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Otto Scharmer: Acupuncture Points for Capitalism
This paper explores the underlying system of thought that has led to our current economic, ecological, social, and spiritual crisis and proposes new ideas and leverage points for a green, inclusive, and intentional ecosystem economy.
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Lord May: Science as Organised Scepticism
Especially in the early stages (of scientific research), questioning and dissident opinion are hugely useful. It is most important that the consensus is not reached to early, too glibly, because it can inhibit fruitful lines of investigation. Yet, despite its importance in the early geo-morphology of the scientific landscape, such questioning becomes unhelpful if it stubbornly persists in the teeth of clear and contrary evidence.
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Western Water & Climate Change | Exloco
The climate change challenge can be transformed into a dynamic opportunity to make significant progress in both energy and water conservation throughout the American West, benefitting both the economy and the environment.
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Participatory Budgeting in Chicago | Yes Magazine
"At the community meetings everyone was complaining about their block... But now every single committee has taken stewardship of the whole ward as their mission."
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Wes Jackson: Knowledge and Ignorance
To call the unknown "random" is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known. … To call the unknown by its right name, "mystery," is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns.
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Oxford Principles on Regulation of Geoengineering
Geoengineering to be regulated as a public good . Wherever possible, those conducting geoengineering research should be required to notify, consult, and ideally obtain the prior informed consent of, those affected by the research activities. There should be complete disclosure of research plans and open publication of results. An assessment of the impacts of geoengineering research should be conducted by a body independent of those undertaking the research. Any decisions with respect to deployment should only be taken with robust governance structures.
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Tony Judt on Equity: Something is Profoundly Wrong
How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn’t always thus. Thinking “economistically,” as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans. There was a time when we ordered our lives differently.
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Charting Our Water Future | McKinsey
Harking back to McKinsey's famous greenhouse gas abatement cost curve, which presented a picture of strategic opportunities by arranging emissions reduction measures from least to most expensive, the Water Resources Group report features water availability cost curves for India, China, South Africa and São Paulo, Brazil.
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Andrew Lo and Mark Mueller: A Taxonomy of Uncertainty
If, like other scientific endeavors, economics is an attempt to understand, predict, and control the unknown through quantitative analysis, the kind of uncertainty affecting economic interactions is critical in determining its successes and failures.
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Design for Resilience | Shareable
When "designing for resilience," what are the principles or characteristics of resilient systems that might guide our designs? If we surmise the characteristics, perhaps we can innovate by analogy?
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The Social Cost of Carbon | E3 Network
While no definite social cost of carbon has been set so far, an interagency working group has endorsed a “central” estimate of $21 per ton of CO2 in 2010, or roughly 20 cents per gallon of gasoline — far too small a price incentive to prompt substantive mitigation measures.
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Rob Hopkins Interview with David Orr
My complaint about the sustainability and climate dialogue up to this point is that it operates at the superficial level, it’s like the veneer on this little table. Until we can get deeper, we’re probably not going to make it. We have to understand what we are as a species.
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Planning for Climate Change in the West | Lincoln Institute
This report underscores the critical role of local planners in confronting challenges posed by climate change and acting in concert with federal, regional, and state efforts to implement mitigation and adaptation policies.
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Wes Jackson: Agriculture as a Mimic of Natural Ecosystems
What we are able to disrupt, without destroying options for future generations depends on the forgiveness of particular area or place.
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Groundwater Monitoring with GRACE Satellites
By studying maps of Earth's gravitational field made with data from GRACE, scientists are able to monitor fluctuations in groundwater over time and highlight where aquifers are being depleted faster than replenished.
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Ecotrust Testimony on Fisheries Catch Shares
Catch share programs need to be carefully designed need to address long term issues in community stability, economic viability, and intergenerational processes. Fisheries are a public trust and community economic development asset and should remain as such.
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Yochai Benkler: Open Access Broadband
Without a major policy shift to increase competition, broadband service in the United States will continue to lag far behind the rest of the developed world.
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Tom Johnson: Toyota and the Price of Growth
I believe that true sustainability in an economy dominated by publicly traded firms is an oxymoron.
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Daniel Yankelovich: The New Pragmatism
Pragmatism is based on a radical theory of truth -- the concept of ideas as tools for coping rather than as mirrors of reality.
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Vision 2050 | World Business Council for Sustainable Development
Vision 2050 spells out the “must haves” – the things that must happen over the coming decade to make a sustainable planetary society possible.
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Douglass North: Institutions and Social Transformation
Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction. They are made up of formal constraints (rules, laws, constitutions), informal constraints (norms of behavior, conventions, and self imposed codes of conduct), and their enforcement characteristics.
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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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volume 01 issue 03
