Hello fellow bloggers! This is my first 'proper' post to my blog so i feel i should introduce myself and explain what this is all about for me. If you don't know me already my name is Sam Taylor (which i think is as much as you need to know personally) and i'm using this blog as a tool to help me further my understanding of 'Sustainable Consumption' and to help me communicate my thoughts and ideas on this topic, as well as others ideas. Feel free to leave me comments - i'm quite an amicable person (well, i think so) :D
Here is a link to a video that i found quite interesting It features a commentary by Will Steffen, Executive Director of the Australian National University Climate Change Institute.
In the short video he asks a simple question: will our world transform or collapse in response to the environmental problems that we face? This is a pattern that can be observed throughout history (e.g. The Mayan and Roman civilisations). We have to adapt to the challenges faced, otherwise we face the prospect of serious hardship. This is clearly something we should learn from, but it seems to me that policy makers are not taking this seriously.
Anyway, that's enough comment from me. Enjoy the video and feel free to leave me a comment (i'll be glad to hear what you think).
2 comments:
So out of curiosity what sort of interventions do you think policy-makers should be making then?
Hey Sam, societal collapse is one of those really interesting topics- that's deserves to be studied a lot more than what it's currently given; in this sense it would at least educate a wider citizenry about previous cultures, and what factors led to their demise. I don't know how much you know on this, put here's a couple of people who are quite big in the field of collapse studies:
Joseph Tainter-amazon his book, the collapse of complex societies (it's in, I think its 25th edition atm)
Jared Diamond- Collapse
Then there's the palaeoclimate record and societal interaction:
-Maya
-Greenland Norse
-Akkadian Empire
-Rome
-Mesopotamia
Joseph Tainter is I believe the main authority on this subject. Collapse is a very complex issue, and its not the so-obvious factors that contribute to it.
For instance: infrastructure decline; increasing pensioners and simultaneous decrease in a wage earning population to pay for services post baby boomer; then there's the ever increasing complexity of our institutions- a good example here is 15 government employees doing slightly different aspects of what could quite easiliy be handled by one person, and the list continues.
Two good films to watch on this are:
-Blindspot
-The 11th Hour
as well as a general youtube search
Oh, and perhaps William Catton-Overshoot? Not read it yet, but I believe he takes the ecological side of the argument.
I think policy makers in the words of Winston Churchill addressing America's partisan attitude to engaging in WW2 ..."Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities" So eventually when we're perhaps faced with catastrophe, before the end then they'll get real, BAU is still the ruling paradigm unfortunately, and lastly in the words of Kenny Ausubel ..."the greatest weapon of mass destruction is corporate economic globalisation" until these are reigned in, or a political leader with clout and determination arises, then the status quo will remain, unfortunately.
Post a Comment