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Bookshelf

How our economic system is designed to promote greed, fear and selfishness

16th May 2016

Rob O’Grady writes in ‘150-strong’: Aldous Huxley suggested that “Our present economic, social and international arrangements are based, in large measure, upon organized lovelessness,” and, on the evidence, it appears that he was right. Our current system, governed by the reconciling force of profit motive, is dominated by greed and fear – certainly not love! …

A Banquet of Consequences: A compelling critique of all that is wrong with the world economy

14th May 2016

The essential argument of Satyajit Das’ new book is: “The 2008 crisis showed that perpetual growth is an illusion. It exposed the high debt levels, credit-driven consumption, global imbalances and excessive financialisation that underpinned an unsustainable economic model, coinciding with an emerging scarcity of energy, food and water, and increasing evidence of climate change impact.”…

Bookshelf: The Oracle of Oil: A Maverick Geologist’s Quest for a Sustainable Future

2nd May 2016

The focal point of The Oracle of Oil, the first biography of King Hubbert, is his distinction as the first person to recognize the phenomenon of peak oil. Hubbert spent decades studying petroleum and natural gas reserves data, hypothesizing that output from large regions—such as the United States, or the whole world—would tend to follow a bell-shaped curve….

Bookshelf: Hot Earth Dreams by Hank Landis

30th April 2016

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….

Nesta.org.uk

Bookshelf: 150 Strong – A Pathway to a Different Future

25th April 2016

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….

Bookshelf: Farmageddon – The True Cost of Cheap Meat

22nd April 2016

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….

Bookshelf: The Politics of Nature by Bruno Latour

19th April 2016

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….

"The Logic of Neo-Liberalism"

John Ledger

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

18th April 2016

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….

Bookshelf: Shattering: Food, politics, and the loss of genetic diversity

17th April 2016

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….

Cars, Capitalism and India

12th April 2016

Vidhyadhar Date writes: A developed country is not one where the poor drive cars, but one where the rich use public transport. Building more roads to reduce congestion is like trying to put out a fire with petrol. India has failed to learn from developed countries’ mistakes and is on a disastrous path of motorization….

Special: Ringing Cedars and the new, silent revolution in Russia

10th April 2016

The Ringing Cedars of Russia series of books have sold over ten million copies in Russia, and has inspired a massive movement in earth consciousness there. Its part of a new, silent revolution in Russia, where more and more people are leaving the cities to live closer to nature. Interestingly, the Russian government actively supports it….

Bookshelf: Capitalism and Climate Change: The Science and Politics of Global Warming

3rd April 2016

The climate crisis is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced, which threatens not only global civilization, but the very survival of our species and many others. This book gives a lucid explanation of the science of climate change and illuminates the role of capitalism in creating and perpetuating the climate crisis and related dangers….

Book/Video: Thanatia – The destiny of the Earth’s mineral resources

24th March 2016

Is Gaia becoming Thanatia, a resource exhausted planet? For how long can our high-tech society be sustained in the light of declining mineral ore grades, heavy dependence on un-recycled critical metals and accelerated material dispersion? Thanatia presents a cradle-to-cradle view of Earth’s abiotic resources through a novel approach based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics….

Elanthemag.com

Bookshelf: When trucks stop running, so does civilization

23rd March 2016

Virtually everything in our homes, everything in our stores, got there on a truck. Prior to that, 90 percent of those items were transported on a ship and/or a train. If trucks, trains, and ships stopped running, our global economy and way of life would stop too. Alice Friedemann’s new book examines precisely this prospect….

Famouseconomists.net

Bookshelf: Failed – What the “experts” got wrong about the global economy

21st March 2016

Author Mark Weisbrot says: “Behind almost every prolonged economic malfeasance there is some combination of outworn bad ideas, incompetence and the malign influence of powerful special interests”. Unfortunately, such nightmares are repeated in other places because even if the lessons are learned, they are not taken to heart, by “the people who call the shots”….

Bookshelf: Shrinking the Technosphere by Dmitry Orlov

18th March 2016

My hypothesis—let’s call it the Technospheratu hypothesis—is that the technosphere, having risen up on top of and in opposition to Gaia and the biosphere, possesses a certain primitive emergent intelligence that allows it to grow in complexity and power and to dominate the biosphere to an ever-greater extent. Unlike Gaia, it is a parasite upon the biosphere….

The Revolution is Love: A missive from Charles Eisenstein

14th March 2016

This is why so many seasoned activists succumb to despair after decades of struggle. Do you think we can beat the military-industrial-financial-agricultural-pharmaceutical-NGO-educational-political complex at its own game? But the modern environmental movement, and most especially the climate change movement, has attempted just that, risking defeat but also often worsening the situation even in its victories….

“The mindset of the Indian elite is: the poor are different from me and I don’t want them around”

R. V. Moorthy

Jan Breman: “76 per cent of the Indian population is living in poverty”

23rd February 2016

“India’s economic policies are determined by the World Bank. They are therefore pro-capital, and anti-labour. Today the World Bank’s at the end of its tether. Its formula of formal capital in the informal economy failed because the poor don’t own capital. Having run out of ideas, they’ve now started blaming the poor for being poor.”…

Graphic novel: The beginning of Delhi’s water wars

20th February 2016

Everyone, deep in their hearts, is “waiting for the end of the world to come,” said Murakami. If not the end, then at least a good showdown’s definitely expected. Sarnath Banerjee‘s latest graphic novel envisions a similar war in the near future. Fittingly, the war’s going to be fought over something as elemental as water….

Peter Wohlleben says, “When I say, ‘Trees suckle their children,’ everyone knows immediately what I mean.”

Gordon Welters

German forest ranger finds that trees have social networks, too

5th February 2016

Peter Wohlleben has delighted readers with the news — long known to biologists — that trees are social beings. They can count, learn and remember; nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger; and, for reasons unknown, keep ancient stumps of their long-felled companions alive for centuries by feeding them a sugar solution through their roots….