Paddy's shelf
The books, articles and podcasts currently on my shelf.
Reading now
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Ecocivilization
Making a World that Works for All
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Fierce Vulnerability
Healing From Trauma, Emerging Through Collapse
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Frontierlands
Britain's Survival in the Making
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Goliath’s Curse
The History and Future of Societal Collapse
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Governing the Commons
The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
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Hegemony How-To
A Roadmap For Radicals
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Lanark
A Life in Four Books
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Lifehouse
Taking Care of Ourselves in a World On Fire
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Please Yourself
How to stop people-pleasing and transform the way you live
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Positive Obsession
The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler
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The Web of Meaning
Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe
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When No Thing Works
A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse
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Recently finished
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The Silmarillion
Finished 15 Jun 2026
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Outgrowing Modernity
Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse with Accountability and Compassion
★★★★★
Finished 30 Nov 2025
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Recently highlighted
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27 Jul 2026
Climate Change Is Real – And the Right Needs to Get Serious About It
But the Right reacted with misplaced sympathy for the devil, telling itself that fossil-fuel giants are the good guys, renewables a joke, and decarbonisation rooted in a misreading of human nature.
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26 Jul 2026
Your Critique of Structure Is a Trauma Response
how do you know, in this moment, whether your resistance to structure is a political analysis or a nervous system response?
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23 Jul 2026
Meet the Man Whose Groundbreaking Book Is Being Devoured by the Left
The years 1914 to 1989 mark the age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and institutionalisation was also high – so people engaged with politics electorally and on the streets.
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22 Jul 2026
Why the Right Swapped Economics for Culture Wars | Martin Wolf
what is sometimes called neoliberal uh, but I would just say a pro-market counterrevolution.
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22 Jul 2026
Confronting Capitalism: Socialism and Class Traitors
So what socialists are against is not property as such, but property that enables one group of people to exploit another group of people.
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22 Jul 2026
Taking Love Seriously: What Ancient Wisdom & Modern Psychology Say About Interconnectedness with John Churchill
Buddha is the Sangha is saying like the new, the next stage of human development is deeply communal.
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21 Jul 2026
Everything You’ve Been Told About Pre-History Is Wrong
When you actually try to think through when people refer to civilization, what they're actually talking about, it's essentially the rise of dominance hierarchies, of societies in which a small group or small number of individuals are ranked above everyone else and maintain that rank through the use of violence.
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17 Jul 2026
Comms-Alt-Delete
If another person tells me the left needs better stories or we need better narratives I’m going to shoot myself. What we do not need are better stories. You develop a story by actually doing things. You develop a story by demonstrating you can do things. #prac/strategy
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16 Jul 2026
Daily Episode 205 - Nobody likes a Cassandra
An RCP, a representative concentration pathway, is a climate change scenario used to project future atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and the global heating they cause.
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13 Jul 2026
Don't Despair, Participate...
My faith comes from proximity. The closer I am to people building life-affirming things, spaces, practices, infrastructures together, the less convincing despair becomes.
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13 Jul 2026
The People Who Know Nothing Know Everything
“This is why these conversations are impossible. You keep retreating into facts.”
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10 Jul 2026
We've Stopped Prepping. Here's Why.
The third layer of fear also goes by the name “anticipatory anxiety.” Basically, you develop a fear of being afraid. For example, you’re so afraid of the future, you don’t even want to think about it. Or you develop unhealthy coping mechanisms, like toxic optimism or hoarding. Some of us have broken past the third layer of fear. It helps when you actually start to wake up. #sm/collapse
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9 Jul 2026
2026 UK Millionaire Polling
Almost half of UK millionaires polled (43%) are most concerned about doctors and other qualified health staff leaving the UK. They are also worried about young people (19%) and business owners leaving (19%) and are least concerned about other millionaires leaving the UK (9%). #facts
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9 Jul 2026
Collapse - A Framework for Understanding and Navigating the Decline of Industrial Civilisation
William Catton called this temporary expansion “phantom carrying capacity”: the illusion that the Earth can support many more people than it actually can because we are drawing down stocks of oil, gas, coal, topsoil, forests, and fresh water faster than they can regenerate.
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9 Jul 2026
Go Fuck Yourself - The Air Conditioning Debate
"what does 7 days of 40C heat in temperate climate countries — that is, Europe — do to food supplies" into an AI chatbot and you get the answer: a 20 to 50% reduction in food outputs for that year. And that is just the beginning. It goes on and on.