Amelia Earhart and the complexity problem
As I watched the recently released film about Amelia Earhart, I couldn’t help thinking about parallels between her journey and ours as an industrial culture.
Overshoot
Immigration and our ecological predicament
Much of the migration we are seeing today is from countries which export resources to wealthy nations. In other words, we are seeing mass migrations from resource exporting countries where carrying capacity is being systematically undermined toward countries that are importing that carrying capacity.
Dr. Albert Bartlett’s “Laws of Sustainability”
At the Denver ASPO conference, I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Albert Bartlett. Afterward, Dr. Bartlett e-mailed me some material he had written over the years. The “Laws of Sustainability” were included in this material. They are part of Al Bartlett’s contribution to the anthology The Future of Sustainability by Marco Keiner, published in 2006.
Path to a peace economy
I start with a basic truth. A persistent pattern of violence against people, community, and nature is inherent in the institutional structure of our existing economy. You don’t treat a cancer with Band-Aids, and we can’t resolve our current economic crisis with marginal regulatory adjustments. It is time to rethink and restructure.
Economic dominoes continue to fall
Passing the world oil peak has had, and doubtless will continue to have, relatively little impact on the long-term price of gasoline. The economic implications of getting through the first half of the Oil Age have been much more significant, a trend that seems likely to continue until the collapse is complete.
The Oceans are Coming
September 2009 the latest global temperature rise projections released by the Hadley Centre, part of the British Meteorological Office indicated an average rise of 4 degrees Celsius (that’s a balmy 7.2°F) by 2055 given a business as usual scenario. Some places will be a bit more stable, but the places that particularly matter – the ice caps, the methane-rich permafrosts in northern Canada and Siberia, and the Amazon rainforest – will be melting, off-gassing, and burning, respectively.
Deep thought – Oct 19
-The ecocidal moment
-“All will be done again as it was in far-off times”
-(Re)Imperializing Anthropology and Decolonizing Knowledge Production
-Do Increased Energy Costs Offer Opportunities for a New Agriculture?
Food & agriculture – Oct 15
-Tulare couple grows a garden by the foot
-Rooftop farming
-Richard Wiswall on the business of organic farming
-On World Food Day: Crunching the Numbers
-Aquacalypse Now
-Culinary Ecotourists Turn Wilderness Foraging into Dinner
Deep thought – Oct 13
-A Timely Reminder of the Real Limits to Growth
-Liberal Education, Stewardship, and the Cosmopolitan Temptation
-Decline of a tribe: and then there were five
-Last Call at Descartes’ Bar and Grill
-The Vindication of a Public Scholar
Resources and anthropocentrism
Evolution demands short-term thinking focused on individual survival. Most attempts to overcome our evolutionarily hardwired absorption with self are selected against. The Overman is dead, killed by a high-fat diet and unwillingness to exercise. Reflexively, we follow him into the grave.
The purpose of it all
It is John McPhee, that fabulous writer about the geology of the United States, who has given me the insight as to what the “true” purpose of humankind is….to alter the landscape and the atmosphere to such a degree that we bring about wholly new conditions on Earth.
Our evanescent culture and the awesome duty of librarians
How secure is our civilization’s accumulated knowledge? It is a question that, in a fundamental sense, transcends many life-and-death concerns (threats of sickness, natural disaster, or military invasion) that prompt us collectively to spend fortunes on insurance, health care, and weaponry.
