Recent Additions
What Every Marxist Needs to Know about Ecology
Sunday, December 12th, 2010Karl North 2010
The problem and some options
Nature rules. Everything we do that violates the rules of nature will eventually fail. Nature’s rules include broad ones like the laws of thermodynamics, and more specific ones like those that govern how the soil food web feeds plants.
It follows from the laws of thermodynamics that there are limits [...]
Invisible Ships and Boiling Frogs: The End of Industrial Affluence
Monday, June 7th, 2010It is said that when the ships of the Old World first approached the New World, they were sometimes invisible to the indigenous people of the Americas because the latter could not imagine such a thing as a fleet of large sailing ships, and simply did not believe their eyes.
In the same way, when a [...]
Visioning County Food Production – Part Four
Monday, April 19th, 2010Urban Agriculture
This series of articles is an exploration of designs for agriculture in Tompkins County to approach sustainability in a future of declining access to the cheap energy and other inputs on which our industrialized food system relies. In earlier parts of this series, I proposed principles of agroecosystem design, addressed the key [...]
Economics as brain damage
Thursday, February 4th, 2010Economics as Brain Damage*
Karl North 2004
On the first day of my first formal introduction to economics as an undergraduate, the professor defined the discipline as the scientific study of the distribution of scarce resources. But the course from then on was concerned only with such matters as market variables like supply and demand, and market [...]
A sustainable agriculture research and education agenda to address a gathering crisis
Sunday, January 31st, 2010A Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Agenda to Address a Gathering Crisis
Karl North 2002
The Crisis, in its multidimensionality, with likely multiplier effects across its elements:
Exponentially rising energy costs for coming decades as currently foreseeable alternative energy technologies fail to compensate for the end of cheap oil;
Gradual loss of most of the energy-intensive inputs that currently [...]
Introduction to Systems Thinking
Thursday, January 21st, 2010A New Understanding of Root Cause—
Systems Thinking for Problem Solvers
By Karl North
“We’ll never be able to go back again to the way we used to think.” – anonymous holist
A Revolution in the Making
The insight that the world functions in complex, interdependent wholes drives a growing revolution in the way people are examining, understanding, [...]
Two Folktales for Comprehending Late Stage Capitalism and its Scientific Culture
Sunday, January 17th, 2010Karl North 2006
Folktales distill the wisdom of the ages. All too often their teachings are applicable to any era. Perhaps their continuing relevance comes, as the saying goes, from the human propensity to repeat history, once as tragedy, again as farce.
My favorite tales to explain the hilarious but tragic human behavior patterns of late stage [...]
How Does This Happen?
Thursday, January 24th, 2008How does this happen?
Abandoned Farmstead – Andalucia, Spain
How does this happen?
Healthy Farmstead – Freetown, New York, USA
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