20 min presentation on the law of sustainability, presented by Sally Goerner, Bernard Lietaer and Robert Ulanowicz.
Abstract: This presentation reviews key concepts in sustainability and asks deep questions about why there are so many symptoms of environmental crises present in the world today (climate disruption, mass species extinctions, nitrogen cycle disruption, ocean acidification, crises with food, energy, and water, and many more). These symptoms relate to the prevailing approach, in which we use reductionist mental models and treat living and environmental systems as if they are mechanisms. However, contrary to machines, ecological systems show much resilience and capacity to self-organize, regenerate, increase their organization and complexity, and improve their environment over time. We propose that achieving a sustainable world will require a shift in the way we approach life and life sciences. The good news is that such a shift is possible now, without the need of waiting for new technologies, and is limited only by our willingness.
Abstract This essay is an invitation to take up the nature and problematics of hospitality in its materiality. It begins and ends with the Marshall Islands, at the crossroads of two great destructive forces: nuclear colonialism and the climate crisis. In the after-math of sixty-seven US nuclear bomb “tests” visited upon the Marshall Islands, the concrete “dome” built on Runit Island by the US government was an act of erasure and a-void-ance — an attempt to contain and cover over plutonium remains and other material traces of the violence of colonial hospitality that live inside the Tomb (as the Marshallese call it). Taking the physicality of the hostility within hospitality seriously, and going into the core of the theory that produced the nuclear bomb, I argue that a radical hospitality — an infinity of possibilities for interrupting state sanctioned violence — is written into the structure of matter itself in its inseparability with the void.
We face systemic problems — economic, political, social, and environmental ones all wound up together. Effective solutions are emerging in all of these domains, but we lack a reliable systemic perspective to weave them together. I believe Energy Network Science (ENS) can provide the sound, systemic framework we need to address our systemic problems. ENS’s study of the energy laws of growth and development can help restore our economies and our souls by: (1) Helping us rediscover the truth and power of free-enterprise democracy; (2) Giving us the tools and concepts we need to build healthy Democratic Free Enterprise Networks (DFENs), the kind that have always formed the sinews of American vitality; (3) Providing precise quantitative measures and targets for healthy development that seem quite unimaginable in the current milieu. This is the story of how these gifts change our view of how to rebuild economic vitality and restore the dream.
KEYWORDS: Balancing resilience & efficiency, energy network analysis, free enterprise democracy, quantitative measures of economic health, regenerative economics.
Evolution did not stop with life per se. At the very least it built brains from which sprang minds from which sprang consciousness, the greatest of the world’s many mysteries. This chapter takes up the question of brains, minds and consciousness. The not-so-surprising implication here, is that these greatest of creation’s wonders are also part of the story. No longer in long, slow, cycles of blind self-organization, somehow the Great Ordering Oneness found a way to build a system which consciously shapes the world and itself as if by plan. More self-aware and more potentially powerful than anything that has ever existed, thinking beings are a world-transforming force in their own right.
This paper shows how the Energy System Sciences provide the theoretical backbone and empirical substance we need to connect findings from across the human and natural sciences in a way that is practical, rigorous, and heart-warming at the same time. Our premise is that the same energy science that explains systemic health in ecosystems can be used to create an empirical explanation of systemic health in human systems too. This integrated understanding of planetary health directly addresses the underlying socio-economic drivers of today’s crises in a rigorous yet emotionally compelling picture of how to save civilization socially, economically and environmentally.
There has never been a more important time to understand how your innate immune system functions. With a healthy immune system, we’re able to live in balance with the virome and array of flora that’s in every niche of our bodies. Join Zach Bush as he discusses The Innate Immune System.
The Innate Immune System webinar and live Q&A with Dr. Zach Bush, Dr. Cindy Fallon, Dr. John Gildea, Dr. Lee Cowden and Dr. Peter Cummings. In this two hour session, we broke down the intricacies and beauty of how our innate immune system functions and flows, unearthed empowering facts on the latest scientific findings on the virome, historical framing of germ warfare and how it applies to today’s mindset toward the pandemic and so much more from top experts across various fields within the human health realm.
What is the virome and how and why is it produced by the microbiome and human cells? In this 35 minute video, Dr. Zach Bush, M.D. elaborates on critical distinctions pertinent to human and planetary health as we look for solutions to respond to pandemic and endemic viruses. Learn how viruses have made the adaptive and resilient life that is exemplified in the mammals of our epoch, and how the toxins we’ve introduced on a massive scale create extinction level stress on the planet and ultimately destroy the fabric of this life within and around us. Ending the cycle of pollution is key to human and planetary health. Even though it may seem daunting, there is so much we can do to overcome these challenges and co-create a better future for our global community.
The retrospective in a year that has been quite quiet and straight forward.
In this programme, we look back and bring together the best of some of our guests so you can re-live 2020 in glorious technicolour…
The video starts with Svandís Ósk Gestsdóttir giving the Z-Day 2020 Intro, then Giorgio Baruchello spoke about Maître à penser.
Born in Genoa, Italy, Giorgio Baruchello is an Icelandic citizen and works as Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Akureyri, Iceland. He read philosophy in Genoa and Reykjavík, Iceland, and holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Guelph, Canada. His publications encompass several different areas, especially social philosophy, theory of value, and intellectual history. Since 2005 he edits Nordicum-Mediterraneum: The Icelandic E-Journal of Nordic and Mediterranean Studies
Source: Holt-LunstadJ, Smith TB, Layton JB (2010) Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review. PLOS Medicine 7(7): e1000316.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
