This story in Nature News about societal collapse in ancient Peru is worth noting, especially for this quote by one of the main researchers: Dramatic climactic events are always used to explain culture change in the Andes. But this is not satisfying based on what we know about human culture. It paints a picture of…Continue Reading…
This fascinating paper (sub req) in Nature on tipping points should have made a huge splash in the media. Hell, it should have at least prompted one of those 10,000 word posts on The Oil Drum. In her NSF press release, Cheryl Dybas does a nice job of summarizing the key findings. Here’s two snippets…Continue Reading…
There’s a fascinating, informative discussion thread on the dynamics of societal collapse over at The Oil Drum, prompted by a very readable 10,000 word essay on the fall of the Roman empire, cleverly entitled, “Peak Civilization.” This is really complicated stuff that the news media utterly fails to convey, preferring instead to focus on single-cause…Continue Reading…
I don’t agree with some of the classic examples cited, which I’ve previously discussed here, but nevertheless, this is an interesting thought experiment posed by Nate Hagens over at The Oil Drum: By definition, all previous ecosystem and non-human collapses were not ‘understood as collapse’ by those organisms alive during the collapse. Similarly, during historical…Continue Reading…
I’ve been traveling so I missed ABC’s big show last night, but if this criticism (below) is on target, then perhaps another missed opportunity… From a columnist at the SF Examiner: The evil that ABC did in broadcasting Earth 2100 will live on long after them. By presenting a fictional account of future global warming,…Continue Reading…
A news service of the U.N. that I find useful for its dispatches from developing countries asks, in an article, if there is a danger of “information overload” with the spate of alarming reports on the consequences of climate change, such as the most recent one released last week from the Global Humanitarian Forum. What…Continue Reading…
Some months ago, Joseph Tainter published a withering essay entitled, “Collapse, Sustainability, and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed.” The title is a clever play off of Jared Diamond’s 2005 best-seller. Anyone interested in an overview of collapse literature and a counter-perspective to the current popularizing of the concept should read Tainter’s…Continue Reading…
“What will a post-crash, truly 21st-century world look like? For people “¨thinking about global systems (economic, environmental, and social) “¨one idea stands out: resilience.”¨” So begins a must read piece in Fast Company by futurist Jamais Cascio. The concept of resilience, as defined by Cascio, means the capacity of an entity–such as a person, an “¨institution, or a…Continue Reading…