Through the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition

We add to the emerging body of literature highlighting cracks in the foundation of the mainstream energy transition narrative. We offer a tripartite analysis that re-characterizes the climate crisis within its broader context of ecological overshoot, highlights numerous collectively fatal problems with so-called renewable energy technologies, and suggests alternative solutions that entail a contraction of the human enterprise. This analysis makes clear that the pat notion of “affordable clean energy” views the world through a narrow keyhole that is blind to innumerable economic, ecological, and social costs. These undesirable “externalities” can no longer be ignored. To achieve sustainability and salvage civilization, society must embark on a planned, cooperative descent from an extreme state of overshoot in just a decade or two. While it might be easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for global society to succeed in this endeavor, history is replete with stellar achievements that have arisen only from a dogged pursuit of the seemingly impossible.

Military scientism and its discontents

The asymptotic limit theorems of control and information theories allow the examination of systemic failures afflicting “scientific” approaches to armed conflict such as reflexive control, the OODA loop, and East Asian alternatives. Large-scale combat, like other major human enterprise, is a form of dialog between cognitive institutional entities only loosely following shifting “laws” that most often express a path-dependent historical trajectory constrained by powerful cultural riverbanks. Such “conversations,” while having their own grammar and syntax, can involve matters of science, engineering, and technology, but they are not, of themselves, scientific in the Western sense. They may, however, be studied using the methodologies of historiography, social science, human ecology, and the like. Moving much beyond this is to invoke an alternate reality.

Handprint, the Shower of Gold, and Thingness of Architecture

Architecture is an eminently artificial human enterprise but subject to natural laws and principles residing somewhere between the mineral world and vegetation. It is eminently archaic, as the dominant epistemologies, pragmatic conditions and techniques may change, but fundamental notions, ideas and principles remain where they have been ever since the construction of the first shelter. Architecture is also eminently thingly. As a thing, every work of architecture is in opposition to our broken world of events. For better or for worse, in actual practice this opposition settles in the act of construction, as a project becomes a building: material, structure, space.

fractal biology of plague and the future of civilization

At the time of writing, the CoViD-19 pandemic was in its second wave with infections doubling every several days to two weeks in many parts of the world. Such geometric (or exponential) expansion is the hallmark of unconstrained population growth in all species ranging from submicroscopic viral particles through bacteria to whales and humans; this suggests a kind of ‘fractal geometry’ in bio-reproductive patterns. In nature, population outbreaks are invariably reversed by the onset of both endogenous and exogenous negative feedback – reduced fecundity, resource shortages, spatial competition, disease, etc., serve to restore the reference population to below carrying capacity, sometimes by dramatic collapse. H. sapiens is no exception – our species is nearing the peak of a fossil-fueled ~200 year plague-like population outbreak that is beginning to trigger serious manifestations of negative feedback, including climate change and CoViD-19 itself. The human population will decline dramatically; theoretically, we can choose between a chaotic collapse imposed by nature or international cooperation to plan a managed, equitable contraction of the human enterprise.

Social dimensions of fertility behavior and consumption patterns in the Anthropocene

We consider two aspects of the human enterprise that profoundly affect the global environment: population and consumption. We show that fertility and consumption behavior harbor a class of externalities that have not been much noted in the literature. Both are driven in part by attitudes and preferences that are not egoistic but socially embedded; that is, each household’s decisions are influenced by the decisions made by others. In a famous paper, Garrett Hardin [G. Hardin,Science162, 1243–1248 (1968)] drew attention to overpopulation and concluded that the solution lay in people “abandoning the freedom to breed.” That human attitudes and practices are socially embedded suggests that it is possible for people to reduce their fertility rates and consumption demands without experiencing a loss in wellbeing. We focus on fertility in sub-Saharan Africa and consumption in the rich world and argue that bottom-up social mechanisms rather than top-down government interventions are better placed to bring about those ecologically desirable changes.

The Emperor's Weavers

This chapter addresses the general lack of emphasis on philosophical thought in the field of education within colleges and universities. Since all human enterprise is guided by philosophical premise, whether conscious or not, the only options for those who consider themselves educators is to engage in strong philosophical practice or to engage in low-quality philosophy. Failing to engage in philosophy is not a real option. The infatuation with quantitative measurement in education, by educators, is an example of the negative effect of failing to engage in educational philosophy as a part of practice, and the uncritical acceptance of S.M.A.R.T. objectives in curricular matters serves as a particularly stark example. These measurement practices result in having an ascribed rather than achieved identity in the field. Three things that can be done to reverse this situation in higher education are (1) begin to engage philosophically as a part of practice, (2) change the terminology used to discuss philosophy, and (3) teach the practice of philosophy across the curriculum, rather than in isolated courses.

Mammal Conservation: Old Problems, New Perspectives, Transdisciplinarity, and the Coming of Age of Conservation Geopolitics

I review the shocking current status of terrestrial mammals and then describe an approach to solving it, embracing a continuum of spatial and intellectual scales, from groundedness to geopolitics. Starting with an illustrative arena, the interface between agriculture and wildlife, I then outline the litany of threats to mammals and some successful approaches to their conservation, and document some broad-scale patterns regarding ecosystems, the mammalian communities within, and some implications for conservation. Observing that the battle for mammalian conservation is being badly lost, I dedicate the third part of this article to a combination of top-down and bottom-up, interdisciplinary studies, aspiring to a holistic approach that sets conservation in the wider sphere of the human enterprise and that I term transdisciplinary conservation.