Archive for January, 2018

The Pace of Descent: A Long Emergency vs. Sudden Collapse

Wednesday, January 17th, 2018

Students 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, 2018

Answers 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. [...]