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Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse?
Paul Kingsnorth and George Monbiot, the Guardian
Dear George
On the desk in front of me is a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each represents the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, population levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of fisheries, destruction of tropical forests, paper consumption, number of motor vehicles, water use, the rate of species extinction and the totality of the human economy’s gross domestic product…
Dear Paul
Like you I have become ever gloomier about our chances of avoiding the crash you predict. For the past few years I have been almost professionally optimistic, exhorting people to keep fighting, knowing that to say there is no hope is to make it so. I still have some faith in our ability to make rational decisions based on evidence. But it is waning…
(17 August 2009)
Sent in by EB reader Jim Barton, who says:
This debates takes place shortly after the web release of the Dark Mountain manifesto by Paul Kingsnorth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine.
The manifesto, taking its name from a line in a Robinson Jeffers poem, is here though it is better approached via the homepage at The Dark Mountain Project.
While the Guardian debate has 500+ comments, there is also a discussion of it at posts on http://www.dark-mountain.net/blog
Thanks to Jim, who also alerted me to the two following “big picture essays.” -KS
Puberty on the Scale of a Planet
Andew C. Revkin, The New York Times
As I put together the post on the role of boosted intelligence in meshing infinite human aspirations with a finite planet, it brought to mind a theme that has been tugging at me for years now. It’s the question of how to blend data, uncertainty and values to produce a worldview and way of life in a time of great change, risk, opportunity and complexity.
As an introduction to this question, I offer below a version of a talk I’ve been giving of late, named after this blog. It may be the only time you’ll see the word puberty in a discussion of environmental sustainability. To a modest extent, I’m trying to take the approach Murray Gell-Mann has extolled in discussing the value of taking a “ crude look at the whole.”
The answers are starting to emerge, in large part thanks to the ongoing discussion here (in other words, largely thanks to you). But for now, here’s a framing of the question…
(7 August 2009)
Something Bigger than Life is Trying to Work Through Us
Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute
More and more, I feel called to talk about crises, as creatively and usefully as I can.
Clearly crises are coming, some are very much here. Once reserved for the fringes, crisis talk has gone mainstream. We aren’t talking “apocalyptic extremists” anymore. We’re talking the respected chief economist of the International Energy Agency saying we’ll be feeling serious economic impact from peak oil in the immediate future
We can no longer act as if such information is merely the hope-curdling pessimism of doom-and-gloomers. It is now our daily news. But listening to it presents a quandry: On the one hand, it feels increasingly odd to proceed with life as usual in the face of it. On the other hand, what exactly are we supposed to do about it?
The more I delve into the situations we face, the less I see clear or easy answers. However, in this challenging process I am coming to realize a few things.
One of the big ones: To the extent our anguish over the coming crises is a cry for no disruption in our lives — and that is certainly part of my own anguish — I suspect we will not find any answers, because our business-as-usual patterns are so closely tied to the destructive systems at work on our planet. Nothing we do to change our small lives within the business-as-usual systems will change that disturbing fact. Only changing those systems will…
(20 August 2009)
Hmmmh…, less of an essay, more of a poem? -KS
