Tag: collasso
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Diritti della natura (o Pacha Mama)
Capítulo séptimo Derechos de la naturaleza Art. 71.- La naturaleza o Pacha Mama, donde se reproduce y realiza la vida, tiene derecho a que se respete integralmente su existencia y el mantenimiento y regeneración de sus ciclos vitales, estructura, funciones y procesos evolutivos. Toda persona, comunidad, pueblo o nacionalidad podrá exigir a la autoridad pública…
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Bollire una società
Here is how to boil a frog. Place the frog in a pan of tepid water. Raise the temperature so gradually that the frog does not realize it is being cooked. It may even fall into a stupor, as a person might in a hot bath. Eventually it will die. According to experiments done in…
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Controproducenti
Sadly, malaria is making a comeback in many parts of the Third World, due partly to insecticide-resistant mosquitoes and partly to complacency and political disintegration. Irrigation projects such as dams, reservoirs, and irrigation canals often work well in temperate climates. However, in tropical regions, they may backfire. They create large bodies of stationary water that…
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Moralità
I said, “I can name for you something that is good, no matter what stories we tell ourselves.” “And it is…” I held up my glass. “Drinkable quantities of clean water.” “I don’t understand.” “Drinkable quantities of clean water are unqualifiedly a good thing, no matter the stories we tell ourselves.” She got it. She…
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L’equivoco
The agricultural life, often referred to as “pastoral” or “rural”, seems a natural world to modern-day city dwellers and suburbanites. A weekend drive in the country is a time for relaxing and “going back to nature.” Yet farming is not na- ture, but rather the largest alteration of Earth’s surface from its natural state that…
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I limiti dell’ingegno
Historical evidence would indicate that very few key inventions have been made by men who had to spend all their energy overcoming the immediate pressures of survival. Atomic energy was discovered in the laboratories of basic science by individuals unaware of any threat of fossil fuel depletion. The first genetic experiments, which led a hundred…
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Una catastrofe annuale artificiale
Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished,…
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Tikopia
In addition to their islandwide system of multistory orchards and fields, social adaptations sustained the Tikopian economy. Most important, the islanders’ religious ideology preached zero population growth. Under a council of chiefs who monitored the balance between the human population and natural resources, Tikopians practiced draconian population control based on celibacy, contraception, abortion, and infanticide,…
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Reinventare l’alienazione
The fact that the ideological distinction is artificial was first spotted by Albert Camus, who pointed out that both Western industrialism and its communist version achieve similar results through similar means – industrialization and specialization of labor. In the 1950s, in Défence de L’Homme Révolté, Camus accurately predicted that if the communist experiment were to…