Can You Change The Future?

Can You Change The Future?

What the people really needed was just some basic common-sense information and advice, somebody to tell them the truth – that their way of life was coming to an end – and to offer them some sensible collective survival strategies.”  – Richard Heinberg Now, You Face A Bleak Future “A Letter from the Future” is an imaginary letter written in the year 2101 to by a 100 year old Richard Heinberg – senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and author of 10 books on issues of energy, the economy and ecology – to people of the world living in our times, about the tough future expected according to tendencies scientists and economists foresee humanity experiencing in the coming century. It portrays a picture of a humanity struggling to make its way when the life it created for itself throughout the 20th century faces its depletion: depletion of energy resources, devaluing of money and products above the level of necessity, scarcity of food and water, and political motions toward fascism and war. After painting a bleak picture of a suffering humanity dealing with all of the above during the 21st century, Heinberg raises the question…   Can You Change The Future? Possibly, as a result of reading this letter, you might do something that would change my world [the world of the person living in the year 2101]. … Then, I suppose this letter would change, as would your experience of reading it. And as a result of that, you’d take different actions. We would have set up some kind of cosmic feedback loop between past and future. It’s pretty interesting...
3 Ways The Environment Shapes Human Behavior

3 Ways The Environment Shapes Human Behavior

Many scientific researches have shown an obvious fact, that the behavior of a human being is created by the environment. If genes predispose a certain behavior but the environment doesn’t support it, then that behavior won’t manifest, so in this case, genes aren’t important.” – TROM Narrator The section ENVIRONMENT in the documentary TROM (The Reality Of Me) shows how the environment shapes human beings’ behaviors via: Scientists’ explanations of their research, Scenes of how certain behaviors become accepted as norms in different cultures and situations.   Watch ENVIRONMENT From TROM   How The Environment Shapes Human Behavior. Example 1: Your Experiences Can Change Your Neural Connections Dr. Gregory Forbes, recorded at TEDGlobal 2010: We live in a remarkable time the age of genomics. Your genome is the entire sequence of your DNA. Your sequence and mine are slightly different. That’s why we look different. I’ve got brown eyes you might have blue, or gray; but it’s not just skin-deep. The headlines tell us that genes can give us scary diseases, maybe even shape our personality, or give us mental disorders. Our genes seem to have awesome power over our destinies, and yet, I would like to think that I am more than my genes. Likewise, every connectome changes over time. What kind of changes happen? Neurons, like trees, can grow new branches, and then can lose old ones. Synapses can be created, and then can be eliminated; And synapses can grow larger, and they can grow smaller. 2nd question: What causes these changes? It’s true; to some extent, they are programmed by your genes. But that’s not the whole story, because there...
How To Redefine Prosperity To Get Through The Crisis Unscathed

How To Redefine Prosperity To Get Through The Crisis Unscathed

“The credit and debt system … is a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.” Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the ESRC Research Group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment (RESOLVE), Economics Commissioner on the UK Sustainable Development Commission, and author of Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, in his TED talk Economic Reality Check explains the paradox of living in crisis times, the paradox between people’s needs to “save, save, save” and the continuation of an socio-economic influence to “spend, spend, spend,” and suggests a solution of redefining prosperity: for meaningful, altruistic values to spread throughout society in order to achieve a “we” vision of prosperity. Graph: The dramatic rise in personal debt and the plummeting of personal savings in the U.K. the last 15 years before the 2008 financial crash [taken from the TED talk] The Crisis’ Paradox – The Need To Save & The Social Influence To Spend “In the crisis, in the recession, what do people want to do? … They want to spend less and save more. But saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view … saving slows down recovery. And politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt, to draw down our own savings even further, just so that we can get the show back on the road, so we can keep this growth-based economy going. It’s an anomaly, it’s a place where the system...
Battle Of The Century: Our Addiction To Economic Growth Vs. Our Finite Planet

Battle Of The Century: Our Addiction To Economic Growth Vs. Our Finite Planet

Crisis = The Clashing Point Between An Economy Of Infinite Growth And The Limits Of Finite Resources Economic growth is effectively over. There are practical limits to debt, and we’re hitting them. There are practical limits to energy sources, and we’re hitting them. There are real limits to the planet’s ability to absorb our wastes and industrial accidents, and we’ve hit those too. We’re being told that the economy is recovering. But take away new debt the government has taken on since 2008 to stimulate the economy, and there’s been no real economic growth. There is no recovery. It’s all been done with more debt. We’ve already mortgaged our grandchildren’s future, but to keep the economy from relapsing, we’ll need to borrow even more. The game is up. We’ve reached the end of economic growth as we’ve known it.”   Unlike Many Think, There Is No ‘They’ To Blame For This Crisis: Everybody’s Addicted To Economic Growth We all got hooked on growth. Rising GDP numbers became our main measure of success. ‘More, bigger and faster’ meant ‘better.’ We’re all addicted to growth. We all want better jobs and higher returns on investments. But we live on a finite planet. The end of growth is not the fault of any one politician or a political party, but some people benefited from growth more than others.”    To Live Without Economic Growth, We’ll Have To Start Doing A Few Things Differently We can live without economic growth, but we’ll have to start doing a few things differently: We have to measure and aim for improvements in life that don’t require...
Global Interconnection Between People And Nations – A Fact Of Life [TED Talk]

Global Interconnection Between People And Nations – A Fact Of Life [TED Talk]

Today, in our modern world, because of the Internet, everything is connected to everything. We are now interdependent. We are now interlocked as nations, as individuals, in a way which has never been the case before.”  – Paddy Ashdown Veteran Diplomat and Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire Paddy Ashdown describes the period we live in as one of those terrifying periods of history when power changes… And these are always periods accompanied by turbulence, and all too often by blood.” Most notably, Ashdown points out that this global interconnection is a fact of life, but one which can be either a terrifying prospect or a cause for celebration and peace, as it means that we all share a common destiny: Global Interconnection  –  Danger: If you get Swine Flu in Mexico, it’s a problem for Charles De Gaul Airport 24 hours later. Lehman Brothers goes down – the whole lot collapses. There are fires in the steppes of Russia – food riots in Africa. We are all now deeply, deeply, deeply interconnected. It used to be the case that if my tribe is more powerful than their tribe, I was safe. My country was more powerful than their country, I was safe. My alliance, like NATO, was more powerful than their alliance, I was safe. It is no longer the case.” Global Interconnection  –  Hope: If it is the case that we are now locked together in a way that has never been quite the same before, then it is also the case that we share a destiny with each other. …The advent of interconnectedness and of the weapons...