Formalia - main researcher

After a brief interlude of linguistic confusion, it has now been made clear that my title, or role, in the research project "The Cultural Heritage of Environmental Spaces. A Comparative Analysis Between Estonia and Norway", headed by Sabine Brauckmann, is 'main researcher'.

Reference to 'Umwelt ethics'

Sebastian Burch refers to my 2003 article 'Umwelt ethics' in an essay of his master thesis in Holistic science, taken at Schumacher College, UK, 2007. His essay is entitled 'About the nature of signs and signifying nature. An introduction to Semiotics in the fields of Holistic science'.

The Future of Growth - out now

TRAMES no. 2, 2008, has now been published - with my article "The Statistician's Guide to Utopia: The Future of Growth". Feel free to check out abstract with references or the whole article.

The article is also uploaded to Scribd.

"Umwelt ethics"

My journal article from 2003, "Umwelt ethics" - an Uexküllian interpretation of the deep ecology platform of Arne Næss - has been uploaded to the site www.scribd.com, where it is freely available and searchable.

21 views by now.

Go to "Umwelt ethics" at scribd.com.

The future of philosophy

Reading Walter Kaufmann´s "EXISTENTIALISM. From Dostoevsky to Sartre", with selected readings. It is an inspiring as well as sobering account, and seems to serve well as an introduction.

"The existentialist has tried to bring philosophy down to earth again like Socrates", Kaufmann wrote (in 1956), "but the existentialist and the analytical philosopher are each only half a Socrates. ... (I)f the feat of Socrates is really to be repeated and philosophy is to have a future outside the academics, there will have to be philosophers who think in the tension between analysis and existentialism."

The Future of Growth - excerpts

"During the last century, population increased by a factor of four, and GDP per capita at least by a factor of five (cf. tables 1 and 2). World GDP, in result, increased by a factor of at least twenty. Clearly, any descriptive explanation of the rise of the ecological crisis has to take these material facts into account.

...

After all, how can we possibly deal with the so-called environmental problems, if we know nothing at all about the future state of the economy?"

Abstract. In this article I paint a concise portrait of world economic and population history. Key factors include the world population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The role of technology in relation to the environmental impact of economic activity is represented by an Environmental Efficiency Factor (EEF). It is asserted that any modern political theory aspiring to comprehensiveness should deal with four subject matters: The legitimate level of human interference with the rest of nature; the level of the human population; the nature and extent of the economy and technology. Past GDP growth rates combined with UN population projections result in a number of scenarios of future real GDP to the year 2300. In the course of inquiry, three measures of all time economic activity are introduced: All time world GDP per capita, accumulated world GDP and the annual growth rate of accumulated world GDP. In conclusion, I describe under what circumstances it is conceivable that the growth economy can persist for at least 300 more years. Directions of inquiry are offered to three groups: Those who want to maintain the growth economy for as long as possible; those who want world population to stay, in the long run, at a level comparable to that of today; and those who want to minimize environmental pressure.

The Future of Growth

My academic article "THE STATISTICIAN´S GUIDE TO UTOPIA: THE FUTURE OF GROWTH" has been accepted by the Estonian journal TRAMES, and will be published in the time to come.