#206 / Two Realities

Richard Heinberg is the author of eleven books, including The Party's Over, The End of Growth, and Snake Oil. He is a Senior Fellow-in-Residence at the Post Carbon Institute.

Heinberg has written a "Two Worlds" kind of essay published on July 22, 2014 on the Resilience website. He calls it "Two Realities." 

Our contemporary world is host to two coexisting but fundamentally different—and, in at least one crucial respect, contradictory—realities. One of these might be termed Political Reality, though it extends far beyond formal politics and pervades conventional economic thinking. It is the bounded universe of what is acceptable in public economic-social-political discourse. The other is Physical Reality: i.e., what exists in terms of energy and materials, and what is possible given the laws of thermodynamics.

Heinberg is worth reading, and his latest essay is illustrated by the lovely picture, above, of those fabled "two roads diverging in a wood." 

Image Credit:
http://www.postcarbon.org/article/2322907-two-realities