Categorie: history

old and new wisdom, for 2024

I’m not much into a kind of spiritual approach, at least, as a beta scientist I’m not sure how to deal with that. I’m more into physics, what can we prove (or at least: what we can’t change…). On a fundamental level that is, not within limited system boundaries where…

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Oppenheimer and ‘the Wealth race’

Last week, I watched the film about Oppenheimer, and that piece of history made me realize that what we are experiencing now is, in fact, a kind of (nuclear) arms race: who can grow the fastest, who can protect themselves the most, to acquire wealth, and who can extract the…

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The biodiversity graph in ‘bars’

Climate change gets all the attention, but at least as problematic is Biodiversity loss, if not even more dramatic. After all, we ourselves are one of those endangered species…. That there is less attention, Miles Richardson thought, also lies in profiling, and a visualization of the problem that could catch…

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Change, back then and now

Everything used to be better, in former times, the older generations think. The Youngsters don’t know the old days so think it’s all better now, that’s their standard. It’s always a bit more nuanced, of course. But let’s turn it around, question the elder with regard to the younger standard:…

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the creating-debtors-theory of money…

Time for yet another ‘episode’ in my series on ‘money’. I am trying to ‘understand’ things, that’s how this episode regarding money should be read. A rediscovered old research sheds some light in the darkness. Virtually everything today is expressed in money, and everything is also measured in money: even…

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Jaime Lerner – Curitiba

Just recently, in May, Jaime Lerner passed away. He more or less invented sustainable urban development. A little tribute. Everything has to be sustainable or circular these days, including the cities. Now, is there a city that has already applied many of these principles, where there is something to learn?…

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A Cuban style ‘Special Period’, now for the capitalist world?

Or: is this the 1,5 degree economy? As the walls fell, back in 1989, the world was in turmoil, and the perspective on a lot of things changed. Not the least the (declining) fear for a nuclear war of course. But even more this kick-started an unprecedented belief in free…

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A New Year, New chances…: ‘Homo Vermis’

It is now exactly 10 years ago around Christmas that I struggled with the interpretation of ‘cycles’. Why I wondered, is everyone convinced there are two resource cycles, as promoted nowadays in whats called the circular economy? And why would we treat these differently? And at some moment around New…

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20-40 years later…

There were boxes full of books and reports, even up to 40 years old. And since it was too hot to do anything outside, I finally cleared the attic. Going through the boxes one by one, its hard to avoid starting reading again. Just throwing away things would be a…

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“The living temperature should be lowered”… Energy Policy from 1974

A little bit of history this time, especially about the Dutch Energy Strategy of 1974. In the period leading  to that bill, we had two moments in history where we had taken the wrong turn . In the 19th century with coal and oil: which was understandable, there was much…

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