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What is Sustainable?
Monday, January 8th, 2018Answers to this question that are rooted in the relevant scientific disciplines – primarily systems ecology, the physics and economics of natural resource science and the world-system method of the history of civilizations – are so unsettling to most people in their implications for the future of modern civilization that they are met with denial. [...]
How the Maximum Power Principle affects living systems
Wednesday, November 22nd, 2017I make no claim to expertise on the subject, but here is how I understand it. The laws of thermodynamics are central for understanding how the universe operates. One of the aspects of the second law is that gradients of energy or matter will try to eliminate themselves. This is important because of all the [...]
Biochar – a Critical View Through the Ecosystemic Lens
Monday, October 30th, 2017I have been following the biochar story since it began to gain visibility over a decade ago. I view it from the perspective of forty years of farming informed by study of systems ecology. My understanding of both of these pursuits has evolved over that time in ways that will inform this critique. I began [...]
Scenarios on the Downslope: Insights from Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future
Sunday, September 17th, 2017Perhaps the hardest truth for modern society on the edge of industrial decline is to learn our species’ dependence, like other species, ultimately on natural laws, not human ones. The learning process has many layers, partly because it involves a revolution that takes us beyond reductionism to seeing reality in a more systemic and historical [...]
What Is the Deep State?
Tuesday, August 22nd, 2017Recently the idea that there exists some shadowy group called the deep state has begun to edge its way into the alternative news media, and occasionally into public discourse in the US. I see two major reasons for this. One is that people in power, whoever they are, fearing the declining public credibility in major [...]
The holarchy of rules and the problem of silos of knowledge in the quest for the survival of humanity
Friday, March 31st, 2017Seen in retrospect, the failure of those concerned with the advancement of knowledge to respect the complexity of the world, and to move toward ways of doing science that account for its connectivity, may be one of the greatest causes of the ongoing collapse of Western Civilization[1]. As products of that civilization, we are all [...]
Clinging to the Titanic, or how to let go
Monday, February 20th, 2017- “A world ends when its metaphor has died” – Archibald MacLeish
- “Don’t be fooled by the idiotic exertions of the Red team and the Blue team. They’re just playing a game of “Capture the Flag” on the deck of the Titanic.”- James Kunstler
Political ecologist William Ophuls has researched the unsustainability of modern industrial society [...]
Reality 101: Some Notes on Teaching Humanity’s Predicament
Saturday, September 10th, 2016Our species faces a predicament: the inevitable decline of industrial civilization as we know it, and possible extinction. Decades ago, a small but growing group became aware of the situation and began to create ways to communicate it to the general public. An ‘energy descent’ literature appeared that has described it using terms like overshoot [...]
Humans Have Energetically Overpowered the Earth
Monday, September 7th, 2015All life depends on constant consumption of energy. Nothing happens without it. More energy, more stuff happens: goods, services, population, raw materials depletion, pollution, damage to soil, water and other ecosystem processes that are essential to all life, including humanity. Less energy, less of all of the above. For most of several billion years of [...]
High Level Rats Who Bail from the Rat Race: Disillusioned Conservative Cabinet Level and Financial Class Insiders
Sunday, March 1st, 2015There exists a long history and literature of criticism of the modern social system based on the concentrated wealth and power of private capital. Most of the critics are writing from outside the centers of power. What is new is the radical rejection of the system now voiced by people with long careers high enough [...]
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