This page provides links to recent publications on social/ecological issues.
Focus on the intersection of patriarchy and everything else: human nature, sexuality and gender, population growth, degrowth, patriarchal gender ideology, patriarchal economics, patriarchal theology, social injustice, ecological footprint, ecological overshoot, industrial ecology, emerging technologies, cultural evolution, integral human development, human ecology, integral ecology, etc., etc., etc.
"Human relations to nature are profoundly interconnected with issues about gender and sexuality. Simultaneously, the tension between domination and control versus love and recognition is not only a question about what is given priority in culture. It is a question about how ideals about gender modulate the inner psychological world of humans in ways that shape relationships with other humans and toward nature. Hence, it is necessary to develop a critical approach to prevailing and still dominant attitudes toward gender and analyze how it may be connected with humans' relationship with nature."
"With the world’s population topping 8 billion last year, it’s clear that humans have achieved a unique status in Earth’s history. We are the only creature that dominates all other organisms on the planet, from animals and fungi to plants and microbes. It remains to be seen whether humans can retain this dominance as we push the global climate to extremes while driving to extinction the very organisms that we climbed over to get to the top. In a new book, a group of scientists and philosophers places part of the blame on an attitude prevalent among scientists and the general public — the false belief that species are uniquely real, and that some species are superior to others.
To the researchers, this is analogous to racism — the fallacious belief that races exist as branches on the Tree of Life, and that some races are superior to others."
"Domestication, extirpation, and simplification: These are the drivers of
wilderness loss. Through them modern civilization has thrown an
asphyxiating cloak over a world where ecological vibrancy, diversity and
complexity were once ubiquitous. The magnitude of this many-layered
wreckage resists description and perhaps even defies comprehension. What
can be stated with a clarion certainty, however, is that accepting the wild’s
su5ocation as an irreversible reality only intensifies the tragedy.
Mercifully, a powerful challenge to such an acceptance comes from a
burgeoning fellowship of Earth citizens who are calling for the cloak to be
peeled back, so that non-human life has a chance to rebound and the brilliant
light of nature’s diversity can shine again. These people, us among them, are
proponents of rewilding, which is a uniting theme for many of the pieces in
the present issue. These contributions add to a body of content on rewilding
that we have brought to readers in recent years, including through our
role as co-publisher, in 2020, of the
Global Charter for Rewilding the Earth."
"This article argues that Vaclav Havel’s critique of technophilia has a lot to
teach us about our collective response to the climate and ecological more-
than-emergency. Havel highlights how consumer society endlessly tempts us
to live within the lie that ‘everything is going to be okay’. His critique helps
reveal the illusions that we need to shed in order to live in truth today. These
illusions currently bind together too many ‘greens’ with the so-called
‘progressive’ element of the ruling class. Instead, the article argues that if we
are being honest with ourselves, then the only way we can avoid collapse is by
creating an ecological civilization by way of transformative adaptation."
"Wealthy countries consume massive amounts of natural resources per capita, and Americans are no exception.
According to data from the National Mining Association, each American needs more than 39,000 pounds (17,700 kg) of minerals and fossil fuels annually to maintain their standard of living."
Dynamic material flow analysis (dMFA) is widely used to model stock-flow dynamics. To appropriately represent material lifetimes, recycling potentials, and service provision, dMFA requires data about the allocation of economy-wide material consumption to different end-use products or sectors, that is, the different product stocks, in which material consumption accumulates. Previous estimates of this allocation only cover few years, countries, and product groups. Recently, several new methods for estimating end-use product allocation in dMFA were proposed, which so far lack systematic comparison. We review and systematize five methods for tracing material consumption into end-use products in inflow-driven dMFA and discuss their strengths and limitations. Widely used data on industry shipments in physical units have low spatio-temporal coverage, which limits their applicability across countries and years. Monetary input–output tables (MIOTs) are widely available and their economy-wide coverage makes them a valuable source to approximate material end-uses. We find four distinct MIOT-based methods: consumption-based, waste input–output MFA (WIO-MFA), Ghosh absorbing Markov chain, and partial Ghosh. We show that when applied to a given MIOT, the methods’ underlying input–output models yield the same results, with the exception of the partial Ghosh method, which involves simplifications. For practical applications, the MIOT system boundary must be aligned to those of dMFA, which involves the removal of service flows, sector (dis)aggregation, and re-defining specific intermediate outputs as final demand. Theoretically, WIO-MFA, applied to a modified MIOT, produces the most accurate results as it excludes massless and waste transactions.
"Despite her rejection of Catholicism as irredeemably patriarchal, this essay explores Mary Daly’s complicated relationship with her theological past. Daly offers a vision for "boundary living" — where institutional disaffiliation creates a space for creatively reclaiming and reconstructing the tradition."
Laudato Si Movement, 27 September 2022
(1) Hearing the Cry of the Earth
(2) Hearing the Cry of the Poor
(3) Ecological Economics
(4) Adoption of Sustainable Lifestyles
(5) Ecological Education
(6) Ecological Spirituality
(7) Community Resilience and Empowerment
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