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The Environment: Increasing Waste – Crash Course Chapter 24 | Peak Prosperity
The Environment: Increasing Waste – Crash Course Chapter 24 | Peak Prosperity.
Chapter 24 of the Crash Course is now publicly available and ready for watching below.
Following up on the previous chapter focusing on human-caused resource depletion, the other disheartening part of the story of the environment concerns the things we humans put back into it, and the impact they have on the ecosystems that support all of life — ours included.
Like the economy, ecosystems are complex systems. That means that they owe their complexity and order to energy flows and, most importantly, they are inherently unpredictable. How they will respond to the change by a thousand rapid insults is unknown and literally unknowable.
Like any complex system, an ecosystem will tend to remain in a stable form until the pressures become too great and then they will suddenly shift to a different baseline and exist there for a while. That is, instead of having some magical preferred equilibrium, they have many — and some of those will be decidedly less or more awesome for humans to exist within.
If the world tips from a stable climate to a less stable one, as it has done many times in the past, then growing enough food for everyone will become difficult if not impossible.
An ocean acidified will remain that way for possibly hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Overly-depleted cod fisheries will take many decades to recover, if and only if they are not fished in between. A species wiped out remains that way forever.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article and view the video…
Panarchy: Implications for Economic & Social PolicyHumanity’s Test
Panarchy: Implications for Economic & Social PolicyHumanity’s Test.
Background
Panarchy is a model that seeks to explain the evolution of complex systems, developed firstly by Buzz Holling through his observation of the adaptive cycle of forests[1]. The forest cycle follows a process of growth/exploitation, conservation, release and reorganization/renewal. At first, there is rapid growth as new species establish themselves in a recently disturbed environment. As the vegetation becomes denser, and the linkages within the system proliferate, the forest moves into a slower-growing state of conservation. It becomes increasingly stable within, and highly adapted to, a limited number of conditions. Efficiency, through the reuse of existing structures and increased connectivity, is traded for lower resilience. A disturbance that exceeds the reduced bounds of resilience then causes the forest to “crash” to a simpler state that releases the material and energy accumulated in the earlier adaptive phases. A highly uncertain phase of renewal can then start, during which novel combinations of species may establish themselves. These can then rapidly develop during a new growth phase. This adaptive cycle has been found to operate across many different natural systems.
figure 1: Panarchy Model from The Sustainable Scale Project. Accessed at http://www.sustainablescale.org/ConceptualFramework/UnderstandingScale/MeasuringScale/Panarchy.aspx
The Panarchy model accepts the fundamentally dynamic nature of ecosystems, and moves away from the previous assumptions of linear and predictable natural systems that could be managed through actions targeted at one variable, such as the maximum sustainable fishing catch. Instead a panarchy approach accepts that components of complex systems may actively adapt to changes within their environments, creating surprising outcomes. Ecological systems are non-linear, and capable of moving from one stable state to another, very different, one. Within an overall system there are nested sets of adaptive cycles, with the larger cycles operating more slowly than the smaller ones. The different cycles can interact, with the larger ones tending to play a stabilizing role. At a critical point though, changes at different scales may interact and reinforce each other leading to systemic collapse.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Infinite Toddler Regress–The Krugman Function Part 3 – Transition Milwaukee
The Infinite Toddler Regress–The Krugman Function Part 3 – Transition Milwaukee.
In this installment I’m going to talk about Paul Krugman’s resistance to whole-system thinking, and I’m going to do it by way of a comparison to a very different intellectual dispensation: namely the one demonstrated by my three year old twin sons. Lest this comparison seem too insulting to be taken seriously, in his defense I should mention that Krugman’s poor showing in this intellectual curiosity contest nevertheless illustrates an important dilemma. This dilemma is faced daily by parents trying to get to work, but also by the intellectual-activist attempting to harness a curious and inquiring disposition for useful action.
Here, at any rate, is a partially fictionalized conversation between me and my three year-olds. I should note, however, that it is less fictionalized than one might be apt to assume.
Daddy [putting boots on]: bye-bye guys
Evjen: Where you going daddy? Where you going?
Isak: No go bye-bye Daddy, no go bye-bye.
Daddy: I’m sorry men, I’d much rather stay here, but I have to go to work.
Evjen: Why Daddy?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
