Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens is the Executive Director of The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF). Allied with leading ecologists, energy experts, politicians, and systems thinkers, ISEOF assembles roadmaps for understanding how human societies might adapt to lower-throughput lifestyles.
Currently, Nate hosts the podcast The Great Simplification, where he has conversations with experts in energy, ecology, government, technology, and the economy to provide a systemic view of the world around us.
After ten years in finance, Nate left Wall Street to study the interrelationships between energy, ecology, and economics—and the implications for human futures. He was the Managing Editor of The Oil Drum, one of the most respected websites for analysis and discussion of global energy supplies and implications of the upcoming energy transition.
For eight years, Nate taught Reality 101, an honors course at the University of Minnesota. He is the co-author of the books Reality Blind: Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures, Vol. 1, and The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century, and continues to develop educational materials and media around energy, the economy, and the environment. Nate has appeared on PBS, BBC, ABC, and NPR, and frequently lectures around the world.
Nate holds a master’s degree in finance with honors from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in natural resources from the University of Vermont. He lives on a small farm in the Mississippi River Valley with his pack of rescue dogs, horses, chickens, and an intermittently tended garden.
Bioregioning and Our Felt Sense of Place
Journal Article
A bioregion is a coherent geographical entity—a landscape—not politically defined. It has coherent geology, landform types, fauna, flora, rainfall, and human history. So, there’s a coherent story that runs through all these layers. When we think about the kinds of “islands of coherence” we need to move forward as a species, bioregions provide that cultural grounding—what was historically true and what we need for the future.
How Well Do ‘Elites’ Understand the Metacrisis?
Journal Article
I think the carbon pulse has skewed our biological template towards being individualistic and competitive and that is not our destiny or our genome. I think a lot of the people who are CEOs and national politicians do have a preponderance of narcissism…it’s the way that our culture has trained our human behavior. I’m most interested in the levers and how we might be able to shift them or at least shift them in certain pockets around the world.
The Great Simplification
Journal Article
The Great Simplification will be the era of the 21st century where we unwind a lot of the complexity built into our system over the last century of fossil fuel addiction. It doesn’t have to be a disaster, but it’s going to mean a different sort of existence. VIDEOS | INTERVIEW