Continued from The Sustainability Misjudgements We’re Programmed to Make – Part 1 5. Herd Mentality Herd mentality is the tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict. I’m going to explore this one in more detail later: personally I think that herd mentality is […]
Category: Sustainability
The Sustainability Misjudgements We're Programmed to Make – Part 1
I am constantly inspired and enthralled by the ingenuity, compassion and creativity of the people around me. For upright, naked apes we’ve come an awfully long way. Our collective model of the universe (our knowledge) spans orders of magnitude and scales which our minds can only barely imagine, let alone experience. Our technology is profoundly […]
The Copenhagen Bikeshed
I’ve been trying to put Copenhagen’s COP15 into perspective, to synthesise the whole experience into something I can hang on a peg. The more I think about it, the more it resonates with a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while about “The Bikeshed Effect”. “Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed […]
Contraction and Convergence
The climate change policy platform that’s floating just under the surface of negotiations I was privileged to attend COP15 in Copenhagen this week as a member of the Global Commons Institute delegation, headed by Aubrey Meyer. During our attendance, I spent a fair bit of time talking about C&C theory with Aubrey, and felt motivated […]
Google or Tea? Introducing the Carbon:Value Ratio
I’m not even sure this is worth blogging it seems so obvious. I guess the thing that crystallised this concept in my mind was that whole two-Google-searches-is-the-energy-equivalent-of-boiling-a-kettle nonsense, precipitated by a journalist from The Times doing some bad research and choosing a sensationalist headline which ensured that the story did the rounds for weeks online. […]
Power without Responsibility
This phrase has been rattling around my brain for a long time now. One of the first times I said it out loud, James Governor asked me for a link to where I’d blogged about it. I hadn’t: Oh! the shame. Power It’s hard to look around without seeing signs of humanity’s power. Financial, military, […]