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Bruce Johnsen: Indigenous Knowledge Management | Ecology and Society
Influenced by the peculiar biology of Pacific salmon, these institutions effectively functioned to resolve conflict, promote technological development, provide reliable information, provide feedback about the environmental effects of resource-harvesting decisions, and encourage the accumulation and transfer of relevant knowledge.
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Richerson and Boyd: Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force | NYT
For the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.
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Amory Lovins: Soft Energy Values
We are more endangered by too much energy too soon than by too little too late, for we understand too little the wise use of power.
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Stewart Brand Reflects | Sustainable Industries
Jimmy Wales did something that we failed to do at CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth. When people would show up, sort-of wanting to join the team, we would look at them like: “We’re old hands here; you’re newbies; just send in your money and don’t bother us.”
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John Christy: Wiki-IPCC | Nature
Groups of four to eight lead authors, chosen by learned societies, would serve in rotating, overlapping three-year terms to manage (wiki) sections organized by science and policy questions.
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Climate Science and Politics 2010
I offer the following recommendations. Leave aside the near-obsessive need to benchmark everything against the 2°C target. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Lower the rhetoric.
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A Shorter Working Week | new economics foundation
A 21-hour week, or its equivalent in hours spread across a month or year, forces us to consider a different set of relationships between time, money, and consumption, as well as how these new co-ordinates might affect the distribution of power between people and groups, what really matters for human well-being, and how we can carve out a sustainable future.
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Thomas Dietz: Integrating Science and Deliberation
The Enlightenment ... led to an estrangement of science and democracy even as it promoted both.
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Food Sovereignty and Causes of Hunger
Food is first and foremost a source of nutrition and only secondarily an item of trade. National agricultural policies must prioritize production for domestic consumption and food self-sufficiency. Food imports must not displace local production nor depress prices.
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The Economist Endorses Cantwell-Collins, Cap-and-Dividend
Of all the bills that would put a price on carbon, cap-and-dividend seems the most promising.
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Alex Evans, Bruce Jones, David Steven: From Risk to Resilience
A society must be resilient in two ways: it needs to deliver lasting benefits from cooperation (functional resilience), but it must also stimulate the will to cooperate, thus ensuring its own structural integrity and durability (formal resilience).
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Forest Tenure, Carbon and REDD | Rights and Resources Institute
Without understanding the way in which forests are owned and managed, the world risks more failed attempts to slow deforestation and promote rural development.
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Russell Ackoff: From Data to Wisdom
Intelligence is the ability to increase efficiency; wisdom is the ability to increase effectiveness.
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Brian Sidlauskas: New Meaning in Old Data | Evolution
Synthetic science promises an unparalleled ability to find new meaning in old data, extant results, or previously unconnected methods and concepts.
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Daniel Sarewitz: Climate Predictions | Nature
Strange as it may seem, the right lessons for the future of climate science come not from the success in predicting thunderstorms, floods and hurricanes, but from the failure to predict earthquakes.
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Not easy to mitigate environmental damage | Science
Current mitigation strategies are meant to compensate for lost stream habitat and functions but do not; water-quality degradation caused by mining activities is neither prevented nor corrected during reclamation or mitigation.
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Yochai Benkler: After Selfishness
Now that we know that social production is here, how do we begin to harness it? How do we begin to think in a stable way about how to structure relations that integrate the social with the productive and that build a more realistic model of human motivation and human action, than those in the past have dominated our systems for organizing production?
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Steve Easterbrook: How good are predictions from climate models?
The more the climate changes in the future, the less we can be sure that current climate models give us good predictions (because of the probability that different kinds of physical processes kick in).
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Michael Tomasello: Why We Cooperate
I do not believe altruism is the process primarily responsible for human cooperation. … The star is mutualism.
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Consumerism and Identity Campaigning
The extensive evidence that identity campaigning draws together from psychology research makes it clear that campaigns for ‘green consumerism’ are likely to contribute to undermining the emergence of systemic concern about ‘bigger-than-self’ problems - like climate change (or, for that matter, world poverty or racism).
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John Seely Brown: Blended Epistemology
In a rapidly changing world, the biggest obstacle to innovation is wisdom. Why is that? Because wisdom is based on authority, and authority is based on experiences and assumptions that, by and large, are no longer valid.
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Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison: The Shift Index
Sources of economic value are moving from “stocks” of knowledge to “flows” of new knowledge.
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Murray Gell-Mann: A Crude Look at the Whole
The most important caveat for any simple model of a complex system is not to take it too seriously.
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David Weinberger: Transparency Subsumes Objectivity | KMWorld
We have taken objectivity into realms where it really should not go. For example, for a long time, journalists aimed to be objective. That’s not an achievable aim, and the claim that reporting is objective is not just wrong but seriously misleading.
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Stephen Toulmin: Rationality and Reasonableness
One of the great virtues of nongovernmental organizations is that they are able, in a new kind of way, to practice the politics of shame rather than the politics of force. The moment Amnesty International buys its first machine gun, its moral authority would be destroyed.
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Gurian-Sherman and Gurwick: Nitrogen Use Efficiency in Farming
The opportunities to address the problems caused by the overuse of synthetic nitrogen in agriculture are considerable. But achieving the degree of improvement in NUE needed over the coming years will require increased public investment and a commitment to move beyond our current fixation on industrial agriculture methods such as precision farming and GE.
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Participatory Budgeting: Unpacking the Values, Principles and Standards
Participatory budgeting is a process of democratic deliberation and decision-making, in which ordinary residents decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget.
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What Jane Jacobs Can Teach Us About the Economy | Miller-McCune
Most know Jane Jacobs as the ultimate champion of cities, who stood up against neighborhood demolition and saw a vibrant ballet where others saw urban squalor. But three years since her death — and a year into a downturn marked by bailouts, foreclosures and sky-high unemployment — her economic vision has come into the spotlight.
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Business Model Generation
We believe a business model can best be described through nine basic building blocks that show the logic of how a company intends to make money.
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Tom Philpott: Monsanto's Antitrust Troubles
The report establishes two facts that would, under any reasonable criteria, force the DOJ to take antitrust action: 1) Monsanto utterly dominates the market for GM traits in corn, soy, and cotton; and 2) it is using its market power to raise prices to farmers and limit their access to non-GM seeds.
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volume 01 issue 02
