By Becky Striepe •
February 4, 2009
Worldchanging.com co-founder Jamais Cascio works in the field of scenario development. He’s used his skills on all sorts of projects from video game design to building alternative energy scenarios. In his recently published lecture, he talks about specific things we can do to build a better world.
[Creative Commons photo by Andrés Larsen]
Each year, the
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference invites experts from a variety of fields to share their knowledge in 18 minute lectures. Jamais Cascio gave this talk back in February of 2006 discussing solutions for a sustainable future. He talks about the need for optimism and how, “focusing only on negative outcomes can really blind you to the very possibility of success.” He emphasizes staying positive, citing scientific and technological advances that help us better understand our impact on the world around us and how to lower that impact.
He even touches on the power of social networking! The Earth Witness project he describes sounds like a really exciting idea - one that might be doable using a microblogging service like Twitter that allows folks to send texts straight from their cell phones to the web!
Check out the whole video after the jump.
By Pem Charnley •
January 21, 2008
It’s a topic that, by its very nature, provokes a passionate response.
Should population growth be curbed?
Immediately, we are faced with important moral, ethical and religious quandaries.
I write this in the light of a piece that appeared in the UK’s Observer. In it, John Gray, a political philosopher, states:
The uncomfortable fact, which is ignored or denied by both ends of the environmental debate, is that an energy-intensive lifestyle of the kind enjoyed in the rich parts of the world cannot be extended to a human population of nine or 10 billion, the level forecast in UN studies for the middle of this century.
Can better energy efficiency help us reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and curb our greenhouse gas emissions? Maybe not as much as some hope.
While some people tout better and more energy-efficient technology as one solution to our current fuel and climate challenges, their expectations might be overblown. A new study from the UK Energy Research Centre, for example, finds that improved efficiency sometimes creates a tendency to use more energy, or [...]
Exploring the Global Education Project’s Website can be as addictive as eating potato chips, but both far more enlightening … and depressing. That’s not a slam on the Website, though; rather, it’s actually a compliment on how effectively the site helps visitors visualize the state of the world. Which, in a word, is "troubled."
While daily news reports and studies mercilessly remind us just how troubled things are, a
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