The Great Simplification | Film on Energy, Environment, and Our Future | FULL MOVIE | Nate Hagens (2022)

This 32 minute animation – in 4 Acts – describes the backdrop for The Great Simplification – an economic / cultural transition beginning in the not-too-distant future.

We made this movie, originally as a framing ‘teaser’ for the new podcast thegreatsimplification.com, but the project….expanded over time.

Part 1 describes how our species got to this point, and the role of energy in our economies

Part 2 gives an overview of the relationship between energy, technology, money and the environment and how global human society is (currently) akin to a metabolic heat engine

Part 3 gives an overview of individual (and aggregate) human behavior tendencies in a novel modern environment and why these dynamics are relevant to our current challenges

Part 4 describes how people look at the future wearing different popular lenses, but when wearing a ‘systems’ lens, it becomes clear that a Great Simplification is soon approaching.

Lies, damn lies and climate statistics | Prof. Steve Keene | rt.com

It will come as no surprise that a recent poll indicated that economists are among the least-trusted professionals. They’ve made blundering mistakes on everything from claiming financial crises can happen to not facing the most obvious recessions.

But all that pales into insignificance when inept economists get involved in modeling climate science. A recession we can recover from, but the breakdown of our planet, we cannot.

Host Ross Ashcroft travels to Kakanomics – the leading economics festival in Norway – to talk with the renegade economist Professor Steve Keen to understand the scale of the damage that blinkered ideology has done to the future of our planet.

Celebrating Crisis: Towards a Culture of Cooperation | Elisabet Sahtouris | worldbusiness.org

Humanity, like all other species of Earth before and with us, is evolving — and evolution, for humans as for all species, is neither predictably linear nor solely Darwinian. Earth’s nearly four billion years of evolutionary experience reveals reliable patterns that give us hope, inspiration and valuable guidance for getting ourselves through the unprecedented confluence of enormous crises in which we humans quite suddenly find ourselves. Here we see the evolutionary Big Picture, including the amazingly complex lives of our remotest bacterial ancestors, who had Earth to themselves for fully half of evolution, and much of whose experience we seem to be mirroring now. They engaged in hostilities, generated global crises of hunger and pollution as great as ours today, and solved them without benefit of brain! Along the way they invented electric motors, atomic piles and the first World Wide Web of DNA exchange; then, in the greatest of all evolutionary ventures, formed cooperatives that became nucleated cells. These cooperatives were the basis for the evolution of our own hundred-trillion-celled human bodies, which role model amazingly sustainable economies. Learning from newly revealed problems and solutions in biological evolution, we too are finding out how to survive and even thrive into a better future despite — perhaps because of — our greatest challenges. That would indeed be cause for celebration.

The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change: The Lancet Commission report

Obesity is still increasing in prevalence in almost all countries and is an important risk factor for poor health and mortality. The current approach to obesity prevention is failing despite many piecemeal efforts, recommendations, and calls to action. This Commission following on from two Lancet Series on obesity looks at obesity in a much wider context of common underlying societal and political drivers for malnutrition in all its forms and climate change. The Commission urges a radical rethink of business models, food systems, civil society involvement, and national and international governance to address The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change. A holistic effort to reorient human systems to achieve better human and planetary health is our most important and urgent challenge.

Beyond Science and Technology: Creating Planetary Health Needs Not Just ‘Head Stuff’, but Social Engagement and ‘Heart, Gut and Spirit’ Stuff | Prof Trevor Hancock

I have been involved in studying and working within what is now called the Anthropocene for almost 50 years, and in all that time, not only have we failed to make much progress, but the state of the Earth’s ecosystems has generally worsened. Yet somehow we must create a world in which everyone on Earth has good health and a good quality of life—a matter of social justice—while living within the physical and ecological constraints of the one small planet that is our home; this is the focus of the new field of planetary health. Our worsening situation is not due to lack of knowledge, science and technology; in broad terms, we knew most of the challenges and many of the needed solutions back in the 1970s. Instead, the challenges we face are social, rooted in cultural values, political ideologies, legal and economic systems, ethical principles and spiritual/religious beliefs. Therefore, we have to move beyond science and technology and address these broader socio-cultural issues by engaging in economic, legal and political work, complementing and supplementing ‘head stuff’ with ‘heart, gut and spirit stuff’, and working from the grass roots up.

Anthropocene Economics and Design: Heterodox Economics for Design Transitions | Joanna Boehnert | She Ji

Highlights

Design has a role to play in facilitating heterodox economic transitions.

Climate change makes ecologically engaged economics and design an imperative.

Visualizations are tools to conceptualize and reconceptualize economic ideas, models, and more.

Economies are complex systems that can be mapped using visual strategies.

Redirected, distributed, regenerative economies are viable alternatives.

Abstract

Economics is a field under fierce contestation. In response to the intersecting challenges of the Anthropocene, scholars who take a broader and more critical view of current economic models have described the shortcomings of orthodox economic theory along with the severe consequences of its systemic discounting of the environment. Heterodox economists describe how the logic of neoclassical and neoliberal economics disregards the interests and needs of the natural world, women, workers, and other historically disadvantaged groups. Explorations of the household, the state, and the commons as alternative economies open space at the intersection of economics and design for incorporating and valuing the provisioning services provided by the ecological context and the undervalued work provided by certain groups of people. Design theorists, economists, social and cultural theorists, and anthropologists describe the relationship between value and values in ways that reveal how sustainable and socially just futures depend on the priorities (notions of value) embedded in the systems that determine what is designed. With these ideas, design can contribute to economic transitions with conceptualizing, modeling, mapping, framing, and other future making practices. Ecologically engaged, heterodox economics is a basis for societal responses to climate change on a scale that can make a difference.