Category: Sustainability

Pruning

July 25, 2015 By arne hendriks 0

Plants grow towards the light. And because getting to the light first is so important for plants, their endocrinological system, especially just after germination, is all about favouring the top branch to grow fast at the expense of other branches. The cells in the top…

Voluntary Simplicity

April 23, 2014 By arne hendriks 2

Voluntary simplicity is characterised by individuals being satisfied with what they need rather than what they want. Simple living movements testify to the mindset and behaviour needed for humanity to make drastic changes. Its many secular and religious manifestations function as a source of how to…

Degrowth

February 15, 2014 By arne hendriks 1

Degrowth is a political, economic, and social movement based on ecological economics. Degrowth thinkers and activists advocate for the downscaling of production and consumption arguing that overconsumption lies at the root of long term environmental issues and social inequalities. It is considered an essential economic strategy responding to the…

Post-Growth / Post-Scarcity

June 18, 2013 By arne hendriks 0

Scarcity is the fundamental economic problem of having seemingly unlimited human needs and wants in a world of limited resources. Several cornucopians have explored the notion of the post-scarcity economy, with unlimited free goods, services and information. The most appealing aspect of most of these post-scarcity…

Deflating the Food Bubble

October 15, 2012 By arne hendriks 1

The era of world food security is coming to an end simply because we can’t sustain the way food is produced. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Research Centre in Washington, says the demands for food are growing so fast that unless we deflate the…

Supersizing Small

August 19, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

Small is disappearing. If you order a small coffee in Starbucks, or any of its copy cat formula coffee shops, you’ll get a cup of coffee which in any previous timeframe would have been considered large. The 1993 introduction of supersizing meals and soft drinks…

Abundance Fantasies: Corn Cult

July 27, 2012 By arne hendriks 1

Mexican protesters against the high tortilla prices in 2007 rallied around an oversized corn. Their public display of the desire for an abundant food supply ressembles cargo cults in which the visualisation of desired abundance, or the context in which the abundance is believed to exist, is…

Six Cities / Empty World

June 20, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

Earth is turning into a global city. Over half the world’s population lives in urbanised areas and those cities are taking up more and more space.  Most of the rest of the world is organised to supply food and resources. Even so, cities are the most…

TEDx Lecture on Shrinking

June 10, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

During TEDx Brainport Arne Hendriks gave a short talk on some of the reasons the human species should shrink, some of its possible consequences, and how it could be done. See it HERE.

D.I.Y. Shrink List.

April 7, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

If we are to believe this last report published by MIT Press, economic collapse is just around the corner. If that’s true it won’t hurt to prepare our children both mentally and physically for a world in which there will be a lot less of…

Parental Height Minus 10

March 14, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

In an exiting paper by S. Matthew Liao,  Anders Sandberg, and Rebecca Roache, it is argued that human engineering may well be a reasonable tool to achieve a sustainable relationship between the planet and its human population. One of their more intriging suggestions is the possibility…

Messengers of the Small Truth

March 4, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

Growth is a human default mode. Every individual, every reproduced cell and in fact every selfish copy of our DNA, intends to proliferate. From an evolutionary perspective such a default mode made perfect sense in the year 4.000 BC when the world population of Homo…

Height Tax

February 27, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

Being tall is expensive. You need more of everything just to sustain yourself, and for most of it either you pay or the environment does. Tall people are an increasing burden on the planet. A 20% increase in height equals a 73% increase in weight. And all…

Poultry/House

February 11, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

If we decide to shrink the human species our livestock may need to shrink with us. We’ll only consume about 2 to 10% of the food we consume today. The meat of one chicken could easily feed 100 people and one egg alone would be enough to…

Ostrich BBQ

December 10, 2011 By arne hendriks 4

One of the most promising advantages of shrinking the human species would be the abundance of food. A single chicken could feed up to 100 people. But perhaps it’s not just a matter of abundance. We might encounter some unsuspected differences in the way we…

Hhp (Human Height Print)

December 5, 2011 By arne hendriks 2

Tall people need more resources than short people. That’s why it’s rather alarming that the human species continues to grow taller. In fact our increasing height puts more pressure on the ecosystem services than the total population growth. If people become 20% taller this creates over…

Kerosine Billions

May 22, 2011 By arne hendriks 1

Dr. Andrew Dannenberg investigated that if the weight of every US citizens increases with 10 pounds, airtravel in the USA alone will use well over 1.3 billion liters of extra kerosine. That’s a lot of fuel and extra CO2,  and that’s just in America. If…

The Shrinking Iguana

September 20, 2010 By arne hendriks 4

Much to his surprise, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University has found that in times of famine, marine iguanas in the Galápagos Islands shrink in length and then regrow when food is plentiful again. “For vertebrates, it’s sort of a dogma that they don’t shrink,”…