A Day to Listen – REALLY LISTEN – to Indigenous People The post A Day to Listen – REALLY LISTEN – to Indigenous People appeared first on Post Carbon Institute ..read more

  Polycrisis, Unraveling, Simplification, or Collapse: Coming Soon to a Planet Near You? The post Polycrisis, Unraveling, Simplification, or Collapse: Coming Soon to a Planet Near You? appeared first on Post Carbon Institute ..read more

A friend and I bought the house I live in. It was 2009. A sliver of a moment when the financial system tanked enough that this water/mountain view home in Langley — albeit homely and needing siding — could be had for under $150/sf. We called it SOL house. That stands for SOLar as we wanted to push it as far as we could to a passiv haus. And SOUL as we wanted to fill it with love and learning. And S.O.L., as in Shit Outta Luck, as in “man (sic) proposes, God disposes” or “whatever can go wrong will go wrong” or “the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.” The effort to do the r ..read more

The world’s shift away from its current reliance on fossil fuels will be the biggest, most expensive, and most complex technical project ever attempted by humans. If it fails, that might mean the end of industrial civilization. For it to succeed, enormous amounts of investment and effort, along with some shared sacrifice, will be required. These are the conclusions of key recent studies attempting to model the global energy transition. Energy is essential; it’s what enables us to do literally anything and everything we do. Fossil fuels, with their ability to store and deliver enormous amount ..read more

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Herman Daly, the father of ecological economics, who began writing about the absurdity of perpetual economic growth in the 1970s; Herman died on October 28 at age 84. Politicians and economists talk glowingly about growth. They want our cities and GDP to grow. Jobs, profits, companies, and industries all should grow; if they don’t, there’s something wrong, and we must identify the problem and fix it. Yet few discuss doubling time, even though it’s an essential concept for understanding growth. Doubling time helps us grasp the physical meaning of growt ..read more

Recently my wife Janet and I splurged on tickets to a spellbinding concert by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. The music was memorable, but a comment by orchestra leader and trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis proved even more so. Marsalis introduced a blues number with the seemingly off-hand suggestion that the blues should be America’s national anthem.[*] The audience laughed. But I, for one, took this as a serious and brilliant suggestion. It’s worth some discussion. The blues is a uniquely American (at first solely African-American) musical form. Unlike minstrel tunes and cakewalks, it wa ..read more

July 28 was EARTH OVERSHOOT DAY. On July 29 we went into ecological deficit. Humans have used the entire annual budget of resources that can replenished by nature. We entered overshoot ~ 40 years ago. When I saw the overshoot (and collapse) graph back then, I said “Holy Sh*t”. I’ve never been the same since, and have wondered why so few also had their hair on fire. Overshoot in context Before your eyes glaze over and you scroll on, I have some juicy context for you. This article exposes how capitalism benefits from reproduction. More people. More consumers. Mother nature be damned. Wha ..read more

As a way to introduce our new Advisors to our larger community, we’ve asked them to answer a question or two that gives us a better understanding of their background or how they approach their personal or professional lives. Our second profile is from Elizabeth Sawin, who answered the question: Do you have strategies that you can share that help you manage the burden of working with such heavy topics such as biodiversity loss and the climate crisis? I’ve worked on climate change for 25 years, and I have definitely felt the need to develop strategies to keep pursuing seemingly difficult goa ..read more

By Anna Ostermeier There’s a lot of bad news these days. Checking social media and news outlets can feel like being hit with wave after crashing wave of demoralizing stories on how our world is falling apart. The more involved you are in addressing pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change, white supremacy, homophobia, sexism, and other interconnected social and environmental issues, the more this constant influx may feel it’s pulling you under. This may be especially true if you’re directly impacted by them. As we collaboratively address these issues, and disrupt the underlying systems t ..read more

  Polycrisis, Unraveling, Simplification, or Collapse: Coming Soon to a Planet Near You? The post Polycrisis, Unraveling, Simplification, or Collapse: Coming Soon to a Planet Near You? appeared first on Post Carbon Institute ..read more