A Struggle of Paradigms

The failures of understanding that so often stymie communication in discussions of the future of industrial society unfold from the most basic models we use to make sense of our experience. Maybe it’s time to address those models and their implications directly, instead of assuming — incorrectly — that those who talk about the future are all talking about the same thing.

Blessing or a burden: population, reproduction and the demographic imagination

Whatever methods of restraint we eventually enact – and I think we will enact them, so let them be good ones, that lead to a justice and honorable society – we must begin from this – every child that we have, every birth is a gift, and if our gifts are fewer than in past years, we must only treasure them the more.

Malthus and vice

Malthus might have earned more respect for his Law of Population if he hadn’t proposed it just at the moment when human production first tapped into the coal seams and oil streams that fueled the industrial expansion. It is only today, when those resources have peaked, that we are revealed to be much more like the other animals than we thought…