Navigating the human predicament with Nate Hagens
HAPPEN FILMS PODCAST #6
Audio only
Learn more about Nate Hagens
Websites: The Great Simplification, The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future
Book: The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century: Essays on the Systems Synthesis of the Human Predicament by Nate Hagens & D.J. White
Article: Ecological Economics issue 169: ‘Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism’ by Nate Hagens
Transcript
Antoinette: Hi everyone, I’m Antoinette, welcome to the Happen Films podcast.
Today I’m speaking to Nate Hagens. Nate’s the co-founder and director of the Institute for Energy and Our Future. He has a deep knowledge of the workings of finance, having begun his career on Wall Street, but his focus changed entirely in the early 2000s. Since then he’s dedicated himself to understanding the interrelationship between energy, the environment, and finance and the implications of that relationship on human futures. Nate teaches a course at the University of Minnesota called Reality 101: A Survey of the Human Predicament and that course is available online. He also gives regular talks, which are available online and I’ll pop links to those in the show notes and in the YouTube description. I’m really excited to speak to Nate today and I hope you’ll enjoy the conversation.
Description
In Episode 6 of the Happen Films podcast, with Jordan away spending time with an unwell family member, Antoinette is flying solo for the first time. She had the pleasure of speaking to Nate Hagens, someone we’ve been following for a while now because we love his deep knowledge and insight into the interrelationship between the environment, energy, and finance.
Having begun his career on Wall Street, Nate has a deep understanding of finance, but his career took a change of direction in the early 2000s as he began to understand the repercussions of peak oil. His personal research led him back to university and a PhD in Natural Resources and he’s dedicated the last 20 years to educating himself, freshman students and the world at large about what he terms The Human Predicament.
Now, instead of Wall Street being the hub of his universe, he states: “Our real stock market is our air, our soils, our forests, our oceans, and the biodiversity we share the planet with. This stock market has been going down for over a millennium and has been in slo-mo crash mode [for decades].”
How did we get to this point, and how do we move beyond it in a way that ensures the planet and humans will thrive?
We hope you enjoy the podcast. Check out the links to dive deeper into Nate’s research, writings and videoed talks.
Urban Living, Permaculture, Zero Waste
56 mins