Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The recent debate in print between Paul Kingsnorth and George Monbiot on the possibility of saving industrial civilization from itself never quite got past some very problematic core assumptions. The Archdruid offers a third opinion on the subject.
When I visited my native USA this summer, I needed to take my daughter from Minnesota to Missouri, a thousand-mile trek across the Heartland. I decided to use Amtrak, and wanted to share with you my perceptions of the journey.
Ecopsychologist Sarah Edwards, PhD, explains stages people often go through when facing the implications of climate change and resource depletion. She outlines various aspects of Denial, Anxiety, Awakening, Despair, Powerlessness and eventual Acceptance. Differentiating these from the normal grief process, Sarah emphasizes how we can face inevitable feelings of grief and free our energy for positive, practical action in our personal and community lives. (http://eco-anxiety.blogspot.com)
A common refrain today is how ‘the government’ needs to do something; the openly voiced belief that those in authority hold all the power, while the ‘common folk’ are merely cogs who have no strength to change anything…It is the power of people – not ‘the’ people, merely people in general, as a whole, who are willing to stand up in defiance of this short-sighted and greedy behavior. It is their courage in the face of an oppressive, world-straddling civilization, one built upon exploiting the poorest to benefit the richest, that now stands as the battlefield in the age-old struggle between the kingmakers and the common folk.
This text describes the presentation that I gave at the “Peak Summit” in Alcatraz (Italy) on June 27, 2009… It is not a transcription, but something that I wrote from memory, mostly in a single stretch, while I had it still fresh in my mind. The result is that my 40 minutes talk became a text of more than 10,000 words, much longer than a typical internet document (but still less than Gibbon’s six volumes on the same subject!)
-Where Do We Go From Here?
-Edward M. Kennedy, Senate Stalwart, Is Dead at 77
-Edward Goldsmith (obituary)
-Discipline has given way to the silence of the graveyard
On my lap, I’ve got a set of school books that date from the 1850s to the 1890s. They belonged to various of my father’s family – my great-uncle, George Hume, who died long before I was born and studied Eaton’s Common School Arithmetic in Amesbury, MA in the late 19th century, not 20 miles from where I would go to school 100 years later.
Modern humans often imagine themselves invincible, living as a species forever into the future, colonizing space, and perhaps even escaping the destruction of the Sun many billions of years hence. This kind of thinking–grounded in neither geology nor paleontology nor ecology I might add–has created the rather cavalier attitude demonstrated by modern leaders and their citizenry toward the daunting dangers of climate change, resource depletion and ecosystem collapse.
Last week the Oil Drum featured an article about the very wealthy making preparations for whatever catastrophe the post-peak future has in stock. Many commentators have pointed out that mercenaries understand very quickly there is more money to be had by cutting their rich but helpless employers’ throat than by defending them. The very fact than some people – including a few billionaires, apparently – believe a doomsday gated community is a viable response to peak energy speaks volumes about the preconceptions and fantasies which stand in the way of a successful adaptation to the changes peak oil heralds.
[T]he present healthcare system is unsustainable for two sets of (interconnected) reasons, fiscal and ecological. The fiscal side receives attention in the current debate, but most discussion underestimates the problems and proposes solutions that provide little more than temporary band-aids… Our collective understanding of the ecological dimension is abysmal, especially its connection to the economy, and if grasped would lead to the abandonment of politics and business as usual in medicine and throughout society.
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.
Politics is a frustrating job. Most of the time you battle windmills and spend an indecent amount of time discussing what you know to be non-issues because they happen to matter to some faction you need to stay in office…A few days ago, my party released an energy plan for Brittany – the Alter Breton Plan – which got some attention from the local press. The Alter Breton Plan is basically a green tech plan, to use Holmgren’s terminology, but the most important thing is the way it came to fruition, for it tells a lot about the way we peak oilers can act in the world of politics.
