Buzz Holling – “On The Verge of a Systemic Crisis” An important quote from the father of resilience science – Buzz Holling (via Computing For Sustainability “Visualizing Sustainability“) Thomas Homer Dixon: “Why do you feel the world is verging on some kind of systemic crisis?” Buzz Holling: “There are three reasons,” he answered. “First, over the years my understanding of the adaptive cycle has improved, and I’ve also come to better understand how multiple adaptive cycles can be nested together-from small to large-to create a panarchy. I now believe that this theory tells us something quite general about the way complex systems, not just ecological systems, change over time. And collapse is usually part of the story.
The first response of many people hearing something like this is probably “that’s ridiculous chicken little propaganda.” But just because the so-called “techno-resource-market optimists” can claim isolated victories (in a world of continuously rising energy availability), doesn’t mean that the debate is over. Cheers, -a.j.m. “A Monkey Economy as Irrational as Ours” – Laurie Santos [TED Talk] A year or two ago, I came across a Wikipedia entry of all the known cognitive biases that human beings are subject to (link). Rather quickly, I concluded that these were all ways that our brains played tricks on us, and that in order to avoid making poor decisions, understanding this list would be crucial. Which brings me to the topic of this post. In the TED talk embedded below, Yale primate psychologist and behavioural economic researcher Laurie Santos discusses her research with Capuchin monkeys who have been trained to use a currency in exchange for food.
The fascinating thing about the experiments is that these monkeys (who split off from the human ancestral line ~35 million years ago), make many of the same mistakes that humans do when it comes to making decisions in the realm of economic calculation. It may come as a surprise to those haven’t studied some economics, but one of the core tenets of this faux-science, is that human beings are “rational, utility-maximizers.” Cheers, Gregor.us Repost – “The Federal Reserve Enters Decline” I forgot to publish this post when I first came across it back in August. In any case, it’s still relevant to the current environment and is reflective of thinking being done by groups like the Institute for Integrated Economic Research, people like Charlie Hall and his students at SUNY-ESF, and countless others mapping the energy-economy-nexus.
Excerpt Below via iTulip The Federal Reserve Enters Decline The Federal Reserve is an artifact of the Abundance Economics that have governed Western economies over the past 250 years. The credibility of the United States Federal Reserve is closely aligned with its ability to induce economic activity, by the provision of money and credit. There is another limit to the Fed’s provision of money and credit: and that is the quantity of debt already being carried in the economy.
The Federal Reserve is now in permanent, irreversible decline because it has no tools to fight both the limits placed on the economy by oil, and, current debt levels. -Gregor. David Korowicz – FEASTA Talk: “The Future Isn’t What it Used to Be” David Korowicz – Complexity, Economy, Civilisation & Collapse.
Posted: September 4, 2010 in Complexity, Energy Resources, Finance, Economics, Money, Overshoot & Collapse Tags: civilization, collapse, complexity, david-korowicz, economics, feasta, sustainability Embedded below is a great video by David Korowicz of the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (FEASTA). As with many of the resources I share on this blog, the following video explores the pressing concerns of today from the perspective of complex-adaptive systems theory.
Complexity is one of those things that most people “get” (at least intuitively) but about which very few people think systematically. Instead of trying to comprehend, cope with & adapt to complexity, many people’s response to it is just simply to ignore it or to minimize it. But, the law of requisite variety says that “if a system is to be stable the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled (wiki link).”
Additional Resources: Nate Hagens – “Energy, Resources, and Human Demand on a Full Planet” Posted: September 4, 2010 in Brain Sciences & Psychology, Energy Resources, Finance, Economics, Money, Key Works & Thinkers, Material Resources, Overshoot & Collapse Tags: energy, EROEI, EROI, financial-crisis, financial-system, nate-hagens, peak-oil, resource-scarcity, sustainability, videos Embedded below is a series of youtube clips from a talk given by one of my favourite thinkers – Nate Hagens.
The talk was given @ the University of Wisconsin in April 2009. I’ve said it before, but Hagens “gets it” better than almost everybody I’ve come across in my 3 or so years of pretty intense research on the various global threats in the 21st Century. The reason that I think Hagens has so much to offer those of us who care about what’s really going on in the world, is due to the relevancy of his background & experience. Check out the videos below to get a good big picture overview of the supply & demand side factors relevant in the Peak Oil/Limits to Growth debate.
Like this: Like Loading... Niall Ferguson: An Evolutionary Approach to Financial History [FORA.tv Video] Embedded below is a short clip from a FORA.tv video of a lecture given by Harvard economic historian & theorist Niall Ferguson. Ferguson discusses many topics which are of interest to this blog – non-linear dynamics and complex systems in the realm of money, finance & economics. Looking at the economy & financial markets through the lens of evolutionary processes provides valuable insights.
For example, Ferguson references Schumpeter as well as other pioneering thinkers on the intersection of the natural world / evolutionary processes and the monetary/economic/financial worlds. Those who recognize that markets & economies are complex systems, who also understand what complex systems are and how they work, are really the only people who are even getting close to an approximation of reality. Here’s the clip: Below is a list of the topics Ferguson discusses in his lecture. (From Full Lecture Available Here): Professor Niall Ferguson offers an evolutionary approach to financial history.
Repost from Overcoming Bias Blog – “Dvorsky Matures” Matt Simmons – A Peak Oil Pioneer Passes. On August 8th, 2010, long-time energy industry veteran and Peak Oil educator Matthew Simmons passed away. Simmons was one of the first names I picked up on when I first learned about Peak Oil back in 2007. After having watched the documentary “A Crude Awakening” which had several minutes of interview footage with Simmons, I realized that this guy knew his stuff. The more I dug into Simmons’ work, the more I knew that this was someone worth paying attention to. Surely, as many have pointed out, Simmons was outspoken on a lot of things, sometimes to the point of hyperbole, but this should not discredit the immense amount of valuable work & advocacy that Matt Simmons did to raise awareness of Peak Oil.
Personally, I know that I will miss his leadership, even though I never met the man. Additional Resources: Financial Sense Newshour Tribute to Matt Simmons (link – tribute begins @ 17:50 mark): From FSN Description: The Ocean Energy Institute (link) Like this: Like Loading... Charles Eisenstein – Interview for Money & Life Film. Idea Sex. I’ll expand on this post later, but just wanted to share this TED talk by Matt Ridley – author of The Rational Optimist. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 3 years researching what many would call the “doomer” or “pessimist” perspective. As such, I thought it would be a good idea to spend some time in the optimists camp – just to be philosophically balanced. Admittedly, I’m still skeptical of the optimists – but I’m open to being convinced otherwise. Just as I’ve tried to focus on the strongest arguments put forth by skeptical/pessimist thinkers, I’m hoping to do the same thing, but on the other end of the spectrum.
Namely, by finding the most well argued position for optimism. Matt Ridley seems like a decent place to start. I’ll add more detail & commentary when I’ve had a chance to re-watch this TED talk, but for now, here’s a quick excerpt from Ridley’s blog post “Intergalactic Idea Sex” which helps give the gist of what the video above is all about: Like this: Like Loading... David Suzuki on Permaculture. “What permaculturists are doing is (some of) the most important activity that any group is doing on the planet. We don’t know what the details of a truly sustainable future are going to be like, but we need options. We need people experimenting in all kinds of ways and permaculturists are one of the critical groups that are doing that”.
~Dr. David Suzuki, Geneticist, Renowned Environmentalist and Broadcaster h/t to Australian Story Artist Nick O’Sullivan for this awesome drawing of David Suzuki (link to O’Sullivan’s blog – with lots of other great pics) Additional Resources: Like this: Like Loading... What Is Catagenesis? In his book “The Upside of Down – Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization,” Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon uses the term catagenesis to describe “the creative renewal of our technologies, institutions, and societies in the aftermath of breakdown.”
This apparent paradox – the notion of renewal being intimately connected with breakdown – is actually a profoundly important dynamic with a long & distinguished intellectual history. We see it in the Hindu religion with the “Hindu Triad” or the “Great Trinity“ which Wikipedia describes as “a concept in Hinduism in which the cosmic functions of creation, maintenance, and destruction are personified by the forms of Brahmā the creator, Vishnu the maintainer or preserver, and Śhiva the destroyer or transformer. We see it in Nietzsche’s writings and his assertion that we can only destroy as creators. We see it in the field of ecology with Buzz Holling & Lance Gunderson’s theory of panarchy & the adaptive cycle of change. Like this: The Rational Optimist. If I am to be epistemologically honest with myself and with those reading this blog, I can’t ignore the optimists.
Although I’m not entirely convinced by the arguments made by the so-called “optimists”, that’s probably because I’ve mostly been reading the work of the so-called “pessimists” (who of course would call themselves realists). But therein lies a big problem with the so-called “pessimists” – they often only pay attention to other pessimists. Which also happens to be a big problem with the so-called optimists – they often only pay attention to other optimists. Echo-chambers exist on both sides of the optimism-pessimism continuum. I think we’d all do ourselves a big favour if we could swallow our pride for a minute, and give a little more time & attention to those with opposing viewpoints. And so, in this post, I wanted to share a promo video for a book that appears to make a cogent argument for the “optimists” case.
Ma’ Nature hooks us up…big time. Like this: Like Loading... Krishnamurti. Build Em’ Tall Just Before the Fall.