Saturday, August 23, 2014

Reading List

I guess I've devolved to book reports, not that there's anything wrong with book reports:
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth -- Buckminster Fuller
His Great Pirate theory is juvenile, but a fascinating book, not least for the temporal effects of reading the work of a futurist of long ago.  Points out how ignoring the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy) as a civilization is just not wise.
Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, and City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design -- Nancy and Jack Todd
Cool but somehow superficial, they have a lot of great ideas which never really engage with the nitty-gritty of making a living.  There is actually astonishingly little written from a practical perspective on the subject of ecology and design
Ecology and Design: Frameworks for Learning
An anthology of academic essays on education for ecology in the design world.  It's academic, so, you know, not very practical.
Dune Messiah -- Frank Herbert
Not as good as Dune, I think, but pretty good.  Nobody does multi-layered conversations like Frank Herbert.  He was obsessed with ecology; I read a very dark, weird, early novel about our human war on insects called The Green Brain. The cultural bricolage in his science fiction is stupendous.