Energy Constrained Learning

The postcarbon world will look substantially different from the current one. Fuels will be scarce, and we will obtain energy from different sources. As a result, the ways in which we live, eat, travel, vacation, work, recreate, trade, manufacture, and consume will all likely be very different from today. There are no crystal balls or other reliable tools for predicting the future, but it is clear that we must be deliberate about responses so that we minimize future disruptions, dislocations, and adverse impacts while providing benefits for health and well-being.

Brian S. Schwartz, Cindy L. Parker, Jeremy Hess, and Howard Frumkin, Public Health and Medicine in an Age of Energy Scarcity: The Case of Petroleum, Am J Public Health 2011 101: 1560-1567.

Hear the alarm in the authors’ voices? This in a peer-reviewed, paywall-protected, academic journal.

The September 2011 issue of the American Journal of Public Health has a special section on peak petroleum and public health, with fully eight articles devoted to the topic. The authors’ concerns are understated in the manner of such journals, but nonetheless clearly evident.

By extension the same alarm can be assumed for education. In this post, I consider how tomorrow’s energy transformation might affect learning. Warning: This is a lengthy post, but its length befits the importance of the topic.
 

Peak Oil and Climate Change

Peak oil is intuitively simple even if the details can be fractious.[1] Oil is a non-renewable resource subject to depletion. Peak production occurs when roughly one-half the recoverable total has been extracted.[2] This concept can be applied at various levels of aggregation including the individual well, oil field, nation, or globally. The world is now perched at or near the peak for crude oil.

This last statement requires some background explanation. We’ll start with the International Energy Agency (IEA), which is an autonomous body within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). IEA includes 28 participating member nations, most of them European but also including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States, Turkey, Korea and Japan.

The IEA produces an annual report called the World Energy Outlook (WEO), published most recently in November 2010. This volume is a 736-page compendium of trends, market outlooks, projections, and discussion of special issues, all expressed in figures, tables and associated text. A single PDF copy costs €120. The WEO publication has its own web site. There is an 80 minute video of the 2010 publication launch in London. Executive summaries of WEO2010 exist in 12 languages. Also available on the web site are a press presentation, a factsheet, and key graphics. All emblematic of a moneyed, complex endeavor.

In WEO210, the IEA considered three future energy scenarios. The scenarios differ in their assumptions about the degree of national commitment to the non-binding accord reached by countries participating in the UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen during December 2009. This Accord would limit the rise in average global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times.[3]

IEA’s central scenario, called the New Policies Scenario, assumes “cautious implementation of the policy commitments and plans announced by countries around the world, including the national pledges to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and plans to phase out fossil-fuel subsidies.”[4] A comparison Current Policies Scenario assumes no commitments beyond those policies already adopted. A second comparison, the 450 Scenario, assumes “vigorous implementation of current commitments in the period to 2020 and much stronger action thereafter.”[5] This scenario would provide a “reasonable chance” of reaching the 2°C goal by limiting the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions to 450 parts per million (ppm) CO2-equivalents.

The figure belows shows peak oil under the New Policies Scenario.[6] Crude oil from fields currently producing oil has already peaked. Including crude oil from known fields not yet developed moves the peak to approximately 2015. Including assumed growth in crude oil from fields not yet discovered would, some say suspiciously,[7] plateau oil production at about current levels until the end of the projection period in 2035. Oil from other sources such as natural gas liquids, tar sands, and heavy oil is expected to increase throughout the projection period.
 

 
The consequences from the New Policies scenario are unsettling. According to the authors of the WEO2010, this scenario would make “it all but impossible to achieve the 2°C goal” in climate change:[8]

These trends are in line with stabilising the concentration of greenhouse gases (GHG) at over 650 parts per million (ppm) of CO2-equivalent, resulting in a likely temperature rise of more than 3.5°C in the long term.
…
Cutting emissions sufficiently to meet the 2°C goal would require a far-reaching transformation of the global energy system.
…
The timidity of current commitments has undoubtedly made it less likely that the 2°C goal will be achieved. Reaching that goal would require a phenomenal policy push by governments worldwide … The technology exists today to enable such a change, but such a rate of technological transformation would be unprecedented.

 

What’s the Concern?

Reaction to IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2010 was almost instantaneous among credible voices following peak oil, including the PostCarbon Institute, The Oil Drum, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas – USA (ASPO-USA), and the Energy Bulletin. In one sentence I’d characterize this reaction as some gratitude toward IEA for finally acknowledging that peak oil is inevitable and for expressing in no uncertain terms that moderating climate change requires dramatic movement in national energy policies, but this gratitude was also accompanied by a healthy dose of fisticuffs over IEA assumptions, omissions, and their weak backbone in the face of political pressures.

This is not the place to detail the point-by-point concerns of IEA and WEP2010 critics. If you’re interested, please follow the links in the previous paragraph.

Instead I’ll try to summarize several key points in the volumes written about the collision of peak oil and climate change.[9] Here’s a condensed version:

Energy provides the means for complex organization in all living and social systems.[10]

Non-renewable fossil fuels provide much of the energy that powers industrial societies, including their agricultural systems.[11]

Global increases in CO2 concentrations are due primarily to use of fossil fuels by humans.[12] The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports “there is very high confidence that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming.”[13]

At the present rate of change in CO2 levels, the world is only a few decades away from the 450 ppm target that IEA believes will provide a “reasonable chance” at safety from climate change.[14]

Fossil-fuels are energy dense, meaning that the units of energy produced comfortably exceed the units of energy needed during production. This is frequently referred to as Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI).[15] It’s easier to refer to it simply as net energy.

Dense energy sources with high net energy provide a powerful multiplier effect for economic activity. For the last three hundred years we benefited enormously from cheap fossil fuels that were readily available.

Net energy of a resource tends to decrease over time.[16] For example, as the most readily available high quality oil fields get depleted, it costs more to locate and extract petroleum of the same grade. A simple example is deep-water drilling.

When the EROEI of any resource reaches 1:1, that resource is no longer a viable source of energy using existing technologies, regardless of how large the reserves may be.[17]

In the past we switched our dominant energy source from wood to coal and then to oil.[18]There is no obvious short-term substitute for oil.[19]

All oil substitutes have one or more limitations, including low net energy, high carbon emissions, intermittency, degradation of ecosystems and livelihoods, potential for catastrophic risk, small scale, restricted transportability, and non-renewability.[20]

Our energy future may be a patchwork involving wind, hydro, solar photovoltaic, concentrating solar thermal, passive solar, geothermal, wave, tidal, and spot use of nuclear, oil, gas, and coal. Local conditions would likely determine the mix.[21]

Insufficient time exists to scale up non-fossil fuel energy sources to ensure safety from climate change and to also maintain current average standards of living in the world.[22]

The constellation of peak oil and climate change will likely provoke an improvised scramble involving conservation, efforts to improve energy efficiencies, and innovation in post-carbon energy technologies.[23]

Anticipated growth in the world’s population will exert additional pressure on energy resources.[24]

Life in the industrial world will be different.

 

Scenario of Scarcity Industrialism

E.F. Schumacher makes a useful distinction between forecasts, which he calls “presumptuous,” and exploratory or feasibility studies:[25]

In the one case I assert that this or that will be the position in, say, twenty years’ time. In the other case I merely explore the long-term effects of certain assumed tendencies.

We first need a scenario of how peak oil and climate change may play out in the future. This provides Schumacher’s “long-term effects of certain assumed tendencies.” It is then possible to explore the implications for learning.

There are no end of peak oil scenarios from which to choose. I’ll use one that is based on extensive work in three books and a popular blog.[26] The work is that of John Michael Greer and the scenario of tomorrow is one he calls “scarcity industrialism.”[27]

Map the likely results of current trends onto a scale of human lifespans and a compelling image of the future emerges. Imagine an American woman born in 1960. She sees the gas lines of the 1970s, the short-term political gimmicks that papered over the crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, and the renewed trouble in the following decades. Periods of economic and political crisis, broken by intervals of partial recovery, shape the rest of her life. By the time she turns 70, she lives in a beleaguered, malfunctioning city where nearly half the population has no reliable access to clean water, electricity, or health care. Shantytowns spread in the shadow of skyscrapers while political and economic leaders keep insisting that things are getting better.[28]

Greer follows this paragraph with a second one about the American woman’s great-grandson born in 2040 and then a third paragraph about the great-grandson’s great-granddaughter born in 2120. Respectively they represent an age of salvaging and an ecotechnic age that Greer suggests may follow scarcity industrialism. Ecotechnic refers to a non-utopian future in which humans finally move beyond the unsustainable patterns of today and see themselves as “subject to the same natural laws and ecological patterns as every other living thing on Earth.”[29]

It’s difficult to do justice to Greer’s notion of scarcity industrialism in a single paragraph. To help fill out the scenario, here are phrases that Greer uses to describe what follows our present age of abundance. The more dramatic of these phrases would tend to appear deeper into scarcity industrialism or even in the age of salvage.[30]

limits to growth begin to bite; serious declines in energy availability; industries like tourism that use titanic flows of energy shut down; commuter lifestyle no longer viable; neighborhoods form around jobs; increased housing density with apartments and row houses; an RIP for the global economy based on cheap transportation; less dependence on foreign resources; less influence of multinational corporations; more willingness of governments to use force to control resources; decentralized energy infrastructure; the end of the information age; human labor becomes less energy-intensive than machines, increasing substitution; relocalized economic activity; economic contraction; frugality; backyard gardens, organic farms, food-coops, farmers’ markets; no retirement; money less relevant; household economies viable again; social conflicts; gutting of social safety nets; slashing of salaries and benefits; impoverishment of millions of previously affluent people; circle of wealth and privilege narrows; unwillingness of society to acknowledge it is in decline; faltering corporate food system; local networks of mutual exchange and support; refurbishing salvage; increased use of appropriate intermediate technologies; conservation; transition toward sustainability; renewable resources; passive solar home heating; long period of trial and error; incremental steps; nature has the final say; depopulation; human migrations; warmer, wetter, ecological change; volatility in energy prices; wars; paper wealth becomes worthless; people work many jobs; established institutions go to pieces; national bankruptcies; hunger; adaptive human efforts and nature’s responses; muddling through; dissensus useful to increase breadth of ideas and experimentation; non-market economies of custom, reciprocity and collective benefit; work of human hands and minds is once again the main source of value; low-tech transportation and communication; Internet is an early casualty, although some government, research, and corporate use; decline punctuated with periods of rebound; collapsing public health; political turmoil; electricity an urban amenity used mostly by the wealthy; transportation unravels, but trains viable longer; critical freeway corridors; auto industry withers; the predicament we face is as least as much a social and cultural crisis as a technical one; experience guides efforts rather than ideology.

Greer’s work provides a rich resource for thinking critically about tomorrow. It’s a thoughtful and well-written depiction of the near future that challenges readers to consider what happens to industrial societies that, in a mere 300 years, managed to blow away nearly one-half of the recoverable fossil fuels that it took nature half a billion years to make. If you have any interest in tomorrow, I highly recommend Greer’s work. It will force you to reconsider how you understand change.

Lest anyone too quickly dismiss the possibility of scarcity industrialism, it’s important to note that Greer stands on firm historical footing. Many previous civilizations have risen, flowered, matured, and then collapsed. For numerous examples, see the academic work of Joseph Tainter[31] or the more popular but still extensively researched work of Jared Diamond.[32]
 

Implications for Online Learning

The way this works is that we take as fact the scenario of scarcity industrialism. We then try to imagine education and learning in such a future. What might it look like?

Here again space limits the extent to which I can explore this topic. A formal analysis might examine in detail one institution or even an entire education level and then play out implications. In another form, the analysis could start fresh and ask what forms of learning seem consistent with the scenario. If you’re interested in such analyses, I encourage you to undertake the explorations. In a time of transition, such work might prove invaluable.

What I’ll do here is consider only online learning in the energy constrained world of scarcity industrialism. Is online learning compatible with this scenario?

In a single word, no. If there is no Internet, there is no online learning. But a single word does not adequately answer the question. No future happens instantaneously; there is always a transition period.

So a better question is this: Is online learning compatible with the run-up to scarcity industrialism? The answer here is yes, but with qualifications. As long as the Internet is available, online learning for some people in some locations would exist. With generally rising energy prices, however, it would likely be expensive. Not exactly ideal conditions for anything bolder than a stop-gap effort.

This is still not a very satisfying exploration of the feasibility of online learning. With the limited transportation and relocalized economies of scarcity industrialism, some form of online learning might offer a compelling way to connect people and allow them to communicate, share, and learn from the world. This seems far preferable to a return to the one-room schoolhouse. But just because something is preferred doesn’t mean it will happen.

Morphing online learning into some form adaptable to scarcity industrialism will require resourceful and creative people willing to experiment, fail, learn from their failures, and try again. E.F. Schumacher offers some help here with his suggestion of “a technology with a human face.”[33] He describes this as:[34]

… making use of the best of modern knowledge and experience, is conducive to decentralization, compatible with the laws of ecology, gentle in its use of scarce resources, and designed to serve the human person instead of making him the servant of machines. I have named it intermediate technology to signify that it is vastly superior to the primitive technology of bygone ages but at the same time much simpler, cheaper, and freer than the supertechnology of the rich. One can also call it self-help technology, or democratic or people’s technology – a technology to which everybody can gain admittance and which is not reserved to those already rich and powerful.

What does this mean for online learning? Is an intermediate online learning technology feasible? Not having the technical networking and communications knowledge required, I’m not the person to best answer that question. But I can suggest a few projects that seem to be tentative steps in this direction. Here are some examples:

  1. Open Mesh

    Open-Mesh creates ultra low-cost zero-config, plug & play wireless mesh network solutions that spread an Internet connection throughout a hotel, apartment, office, neighborhood, village, coffee shop, shopping mall, campground, marina and just about anywhere else you can imagine.

  2. Serval

    Communicate anywhere, any time … without infrastructure, without mobile towers, without satellites, without wifi hotspots, and without carriers. Use existing off-the-shelf mobile cell phone handsets.

  3. Village Telco

    The Village Telco is an initiative to build low-cost community telephone network hardware and software that can be set up in minutes anywhere in the world. No mobile phone towers or land lines are required. The Village Telco uses the latest Open Source telephony software and low cost wireless mesh networking technology to deliver affordable telephony anywhere.

  4. ahumanright.org

    Our vision is to connect all people by creating and stewarding a freely available decentralized global system of communication.

  5. Village Base Station Project (PDF) and Demonstration Review

    [T]he Village Base Station (VBTS) [is] a GSM base station designed to be deployed “off the grid” to locations without power or network infrastructure.

In an age of scarcity industrialism, we need something simple, cheap, small-scale, decentralized, and modular for easy scalability. None of the projects just mentioned was initiated with scarcity industrialism in mind, but they all seem cast in that spirit. If anyone is interested in pursuing the feasibility of intermediate online learning technologies, Greer offers seven questions he believes need answers when “triaging” technologies for the postcarbon transition.[35]

 

Reflections

Up to this point, I’ve deliberately tried to maintain the distance granted from writing with a quasi-academic style. That works well for description and explication, but eventually the most important question for each of us is “what do I really think about all this?” I’d like to end this post by making explicit my own views.

Peak oil is real. In fact, peak in all fossil fuels is real. Only the timing and rate of descent are in question. Timing, however, is sooner rather than later.

Climate change is also real and hugely serious. It should provide an immediate brake on the use of fossil fuels, but that seems doubtful. Most national leaders will pursue growth and life-as-we-know-it until a point where financial considerations dictate otherwise. Likely that will be way past the point where the transition can be managed tolerably well. Hopefully it won’t be too late.

More-of-the-same means that renewable energy sources, improved efficiency in the use of existing resources, and conservation are not likely to receive their full due any time soon. So we move out farther along the limb we’re sawing behind us.

Is scarcity industrialism our next stage? Perhaps. But what I find generally lacking in peak oil scenarios is a sense of fun and hope. I suppose this should not be surprising. Collapse scenarios can easily depict the loss of what exists today. It’s much more difficult to imagine the totally new.

Industrial society is surely unsustainable now. So I agree with both Schumacher and Greer that we humans need to see ourselves through ecological lenses, as beings both limited and liberated by nature. However, I would suggest one important addition. The minds of people are also a primary resource in the same sense as nature.

Considerable precedence exists for this suggestion. In Buddhist thought, for example, the notion of mind-nature appears prominently. It is defined by Kazuaki Tanahashi as the “foundation of all things.”[36] Writing in the 13th century, Zen master Dogen describes mind-nature as:[37]

… mind-nature in buddha-dharma includes the entire phenomenal world … Nothing, not even bodhi or nirvana, is outside mind-nature.

More recently, Gregory Bateson suggested “a necessary unity” of mind and nature.[38] He bases this on the fundamental similarity of two systems, which each have a random component and a selective process so that only certain outcomes from the random actually endure. Such systems are called stochastic. In Bateson’s words: [39]

We face, then, two great stochastic systems that are partly in interaction and partly isolated from each other. One system is within the individual and is called learning, the other is immanent in heredity and in populations and is called evolution. One is a matter of the single lifetime; the other is a matter of multiple generations of many individuals.
…
[T]hese two stochastic systems, working at different levels of logical typing, fit together into a single ongoing biosphere that could not endure if either somatic or genetic change were fundamentally different from what it is.

In evolution there is random genetic change accompanied by natural selection. In learning, Bateson describes the corresponding stochastic process this way:[40]

Today I would emphasize that creative thought must always contain a random component. The exploratory process – the endless trial and error of mental progress – can achieve the new only by embarking upon pathways randomly presented, some of which when tried are somehow selected for something like survival.

Yes, we do need to live sustainably within the limits of mind-nature.[41] Mind deserves the same care and nurturing we give to other natural resources. Today this is far from the case. The world’s people lie woefully fallow.

At this crucial point in time, a huge need and opportunity exist for all people to fully engage their creativity, to experiment with new learning forms, to fail and adjust and try again, and ultimately to help drape tomorrow on learning.

I cannot conceive of what learning will look like in a hundred years. But I feel certain it will not look like education. Getting there requires lots of imagination. It also requires an abundance of gentleness.
 

 

Notes

  1. ^ Fractious doesn’t begin to describe the garrulous viewpoints about peak oil, which range from the apocalyptic to a minor speed bump. The noise level is oppressive. I listened intently to identify trustworthy voices, but even the trustworthy do not speak with a single voice.
  2. ^ This is an easily digestible definition. The more precise definition uses extraction rates. See the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (APSO) or the asymmetrical production curve in the peak oil entry at Wikipedia.
  3. ^ The Accord recognizes “the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius”, in a context of sustainable development, to combat climate change. See the Wikipedia entry on the Copenhagen Accord.
  4. ^ International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2010 Factsheet (PDF), p2.
  5. ^ Ibid. p6.
  6. ^ International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2010 Key Graphs (PDF), p7.
  7. ^ Delores Garcia, An alternative version for three of the “key graphs” in IEA’s 2010 World Energy Outlook, 07-July-2011.
  8. ^ International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2010 Factsheet (PDF), p6.
  9. ^ I don’t want to misrepresent myself, so let me be clear. I am not a peak oil researcher, but rather an individual concerned about tomorrow. I have not read the entire volumes written about peak oil. So this summary may not accurately reflect what an energy expert would provide. Still, I think it hits the major points.
  10. ^ This is a colloquial restatement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a system open to an environment, work can transfer energy into action that increases the organization of the system. In the process, however, heat gets dissipated into the environment subject to the restraint that the disorder produced by the heat exceeds the order created by the work. The result is increased system order, increased environmental disorder, and increased total disorder. See Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan. Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
  11. ^ In the United States in 2009, for example, oil alone provided 94% of the energy used in the transportation sector and 41% of the energy used by industry. Fossil fuels in total provided 83% of all primary energy used in the U.S. in 2009. All figures are from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Review 2009 (PDF), August 2010, Figure 2.0, p75 and tables listed in the footnotes.
  12. ^ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, Summary for Policymakers (PDF), November 2007, p5.
  13. ^ Ibid. p5.
  14. ^ The world now sits at 392 ppm CO2. Even less time remains to make the transition to a post-carbon world if we want to improve the odds beyond reasonable. The current rate of increase in CO2 concentration is 2 ppm per year. Other science claims that 350 ppm should be the target to ensure safety from climate change. Baseline concentrations were about 275 ppm before use of fossil fuels began in earnest. See 350 Science for details.
  15. ^ Richard Heinberg, Searching for a Miracle: “Net Energy” Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society (PDF), Post Carbon Institute & International Forum on Globalization, September 2009, p10.
  16. ^ Charles A.S. Hall and John W. Day, Jr, Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil, American Scientist, May-June 2009 (PDF; paywall), p237 and Figure 10, p236.
  17. ^ Ibid. p237.
  18. ^ For a nice graph of the sources of energy consumption in the United States from 1775 to 2009, see the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Review 2009 (PDF), August 2010, Figure 5, p22.
  19. ^ Heinberg, Searching for a Miracle, p7.
  20. ^ Ibid. p7,31-55.
  21. ^ Ibid. p57-58.
  22. ^ Ibid. p61-62.
  23. ^ Ibid. p65-69.
  24. ^ United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, Population Estimates and Projections Section. World Population Projects: The 2010 Revision, Press Release (PDF), 03 May 2011, p1. The world population is nearly 7 billion and is expected to increase to 9.3 billion by 2050.
  25. ^ E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, New York: Harper Perennial, 2010, p. 251.
  26. ^ All three books are published by New Society Publishers. The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (2008); The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World (2009); and The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered (2011). John Michael Greer blogs at The Archdruid Report.
  27. ^ Several scenarios might be used in a formal analysis, typically differing on the level of change anticipated (e.g., none, significant, or likely). Peak oil scenarios commonly anticipate substantial change, as does Greer’s scarcity industrialism. The advantage of divergent scenarios is that they can be compared and contrasted, which sometimes helps in the exploration. However, in the limited space of a single post only a single scenario can be considered.
  28. ^ Greer, The Long Descent, p31.
  29. ^ Greer, The Ecotecnic Future, p245.
  30. ^ These phrases are not direct quotes. They are what I’d call near quotes that stick as close as possible to the actual words but incorporate my editing or interpretations when needed to make the phrases concise yet consistent with what I believe Greer intended. I used all three books listed in citation 26 and Greer’s blog post How Not to Play the Game. Note that scarcity industrialism, the age of salvaging, and the ecotechnic age are what Greer calls “workable sketches” that occur in slow, overlapping, and uneven ways that make assigning specific phrases to specific ages a little difficult. In some cases it was a judgment call as to whether a phrase should be associated with scarcity industrialism.
  31. ^ Joseph A. Tainter. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
  32. ^ Jared Diamond. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
  33. ^ Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, p157.
  34. ^ Ibid. p163.
  35. ^ Greer, The Long Descent, pp175-177.
  36. ^ Kazuaki Tanahashi (ed). Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen. New York: North Point Press, 1985, p307.
  37. ^ Ibid. p154.
  38. ^ Gregory Bateson. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 2002.
  39. ^ Ibid. p141.
  40. ^ Ibid. p172.
  41. ^ Note that this differs fundamentally from the tired economics notion of human capital, which is used in the context of producing a good or service whose worth is determined by a market. Mind-nature is priceless.

 

categories Context of Education Change | Gary Lewis, September 19, 2011 7:43 am

  1. John Sobol — September 21, 2011 @ 1:14 pm

    A fascinating and scary but I think highly relevant and clear post. Thanks. I will return to it I am sure. You might be interested in my blog, http://www.youareyourmedia.com, whose latest post also addresses the future of education, technology and the environment. Best, John.