Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This is a written version of the talk that I gave at the “ASPO-2012” meeting in Vienna, on May 31 2012. It describes my experience with waste management as a way of closing the industrial cycle and attaining long term sustainability. Here, I introduce the concept of “urban gleaning”, a high efficiency way of dealing with waste.
One mile north of the Mason-Dixon line in Southeastern Pennsylvania, nearly 200 people from the US and beyond, gathered this weekend on the land of Four Quarters Inter-Faith Sanctuary to consider Peak Oil, climate change, and economic meltdown—and the collapse of industrial civilization.
You could say this is the worst and the best of times to be publishing in print. Worst because we are in a recession, at the tail end of an industrialised civilisation, where “growth at all cost” has began to play out its consequences. Best because there is a whole new narrative out there, the happening story of Transition you might not see covered by mainstream media. That’s the story we’re aiming to tell.
I do not have an awful lot to say on the subjects of mysticism or spirituality, but since these were on the agenda at this gathering, at which I was invited to speak (the Age of Limits Conference), I had thought that I could add something to the proceedings by holding forth on the (possibly) related topic of religion and the (potential) usefulness of religious institutions in helping us adapt to the unfolding deterioration and collapse of industrial civilization, all the while steering well clear of any mystical or spiritual matters. What follows is a summary of my talk, based on the notes I had scribbled on some index cards.
It is our premise that human societies will not succeed in overcoming our myriad eco-crises through better “green” technology or economic reforms alone; we must pioneer new types of governance that allow and encourage people to move from anthropocentrism to biocentrism, and to develop qualitatively different types of relationships with nature itself and, indeed, with each other. An economics and supporting civic polity that valorizes growth and material development as the precondition for virtually everything else is ultimately a dead end—literally.
Transition is providing an alternative and showing that not only is it possible to think differently, it’s also possible to take actions in the world which change things. It’s important to give people a sense that we could make a different future because one of the biggest things that we’re up against is that the majority of people can’t see beyond the way that we do things now. Whether they think that’s great or whether they think it’s rubbish, there’s a real feeling of people not having any hope that things could be any different. And many don’t want to change.
After well over a decade of peak oil events, it may come as a surprise to see one break new ground. Still, last weekend’s “Age of Limits” conference managed that, by focusing steadfastly on what happens when current efforts to evade the limits to growth inevitably fail — and in the process, it allowed a glimpse at certain unexpected realities in and around the peak oil movement. With an uneasy eye toward dark clouds, the Archdruid explains.
In Extraenvironmentalist #41 we speak with Ronald Wright about his book A Short History of Progress which chronicles the idea of progress through human history and has been adapted into a new film, Surviving Progress. Then we hear from Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks who directed and wrote Surviving Progress. We ask them about the challenges of adapting the story of our complex civilization into a succinct and slick film. Last of all, we report back from Montreal about the Maple Spring uprising and our interviews with numerous ecological economists at the Montreal Degrowth conference as our civilization attempts to redefine our economic priorities.
Odum often drew an analogy between the way meteorological storms such as hurricanes disperse heat and the way that other systems do, including information systems. After Tom Abel’s excellent post last week on trends in education in a world in transition, it is a good time to share Odum’s analogy linking storms of information and weather storms. But to make that analogy, we first need a meteorology lesson, starting with the second law of thermodynamics.
You’ve heard of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s 900 users exchanging gossip and other personal pleasantries or worries through a medium that inflates narcissism. You’ve probably not heard of Ben Rose of the New York City Materials Exchange Development Program (NYC MEDP) or the equivalent organizations in your communities providing services to thousands of charitable non-profit groups which promote the donating and reusing of materials to avoid incineration, landfilling and recycling.
The single biggest reason for Dutch success in making biking safe and popular is their policy of separating bike lanes from moving vehicles on busy streets, either by physical barriers such as curbs or bright painted markings on the pavement.
I was so gratified to see Wendell Berry’s remarks in a recent interview (“Wendell Berry: Landsman” with Jim Leach in Humanities magazine, May/June 2012) where he makes a point about economics that is overlooked in these days when divisiveness rules the political roost. The general view is that the economic battle is between capitalism and socialism, but as Wendell observes, “both are industrial systems and they have made the same mistakes in some ways.” Both have ignored “the propriety of scale and the standard of ecological health.”
