This post briefly considers Chris Thomas’s new book Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction. As the subtitle suggests, the book seeks to challenge the “pessimism-laden, loss-only view of the world” (p.9) that Thomas believes is currently dominant in conservation and ecology. In contrast, the book emphasises the “biological … [Read more…]
These questions have been on my mind lately, particularly in relation to an article entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth” (link) which recently caught fire on social media. This post briefly considers these questions and related questions about human action on climate and energy issues. The questions are not simple or straightforward to consider, but topical high-profile … [Read more…]
Lately I’ve seen the following James Gustave Speth quote shared on social media: When I read that quote I “groaned” a little. Cultural change is part of what’s needed, no doubt about it, but are the top problems “selfishness, greed and apathy”? Apathy can hamper any change effort, sure, but the emphasis on selfishness and … [Read more…]
An interesting critique of Naomi Klein’s latest book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate was recently published in New York Magazine. The review begins with a discussion of an idea that the author terms the “purity fallacy”. This is the fallacy of believing that the failure to adequately address a problem, e.g. climate change, … [Read more…]
It has been argued that two of the major virtues of capitalism are that it is highly adaptive and, secondly, that entrepreneurs and other actors in capitalist economies even finds ways of adapting to ruinous conditions and turning them to their advantage (i.e. they are often adept at finding and seizing new opportunities in a … [Read more…]
Early in my PhD studies I reviewed the literature on so-called ‘foresight’ practices such as on scenario-building, scenario-based planning, and techno-economic modelling. What came through clearly is that there is a dominant set of ideas about these practices. These ideas can be termed the received wisdom. These ideas include that foresight methods and practices are … [Read more…]
The question of ‘why are we waiting?’ is one which Nicholas Stern addresses in his recent book Why Are We Waiting? The Logic, Urgency and Promise of Tackling Climate Change. It is a ridiculously big question for which there can be no single definitive answer, but the question is still worth asking and exploring. The … [Read more…]
For a while I’ve been meaning to re-read Marris’s book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-wild World. The book’s central thesis is that we must abandon the idea that the central goal of conservation is to preserve nature in a pristine, prehuman state, and consequently must rethink conservation goals and practices. I recall at … [Read more…]
Some researchers from the University of Melbourne have recently published an interesting paper entitled “The problem of fit: scenario planning and climate change adaptation in the public sector” in Environment and Planning C. The paper reports some of the findings of the ‘Scenarios for Climate Adaptation’ project which explored the use of scenario planning to … [Read more…]
In a brief talk entitled “Futures of Climate Change“, Brad Allenby – Distinguished Sustainability Scientist at Arizona State University (ASU) – outlines three areas of emerging technologies and argues that we are unhelpfully trapped in outdated mental models on climate change and related sustainability problems. The three emerging technologies are: Technologies for capturing carbon dioxide from … [Read more…]