By Asher Miller, Rob Dietz, Jason Bradford, Richard Heinberg
The “maximum power principle” may sound like the doctrine of an evil supervillain, but it actually applies to all living creatures. The principle states that biological systems organize to increase power whenever constraints allow.
By Vicki Robin, Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
Richard Heinberg is an author, Senior Fellow-in-Residence of the Post Carbon Institute, and widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost educators on the need to transition society off fossil fuels. He addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
If we modern humans are, in effect, addicted to power, perhaps we need something like a collective twelve-step program.
By Marissa Mommaerts, Transition US
Though the western-colonial orientation to power is unhealthy, power in itself is not inherently “bad.” In fact, we need to understand and utilize power in a healthy way in order to transform our communities and our world.
By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
From laws to police and prisons, to armies and weaponry, to fame and high political office, to paychecks and taxes, to debt and credit, to advertising and public relations, to propaganda, to household and workplace gender dynamics, to organizational chains of command, to extremes of wealth and poverty, people have found endless ways of modifying one another’s behavior to suit their wants and needs.
By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
It’s high time we discussed power more honestly, compassionately, and intelligently. But first we have to understand what we’re talking about.
By Rupert Read, Resilience.org
I started to re-assess my assumption about who this letter would be directed to. When I looked up the dictionary definition - “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events” – and I recalled the way the world has changed since 2018, it became clearer where the power really is. With us, the people.
By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
We humans are aggregating more power, and doing so more unequally across society, than in any previous period in history. Power is good; without it, we would be powerless. But it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and that’s an apt way of describing the human predicament in the early 21st century.
By Jason Hickel, Jason Hickel blog
One of the main reasons we are concerned about inequality in the first place is that it allows rich people to exercise power over the lives of the poor.
By Laurie Macfarlane, Open Democracy
How the fruits of wealth creation should be divided between capital, land and labour has been subject of considerable debate throughout history. In 1817, the economist David Ricardo described this as “the principal problem in political economy”.
By Vera Bradova, Leaving Babylon
When a group outdominates the current dominators, they become the new dominators.
By Energy Crunch staff, New Economics Foundation
Should we be worried about the threat of a cold dark winter?