“The internal conflict of conscience caused by competing levels of natural selection is more than just an arcane subject for theoretical biologists to ponder. It is not the presence of good and evil tearing at one another in our breasts. It is a biological trait fundamental to understanding the human condition, and necessary for survival […]
“Those on the Pressure Drop would be humans, mostly, it imagined. Mongrel-Culture; the result of a hundred centuries of species-mixing, serial amendment, augmentation, uploading, downloading, simple autonomous choice-directed breeding and––after all that time––perhaps even some genuine evolution. The usual bizarre bio-mix of who-knew-how-many planetary-original blood-lines, all tangled inextricably together with those from an equally unfathomable […]
This is definitely the best resource I’ve encountered for a crash course in the root causes of climate change and the potential negative outcomes if the global community continues to ignore the problem. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have condensed years of research into a tiny book––all the better to penetrate the noosphere of a […]
“The Mistake Not…, self-saddled with a full name so long and unmanageable that even other Culture ships rarely took the trouble to use all of it, was just vain enough to feel slightly flattered at all this attention, but still found the incessant chit-chat unbearably slow and fundamentally pointless. All these people seemed to do […]
“Alone again, in a pocket of silence as the wind dropped and all went still, Cossont paused for a moment. She looked up into the blue-black sky with its tinily pointed spray of stars and sat-light, and wondered what it would really be like to be Sublimed, to have gone through with it, to be […]
“‘History knocked on your door, did you answer?’” ––This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, by Naomi Klein, pg. 466
Every human struggle needs an image of a better future for supporters to rally around, but it’s never enough to simply know where we want to end up. The accomplishment of profound societal change, if sought peacefully, also demands a set of linguistic and psychological frames revolutionaries can use to inform, impassion, and ultimately persuade […]
“When the Big Green groups refer to offsets as the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of climate action, they are in fact making a crude cost-benefit analysis that concludes that it’s easier to cordon off a forest inhabited by politically weak people in a poor country than to stop politically powerful corporate emitters in rich countries––that it’s easier […]
“The environmental crisis––if conceived sufficiently broadly––neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency. As Yotam Marom, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street in New York, wrote in July 2013, ‘The fight for the climate isn’t a separate movement, it’s both a challenge […]
“This relationship between power decentralization and successful climate action points to how the planning required by this moment differs markedly from the more centralized versions of the past. There is a reason, after all, why it was so easy for the right to vilify state enterprises and national planning: many state-owned companies were bureaucratic, cumbersome, […]