Website review: The Archdruid Report: The Innovatio...
laodan discovered this in Science/Tech
•1 reviews since Sep 13, 2007
reality
•thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/09/innov...
People who like this website
StumbleUpon is the best way to discover great web sites, videos, photos, blogs and more - based on your interests.
Everything is submitted and rated by the community. Discover, share and review the best of the web!
Reviews of this website
laodan discovered 8 months ago- The Innovation Fallacy in The Archdruid report by John Michael Greer
It took 500 million years to create our planet's stockpile of fossil fuels. Once they're gone, what's left is mostly diffuse sources such as sunlight and wind, and trying to concentrate these so they can power industrial society is like trying to make a river flow uphill. ... If energy resources are't available in sufficient quality and quantity, innovation can make a successful society but it won't make or maintain an industrial one. Itu2019s worth suggesting that the maximum possible level of economic development in a society is defined by the abundance and concentration of energy resources available to that society. ... For most of human history, the resource that has been in shortest supply has arguably been energy. For the last three hundred years, and especially for the last three-fourths of a century, that's been less true than ever before. Today, however, the highly concentrated and abundant energy resources stockpiled by the biosphere over the last half billion years or so are running low, and there are no other resources on or around Earth at the same level of concentration and abundance. Innovation is vital if weu2019re to deal with the consequences of that reality, but it can't make the laws of thermodynamics run backwards and give us an endless supply of concentrated energy just because we happen to want one. The Innovation Fallacy Technophiles push reality out of the sphere of their ideological rationalism. They just fail to see the big picture. In this article John Michael Greer gives an compelling refutation of technophiles' ideology of "the ever more". The principle of life relies on what its environment has to offer, in term of energy and resources, that can help it to reproduce itself and to expand. Evolutionary transformations in the principle of life appear as a species' adaptation to changes threatening the access to its habitual resources. Once a resource rarefies the specie has to find another one which eventually obliges it to mutate in order to adapt itself to whatever is available out there. But once all the resources the specie can possibly adopt are rarefying then that specie enters a spiral of collapse. It seems to me that humanity is entering such a spiral and technology is not going to extract us from our condition. There is just no way out the world population will decline drastically and such a decline shall not go without much suffering. Demographic projections table such a decline to start after 2050. Will humanity find an optimum equilibrium for the resources available to it? I think so. But this road of adaptation to our environmental realities could possibly disrupt the complexity of our advanced societies leaving our descendants to strive in a post-modern reality that could take possibly some pre-modern traits of simplicity.
- The Innovation Fallacy in The Archdruid report by John Michael Greer
