Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In a piece in USA Today Bjørn Lomborg, Danish author of the much criticized book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, recycles claims that “many key environmental measures” are getting better. As you sift through the piece, you will see that his “key environmental measures” relate almost exclusively to the health and well-being of humans. And, this is what he uses to build a three-fold strategy to deceive the public.
Mention superstitions, and most people nowadays think that you’re talking about planting by the signs or leaving a dish of milk on the back step for the fairies. A superstition, though, is simply an observance that has become detached from its meaning — and by that measure, the most widespread and dangerous superstitions these days are those practiced by economists and blindly accepted by politicians.
There is at least one important class of threats where we might expect modern civilization to be much more resilient than past civilizations. Specifically, modern civilization operates at far higher levels of economic surplus than past civilizations, and this means that it is in a position to devote far higher levels of economic resources on solving certain kinds of problems.
If you are a resident of the East Coast of the United States or of Western Europe, when did you last attend a shad bake, eat an eel, or watch Atlantic salmon vault a waterfall? Community shad bakes once celebrated the return of American shad to rivers as a marker of spring. Recently though, a dearth of shad led to a “shadless shad bake” on the Hudson — a river that in its glory days supplied more than four million pounds of shad in one season.
One thing that has always intrigued me about elephants is how the people who drive them manage to control the beast without a harness. There have to be ways, since it can be done, but it cannot be simple. So elephant driving may be seen as as a metaphor for controlling complex systems. What you’ll find below is a talk that I gave on this subject at a recent meeting in Italy. It is not a transcription, but a version written from memory that tries to maintain the style and the sense of what I said.
It’s as indicative as it is ironic that the most popular ideas for a response to the impact of resource depletion on our gargantuan and increasingly unstable technologies involve building even more gargantuan and unstable technologies
A faceoff between two cultural icons, Rosie the Riveter and HAL 9000, points toward another approach.
A group of social and natural scientists and scholars in the humanities is starting the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB, pronounced “mob”). The admittedly ambitious aim is to change human behavior to avoid a collapse of global civilization.
In Africa and elsewhere, burgeoning population growth threatens to overwhelm already over-stretched food supply systems. But the next agricultural revolution needs to get local — and must start to see rising populations as potentially part of the solution.
During the pre-recession years of the 21st century, we experienced wide-ranging nonrenewable natural resource (NNR) scarcity on a global scale for the first time. Supplies associated with an overwhelming majority of the global energy resources, metals, and minerals that enable our industrialized way of life failed to keep pace with increasing global demand during the 2000-2008 period, resulting in global NNR supply shortfalls.
Review of two recent additions to the post-petroleum literary canon:
– Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson
– Crossing the Blue by Holly Jean Buck.
How should we think about the conundrum of mounting threats to the health of the public with declining resources to meet these threats?
I came back to my computer to find that many of my fellow Sciblings have recently taken up issues of resource depletion from various interesting perspectives – doing my work for me, I guess ;-). It isn’t exactly news to most of us that we’ve been using just about every resource on the planet far too casually, but it is interesting to see them tied together.
