By Brian Tokar, Local Futures
Since the heyday of technological determinism in the 1960s, many authors have written eloquently about how developments in technology are more typically the outcome of particular social and economic arrangements.
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
The best response to this constellation of emergencies is to actively shrink the technosphere and radically reduce economic growth and energy spending. Our political class can’t imagine such a conversation.
By Asher Miller, Rob Dietz, Jason Bradford, Resilience.org
If all goes well, by the end of this episode, you’ll feel inspired to shut down your electronic devices, stow your earbuds, and go outside to scan the skies, dig in the dirt, watch the wildlife, or find some other healthy way to pay attention to the natural world.
By Tom Murphy, Do the Math
No, life has not yet been found on Mars, but imagine waking up to that headline. How would you react? What would this stir for you?
By Lynne Davis, Agroecology Now!
Civilisations have tried to dominate chaos with order for centuries, in a false dichotomy of biblical proportions. Greater diversity wants to exist. Perhaps our role is not to impose order, but to steward complexity.
By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
Today our situation calls to mind the myth of Icarus as much as that of Prometheus. When will the cycle end? Will it be when we finally get the technology right? Or when nature says, ‘Enough’?
By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
What if we actually planned to reduce energy usage significantly while revamping the economy to promote happiness and well-being? Then it would be far easier to replace our remaining energy usage with renewable sources.
By Alf Hornborg, Uneven Earth
A better way to define technology is to acknowledge that it is a global social phenomenon and a moral and political question rather than simply one of engineering.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
Far from saving the whales, it was oil that nearly obliterated them, and may yet still do so. The real lessons to be drawn from the history of whaling are more interesting and more complex than the oil salvation narrative.
By Brian Miller, Winged Elm Farm blog
That we have begun to confuse understanding with outsourced expertise is not a surprise. The apps are merely the latest indicator of our disconnect from the natural world.
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
So I have decided to do something counterintuitive, and write a blog that I really hope you won’t read, because its intention is that that you might instead use the time you would have spent reading it to close your laptop screen and go and do something else instead.
By Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian blog
Human beings are at their worst when they are consumers, locked into the miserable pursuit of satisfaction through the isolation of individual consumption – particularly when that shopping and consuming is done online (and when, as with Instagram, we learn to turn ourselves into commodities). T