On a previous occasion I elaborated on the growing natural scientific evidence that the world is at “Red Alert” status regarding a looming ecological crisis. The question arises, whether the human sciences (humanities and social sciences) are in agreement with their natural science colleagues on this issue. In light of the incontrovertible evidence in this […]
ecology
Posted inBusiness, Environment
Climate change: Red alert in the Anthropocene
It is fitting that “Anthropocene”, the term coined just more than ten years ago by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, denotes the new ecological period, following the end of the Holocene, when humans became the principal force driving changes in the planetary system. I say this because the Holocene (“New Whole”), or stable […]
Posted inGeneral
What ‘wisdom’?
Can humanity today show itself capable of developing a way of life that may be called, against all odds, one marked by WISDOM? This seems highly unlikely, given the state of the world economy (which has a lot to do with short-sightedness and wastefulness), and more importantly, the planetary ecology. Fact is, humans have shown […]
Posted inGeneral
The ‘crystals’ of time
It seems to me undeniable that the human sciences – short for the social sciences and the humanities – are facing a crisis of perceived irrelevance in a world suffused in unreflective technophilia and, concomitantly, indifference to the potential value of the humanistic knowledge represented by, and archived in these sciences. Among the many ways […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Why we always sow the same old reap
I think most readers will be familiar with that unbearable screech which sometimes blasts out of a concert’s or meeting’s sound system. Well, that screech is caused by the feedback into the sound system of some of the amplified sound already produced by the system. Because the sound wave of the feedback is in phase […]
Posted inGeneral
Disenchanted youth of the world: Tomorrow’s hope
The youth of the world are disenchanted — disenchanted by the older generation’s politics as well as their economics, by their ideologies and their religions and by their inability to halt ecological destruction. And they are the ones who will replace the current leaders of the world. What are the chances that they might just […]
Posted inGeneral
Going after ‘extreme oil’ is extremely irresponsible
The emerging information on the quest for what is referred to as “extreme oil” is worrying in the extreme. And it is very bad news for other creatures on the planet, especially those who live in the oceans, judging by the information clip sent to me by the Care2 petition site, to which I subscribe […]
Posted inGeneral
Beyond protecting the environment: Ensuring life support
Several recent reports on a variety of things have made me return to an important book by Thomas Princen, Treading Softly – on which I have written here before. The news items that caught my eye covered different, but related topics. Two of them focused on court cases involving big oil companies – Chevron and […]
Posted inGeneral
The ‘economistic worldview’ and the destruction of life
In his important recent book Treading Softly – Paths to Ecological Order (see my earlier post on it) — Thomas Princen distinguishes among four “worldviews” in relation to the environment, that is, four different ways of “perceiving and conceiving and making sense of one’s world” (pg 164) within what he terms “the current industrial, commercial […]
Posted inGeneral
What is creativity?
How does it work? Is it mere imitation, or transformation, or could it be — under rare circumstances — “pure” creation, that is, out of thin air, as it were? This last possibility is captured in the Christian doctrine of “creatio ex nihilo”, which is attributed to God — the creation of the universe out […]
Posted inLifestyle
We’ll need two planets by 2030
At the beginning of his latest book, Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order, American ecological scholar Thomas Princen quotes from the Living Planet Report of 2008: “Our global [ecological] footprint now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30%. If our demands on the planet continue at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we […]
Posted inGeneral
Is capitalism destroying our planet? (3)
*What is therefore new in Kovel’s book (The Enemy of Nature), in contrast to the many books devoted to the ecological crisis today, is the sustained manner in which he connects all the obvious signs of environmental degradation and ecosystemic breakdown with the social order or system referred to above. Thomas Berry (in The Great […]