Society

Peak Moment #202: Collapse of the titans

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Learn from the Soviets — personal relationships are the best currency, says Russian-born Dmitry Orlov, the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. The American empire is following the USSR into collapse, he asserts, with financial collapse happening first, followed by commercial and then political collapse. Dmitry, an America resident for several decades, suggests lowering our needs and expectations and replacing money transactions with barter and exchanges. [Transcript is online]

Wendell Berry’s weapons of mass destruction

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In 2002, talking like a modernist poet, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked Americans to pay heed to “known unknowns” to prevent terrorist disaster. Two years later, a real poet, Wendell Berry, advised us to take the “Way of Ignorance” to prevent ecological catastrophe. If Rumsfeld is a man who tormented people and words alike, Berry is a man who would set them both free. And that could be more dangerous to the status quo than any weapons imagined by Rummy.

Sorting out possible scenarios for the future

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Most Americans are caught up in the Klingons/Cylons distinction in ways that are destructive – the default assumption is a techno-utopianism that doesn’t take physical limits into account, and if they consider any other viewpoint, they assume that the alternative is an apocalyptic nightmare, a Mad-Max-style cartoon.

Neither of these is a likely outcome – we know that we are likely to experience unchecked climate change, energy depletion and economic instability related to both (and to a host of other factors) – there’s little doubt about all of those outcomes. But assuming that everyone will have a single utopian or dystopian experience stands against pretty much all historical evidence. That doesn’t mean no one’s life is ever ideal or disastrous – merely that that’s not generally where most experiences lie.

INDIE GOGO Campaign: the straight talk introduction

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In this video, Post Carbon’s Executive Director, Asher Miller, provides the voice over for this sample of what will be the ‘Shared Future’ presentation. What you see is a short introduction, but it’s enough to give you a great idea of the visual storytelling style we’ll be employing. With your help (share our campaign, share this video if you please) and generosity, we’ll get there.

(If you would like to support Energy Bulletin, this is the way to do it.)

The quest for vision

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For the longest time, I found it really difficult to imagine, create, or buy into a vision for the future. People would hand me thick folders full of their ideas and plans. Others would send me links and attachments. Some, often after screenings of our documentary, would tell me face to face what it was they were excited about. And many other visions and plans came across my radar just by virtue of my being connected into the Doomosphere™. But by and large, whether it was the relocalization movement, the biochar revolution, or the audacity of hope, whether any of these might be good ideas or not, I just couldn’t manage to really feel the excitement that so many around me appeared to be feeling.

Who’s storing food now?

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With a freaky round of natural disasters hitting an ever shakier economy, more and more people are starting to prepare for disasters natural and manmade. The obvious place to begin: storing food. You don’t have to be a total doomer to start collecting cans and dry food down in the basement. You just have to care about making your family more resilient. Start by learning from the experts: Mormons and survivalists. And don’t count out FEMA.

The social-democratic illusion

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Social-democracy had its apogee in the period 1945 to the late 1960s. At that time, it represented an ideology and a movement that stood for the use of state resources to ensure some redistribution to the majority of the population in various concrete ways: expansion of educational and health facilities; guarantees of lifelong income levels by programs to support the needs of the non-“wage-employed” groups, particularly children and seniors; and programs to minimize unemployment. Social-democracy promised an ever-better future for future generations, a sort of permanent rising level of national and family incomes. This was called the welfare state. It was an ideology that reflected the view that capitalism could be “reformed” and acquire a more human face. … The social-democratic solution has become an illusion. The question is what will replace it for the vast majority of the world’s populations.