The men of affairs who treat the arts as amenities and dismiss philosophies as worthless abstraction, spend their workdays unknowingly mouthing the words of dead philosophers and acting out poems they have not read on the stage of current events. – John Michael Greer If industrial society turns out to have been little more than [...]
With the converging crises of imminent energy scarcity, environmental degradation, resource depletion and economic insolvency, suddenly I’m recognizing the apogee of our modern civilization may have passed us by a few decades ago. Being on the slope of globalization’s decline as opposed to its ascent or plateau is a precarious position, mainly because the evidence [...]
Civilizations are constructed of population, energy and knowledge. All three of these dimensions are under significant threat from the relationship between our species and our surrounding world. Success over the last hundred years, industrializing much of the world, has been borrowed from the future rather than sustainably building on the past. Ignoring the achievements of [...]
The Vanishing Face of Gaia is my first exposure to James Lovelock’s work and is my first in-depth reading of a work about Gaia theory, the idea that the Earth is a self-regulating organism. Environmentalists and New Age movements speak of the earth being alive and this perspective is often lumped with Gaia theory to [...]
The rise of a new economics. That is what McKibben succeeds in describing through Deep Economy. After years of the ‘Cult of Growth’ dominating modern US politics, the Vermont environmental writer argues that its time we invest in our communities. Perhaps the wonders of globalization argued for by the likes of Friedman, Krugman and countless [...]