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"No country in the world currently meets the basic needs of its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Our research, recently published in Nature Sustainability (and summarised in The Conversation), is the first to quantify the national resource use associated with achieving a good life for over 150 countries. It shows that meeting the basic needs of all people on the planet would result in humanity transgressing multiple environmental limits, based on current relationships between resource use and human well-being. The chart below demonstrates the profound challenge nations currently face. National performance on seven environmental sustainability indicators is plotted against eleven minimum social thresholds for a good life (see About page for further details). Ideally, nations would be located in the top-left corner with no biophysical boundaries transgressed and all minimum social thresholds achieved."

"To revert the current ecological overshoot and build a sustainable society, we have to collectively engage in changing our economic model. "Sufficiency: moving beyond the gospel of eco-efficiency" suggests introducing hard limitations to unsustainable trends-in particular to overconsumption-and putting emphasis on distributional justice. Seven chapters written by sustainability and economics experts plus a foreword by Janez Potočnik (Co-chair of the International Resource Panel and former European Commissioner for the Environment) shed light on different angles of sufficiency and formulate concrete recommendations to EU policy makers. The booklet ends with a discussion of several eco-social policies that can start the transition towards an "economics of enough". Many new ideas for an economic paradigm shift have been developed and discussed at the academic and grassroots levels in recent years. The aim of this booklet is to build on a rich body of knowledge and bring these ideas to the attention of engaged citizens and policy makers in order to advance the debate on how to implement sufficiency."

"... In addition to serving as a great explanatory example of the potential danger of AI, I have realized that paperclip maximizer is also a perfect allegory for capitalism. Where the artificial intelligence sought to maximize paperclips, the capital maximizer seeks to maximize capital. ... While this story of the capital maximizer might strike some as the anti-capitalist rantings of socialist idealism, it is not meant as such. Capitalism is the most powerful machine that humans have ever created. It can realize the benefits of technological progress and leverage them to improving the human condition better than any other economic system yet devised. The problem is in viewing the growth of capital as an ends and not a means. If we do not demand that our systems maximize the well-being of humans and the environment which sustains us, then all is lost."

"The time is now. For decades, scientists have been raising calls for societal changes that will reduce our impacts on nature. Though much conservation has occurred, our natural environment continues to decline under the weight of our consumption. Humanity depends directly on the output of nature; thus, this decline will affect us, just as it does the other species with which we share this world. Díaz et al. review the findings of the largest assessment of the state of nature conducted as of yet. They report that the state of nature, and the state of the equitable distribution of nature's support, is in serious decline. Only immediate transformation of global business-as-usual economies and operations will sustain nature as we know it, and us, into the future."

"This is not an environmental book, even though it is concerned with the environment. It is not a book to save the world, even though the world is clearly in trouble. Ultimately, A Matter Of Scale is a book about survival; about ensuring that every individual human has the means to save herself or himself from the crisis that is unfolding. And there most certainly is a crisis; like the waves of a surging river; small and irregular at first, but growing larger, creating whirlpools, rising in treacherous white water, and eventually inundating everything in its path. People know that the climate is changing, that species are being removed from the Earth at a rapidly increasing rate, that entire ecosystems are becoming shadows of their former richness; they know, but they do not understand. The environmental crisis is closing in on humanity from all directions, yet the crisis barely registers on this culture's list of problems. As we stand, humanity is doomed to a collapse that will leave only a few nomads, and a toxic, barely survivable Earth in its wake."

"La crisis ecosocial en clave educativa. Guía didáctica para una nueva cultura de paz Autor: Antonio Hernández, Yayo Herrero, Águeda. Ferriz, Luis González, Charo Morán, Alberto Brasero y Ana María Ortega Editor: FUHEM Ecosocial Año: 2009 Formato: guía didáctica + fichas Sinopsis: Guía didáctica para profesorado de secundaria y bachillerato. Expone una visión crítica de la actual crisis ecológica y social, sus causas, impactos e interrelaciones. Concluye con propuestas para el cambio hacia una cultura de paz. Ofrece más de 60 actividades y otras tantas fichas guiadas, incluyendo propuestas de investigación, documentales y juegos de rol. El punto de partida de la guía es el análisis crítico de las causas y manifestaciones de la crisis de sostenibilidad actual, que remiten a patrones y prácticas de la actividad humana y, muy especialmente, de la cultura occidental. Esta Recurso didáctico constituye una herramienta teórica y práctica para interpretar la crisis ecosocial desde una visión crítica y proporciona pautas para mirar la realidad de un modo ecológico, de tal modo que profesores y profesoras puedan, desde una perspectiva transdisciplinar, abordar la problemática global en el aula."