In Collapse, Jared Diamond argues that civilizations choose to collapse by neglecting their ecology. He spends most of his volume pointing to numerous examples of how civilizations collapsed because of ecological problems on Easter Island, Greenland, the southwest United States, and the Yucatan peninsula. He highlights the ecological role in conflicts in Rwanda, Haiti, Montana, China and Australia; he even provides a map which illustrates the nearly perfect overlap between the world’s most ecologically distressed areas, and its most politically distressed areas. Perhaps to shield himself from the charges of geograhpical determinism that came of his previous volume, Guns, Germs & Steel, Diamond includes a few examples of societies that faced ecological problems and “chose” to survive: in the New Guinea highlands, Tikopia, and the Tokugawa shogunate. Yet, it is precisely in these “counter-examples” that we see where Diamond’s model goes awry.

In 2000, director Ridley Scott breathed new life into the Roman based sword and sandal adventure with his blockbuster film Gladiator. The film follows the exploits of Roman general Maximus Decimus Meridius from the conquests of Germania to the gladiatorial battles of the Colosseum and the intrigue of the Senate. The movie took home five Oscar awards for the year, including the award for Best Picture. Its aftermath saw classical antiquity based films such as Troy and Alexander, plans for a Gladiator sequel expected to be released next year, and a slew of Greco-Roman themed video games. The latest work to take audiences to the Roman Empire is the HBO/BBC television series Rome, which finishes its first season tonight with “The Kalends of February.”

A while back I came to realize that people seem to want things to be complicated. Simple solutions are uniformly treated with skepticism, while complicated solutions are hailed as being salvation. And this routinely repeats itself despite comparative success rates. Simple and elegant solutions always work better than complicated and contrived solutions. Why? As you might expect, the answer is very simple.

One of the most basic concepts of the New Tribal Revolution is the realization of the Food Race. Essentially the Food Race is the name Daniel Quinn gave to the observation that every year civilization grows more food, which is inevitably followed by civilization being made of more people. In order to feed this excess of people we then grow more, which in turn causes an increase in the population. Daniel Quinn called this an “experiment run 10,000 times,” which might actually be an understatement. But suffice it to say that we’ve tried this quite a few times now with no variation on the result.

Well, they say it right when they flood the house and they tear it to shreds that, like, destruction is a form of creation. So the fact that they burn the money is ironic. They just want to see what happens when they tear the world apart. They want to change things.
–Donnie Darko

During any upheaval in a culture there are two general reactions. The first reaction is to hold ever tighter to the foundations of your beliefs. The second is to discard those beliefs and attempt to find new ones. The more massive this upheaval, the more extreme the reactions are.

Yesterday I got an unexpected day free. I was sent home shortly after having arrived at work. I wasn’t fired, just sent home. Since my daily commute would make me returning home foolish, especially when my scheduled after-work activities were taken into account, Miranda and I went to Cedarville State Forest. Cedarville State Forest is where the Piscataway used to winter. Apparently it was ideal due to a mild climate and good hunting grounds. It was a clear day, with but a single cloud in the sky. After a picnic we went on a hike along one of the trails. Figuring we had ample time and the day was certainly clear, with no sign of rain. The other hikers were mercifully few, it being so late in the year. All the trees had turned, with the obvious exception of the frequent Holly and Pine trees, and carpeted the ground in fresh leaves. The air was just sufficiently moist to make breathing a pleasure and the leaves crunch at just the right times. The day was unseasonably warm, but no insects took an interest in us. We saw frogs, horses, and Miranda believes she saw a wild cat. The trees were friendly, and wind often caressed us in a breeze.

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot,
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

Four hundred years ago today, Guy Fawkes attempted to kill much of the English Protestant aristocracy by blowing up Parliament during the annual State Opening using barrels of gunpowder in an undercroft just beneath the House of Lords. One of Fawkes’ fellow conspirators wrote a warning to Lord Monteagle. Monteagle showed the letter to Secretary of State Robert Cecil, who had the vaults underneath the House of Lords searched on November 5, 1605. As a result, Fawkes was found and arrested. The Gunpowder Plot is one of the most well-known assassination attempts in history, mostly due to how close Fawkes actually came to crippling the entire English government. In England and some of its former colonies, November 5th is now marked as Guy Fawkes Night—a celebration of Fawkes’ failure.

Agriculture uses resources. This is about as simple as it gets. Agriculture is a method by which resources are transformed into food energy with which humans can sustain their lives. Ultimately there are two kinds of resources that agriculture uses in order to achieve this: solar energy and chemicals found in the earth. Both of these resources are ultimately quite limited. We have found new ways to increase the number of resources in the Earth, specifically by using oil, which has been discussed at length. However, solar energy is also limited. Indeed, on a yearly basis the amount of solar energy that arrives on Earth does not vary exceptionally, as such we can deal with solar energy as a constant energy input per year.

A particularly heated thread at IshCon has recently laid bear my fundamental disagreement with Matthew Kabwe, a.k.a. “Ghost.” It essentially comes down to one of the oldest philosophical questions humanity has ever considered: do we have free will, or is our fate predetermined? Matt cannot accept the inevitability of collapse, because that would entail, in his words, “an absolutist deterministic fatalistic binary zero-sum game with no room for the core of my faith, the third option, which is that walking away is possible and even a good idea.” This objection is sufficiently common to warrant a full explanation.