Barath Raghavan

In modern economic thought, efficiency is paramount. The goal of economic systems, and entities within those systems, is to maximize efficiency.

Last year I did an analysis to try to understand whether it’s possible to feed the world sustainably. Today I’d like to try to understand what happens to countries as they must rely upon the sun for energy (and, indirectly, wealth).

The more I learn about it, the more Nature looks like a Rube Goldberg machine: energy and materials flow through convoluted paths to accomplish something seemingly simple.

There are, and have been for a few decades now, competing narratives about food, hunger, and population.

Many ancient societies were ruled by claims of divine right; royal proclamations were not falsifiable…But we don’t have to look to the distant past to see what it looks like for dogma to trump reason.

A few months back I started exploring the idea of terraforming. In this post I’d like to consider two important questions about it. First, what is terraforming, anyway? And second, why should we do it? Oddly enough, it seems to me that the second question is easier to answer than the first because even with a vague sense of what terraforming entails, it seems clear that there are many degraded ecosystems around us in the industrialized world today, ecosystems that could use what is conventionally termed “restoration”. (I hesitate to use the term “restoration” as most ecosystems will never be returned to what they once were before being overtaken by human interests, and since my goal isn’t to live apart from nature — there are way too many people on the planet for that — but rather to live among nature and with nature better than we have in the past.)