This report seeks to build a coherent narrative about the roots of the polycrisis, the signs of its arrival and evolution, and why we should be thinking differently about the future.
The Future is Rural challenges the conventional wisdom about the future of food in our modern, globalized world. It is a much-needed reality check that explains why certain trends we take for granted are historical anomalies.
Technology has grown with us, side by side, since the dawn of human society. Each time that we’ve turned to it to solve a problem or make us more comfortable, we’ve been granted a solution. But it turns out that all of the gifts Technology has bestowed on us come with costs. Richard Heinberg examines where this incredibly pervasive belief falls apart and offers compelling evidence for why we can’t count on technology alone to save us from climate change, overpopulation, and biodiversity loss.
Climate change, along with the depletion of oil, coal, and gas, dictate that we will inevitably move away from our profound societal reliance on fossil fuels; but just how big a transformation will this be? While many policy-makers assume that renewable energy sources will provide an easy “plug-and-play” solution, author Richard Heinberg suggests instead that […]
This provocative paper makes a convincing case for why the environmental community must embrace post-growth economics and community resilience in their efforts to address the climate crisis.
We have founded our present society upon delusional assumptions of limitlessness. Our national faith is a sort of autistic industrialism. This necessarily leads to limitless violence, waste, war, and destruction. Our great need now is for sciences and technologies of limits. The limits would be the accepted contexts of places, communities, and neighborhoods, both natural […]
Our mismanaged world economy today has many of the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme takes payments from a broad base of investors and uses these to pay off returns. It creates the illusion that it is providing a highly attractive rate of return on investment as a result of savvy investment decisions […]
The main cause of global climate change is growth: unrelenting economic growth and a swelling human population. Most proposals for reducing climate change take this growth for granted and focus exclusively on technical means for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. An economic system dedicated to generating ever more wealth and consumption for ever more people must […]
In The End of Growth, published in September 2011, Richard Heinberg, made the observation that world economic expansion, which has been barreling along for the past few decades, is now stalling. The book further claimed that this is not an outcome we can prevent; we can only choose whether and how to adapt. He argued […]
As a contribution to this ongoing refinement of the concept, I recently formulated five axioms (self-evident truths) of sustainability. My goal was simply to distill ideas that had been proposed previously and put them into a concise, easy-to-understand form. The First Axiom Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse. Exception: A […]