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Suspicious minds: paranoia on the rise
Sabine Durrant, Guardian
Once it affected 1% of the population. Now more than a quarter of us suffer from paranoia
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... He has just written a book, Paranoia: The 21st-Century Fear, with his brother Jason Freeman, a writer. Their thesis is that we are suffering from paranoia more than ever before. It was a mental disorder that was once thought to afflict 1% of the population - basically, people with schizophrenia - but now, according to studies, it affects a quarter of us. Many people with paranoia may not believe - as one of Freeman's patients does - that the government is trying to kill them, or that security agencies have planted cameras in their eyes, but they may worry irrationally that people are gossiping about them, or intend to mug them, or that their children may be taken by paedophiles.

... Over the last 15 years, as a research fellow for the Wellcome Trust, Freeman has found links between paranoia and urbanisation, globalisation, migration and wealth inequality, increased power of the media, CCTV cameras and the internet. Urbanisation particularly fascinates him. "You go into Camberwell [home to King's College hospital] and it's stressful, it's noisy, it's chaotic. You are bustled about, you have to negotiate your path. Sometimes it's familiar and fine, but as soon as you have a suspicious thought, there is ambiguity and confusion, and paranoia thrives in that sort of environment. But it's hard to quantify. We are speculating. There are a number of really consistent results looking at the adult population in Sweden, showing people in urban areas have higher levels of paranoia. But we don't know exactly why," he says.
(10 March 2009)

Psychology of denial
George Marshall, Guardian
Academics meeting in Bristol at the weekend for Britain's first conference on the psychology of climate change argued that the greatest obstacles to action are not technical, economic or political — they are the denial strategies that we adopt to protect ourselves from unwelcome information.

It is true that nearly 80% of people claim to be concerned about climate change. However, delve deeper and one finds that people have a remarkable tendency to define this concern in ways that keep it as far away as possible.

... How is it possible that so many people are still unpersuaded by 40 years of research and the consensus of every major scientific institution in the world? Surely we are now long past the point at which the evidence became overwhelming?

If only belief formation were this simple. Having neither the time nor skills to weigh up each piece of evidence we fall back on decision-making shortcuts formed by our education, politics and class. In particular we measure new information against our life experience and the views of the people around us.

... Dr Myanna Lahsen, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Colorado, has specialised in understanding how professional scientists, some of them with highly respected careers, turn climate sceptic. She found the largest common factor was a shared sense that they had personally lost prestige and authority as the result of campaigns by liberals and environmentalists. She concluded that their engagement in climate issues "can be understood in part as a struggle to preserve their particular culturally charged understanding of environmental reality."
(9 March 2009)
Related: Warming skeptics face shrinking support (UPI)

Framing The Collapsonomics Practice
Vinay Gupta, The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution
Most of the people working on collapse scenarios are working from the current state and trying to maintain essential services at about the current level. On noting that this is impossible, in most cases a sort of Mad Max / Former Soviet Union model takes over.

Dimitri Orlov and the American Survivalists are pretty much the epitome of this way of framing the problem. If you are not familiar with Orlov’s work, this ten minute video is a very fair overview of his perspective, or check this long transcript of a talk on social collapse.

[You Tube of Dimtry Orlov being interviewed by Russia Today ]

I’m going to suggest there are three reasons why we do not need to go down the FSU “it’s all gone horribly wrong” path.

The first is simply that in living memory we’ve seen a full-on five stage collapse. I’ve talked to a couple of people who saw the bolts come off the FSU up close, and - like Orlov - they are mines of hard-won perspective that can be used to get a different outcome in Europe and the USA. It’s not like we have to refer to events of our grandparents time, like 1930s Germany, to see the worst of economic collapse up close. No, we can see the worst quite a lot closer to home and have the luxury and privilege of having read access to people with that perspective, Orlov most visibly.

The second is that at least in America, the war for control of society between the people and the government was not won by the government until relatively recently.
(9 March 2009)
Recommended by Jim Barton. Related:
Vinay Gupta: About Me
Interview: Vinay Gupta on Opensource Disaster Relief and Pod Ambiance
Can we build a world with open source? (Guardian)

Hot, Flat, and Confused
Asher Miller, Post Carbon Institute
I was invited to a small gathering (about 150 people) on Friday afternoon to hear a presentation by Tom Friedman, based on his latest book Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

... good or bad--he's very influential with business leaders, policy makers, D.C. talking heads, and the New York Times crowd. What he says, right or wrong, is important, and so I was curious to hear his thinking on energy, globalization, and climate change--particularly in the context of the economic collapse. And I wanted to ask him a couple of questions.

I got there early and so was introduced by the host to Friedman, who was busy signing copies of his book before the crowd arrived. I asked him if he was familiar with Peak Oil. His short response was namely that, no, he wasn't too familiar with it other than to say he expects we'll run out of oil sometime. Since I can't read the man's mind, this may be unfair, but the look on his face gave me the decided feeling that he thought I was a crackpot. So I asked if he was familiar with the work of Paul Roberts, a fellow journalist turned author, who wrote The End of Oil. Friedman told me he's heard of him, but never read his work.

I'm used to getting blank faces or fleeting glances looking for my tinfoil hat when I mention Peak Oil. But I'll admit I was stunned to think that Friedman hadn't explored the issue. I'd honestly rather believe he's looked into it and decided it was bunk than think he dismissed it out of hand or was too lazy to look into it.

Friedman's presentation was very good. He has a skilled way of communicating complex issues with powerful metaphors and anecdotes. He covered a broad and frightening range of issues with humor and creative storytelling. And he covered far more ground than I had expected (honest admission: I have not read Hot, Flat, and Crowded). The theme of the book was three main challenges:

• Hot: the climate crisis
• Flat: the rise of the global middle class (with consumptive behaviors paralleling those in the US)
• Crowded: the population explosion

And Friedman also covered the issues of energy poverty around the world (showing this powerful picture of students in Guinea studying at night by the light of the airport), biodiversity loss, the plight of "petrodictators," and other related challenges. I was puzzled to see that energy decline was not on the list.

More troubling was Friedman's seeming belief that what he calls Energy Technology can fix all these problems. Never mind the assumption that we have the time, capital, supply chains, and natural resources to quickly deploy these technologies (some of which don't yet exist). I wrestled with this question, which I wanted to ask Friedman:

"Let's assume that energy technology can solve the hot part of the equation. [BIG ASSUMPTION.] How does ET solve flat and crowded?"

Friedman himself talked about the loss of biodiversity. That's just one in an array of environmental collapses our population and consumption have caused. Energy technology doesn't solve fresh water depletion, soil erosion, the loss of arable land, depletion of fish stocks, etc.

And he ended his book--and his presentation--with the eulogy given by Amory Lovins when Donella Meadows passed away:

When asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she'd always say that we have exactly enough time -- starting now.

Meadows was the author of Limits to Growth, a report that explored the consequences of exponential growth in population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion on the earth’s ecosystems.

(8 March 2009)
Thomas Friedman questions the orthodoxy of growth in his latest column: The Inflection Is Near? (NY Times)