understanding that our unsustainable civilization culture can’t be saved, and is trying to cope with that terrible knowledge.
