[Balliol is one of the oldest and most distinguished of Oxford Colleges — exceptional by any standard. Its current students and alumni span the globe and link to colleges and universities of higher education, internet institutes, and online learning throughout the world. Its alumni keep in touch with one another and with the College in Oxford through a number of online newsletters and monthly updates from the college as well.]
Note under “Alumni Stories: Global Balliol,” Floreat Domus, (June 2022) p. 34. (PDF version).
See as well:
- Global Climate Change & Africa: Coastal Urban Vulnerability on a “Marginalized” Continent.
- Some Troubling and Enduring Thoughts of a Balliol ‘Old Boy’ on the Focus, Direction and Value of PPE at Oxford (and beyond…).
Tim Weiskel, (1969)
social anthropologist, historian & student of global agriculture, USA
As human beings we live within a planetary ecosystem that we did not create, cannot control and must not destroy. Moreover, it seems that Earth is the only life-supporting planet in the known universe. This is a sobering fact about the precariousness of our place in space.
Yet, even more disturbing is the fact that in spite of all we now know about our vulnerable circumstance and despite our very best intentions, the social, economic and political institutions of our contemporary world are committed to operate – in their ‘default mode’ – so as to destroy the prospects for our future survival within the constraints of Earth’s ecosystem.
The institutions of which we are so proud and like to think we can control have in reality taken control of our behavior as a species. This is particularly troubling because these institutions are founded in law and in practice upon the principle of promoting perpetual growth and continued human expansion.
The trouble is – as ecologists have pointed out long ago – that this growth will not persist for any species in a finite ecosystem. It is a basic law of biological systems that no organism within them can grow without limit without destroying the system itself.
Starkly put, then, the question is simply this: can humans survive the anthropocene? Can we repurpose with sufficient speed our institutions so as to assure human continuity, rather than accelerate our demise? If we fail to redirect them away from their default modes of perpetual growth no amount of technological wizardry will spare us from the system-wide collapse towards which our global agriculture is now headed.
At Balliol in Oxford I completed two graduate degrees – one in Social Anthropology and the other in Modern History, concentrating upon European colonialism in Africa. After teaching history and anthropology at Yale and Harvard, I was granted an extended Luce Research Fellowship at Harvard Divinity School to examine environmental ethics and public policy. There I concentrated upon the ecology, ethics and trajectory of modern, petro-intensive agriculture.
Following a further year as part of a research team at the Rockefeller Foundation, I returned to Harvard to found and direct the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values (HSEV) – the first university-wide inter-faculty initiative designed to expand awareness of environmental ethics at Harvard.
This cumulative work underscored the urgent need for our civilisation to limit its growth and focus attention instead upon engineering a transition towards sustainability. The colonial legacy of ‘growth economics’ combined with a tragic and pervasive public misunderstanding of the petro-intensive ‘magic’ of the ‘green revolution’ has meant that modern cultures all over the world are on a collision course with Earth’s finite ecosystem. These interconnected crises are accelerating as the global food system is becoming ever-more dependent upon fossil fuel combustion, while recurrent pandemics impact the world’s poorest agricultural populations with increasing severity, and extreme weather and changes in the climate stress food production and global supply chains beyond the breaking point.
As a vehicle to foster global public awareness, we have created the weblog Transition-Studies.Net to expand understanding of the depth of the interlocking crises we now face as a human community. Through this weblog and links to other internet channels that are both interdisciplinary in character and international in scope we have sought to create new means of communicating around the world to address the collective human task of devising a just transition towards global sustainability.
See related:
- Global Climate Change & Africa: Coastal Urban Vulnerability on a “Marginalized” Continent.
- The Malthus Insight and the Global Limits of “Green Revolution” Food Production
- The Fertiliser Trap | IATP
- The mistake of petro-intensive agriculture – the UNA “Global Engagement Summit”
- USA: climate change threat to food
- Malthus and the Anthropocene: The Agricultural Collapse of Complex Civilizations
- Human Population Dynamics, European Arrogance & Anthropocentric Delusions in a Collapsing Ecosystem….
- Malthus and the Anthropocene: An Essay on Population and the Evolving Global Food System
- The trouble with Economists is that they are – for the most part – focused upon the wrong problem: making extinction “more efficient….”
- “Just take the case of agriculture…”
- “A New Paradigm for Environmental Protection for the 21st Century”
- The “Green Revolution:” Its Essence, Achievements & Aftermath
- “If you do not change direction, you will most likely end up where you are headed.”
- Got a Carbon Problem? Fix it ! Part 1 – Some Prophetic & Enduring Testimony
- “One of the biggest legacies of colonialism….is the marginalization of the human population…” – T. C. Weiskel, [interview excerpt, “Voices from Oxford”]
- Hominid Exceptionalism and the Intrinsic Limit of Human Power in Earth’s Ecosystem
- Billionaire Hydroponics, Expanding World Hunger & The Tragic Future Trajectory of the Global Food System
- Ignorance, Arrogance, Overshoot & Collapse: The Destructive Power of Enduing Myths In Collapsing Civilizations
- Soils, Agriculture, Carbon Sequestration and Human Survival
- Fresh Water, Food and Energy in a Market-Integrated, War-Torn World
- “No Soil. No Growing Seasons. Just Add Water and Technology:” The Recent Evolution & Tragic Trajectory of the World Food System
- Overcoming the Multiple Legacies of European Colonialism: Can The West Survive Its Most Cherished Historical Myths?
- “Some Notes from Belshazzar’s Feast” — Balliol College – JCR – 21 January 2015
- BBC Documentary The Future of The Global Food Supply at Risk (Full Documentary)
- The Rise and Coming Demise of “Free-Market” Fundamentalism – Viewpoints from Balliol College Over Time
- Some Troubling and Enduring Thoughts of a Balliol ‘Old Boy’ on the Focus, Direction and Value of PPE at Oxford (and beyond…).
- Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet Is Not Possible
- Video: Tim Weiskel – Advice to Young People: Environmental Sustainability
- Drawing the Wrong Conclusions – An Anthropologist Looks at History: Cultural Mistakes Since 1492 – The “Frontier” Metaphor & the Myth of Endless Growth
- The Law & The Profits vs. Natural Law & The Prophet: Herman Daly & the Future of the Human Prospect
- Noam Chomsky – Years Ago & Ever Since
- Global Climate Change & Africa
and further:
- “Rubbish and Racism: Problems of Boundary in an Ecosystem,” The Yale Review (1971 & 1983).
- The Enduring Legacy of Empire: Learning How We Came to Misconceive Our Role in a Complex Ecosystem
- “We treat soil like dirt” — Topsoil, Climate Change and the Collapse of Civilizations
- Dave Montgomery – Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations
- The Vulnerability of the Global Food System and the Strategies Needed for a Sustainable “Recovery”
- The Rise and Forthcoming Demise of Petro-Intensive Agriculture – The Scientific Critique – Part 2
- Climate Change, Soils and Humans as a Keystone Species in the Global Ecosystem
- The Fatal Consequences of a Misplaced Metaphor: Agriculture Industry and Infinite Growth
- Hominid Exceptionalism and the Intrinsic Limit of Human Power in Earth’s Ecosystem – [the series]
- T.C. Weiskel – Statements from the United Nations + Critique of Growth Economics on a Finite Planet
- Where are we headed on this “blue planet?” Can we change our collective behavior in time to survive?
- “Overview Effect” & Transition Studies: Working for Sustainable Human Survival in a Finite Ecosystem
- “We are running out of water on a the only water-wealthy planet in the known universe…” Why?
- The Social Impact of Terrestrial Carbon Combustion: Global Coastlines & The Rising Sea
- April Fool’s Day: The Tragic Myopia of the ‘Best and Brightest:’ Growthism –> Overshoot & Collapse
Concerning the trends and evolving fatal “logic” of global agricultural production:
- How Could Something So Right Turn Out Wrong? How Could Something So Good Go Bad? The Tragic Story of the Modern World’s Love Affair with The “Green Revolution” – Part 1
- The Rise and Forthcoming Demise of Petro-Intensive Agriculture – Some Elements of The Scientific Critique – Part 2
- The Mythology of the Green Revolution – Part 3
- Alternatives to “Green Revolution” Technology for Long-Term Agricultural Sustainability & Survival – Part 4
- The “Green Revolution,” AGRA & the African Agricultural Narrative – Part 5
- A New ‘Scramble for Africa:’ The Resistance to Corporate ‘Landgrabbing’ & the AGRA ‘Meta-Narrative’ – Part 6
- After the “Green Revolution” Who “Owns” Global Agriculture? The Fatal Mistake of Misplaced Metaphors in Our Globalized Agro-ecosystem – Part 7
and - Can AGRA correct course? New plan offers big budget, few changes to address African food crisis | Tim Wise
See as well:
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Transition Studies 