Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In the world of climate policy, the argument has been shifting. It used to be between a few global warming Cassandras and hoards of global warming deniers, and that arguing got, well, pretty heated. The deniers long ago lost their argument to the hard science of the matter, so the debate has boiled down to the preventionists versus the mitigators.
Town hall meetings being held on health care legislation across the country are exploding with emotion, frustration, and conflict. Citizens are showing up in throngs to speak out, and sometimes to shout, about health care—turning the meetings into a vivid demonstration of what’s missing from American democracy.
If we are to work on a community level, we’re going to have to use the old community and neighborhood organizing strategies, rather than a series of showings of End of Suburbia or How to Boil a Frog (don’t get me wrong, I really think very highly of these movies). That is, that we are going to have to be able to enlist people at very low levels of commonality, rather than at high levels of education about the future of the world if we’re to get enough bodies on the ground to do what is needed. And that these communities need to be built, well, yesterday.
When the hummingbirds run out of sugar water in their feeder right outside our kitchen, one of them flies up to the window and gently bumps it. Doesn’t run into it as if by accident, but hovers right at the pane and deliberately bumps it. The hummer seems to be saying: “The feeder is empty, you dolts. Get with it.” And they never bump the window unless the feeder is empty. They know. How do they know?
We’d like to hear more about what you’re doing. As you may know, our Senior Fellow, Richard Heinberg, is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost educators on the perils of a global oil economy. Right now, Richard is starting his next book about how individuals and communities can build resilience in the face of uncertainty and rapid change caused by economic collapse, peak oil, climate change, and other crises. In short, this book is about you. So, you see, Richard wants to hear your stories; the stories of what individuals, families and communities are doing to transition to a post-carbon world.
I want to step back from our gargantuan dilemmas of 2009 and reflect on the East German intelligentsia I interviewed in 1990-1992 at the time of the unification of Germany…these East Germans faced the destruction of their national myth, which held that socialism was the true victor over Nazism and that capitalism’s demise was inevitable. In America unquestioned belief in growth has inspired us throughout our history, yet it is going the way of the East German’s mythology.
The Archdruid returns from vacation with a few unexpected announcements and a glimpse at a future that may resemble nothing so much as the nineteenth-century past.
Human beings are capable of living egalitarian lives without fossil fuels. Many hunter-gatherer societies testify to the fact it is possible, though not inevitable. Human nature includes both cooperative/altruistic and competitive/“us versus them” tendencies. Our empathetic and cooperative tendencies must be consciously cultivated in everyday life if we are to create a non-violent, democratic future without fossil fuels.
-Apocalypse Later? I’m Going Local Now.
-Local Future: Peak Oil, Climate Change & the Economic Crisis
-LOOK: Lanefab Microhousing
There exists today, a trinity of situations that confronts those of us who live in Western culture: global climate change, the peak and eventual end of non-renewable sources of fossil fuels (oil and gas), and economic meltdown. These issues are old news for much of the world. We in the wealthier nations are going to join the global community in attempting to find ways to survive and live amidst enormously trying circumstances.
If we want to engender a new economy, bottom-up, we have to start by discovering the work we’re meant to do, because we’re only going to persevere effectively if the role we’re playing lies at the intersection of what we’re good at, what we love doing, and what’s needed in the world that we care about.
For those concerned about a sustainable future, changing the reigning industrially-conditioned aesthetic–which is now deeply ingrained in the public mind–will be as much of a challenge as changing the underlying system that created it.
