This may sound harsh in a world with so much human suffering, so unequally distributed. So, let us be clear: This analysis does not minimize or trivialize that suffering. Nor does this analysis ignore or minimize the moral and political failures that exacerbate it. We will say this over and over, so there can be no misunderstanding: Strategies for a sustainable human presence must involve holding the wealthy and powerful accountable for damage done, and moving toward a more equitable distribution of wealth and power. Those goals are desirable independent of ecological realities. Those realities also mean, as a starting point, a commitment to a downpowering and an acceptance of limits, which is necessary for a withering away of the growth economy, which is necessary for long-term survival. Call it “degrowth” or “steady state economics” or “doughnut economics.” Advocates for different approaches will disagree about specifics of policy proposals, but there is a growing awareness of the need to talk about limits. That starts with recognizing the need to transcend capitalism and the current politics designed to serve capitalists, in pursuit of an equitable distribution of wealth within planetary boundaries. Those of us living in the more affluent sectors of the world should not try to evade these moral assessments and political obligations. Time for a summary of our assessment: The human species faces multiple cascading social and ecological crises that will not be solved by virtuous individuals making moral judgments of others’ failures or by frugal people exhorting the profligate to lower their consumption. Things are bad, getting worse, and getting worse faster than we expected. This is happening not just because of a few bad people or bad systems, though there are plenty of people doing bad things in bad systems that reward people for doing those bad things. At the core of the problem is our human-carbon nature, the scramble for energy-rich carbon that defines life. Technological innovations can help us cope, but that will not indefinitely forestall the dramatic changes that will test our ability to hold onto our humanity in the face of dislocation and deprivation. Although the worst effects of the crises are being experienced today in developing societies, more affluent societies aren’t exempt indefinitely. Ironically, in those more developed societies with greater dependency on high-energy/high-technology, the eventual crash might be the most unpredictable and disruptive. Affluent people tend to know the least about how to get by on less. A lot of past talk of population control has been based in white supremacy, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the question of what’s a sustainable population. That’s the kind of thing that people have bristled against. We don’t have a solution. But the fact that there aren’t easy and obvious solutions doesn’t mean that you can ignore the issue.”

Review: An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson and Robert

Scale, scope and speed refer, respectively, to the natural size limit of human social groups, the maximum technological level of a sustainable industrial infrastructure and the speed with which humanity must undergo its transition toward a sustainable society. The authors cite 150 people as the natural size limit of a human community, a figure rooted in human cognitive capacity and known as “Dunbar’s number.” They argue compellingly for an industrial infrastructure that is technologically simpler and far less energy-intensive than today’s. As for the speed with which we must shift our society onto a sustainable path, they say we need to do so “faster than we have been and faster than it appears we are capable of.” Right now we don’t seem to have the inclination or the ability to structure our basic econ sub-systems (ag, energy, materials, mfg’g) such that they repair and replenish .vs. degrade and disperse. By stopping scientific progress, you and your children will not see a cure for cancer (example only) This shouldn’t be a surprising claim. All organisms adapt to, and are shaped by, their places. There is no reason that humans should be exempt from that observation. While it’s true that humans’ physiology and cognitive capacity allow us to live almost anywhere on land on Earth, that doesn’t mean that geography has no relevance in how we have organized societies and developed new technologies. b. the ability, or not, to return materials to the place they originated. Does nature do “transport”? Geology does transport, the water cycle and rivers do transport, and that’s about it. Everything else is returned to almost the same place it was sourced. Nature recycles, re-uses, wrings every last bit of energy and nutrition from what it sources, and all of the materials are replenished via energy harvested from the sun, via plants, to feed the cycle anew. Local can recycle, but once and done linear global/national supply chains cannot do this.Nothing we have argued relieves individuals or societies of moral accountability for unjust and unsustainable actions. We cannot know precisely what level of determinism is at play in our lives, but we can continue to assess our choices and act according to moral principles of dignity, solidarity, and equality. But as we judge human failures—our own and of others—and take corrective action, we should remember to be humble.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse with Bob Jensen (Bonus episode of An Inconvenient Apocalypse with Bob Jensen (Bonus episode of

My definition of an “economy” is “how and from where do you get what you need to operate your household”. Those waste piles can be processed into useable fuel once pesky political hurdles are cleared. The great irony of the present moment is France’s near total dependence on nuclear energy coupled with the fact that it has no capacity to deal with spent fuel, and has allowed over a 1/3rd of its power plants to be shutdown due to deferred maintenance.

Herman Daly’s work was actually recognized and then promptly dismissed by one Lawrence Summers of the World Bank, who maintained that placing the “economy” within the ecosphere was “not the way to think about it.” No surprise there from the John Bates Clark Medal awardee of 1993. John Bates Clark was a teacher of Thorstein Veblenat Carleton College in the 1870s. This little fact makes me smile.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse - Daniel Pinchbeck’s Newsletter An Inconvenient Apocalypse - Daniel Pinchbeck’s Newsletter

Eastern religions–DLG points to Buddhism and I’d point to the Tao te Ching, do not attribute some sort of personal relationship between any living individual and the Cosmos. The Tao te Ching puts it this way: On handling it: It’s easy for people—ourselves included—to project our own fears onto others, to cover up our own inability to face difficult realities by suggesting the deficiency is in others. Both of us have given lectures or presented this perspective to friends and been told, “I agree with your assessment, but you shouldn’t say it publicly because people can’t handle it.” It’s never entirely clear who is in the category of “people.” Who are these people who are either cognitively or emotionally incapable of engaging these issues? These allegedly deficient folks are sometimes called “the masses,” implying a category of people not as smart as the people who are labeling them as such. We assume that whenever someone asserts that “people can’t handle it,” the person speaking really is confessing “I can’t handle it.” Rather than confront their own limitations, many find it easier to displace their fears onto others. There are no known biologically based differences in intellectual, psychological, or moral attributes between human populations from different regions of the world. There is individual variation within any human population in a particular place (obviously, individuals in any society differ in a variety of traits). But there are no meaningful biologically base differences between populations in the way people are capable of thinking, feeling, or making decisions. We are one species. We are all basically the same animal. Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, and individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption. By supporting getting rid of technology which creates food production,.you and your children will starvea. An architecture, or “design”. What are the sources, flows, transformations, and relationships between sub-systems (ag, energy, transport, mfg’g, use, mat’l reclamation, and re-use). Those source and flow characteristics should look a lot like how the natural world behaves