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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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Data Centers and District Heating | GreenerComputing
The system will use the heat generated by computer servers to heat water which will be circulated in pipes to more than 1,000 homes in the area. The cooled water will then return to the datacentre to be heated again.
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Forest Monitoring with CLASLite, Imazon, and Google Earth
In what could be a critical development in helping tropical countries monitor deforestation, Google has unveiled a partnership with scientists using advanced remote sensing technology to rapidly analyze and map forest cover in extremely high resolution. The effort could help countries detect deforestation shortly after it occurs making it easier to prevent further forest clearing.
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Dominique Bachelet: Citizen Science and Climate Change
Galileo once said: We cannot teach people anything, we can only help them discover it within themselves.
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Public Participation and the Open Government Directive
Here is a survey of the mixed reactions I've seen. While Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org says, “This is great. No equivocating, vacillating, hemming, or hawing," Andrea DiMaio flat out calls the directive disappointing.
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Thomas Homer-Dixon: The Culture of Growth
When we move this century to a steady-state economy – as we will – we will need to have a clear sense for where we’re going. In other words, we will need to know that we can maintain our solvency, happiness, freedom, and peace even though we don´t grow.
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The Low-Carbon Technology Challenge | Nature
Stabilizing the climate is a huge technological challenge and the solution of ready-to-deploy, scalable low-carbon technologies is far from being a reality.
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Arthur C. Nelson: Metropolitan Transit and Density
Nelson predicts that there will be a surplus of between 3 million & 22 million homes on large lots (built on one-sixth of an acre or more) by 2025. He & other experts foresee these big homes in the exurbs eroding in value, with many of them being subdivided into multiple units.
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Carbon Payments to Protect Biodiversity | Science
We discover that the biodiversity benefits of REDD can be doubled while incurring just a 4 to 8% reduction in carbon benefits, depending on the amount of REDD funds expended.
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volume 01 issue 03
