Category Archives: Mail & Comment

Personal comments and letters that seem to capture an idea well

T. Boon Pickens plans to take over the wind?

Responding to an Archinect.com discussion:

Hi there! I haven’t read the whole thread, but gather the question is whether we can grow our way our of the impacts of growth, using crafty wind power investments to do it. I’ve been spending this week trying to find out why none of the media are aware of the vigorous discussions of why a financial meltdown happens naturally when finances need to multiply for their own stability in a world that doesn’t.

Even JM Keynes pointed out the problem. Now our whole blithering world of back scratchers seeing it happen acts as if it’s a total surprise.  I pegged the beginning of it 15 months ago, as beginning “the big crunch”, when the fuel/food price war showed the whole system’s resource steering choices running into conflict with each other and fishtailing. Continue reading T. Boon Pickens plans to take over the wind?

A very short novel – A Small Mistake

I think maybe we should believe our eyes rather than make excuses for some old rules that aren’t working.

Maybe what happened, in the beginning, was that God sent the scribe a text message, saying, “…and I give you all this and a wonderful mind with which you can make models to bee the world around you. Have fun! G.” As the scribe gazed into the meanings of the message, silently observing the typographical error in God’s texting, he quickly judged there was an extra ‘e’ in ‘bee’, and to not bother God by mentioning it. Continue reading A very short novel – A Small Mistake

The probable, desirable & the possible.

Anselmo,

I agree with you 99% philosophically, but note that there is a basic difference between the kind of environmental intervention we’ve gotten into from the kind that we started with. It’s a change in scale.

Our method of intervention in nature includes an automatic multiplier of scale. It may possibly be that there have always been people, even in hunter-gatherer times, who wanted to manipulate the environment that way. It wasn’t till relatively recently that we figured out how. Continue reading The probable, desirable & the possible.

Just curious

RE:[coteforum]

Allison, Hope this is responsive.

“! And please not just a theory.”

– The practical tools for measuring total direct project impacts has been the main thing I’ve raised here. The hidden impacts exported to others by making purchases, are regularly not included. To know our impacts and our choices we’d need to include them. As you observed it’s ‘sensitive’ though, and so we’d also need to address the moral dilemmas.

“I am not going to simply stop eating this weekend because my money will help a cycle I don’t believe in. Come on. I might complain, but I am part of this system too. We all are. Even you.“

– Absolutely correct, which means that drastic personal cuts wouldn’t help in the slightest, even if you could make them. Cutting personal consumption or dropping out won’t change how others are misusing your creativity. Continue reading Just curious

Human interference polluting the genome??

Anselmo & all,

I think it’s very relevant to consider the accumulating adverse genetic change due to human intervention. The principal process of evolution is not yet well understood yet though. “Punctuated equilibrium” requires a mechanism for relatively rapid change of the whole genome rather than a selective drift of individual genes, and as yet there are no testable hypotheses for how that would work.

I think Tim Beardsley’s use of the terms ‘divergence’ and ‘degeneration’, applying general terms to specialized things, does not accurately characterize what they refer to, and so are easily misunderstood. I’d prefer to use genetic ‘pollution’, some of which is human caused, though that’s not a perfect term either. Continue reading Human interference polluting the genome??

Highlighting the challenges of 9 billion people II

Brian,

Yea, most people think it’s a problem of attitude, but there are great examples of where that’s clearly not the case. The environmental movement, for example, makes the same mistake time after time of treating niche opportunities as unlimited resources. The important part is not to say they have a ‘bad attitude’. The error is not one of attitude. The important thing to note it that it’s the exact same error they are trying to correct.

It’s error that the business and finance interests are making in massively misjudging the limits of the earth’s easy resources. The greens like the developers tend to think that every resource we have not yet exhausted is unlimited, like wind and solar and all that. That insight is the useful and helpful lesson of ethanol, that it was a good niche opportunity thought of as an unlimited resource up until it triggered the world food crisis. What we’re dealing with is a major conceptual misunderstanding of the problem.

If you don’t want to “plan for failure” as you say, then you should pull yourself up short and figure out why nearly everyone with that attitude actually is planning for failure. Almost no one thinks things through. Almost all planning is done to just push the problem a little ways ahead, hoping it will go away. That worked when we had not hit the limits of the earth.

Now just pushing the problem ahead a bit just pushes it to where it will be worse when we get to it again. In order to think things through we need to understand them from beginning to end, ¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸ , and that’ll teach you how nature starts everything with explosions of creativity to see if they will learn how to stabilize, or lets them collapse of their own feeble accord if they don’t.

The real solutions to our two main uncontrolled growth problems, population and wealth, are both stubbornly in conflict with our self-images of what ‘good’ means, the stuff we cling to in our minds. Those ‘functional fixations’ throw us into deep conflict with a changing world. To me the real solution to both is *not* getting the right ideas into our minds.

It’s to learn a way to see *through* our ideas so we can watch the real world, see them in overlay. Otherwise we only look *at* our ideas and let them hide the world from us. If we see both we don’t have to give up the things that are precious to us, including our attitudes, and can successfully navigate a place that we’ve mostly lost contact with too.

Does that make any sense?

Best,

Phil Henshaw

———-

Hi Phil,

What differentiates humans from animals is our capacity to conceptualise in abstract terms and to plan for the future, and then to act on those plans with a view to realising them. To me the problem is one of “attitude”. My personal experience is that our plans are self fulfilling. Winners plan to succeed, and losers plan to fail. I am personally not predisposed to plan for failure. To me that is not a constructive use of my time and energy. My personal predisposition is to want to co-operate with my fellow humans with the objective of furthering our mutual interests. To me there is no purpose to be served in contemplating the end of the world. That is not the attitude of a healthy mind.

Kind Regards,

Brian Bloom

 

Measuring CO2 lifespan… and signs of nature’s rejection

O2 post:

Mauro asked about sorting out “carbon sinks”

That’s an excellent question. What you want is the *accumulative* total effect, for the *choice* being made, not so much the particular carbon sink (if what you want is to give people ways to decide what choices are better than others).

The way you’re starting is just the right way, thinking it through far enough to begin to see the real complications. It is indeed so complicated that leads me to seeing the need for ways to simplify. You want to get the whole picture right, not just use up your energy fully detailing the issues you start with. Continue reading Measuring CO2 lifespan… and signs of nature’s rejection

Highlighting the challenges of 9 billion people

Nick,

There’s another, maybe better, explanation for the conspiracy of blindness to the concert of diminishing resource problems. The lack of a mental model for looking at things as a whole when they have so many seemingly disconnected parts. That’s a real physical barrier to conceptual understanding. That’s also something my method works very well for correcting if you get the feel for it.

I think the best unifying concept to the multiple resource peaks coming at once is that the economic system behaves as a whole, with spare capacity of any part being used to relieve strains on the others, so… all resources then necessarily hit diminishing returns at the same time. Continue reading Highlighting the challenges of 9 billion people

What’s a formula anyway…?

Jack,

I think there are so many disconnects between what formulas describe and what they’re used for, once you see it, you’ll wonder why we have not noticed the defect in thinking of ‘everything’ in terms of formulas right from the start.  How we’ve made use of formulas has never been to actually follow them.

Their best use is always as learning tools.  That’s how we test them too, but then seem to ignore how critically important the learning process is to making them work. Take the problem of sitting at dinner and picking up a glass of water to drink.  We have a ‘formula’ for where the glass should be, at the upper right of the place.

Continue reading What’s a formula anyway…?

Schematic Design of Sustainability

(see also #1 Issue in Sustainability Today)

Jodi,

Well, not compounding your returns has the same sort of Catch 22 that doing great sustainable design and having the profits go to pumping up the world’s appetites does. You need to build a broader reason for doing the right thing. For sustainable design we definitely do still need to learn how to live in a sustainable world, even if we don’t have one, and it has to make business sense.

On the first level we just need to respond to the contradictions involved, rather than avoid them. Once there’s a critical mass of people who see that finance has to be different in a sustainable world, then you can think of how it’ll work for the community as a whole. Continue reading Schematic Design of Sustainability