Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The tin production story is out there is in plain sight, but only those directly involved in supplying the tin ore, refining it or consuming tin metal are paying any attention. Bloomberg’s Bear Market in Tin Ending as Shortages Mean PT Timah’s Profit Advances 55% explains what’s going on now, and what’s been going on for years now…
Phosphate has been essential to feeding the world since the Green Revolution, but its excessive use as a fertilizer has led to widespread pollution and eutrophication. Now, many of the world’s remaining reserves are starting to be depleted.
Farmer-philosopher Frederick L. Kirschenmann’s recently published collection of essays, Cultivating an Ecological Conscience, with its clear concern for the part petroleum plays in modern agriculture, offers significant common ground for farmers and carbon-footprint conscious, twenty-first century environmentalists. This alone would make Kirschenmann’s book important, but it also does such a thorough job of describing the current state of agriculture, it would be difficult to find a more comprehensive compilation of essays on the subject.
Writing this book has been a fascinating work. Re-examining the story of “The Limits to Growth” opens up a whole new world that urban legends and propaganda had tried to bury under a layer of lies and misinterpretations. We all have heard of the “mistakes” that the authors of LTG, or their sponsors, the Club of Rome, are said to have made. But LTG was not “wrong”: nowhere in the 1972 book you find the mistakes that are commonly attributed to it.
Very few soils have a perfect balance of minerals. As a result, their fertility is limited and the crops grown on them cannot provide all the nutrients people need. As people can get food from elsewhere at present, these local deficiencies do not matter too much. However, if the option of filling one’s plate from all over the world disappears, human health will likely decline unless the missing minerals are applied over the next few years.
Neither an economist nor a formally trained scholar, Dmitry Orlov is perhaps best described in his own words, as “more of an eyewitness” to the phenomenon on which he writes. He’s a Russian émigré who saw the Soviet Union fall firsthand and has been drawing on this experience in warning of the coming U.S. collapse. He came to fame five years ago with a smash-hit Internet article that won him a loyal following and a subsequent book deal. The book, Reinventing Collapse, is now in its second edition—and regardless of how well it holds up to scholarly scrutiny, it’s admirable in its wit and prodigious street smarts.
As nations compete for currency advantages, they are also eyeing the world’s diminishing resources—fossil fuels, minerals, agricultural land, and water. Resource wars have been fought since the dawn of history, but today the competition is entering a new phase. From Richard Heinberg’s new book ‘The End of Growth’.
Elites in both corporations and government are often quite good at running systems they create, and bad at looking beyond these systems at larger social effects.
Julian Cribb, Principal of Julian Cribb and Associates presentation on what are the future challenges to our food system at the National Sustainable Food Summit in Melbourne Australia on 5-6 April, 2011.
User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization shows how our major crises share the same root causes and thus can be solved only by taking into account their complex interactions. Ahmed acknowledges that in this age of specialization it’s understandable for issues like climate change and oil depletion to be studied and discussed separately—indeed, he observes that this mode of inquiry into the causes of specific phenomena has enabled many of our greatest scientific advances. But it’s also, he argues, beginning to seem like an increasingly antiquated method, preventing experts from seeing the whole picture and the public from receiving consistent information.
So given the International Panel on Climate Change’s warnings about anthropogenic global warming and a well-documented expanding drought, residents of the West are not just living on borrowed water, they’re also living on borrowed time.
Humans have an innate need for status and for novelty in their lives. Unfortunately, the modern world has adopted very energy- and resource-intensive ways of meeting those needs. Other ways are going to have to be found as part of the move to a more sustainable world.
