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The progress of this storm: Nature and society in a warming world

February 21, 2018

The progress of this storm: Nature and society in a warming world

Andreas Malm’s powerful critique of current environmental philosophies puts historical materialism and cutting-edge science at the center of a call for militant action

Andreas Malm
THE PROGRESS OF THIS STORM
Nature and society in a warming world
Verso Books, 2018

reviewed by Ian Angus

Anyone who reads contemporary green literature has seen books with titles like The End of Nature, and statements such as these:

  • “There is no such thing as nature.”[1]
  • “Nature is nothing if it is not social.”[2]
  • “Many of us no longer believe in a Nature that is independent of the Anthropos.”[3]
  • “There is nothing in our environment that we have not, in some sense or other, had a hand in producing.”[4]
  • “In every respect the world we inhabit will henceforth be the world we have made.”[5]
  • “The contrast between what is nature and what is not no longer makes any sense.”[6]

In contrast to environmentalists who want to protect nature, in some circles it has become common, even fashionable, to assert that nature no longer exists, that humans have taken over and it is impossible to distinguish between what is natural and what is social. The proponents of such views aren’t just saying that humans are part of the natural world; rather they claim that nature and society literally cannot be separated, in theory or in practice. “For better or worse,” writes Bruno Latour, “we have entered into a postnatural world.”[7]

Proponents of this viewpoint fall into three camps. Ecomodernists see the end of nature as cause for celebration. We should expand and deepen the process, to free humanity from dependence on nature and use whatever of it remains for our benefit. Others mourn the loss of nature but see no way out.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Seneca Effect: a Book Review by Jantje Hannover

January 12, 2018

The Seneca Effect: a Book Review by Jantje Hannover

This is a review of the German edition of “The Seneca Effect” written by Jantie Hannover for the site of the radio station “Deutschelandfunk.” Very well done by someone who really read the book. Here I report a translation made mainly using “Google Translate,” and also some intervention on my part. Not a very good English, but at least understandable (U.B.)

Collapsing Systems

What empires and avalanches have in common

The Italian chemistry professor Ugo Bardi has written a book about the Seneca effect. He refers to the abrupt collapse of systems: observed in avalanches and balloons, but also in financial market bubbles and powerful empires.
By Jantje Hannover

When a balloon bursts or an avalanche takes place, it is a network structure that suddenly reorganizes. (image stock & people / Michael Nolan and Oekom Verlag)

Net, nodes, and collapses

“It would be a consolation to our weak souls and our works, if all things would slowly pass away as they arise, but as it happens, growth is slow, while the road to ruin is fast.”

This is what the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca said about 2,000 years ago. And as if Seneca had wanted to prove this sentence, in the course of his life he too had become more and more wealthy and influential, even rising up to become advisor to Emperor Nero. Until he fell out of favor and was eventually suspected of being part of a plot against the Emperor. Then, Nero ordered him to commit suicide.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Book Review: Food Scarcity. Unavoidable by 2100?

December 27, 2017

Book Review: Food Scarcity. Unavoidable by 2100?

This is an excerpt from the review by Ugo Bardi published on the “Journal of Population and Sustainability“

Scientific studies that examine the food supply and its correlation to human population have a long tradition that goes back to Thomas Malthus and his “An Essay on the Future of Population“ of 1798. From then on, the field has remained politically charged. Still today, Malthus is often dismissed as a doomsday prophet whose apocalyptic predictions turned out to be wrong. But Malthus lacked the modern concept of “overshoot and collapse” and he never predicted the kind of population crashes that we associate to modern famines.

Another study often accused of having been overly catastrophistic in terms of the future of the human population is the report to the Club of Rome titled “The Limits to Growth”, published in its first version in 1972. This is also a misinterpretation, since none of the several scenarios reported in 1972 foresaw a population decline before entering the second half of the 21st century.

In analogy with the first report to the Club of Rome, the recent book by Weiler and Demuynck, “Food Scarcity” approaches an old problem with a new methodology. While “The Limits to Growth” was one of the first studies to apply system dynamics to the study of the economy, “Food Scarcity” is among the first studies that applies the modern network theory to the world’s food system. The resulting book, “Food Scarcity,” is an ambitious attempt to pack an enormous amount of material into just 150 pages. It starts with a review of the situation of the world’s food supply with extensive data on the different climate systems, cultivation technologies, geographical conditions, and more.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

THE WORLD AFTER CHEAP OIL

February 6, 2015

Rauli Partanen, Harri Paloheimo, and Heikki Waris

Reviewed by Frank Kaminski

Toward the end of this book, its authors make an astute, if self-deprecating, observation about its potential merits. They’ve been discussing how innate human biases cause us to make cognitive errors when trying to make sense of world crises. They’ve described in particular the tendency of scientifically knowledgeable people to become less convinced about climate change the more evidence they encounter for it, due to confirmation bias. For the authors, this fact “raises the question of how meaningful writing this book has actually been.” Won’t skeptical readers simply cherry-pick the data that supports their views and reject the rest? While it is, of course, correct that some readers will do this, there’s no question that writing the book has been meaningful. Indeed, in this era of unprecedented challenge, few things could be more meaningful than accurate knowledge such as this book contains, together with the will to act on that knowledge.

Written by Finnish energy analysts Rauli Partanen, Harri Paloheimo and Heikki Waris, The World After Cheap Oil offers an exhaustive, up-to-date dissection of the world oil situation. It looks at the issue from every angle, starting with the looming supply shock for which the world’s developed nations are tragically unprepared, and moving on to the concomitant crisis with Earth’s climate that our oil use has unleashed. It also supplies an in-depth assessment of alternative energy sources, as well as the science, geopolitics, psychology and economics vital to understanding our predicament. Unquestionably the book’s strongest points are its wealth of hard data, straightforward explanations and informative visual aids. Indeed, the authors aptly describe their purpose as providing “a thorough package of information” about the end of cheap oil.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Book review: “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels”. Really?

February 4, 2015

Book review: “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels”. Really?

I first heard about Alex Epstein’s book ‘The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels’ via an unsurprisingly fawning review over at the SkeptEco blog.  Its premise is so ludicrous that normally I wouldn’t read it, never mind review it.  There is no “moral case for fossil fuels”, just as there was no “moral case for slavery” in 1860. But given the alarming rise, in the US and elsewhere, of the climate sceptic/pro fossil fuel lobby (witness, for instance, Sen. James Infoe’s ludicrous attack on climate science in the US Senate recently) it feels important to look a bit closer at the arguments presented here. 

Epstein recently started something called the ‘Center for Industrial Progress’, and lectures on the need to keep fossil fuels as a key driver for the economy. At other times he can be found, among other things,defending child labour or arguing that animals have no rights. He likes to paint himself and the fossil fuel industry as the misunderstood underdogs, holding the line against the far more influential “greens”.  He’s a curious character, as can be seen in this video of him standing in the middle of the hundreds of thousands of people who attended the Peoples’ Climate March in New York last year, heckling them with inane comments like “you know, your clothes are fracked!”

“As you read this”, he writes, “there is a real, live, committed movement against fossil fuels that truly wants to deprive us of the energy of life”.  This painting of the oil industry as the good guys, as the misunderstood heroes being undermined by uninformed idiots (i.e. you and I), is the first, but by no means the last, place where Epstein parts company with reality.

He bemoans the fact that fossil fuel companies “have had to fight daily for permission to empower billions of people”.  Try telling that to the communities in Ecuador affected by the oil spills for which Chevron was fined $19 billion, people in Richmond, California who live in the shadow of the Chevron refinery which exploded in 2012, communities living near mountaintop removal coal plants, people living near fracking sites, or First Nation people living near the Tar Sands in Alberta.  He continues:

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Greer’s ‘Twilight’s Last Gleaming’ sees end of empire — Transition Voice

December 8, 2014

Greer’s ‘Twilight’s Last Gleaming’ sees end of empire — Transition Voice.

Apparently, people who write titles for politico-military thrillers about nuclear brinksmanship find the language of The Star Spangled Banner just too good to resist.

Twilight’s Last Gleaming is a 1977 drama starring Burt Lancaster as a renegade air force general who takes over a nuclear missile silo and threatens to start World War III unless the president, played by Charles Durning, releases a document to the public demonstrating the U.S. government’s bad faith in conducting the recently ended Vietnam War.

By Dawn’s Early Light, a made-for-TV film from 1990, spins a similarly Strangelovian tale, where the president played by Martin Landau tries to get control of the military from renegade officers seeking a pre-emptive strike against a late-Cold War Soviet Union.

And earlier this year novelist Greg Dinallo published Rockets’ Red Glare, a techno-thriller that imagined a connection between the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and a potential nuclear war at sea in the late 1980s.

Twilight's Last Gleaming cover

Now, we can add to the list another Twilight’s Last Gleaming —  this one a new novel of America’s decline and fall by John Michael Greer.

– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2014/12/star-spangled-collapse/#sthash.APjU6po4.dpuf

 

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