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No farmer has ever gone out to the barn to start the day and discovered that a baby tractor had been born overnight. For farmers who work with horses, the birth of a foal would not be surprising.

That observation may seem silly, but it highlights an important contrast: Machines cannot reproduce or maintain themselves. Creatures can.

The tractor comes out of the industrial mind, while the horse is creaturely. The tractor is the product of an energy-intensive human-designed system, while the horse is the product of an information-intensive biological process that emerges from earth and sun.

The implications of this difference are rarely acknowledged in the dominant culture, but we believe they are crucial to explore, especially with new political space opened up by the Green New Deal for discussing ecological sustainability and economic justice.

In the short term, humanity needs to devise policies that respond in meaningful ways to today’s multiple, cascading ecological crises (including, but not limited to, rapid climate disruption), which present risks now greatly accelerated and intensified well beyond previous predictions. If that seems alarmist, we recommend “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice” for details.

To put uncomfortable realities bluntly: In ecological terms, things are bad, getting worse faster than anticipated, leaving humanity with increasingly limited options. Everyone agrees that there are no quick and easy fixes, but we want to push further: Do not expect any truly sustainable fixes to emerge from the industrial mind.

That’s why we believe it’s crucial to discuss not only policy but the need for a new worldview, one that can expand our imaginations. The distressing realities of our moment in history need not be the end of our story, if humanity can transcend the industrial and get creaturely.

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

What a Waste

March 22, 2019

What a Waste

Our modern industrial economy traces a straight line from resource extraction to manufacturing to sales to waste disposal. Since Earth has finite resources and limited ability to absorb pollution, the straight-line economy is unsustainable; it is designed for eventual failure.

Why not make the economy circular, with waste from one process feeding into other production processes, thus dramatically reducing the need both for resource extraction and for the dumping of rubbish? We should mimic nature: it’s a central ideal of the ecology movement, with roots in indigenous wisdom worldwide. Doing so requires that we reduce, reuse, repair, and recycle—and replace nonrenewable resources with renewables wherever possible.

The circular economy is needed now more than ever. America alone currently produces almost 235 million tonnes of waste per year from homes and businesses, which works out to almost 4 kilograms per person per day. But that’s only 3 percent of all the solid waste in the US economy; the other 97 percent is generated by agricultural and industrial (e.g., mining and manufacturing) processes. If the total US waste stream (including wastewater) is allotted on a per capita basis, each American is responsible for 1.8 million kilograms of waste per year.

Only about a third of waste from homes and businesses is recycled; the rate for industrial waste is much lower, with only 2 percent of the total waste stream currently being recycled. Meanwhile, the 2,000 active landfills in the US that hold the bulk of household trash are reaching their capacity. The US is among the highest waste-producing nations of the world on a per-capita basis, and the federal government has no strategy for dealing with the problem.

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

Managing without Growth. Slower by Design, not Disaster

February 20, 2019

Managing without Growth. Slower by Design, not Disaster

It took homo sapiens some 200,000 years to reach the first billion by about 1800. In just the 10 years separating the first and second edition of Managing without Growth: Slower by Design, not Disaster, the human population increased by the same amount putting increased pressure on an already crowded planet. In the past decade the global use of resources spiked upwards, greenhouse gas emissions continued to increase, income and wealth inequality rose to the highest levels in half a century, the global financial system almost crashed, and mammal, bird and insect populations declined markedly because of increased deforestation and industrialized agriculture. So, while material living standards of the poorest rose, mostly in China, which is something to celebrate, there are many reasons to be deeply concerned about what lies ahead. Humanity’s grossly unequal ecological footprints greatly exceed the Earth’s regenerative biocapacity and it is doubtful whether the planet can support the continued economic growth to which virtually all of the world’s governments are committed. Can we do better?

The opening chapters of this updated, revised, and expanded second edition Managing without Growth tell how the recent idea of economic growth emerged from the idea of progress, itself only a few hundred years old. There are many reasons for questioning growth as a key economic policy objective supported in the book based on extensive data as well as on conceptual and methodological considerations. Critical attention is given to the commodification of nature through monetization. ‘Natural’ capital captures the spirit of the times, but it can hardly be said to capture the spirit of nature.

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

Why Liberals Should be Conservative: Climate Change, Excellence, and the Practice of Happiness, Part 2

February 4, 2019

Why Liberals Should be Conservative: Climate Change, Excellence, and the Practice of Happiness, Part 2

Ed. note: Part 1 of this series can be found on Resilience.org here.

The Resurgent Aristotelians: Hopkins, Fleming, Francis, and Holmgren

What then does a modern Aristotelianism look like? How might we reconcile his ideal of a singular, philosophically deduced definition of a “good life” with modern pluralism and heterogeneity, and the Liberal insistence on individual expressive self-creation? How do we define “good” or “excellence” without imposing an ideology or world-view on others who have their own? Who judges and according to what standards? If such a reconciliation is impossible, will we be required to make a difficult choice? Or is there no real choice at all?

These are the questions that I will be considering, and to which in some cases I will hazard an answer, as we go forward. To start that process, a quick recap may be in order. I have outlined a philosophical and political standoff between Liberalism and a still-being-defined conservative Aristotelianism using common terminology, but in a particular way that may also need clarification. I take Liberalism to represent the broad post-Enlightenment political and moral philosophy that has found its home in societies organized around a market economy, in which the primary location of agency, obligation, and desert or rights resides in the individual, who is freed from the “constraints” of “kinship, neighborhood, profession, and creed,” and given over to seemingly voluntary “freedom of contract” (Polanyi, 171). Liberalism, as I use the capitalized version of the term, includes both political liberals or progressives of the sort that one might associate with Democrats, the Labor party, or Democratic Socialism, on the one hand, and “conservatives” (with scare-quotes) of the sort associated with Republicans, the British Conservative Party, and Christian Democrats, on the other.

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

Living in the Concretaceous Period

January 7, 2019

Living in the Concretaceous Period

Scientists long ago determined that Earth had entered the Anthropocene period, based on a determination that humans were altering fundamental planetary parameters such as biodiversity and the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans to the degree that it warranted an entirely new geological designation. Following another millennium of observation and analysis, skilled observers now tend to divide the Anthropocene into brief but distinct phases, including the Concretaceous, the Hellocene, and the current Depletozoic—which began centuries ago and appears likely to persist until the next awful thing happens.

While biologists have long agreed that humans are the dominant lifeform of the Anthropocene, some geologists now argue that, during the pivotal Concretaceous phase, it was the automobile that served as the true apex species. It was for the sake of automobiles that concrete—the signature rock stratum of the Concretaceous—was laid down over millions of square kilometers of landscape. The automobile served as a kind of exoskeleton for Concretaceous humans, as well as a status symbol, and it was for the powering of automobiles that millions of years’ worth of ancient sunlight, stored in the form of petroleum, was wrenched from the ground and combusted—thus altering the climate and triggering the swarm of events that led to the second phase of the Anthropocene, the Hellocene.

This latter observation has led some historians to explore the evolution of the automobile, from the primitive Stutzes and Locomobiles that rolled the primordial roads of the early Concreteaceous, all the way to the sleek Teslas and other electric cars that began to proliferate just as the swiftly intensifying events of the brief Hellocene brought the Concretaceous to a hot, chaotic end.

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

The Big Picture

December 17, 2018

The Big Picture

Humanity has a lot of problems these days. Climate change, increasing economic inequality, crashing biodiversity, political polarization, and a global debt bubble are just a few of our worries. None of these trends can continue indefinitely without leading to a serious failure of our civilization’s ability to maintain itself. Taken together, these metastasizing problems suggest we are headed toward some kind of historic discontinuity.

Serious discontinuities tend to disrupt the timelines of all complex societies (another name for civilizations—that is, societies with cities, writing, money, and full-time division of labor). The ancient Roman, Egyptian, and Mayan civilizations all collapsed. Archaeologists, historians, and systems thinkers have spent decades seeking an explanation for this pattern of failure—a general unified theory of civilizational collapse, if you will. One of the most promising concepts that could serve as the basis for such a theory comes from resilience science, a branch of ecology (the study of the relationship between organisms and their environments).

Why Civilizations Collapse: The Adaptive Cycle

Ecosystems have been observed almost universally to repeatedly pass through four phases of the adaptive cycle: exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization. Imagine, for example, a Ponderosa pine forest. Following a disturbance such as a fire (in which stored carbon is released into the environment), hardy and adaptable “pioneer” species of plants and small animals fill in open niches and reproduce rapidly.

This reorganization phase of the cycle soon transitions to an exploitation phase, in which those species that can take advantage of relationships with other species start to dominate. These relationships make the system more stable, but at the expense of diversity.

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

The Demise of the Official Future

December 13, 2018

The Demise of the Official Future

Americans are more likely to think the US is heading in the right direction since Donald Trump’s election. Why?

The poll results are extraordinary: the proportion of Americans who thought the country was ‘heading in the right direction’ rose sharply when Donald Trump became president of the US, while the proportion who thought it was ‘off on the wrong track’ dropped. The numbers were even at about 50%.

Negative perceptions have increased again since, but remain lower than during the Obama presidency. In September 2010, the earliest US data in the recent Ipsos report, ‘What worries the world’, about 70% thought the US was on the wrong track, 30% that it was heading in the right direction. In September 2018, the ratio was about 60% ‘wrong track’ to 40% ‘the right direction’ – about the same as the world average.

The US findings are at odds with so much of the media commentary about Trump, especially in the liberal media: his loss of the popular vote, the gerrymandering, the Russian interference, his low approval rating, the sustained criticism of him in the mainstream media. What can explain the trends? I want to offer one explanation, based on a social, not political, analysis; there may be others.

The answers we get in survey questions depend critically on their wording. In this case the question was not asking anything about the presidency, Trump and his actions and utterances. It asked Americans, ‘Generally speaking, would you say things in this country are heading in the right direction, or are they off on the wrong track?’

I have long argued that people’s concerns about modern life and the future have been poorly reflected in politics, and it is this that lies behind the unease and disenchantment in the electorate, not just the conduct of politicians and the merits of specific policies.

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

Feeling Resilient in Tumultuous Times

December 1, 2018

Feeling Resilient in Tumultuous Times

As I read the thoughtful blogs on this site, I feel grateful for the vision, practical wisdom, and creative thinking that I see so often expressed here. In a time when the very foundation of our way of life is breaking down, it is inspiring to hear from so many who are willing to roll up their sleeves and prepare to do the more conscious work of growing good food, providing shelter, and strengthening their local communities for whatever may come.

And of course there is good reason to believe that we may be facing a great deal more challenge in the future. Global climate change, species decline, and the growing political and economic polarization all hint at a “perfect storm” of events that call into question our very survival. Curiously, all of this seems to be happening at the same time that our political leaders are increasingly parochial and less capable. For the next few decades, and probably for the next few generations, it looks like we are in for a very wild ride indeed!

Food, clothing, and shelter are basic needs. Most of us also acknowledge the importance of healthy communities to help provide these basic necessities. There is however a whole other realm of experience that is critical to our survival; indeed, it begins to become more apparent when people come together on common projects and seek to live in community. This is the realm of emotions.

Without emotional resilience, people will not survive. Not only do we need to ‘think through’ this process of breakdown, we need to feel our way through it. In fact, our proclivity for thinking first and perhaps allowing a bit of emotional expression later on is a pattern that has helped get us into this dire predicament. More about that at another time perhaps.

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

Drawdown: the Most Comprehensive Plan ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming: Review

November 21, 2018

Drawdown: the Most Comprehensive Plan ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming: Review

Drawdown was a major collaborative effort involving 70 research fellows from 40 countries. It’s not so much a cohesive plan as a list of partial solutions: 80 that are tested and in use at least somewhere in the world, and another 20 that are speculative. The book has a few essays but is primarily composed of descriptions of these possible solutions; each comes with estimates of its potential impact on climate, and a ranking (and a picture, naturally).

These numbers are speculative, of course. One of the things I found surprising was the estimates in a few cases of the potential of solutions—in particular, a back-to-back pair: using bicycles instead of motor vehicles in cities was estimated to increase from 5.5 percent of trips in 2014 to 7.5 percent by 2050. But green roofs and cool roofs (that is, roofs with turf on top and roofs with reflective metal that sends solar radiation back) are estimated to grow to 30 and 60 percent, respectively. That totals to 90 percent as the two are different approaches with no overlap. I can only think that people doing the bike chapter were much less optimistic than those coming up with numbers for the green roof piece.

The other issue with numbers is the question of double counting, of overlap. For example, it seemed to me that farmland restoration, regenerative agriculture, multistrata agroforestry, silvopasture, tree intercropping, managed grazing, pasture cropping, and intensive silvopasture are not really eight different schemes, but three. A problem with any assessment of climate change is assigning categories and avoiding overlap. For example, take a truck bringing corn to an ethanol plant—is that in the transportation sector, the agriculture sector, or the energy production sector? But the authors claim they “made sure to avoid” double counting; perhaps I misunderstood the differences between some of these things. Anyway, I don’t think the numbers are the important part of this effort.

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

The Ghosts of Past Political Failures Haunt Environmental Challenges

November 14, 2018

The Ghosts of Past Political Failures Haunt Environmental Challenges

We will not solve climate change and other pressing global threats until we admit, and learn from, the repeated failures of past proclamations and promises.

The general public, the American news magazine proclaims in its cover story, ‘The ravaged environment’, ‘has been seized with such anger and alarm as to goad political leaders into proclaiming conservation of the environment the chief task of this decade’. The US president is quoted as saying this must be the decade ‘when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its water and our living environment. It is literally now or never.’

At last! But wait. When was this? The president is obviously not Donald Trump. Perhaps Barack Obama? No, it was Richard Nixon, the date was 26 January, 1970, and the magazine was Newsweek.

It is barely stretching the truth to say that since the 1960s, we have declared each decade as the time for decisive action on the environment, and as each decade passes, we postpone the deadline another ten years. Now, as we near the end of the 2010s without the necessary action having been taken, the 2020s are shaping up to be the critical decade.

In the same year – 1992 – that I cited the Newsweek article in an essay for the Australian Commission for the Future (to make a similar point to that here), more than 1700 independent scientists issued a warning to humanity that environmental destruction required a great change in its stewardship of the Earth if ‘vast human misery’ was to be avoided. Last year, on the 25th anniversary of that warning, more than 15,000 scientists signed a ‘second notice’ warning that with the exception of stabilising the stratospheric ozone layer, humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in solving environmental challenges, and ‘alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse’.

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

Money –Some points for revolutionaries to think about

November 8, 2018

Money –Some points for revolutionaries to think about

The monetary system we have is a fundamental cause of our problems, and setting up new systems is crucial in the development of alternative economies. However some popular initiatives are sadly mistaken and can have few if any beneficial effects. The goal must be to set up a system that enables previously idle people and resources to begin producing necessities for the locality. This is easily done.

First, let’s look at the main faults in the present system.

The present monetary system … works for the rich.

Money is puzzling stuff. It should just be little more than something that facilitates economic exchange, the safe keeping of savings, and the keeping of accounts. But in our system it is also a commodity, something that can be “hired” for a fee, i.e., borrowed and paid back with interest. Thus there is now a vast industry managing this lending, recently so big that it was making 40% of US profits. Kennedy (1995) estimated that 40% of what we pay for goods gets siphoned off into interest payments.

What’s wrong with the system? There are four major faults.

1. In a market system things go to those who are able and prepared to pay most for them. That explains most of what is wrong with the world. For instance there is enough food produced to feed everyone in the world but about one third of world grain is fed to animals in rich countries while at least 800 million are hungry all the time. Why? Simply because it is more profitable in the market to sell the grain to feedlot beef produces etc. In a market economy, need is irrelevant and ignored; the rich can take resources and goods because they can afford to pay more for them.

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

The Secret of Eternal Growth? It’s Wishful Thinking

November 7, 2018

The Secret of Eternal Growth? It’s Wishful Thinking

I want to believe in eternal economic growth. Given what humanity is facing with climate change and other consequences of our collective consumption, it must be awfully comforting to have faith in a cornucopian future where no one ever goes wanting. Especially if all we have to do is more of the same, sticking to capitalism’s exploitative playbook. I used to have that faith. I was a worshipper of technological progress and its potential to overcome all the social and environmental problems that accompany exponentially increasing population and consumption. I also used to believe in the Easter Bunny. Unlike Michael Liebreich (author of “The Secret of Eternal Growth,” the article I’m rebutting), however, I paid enough attention to the evidence to put aside such fantasies.

I intend to provide a blow-by-blow analysis of Liebreich’s contentions, but I feel compelled to start with a gem near the end of his article. In a one-sentence paragraph that summarizes his thesis, he writes, “The bottom line here is that the world’s most feted scientists and economists have shown that economic growth is consistent with environmental protection and the mitigation of climate change.” Here’s a small point: his use of a financial metaphor (“bottom line”) may reveal something about how much the culture of money influences his thinking. But here’s the bigger point. Really?!? What the hell is he talking about?

Let’s start with his claim about scientists. It’s a safe bet he hasn’t read the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity. This article appeared in the peer-reviewed journal BioScience in December 2017. In the article, which was endorsed by more than 15,000 scientists at the time it was published, the authors write, “We are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically and demographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats.”

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

After Florence, Carolinians Know the Climate is Changing; Now we Must Act

November 2, 2018

After Florence, Carolinians Know the Climate is Changing; Now we Must Act

Across the Carolinas, the floodwaters have receded and rebuilding is under way. But the epic 2018 hurricane season has left a mark, like a ghostly high-water stain on the wall of a flooded building. Today, Carolina residents increasingly accept the reality of climate change, and want to prepare for its ravages.

The urgent need to adapt to a hotter, wilder world presents extraordinary challenges. But it also offers a chance to rethink who we are, and how we live.

The challenges are real: our long coastline is vulnerable to sea-level rise and supercharged storms; our essential crops face withering heat and erratic rainfall. From hog farms to chemical plants and coal-ash ponds, our industries harbor toxic threats when flooded. And, asMatthew and Florence made clear, climate disasters hit low-income communities and communities of color first and worst.

There is growing awareness of the threats we face. An Elon University survey taken earlier this month showed that more than eight in 10 North Carolinians now believe climate change is “very” or “somewhat” likely to negatively impact the state’s coastal communities. The most notable shift is among Republicans, 37 percent of whom now believe global warming is “very likely” to have a negative impact—nearly triple the percentage who felt that way in 2017.

In fact, even before Florence hit, the Carolinas were reckoning with climate change by assessing the threats, preparing for the worst, and protecting the most vulnerable. For years, North and South Carolinians have been seeing climate changes firsthand, and finding ways to adapt. For example, North Carolina’s Land Loss Prevention Project—originally founded to prevent black farmers from losing their land to foreclosure—is identifying farm communities that are vulnerable to climate impacts and helping them move to safer land.

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

Our Bonus Decade

October 29, 2018

Our Bonus Decade

“The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.”

–George Eliot, Silas Marner

It’s been ten years since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. Print, online, and broadcast news media have dutifully featured articles and programs commemorating the crisis, wherein commentators mull why it happened, what we learned from it, and what we failed to learn. Nearly all of these articles and programs have adopted the perspective of conventional economic theory, in which the global economy is seen as an inherently stable system that experiences an occasional market crash as a result of greed, bad policies, or “irrational exuberance” (to use Alan Greenspan’s memorable phrase). From this perspective, recovery from the GFC was certainly to be expected, even though it could have been impeded by poor decisions.

Some of us have a different view. From our minority perspective, the global economy as currently configured is inherently not just unstable, but unsustainable. The economy depends on perpetual growth of GDP, whereas we live upon a finite planet on which the compounded growth of any material process or quantity inevitably leads to a crash. The economy requires ever-increasing energy supplies, mostly from fossil fuels, whereas coal, oil, and natural gas are nonrenewable, depleting, and climate-changing resources.

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

Durable Goods

October 26, 2018

Durable Goods

Ed. note: The post below is a transcription of Post Carbon Fellow Stephanie Mills’ remarks at the 50 year anniversary of the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Gratitude to Mother Earth, ground of being. Gratitude to Stewart and Ryan and their colleagues for realizing this event. Gratitude to Stephanie Feldstein for her partnership tonight.

The image was taken this summer in a stand of old growth White Pine saved in 1973 from the chainsaws by a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens. The flowers are Bunchberry and Canada Mayflower. Gratitude to all those beings.

Stewart, master of compressed utterance, asked for five minutes on the last and next half-centuries: More than a tweet, less than a tome.

Fifty years is an eyeblink. Yet despite many good faith efforts at every level to prevent waste and ruin, the growth of industrial civilization has ravaged the Earth, depleting soil, water, and biodiversity, contaminating oceans and the atmosphere.

In 1968 Paul and Anne Ehrlich dropped The Population Bomb. There were about 3.5 billion of us then, over seven billion now. Contraceptive means improved, while political calculation, cultural conservatism and patriarchy hampered their widespread adoption.

Sixties temblors of revolutionary change cracked a few foundations. In 1972 from the Club of Rome we got a world systems model forecasting industrial civilization’s inescapable limits to growth. In 1974, Congress heard of M. King Hubbert’s curve mapping the limits to oil production, the end times for a petroleum-driven global infrastructure. Big business as usual has continued. Critical thresholds have been crossed. A late-breaking discussion of degrowth is underway but yet to reach a wide audience.

A half-century ago we thought about living more responsibly. “Access to tools” enlivened possibilities of household, homestead, village, and neighborhood self-reliance. There was hope of stalling the Apocalypse Juggernaut. There still may be.

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

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