All Over But the Shouting: A new and exhaustive joint scientific study shows that species biodiversity on Earth has plummeted almost a third in the past 35 years, and the pace of extinction is accelerating. Transition Towns as Model Intentional Communities: I’ve written before about the Transition Towns model: Dramatically reduce dependence on oil and dramatically reduce carbon footprint. The list of such towns has grown, especially in the UK where the model began. Thanks to Rimu for the link. Rebirth of an Intentional Community: “This time not just a collective house, but a kind of collective urban farmstead, a demonstration project of sustainability, a public/private place where people could learn and teach all the practices of sustainability from rainwater catchment and permaculture to consensus decision-making and conflict resolution.” We’ll be watching, Liz. Do We Suffer from Environmental Amnesia?: “Maybe weíre now spending so much more time with consumer objects than with our natural environments that we have forgotten how to think about them. Sport water bottles are real to us but creekbeds are fuzzy concepts…Or maybe our unremembering is a wall against grief…That drive-through over there was once the field where, every recess, my sister and Danelle and I ran, circling and whinnying like wild, wild horses.” The Unraveling of Chinese Culture: “Dujiangyan’s wreckage today stands as a tragic monument to a culture that turned its back on its remarkable and glittering history.” The author doesn’t explain why China has done so; perhaps the answer to that could be the answer to why our civilization is now beyond saving. A Second Life Music Video: For those who don’t have the patience to learn Second Life’s unintuitive technology sufficiently to use the tool, here’s a video from Chouchou that shows the artistic potential of virtual world technologies (screen cap above) at their best. Thanks to Mia for the link :-) What Happens After Foreclosure?: Well, you put all your stuff into self-storage, and then, when you can’t pay the self-storage bill either, the self-storage company seizes all your stuff and sells it for $150, so they can rent the space to the next person who’s lost their home. Tom Tancredo Wants a Fence Between US and Canada: I wondered when the wingnuts would get wind of the reality of the incompetence of Canadian immigration authorities. But it can’t even come close to that of US immigration authorities, empowered by Bush to make life and death decisions about visitors on their own personal whims. Answering the PETA Challenge for Invention of Commercial-Grade Scalable In Vitro Meat: Last week I mentioned that PETA is offering $1 million for such an invention, to eliminate the need for factory farms. Jon Husband pointed me to a consortium already working on this. “An environmentally friendly cultured meat technology rests on four basic premises: (1) the culturing of muscle progenitor cells from farm animals of choice that are able to proliferate at a high rate, (2) the application of a growth medium that does not contain animal products, (3) the efficient differentiation of the progenitor cells into muscle cells that contain all nutrients present in conventional meat, and (4) the organisation of the muscle cells into 3-dimensional muscle structures.” Nothing to it. More here. Thought for the Week: I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself innature.
– Albert Einstein, The World As I See It |
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Collapse Watch:
Hope — On the Balance of Probabilities
The Caste War for the Dregs
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Collapse Not Apocalypse
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Post Collapse with Michael Dowd (video)
Why Economic Collapse Will Precede Climate Collapse
Being Adaptable: A Reminder List
A Culture of Fear
What Will It Take?
A Future Without Us
Dean Walker Interview (video)
The Mushroom at the End of the World
What Would It Take To Live Sustainably?
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Beyond Belief
Complexity and Collapse
Requiem for a Species
Civilization Disease
What a Desolated Earth Looks Like
If We Had a Better Story...
Giving Up on Environmentalism
The Hard Part is Finding People Who Care
Going Vegan
The Dark & Gathering Sameness of the World
The End of Philosophy
A Short History of Progress
The Boiling Frog
Our Culture / Ourselves:
A CoVid-19 Recap
What It Means to be Human
A Culture Built on Wrong Models
Understanding Conservatives
Our Unique Capacity for Hatred
Not Meant to Govern Each Other
The Humanist Trap
Credulous
Amazing What People Get Used To
My Reluctant Misanthropy
The Dawn of Everything
Species Shame
Why Misinformation Doesn't Work
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The Right to Die
CoVid-19: Go for Zero
Pollard's Laws
On Caste
The Process of Self-Organization
The Tragic Spread of Misinformation
A Better Way to Work
The Needs of the Moment
Ask Yourself This
What to Believe Now?
Rogue Primate
Conversation & Silence
The Language of Our Eyes
True Story
May I Ask a Question?
Cultural Acedia: When We Can No Longer Care
Useless Advice
Several Short Sentences About Learning
Why I Don't Want to Hear Your Story
A Harvest of Myths
The Qualities of a Great Story
The Trouble With Stories
A Model of Identity & Community
Not Ready to Do What's Needed
A Culture of Dependence
So What's Next
Ten Things to Do When You're Feeling Hopeless
No Use to the World Broken
Living in Another World
Does Language Restrict What We Can Think?
The Value of Conversation Manifesto Nobody Knows Anything
If I Only Had 37 Days
The Only Life We Know
A Long Way Down
No Noble Savages
Figments of Reality
Too Far Ahead
Learning From Nature
The Rogue Animal
How the World Really Works:
Making Sense of Scents
An Age of Wonder
The Truth About Ukraine
Navigating Complexity
The Supply Chain Problem
The Promise of Dialogue
Too Dumb to Take Care of Ourselves
Extinction Capitalism
Homeless
Republicans Slide Into Fascism
All the Things I Was Wrong About
Several Short Sentences About Sharks
How Change Happens
What's the Best Possible Outcome?
The Perpetual Growth Machine
We Make Zero
How Long We've Been Around (graphic)
If You Wanted to Sabotage the Elections
Collective Intelligence & Complexity
Ten Things I Wish I'd Learned Earlier
The Problem With Systems
Against Hope (Video)
The Admission of Necessary Ignorance
Several Short Sentences About Jellyfish
Loren Eiseley, in Verse
A Synopsis of 'Finding the Sweet Spot'
Learning from Indigenous Cultures
The Gift Economy
The Job of the Media
The Wal-Mart Dilemma
The Illusion of the Separate Self, and Free Will:
No Free Will, No Freedom
The Other Side of 'No Me'
This Body Takes Me For a Walk
The Only One Who Really Knew Me
No Free Will — Fightin' Words
The Paradox of the Self
A Radical Non-Duality FAQ
What We Think We Know
Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark
Healing From Ourselves
The Entanglement Hypothesis
Nothing Needs to Happen
Nothing to Say About This
What I Wanted to Believe
A Continuous Reassemblage of Meaning
No Choice But to Misbehave
What's Apparently Happening
A Different Kind of Animal
Happy Now?
This Creature
Did Early Humans Have Selves?
Nothing On Offer Here
Even Simpler and More Hopeless Than That
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We Have No Choice
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Letting Go of the Story of Me
All There Is, Is This
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Your Self: An Owner's Manual (Satire)
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