Joe Costello has decades experience in politics, energy, environment, and communications. Traveled and worked across the planet. Long a student of democracy, its demise, possible revitalization.
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The Industrial Era was forged by Newtonian physics, a simple understanding of the movement of matter. The technologies derived from this understanding, fired by abundant and relatively inexpensive coal, oil, and natural gas, reshaped the ecology of the planet. Our understanding of ecology, that is biology, is relatively new. Technologies
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Art is a very nebulous term, artist even more so. Many years ago, I was at a party talking with an interesting fellow who was a research neurobiologist. Someone walked up to us and introduced themselves as an artist. The biologist replied, “Such that we all are.” That was both
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Subscribe now Natural gas is in the news so much lately, you'd think it was oil. Natural gas is basically oil matter that was exposed to greater pressures and higher temperatures. It’s comprised of the same organic life from tens to hundreds of million years ago. Most
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Two in one week, Richard Leakey joins E.O. Wilson. Voices for wildlife conservation have always been too few, always overwhelmed by industrialism's cacophony. Leakey was a great voice for and actor in conserving the ecology of Africa, where, as he helped prove, we as a species were
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Subscribe now Elections are necessary for democracy. To carry the weight of effective democratic governance, elections need to be considered credible, that is free and fair by all participants. At times, all democracies struggle with election processes. Over the last couple decades, the din from all sides questioning the soundness
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. It is extremely difficult for any person born into industrial society to understand any alternative. Pre-industrial life is now labeled poverty, certainly no one wants poverty. Industrial life
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Thank you for reading Life in the 21st Century. This post is public so feel free to share it. A number of years ago for a Christmas gift, I gave two of my young nieces E.O. Wilson's encyclopedic, The Ants. A few years ago, I was talking
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Subscribe now While the pyramids of Egypt are not the oldest human structures, they do capture the historical imagination like few others. Egypt was one of the greatest agrarian, or farming cultures. Birthed by the Nile River, the civilization of the Pharaohs lasted several thousand years, longer that is from
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If you grew up in Chicago many years ago, there was a daily morning television show called Ray Rayner and His Friends. It was sort of like Good Morning America with old Warner Brother cartoons, though depending what you think of the animated antics of the hosts and guests of
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Subscribe now It's sort of funny, if funny is the word, how Afghanistan has remained in the headlines. One assumed once the US finally left, coverage would fall to at least the imperceptible level it was during the 20 year occupation. More likely, it would fall to the
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Subscribe now In 1980, the New Deal Coalition, which controlled much of American politics for almost a half-century collapsed, never, like Humpty Dumpty, to be put back together again. It was replaced by a more direct corporate rule, maybe best described as unfettered corporate rule, with sprinklings of various elements
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. “But since the institutions of the state, which were no longer good amidst the corruption, remained fixed, these renewed laws were not sufficient to keep people good, but