Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This year Post Carbon Institute has leaned into the “Great Unraveling” as a label for framing what’s happening in modern society and the natural world. In short, the Great Unraveling represents humanity’s comeuppance from overshoot, a time when debts are coming due and the promise of everlasting growth is fading.
I believe that all of us, from those involved in planning an ecological transition to everyday people who will decide whether it moves forward or not, must cultivate our ability to think critically. And not just as a tool we use sometimes, but as a core part of our identity.
Modernity is not time-tested, evolution-approved. It will fail. The question becomes: how do we respond to the failure?
In this final Frankly of 2023, Nate outlines some global themes that are worth keeping an eye on in 2024. From climate change to domestic and global politics to an unstable financial system, world events continue to converge.
Our entire cultural pattern of making sense of things is rooted in the sense of our being separate from one another, isolated and alone.
I believe we’re going to have to address the very root of the metacrisis where it emerges from the ground of its pseudo-being.
Following another summer of record heat waves, droughts, floods, and wildfires across vast swaths of the planet, the injuries done to the planet by the Industrial Growth Society have never been so conclusive. As I grapple with collapse, I wanted to speak with Dilafruz Khonikboyeva, an Indigenous Pamiri from Tajikistan, who has lived through it and come out the other side.
Short for “fossil fuel obsolescence,” the larger concept / narrative I provided was one in which our civilization continues to design itself around (in accordance with) the premise of cheap fossil fuels (measured both in economic and ecological terms), even though those days are well behind us.
There are many aspects to paradigm shift. Several have been described in this Primer. Everyone can expand the adventure and share what we are learning from own experiences. This Primer is exactly that. Add to it. Share it with others!
Fortunately, the “right to repair” movement has made serious headway in challenging the contrived obstacles to repair, and in winning legal rights for repair commons to exist.
We can barely even begin to imagine an amodern / postmodern / metamodern relational culture. But imagining it we must.
Autonomous vehicles as currently deployed face a conceptual flaw that can’t be overcome
The project of direct democracy, being a socio-political system that is incompatible with the Nation-State-Capital complex, implies radical change to people’s relations to physical space.
