By Richard Heinberg, Resilience
My goal isn’t to come up with new solutions to humanity’s converging crises—because until we have sufficient wisdom, we won’t recognize real solutions, even if they already exist. First wisdom, then action.
By Richard Heinberg, Melody Travers, Rob Dietz, Resilience.org
We can still choose our path forward, we can still sacrifice for what we value. But to do so we must recognize the power we possess, build on it in community with others, and acknowledge the ways in which we wield it.
By Richard Heinberg, Melody Travers, Rob Dietz, Resilience.org
But what if our voracious appetite is less to blame than the types of things that hunger has been directed toward? Could we direct our attention instead toward beauty, tenderness, and collective action?
By Richard Heinberg, Melody Travers, Rob Dietz, Resilence.org
Improve your energy literacy with stories about pushing motor vehicles, enduring blackouts, and growing $10 tomatoes, and take a tour of history that visits ancient China, industrializing Britain, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and the Green Revolution.
By Richard Heinberg, Melody Travers, Rob Dietz, Resilience.org
As people learned to wield fire, deploy an array of tools, and coordinate actions through increasingly descriptive language, they became more capable of concentrating power.
By Richard Heinberg, Melody Travers, Rob Dietz, Jason Bradford
To understand humanity's relationship with energy and power, and to get a handle on why we're experiencing a polycrisis of climate change, social inequality, and loss of biodiversity, you have to go back to the beginning – all the way back to the origins of life on Earth.
By Richard Heinberg, Melody Travers, Rob Dietz, Resilience.org
If we want to address this problem and reduce the chances of a chaotic collapse of society, we will have to confront our overuse and abuse of power.
By Richard Heinberg, New Society Publishers
Power is essential; without it, we would be literally powerless. But one can have too much of a good thing. How much power is enough? How much is too much?
By Richard Heinberg, New Society Publishers
With fossil fuels and electrification, and thus greater mobility and instant communications, we have indeed become a human “hive.”
By Richard Heinberg, New Society Publishers
Whether in family, school, work, or politics, we’re all immersed in the pathologies of power. If we’re lucky, we learn to navigate these waters without being harmed irreparably, and without harming others. Many are not so fortunate.
By Richard Heinberg, New Society Publishers
The power to communicate aesthetic pleasure and thereby to feel profound affinity with other people, including individuals of other species, propel human culture forward in ways that are hard to measure, but that are impossible to ignore. These are powers that provide hope for our future.
By Richard Heinberg, New Society Publishers
There are probably downsides to humans’ specialized powers (extreme intelligence, a highly developed ability to communicate, and proficient tool use). We humans tend to emphasize the advantages of these traits, but it’s always important to look for hidden costs.