Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kurt Cobb Uber is being hailed as a revolutionary tech company that is modernizing city transport. In fact, the failure of Uber to generate profits shows that it is not a tech company at all and that, notwithstanding our worship of all that is tech, some problems are not amenable to a technofix.
If only Bayer, the German pharmaceutical and agricultural seed and chemical giant, had bothered to ask around before acquiring the American-based Monsanto Company for $63 billion in cash last June.
There’s a reason that few people are thinking about world grain supplies. Last year saw record worldwide production of grains and record stocks of grains left over. But this year worldwide production slipped about 2 percent, owing in large part to the plunge in Australia’s production caused by an ongoing severe drought.
The increasing connectedness of the global economic system has long been touted as the path to greater prosperity and peaceful relations among nations and their peoples. There’s just one hitch: Complex systems have more points of failure and also hidden risks that only surface when something goes wrong.
The monetary system we have is a fundamental cause of our problems, and setting up new systems is crucial in the development of alternative economies. However some popular initiatives are sadly mistaken and can have few if any beneficial effects. The goal must be to set up a system that enables previously idle people and resources to begin producing necessities for the locality. This is easily done.
All of this commotion we call industrial civilization understandably looks like progress to those living through it and fortunate enough to die before the decline begins.
The rapid rise in U.S. oil production from so-called shale oil deposits has resulted in forecasts of oil abundance far into the future. The financial indicators and simple logic tell us that these forecasts are almost certainly wrong.
Synthetic biology offers grand new possibilities to “process information, manipulate chemicals, fabricate materials and structures, produce energy, provide food, and maintain and enhance human health” according to Wikipedia. But the supposed benefits cannot sensibly be weighed against the catastrophic systemic risks which are inherent in its use.
Rather than sharing the distractions now capturing the attention of other drivers, we must each retrain ourselves to pay attention to the instrument panel and the road ahead of us. Abandoning old habits and making new ones requires effort. But some habits are so unwise that changing them is a life-or-death affair.
“It has been a disappointment to me that so many people, including all too many environmentalists, thought the spirit of liberation of the 1960s was and is dispensable.” — Jan Lundberg (1952-2018)
Leave/Remain was always a false dichotomy. The real choice is between a corporate economic system that systematically destroys livelihoods and undermines the environment and, on the other hand, a form of economic decentralisation that actively encourages both community and ecological renewal. The British people weren’t offered that choice in the referendum. But it’s on offer out there in the real world.
In 2005, a group of Permaculture students from Kinsale Further Education College set a course for how their town of 7,000 people on the west coast of Ireland could transition to a better quality of life while dramatically reducing fossil fuel consumption. … Their plan was soon adopted by the Town Council of Kinsale, and when it was posted online, it quickly spread around the world as people everywhere embraced it as a groundbreaking tool for cultivating community-level sustainability and resilience.
