Society

Cassandra’s curse: how “The Limits to Growth” was demonized

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There is a legend lingering around the first “Limits to Growth” book that says that it was laughed off as an obvious quackery immediately after it was published. It is not true. The study was debated and criticized, as it is normal for a new theory or idea. But it raised enormous interest and millions of copies were sold. Evidently, despite the general optimism of the time, the study had given visibility to a feeling that wasn’t often expressed but that was in everybody’s minds. Can we really grow forever?

The Glass Bead Game

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The search for constructive visions of a world in the wake of peak oil can lead in strange directions, and one of the more unexpected is a science fiction masterpiece from the first half of the 20th century that few readers have even recognized as science fiction at all, offering a vision of the future that, however appealing, flies in the face of some of the most cherished claims industrial society makes for its own superiority. Unpacking a box of books from his own college days, the Archdruid explains.

Knitting a new future

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Here, in the middle of urban Los Angeles, knitting is a pretty elitist hobby. It might be a “reskilling type of thing” good for necessary clothing-making somewhere out on a farm where there are plenty of goats and sheep. Or if I took to raising angora rabbits. Because when the serious hiccups in the economy come, when the darker transportation issues of peak oil set in, the boutique yarn stores I patronize today likely won’t be around anymore.

Teaching peak oil to preteens

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What will our cities look like from a preteen’s perspective in the not-too-distant future when peak oil pushes gas and food prices to new heights? No rides to the mall? No eating out? City-wide blackouts? Catastrophic! It was to Luz and her friends at first, but through a little bit of creativity and preteen gumption they discover the hidden potentials of an abandoned lot in their neighbourhood. Claudia Dávila’s debut graphic novel, “Luz Sees the Light,” sets Luz and her friends on a path to transform their fossil-fueled world.

Invasion of the space bats

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One of the challenges the peak oil movement faces just now is a lack of visions of the post-peak future that portray our species dealing with the end of industrial civilization, rather than evading it on the one hand or crumpling into fashionable despair on the other. It’s important to recognize the existence of that lack, but even more important just now to begin to fill it — even if that involves confrontations with alien space bats. Clutching an old copy of Analog Science Fiction Magazine in one hand and a can of bat repellent in the other, the Archdruid plunges ahead…

From crushing distance to opening space – a meditation on speed and local consciousness

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We do not really cease being drivers when we step from our vehicles. Like television, automobile travel strengthens some of the more pernicious habits of the egoic mind. Bottom line: motor travel is addictive, and the effects of the addiction are likely to persist even if we can no longer afford to drive.

Cassandra and the limits to growth

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Sometimes I wonder how it was that Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess, had so much trouble in convincing her fellow Trojan citizen that it was not such a good idea to demolish the city walls to let in that big, wooden horse. Maybe she spoke in riddles and using obscure language, as fitting for a prophetess. But in our case, facing global warming and resource depletion, I believe that it is fundamental today to arrange our knowledge in ways that can be understood by citizens and decision makers.
(discussion of the Limits to Growth model)

Zombies and aliens

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During the first decades of communist rule, Todd argued, aliens were seen as friendly or, what amounted to the same thing, in need of some revolutionary help from Earth. “Andromeda”, published in 1957 by Ivan Yefremov, is the perfect example of this. It pictures an entirely communist Earth, member of a kind of interstellar radio network, the Great Circle. There is no faster-than-light travel, so the civilizations of the Great Circle almost never meet in person, but from time to time a utopian Earth sends spaceships in a kind of Grand Tour with the occasional fight against non-sentient monsters and the occasional ecological disaster on some distant planet. As the Soviet Union sank deeper into depression, however, the tone changed.

Peak Moment 200: How the West has won (with transcript)

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“Is the world a better place because you were born?” asks author Derrick Jensen. He contrasts sustainable indigenous cultures who enrich their habitat with the current “dominant culture destroying everything.” He explores how industrial civilization is inherently violent, turning people into objects and the earth into stuff. His books include A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, What We Leave Behind and Endgame. [Part 1]