Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization
What is Fascism?
Tuesday, September 30th, 2014Who cares what fascism is? We in the US should, because elements of it are creeping into our society, activated on an as-needed basis at present to keep its development somewhat below the radar of the masses. Because the term is so often misused, here I will summarize a relatively rigorous conception of fascism like [...]
The Alchemy of Language in the Pacification of the American People
Monday, July 14th, 2014Orwell’s term “doublethink”[1], the use of language to create a false picture of reality, has spawned a large literature, but that exposure has not stopped powerful interests from inventing new ways to use the capacity of language to control thought.
Something primed me many years ago to automatically search for the camouflage, innuendo, and outright misrepresentation [...]
Locked In: The Paradox of Capitalism
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2014Much of this post was lifted from an article by another author, because I found the logic and the language so compelling. But I neglected to keep the reference. If I learn who the author is, I will be happy to credit him/her with those statements that are not mine, and provide a link to [...]
Why Systems Thinking?
Thursday, January 23rd, 2014My explicit focus on systems thinking in writing and teaching comes from an awareness, spreading slowly through the knowledge business, that it is an essential approach to all inquiry intended for application to real world problems. For its importance to be taken seriously and applied to all important issues in everyday life, systems thinking needs [...]
The Future of Industrial Society: “Progress”, A Microscopic Scientific Paradigm, and Blowback
Thursday, January 2nd, 2014Nothing is more important to understanding the behavior of a large social entity than awareness of its collective worldview. Usually that worldview is so deeply embedded and taken for granted that its inhabitants rarely know that it exists and shapes their individual and collective behavior in many ways. A common parallel is fish who do [...]
Three Farmhouses: A Study in Passive Solar Design
Wednesday, August 21st, 2013I have just added this account of my experiences in energy-efficient housing design and construction to my Core Papers on this website. It is an attempt to fill a gap in the literature of low energy design that, in view of the long-term energy crisis that the world is entering, I see as a serious [...]
Food Production Systems in the Decline of the Industrial Age: A Call for a Socio-ecological Synthesis
Sunday, June 9th, 2013The sustainability of industrial food production has long been under attack for its destruction of the soil, water, air and other products and services essential to life on earth. Now the massive consumption of energy and other resources needed to build and maintain industrial society has led to the depletion of these [...]
The Interdependence of Phantom Financial Wealth, Phantom Carrying Capacity and Phantom Democratic Power
Monday, May 13th, 2013Capitalism is a total social system in which most land and other capital assets can be privately owned. Over time this allows profit, wealth and power to concentrate in the hands of a minority. As a result, that minority makes or indirectly controls all the major decisions that shape US society and the [...]
Why Trying to Save Industrial Civilization with Alternatives to Fossil Fuels Only Makes Things Worse
Saturday, April 6th, 2013A recent Cornell report on how to convert New York state energy consumption to alternative fuels perpetuates the nonsense that in a declining economy we can convert NY or anywhere else to “clean” wind and solar energy, maybe dimming the lights a bit, and thus continue the party (industrial civilization and the US way of [...]
Scenarios of Political Response to Energy Descent Crises
Sunday, December 9th, 2012A number of students of the energy descent have concluded that the new era will include tipping points where key economic and political institutions suddenly go into crisis[1]. Charles Hugh Smith, for example, describes “snapback” points[2] when increasing divergence between “phantom wealth” and real wealth collapses. In The Case for a Disorderly Descent I described [...]
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