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A major deficiency of the growth-obsessed model driving global neoliberal economic policy is its lack of understanding on the Earth System on which it—and…

In summary, the global economy and biology have very parallel growth patterns relating energy consumption to size. 

When not busy trying to murder humans in The Matrix, the AI program known as Agent Smith took time to pontificate on our nature as a species. You can’t really consider us mammals, he reckoned, because mammals form an equilibrium with their environment. By contrast, humans move to an area and multiply “until every natural resource is consumed,” making us more like a kind of virus. “Human beings are a disease,” he concluded, “a cancer of this planet. You are a plague.” I think, though, that it would be more accurate to describe humanity as a kind of biofilm,...

The Download: Only 3 percent of living biomass in 1900, man-made materials such as steel, plastic, and concrete now outweigh animals, plants, and microorganisms, according to a new study by Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science. The total mass has grown from less than 0.1 teratonnes to 1 teratonne (1 trillion tonnes) as the scale of roads, buildings, structures, and other objects has increased beginning in the 1950s postwar construction boom, known as the “Great Acceleration,” and doubling every 20 years ever since. The amount of new stuff being produced every week is equivalent to t...