Books Archives - Page 6 of 6

Bookshelf

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

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

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

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….

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

Gordon Welters

Bookshelf

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….

ALTERNATIVES

Blessed Unrest – How the largest social movement in history is restoring grace, justice, and beauty to the world

2nd February 2016

Environmentalist Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the mainstream media. www.blessedunrest.com…

Frans Lanting

Bookshelf

New book: Elemental India : The Natural World in Crisis

24th January 2016

From the blurb: Around the world, people are increasingly facing a future that is crowded and hot, subject to violent weather extremes and a changing climate, where the rich and poor inhabit separate spheres and governments are unable or unwilling to confront these most vital challenges. For India, this reality is the very tangible present….

Bookshelf

Book: The Secure and the Dispossessed

7th November 2015

(Note: This new book asks, and attempts to answer, the crucial question: What if government and corporate elites have given up on stopping climate change and prefer to try to manage its consequences instead?) The Secure and the Dispossessed: How the Military and Corporations Are Shaping a Climate-Changed World Edited by Nick Buxton and Ben…

ALTERNATIVES

Pope Francis’ Encyclical on Climate Change – Selected Excerpts

20th June 2015

The Encyclical by Pope Francis is being hailed by environmentalists as the second coming. It’s hardly that, in my view. Nonetheless, I was struck within minutes of starting it, by the incisive and accurate commentary it offers on our true predicament. Here are some passages that resonated with me and that I found highly insightful. Manu…

Bookshelf

Interview: Mansoor Khan

22nd July 2014

(Editor’s Note: POI member Mansoor Khan is the author of the book The Third Curve: The End of Growth. As we know it! , which examines Peak Oil and the future of energy and economic growth to provide a new lens to understand our reality and the future. In this interview with The CSR Journal, he says that adapting to global energy descent…

Bookshelf

Book review: The Crisis of Capitalism

16th April 2014

Review of Saral Sarkar’s The Crisis of Capitalism, from Frontier Weekly Saral Sarkar has been writing for many years on his favourite subject, eco-system. He is an eco-socialist par excellence. This encyclopaedic *work of his has encompassed a wide range of subjects, and pressed into service an astonishingly large number of facts and theories, and…

Bookshelf

Review: The real price of development

19th November 2013

Book Review in The Hindu, 29 October 2013 Creating Space: Ecological Limits and Economic Development by Ramprasad Sengupta; Oxford University Press. Rs. 1250 Many sins are committed in the name of development. We are becoming aware that much of what were hailed as achievements over the past few centuries were actually “sordid boons.” Curiously, the…