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Sharon Astyk: In praise of Sacred Demise
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
In some senses “Sacred Demise” covers familiar territory. Like all books in the genre of peak oil literature, it must cover the basic ground of our situation. But at no time does this look like just another peak oil or end of the world book. Instead, Baker asks her readers to think seriously about defining the end of the society they know in new terms – thus far, most books have no asked us to imagine collapse both as inevitable and as contextualized as a moral journey.
The stories we tell ourselves about the future will, in the end, define it more than our technologies or our practices. In the end, practices are vulnerable to shift in meaning – one can see poverty or wealth in a simple, subsistence life, for example. Fixing meaning is the only way to sustain ethical practice – modern society at its root transforms things that are good and sustainable into things that are backwards and impoverished. Few other books that I know of on our coming triple crisis – the end of economic growth, peak oil and climate change – has begun to answer the deeply important question “how shall we view this, how shall we speak of it.”
I often joke “I’m not spiritual, I’m religious.” That is, I am something of a skeptic about spiritual approaches that pick and choose appealing bits from faiths, without addressing or fully dealing with the whole structure of religious belief that underlies them. I worry about the lack of rigor of such an approach, and so when Baker sent me a copy of her book, I was afraid I’d struggle to find something good to say. I was thus, favorably impressed by the way that Baker uses her raw material to speak about spiritual life in ways that are not pallid or empty, but are deep, rigorous and complex.
Baker is unflinching in her diagnosis of our situation, and never pulls her punches. She does not offer false hope or false reassurance. What she offers is a deeply complex and valuable narrative in which to contextualize our experience, a great deal of personal wisdom, and a long historical view of our present state. It might seem that these things are small in comparison to what we lose when we look honestly at our situation, but they turn out not to be.
Perhaps the best and most useful thing I can say about Carolyn Baker’s book is this – it manages to leave you consoled, sustained and in new ways prepared to face the future. Despite the fact that its unflinching honesty takes away denial as a choice, it leaves us better off than before. And what more can one say about a book?
Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse is now available! ! Book foreword may be read at top of home page. CLICK HERE to order
Sharon Astyk is the author of DEPLETION AND ABUNDANCE: Life On The New Home Front and A NATION OF FARMERS: Defeating The Food Crisis on American Soil. By all means, check out her BLOG
(26 March 2009)
Carolyn Baker is a long-time contributor to Energy Bulletin.
It’s the Ecology, Stupid (ecological economics)
Joshua E. Brown1, University of Vermont
The most obvious fact about ecological economics is that, well, ecology comes before economics.
“For example,” says Joshua Farley, an economist at the University of Vermont, “without healthy ecosystems to regulate climate and rainfall and provide habitat for pollinators, agriculture would collapse.” Which makes it tough to sell cars.
Put another way, “we need economic production to survive, but we also need healthy ecosystems and the service they provide,” he says. No bees, no food, no trip to the grocery store.
This hierarchy of logic might seem self-evident, but to ecological economists — like Farley and graduate student Rachael Beddoe and their colleagues at UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics — the mainstream of economic thought seems to have the formula backward. Get the economy growing again, the conventional argument goes, then we’ll have the time and resources to take care of the environment; let the market set a price tag on conservation and the ecosystems will take care of themselves.
Farley and Beddoe are the lead authors of two new papers — one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the other in the journal Conservation Biology — that take aim at these economic orthodoxies.
A full world
There is abundant evidence that “further material growth no longer significantly contributes to improvement in quality of life,” Beddoe and her co-authors wrote in the February 24 edition of PNAS3.
Yet our institutions and industries rush on “like a runaway train,” she says, pushing for greater and greater material production and consumption. They’re driven by an underlying worldview that assumes growth equals progress.
(25 March 2009)
Honest Evaluation of Costs and Benefits, Profit and Loss
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
No, this one actually isn’t about the economy. This post came out of a question that was asked at the end of my talk at the New York State Museum last week, a question I get a lot, and always feel inadequate answering – how do we deal with our sense of loss, with what we don’t get in a world where we either by necessity or because it is the moral things to do choose to live with less, choose to make hard choices about what we can have.
I don’t want to deny that people really do endure substantial costs here – they truly do. I believe that much about the low impact, adaptive life is good and valuable, but there are things that are inconvenient, and if events make things necessary, that will be a heck of a lot more than inconvenient, and by virtue of time invested, my situation may be easier than most. I do not mean to understate loss.
And yet, I think it very important that we consider seriously how we look at and evaluate the costs of our new lifestyle, in order to really understand them. Because one of the insidious things about our society – probably any society – is that we are accustomed to paying certain prices for the society we live in, so accustomed that we understate these costs, and rarely fully acknowledge them. Unfamiliar costs and negatives, we tend to overstate. This plays out in nearly every area of our thinking about the future, and distorts our reasoning. To some degree this distortion may be inevitable, but I think it is worth trying to balance it as clearly as possible.
What do I mean by this? Well, one easy example would the costs of a car-rich vs. car-free society. I think when many of us (perhaps not so much my blog readers, but most people more embedded in the culture) think about life without a car, early on we leap to a scenario in which we cannot rush our desperately ill or injured family member to the hospital. And this is, in fact, a concern. There is no doubt that in a society without private cars, where one has to rely on public ambulances, some people who might not otherwise die or be seriously harmed would die or be seriously harmed.
(26 March 2009)
Listening to the Talking Heads (experts and predicting the future)
Kevin Drum, blog, Mother Jones
Today Nick Kristof hauls out the columnist’s favorite evergreen subject for a slow day: Philip Tetlock, the Berkeley professor who famously found that expert predictions weren’t much better than throwing darts.
Indeed, the only consistent predictor was fame — and it was an inverse relationship. [The worst performance came from] experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites. People who shouted
….Mr. Tetlock called experts such as these the “hedgehogs,” after a famous distinction by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin (my favorite philosopher) between hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.
This was the distinction that mattered most among the forecasters, not whether they had expertise. Over all, the foxes did significantly better, both in areas they knew well and in areas they didn’t.
I don’t have any actual data to back this up — which, ironically, might make this a hedgehog-ish thing to say — but my experience suggests that a key difference between the two types is respect for history and broad trends. That is, if you want to know what’s going to happen in the future, you should pay attention to what’s happened before. If simpleminded data says there’s a housing bubble, there’s probably a housing bubble. If foreign occupations usually turn into guerrilla wars, then your occupation is probably going to turn into a guerrilla war. If tax cuts usually reduce government revenues, then your tax cut will probably reduce government revenues.
The problem is that most people don’t find this kind of thinking at all persuasive. If somebody gets on TV back in 2005 and explains in detail why this time it’s different and high housing prices are completely sustainable, it all sounds vaguely plausible. The skeptics don’t believe it, but they don’t have fancy arguments. They just point to a chart and say that the numbers look really high by historical standards, and whenever that’s happened in the past there’s been a crash. So there’s probably going to be a crash this time too. And they’re duly ignored.
(26 March 2009)
The article quoted by Kevin Drum is worth a read: Learning How to Think by Nicholas D. Kristof in the NY Times.
