Category Archives: Ideas

Connecting the Instability of Markets and Ecosystems – C.S. Holling and Hyman Minsky

Both markets and ecosystems can, and have, been viewed as being shaped by feedback processes that push them towards a steady state – in markets this is the “invisible hand” – in ecology it is “succession.”  However, what has been … Continue reading

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Digging the Anthropocene

Human material use has rapidly and massively increased over the past century.  This is nicely illustrated in a 2009 paper by Krausmann and others at the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna. The use of material has exploded: overall use of … Continue reading

Posted in Ecological Economics, Inequality, Visualization | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

James C Scott on the value of an anarchist squint

Political scientist James C. Scott, author of a series of ground breaking books that explore some of political and anthropological aspects of resilience has a new book out Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and … Continue reading

Posted in Ecological Management, Ideas | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

A history of bicycle transformation in the Netherlands

Cool video about how a movement for social-ecological transformation took advantage of a window of opportunity. Dutch cyclist organizations pushing for new cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands. Read more on the Bicycling Dutch website in this post.  An interesting post compares … Continue reading

Posted in Cities, Reorganization | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Robert Harrison on Joesph Conrad

Stanford humanities professor Robert Harrison has a great online podcast, Entitled Opinons, that discusses various aspects of the Humanities. Robert Harrison is a Dante specialist, but he is also very interested in people’s relationships with the Earth.  His enthralling books Gardens: … Continue reading

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Forty years of Limits to Growth

The first presentation of the influential environmentalist book Limits to Growth was on March 1 in 1972 at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, four decades ago. The study was both hugely influential and hugely controversial, and the authors were quite … Continue reading

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Learning about Arctic Regime Shifts

Science magazine has an interesting question and answer interview with Igor Krupnik, an anthropologist from the USA’s Smithsonian Institution, who has a worked with indigenous communities in Alaska and northern Russia. They talk about learning about local ecological knowledge and … Continue reading

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Stabilizing Collectives in the Study of Transformation: Instead of “key-individuals”

This deserves perhaps an even longer blog post, but I wrote this quickly as an appreciation to the previous blog by Juan Carlos Rocha. The previous blog post puts focus on a quite problematic nexus within social-ecological studies, and management … Continue reading

Posted in Networks, Regime Shifts | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

What Are Leaders Really For?

A week ago I had an interesting discussion with Jon Norberg, a professor in Systems Ecology here at Stockholm University, about leadership.  Jon is working on, among other things, an agent based model about how leaders influence opinion change in … Continue reading

Posted in Big Back Loop, Networks, Regime Shifts, Reorganization | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Resilience and Euro – diversity

On MacroEconomic Resilience ex-banker Ashwin Parameswaran draws upon Holling’s pathology of natural resource management and the work of Hyman Minsky (a connection I’ve mentioned previously and Ashwin has explored extensively – see here and here) to write about The Resilience Stability Tradeoff: Drawing Analogies … Continue reading

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