Timothy Wilken, MD explains: 
Synergic Science is the study of how systems work together
— physical systems, biological systems and social systems. This
involves a careful study of the relationship of the “parts” of a system
to the “whole” of the system.

 “Synergy
means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their
parts taken separately. Ö Synergy is the only word that means this. The
fact that we humans are unfamiliar with the word means that we do not
think there are behaviors of “wholes” unpredicted by the behavior of
“parts”.”      —R. Buckminster Fuller

Synergic
Science makes much of the relationships between the “parts” and their
relationships to the  “whole”. For human beings there can be no other
more important “parts” than Self and Other.

From my
perspective I am self and you are other, but from your point of view
you are self and I am other. This is a very simple way of looking at
things.

Our relationships then are major importance in determining the quality of our lives.

From the point of view of the individual joining in relationship, I can be hurt, I can be ignored, or I can be helped by the relationship—there are only three ways.

Relationships that hurt are adversary.
Relationships that ignore are neutral.
Relationships that help are synergic.

Therefore all human choices and all human relationships can be described as falling on a continuum.

Adversity — ï — Neutrality — ï — Synergy

We
humans are conditioned by our life experience. The propensity of the
types of relationship we encounter can well determine how we believe
the world works.

Adversaries believe there is not enough for everyone and only the physically strong will survive. They believe humans are coercively dependent on others, and they best understand the language of force.

Neutralists
believe there is enough for everyone, if only you work hard enough and
take care of yourself. They believe humans are financial independent
and should be self-sufficient unless they are too lazy or defective.
They best understand the language of money.

And, finally a new type of human is still emerging. Synergists
believe there is enough for everyone but only if we work together and
act responsibly. They believe humans are INTERdependent and can only
obtain sufficiency by working together as community. Synergists best understand the language of love. (05/01/08)
more…

Dan Bednarz, PhD, speaking to Nurses and other health professionals, explains: My intent is to give you a
realistic take on the future of your profession by explaining why
healthcare and nursing will be transformed by rising energy costs.

Is
there danger ahead? You bet. It’s going to be difficult, probably
life-changing for all Americans. Here’s why: the scale of our energy
predicament is enormous, unprecedented and grossly misunderstood by
institutional leaders and most of the media.

I know some of you may be wondering, Energy scarcity? That’s someone
else’s problem; put this guy in touch with geologists and politicians.

So let’s step back for the big picture:


The amount of crude oil
pumped out of the ground has been on a bumpy plateau since May of 2005.
Until then oil production was steadily increasing about 2% a year –with
periodic declines - and the world had a daily surplus, or emergency
cushion. That surplus is gone, everything produced, supply, is
immediately purchased, demand. Whether or not the world has reached
“peak oil” –the point at which yearly total worldwide extraction cannot
be increased - this 3 year plateau indicates that the era of cheap
energy is over.

Oil is now over $100.00 a barrel. It was $10.00 a barrel in November 1998.

Oil powers 90% of all transportation and it is essential
to food production and distribution; it is the primary ingredient in
many products –think plastics, petrochemicals, and clothing. It is fair
to say that all our institutions, especially medicine, are dependent
upon oil, the lynchpin resource that keeps the economy humming and
allows it to grow.

And it’s not just oil that’s getting scarce. Natural gas in Pittsburgh went up 30% on April 1^st,
to $12.50 per MCF (thousand cubic feet); it was $2.50 in 2001.
Typically, the cost of natural gas drops after the winter but here we
are facing higher prices during the summer.

Coal is becoming scarce in many countries and more expensive
here; its price has about doubled in the past year. It is our main
source of electricity. In about 15 years the world may hit a peak in
its production, and this combined with the fact that natural gas –the
secondary source of electricity generation - simultaneously will be at
or past its peak, poses a threat to our supply of electricity.

To put a human face on this, a polling agency found in
December 2007 that 12% of Americans planned to put their winter energy
bills on their credit card –no wonder Christmas spending was down. An
article in this past Saturday’s New York Times details the rising
number of people unable to pay their winter utility bills and now
facing service cutoffs.

Many hospitals in California are on the verge of bankruptcy; rising
energy costs –in tandem with other increasing costs - could be a
breaking point for them. Further, we are merely at the beginning of
what some of you recognize as Jim Kunstler’s poetic phrase “The Long
Emergency.”

Now let’s look at energy use in hospitals and then use the issue of
record keeping, a biggie for nurses, as one small but significant
example of how energy scarcity will shape the future of healthcare.
Then we’ll close with some comments on where medicine is heading and my
claim that nursing stands to become a force in reforming the healthcare
system.

The EPA estimates that hospitals use twice as much energy per square
foot as do office buildings. Until recently hospital administrators
have not paid attention to the cost of energy because they think
–mistakenly - that it represents less than 2% of their operating
expenses. Therefore, they have considered rising energy costs a
nuisance, not a threat. However, a few weeks ago a former AMA (American
Medical Association) official told me hospital administrators are
getting worried about energy costs because sharp increases are eating
into profits. For example, all energy costs in the US rose 17% in 2007,
with the cost of oil climbing 57%. The first quarter of 2008 shows no
change in this trend. How many years can our society –and hospitals -
absorb these increases? (05/01/08)
more…

John Michael Greer writes: You know that things are beginning to heat up when both sides of a
controversy declare victory at the same time. Over the last week or so,
that’s happened in the peak oil scene. On the one hand, quite a number
of cornucopians – those enthusiastic souls who believe that we can get
ourselves out of the hole we’re in by digging faster and paying less
attention to where the dirt lands – have trumpeted the discovery of a
few new oil fields as proof that peak oil is a myth.

The Bakken shale,
a geological formation down in the basement of the northern Great
Plains, has attracted the bulk of this cheerleading in the last few
weeks. Mind you, the Bakken’s a significant discovery; there’s
apparently a fair amount of oil down there, though the technical
challenges involved in extracting more than a tiny fraction of it are
immense, and nobody’s yet sure if the energy that can be extracted from
it will be more or less than the energy cost needed to extract it. Even
if it turns out to be the oil find of the decade, though, and North
Dakota oil millionaires start showing up as a recognized type in
American popular culture, the most the Bakken can do is make up some of
the production losses from older oil fields and slow, for a time, our
descent from Hubbert’s peak.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, the number of voices
proclaiming the imminence of total collapse has skyrocketed. Typical is
a recent post
in Sharon Astyk’s useful peak oil blog. Astyk claims that recent events
have decisively settled the debate between the fast-crash and
slow-grind models of post-peak oil reality, in favor of the fast crash
– and we’re already in it. Her argument is basically that the drastic
spikes in food and energy costs over the last few months have outrun
the limits of the slow-grind scenario; ergo, the fast crash is here.

I’ve commented several times in these essays about the way that linear
thinking distorts our view of the future, and Astyk’s prediction makes
a good example. The drastic price spikes in many commodities over the
last few months offer a warning that shouldn’t be ignored, but treating
them as evidence that industrial society is about to implode imposes a
linear model onto the complex realities of socioeconomic change. The
fact that change is happening quickly right now does not mean that it
will continue to happen at the same pace, or even in the same direction. …

The end of the global economy may make life a good deal harder for
those of us in the United States and those other industrial nations,
such as Canada and Australia, that have become used to the absurdly
lavish energy and resource expenditures of the recent past. It bears
remembering, though, that people in Europe maintain a standard of
living in many ways higher ours on roughly one-third the energy per
capita Americans seem to think is necessary for civilized life. We can
get by, and get by tolerably well, on much less energy and many fewer
resources than we think.

This is likely to be a crucial point to keep in mind as the present
crisis unfolds. It’s not the end of the world, or even the end of
industrial civilization, but if history is anything to go by, we could
be in for a couple of very rough decades. (05/01/08)
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Buckminster Fuller coined the term Dymaxion to mean “More for Less” or producing the most benefit with the least action.

BBC Science – Details
of an entirely new kind of electronic device, which could make chips
smaller and far more efficient, have been outlined by scientists. The
new components, described by scientists at Hewlett-Packard, are known
as “memristors”.

The devices were proposed 40 years ago but have only recently been fabricated, the team wrote in the journal Nature. …

Memristors were first proposed in 1971 by Professor Leon Chua, a
scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the
“fourth” basic building block of circuits, after capacitors, resistors
and inductors.

“I never thought I’d live long enough to see this happen,” Professor
Chua told the Associated Press. “I’m thrilled because it’s almost like
vindication. Something I did is not just in my imagination, it’s
fundamental.”

The memristors are so called because they have the ability to
“remember” the amount of charge that has flowed through them after the
power has been switched off.

This could allow researchers to build new kinds of computer memory that would would not require powering up.

Today, most PCs use dynamic random access memory (DRAM) which loses
data when the power is turned off. But a computer built with memristors
could allow PCs that start up instantly, laptops that retain sessions
after the battery dies, or mobile phones that can last for weeks
without needing a charge.

“If you turn on your computer it will come up instantly where it was when you turned it off,” Professor Williams told Reuters. (05/01/08)
more…

BBC Science — The
Earth’s temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural
climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted.

A new computer model developed by German researchers, reported in the journal Nature, suggests the cooling will counter greenhouse warming.

However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020, they say.

Other climate scientists have welcomed the research, saying it may help societies plan better for the future.

See how modelled temperatures may develop

The key to the new prediction is the natural cycle of ocean
temperatures called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which
is closely related to the warm currents that bring heat from the
tropics to the shores of Europe.

The cause of the oscillation is not well understood, but the cycle appears to come round about every 60 to 70 years. …

The projection does not come as a surprise to climate scientists,
though it may to a public that has perhaps become used to the idea that
the rapid temperature rises seen through the 1990s are a permanent
phenomenon.

“We’ve always known that the climate varies naturally from year to year
and decade to decade,” said Richard Wood from the UK’s Hadley Centre,
who reviewed the new research for Nature.

“We expect man-made global warming to be superimposed on those natural
variations; and this kind of research is important to make sure we
don’t get distracted from the longer term changes that will happen in
the climate (as a result of greenhouse gas emissions).”(05/01/08)
more…