Culture & Behavior

If I were a billionaire…

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If I were a billionaire, I wouldn’t believe what I’m about to write. Firstly, because my training, and especially my experience of getting richer in a growth based economy would have taught me that these ‘perfect storms’ when resource/financial bottlenecks supposedly loomed, historically worked out to be opportunities that spiked my digital wealth and incremental social power. Secondly, if I were a billionaire I wouldn’t believe what I’m about to write because all my peers, advisors and friends would tell me that it’s caca. And lastly I wouldn’t believe what I’m about to write as the implications would be too threatening, at least on the surface, to comprehend let alone integrate into my world view. All the same, if I were a billionaire, based on my understanding of our particular juncture of history, likely on the verge of transitioning away from marker claims back to real capital, here is what I would do….

Thinking Thanksgiving I: Turkey in the straw

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The centerpiece of any homegrown Thanksgiving meal, assuming you are not a vegetarian, is inevitably the homegrown turkey. And there are a lot of good reasons to get a local turkey or raise your own – there’s the flavor which is richer and deeper, an essence of turkey thing, there’s the fact that you know what went into it. And there’s the fact that by raising older breeds of turkeys, you actually preserve their future by eating them – honestly, there is no retirement home for elderly turkeys, and no one keeps them as pets. The future of the Blue Slate and the Standard Bronze depends heavily on their future as meat animals – and the extinction of a breed of livestock is a tragedy.

A strategy to reverse overshoot and achieve sustainable well-being

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In order for humankind to resolve its ecological predicament, capitalism must be historically superseded. People who are aware of the system’s growth compulsion and the environmental destruction that results may well suspect that this statement is true. But carrying this train of thought forward is difficult. Why? Because currently the only well-known model for moving beyond capitalism is that of the socialist tradition. This model, however, arose in the context of class struggles rather than overshoot, and in my view it incorporates several grave errors. I therefore believe that an alternative model for the post-capitalist transition must be developed.

G20 pushes business as usual, small farmers demand system change

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The G20’s agenda is driven by corporate capital as evidenced by the G20 Seoul Business Summit where around 120 top global CEO’s met with G20 leaders to discuss corporate priorities. In contrast, civil society and social movement representatives voicing people’s demands and priorities were not allowed into Korea. The Korean government effectively prevented the democratic participation of civil society and social movement representatives from abroad by denying visas and by forcibly deporting others.

Re-envisioning and transforming the built environment

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The leap from seeing the water tower as a background object, a simple industrial structure, to imagining its possibilities gets at the question of transformation, of seeing with new eyes. We have the resources, the technologies, the skills, and the vision to create a greener world, so why haven’t we succeeded? What is missing in our applied knowledge? How can we shift our thinking so that moments like this will occur as a matter of course?

Straight Talk with James Howard Kunstler: “The world is going to get rounder and bigger again”

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The world is going to get rounder and bigger again. We’ll discover — surprise! — that the global economy was a set of transient economic relations that obtained only because of a half century of cheap energy and relative peace between the big nations.

Enough is enough

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I have a running dialogue with my steady state friends and colleagues. The subject is best described with the metaphor of a horse and cart. I say, if we want to succeed in replacing the outdated goal of economic growth with a steady state economy, we have to put the horse before the cart. The horse is the public opinion and political will needed for this change. Without this horse, I say, we have little hope of pulling a cart of steady state policies into the economic policy arena.

A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save it – A review of Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed’s latest book

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Anyone who has spent much time discussing peak oil, the collapse of civilizations, climate change or modern security issues eventually confronts the issue of historical antecedents. The [Insert choice of vanished civilization here] collapsed because of X, and that’s the same thing that is happening now . . . . For those who have delved more deeply into such lines of argument, one thing becomes abundantly clear: historical civilizations did not collapse for a single reason. Fast-forward to present, and there is no shortage of commentary forecasting crisis or collapse of our modern civilization. But these analysts have failed to advance a comprehensive systems-theory approach to our civilization’s troubles. Enter Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed.

Joining In The Dance

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Despite the much-ballyhooed claim that ours is an “information society,” the industrial world is remarkably careless with the information available to it — and especially with that provided by nonhuman Nature. The simple act of saving the seeds from one’s own garden plants offers a way to tap into Nature’s information economy, and participate in a dance of communication that offers options more anthropocentric conversations too often leave out.