PermaLiv

-  The Coming Crash: Our Addiction to Endless Growth on a Finite Planet

A wide evening view to Måbødalen in Eidfjord municipality, Sogn og Fjordane, Norway. Photo:  Simo Räsänen

Publisert som dagens bilde i Oppland Arbeiderblad onsdag 3. april 2013, s. 16.

Nikos A. Salingaros has recently published two magnificent essays, one about resilience (together with Michael Mehaffy) and another about modernism as a break with everything human, natural and sacred. Unfortunately, most people cannot really believe that the image in which we created our world in the last century is entirely wrong and evil, and therefor try to grew something new from its roots. But this is not what is needed! What we need is to cut down the very tree of Modernism, to rip out every single root of this tree and to destroy everyone of its seeds. A big job, as it has grown huge and spread its branches all over the world, like the holy world tree Yggdrasil, as found in Norse mythology. Yggdrasil, the ash that once grew large and proud upon our world, this tree of life, is now reduced to a fading dwarf, withering in the shadows of the tree of darkness, carrying the name of Modernism. And here Salingaros comes as a savior for the last remnant...

-  In the Corporate-State Education System, Students are the Product

Roberto Verzola, an economist and agricultural activist in the Philippines, opened with a presentation about the inherent abundance of nature – an abundance that market capitalism systematically attempts to negate and control. He compares natural abundance to the “miracle of the loaves” parable in the New Testament of the Bible, in which living things seem to miraculously multiply. Verzola calls this ecological sector of production the “living sector,” which must be seen as qualitatively different from the industrial sector, which by contrast “creates things from dead matter.” The significant factor about the “living sector” is that it is capable of zero marginal costs in production because of the self-reproductive capacity of living things. As humans interact with nature, they can alter and improve the “programming” of living things, cultivating a framework of abundance that conventional economics simply cannot understand. The logic of natural abundance is well illustrated by the S...