Author: Michele Guieu

Culture Change and Neuroscience

WNFE Exhibition Culture Change and Neuroscience copy
| Michele Guieu

This is the 11th What’s Next for Earth online exhibition based on Think Resilience,
a free online course written by Richard Heinberg and produced by the Post Carbon Institute.

“If we want to adapt successfully to a future of less energy per capita, and little or no economic growth, we need to better manage some of the neurological traits that served our evolutionary forebears but are ill-suited to the modern world. Consumerism is a modern version of our biological drives for status-seeking and novelty-seeking and makes use of how our brain chemistry develops addictions. We also have an innate tendency to give more weight to present threats and opportunities than to future ones; this is called discounting the future, and it makes it hard to sacrifice now to overcome an enormous future risk such as climate change. Fortunately, we also have some inherited neurological tendencies that would be useful to encourage, like cooperation, empathy, and altruism.”
– Richard Heinberg

Shifting Cultural Stories

Shifting Cultural Stories Online Exhibition 02
| Michele Guieu

This is the 10th What’s Next for Earth online exhibition based on Think Resilience,
a free online course by the Post Carbon Institute.

“Society’s goals and mindsets could be thought of as the stories we tell ourselves. Some cultural stories are deeply ingrained in us as a species, while some are the predominant narratives of the particular society into which we have been born. They help us make sense of the world around us, but they may also hinder our ability to foresee big social changes and to adjust our behavior accordingly. Therefore, some of these stories need to change: we may need to shift from the consumer economy to a conserver economy; from valuing things to valuing relationships and experiences; from inevitable growth to a steady-state economy; from a politics of mass persuasion to a politics of local engagement.”
– Richard Heinberg

Thinking in Systems

Thinking in Systems online exhibition
| Michele Guieu

This is the 9th What’s Next for Earth online exhibition based on Think Resilience,
a free online course by the Post Carbon Institute.

“In the previous nine videos we explored the interrelated crises of the twenty-first century. As we saw, these are not simple problems, and they can’t be solved with simple technical adjustments. They are systemic issues. Understanding and responding to them intelligently requires us to think systemically. Well, systems thinking emerged in science during the latter part of the twentieth century. Previously, it was often assumed that we could understand systems simply by analyzing their parts. However, it gradually became apparent—in practical fields from medicine to wildlife management to business management—that this often led to unintended consequences.”

– Richard Heinberg

Collapse

WNFE Collapse online exhibition 02
| Michele Guieu

This is the 8th What’s Next for Earth online exhibition based on Think Resilience,
a free online course by the Post Carbon Institute.

“Historians have long noted that civilizations appear to pass through cycles of expansion and decline. Underlying the factors that appear to contribute to the collapse of civilizations, there may be a deeper dynamic: the relationship between the ability of a society to solve problems
and the amount of energy it has available to do work.
Unfortunately, most energy production activities are subject to the law of diminishing returns.
At what stage in the cycle of expansion and decline might our own civilization find itself today?”
– Richard Heinberg, an excerpt of the Think Resilience free Online Course, lesson 9: “Collapse”.