Sam Judd: Valuable poop - The Changing World. New Zealand wastewater treatment plants (which account for 85%) of our wastewater) produce 234,112 tonnes of sewage sludge each year. This figure is rising annually as treatment plants are upgraded - more of this filth is captured rather than poured into the ocean - which is good. But what to do with this increasing tide of stinky sludge? 79,440 tonnes of this solid human waste is very expensively disposed of in our ever-growing landfills each year and the rest is "diverted". The vast majority is used in land reclamation - which the Ministry for the Environment calls a "beneficial use" of the material. Studies show that reclaiming land with sewage sludge can release heavy metals, ammonium and nitrates into the ground, which carries serious environmental risks.
I remember playing rugby as a youngster on an old landfill with grass on top (Ian Galloway Park) - every time I was rucked and suffered a scrape - it ballooned infectiously red immediately and whenever it rained, the place stank. The Economics of Enough – Is ‘Listening’ the new Black? | The Culture Concept Circle. Mayhem on Markets…said The Age headlines – Stocks dive on global fears.
Sharemarket sheds $55 bn Down down, ‘markets’ are down! Culturally, and in so many other ways innovative and tracking technology has ensured that we are all now connected, whether we like it or not. While we all have to look to our own countries first, it is blatantly obvious that economic recovery in the next few years hinges on a real dialogue taking place between all nations, which includes planning for action if people and our cultures and societies are to achieve real outcomes.
Since the aftermath of World War II, when the ‘baby boomer’ generation grew up with higher expectations than their parents and grandparents, the following X and Y generation embraced ‘brand’ values as a marker of celebrity status. So is the new black now really red? What happened on a huge scale certainly reflects a total collapse of confidence in global human economic activity as it stands today.
Reimagining Capitalism - Polly LaBarre. GreenBiz.com. Happiness Is The Ultimate Economic Indicator. One factor that is increasingly being cited as an important economic indicator is happiness. After all, what good is increased production and consumption if the result isn’t increased human satisfaction? Until fairly recently, the subject of happiness was mostly avoided by economists for lack of good ways to measure it; however, in recent years, “happiness economists” have found ways to combine subjective surveys with objective data (on lifespan, income, and education) to yield data with consistent patterns, making a national happiness index a practical reality.
In The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being, former Harvard University president Derek Bok traces the history of the relationship between economic growth and happiness in America. Ironically, perhaps, this realization dawned first not in America, but in the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Achieving Sustainable Development for the Global Economy. What's the Latest Development? The global economy is on an unsustainable path. In other words, it cannot supply the resources required by future generations while preserving an ecosystem in which we can all live healthily. By 2030, the world's population will require 50 percent more food, 45 percent more energy and 30 percent more water. A narrow set of interests that produces inequality, both within and between countries, has superseded common interests and common responsibilities, says the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Global Sustainability.
What's the Big Idea? What concrete steps can be taken to make the common good a legitimate policy goal? We must measure the full ecological and human toll of economic growth. Photo credit: shutterstock.com. Big Ideas For A New Economy: Social Currency Unleashed. In last week’s article we suggested alternative currency was one of the "next big things” for the new economy. In particular, Bitcoin has enabled an explosion of interest in alternative currency. But what can Bitcoin’s approach and scale teach us about the future of such currencies? While Bitcoin has been successful, local currency movements have never truly taken hold. So what are the drivers of Bitcoin’s success? For those of you following along at home, Bitcoin is a new breed of currency (this is a great primer). After a series of failed Internet-currency dotcoms in the 1990s (Beenz anyone?
The Achilles heel of these startups was actually their own existence; if they failed, the currency doesn’t just lose some value, it stops working completely. Bitcoin provides something different. This is, of course, great for all sorts of things. Like any other good privacy technology, this cuts both ways. Water Conserve Action Alerts. The Problem with the Profit Motive in Finance - Justin Fox. 5 Big Ideas For A New Economy. An exciting moment is upon us, where some of the assumptions that have long governed our economy are beginning to unravel. There is the possibility that we could come out of this recession with a new concept of what the economy is, who it serves, and how it works.
Reflecting on history, we know that moments for truly re-thinking the economy are scarce. The replacement of mercantilism with liberal economic theory was such a moment. The Keynesian revolution was another. But where will this current moment of crisis take us? The truth is that it is actually up to us to decide what is to be on the menu of new economic thinking; what ideas take hold, what solutions gain staying power. Shift from outsourcing to insourcing A few weeks ago, the White House hosted a forum on “insourcing”--the idea of keeping jobs that would normally go overseas in America--with an aim to bring jobs back to the United States and stimulate local and regional economies. Access the wealth of the (hyper) local.
Al Gore and David Blood: A Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism. UN project shows how trees help halt desertification. 20 June 2011Last updated at 17:22 By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News Tree planting can help halt the loss of arable land to the encroaching desert A UN-led pilot scheme hopes to highlight how trees can help people in arid zone, considered to one of the most hostile habitats on the planet.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Acacia project's goal is to show how trees provide, food, fuel, shelter and income during times of hardship. So far, six nations - including Senegal and Sudan - have hosted tree planting schemes for at-risk communities. Drylands cover 30% of the Earth's land area, and are found in 100 nations. "People do not often associate forests with arid areas, yet they are critical in terms of soil protection, mitigating climate change, maintaining biodiversity etc," said Eduardo Rojas, FAO's assistant director general. "In terms of supporting livelihoods for local communities, forests are very important, " he told BBC News.
Roots of hope 'Funding drought' The Next Global Economy Asks Companies To Create More Than Just Profit. The global economy is a human construct--a tool. And every so often, it gets radically updated, as it did after World War II at the historic Bretton Woods conference, where a new global monetary and financial architecture was laid down. Already, economists at governments, universities, and international agencies are hard at work laying the groundwork for the next global economy. Its contours? New systems of national accounts that explicitly count not just gross product, but the full spectrum of wealth creation. I’ve called for countries to build national balance sheets, that take into account more than just GDP.
Some countries are already taking baby steps in that very direction, and when they get there, the terms of an authentically beneficial human exchange will change, probably radically. Here’s what the new rules of competition might force you to conclude. Poiesis--the root word of poetry--means to create, to generate. Merely capturing more rent can never yield a surplus. Will the End of Oil Mean the End of Growth? - Environment. It’ll be nice when this recession is over and the economy starts chugging along again. When GDP resumes its ordained upward trajectory. When we finally get back to growth. After all, the economy should always be growing, right? Well, maybe not. As you probably heard, the world’s population raced past the 7-billion mark sometime in the last few weeks. In the early 1970s a team of young scientists at MIT set out to answer that question. Their findings appeared in a 1972 book called .
But here’s the scary thing: The model has been pretty reliable so far. So when will we hit the limit of economic growth? The standard view among economists is that economic growth doesn’t depend on any given resource. Gail Tverberg, an actuary and energy analyst, thinks this oil shortage is going to keep us mired in recession for a long time to come. We should take that possibility seriously. Clearly, a prolonged period without economic growth would be rough.
And if they don’t? Capitalism’s future part 1: Why we can’t ignore a rethink. We’ve heard it being said many times, especially on a Sunday afternoon National Geographic special, “You can remove all animals from earth and man won’t survive but remove man and animals will survive.” Whilst it does wonders in stirring up a fuzzy feeling towards the animal kingdom with regards to how great and apparently self sustaining they are, at the same time it has the power to remove fuzzy logic that our decision making equates to that of the animal kingdom and that we can live as we please and all should be fine. No one quite transforms like humans. Whether we consciously live by it or not, all our decisions have a transformational impact on everything around us. As the world of capitalism has been shaken now for the umpteenth time, and this shake brought with it a few more tremors than before, even as a proponent it is hard not to pause for thought at exactly what this system propagates.
Creating value was once synonymous with the increase of the bottom line. Plexus Institute: Thursday Complexity Post Global Economies. New Network Study Suggests Tight Connectivity in Global Economies is Inevitable and Dangerous Author: Prucia Buscell If there is indeed a tiny elite with disproportionate control over the world economy, it may be more a matter of science than conspiracy, new research suggests. A study by complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology analyzes the relationships among 43,000 international corporations and identifies a small tightly interconnected group that wields exceptional global power. The Swiss researchers used mathematical modeling used in studying natural systems to analyze comprehensive corporate data of ownership among the world's transnational corporations. "Our analysis is reality based. " Concentration of power isn't a bad thing in itself, the team says, implying that greed and corruption are not inevitable.
The study has its critics. Catch up on all the complexity posts from the last quarter - Q3 Complexity Posts - or listen to an archived PlexusCall. Eliminative Materialism. First published Thu May 8, 2003; substantive revision Tue Apr 16, 2013 Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist.
Descartes famously challenged much of what we take for granted, but he insisted that, for the most part, we can be confident about the content of our own minds. Eliminative materialists go further than Descartes on this point, since they challenge the existence of various mental states that Descartes took for granted. 1. A Brief History In principle, anyone denying the existence of some type of thing is an eliminativist with regard to that type of thing. Nevertheless, contemporary eliminative materialism—the sort of eliminativism that denies the existence of specific types of mental states—is a relatively new theory with a very short history. 2. 2.1 Folk Psychology and the Theory-Theory 3. Conscious Capitalism: Accelerating the Integration of Consciousness & Capitalism™ Logout. Blueeconomy: Green Economy 2.0 -The Community functions as a platform for companies, innovators and scientists. The Future of Management: Is it Deja vu all over again?
If you are a regular reader of the MIX, you probably already have a point of view on the future of management. Indeed, the MIX was created to help accelerate the evolution of management, so chances are you have already bought into the argument that we are going through a period of upheaval that will transform the way we work in organizations in the years ahead. I hope and believe this argument is right. And in future blog posts on this site I will discuss examples of some of the changes in management that are currently underway. But let me develop a contrarian line of argument first, before offering a synthesis. Here's the problem with all this talk of virtual and networked organizations, and this vision of empowered and engaged employees.
We see the massive changes underway in technology and connectivity, and we assume that these changes will drive change in how we work. So there is an enduring puzzle that we need to come to grips with. Why is this? I see four interlinked reasons: Intertemporal Selfishness. It turns out that we have widely varying levels of psychological connectness to our future selves, and the ‘me’ of today is more likely to defer rewards to the future if there is a belief that the ‘me’ of a distant tomorrow will be very like today’s.
Daniel Bartels and Oleg Urminsky explore this intertemporal selfishness, by setting contexts where experimental subjects are led to believe that their future selves will have changed drastically. In such cases, the subjects are much less likely to defer rewards, and more likely to consume them in the near term. This is explored using the idea of discount rates: subjects’ willingness to discount rewards by comsuming them in the near term increases as their sense on connection to a future ‘me’ decreases. I suppose that the sense of connectedness with future groups — families, communities, nations — plays an important role in our willingness to defer rewards for their benefit. (via James Warren) related articles.
UN releases blueprint for ‘green’ economic growth. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) today announced that it had drafted a blueprint for transitioning the world to a greener future while preserving – and potentially even accelerating – predicted economic growth. The UPEP report, Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication, called for investing $1.3 trillion a year (approximately 2 percent of yearly world GDP) into ten key sectors: agriculture, buildings, energy, fisheries, forestry, industry, tourism, transport, waste, and water. Governments already spend between 1-2 percent of subsidizing fossil fuels and unsustainable fisheries, the report notes. The UN believes that trillions of dollars in private capital will follow public investments. The report cited multiple examples of how “green” initiatives can effectively fight poverty in the developing world.
There is mounting evidence that “green” initiatives can indeed propel economic growth, despite aggressive rhetoric to the contrary. Study: When it comes to corporate sustainability, it doesn’t pay to wait. Redefining Progress. A Better Way to Win: Profiting from Purpose. Conscious Capitalism | Join the Movement. Interviews Home Page.