I mean, I’m not sure I had ever encountered anything but effusive praise for the development of writing. Look what it enables us to do! (Exactly, say the extinct—if they could.)Yet the whole time, the dark side of written language was hiding in plain sight. The writing was on the wall.| resilience
From Boston Public Library via Wikimedia Commons.Daniel Quinn returned to the theme that “food makes babies” so often in his writings that it would seem he was continually dissatisfied either with the clarity of his case, or with objections people had, or both. I get it. I often return over and over to the same thorny themes, each time thinking I’ll finally nail it. The exercise is as much for improving internal clarity as anything.| Do the Math
Think about it first..| Do the Math
Image by Daniel Borker from Pixabay| Do the Math
Image by günter from Pixabay| Do the Math
This is the fourteenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. We have arrived at the episode whose concept inspired the name of the series. Though no metaphor can perfectly capture a complex reality, by comparing modernity to metastatic cancer I hope to provide a useful framework that counters the usual modernity-boosting...| Do the Math
This is the eighth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode provides several ways to develop intuition about the brevity and temporary nature of modernity.| Do the Math
As we look toward the uncertain future, it may occur to some among us that we’ll need energy on Mars. How are we going to get it? Presumably Mars has no fossil fuels—although on the plus side its atmosphere is already 95% CO2, compared to Earth’s 0.04%, so they’re likely to be less uptight about carbon emissions on the red planet.| Do the Math
For many years now, I have made efforts to live differently—initially motivated by a sense of resource limits and the recognition that scaling back could have a dramatic effect if adopted widely. I was able to cut my domestic energy demand by a factor of four or five. I changed my habits of diet, travel, heating/cooling, laundry, showering, consumer activity, and much else.| Do the Math