Culture & Behavior

Work and ecology: Less is more

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Work, for an individual or a society, begins with the effort required to modify or eradicate the ecology that’s there and replace it with something else. For most of history, this is in fact exactly what was meant by the word work. Even more specifically: in most places it meant cutting down forests and then hoeing, plowing, planting, weeding, and harvesting fields. In another word, farming. That was the first work and it is still the one that is prior to all others.

Worlds collide in a luxury suite

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Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we’ve just been given? The extraordinarily powerful head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a global organization that has created mass poverty and economic injustice, allegedly assaulted a hotel maid, an immigrant from Africa, in a hotel’s luxury suite in New York City. Worlds have collided. In an earlier era, her word would have been worthless against his and she might not have filed charges, or the police might not have followed through and yanked Dominique Strauss-Kahn off the plane to Paris at the last moment. But she did, and they did, and now he’s in custody, and the economy of Europe has been dealt a blow, and French politics have been upended, and that nation is reeling and soul-searching.

Failure as prelude to success, in climate change policy and other areas

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“Evolution is cleverer than you are,” said biochemist Leslie Orgel, and author Tim Harford takes the theme and runs with it in his book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. The best ideas come not from smart individuals, he argues, but by trying out many different ideas and culling out the less successful ones. Continuing the theme of learning from failure, Kurt Cobb talks about his 2009 article, “We Must Make a Lot of Mistakes Quickly,” which was written about the urgent task of drastically upgrading energy efficiency in buildings but applies to many other areas. He discusses tradeable energy quotas, an alternative to a carbon tax or cap that could make the US economy more globally competitive while leveling out inequalities in wealth and income.

The case for a disorderly energy descent

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The energy descent from peak oil production imposes decades of contraction in the global economy. An orderly contraction, particularly in the US, is not likely for a number of reasons. The decline of the oil civilization is a phenomenon and spectacle of such complexity that understanding it requires a systems perspective. This summary of the case for a disorderly contraction and its core drivers demonstrates the capacity of systems tools to show the interlocking feedback structure that shapes how this momentous change plays out over time.

‘The Ecological Rift’: a radical response to capitalism’s war on the planet (book review)

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John Bellamy Foster’s book focuses on a sustained critique of the mainstream ecological theories, solutions and proposals that do not address the root cause of the dilemma, and that do not deeply investigate why the ecological crisis has reached such dire proportions. A big issue for those concerned with climate change and other environmental ills is to get a better understanding of the capitalist system, who benefits most from it and how it works to undermine stable ecosystems.

The Stockholm Memorandum: tipping the scales towards sustainability

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The jury of Nobel Laureates concluded that humans are now the most significant driver of global change, and that our collective actions could have abrupt and irreversible consequences for human communities and ecological systems. It recommends a suite of urgent and far-reaching actions for decision makers and societies to become active stewards of the planet for future generations

Teaching Happiness: The Prime Minister of Bhutan Takes on Education

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GNH (Gross National Happiness) attempts to balance economic development, environmental conservation, good governance, and cultural promotion. Bhutan’s first prime minister, Lyonchoen Jigme Y. Thinley, is now working to radically transform Bhutan’s national education system to reflect GNH values, which he defines as “sacredness, reverence, honour, and respect.”

Living buildings, living economies, and a living future

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At a recent conference, I saw the potential for blending two of the most exciting emerging movements of our time—the living building and the living economies movements. A vision of the combination of these two movements energized me with renewed hope that we humans can end our isolation from one another and from nature—that we can move forward to achieve a prosperous, secure, and creative human future for all.

Preserving food to reduce waste

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The Global North and South both waste similar portions of the food they produce, but there is a significant difference between them – the majority of the wastage in the global south comes from lack of ability to preserve food – no refrigeration, no easy way to preserve it on a large scale, and limited market access or long times from harvest to market…In the Global North, the picture is different. We do lose food at harvest, but the majority of all food loss is household and market – supermarkets throwing out lightly dinged cans and crates of produce, households buying food and burying it in the back of their refrigerators – this is the picture of food waste in the Global North.

The Thermodynamics of an Intelligent Living Universe

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Not only do we “seem to be a verb”, but more precisely we are transitive verbs whose job it is to maintain bounded order in order to export chaos into the environment by the alchemical transmutation of energy “gold” into the “dross” of dissipated heat. This may seem to be an inadequate job description for such “highly evolved” creatures as Homo Sapiens Sapiens, one step below the angels (our hubris has always tripped us up). But there is a bit more to the job description than that. Unfortunately, we seem to have misread it.