Reading Nature’s Signals

Andy Revkin had asked the question on Twitter:
Revkin
Thomas Edison, with energy breakthroughs, “invented the 20th century.” Who’ll invent the 21st? http://shar.es/m8ziQ #energy #innovation
The way nature engineers her highly dramatic smooth changes in complex systems, her “punctuated equilibria”, is to begin with explosive reorganization and energy flows.
The “catch” is that initial spurt is also their end, […]

It’s to end the automatic use of any successful promise for financially profitable returns to multiply future promises for profitable returns. The problem is that money driven process of multiplying promises for what we can do with the earth, and compelling attempts to deliver them, is naturally destabilizing for physical systems.
There was a recent No-Growth […]

There’s been a fascinating discussion on the Monbiot Discussions of the Biblical model of nature as controlled by an authoritarian master, given to humans for us to “be fruitful and multiply” our “dominion” over and “domesticate” (both English words from the same Latin and older roots), and so treat as part of our household and […]

In comments on a discussion of “economics as if people and the earth mattered” in a NEF blog post Clever thinking about how we think, Dave Chester offered a concise statement on the scinetific method of reasoning, concluding:
The most famous saying which fails this test is “I think therefore I Exist” (Descarte). Better to claim […]

There’s been a lively exchange on GRIST around “Who’s to blame for the Gulf oil gusher?”
MimiK on 10 JUN 2010 8:59AM said:
EVERYONE: This whole issue, and ALL the comments, are all stuck on the same problem: the gap between what we THINK about what we are doing what we are actually DOING.
There is a LOT […]