Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The Transition Movement in the ‘West’ (and therefore North) has for the most part been unable to conceptualise a response to the human development and social justice needs of the South. Much of this lack has to do with the very formidable inertness which western societies inherited from the transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and the apparently incontrovertible ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘growth.’
What if, a friend of mine proposed, we are not approaching a point that will tip us into a grand ecological catastrophe which we are called upon to prevent? What if we are in the middle of that catastrophe and it began some time ago?
In Ray Kurzweil’s future technological progress will proceed at a rate that represents the end of the human era and the beginning of one shared by humans and machines joined together and producing unimaginably rapid technological change. He and others refer to this point of transition as the technological singularity. This change, he believes, will enable humanity to overcome all of its most pressing problems: disease, hunger, climate change, resource scarcity, and, of course, death.
What makes a mild-mannered biology professor call for a planned collapse of the economy? Canadian scientist Bill Rees would know. He was an inventor of the ecological footprint concept, and has been measuring our impact on the planet for decades. Now he’s worried about survival. Ours and all living systems.
Following the failure of the latest efforts to plug the gushing leak from BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, and amid warnings that oil could continue to flow for another two months or more, perhaps it’s a good time to step back a moment mentally and look at the bigger picture—the context of our human history of resource extraction—to see how current events reveal deeper trends that will have even greater and longer-lasting significance.
Cities in Asia are hubs of production, innovation and wealth, funnelling into themselves immense resources, water, energy, food, drawing in from nearby districts and far-off provinces families and entire communities.
We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it. …. This age of collapse – which is already beginning – could also offer a new start, if we are careful in our choices.
[Manifesto of a new group of writers, artists and thinkers in the UK]
The unraveling of industrial society, like the declines and falls of other civilizations in the past, involves sweeping changes to the most basic assumptions of economics, and these have practical implications here and now. One of these unfolds from the role of money in contemporary economies — a role that will face dramatic changes in the years ahead of us.
We are appoaching all the wrong limits at blowout speed. The choices are do nothing (crash) or “degrowth” (planned radical contraction). Speeches from 1st North American Degrowth Conference.
South Asians are seeing more work on the ground and hearing more policy announcements about urban development than ever before. For many who live in and around towns and cities in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India (where South Asia’s biggest cities lie) this could be a good thing. The trouble is: national governments and planning authorities in Dhaka, Islamabad and New Delhi are tending more and more to follow a single ideology – economic growth will drive down poverty – and a primary route to that misplaced objective, which is greater urbanisation.
There is a horrible paper in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which looks at how the limits of human physiology interact with upper-range global warming scenarios. The bottom line conclusion is that there is a small – of order 5% – risk of global warming creating a situation in which a large fraction of the planet was uninhabitable (in the sense that if you were outside for an extended period during the hottest days of the year, even in the shade with wet clothing, you would die).
The conventional wisdom in energy-and-environment circles is that China’s economy, which is growing at a rate of eight percent or more per year, is mostly coal powered today and will continue to be so for decades to come…Most of this conventional wisdom is correct, but some of it is plain wrong—so wrong, in fact, that environment-, economic-, and energy-policy wonks are constructing scenarios for the future of U.S. and world energy, and for the global economy, that bear little or no resemblance to the reality that is unfolding.
