This morning I was pulling poison ivy. It looked like I was up against the withering prospect of pulling more than a hundred individual plants. But I found that if I dug my gloved finger to the root and gently tugged, I could trace it through other roots and stems in my neglected garden, then fairly easily zip out whole tracts of the stuff. Without pulling a single individual plant, tugging up the root dislodged all the ones I could see and a lot that I hadn’t seen in the tangle of vegetation.

On November 13th 2011, economists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst drafted an open statement to the Occupy Wall Street movement pledging their support. Since then, more than 250 economists from around the world have added their names.

Join them at econ4.org

Alf Hornborg, professor in the department of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden has long been untangling the tightly fused networks that merge the material dimensions of the environment with the cultural processes of society. “Machine Fetishism” Hornborg’s term for the way in which we have been mystified by technology highlights the links between technology and asymmetries in global exchange and uncovers the relationship between ecology and power.

Sustainability is a profoundly ambiguous term. Depending on the context in which it is used, it is a word that can mean an almost incalculable variety of things, running the gamut of interpretation. At best the idea of sustainability should suggest that we live on a planet composed of finite resources, where there are thermodynamic constraints on the growth of any material or energetic system.