From SHIFT: My Three-Part Series on Complexity and Collapse

complex predicament map export

Graphic courtesy of SHIFT Magazine (click on the graphic to view full-screen)

The third and final part of my series of articles on complexity and collapse is now up on the SHIFT Magazine site. Here’s a synopsis of all three parts, with links to the online versions of the articles:

Part One: The Energy Predicament

 A look at our global energy and resource systems, and the complex relationship between resource prices, regulation, exploration, supply and demand, and how they are pushing us towards disastrous resource exhaustion. An overview of how the three systems — energy/resource, economic and ecological/climate — are related.

Part Two: The Economic Predicament

The complexities of our global economic systems, and an exploration of whether, although it won’t ‘save’ civilization, the dismantling or crumbling of our current industrial growth economy, sooner rather than later, might lessen the hardship and suffering of drastic climate change that we and our descendants are likely to face.

Part Three: The Ecological Predicament

How our biosphere is yet another complex system, a look at some of the latest climate change scenarios, and an attempt to paint a picture of a future world as much warmer than our planet is today as it was colder at the coldest point in the “ice ages” of Earth’s recent past – and posing the question, in the face of this grim certainty, what a rational, useful, human response might be.

The three articles together constitute a sort of manifesto on complexity and the futility of attempting to change these three, massive, global, interconnected systems — and what we can do instead.

Please take a look at some of the other excellent articles in the first three editions of the new magazine, and if you like what you see, please let the editors know, and consider subscribing. They’re doing some great stuff.

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1 Response to From SHIFT: My Three-Part Series on Complexity and Collapse

  1. Pingback: On Complexity and Collapse » Murray J. Brown

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