Extraenvironmentalist

Though we often think the modern culture of consumerism is an export from United States and a product of capitalism, people long before today’s era were enjoying the benefit of soft shoes, beautiful cloth and exceptional goods. Acquisition has been an important part of community and identity, essential to societies even though only recently so […]

Companies like Twitter can make billions of dollars in revenue while providing a widely used service and still be considered a financial failure. Though today's digital technologies provide new innovations that reorganize daily life, can the digital economy expand forever? Will our most promising tech ever reach its potential in an economy pushing for growth […]

After years of mediocre negotiations on an international agreement to limit future climate change, it is easy to be cynical about the viability of a global strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. What do these large conferences really mean for the future of the planet? Our correspondent reports back from the December 2015 COP21 meeting […]

Digital communication technologies hold the possibility of re-orienting the way we exchange value and think about money. Do digital currencies like Bitcoin have the ability to change the global economic order? Can machine learning, automation, and cryptocurrencies unleash exponential innovations that unseat the financial institutions at the top of the monetary pyramid? In Extraenvironmentalist #92 we first […]

The common political conversation about our shared economic future focuses on achieving an escape velocity where the post-war growth boom can return as usual. While years of lackluster economic performance mount, a rapidly growing global economy is still discussed like it is readily just over the horizon. Can the factors creating a slower growth world […]

In our highly connected world of cell phones, ever expanding inboxes and regular social media updates, it is easy to be constantly immersed in the rich and dynamic worlds created by our technologies. While the internet gives us so much, it also changes our social relationships and mental environment in many subtle ways that can […]

In this Autumn 2015 Interlude of The Extraenvironmentalist we talk about research on how ancient humans perceived sounds with Steve Waller on rock art acoustics and Miriam Kolar about her archaeoacoustic research at Chavín de Huantar.   // Music (in order of appearance) St. Germain - Forget Me Not Ólafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm - […]

We're launching The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder - the first show on our forthcoming podcast network! This is the only episode we'll place in our Extraenvironmentalist podcast feed so please go to http://energytransitionshow.com/ to subscribe. Episode #0 features the conversation we had with Chris in XE #89 on how global macro trends are […]

Today's textbook notions of business were developed during an unprecedented global economic expansion - a cultural condition that faces diminishing returns in today’s world. Can we build enterprises for a post-growth future that thrive among challenges of the next century? By reversing the process that privatizes profits, would unsustainable trends and drivers of inequality be […]

Our governments, businesses and economic institutions were built on a society that was supercharged with fossil fuels to get as big as possible as fast as possible. Now, with the challenges of the 21st century, resilience is a more appropriate principle for reinventing and reorganizing our economic life. Is it possible to develop economic and […]

Usually we think of permaculture as a system for land and food, where humans work with the flows and systems of nature. Can we also apply permaculture to societies? To our justice or education systems? Can we reorganize our civilization to live on yield rather than the principle before depleting our most important stocks? In […]

The soil of our food system provides the roots of our culture. Without soil, our modern lifestyle would cease to exist. As climate change accelerates rates of soil erosion, will the global population be left as a stranded asset? As we fail to describe the real cost of cheap food through our vocabulary and economics, and […]

You aren’t being borne along the current of an inevitable thing, you are able to steer from what brings you down, make alliances with what supports you. Personal empowerment means deconditioning from values of the society, putting your own values in place. Realize you must shoot for Extra-environmentalism. When people say they feel like a creature from outer space, that’s not such a bad way to feel, it means you see the game, you don’t buy in, you can't be bought with a Mercedes, business trips to Paris. It’s a controlled alienation, where you cultivate extra-environmentalism.

Our 20th century food system has created a global market for cheaply priced commodities of corn, wheat, soybeans and rice. We pump a plethora of food from the earth, in the same way we pump barrels of oil. A vision of never-ending technological progress frames the creation of genetically modified organisms in an attempt to […]

Our industrial system of agriculture and an integrated global marketplace has created an abundance of available food for those in wealthy nations. Cheaply priced produce and meat shows up in our supermarkets and restaurants with rarely any concern. Values of efficiency and synchronized just-in-time deliveries have been served by a philosophy of capital-intensive financing for […]