Purchase Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places (Greystone Books, October 2023), is a global investigation of metals mining – led by a secretive industry that enables most modern comforts, but simultaneously exacts staggering environmental and social costs. How do we get the metals we need, including to save the planet from
On the edge: the art of risking everything
"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Signal and the Noise, the definitive guide to our era of risk-and the players raising the stakes In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates "The River," or those whose mastery of risk allows them to shape-and dominate-so much of modern life. These professional risk takers-poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true-believers and blue-chip art collectors-can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the 21st century. By embedding within the worlds of Doyle Brunson, Peter Thiel, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, and many others, Silver offers insight into a range of issues that affect us all, from the frontiers of finance to the future of AI. The River has increasing amounts of wealth and power in our society, and understanding their mindset-including the flaws in their thinking-is key to understanding what drives technology and the global economy today. There are certain commonalities in this otherwise diverse group: high tolerance for risk; appreciation of uncertainty; affinity for numbers; skill at de-coupling; self-reliance and a distrust of the conventional wisdom. For the River, complexity is baked in, and the work is how to navigate it, without going beyond the pale. Taking us behind-the-scenes from casinos to venture capital firms to the FTX inner sanctum to meetings of the effective altruism movement, On the Edge is a deeply-reported, all-access journey into a hidden world of powerbrokers and risk takers"--
Nature Risk Rising: Why the Crisis Engulfing Nature Matters for Business and the Economy
Nature Risk Rising, the first report in the NNE series, explains how nature-related risks matter to business, why they must be urgently mainstreamed into risk management strategies and why it is vital to prioritize the protection of nature’s assets and services within the broader global economic growth agenda.
Daniel Christian Wahl: “Bioregional Futures: Reconnecting to Place for Planetary Health” - The Great Simplification
In the past century of abundant energy surplus, humanity’s globalized, large-scale approach to problem-solving
Damaged Earth Catalog
We are humans and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross profits obscure actual loss. In response to this dilemma and to these losses a realm of intimate, community power is developing—power of communities to conduct their own education, find their own inspiration, shape their own environment, and share their knowledge with others. Practices that aid this process are sought and promoted by the DAMAGED EARTH CATALOG.
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
Check out A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None - <p><b>Rewriting the “origin stories” of the Anthropocene</b><br /><br /> No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, <i>A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None</i> examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. Yusoff initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between feminist black theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.<br /><br /> Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.</p> by Kathryn Yusoff on Bookshop.org UK!
HOME - Daniel Schmachtenberger
EXPLORATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF CIVILIZATION Some of the central questions being explored here: With the first fully globalized civilization, how do we avoid the collapse fate that has befallen all previous civilizations? What are effective types of immune systems for identifying and correcting corruption in governance systems? How do we comprehensively disincentivize misinformation and harm to … HOME Read More »
LIMITS 2025 -- Workshop on Computing within Limits
The LIMITS workshop concerns the role of computing in human societies situated in a world of limits, such as limits of extractive logics, limits to a biosphere’s ability to recover, limits to our knowledge, or limits to technological solutions to societal issues. As an interdisciplinary group of researchers, practitioners, and scholars, we seek to reshape the computing research agenda, grounded by an awareness that contemporary computing research is intertwined with ecological limits in general, and climate- and climate justice-related limits in particular. LIMITS 2025 solicits submissions that move us closer towards computing that supports diverse human and non-human lifeforms and thriving biospheres.
The “Anthropocene”
Human activities are exerting increasing impacts on the environment on all scales, in many ways outcompeting natural processes. This includes the manufacturing of hazardous chemical compounds which are not produced by nature, such as for instance the...
Incomputable Earth: Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis
This open access collection argues that climate breakdown represents an irreducibly incomputable problem that cannot be resolved through algorithmic optimization or cybernetic planetary management.
Material World by Ed Conway | Penguin Random House Canada
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. • Finalist for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award
Appropriate Measures — Real Life
Changing the tech we use is not enough to mitigate the environmental and social harm of mass technology
Leave Tyrants in the Ground
By unhooking ourselves from fossil fuels, we release ourselves from a world of harm.
Tracers in the dark: the global hunt for the crime lords of cryptocurrency
"A propulsive story of a new breed of investigators who have cracked the Bitcoin blockchain, taking once-anonymous realms of money, drugs, and violence and holding them up to the light Black markets have always thrived in the shadows of society. Increasingly, these enterprises-drug dealing, money laundering, human trafficking, terrorist funding-have found their shadows online. Digital crime lords inhabiting lawless corners of the internet have operated more freely than their analog counterparts could have ever dreamed of. At the heart of their massive conspiracies: cryptocurrency. By transacting not in dollars or pounds but in Bitcoin-a currency with anonymous ledgers, overseen by no government, beholden to no bankers-black marketeers robbed law enforcement for years of their chief method of cracking down on criminal markets, namely, following the money. But what if the centerpiece of this dark economy held a secret, fatal flaw? What if their currency wasn't so cryptic after all? An investigator using the right mixture of technical wizardry, financial forensics, and old-fashioned persistence could crack open an entire world of crime. Men with No Names is a story of crime and consequences unlike any other. With unprecedented access to the major players in federal law enforcement and private industry, veteran cybersecurity reporter Andy Greenberg tells an astonishing saga of criminal empires built and destroyed. He introduces an IRS agent with a defiant streak; a Bitcoin-tracing Danish entrepreneur; and a colorful ensemble of hardboiled agents and prosecutors as they delve deep into the crypto-underworld. The result is a thrilling, globe-spanning story of dirty cops, drug bazaars, sex-abuse rings, and the biggest takedown of an online narcotics market in the history of the internet. This is a cat-and-mouse story and a tale of a technological one-upmanship that's utterly of our time. Filled with canny maneuvering and shocking twists, it answers a provocative question: How would some of the world's most brazen criminals behave if they were sure they could never get caught?"--
Arnaud Bertrand on Twitter / X
After reflection, this new narrative by Palantir is probably much more consequential than people may assume.Palantir is basically being the canary in the coal mine announcing the death of two major assumptions propping up the US economy right now: 1) that AI labs will be able… https://t.co/oLRdkWe8nL— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) July 3, 2026
The Stuff That Makes the World Go Round (Published 1990)
THE PRIZE The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. By Daniel Yergin. Illustrated. 910 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $24.95.
Jason Hickel on Twitter / X
The climate crisis reveals that our civilization has never really been organized around science, contrary to the usual Enlightenment narrative. It is organized around capital. Science is embraced when it serves the interests of capital, and is often ignored when it does not.— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) January 6, 2022