How we're learning to use fungi for more sustainable design Fungi built the first soils, hold ecosystems together, and now offer practical tools for food, medicine, materials, and pollution control.  We've been using them for millennia, and now more weird and wonderful uses are emerging. What fungi are Fungi belong to their own kingdom.  They don't make food from sunlight, and they don't swallow it as animals do.  They grow as fine filaments called hyphae that spread through

Private equity's mining of American business, employees, and citizens Note: This is the full version of the article on private equity published on Anthropocene Dynamics. Capitalism is the most effective system for producing economic growth.  One of the downsides of capitalism is recessions or crashes.  When things are going well in the economy, people are optimistic.  Entrepreneurs start businesses, banks lend more credit, investors become more speculative, companies take on

Good vs less bad, and not losing sight of the big picture. If we want to move towards a better world, we have to set a direction.  That's what a goal is for.  Then we have to establish a method to determine our progress on the journey from where we are to our goal.  That's what measurements are for. The goals we set and the measurements we use influence the results we get.  But when we zoom out, we may find that a lot of our metrics for success are not aligned with what we wa