Deep thought – Mar 11
How The Limits to Growth was demonized
Alex Steffen: Zero, now
Jeff Vail: Rhizome at the community level
Overshoot
A work of imagination
Our futures, personal and collective, depend as much on our imagination as the brute facts. If there is one thing that imagination makes possible, it is to believe that we are not necessarily limited by our past.
The elephant in the room
The UK has until recently been one of the most resilient economies in the world. Over the last 100 years, it has survived two world wars, staged spectacular economic recoveries, been blessed with energy resources, and evolved from manufacturer to the world into a service economy. But the position in which it now finds itself looks bleaker.
Deep thought – Mar 8
The New Green Deal of 2009
Can we survive?
Norman Church: The elephant in the room
Personal survival in a world gone mad
Peak oil – Feb 28
TOD: Olduvai revisited 2008
Abu Dhabi energy summit: ‘urgent race to find solutions to the coming energy crisis.’
Oil could reach $300, says Simmons in Mideast
Shell report mentions PO:
A National Dialogue on Energy Security
Review of Dmitry Orlov’s Re-inventing Collapse
The book opens with a “recipe” for collapse soup and notes that the United States has combined all of the ingredients. While Re-Inventing Collapse isn’t a fluffy, feel-good novel, it is tempered with delicious outbursts of Dmitry’s mischievous humor.
The cult of continuity
History is chock full of wars, the rise and fall of empires and of whole civilizations, ravaging plagues, breathtaking discoveries, vast migrations, world-changing inventions and cultural evolution. So, it is a puzzle why so much emphasis is now put on the supposed inevitable continuity of modern industrial life.
Peak oil and The Limits to Growth: two parallel stories
Marion King Hubbert and Jay Wright Forrester, working independently, set the basis for a new science. They were not the first to study the limits of the world’s resources. But they were the first to do that using mathematical models that could be extrapolated into the future.
Deep thought – Feb 10
Alex Steffen: Jim Hansen, Climate Code Red and the atmospheric singularity
Carolyn Baker: Holding vision alongside current reality
Dmitri Orlov: Money as metaphor
The (un?) sustainability of growth
Deep thought – Feb 7
Hooked on growth: our misguided quest for prosperity
Rolf Nordstrom discusses depletion scenarios
Feeding people
The big picture: climate chaos (Jamais Cascio)
The organic apocalypse
Deep thought – Feb 1
Jamais Cascio: The big picture
Sharon Astyk on collapse: Let her go down
Carolyn Baker reviews William Kotke’s The Final Empire
The limits to scenario planning
I was involved in one of those periodic discussions that spring up about The Limits To Growth recently and found myself wondering, not for the first time, if other people have read a completely different version of the book to the one I possess.