Bill gates was on Fox News Sunday this last weekend. He was there to promote his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. If this interview is anything like the book, Mr. Gates has a deep flaw in his solutions and ideas about the future. It’s not his fault. Most people are working under … More Bill Gates’s View of the Future Is Dangerously Flawed
In the year 1500, Europe was experiencing the Renaissance and the explosion of thought that followed the invention of the printing press. The Aztecs and Incas dominated large empires in the New World. When London and Rome’s populations numbered around 50,000 each, Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was home to about 200,000. Cusco, the Inca capital, was only the size of London or Rome, but controlled an empire linked by 40,000 km (25,000 mi.) of roads. By 1533, both Tenochtitlan and Cusco were in Spanish hands. … More COVID Hubris, Collapse, and Resilience: Pandemic in the New World (Part 4)
I’ll be publishing reworked sections from my 2016 book, Why Did Ancient Civilizations Fail?, updated for today, with a special emphasis on health and COVID, but also discussing other social problems we face. … More COVID Hubris, Collapse, and Resilience: Anthropogenic Disasters (Part 3)
I’ll be publishing reworked sections from my 2016 book, Why Did Ancient Civilizations Fail?, updated for today, with a special emphasis on health and COVID, but also discussing other social problems we face. … More COVID Hubris, Collapse, and Resilience: Social Hubris and Resilience (Part 2)
I’ll be publishing reworked sections from my 2016 book, Why Did Ancient Civilizations Fail?, updated for today, with a special emphasis on health and COVID, but also discussing other social problems we face. … More COVID Hubris, Collapse, and Resilience: Introduction (Part 1)
Every swing of the scythe begins with a smooth draw back and to the side, loading energy in the reaper’s body like a spring. … More A Few Thoughts Harvesting Wheat with a Scythe
Correlation does not equal causation. In this case, COVID-19 has reduced our travel and use of fossil fuels for transport by 31 percent overall (source in graphic). Although we are not seeing a decline in the use of fossil fuels leading to reduced transportation (rather the reverse), it can be considered a small-scale dry run … More COVID-19 Disruption is Just a Foreshadowing of Later Problems
A note at the top, especially for my academic friends: this is a simplified discussion of domestication of plants for the purposes of an upcoming presentation on the history of gardening. The dates and theories have been rounded off for the amount of time and target audience. Until about 10,000 years ago, all humans on … More Gardening: The First Domesticated Plants?
The news is full of talk of recession. The dreaded inverted yield curve (short-term bonds have higher yields than long-term ones — the inverse of the typical state) has occurred less than two years before every recession since 1955 (and the one time it happened without a recession following was the economic slowdown of the … More Low-Tech Recession?
A few years ago, Why Did Ancient Civilizations Fail? identified many of the same problems outlined in the recent UN report on our diet and its climate effects. What follows is a brief excerpt from the book. A sustainable food system can be built on the three principles laid out at the beginning of this … More A More Sustainable Food System — UN Report