Stories tagged with "joseph tainter"

Joseph Tainter - Human Resource Use: Timing and Implications for Sustainability

Posted by Nate Hagens on September 9, 2009 - 10:17am
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: complexity, energy gain, joseph tainter, sustainability [list all tags]

Joseph Tainter, a Professor in the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University, and author of the seminal work "The Collapse of Complex Societies", recently gave a speech on complexity and resource use at the 94th Annual Meeting of Ecological Society of America in New Mexico: (Conference theme: Human Macroecology: Understanding Human-Environment Interactions Across Scales). The speech, 'Human Resource Use: Timing and Implications for Sustainability', based on a forthcoming paper, is reprinted below with the authors permission.

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How Will Knowledge of Collapse Impact Collapse?

Posted by Nate Hagens on June 21, 2009 - 10:00am in The Oil Drum: Campfire
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: collapse, joseph tainter, noah raford, panarchy [list all tags]

I just watched an excellent and thought provoking lecture by Noah Raford at London School of Economics (hat tip Jason Bradford): (Note: you can play around with these models on Netlogo online HERE)


Collapse Dynamics

The lecture was about various examples in nature, financial markets and civilizations where previously correlated patterns were eventually sharply disrupted by small critical changes leading to phase transitions. We've had essays on the failure of networked systems, the ecological framing of collapse, and similar topics on TOD before, but while watching the 2 video lectures, I started to wonder: what impact does detailed knowledge of collapse dynamics have on collapse dynamics? This is the topic of tonight's Campfire.

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