Deep thought – Mar 24
Despoiled Nauru – poster child for “The Party’s Over”
What does climate change do to our heads?
Overshoot
Making the most of a global depression
The problem is not just financial mismanagement; there is a deeper instability: the global economy is based on a fundamentally unsustainable exploitation of depleting natural resources.
Do we have too much energy?
Our biggest challenge is not related to getting enough energy. Our biggest challenge is to understand our relationship with energy and to recast it so that we may live more harmoniously with the world around us.
Deep thought – Mar 11
How The Limits to Growth was demonized
Alex Steffen: Zero, now
Jeff Vail: Rhizome at the community level
A work of imagination
Our futures, personal and collective, depend as much on our imagination as the brute facts. If there is one thing that imagination makes possible, it is to believe that we are not necessarily limited by our past.
Deep thought – Mar 8
The New Green Deal of 2009
Can we survive?
Norman Church: The elephant in the room
Personal survival in a world gone mad
The elephant in the room
The UK has until recently been one of the most resilient economies in the world. Over the last 100 years, it has survived two world wars, staged spectacular economic recoveries, been blessed with energy resources, and evolved from manufacturer to the world into a service economy. But the position in which it now finds itself looks bleaker.
Peak oil – Feb 28
TOD: Olduvai revisited 2008
Abu Dhabi energy summit: ‘urgent race to find solutions to the coming energy crisis.’
Oil could reach $300, says Simmons in Mideast
Shell report mentions PO:
A National Dialogue on Energy Security
Review of Dmitry Orlov’s Re-inventing Collapse
The book opens with a “recipe” for collapse soup and notes that the United States has combined all of the ingredients. While Re-Inventing Collapse isn’t a fluffy, feel-good novel, it is tempered with delicious outbursts of Dmitry’s mischievous humor.
The cult of continuity
History is chock full of wars, the rise and fall of empires and of whole civilizations, ravaging plagues, breathtaking discoveries, vast migrations, world-changing inventions and cultural evolution. So, it is a puzzle why so much emphasis is now put on the supposed inevitable continuity of modern industrial life.
Peak oil and The Limits to Growth: two parallel stories
Marion King Hubbert and Jay Wright Forrester, working independently, set the basis for a new science. They were not the first to study the limits of the world’s resources. But they were the first to do that using mathematical models that could be extrapolated into the future.
Deep thought – Feb 10
Alex Steffen: Jim Hansen, Climate Code Red and the atmospheric singularity
Carolyn Baker: Holding vision alongside current reality
Dmitri Orlov: Money as metaphor
The (un?) sustainability of growth
