Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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