Introductions to WWW resources (links)

Dr. Albert Bartlett

Dr. Albert Bartlett is Professor Emeritus in Nuclear Physics at University of Colorado at Boulder, USA.

 

Dr. Albert Bartlett's presentation Arithmetic, Population and Energy. is surprisingly fun and entertaining as well as being informative and easy to understand.  The lecture can be viewed at his website.  A transcript of the lecture is also available.

 

Jeremy Grantham

Jeremy Grantham is an investor, and co-founder and Chief Investment Strategist of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO), a Boston-based asset management firm. GMO is one of the largest managers of such funds in the world, having more than US $107 billion in assets under management as of December 2010. Grantham is regarded as a highly knowledgeable investor in various stock, bond, and commodity markets, and is particularly noted for his prediction of various bubbles. 

 

  Jeremy Grantham writes a remarkably insightful and sensible quarterly newsletter, which you can download from the GMO website if

you register (for free.)

 

Of particular interest to the concerns of choose the future! are:

 

Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever

 

Resource Limitations 2: Separating the Dangerous from the Merely Serious

 

Money as Debt

Paul Grignon has produced a series of three movies titled Money as Debt that show how money is created, reveal the consequences of that method of creating money, and look at alternative ways of creating money that don't produce these negative consequences. The movies are animated, with just enough humour to make them enjoyable to watch without distracting from their serious message.

 

For a very short overview of the subject matter of Money as Debt  you can watch Paul address the Occupy Vancouver protest.

 

Tim Jackson

Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey. Tim is the author of the book 'Prosperity Without Growth'

 

Tim Jackson was Economics Commissioner on the UK Government's Sustainable Development Commission and is the author of their controversial and groundbreaking report, updated and expanded in the book, Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet.

 

You can see or hear a great lecture given by him as part of the 2010 Alfred Deakin Lecture series, on the ABC's Big Ideas program.

 

Chris Martenson's Peak Prosperity

Chris Martenson is a financial observer who is trained as a scientist (neurotoxicology), and is experienced in business.

 

Chris's website Peak Prosperity contains lots of interesting ideas, information, and discussions.

 

Chris's video series Crash Course is a good source of explanatory information about money, debt, growth, resources and other related things.

 

Web of Debt

Nothing here yet! But you can go to the Web of Debt website to find out more.

 

The Global Footprint Network

The Ecological Footprint is a measure of humanity’s demand on nature. It measures how much land and water area each person requires to produce the resource he or she consumes and to absorb his or her waste, using contemporary technology.

 

The Ecological Footprint is determined by the Global Footprint Network. This group of scientists, under the supervision of an eminent global advisory board, takes the complexity of the various ecological services and translates them into the area of the Earth's surface needed to sustain them. They take 5,400 data points for each country, each year, derived from internationally recognized sources to determine the area required to produce the biological resources a country uses and to absorb its wastes.

 

They work out how much land we need to support our economy and lifestyle and then compare that with how much suitable land we have available to do so. By analysing this globally, they show us how much land we need for each person to sustain our current economy.

 

The Environment Protection Authority Victoria, part of the environment portfolio of the government of the state of Victoria in Australia, worked with Global Footprint Network to develop a documentary film about Ecological Footprint.  You can download the film from their website.

 

You may choose to skip the first one-and-a-half minutes of the video, which is an introduction by the Victorian government's Minister for the Environment and Water – anyone who oxymoronically refers to sustainability being vital for a growing economy doesn't understand the issue!

 

The video is also available to watch on YouTube.

 

The Ecological Footprint has been officially adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a convention agree to by the world’s governments to significantly halt the rate of biodiversity loss, to be included among its biodiversity indicators.