My first job out of graduate school was also my first and only job offer. I jumped at the opportunity of becoming a manager at a fungal microbiology laboratory, specializing on indoor mold: people would bring me samples from their blackened shower wall, their carpet, or their basement, and I would analyze them. I would … Continue reading Biology Lessons In Degrowth: The Three Stages of Civilisation
The reason why there are thousands of times more small fish in the ocean compared to sharks is very simple: sharks eat a lot more, so they come at a very high resource cost to the ecosystem. Nature has designed sharks so that they have far fewer viable offspring than smaller fish, not only so … Continue reading The Real Reason Why Human Population Must, and Will, Crash
Civilisations and ecosystems are virtually indistinguishable from each other at times of existential stress: the same laws of scarcity and competition which decimate an ecosystem’s food chain are behind the collapse of a human currency chain. In any interconnected system, whether this is a human society or an ecosystem, the weight of collapse bears down … Continue reading Transformation Through Collapse: The Parable of The Burning Forest
Today I discovered that one of my Cyclamen coum plants in the upper woodland garden had produced offspring: tiny one-leaf seedlings fighting for space and light under the canopy of a 45 year-old evergreen Jasminum mesnyi that complements their intense fuchsia colour with its narcissus-yellow blooms. Both plants bloom in the middle of February, a most drab … Continue reading Patience
125 million years ago an exceptionally long, baking hot summer began to sweep through the Celestial Mountain in the Tien Shan alpine range spanning modern-day Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China. The scorching conditions on the desiccated slopes of the mountain left little room for survival for the great majority of organisms, and the freezing … Continue reading Meditative Degrowth: Sometimes The Smartest Act of Defiance Is To Stay Still
Evolving Into One 3.8 billion years ago, life began to emerge on Earth. A single lonely cell, the ancestor we share with everything else that lives, began to diverge into individual species. At first, only a handful of life forms existed, barely distinguishable from each other. Fast forward a few million years and an incredible … Continue reading The False Narrative of Conflict
With a brain no longer fit for a world of scarcity, humans meet the definition of an evolutionary dead-end: a species unable to adapt. Extinction events occur when environmental conditions change too rapidly for organisms to develop evolutionary adaptations, and this is precisely what is happening to humans. Runaway climate change is altering Earth too fast … Continue reading Final Destination: Extinction
With any economy, the faster you grow and expand, the sooner you die, just like an obesity patient. There is, however, one economy in the world who has got it right. It neither grows nor dies, and actually manages to stay the same, or at least it did, until recently. It is the oldest economy … Continue reading The Biggest, Oldest Economy In The World Is Burning
Although chaotic on the surface, the ecosystem is incredibly simple in its core operating principles. But when studying ecosystems and climate systems, we always overcomplicate things. We focus only on the chaos and conflict between species and between weather elements, forgetting about the principle of balance that supersedes them. This is because we choose to … Continue reading The Myth of The Predator
While humans achieved impressive technological accomplishments inside their busy cities, they had failed to equally develop all parts of themselves. If anything, over centuries they devolved into a species with a lost identity, meaning or purpose, core elements of the psyche that were neglected and sidelined by the whiplash of technological “progress”. These huge widening … Continue reading The Loneliness of a Dying Parasite
George Tsakraklides 