Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
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.
