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Monoculture: How Our Era’s Dominant Story Shapes Our Lives | Brain Pickings

6 Mar

F. S. Michaels, Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything.

The Middle Ages was dominated by an ethos of religion and superstition. The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution was dominated by an ethos of machines and science. Our age is dominated by an ethos of economics.

Neither a dreary observation of all the ways in which our economic monoculture has thwarted our ability to live life fully and authentically nor a blindly optimistic sticking-it-to-the-man kumbaya, Michaels offers a smart and realistic guide to first recognizing the monoculture and the challenges of transcending its limitations, then considering ways in which we, as sentient and autonomous individuals, can move past its confines to live a more authentic life within a broader spectrum of human values.

via Monoculture: How Our Era’s Dominant Story Shapes Our Lives | Brain Pickings.

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Africa’s Amazing Rise and What it Can Teach the World – G. Pascal Zachary – International – The Atlantic

4 Mar

Meanwhile, things are looking up in Africa:

In virtually every single African nation, the leading mobile phone company is now the leading taxpayer to the government, the leading local donor to local causes, and one of the leading employers.

But more important than the economic impact of the mobile revolution was the mental impact. The twin values of self-reliance and exceeding expectations were cemented by the success in mobile telephony, which compelled development experts to rethink their commitment to African under-development.

The striking improvements in living standards in Africa, especially for small farmers, have triggered a new optimism about the prospects for the continent. While gloomy “Afro-pessimists” still dominate the global debate, more optimistic and pragmatic voices are starting to challenge old orthodoxies. “Policies devised by governments and donors imply a daunting lack of ambition,” declared a 2010 report from the London-based Africa Research Institute. While the report is specifically about “why Africa can make it big in agriculture,” the same observation — that international development experts inexplicably downplay African prospects — could be made across industries.

via Africa’s Amazing Rise and What it Can Teach the World – G. Pascal Zachary – International – The Atlantic.

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It’s time to love the bus – Dream City – Salon.com

3 Mar

Just as Google uses its bus system to compete with other companies, cities might do the same with theirs. But while budget constraints are one obstacle, just as often it’s a problem of perception: The bus is seen as cut-rate transit, ever inferior to rail and not worthy of attention. Even last week, when I traveled to Athens, Ga., to meet with a community group that’s promoting better urban planning, everyone I spoke to was shocked that I had taken the bus from Atlanta instead of a private shuttle.

via It’s time to love the bus – Dream City – Salon.com.

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The unlikely oracle of Occupy – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com

1 Mar

Concerning nonviolence, the Arab Spring, and Occupy:

It’s as though below the visible landscape of politics, whose permanence and strength we characteristically overestimate, there’s this other landscape we rather pallidly call the world of opinion.

And somewhere in this landscape of popular will, in these changes in hearts and minds — a phrase that has become a cliché but still expresses a deep truth — lie hidden powers that, when they erupt, can overmatch and bring down existing structures. That’s what John Adams said about the American Revolution: the revolution was in the hearts of the people, the minds of the people. It was amazing to find that very Vietnam-era phrase in Adams’ eighteenth century writings. What John Adams was saying you find over and over again in the history of revolutions, once you look for it.

via The unlikely oracle of Occupy – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com.

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Becoming Locavores, One Locally Grown Meal at a Time – Aliso Viejo, CA Patch

28 Feb

“Connections create resilience,” said Leeds, an Aliso Viejo resident. “We’re going to have to re-evaluate how we live our lives. When oil gets really expensive, food costs will rise. We are not sustainable at this point.”

In September 2011, Leeds started holding potlucks to raise awareness about “creating community through resilience.” With a steering committee of nine members, she introduced the Transition Movement to Aliso Viejo….

To help residents become locavores, people who eat food that is grown locally, members of Transition Aliso Viejo are helping each other install backyard gardens. Under the guidance of Karen Wilson, a master gardener with the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, a workgroup of 10 Transition members performs the labor for each garden.

Leeds admits that each homeowner can’t grow everything they need, so she is encouraging them to share or trade what they grow with their neighbors.

via Becoming Locavores, One Locally Grown Meal at a Time – Aliso Viejo, CA Patch.

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The Limits to Growth

28 Feb

Dermit O’Conner, in association with the Post Carbon Institute, has made this cartoon illustrating the problems that are now piling up all around us: There’s No Tomorrow:

Well, there IS a tomorrow, but we’re going to have to change a few things to get there, hence Truth and Traditions. The cartoon was hatched by folks a Hubbert’s Arms, a discussion space for people transitioning to a post-carbon world.

Here’s the script for the film, along with references and links to further information.

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Activists challenge Japan’s “nuclear village” – Nuclear Power – Salon.com

27 Feb

The Japanese government has been incompetent in response to Fukushima and the Japanese people have begun organizing and protesting,

…several community-based initiatives, protests and rallies have sprung up in the past year. Volunteers have set up a popular website where users crowd-source local radiation levels. Mothers are testing school lunches for radiation. And perhaps in a nod to the Occupy movement, antinuclear activists have camped out in front of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Tokyo for more than four months and refused orders to leave. Citizens are also becoming increasingly vocal toward public officials.

“You see people yelling and interrupting these bureaucrats, which I’ve never seen at public meetings,” said Aldrich. “What I’ve been seeing from Fukushima and elsewhere is ‘rituals of dissent’ — local people not willing to be talked down to, not willing to be ignored.”

via Activists challenge Japan’s “nuclear village” – Nuclear Power – Salon.com.

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America’s endless apocalypse – History – Salon.com

27 Feb

For some, the lack of drama or disaster that accompanied Y2K justified placing most discussions of Armageddon on the yonder side of the grassy knoll, in tinfoil-hat territory. This line of thinking has proven disastrous to efforts to address numerous pressing issues — global warming being chief among them. Yet for many others, Y2K turned obsessing about the apocalypse into a national pastime; by 2001, the expectation that a major event could lead to the rapid unraveling of modern society had moved firmly from the realm of the conspiracy into the suburban American living room, where it has stayed ever since.

via America’s endless apocalypse – History – Salon.com.

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Too Big To Fail: The First 5000 Years — Crooked Timber

26 Feb

This is from the ‘middle’ (I suspect) of an ongoing conversation which I don’t have time to (even attempt to) summarize. But the suggestion is that it’s Jubilee time for all. That is, if the Powers That Be had any sense, which they don’t:

Well, no firm in any business can make a big profit if there is too much supply. Globally there is US$40 to $60 trillion zapping around, fast as electrons, looking for big yields.

Now they are running out of bubbles to blow up, while their yields in the safe sovereign harbors are negative, or almost negative.

The correct solution is redistribution, jubilee. But in today’s terms: let’s have higher fiscal deficits in the short-term to boost infrastructure and human capital (a.k.a. “education”), to get the economy moving again. Then afterward, let’s have a series of slow and progressive tax hikes to pay down deficits until the safety-net programs are long-term robust—which is also, incidentally or double coincidentally, a fiscal policy to reduce inflation from the wage side, and thus also to keep interest rates in check. And perhaps include a charter for a small-business investment bank, perhaps the only one with government deposit insurance.

via Too Big To Fail: The First 5000 Years — Crooked Timber.

Bell Labs, Innovation for the Ages

26 Feb

Bell Labs, Innovation for the Ages

Jon Gertner has an interesting article in today’s New York Times about Bell Labs, the place that gave us the transistor and the Unix operating system, information theory and the background radiation of the universe, among many other ideas and devices. It was perhaps the greatest industrial lab America, or the world, has seen. Ever. So far.

in the search for innovative models to address seemingly intractable problems like climate change, we would do well to consider Bell Labs’ example — an effort that rivals the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project in size, scope and expense. Its mission, and its great triumph, was to connect all of us, and all of our new machines, together.

In his recent letter to potential shareholders of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg noted that one of his firm’s mottoes was “move fast and break things.” Bell Labs’ might just as well have been “move deliberately and build things.”

Perhaps the ecology of innovation has changed so much in the last couple of decades that Zuckerberg’s philosophy is the right one. Perhaps not. So far Facebook is only one idea.

And again: Continue reading →

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