Category Archives: Ideas

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

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Garry Peterson

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 →

Posted in Ecological Economics, Regime Shifts, Reorganization | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Digging the Anthropocene

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Garry Peterson

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

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Garry Peterson

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

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Garry Peterson

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

Posted on April 21, 2012 by Garry Peterson

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

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Garry Peterson

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

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Garry Peterson

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 →

Posted in Regime Shifts | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

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

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Henrik Ernstson

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?

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Juan Carlos Rocha

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

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Garry Peterson

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 →

Posted in Adaptation, Vulnerability | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments