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The Early Roots of a Modern Crisis
The Early Roots of a Modern Crisis This is our challenge: to move a world of almost 8 billion people, most involved in an economic system with tremendous inequality, a clear imperative to expand, and a chronic tendency to stagnate, toward some real rapprochement with earth. This is a monumental challenge. If nothing else, the […]
un-Denial Manifesto: Energy and Denial
un-Denial Manifesto: Energy and Denial Six years ago this essay launched and defined un-Denial.com. I’m featuring it on the home page to celebrate 500 posts. This is the story of the two most important things that enabled the success and possible demise of humans: energy and denial. Simple single cell (prokaryotic) life emerges as a gradual […]
Why People Harm the Environment Although They Try to Treat It Well: An Evolutionary-Cognitive Perspective on Climate Compensation
Why People Harm the Environment Although They Try to Treat It Well: An Evolutionary-Cognitive Perspective on Climate Compensation Anthropogenic climate changes stress the importance of understanding why people harm the environment despite their attempts to behave in climate friendly ways. This paper argues that one reason behind why people do this is that people apply […]
Why We’re Doomed: Our Delusional Faith in Incremental Change
Why We’re Doomed: Our Delusional Faith in Incremental Change Better not to risk any radical evolution that might fail, and so failure is thus assured. When times are good, modest reforms are all that’s needed to maintain the ship’s course. By “good times,” I mean eras of rising prosperity which generate bigger budgets, profits, tax revenues, […]
Yes, the Climate Crisis May Wipe out Six Billion People Creator of the ‘ecological footprint’ on life and death in a world 4 C hotter. One thing the climate crisis underscores is that Homo sapiens are not primarily a rational species. When forced to make important decisions, particularly decisions affecting our economic security or socio-political […]
Society As Platform — A New Frontier in Complexity Science
Society As Platform — A New Frontier in Complexity Science Cities are profoundly complex incarnations of cultural evolution. Image Credit: Vincent Laforet Humanity is now confronted with new challenges unlike anything we have experienced before. Our evolved history as a species has not prepared us for what is happening now. It is time to start seeing culture as […]
The Neoliberal Survival Game
The Neoliberal Survival Game Photo by Nathaniel St. Clair One of the ways the media has shaped the public’s attitude concerning the distribution of wealth and power in our society, has been by the dissemination of a familiar but menacing ideology, an ideology which teaches that human success and failure is determined by evolutionary fitness — ‘the […]
Cooperation Versus Competition: An Evolutionary Perspective
COOPERATION VERSUS COMPETITION: AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE Charles Darwin is credited for forming the idea of evolution. During his explorations around the world and his intimate observation of how animal and plant life evolved over time, he came to believe that everything followed one basic maxim: “the survival of the fittest.” This theory states that organisms […]
Ethics and Ecosystem Interactions: Why Reconciliation Ecology Matters
Ethics and Ecosystem Interactions: Why Reconciliation Ecology Matters The problem with ecosystem interactions Here’s a phrase that’s lately been haunting me: “the extinction of ecosystem interactions.” I first encountered it in science writer Connie Barlow’s fascinating book, The Ghosts of Evolution, which is about the plants, mainly trees, that have lingered into modern times even though […]
Sociocultural Boundaries
Sociocultural Boundaries Some years ago now a team of Swedish scientists proposed an interesting framework for understanding planetary environmental problems. It generated a range of responses from the environmental community, mostly positive. I had what is undoubtedly a very unusual response to their framework, and while it is perhaps old news, it may still be […]
Wisdom: Re-Tuning for a Sustainable Future
Wisdom: Re-Tuning for a Sustainable Future Mankind achieved civilization by developing and learning to follow rules that often forbade to do what his instincts demanded…Man is not born wise, rational and good, but has to be taught to become so. Man became intelligent because there was tradition (habits) between instinct and reason… Friedrich Hayek The […]
Darwin’s Casino
Darwin’s Casino Our age has no shortage of curious features, but for me, at least, one of the oddest is the way that so many people these days don’t seem to be able to think through the consequences of their own beliefs. Pick an ideology, any ideology, straight across the spectrum from the most devoutly […]
Ready for the revolution?
Ready for the revolution? Once aggrandizers are given an inch of leeway under favorable resource conditions, they quickly stretch that inch into a mile and keep on going. — Brian Hayden Once upon a time, there lived the ancestral apes that gave rise to humans, chimpanzees and bonobos. In all likelihood, they lived in bands dominated […]
Towards the Permacene
Towards the Permacene In the Beginning The Earth is an old place. Roughly 4 and a half billion years old is the date agreed upon by scientist. Starting out as an orbiting cloud of dust, rocks, and ice that eventually came together with the help of the gravitational pull of our sun, the Earth […]
