Should Humans Adopt a Mushroom Strategy? The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna L. Tsing In some ways, mushrooms are smarter than people. We should pay more attention. Although not quite said, that’s the conclusion of Anna Tsing, Professor of Anthropology at the University […]
Call of The Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth by Charles Massy Review by Don Stewart Massy is an Australian farmer who earned a mid-life PhD in Human Ecology. In the course of doing the research for his dissertation, he met and studied the methods used by many “regenerative’ farmers,” mostly in Australia, and […]
Deep Change (video 4 minutes) Deep Diving into Deep Everything “Deep” describes change so complete that we lose our reference points to the past, and struggle to understand. We may have to dredge up unarticulated assumptions about how the world works, and we can’t question beliefs so deep that we were unaware of them. The […]
Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, by Eric Topol Eric Topol hit the news big time in 2004 as the chief whistleblower questioning the validity of research that led the FDA to approve the Merck drug, Vioxx. Amid scandal, Merck withdrew Vioxx and paid a big fine. The New York Timesinvestigated Topol’s […]
Big Other (video 5 minutes) Big Other by Robert W. “Doc” Hall During the first few hundred years of industrial expansion, mankind profited by learning to control nature. During the last 20 years or so, we have learned to profit big time by controlling – or manipulating – human nature. Let’s call this new phenomenon […]
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff Shoshana Zuboff is Professor Emerita from Harvard Business School. Her research career began by studying the history of work, and she gradually focused on how the digital world was changing the work world. It’s a long […]
Nature’s Business (6 minute video) Can We Learn to Think Like Nature? Industrial societies can’t keep living the way they do now because their systems make the environment unnatural. Climate change draws the most attention, but were the climate not changing, many other problems, some poorly understood, might be just as perilous. An example is […]
The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra Fritjof Capra is well known for scientifically proposing that the universe, including humans, is a complex web of relationships, and for examining the concept of universal unity in religious beliefs, especially Buddhism. Originally written in 1975, The Tao of Physics is the classic book about the integration of everything. This […]
(24 minute video and article) From Compression to Symbiosis. By Doc Hall. Evolution is geological as well as biological. Predictions of geologic evolution are that life on Earth will continue in some form for perhaps 600 million more years. Whether human life will continue to evolve that long is doubtful, but working with nature instead […]
Commercial Thinking vs. Scientific Thinking Unsavory Truth, by Marion Nestle Except for political propaganda, hardly any field is more laden with misleading BS than nutrition. It comes from purveyors of food all wanting to sell their products. Those most influential are big food corporations. They can and do influence nutrition research. Marion Nestlé (no relation to […]
Background for Environmental Symbiosis A Rough Ride to the Future, by James Lovelock This book is a fun read by a scientific maverick, written at age 95. He’s now 99, still going strong. A prolific scientist and inventor, Lovelock is best known for two things: 1) inventing the electron capture detector, which detects particles in […]
