notes June 9, 2008

off in a pleinair workshop for the long weekend.

From Fred Turner’s
From counterculture to cyberculture : Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism

The last paragraph. Page 262

And yet, they have preserved a deeper dream as well. As they set off for the hills of New Mexico and Tennessee, the communards of the back-to-the land movement hoped to build not only communities of consciousness, but real, embodied towns. Most failed—not for lack of good intentions, nor even for lack of tools, but for lack of attention to politics. To the extent that Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth group have succeeded in linking the ideals of those whom Kenneth Keniston called the alienated to digital technologies, they have allowed computer users everywhere to imagine their machines as tools of personal liberation. Over the past thirty years, this reimagining has helped transform the machines themselves, the institutions in which we use them, and society at large. Yet, as the short life of the New Communalist movement suggests, information and information technologies will never allow us to fully escape the demands of our bodies, our institutions, and the times in which we find ourselves. Much like the commune bound readers of the Whole. Earth Catalog, we remain confronted by the need to build egalitarian, ecologically sound communities. Only by helping us meet that fundamentality political challenge can information technology fulfill its counter-cultural promise.

And

reading Peter Senge’s new book,

The necessary revolution : how individuals and organizations are working together to create a sustainable world.

Good but there still is no vision like GardenWorld, and it repeats the meme that the commons was closed by the ordinary farmer.

Notes July 3

from The Institute For Figuring — ExhibitionINVENTING KINDERGARTEN

Unidentified Los Angeles Kindergarten circa 1900.

Most of us today experienced kindergarten as a loose assortment of playful activities – a kind of preparatory ground for school proper. But in its original incarnation kindergarten was a formalized system that drew its inspiration from the science of crystallography. During its early years in the nineteenth century, kindergarten was based around a system of abstract exercises that aimed to instill in young children an understanding of the mathematically generated logic underlying the ebb and flow of creation. This revolutionary system was developed by the German scientist Friedrich Froebel whose vision of childhood education changed the course of our culture laying the grounds for modernist art, architecture and design. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller are all documented attendees of kindergarten. Other “form-givers” of the modern era – including Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Georges Braque – were educated in an environment permeated with Frobelian influence.
Froebel believed that education of the very young would enable the flowering of human potential. “By education,” he declared, “the divine essence of man should be unfolded, brought out, lifted into consciousness.” Froebel’s insights would expand the minds not just of children, but also of their teachers. Denied access to universities, women of intellect were also yearning for mental stimulation and Froebel’s system provided an outlet of expression for hundreds of thousands of women around the world who flocked to become kindergarten teachers. Among them was Anna Wright, mother of the future architect. From the world of early kindergarten it is largely the teacher’s output that has been preserved and in this remarkable body of work we witness the stirrings of a new era. Mostly created in the late nineteenth century, the objects on displayed in this exhibition prefigure the aesthetic upheavals of the following century. As kindergarten scholar and collector Norman Brosterman has proposed, in the work undertaken by “kindergartners” we may locate the seed-bed of modern art.
Inventing Kindergarten surveys rare objects and artifacts from the
collection of Norman Brosterman, Froebel scholar and author of the book
Inventing Kindergarten.

also

reading the great and helpful paper by Bruno Latour, about greening in france and the garden idea. see GardenWorld

http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/107-NORDHAUS&SHELLENBERGER.pdf

 

and

Even though I am too remote from North America day to day
politics to comment usefully on the many suggestions given in this important book, I may have five (plus one) vantage points to
benefit from the “breakthrough” they wish to make.
First, I am from a country where the Green parties have simply
vanished: election after election, they have finally lost themselves in more and more arcane and distracting issues proving the main thesis of “postenvironmentalism” by gracefully committing suicide… Second, France has never believed in the notion of a pristine nature that has so confused the “defense of the environment” in other countries: what we call a “national park” here is a rural ecosystem complete with post offices, well tended roads, highly subsidized cows and handsome villages… Third, France is the only country that has so much believed in modernity that it always thought possible to get entirely rid of politics and replace it with the government of Reason alone: in a way Nature, capital N, has always reigned here under the guise of Science, capital S, proving already one of the main thesis of the book about the danger of ignoring pragmatism. But fourth, through a tortuous process that still mystifies law professors, France is also the only country to have introduced in her Constitution, the principle of precaution, an initiative of the now almost forgotten president Chirac.1 And fifth, and to the bafflement of all observers, the new French government
has engaged in an extraordinary experiment to engage with pressing environmental issues through an innovative process of
representation called “le Grenelle de l’environnement”, in reference to the great bargain at the end of the May 1968 crisis, a hybrid symbol of class struggle mixed with questions of nature —an expression as odd as if you were talking about a “Bastille Day of Ecology” or the “Red October of Nature”… For all those reasons, France is not such a bad standpoint to witness what the ecological crisis may do to politics.

But I might have an additional qualification to comment on this
book since I have always been convinced that the key to the
understanding of politics lies in the conceptions of science and,
more generally, of knowledge acquisition —political epistemology is the name given to this crucial connection. This has been true
throughout the whole history of Western political thought, but
never more clearly than since the various ecological crisis have
brought the very definitions of science and politics in even more
dramatic contact. This is where science studies (my field) may
provide a chance to comment on what I have called the politics of
nature.2

The great virtue of Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s (from now on
N&S) plea for development, is to attack head on the question of
why the most pressing issues of our days —ecological crisis broadly construed— have not been met with the same enthusiasm, energy, optimism, ideals and forward looking democratic spirit as the past tragedies of poverty, tyranny and war. If I summarize the thrust of the book, I’d say that the authors try to overcome the tragic consequence of bringing Nature into politics: in the name of indisputable facts portraying a bleak future for the human race,
Green politics has succeeded in depoliticizing political passions to
the point of leaving citizens nothing but gloomy ascetism, a terror for trespassing over Nature and a diffidence toward industry, innovation, technology and science. Everything happens as if Green politics had frozen politics hard.
Such a view of environmentalism is of course very unfair to the
great number of scientific and political groups who have struggled with such intelligence to bring ecological issues to the forefront of public consciousness. No militant, no scientist, no administrator that I know, will recognize oneself in the portrait the authors make of the “environmentalists”. And yet, N&S are right on one essential feature: no matter how important the work that has been done so far, ecological questions are still taken as peculiar to one specific domain of concerns not as the core of politics. Never are those
issues treated with the same sense of urgency and centrality, with the same passions, the same moral energy than the rest of public issues. At the very least, they don’t mobilize in the same ways the democratic ideals so essential to the pursuit of civilized life. N&S are clearly focused, in my view, on the right philosophical blocking point: the whole endeavor of political ecology is presented as a question of learning our limitations even though, it is this very notion of limits that, paradoxically has limited or even paralyzed politics. What the authors want is to “break through” the limits of the notion of limits, so as to unleash the same type of courage, energy and moral enthusiasm that is necessary to overcome the new threats to democratic society.

For a European and certainly for a French, such an endeavor is
especially timely since they tackle this philosophical issue as a
psycho-social question, namely as a question of emotion, of feeling, as if they had sensed that the gamut of political passions triggered by the ecological crisis was much too narrow to deal with the massive dimension of the problems —or at least much too weak compared to those that religion, war, protest, art, may unlock. They try to tune in to another tone of political emotions, those necessary to redevelop, or, to use another expression proposed by Ulrich Beck, to modernize modernization.3 Those two traits —the detection of the limit of limits and the psycho-social entry into the problem— put this book apart and justifies, even though it is often unfair to the practitioners, that it be taken seriously.

The thesis of the authors is never more striking (and never
funnier) than when, at the very end, they cross over a Churchill’s
talk on the renewal of Europe to stand united at the time of the
Cold War with Tony Blair’s speech on global warming at the Davos Forum in 2005 (p.263 et seq). Blair’s talk is excellent but purely factual, uninspiring, as if emptied of any politicizing urge; Churchill’s speech is…, well Churchillian, but of course freed from any reference to the nonhuman friends and enemies (in 1947,
remember, politics was still “for humans only” —they had enough inhumanities to deal with). On hearing Blair’s lecture, people shake their head in assent, in despair, in fright, but they are moved no further than to sit on their butts for the rest of their life. On hearing the second, they rebuild the ruined Europe from top to bottom and “never had it so good”. Then, N&S try their own little cloning experiment by inserting the factual Blair’s approach to suck the energy out of Churchill’s plea for reconstruction (p.267) and then inject Churchill’s energy in the genetic code inside Blair’s dry argument (p. 268): Churchill expatiates about the Cold War like Blair; Blair speaks of the global warming like Churchill. A very effective thought experiment: Europe remains in ruins for the sixty
years to come because no one does anything much after hearing it;, global warming is recast as the way to unleash political energy for the next sixty years to come because the right emotional cord have been struck…

This is the right kind of attitude: optimistic about tech, concerned about politics, wanting to get on with it, that fits the GWP perspective.

and

on meaning. what if money is just what people do with it expanding from airy random occurrences and spreads by imitation  “takes”, and that is because, like smoking, it organizes lots of human feelings and actions - but it does not have a deeper meaning.

Why is it that 2 billion people believe in Christianity? Can we moderns compete with that? As Latour asks,  himself quoting from the book,”How come the same energy that is being churned to cerebrate the creator has not ben mobilized for saving his creation?”

and

leads me to Norhaus and Shellenberger, Breakthrough my book number 1117

“the time is ripe for the Democratic story about America, one focused more on aspiration”  p 13

arguing that the people are fairly well off(missing cosss of commutingfor example), hat we cnbe both for justiceand individuality. and prgmatic.

“In 1969, one of the founding fathers of American environmentalism, Rene Dubos, called for environmentalism to become a new religion,…he ecological crises will replace the reductionist question “What must we do to save the environment?” with “What new environments can we imagine and create?”

239

 

top priorities of the liberal interest groups that define the Democratic agenda. For these groups, bold, innovative, aspirational proposals to dramatically transform the economic and political landscape are seen as distractions from their attempts to advance their small, incremental policies.  pg 259.

 

“However,” Blair said, “behind the dispute over science is another concern. Political leaders worry they are being asked to take unacceptable falls in economic growth and living standards to tackle climate change.

so, all pretty good, but,but, there is no actual vision, no sense of a world that could be beyond the social welfare and justice world . These are great, really important, but not sufficient to energize.

notes July 2, 2008

The point here is that een the absence of green can be GardenWorld if the intent is exploration o fplay and space. GardenWorld is open to such ploys.

Le Parc de la Villette

Porte de la Villette

avenue Jean-Jaurès

Paris 19e

France

The Parc de la Villette was developed as part of an urban renewal plan on the site the former national meat market and slaughterhouse. Tschumi won a competition for the design of Paris’ largest park in 1982.

Related to his theoretical work on ‘event space’, his proposal for a distinctly urban park called for the deployment of a number of abstract, programless structures, dubbed ‘follies’. It was intended that the bright red structures would then house various events and groups related to the activities of the park. Many do just that, but not all, and not always the activities envisaged.

The design questions the conventional conception of a park as green open space. While there is plenty of grass here, the ‘natural’ park is clearly designed to express the fact that it is artificial, domesticated.

Inserted from <http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/villette/>

Notes July 1, 2008

From ancient china, a template?

 

During the transitional period 01 social metamorphosis, not only did strife and disorder persist, making the livelihood of the people ever more precarious, but also all of the customs and institutions that previously had united people’s minds and preserved social order were shaken to the point of collapse, their former effectiveness dissipated. Men of profound thought and far vision inevitably were moved to make critical inquiries into the causes and influences of these great changes, and quite naturally voiced opposition or offered constructive proposals. In consequence, political thought suddenly flowered. All of the factors mentioned above were already incipient in the Spring and Autumn Period, and by the Warring States Period they had intensified.” Consequently, the development of thought also reached its most intense stage only in the Warring States Period.

Ku Yen-wu [1613—1682]: Jih-ckM-tu, ck. IS, under the heading “Chou-mo feng-su” states: “In the Spring and Autumn Period, protocol and good faith were still respected, but among the Seven States [of the Warring States Period] protocol and good faith were definitely no longer observed. In the Spring and Autumn Period the Chou King still commanded respect, but among the Seven States the King definitely was not even mentioned. In the Spring and Autumn Period the sacrifices were still rigorously performed, and importance was attached to ceremonial etiquette and rites, but among the Seven States such things no longer existed. in the Spring and Autumn Period they still attached importance to clan and family relationships, but among the Seven States there is no single reference to such matters, In the Spring and Autumn Period at banquets of state the Odes were still recited, but we hear nothing of this among the Seven States. In the Spring and Autumn Period announcements of celebrations and mournings still were properly made, but there were none among the Seven States. States had no stable diplomatic ties, and men had no constant overlord. All of these changes occurred during the one hundred thirty-three year period for which historical records are lacking, but about which men of later ages can make their own deduction.” This sets forth with great clarity the transformation from the Spring and Autumn Period to that of the Warring States.
Liu Hsiang [first century B.C.] also states in his preface to the Chan.kua Ts’e ‘After Chung-ni [i.e., Confucius] died, the T’ien family seized the State of Ch’i, and the six chief minister divided up the State of Chin. Morality largely fell into decline; superior and inferior lost their status. Duke Hsiao of Ch’io abandoned comity and prized warfare, he discarded benevolence and righteousness and employed trickery and deceit—solely in the quest for power. Usurpers came to be ranked with princes and nobles, treacherous and deceitful states waxed to the status of great powers. Then this came to be imitated, and those who followed took Ch’in as their model. Thereafter [the States] all undertook to swallow and annihilate one another, annexing large and small, engaging in violent war year after year, shedding blood through all the countryside. Fathers and sons failed to observe family bonds, brother could not trust brother, husbands and wives were separated, and no one could guarantee his own life. In chaos and confusion, morality was extinguished.” Here we see the main features of late Chou society-

These are from the text in A History of Chinese Political Thought vol1. Kung-chuan Hsiao  Princeton.

and

New Book to read The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace:a history of space from Dante to the Internet, Margaret Wertheim Norton. 1999

notes june 29, 2008

Gardens of Paris

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/29/travel/0629-PARIS_index.html for slide show

 

and

Larry Summers has an article

What we can do in this dangerous moment

By Lawrence Summers

Published: June 29 2008 18:10 | Last updated: June 29 2008 18:10

It is quite possible that we are now at the most dangerous moment since the American financial crisis began last August. Staggering increases in the prices of oil and other commodities have brought American consumer confidence to new lows and raised serious concerns about inflation, thereby limiting the capacity of monetary policy to respond to a financial sector which – judging by equity values – is at its weakest point since the crisis began. With housing values still falling and growing evidence that problems are spreading to the construction and consumer credit sectors, there is a possibility that a faltering economy damages the financial system, which weakens the economy further.

 

The financial system… as I understand it, it is 20% of the US economy,and 40% of the profits. Is this not like a tax on all other transactions? What if the financial system were a public utility?

and

yo-yo ma on education

WHAT KIND OF EDUCATION FOR WHAT KIND OF WORLD? | What kind of education will prepare a student to live on such a planet? What tools do people need to become architects of their own lives? In a highly competitive hierarchical world driven by tests and measurable results, I would like to propose four priorities for education that are hard to measure and easy to ignore, yet they are vitally important and within reach for all of us.

My conclusions are drawn from my work as a musician, and my first priority is based in a common goal that musicians and teachers share: to make the communication of their content memorable. By memorable, I mean the listeners or students become transported by their experience of the music or subject. The content, then, remains active and accessible in their minds and can grow and connect to future experiences. Our stories will be different, but I’m sure that each of us can recall a teacher whose inspiration transformed our lives.

Content that is memorable becomes a key ingredient in the second priority, passion-driven education. Education driven by passion awakens us to a world bigger than ourselves and makes us curious. Learning becomes self-sustaining as it transforms from a requirement to a desire. Students who are passionate are a pleasure to teach, and teachers who are passionate share their knowledge generously. In fact, teaching becomes learning and vice versa. Passion-driven education liberates students and gives them the self-confidence to discover who they are as individuals and how they fit in the world.

The next priority is the development of a disciplined imagination. Imagination draws on all of our intelligences, senses, experiences and intuition to construct possible scenarios. Through imagination, we are able to transcend our present local reality and envision distant futures. It allows us to think not only about the tools people need today, but about the tools our children will need to contribute to the world they will share. Imagination is the great engine that powers the arts and sciences, and it is an available resource for all to use.

Disciplined imagination leads me to the final priority: empathy. To be able to put oneself in another’s shoes without prejudgment is an essential skill. Empathy comes when you understand something deeply and can thus make unexpected connections. These parallels bring you closer to things that would otherwise seem far away. In our world of specialization, compartmentalization and myriad responsibilities, empathy is the ultimate quality that acknowledges our identity as members of the human family.

additional june 26

Notes june 26

The cost of security, such as the video cameras in London, need to be compared to the costs of building a fairer society where the roots of grievance , frustration and need are modified by social policy and philosophy. (see wiki cctv)

and, for GWP,

Add that we want a balance between market, home, garden and academy (see coyne, Cornucopia Limited 33)

The household moves to the center of activity, but is not recognized as the center of a new civilizational impulse. The home as more than market , more than commerce, means the shifts in society are being prepared by Internet/work at home activity.

notes June 17

thoughtful

http://www.humboldt.edu/~essays/cussen.html

We can think of Nietzsche’s notion of the Apollonian as referring to all those aspects of human nature that make us differ from the rest of nature, things like self-restraint, control, language, civilisation, art, technology, morality and law: all those things that we could sum up as human culture; the order and harmony of classical architecture, and the control over nature that such things demonstrate, might stand as a suitable symbol. We can think of the Dionysian as referring to all those aspects of humans that we share with nature: things like instinct, wildness, lack of restraint, intoxication, lust, unbridled competition and cruelty: the image of the wine-soaked, amoral, sexually insatiable satyr - half man, half goat - is often used to represent the Dionysian conception of humans.

We cannot conceive of human life without these cultural achievements: we are, beyond question, creatures of culture. But we are not just that. Partly because of our cultural achievements, we are also the most successful, daring predator animals on the planet, with undeniably strong impulses still toward cruelty, intoxication, lust, fierce competition, and the thrill of the hunt.

Notes June 16

Important discussion. I hope to analyze this.

 

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol7/iss3/art4/main.html>

SUMMARY: ENERGY GAIN AND ORGANIZATION
The above and other cases exemplify several characteristics common to high- and low-gain extraction in human and other living systems. We presented these characteristics in Table 1 as a set of initial hypotheses. High-gain systems, we argue, tap into steep energy gradients, often in new ways. These systems are impressive not only in their capture of energy but also, and more importantly, in their net return on investment. Because resources are abundant and the demands on the system are minimal, resource use tends to be dissipative and inefficient. The steep energy gradient forces new organization on the system, which causes new levels to emerge at the top of a hierarchy. If such a system is disturbed, the steep energy gradient means that the system will self-repair, or that a similar one will take its place. As just noted, beaver will attempt to repair and recolonize high-quality sites after other beaver are removed. Because the high-return resource comes inevitably to be used fully or depleted, however, high-gain phases in human societies and among animals such as beaver tend to be short.
Low-gain phases depend on resources that have a shallower gradient of potential degradation. In a low-gain phase, resources are scarce, and, if the demands on the system are great, it will be vulnerable to instability or will require higher organization. Although net output per capita is low, it is great in the aggregate. Whereas high-gain phases are impressive in their dissipation of energy, low-gain phases are more impressive for their organization. Higher levels of organization and effort are required to maintain a sufficient flow of resources, as seen in the trails of leaf-cutter ants, in beaver canals, or in imperial taxation. In the later Roman Empire, as described above, taxation officials assessed the expected productivity of every parcel of land across all of northwestern Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. New levels in a low-gain system, such as bureaucrats or administrators, are inserted into the middle of the hierarchy, which always increases its complexity and costs. Although small energy margins mean that individual producers in such systems are vulnerable to perturbation, the systems themselves may be long-lived due to the ubiquity of low-gain resources.

ENERGY GAIN AND FUTURE HUMAN ORGANIZATION
This framework not only helps us to understand empires, ants, and beavers, but it also suggests clues about our potential future. Since the development of industrialism and economies based on fossil fuels, the world’s wealthier nations have been in a high-gain phase. Because high-gain systems use high-quality, concentrated energy, their energy usage is intensive and local. In contrast, low-gain systems, which rely on low-quality energy, must be dispersed in their resource capture and organized correspondingly. Despite the fact that engineers are impressive in their ability to extend the era of high-gain fossil fuel dependence, we know that someday the energy opportunity cost of fossil fuels will reach the point that our dependence on such fuels will diminish (e.g., Campbell and Laherrère 1998). Before that happens, perhaps nuclear fusion will be controlled to the point that it is safe and efficient, providing us with a further source of high-quality energy. A primary alternative is the so-called “green” energy sources, including renewables such as wind, wave, and solar. We focus on the consequences of possible future dependence on these.
Renewable energy sources are low gain, yielding little net energy per unit of production compared to fossil fuels. Most renewables depend ultimately on the sun, and the conversion of solar energy to mechanical work is still inefficient (Wayne et al. 1992). Low-gain energy production must therefore be dispersed.
The industrial era was characterized by the application of large amounts of energy and raw materials to solve problems by brute force. In today’s so-called information economy, there is much less need to move matter and people. Human settlement can be dispersed. Thus, today we are becoming accustomed to telecommuting, the increased conversion of rural areas into low-density housing, and even the gentrification of rural areas that have traditionally been isolated and impoverished.
The dispersed energy production that would be required by low-gain resources is a good fit with the sort of dispersed settlement pattern that an information economy allows. One scenario for a postcarbon future is dispersed production of low-gain energy by small communities or even individual households. Energy would be captured by small, individual units scattered across the landscape. This is the green energy scenario that many think would be a desirable future, or even preferable today. Unlike many commentators, we take care not to impute morality to preferences regarding energy production systems. Without judgment, therefore, we point out that green energy would encompass its own costs and its own winners and losers. For many people, the transformation would be catastrophic because a decentralized production system would make many infrastructure workers redundant. Urban decay would accompany increased rural settlement. At the same time, new opportunities would emerge in the manufacture and repair of small, dispersed sources of energy production. Hydrogen might be generated as part of local energy-capture systems (Barbir 2001), so that at least some high-quality energy would be available for tasks that require it. Many people might prefer such a decentralized existence, but others would find it wrenching. It would require capital investment by each family or community. These investments would be largely redundant, with high energy-opportunity costs, and would not initially enjoy economies of scale. Living standards, as currently defined, would likely decline.
Renewable energy is a popular concept, but there is a certain irony in this. Although environmentalists are quick to blame industry and fossil fuels, the environmental damage done to the world is only partly from industrial sources. The energy used in the industrial world is principally of high quality. It works in a focused fashion with concentrated side effects. In contrast, low-gain agriculture, a highly dispersed activity, is causing a substantial loss of species as well as environmental degradation. The distributed nature of agriculture means that habitat is removed and landscapes are greatly altered. Increased flooding, soil loss, and nonpoint sources of pollution are to a large extent caused by agriculture, as exemplified by the flooding of the Mississippi River in 1993 and the Ohio River in 1997. Although some observers criticize the environmental effects of agribusiness, Third World peasants at their present population levels have an aggregate effect that is substantial, and perhaps comparable. Similarly, the environmental impact of ants that use droppings is minimal compared to those that strip leaves from plants. The former are not considered agricultural pests, whereas the latter are. Environmental degradation is greater when the resource is of low quality and distributed but heavily used. Thus, a switch to renewable energy sources might bring, ironically, environmental damage comparable in scale to, or greater than, that caused by the use of fossil fuels. It is also ironic that, although industrialists have not rushed to embrace renewable energy sources, great profits would be made from building the infrastructure needed to capture and concentrate renewable resources. Politicians would be influenced less by road builders and more by businesses that recreate coastlines for wave capture and cover huge tracts of land with solar collectors or wind generators.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
The concepts of high and low energy gains clarify important organizational differences in human societies and other living systems. The quality of resources and the returns on exploiting them impose organizational constraints that are inescapable. We characterize high- and low-gain systems as polar opposites, but of course there are innumerable systems of resource extraction in between these two extremes. Understanding the organizational requirements of these extraction systems is a rich topic for integrated social and biological research.
It has long been a tantalizing goal to understand commonalities across living systems. The occasional attempts (e.g., Miller 1978, Holling 2001) have so far not generated sustained research programs. In this regard, the potential of studying energy gain is not only that it reveals patterns across living systems, but also that these patterns may clarify potential human energy futures. Thus, the physical science concept of energy gain has the potential to support humanistic interest in the energy transition that the industrial world will inevitably undergo. Energy gain is a uniquely valuable approach to understanding past and future human resource transitions and the ways of life that future energy will both enable and impose.

RESPONSES TO THIS ARTICLE
Responses to this article are invited. If accepted for publication, your response will be hyperlinked to the article. To submit a comment, follow this link. To read comments already accepted, follow this link.

Acknowledgments:

Notes June 14 2008

Money is clothes, moving from the cosmos of the studs on the Greek horse collar to cosmetics and cosmos (the bright spots of silver in the sky). From jewelry to value to gif to exchange. Money shows like clothes our status, our position in a society of rank. We wear our money to show our statues, and we seek it to show our status.

Money is thus part of a larger domain of status symbols.

Now, what is fascinating is that the modern theory of money separates it from status by equating it with acquisitiveness, which is unlimited But as we know, in some societies, status comes from restraint, and there are attitudes on how one can express oneself through clothes. Hence money is potentially subject to restraint.

Status, not greed, is the motive we have to work with.

 

and

re-looking at Mckibben’s Enough. Can humans put restraints.. what the techno-hypists fail to see is the actual achievements of the human. Reducing progress to a technical idea or driven by biology and survival, rather than recognizing deeply its origin in religious thinking. they want to increase the human potential, but of leverage of muscles and speed of computation, not the grace of human movement as in ballet or ice skating, but as back hoes. Mind, not as Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Joyce, but as UNIX machines.