Weekly Inchoate No. 3
Summarizing the week's posts -- mines, moon, Hobbes, and green business
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This week there were three posts on general sustainability issues: mines, junk on the moon, and green business resources; and two posts introducing Thomas Hobbes, author of the famous foundational book of modern political philosophy: The Leviathan. A mix of the practical and (hopefully) thought-provoking.
Have a good weekend!
A World of Mines
With the shift to renewable energy, the world is hot on the trail of essential (often rare) metals needed for batteries and other technology components. At least a couple major news items have cross my radar recently, so I thought I’d share. Lithium
Lunar Anthropocene
A while back I reported on the International Space Station, that it would probably become space junk. Here’s the latest on the moon. NASA estimates there are already 227,000 kilos of human garbage littering the moon, mostly from space explorations, including moon buggies and other equipment, excrement, statues, golf balls, human ashes and flags, among oth…
Intro to Hobbes
Last week I promised to get into John Gray’s New Leviathans book, along with Wainwright and Mann’s Climate Leviathan. Why? Well, because I’m trying to figure out how to be human in the Anthropocene, what could be a workable anthropology or “theory of the human” including an ethics, and a politics, since we’re inevitably involved in a collective endeavor.
Hobbes & the State of Nature
John Gray says something in his book and in online conservation, about Hobbes and the state of nature, that it was the anarchic conditions under which Hobbes lived, during the English Civil Wars and the Thirty Years War of religion in Europe, that caused Hobbes to worry about what happened between human beings when political order broke down.
Green Business
For Resource Friday this week I want to share two publications for green business: GreenBiz Corporate Knights GreenBiz does deep dives into climate tech, sustainable finance, the circular economy, energy, transportation, and food systems. They hold events and publish research, as well as cover the news and analyses of major issues.