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Human designs for ecosystem management and survival after the oil era
Saturday, January 18th, 2020All societies in history have relied on the land and its plant and animal resources. The superstructure of high technologies and complex forms of social organization like cities that fossil energy has made possible only conceal our essential reliance on the land. As access to the dense, high quality forms of energy in fossil fuels [...]
A systems view of Western policy today
Friday, July 12th, 2019Complex systems are resilient, or resistant to change from another viewpoint. Human societies are complex systems. Historically they have exhibited this inertia – a tendency to repeatedly snap back to business as usual or some facsimile of it when faced with a long period of inevitable change. Modern industrial society confronts just this situation – [...]
The Industrial Economy is Ending Forever: an Energy Explanation for Agriculturists and Everyone
Saturday, March 30th, 2019Nothing happens without energy. Howard T. Odum created a framework of energy flow, conversion, storages and feedback that built systems ecology into a general systems theory. That provided ecosystem science with a rigorous disciplinary basis. Odum and his intellectual progeny see that understanding how energy makes everything happen is so important, not only for the [...]
Wind and solar – societal and residential
Friday, March 15th, 2019I hasten to preface these brief results of my experiments with a residential solar electric system by stating that in accord with what I think is a rising consensus, in my view these energy sources will never significantly replace fossil energy consumption at a societal level. Hence, as fossil energy depletion continues, becoming ever scarcer, [...]
The Age of Modernity and its Discontents
Sunday, January 27th, 2019When the whole world is globalized [read modernized], you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.
—Rene Girard
In human history, every cultural age is more than a collection of disparate elements. It is an interdependent, interactive whole some of whose elements need others to survive, as do species [...]
The prospect of a new Gothic Age in the US during the decline of the industrial era
Sunday, November 18th, 2018Human society faces an unprecedented, irreparable shift away from industrial civilization that ultimately will prove catastrophic for most people. A large part of the global population has a cultural heritage that derives from the age of monotheisms that began about two millennia ago. This heritage persists despite strong secularization trends that began in recent centuries [...]
An ecology of social systems
Wednesday, September 19th, 2018This essay consists of a condensation of insights from Heinberg’s three-part article, “Human Predators, Human Prey”, and a partial reinterpretation.
Two types of hierarchical relations are evident in ecosystemic predator/prey relations :
Functional as in population regulation, a problem-solving relation that benefits the entire ecosystem as predators keep prey populations in check throughout the ecosystem food [...]
The Peasants Shall Inherit the Earth
Thursday, August 30th, 2018It is said that prediction is difficult, especially about the future. Nonetheless, a few Romans saw the inevitable fall of the Roman Empire more than a hundred years before it completely disappeared. Their prediction was possible because they saw that the system was depleting resources essential to its survival, so had trapped itself into a [...]
Mass deception and the quest for a more sustainable agriculture
Friday, February 16th, 2018Most of our society has fallen victim to a spectacularly successful, century-long effort of mass deception. The idea that organically certified farming is making a significant difference is just one of the many myths. To explain how that happens, I will first sketch a more general, historical picture that provides the necessary context.
The advent of [...]
The Pace of Descent: A Long Emergency vs. Sudden Collapse
Wednesday, January 17th, 2018Students of the energy descent continue to debate the probability of different rates of industrial decline. Sudden collapse advocates focus on the increase of many kinds of fragility in the global industrial economy. Risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile, The Black Swan) and others argue that increasing fragility is inherent with increasing complexity in systems [...]
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