Bookshelf
John Michael Greer writes: We are about to witness the disintegration of everything that counts as business as usual, and the opening phases of a bleak new reality that author Frank Landis has sketched out in his Hot Earth Dreams—a brilliant fictional take on what the world will look like in the wake of severe climate change….
Read More about Bookshelf: Hot Earth Dreams by Hank Landis
ALTERNATIVES
Many parts of India is in the grip of severe drought, some for the third consecutive year, leading to growing hunger, mass migration, water conflicts and farmer suicides. We present four well-known voices – Yogendra Yadav, Jean Dreze, Sunita Narain and the late Anil Agarwal – on India’s perennial drought problem, its causes and possible solutions….
Read More about Four critical voices on India’s perennial drought problem
CLIMATE CRISIS
The Indian Express reports: The Global Integrated Drought Monitoring and Prediction System (GIDMaPS) map shows large patches of dry areas in every continent, indicating droughts of varying severity. The GIDMaPS is a drought monitoring and prediction system that provides near real-time drought information based on multiple drought indicators and input data sets, mostly from NASA….
Read More about Drought Digest: Dry planet: In every continent, flashing redALTERNATIVES
Disobedience is the story of the struggle to save the world. Disobedience tells the David vs Goliath tales of front line leaders around the world risking life and limb in the fight for a liveable climate. Interwoven with this riveting verité footage are the most renowned voices in the global conversation around social movements and climate justice…
Read More about Video: Disobedience – The rise of the global fossil fuel resistance
Transhumanity.net
Economy
Klaus Schwab writes: A technological revolution is fundamentally altering the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, its unlike anything humankind has experienced before. We do not yet know just how it will unfold, but the response to it must involve all stakeholders of the global polity….
Read More about ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’: What it means and how to respond
Nesta.org.uk
ALTERNATIVES
Rob O’ Grady explains why none of the existing large-scale systems —be they capitalist or communist— would work. For a community to function well, it must resolve conflicts as they arise. It can only operate if we personally know every other person. This limits the maximum size of the community to Dunbar’s Number—around 150 individuals….
Read More about Bookshelf: 150 Strong – A Pathway to a Different FutureEconomy
The physics of energy and the economy evokes some trepidation. An economy seems to be a dissipative system, but what does this really mean? Not many people understand dissipative systems, and very few understand how an economy operates. The combination leads to an awfully lot of false beliefs about the energy needs of an economy….
Read More about Gail Tverberg: The Physics of Energy and the Economy
Economy
Ugo Bardi writes: Something like Trump was unavoidable. He is best defined as the visible effect of the ongoing social phase transition. A symptom of the ongoing breakdown of the social pact in the West. A discrete change in our path in the direction of collapse, in turn precipitated by depletion of resources, especially energy….
Read More about Connecting the rise of Donald Trump with global resource depletion
Bookshelf
Martin Simpson writes: It is impossible to read Farmageddon without coming to the conclusion that the world’s food and agriculture system is screwed. This is a system that produces enormous quantities of food, yet wastes up to a third of it… What it also produces is environmental disaster, ill health in humans and stressful and unhealthy animals….
Read More about Bookshelf: Farmageddon – The True Cost of Cheap Meat
Mashable.com
Education/Awareness
George Dvorsky writes: Last year, SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk warned that Artificial Intelligence could “take over the world”. The day when machines become smarter than humans has never appeared closer— yet we seem no closer in grasping the implications of this epochal event. Indeed, we are clinging to some serious—and even dangerous—misconceptions about artificial intelligence….
Read More about Everything you know about Artificial Intelligence is wrong
Charterforcompassion.org
Economy
William Robinson writes: The celebrated economist Thomas Piketty has argued for a global tax on capital and redistribution through tax reform. This reformist approach to global inequality is entirely inadequate because it bypasses the questions of power and of corporate control over the planet’s productive resources that are at the very heart of global capitalism and its crisis….
Read More about Reform is not enough to stem the rising tide of inequality worldwideBookshelf
Kurt Cobb writes: Latour understands that the natural world — which politics has always held at arm’s length while nevertheless dealing daily with nature’s demands — must now explicitly invite that natural world to the bargaining table. This is not about being a “nature lover” who only cares about animals and plants, but not about humans….
Read More about Bookshelf: The Politics of Nature by Bruno Latour
"The Logic of Neo-Liberalism"
John Ledger
Bookshelf
George Monbiot writes: So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom recognise it as an ideology. We accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power….
Read More about Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems
Amit Verma/Forbes India
Economy
Debarshi Das writes: The neoliberal State seeks to cut down welfare expenditure, hence it is against PDS. It also relies on the market. Although contemporary advocates of free market are not motivated by extraction of colonial revenue, in terms of policy prescription they do not differ from the advocates of free market of colonial era….
Read More about Famines and Public Distribution System in India
Bookshelf
Billy Brack writes: Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity by Fowler and Mooney is one of the important books of our times, explaining how agribusiness is putting the world at risk by limiting the world’s food crops to a few genetic strains. Quite literally we are putting our eggs in one basket….
Read More about Bookshelf: Shattering: Food, politics, and the loss of genetic diversity
Riber Hansson
CLIMATE CRISIS
A new study finds that climate change is triggering a massive reallocation of resources to the world’s wealthiest countries. Fish and other important resources are moving toward the Earth’s poles as the climate warms, and wealth is moving with them, according to a new paper by scientists at Rutgers, Princeton, Yale, and Arizona State universities….
Read More about Study: Climate change takes from the poor, gives to the rich
CLIMATE CRISIS
Michael Igo writes: Since 2008, 22.5 million people have been forced from their homes due to floods and hurricanes, twice as many as the record 11 million displaced by conflict in 2014… As global temperatures creep higher, and storms, droughts, floods, and heat waves grow more severe, we face a future of mass climate-related migration….
Read More about The gathering storm of climate migration
Development/Growth
Usha Dewani writes: Indigenous communities have a strong belief in the sacredness of the natural world and assert that excess exploitation of the material world through huge infrastructure programs like large dams and hydropower projects would not lead to social development. They are concerned that these infrastructure programmes might compromise their autonomy over their lands….
Read More about Video: Development and identity theft in Northeast India
ALTERNATIVES
Rocco Pallin writes: Thirty-three percent of soil worldwide is degraded, and 50,000 square kilometers of soil are lost each year. Soil is not a renewable resource and “isn’t recoverable within a human lifespan,” but sustainable practices could increase the world’s food production by 58 percent. Here are seven projects helping to restore the world’s soil….
Read More about Seven projects around the world that protect soil
