Sublime

the authors of this book consider themselves environmentally conscious individuals. In our book, in fact, we are happy to draw on the wisdom of such “eco-modernists” and “eco-pragmatists” as Michael Schellenberger, whom we shall meet later in this chapter, and Jesse Ausubel,

After its development by publicly funded researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the University of Freiburg, biotech firm Syngenta subsequently developed a variety that produced 23 times more beta-carotene than the original Golden Rice. It is to be offered to poor farmers royalty-free and farmers may keep the seeds for

One business leader reflected on its value, “I am convinced that the world is not capable of feeding nine billion people in the second half of this century, in our grandchildren’s world.… We see the system cannot work. What the Sustainable Food Lab is doing has never been done before, this intersection of private and public institutions. This is

For example, in Uruk, Mesopotamia, the world’s first city-states were founded on the idea of the king as the good shepherd: the king protected and provided for

Each of the systems interacts with its environment in a game-like way: sequences of action (“moves”) occasionally produce payoff, special inputs that provide the system with the wherewithal for continued existence and adaptation.