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A message to our grandchildren
Stewart and Lee Udall, High Country News
Among other accomplishments in a life of public service, Arizona native Stewart Udall was perhaps the most influential secretary of Interior ever. He served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations from 1961 to 1969, and played a part in some of the nation’s landmark environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Wilderness Act and the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act. He now lives in Santa Fe, N.M., where he and his wife, Lee, penned this letter to their grandchildren.
My dear ones, your generation will face a series of environmental challenges that will dwarf anything any previous generation has confronted. I’m hoping to add some insights of my own based on things I learned as a policymaker in the 1950s and ’60s, when I observed and participated in some monumental achievements and profound misjudgments.
As a freshman congressman in 1955, I regrettably voted with my unanimous colleagues for the Interstate Highway Program. All of us acted on the shortsighted assumption that cheap oil was super-abundant and would always be available. This illusion began to unravel in the 1970s, and it haunts Americans today.
Oil lies at the epicenter of a critical energy crisis. Petroleum is a finite resource and is the most precious, versatile resource on the planet. Cheap oil played a crucial role in the development of American power and prosperity, and sustains the military machine that dominates the world today. Oil is now nearing a historic transition that will alter the civilization Americans have come to take for granted.
… Having [expressed doubts about the ability of technology to solve all problems], technology may yet help solve some of our current problems. Some of the world’s best architects and designers are already working on changes in the design of buildings and cities, which, they believe, will reduce requirements for electricity by as much as 50 percent by 2050.
Such advances won’t be enough, however. Americans must finally cast aside our notion that we can continue the wasteful consumption patterns of our past. We must promote a consciousness attuned to a frugal, highly efficient mode of living. In closing, I leave you with these thoughts, and hope you will hold to these ideals throughout your lives:
Foster a consciousness that puts a premium on the common good and the protection of the environment. Give your unstinting support to all lasting, fruitful technological innovations. Be steadfast enemies of waste. The lifetime crusade of your days must be to develop a new energy ethic to sustain life on earth.
(31 March 2008)
Are We Doomed? Why Civilizations Like Ours Fall (audio)
The Bryant Park Project via National Public Radio (NPR)
Are we doomed? Debora MacKenzie, the author of a recent New Scientist cover story, says our survival depends on how connected we are to each other.
“A civilization is a system whereby people get what they need. They get the basics of life – food, water, shelter, civil order, and some kind of satisfaction,” she argues. “When they fall is when they can no longer meet their people’s basic needs using the mechanisms that have evolved.
MacKenzie says it all comes down to how complex and interconnected your civilization is. Hierarchies tend to create increasing levels of bureaucracy, each serving in part to deal with problems created by the other levels. When the situation becomes too complex to manage, she says, “you turn into a network where the decision-making is sort of decentralized.”
Consider the food supply of New York City, for example. Every day, truck drivers bring groceries to stores across a vast region. They’re responding to the forces of supply and demand, not to a centralized government authority. You might think a self-regulating network would be resilient. “The trouble is there are unexpected fragilities in those networks,” she says. “You hit them at one place, and the shock just transmits through the whole system.”
She cites an old adage that civilization is four meals away from anarchy. She admits to being known around her newsroom as the “doomsday correspondent,” and she intends to be prepared for the worst. “I’ve covered bird flu for a while, so I have some food in the basement,” she reports. “I don’t have any illusions.”
(7 April 2008)
Upbeat interview about collapse. It sounds as if MacKenzie has been reading Tainter, Homer-Dixon and other theorists of collapse. She covers many of the concerns voiced among peak oilers, though she didn’t mention peak oil.
Her article in the New Scientist is Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable, unfortunately behind a paywall. -BA
Coming Ecological Collapse: Failing Ecosystems the Mother of All Bubbles
Dr. Glen Barry, Earth Meanders
The converging mortgage, financial, food, fuel and climate crises are all symptoms of a massive global ecological bubble
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Ecological overshoot whereby humanity exceeds the Earth’s carrying capacity is the mother of all “bubbles”. Within the current sub-prime mortgage and financial bubbles, and food and energy price increases, we are witnessing the logical and inevitable economic consequences of over-population, resource scarcity, inequitable and unreasonable consumption, and unsustainable economic growth. Growth and livelihoods based upon unreasonable presumptions of continued resource outputs from dwindling ecosystems are a dangerous, unprecedented “ecological bubble” that threatens civilization and mass apocalyptic death.
… In the mortgage bubble, we are seeing the first signs of many wholly ecological bubbles to come. The world is not only at peak oil, but well past peak water, land, climate, oceans, food and energy in general. Rising food prices are the front edge of the food bubble — a result of over-population, climate change, water shortages and land scarcity. The climate bubble has already begun to burst — it is too late to return to the relatively stable set of climate patterns with which we evolved — but failure to stabilize emissions as early as possible will bring far worse. And perhaps most ominously, and by extension of the food and climate bubbles, we are facing a deadly water bubble that is already disrupting societies and may prove insurmountable.
… It is time for a new global dream. The new dream would include aspiring that all have their basic needs met, even as individuals are free to pursue their passions and fortunes, as long as they do not undermine common ecological systems. Such a dream seeks to avert apocalyptic ecological and societal collapse through promotion of a sense of personal enoughness, voluntary simplicity and a whole range of necessary fundamental changes in society such as ending the use of coal and logging of ancient forests.
(11 April 2008)
Bio of Dr. Glen Barry.
From another posting at The People’s Voice:
Dr. Barry is founder and President of Ecological Internet; provider of the largest, most used environmental portals on the Internet including the Climate Ark at www.climateark.org/ and http://www.EcoEarth.Info/.
Recession, depression, collapse: What’s fear got to do with it?
Carolyn Baker, Truth to Power
… In looking honestly at these realities, it is impossible not to feel fearful, and some may once again accuse me of fear-mongering. However, I argue that fear is not necessarily a negative emotion or an unproductive waste of energy. I’m not talking about fear for the sake of fear, but rather, fear as a motivator-fear as a force that compels us to act.
Gavin De Becker’s 1997 book The Gift Of Fear was written to assist readers in detecting violent behavior in the workplace, in the street, or in the home, for the purpose of protecting themselves. In contemplating collapse we are not dealing up close and personal with violence-at least not in this stage of collapse, as much as we are attempting to read the signals it is sending so that we may wisely prepare ourselves for navigating it. Among the author’s suggestions are:
- Recognizing the survival signals that warn us of impending danger
- Relying on our intuition
- Separating real from imagined danger
- Moving beyond denial so that one can tune in to one’s intuition
As we witness collapse and experience its impact on our lives, the fundamental concept of De Becker’s book may serve us well. He argues that fear is an evolutionary gift imbedded in our DNA for the purpose of assisting our survival. Becoming overwhelmed with it or wallowing in it is indeed not useful, but neither is attempting to hermetically seal ourselves off from it. In fact, as De Becker argues, fear helps us move out of denial so that we can really tune into our intuition which facilitates our becoming proactive on our own behalf. What we need is not exemption from fear but a way of integrating it into our current reality in balance with other emotions.
What I want the reader to understand is that collapse is already happening. Your resentment of the word doesn’t change the fact that it is occurring.
(11 April 2008)
