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The Red Queen: Bates and Orlov interview (Audio)
KMO, C-Realm Podcast
First up Dmitry Orlov and Albert K. Bates explore visions of a post-collapse America, and later KMO talks food, consciousness, and the forces of darkness with Neil Kramer of the Cleaver.
Dmitry Orlov is the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, and Albert K. Bates is the author of The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times. In the podcast, Dmitry makes mention of Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology by Eric Brende
(27 February 2008)
Lovelock: ‘Enjoy life while you can’
Decca Aitkenhead, Guardian
… Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain’s most respected – if maverick – independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.
For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists – but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language – but its calculations aren’t a million miles away from his.
As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we’re trying to do about it is wrong.
(1 Mar 2008)
Building an Alternative to Hierarchy: Rhizome Theory
Jeff Vail, rhizome
This third essay in a five-part series, The Problem of Growth, looks at the theoretical requirements for a sustainable alternative to hierarchy. In the first two installments (1 2), I argued that competition between hierarchal entities selects for those entities that most efficiently grow and intensify, resulting in a requirement for perpetual growth, and that ongoing human dependency on participation in this system is the lifeblood of this process. At the most basic level, then, an alternative to hierarchy and a solution to the problem of growth must address this issue of dependency. My proposed alternative-what I call “rhizome”-begins at exactly this point.
Achieving Minimal Self-Sufficiency
The first principle of rhizome is that individual nodes-whether that is family units or communities of varying sizes-must be minimally self-sufficient. “Minimally self-sufficient” means the ability to consistently and reliably provide for anything so important that you would be willing to subject yourself to the terms of the hierarchal system in order to get it: food, shelter, heat, medical care, entertainment, etc. It doesn’t mean zero trade, asceticism, or “isolationism,” but rather the ability to engage in trade and interaction with the broader system when, and only when, it is advantageous to do so. The corollary here is that a minimally self-sufficient system should also produce some surplus that can be exchanged-but only to the extent that is found to be advantageous. A minimally self sufficient family may produce enough of its own food to get by if need be, its own heat and shelter, and enough of some surplus-let’s say olive oil-to exchange for additional, quality-of-life-enhancing consumables as it finds advantageous. This principle of minimal self-sufficiency empowers the individual family or community, while allowing the continuation of trade, value-added exchange, and full interaction with the outside world.
It should be immediately apparent that “dependency” is the result of one’s definition of “need.” Total self-sufficiency in the eyes of a Zimbabwean peasant, even outright luxury, may fall far short of what the average American perceives as “needing” to survive.
(25 February 2008)
Upsides of being down
Paul Keedwell, Guardian
Focusing on depression in a purely clinical way is preventing us understanding our susceptibility to it and ignores the good it can bring, argues psychiatrist Paul Keedwell
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… The assumption that depression is a disease has been reinforced and perpetuated by biologists, psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies, all of whom have a vested interest – consciously or unconsciously – in the clinical perspective. This might be an appropriate model for the more severe “melancholic” forms of depression that psychiatrists tend to see, but not for the majority of cases of depression. Most depression is dealt with in the GP surgery or resolves itself without a single medical consultation. Most of the time, depression is hidden from view because of the stigma attached to it.
… The truth is that short-term pain can lead to longer-term gain. A recently published follow-up study of depression in Holland – the Netherlands Mental Health Survey and Incidence Study (Nemesis) – used a sample of 165 people with a major depressive episode, and provides some preliminary scientific evidence to suggest that depression is indeed helpful in the longer term. Researchers who were looking for evidence to suggest that depression leaves people chronically disabled were surprised to discover the opposite.
The population they followed from before illness to the period after recovery showed that people seemed to cope better with life’s trials after depression than they were doing before its onset. In the group as a whole, averaged ratings of vitality, psychological health, social and leisure activities, occupational performance and general health all significantly improved upon recovery from depression, compared to functioning prior to the depression.
…Depression may bring about a “rebirth” because it removes self-delusion. There is some evidence from scientific studies to show that depressed people are rather more realistic in their thinking than “healthy” individuals – the phenomenon of “depressive realism”. It prompted the scientific journalist Kyla Dunn to write: “One cognitive symptom of depression might be the loss of optimistic, self-enhancing biases that normally protect healthy people against assaults to their self-esteem. In many instances, depressives may simply be judging themselves and the world much more accurately than non-depressed people, and finding it not a pretty place.”
With recovery, and with the lifting of mood, a new kind of truth could emerge that lies somewhere between the overly optimistic and the overly negative. The new truth would be devoid of blind optimism: a more humble assessment of the depressed person’s own capability, contai
Paul Keedwell is an honorary consultant psychiatrist at the mood disorders clinic at the Maudsley hospital, London, and a lecturer in the neuroscience of emotion. His book, How Sadness Survived, is published by Radcliffe, RRP
(27 February 2008)
There may be some meaning here for the people who experience depression as they contemplate peak oil and climate change. At best, the “peak oil blues” can cause one to re-examine one’s life and attitudes, emerging with a more realistic outlook.
-BA
