Generation Why
Matthew Craft, Forging Reality: The Anthropocene Era blog
It’s a wag’s quip. Jokingly referring to Generation Y as Generation Why, the pundits might have hit something more accurate than they realize. Ours is a generation that has good cause to look around at the world and wonder why things are the way they are. Why are we in this mess? Why didn’t our parents and grandparents, who had forewarning, do anything to mitigate the mess we have in our hands? Why do people harumph about ‘kids these days’ when they’re the ones who plopped us in front of a TV or a computer and expected it to substitute for a family life?Why does it have to be us, ill-prepared by our educational system and often dysfunctional in some fashion from the way we’ve been processed by industrial society, that has to be witness to the full, inglorious dawn of the Anthropocene?
In short, why do we have to pay for the selfishness of those who came before? And why are we apparently expected to save the world when we have to fight bitterly for any scrap of power to make the changes that need made, or even to really roust our fellow Millennials from a digital trance of disinformation and outright lies?
The answer may not exist – but better that we try to answer it, by adding other questions to the Why that defines us. How can we slow down, or stop the emissions of greenhouse gas? What can we do to mitigate the impact of climate change? Where are we going to put the people who will be displaced by the shifting climate and the rising ocean? When will those who bequeathed us these problems realize that we can’t do it alone, and that we need them to help us – the way humanity was for thousands of years before industrial civilization arose? What can we do to adapt, what can we do to prevent, how can we help others do the same? We are a generation full of questions, driven by the realization that the future we were promised isn’t going to happen. From those questions, we have to draw up a drive to action; to keep the generation after us actually being Generation Z – the last humans to live in a world that is relatively hospitable to our species
Smallscale farming and parting ways with fossil fuels are but the start to the course for this generation of ours; the future is still uncharted, and the chance exists to at least mitigate the nightmare we are inheriting…
(9 Sept 2009)
Greenpunk
Matthew Craft, Forging Reality: The Anthropocene Era blog
People have begun to recognize the notion of steampunk; while clad in some decidedly odd trappings, such as Victorian fashions, a love of goggles, and a prediliction for clockworks and keys, it also houses an extremely powerful do-it-yourself ethic of making your own things; often decorative, but there are more than a few highly practical steampunks out there, building functional things with a decidedly alternate-history-Victorian style to them. More importantly, these creations are often made from already-existant objects, reusing and repurposing things that might otherwise be consigned to the scrapheap.
This is a useful trait, as anyone who understands sustainability can tell you; beneath the trappings of Victorian London and mad science, steampunks are well on their way to being sustainable.
This somehow led to a new word bouncing around inside my head yesterday morning: greenpunk. Taking the steampunk ethic, blending it with the concept of sustainability, and taking the fusion to the logical conclusion. Steampunk already tosses the consumer model of life out the window; greenpunk would step past that, into a build-it-yourself, grow-it-yourself, personal-scale kind of clean industrialism. It disables the structure of globalism, taking the idea of cottage industry and bringing it back to where it belongs. A greenpunk community would, I expect, be a marvel to behold – a place of gardens, handcrafted devices from solar/thermal power right down to fabricating long-lasting furniture and clothing.
I think I might like being a greenpunk.
(9 Sept 2009)
Colorado: Preparing For Winter
Kylara Kenshea, Forging Reality: The Anthropocene Era blog
Gardening in Colorado is much like gardening in preparation for climate change.
Nothing is predictable. It might be hot and dry one day (in the 102 range with under 10% humidity), and the next day it might be pouring torrential rain and hovering around 40 degrees. Worse yet, you are at risk of blizzards late into the season and long before anyone would expect them (for example, the blizzard in Denver in late March of 2009, and cloying snow that held on deep into April). Occasionally snow and freezing occurs as early as August as well, and there is no real way to predict the cycle.
However, there are methods for protecting one’s garden from the unruly weather, without building a huge greenhouse to enrage your local HOA.
One of the best methods is that of indoor planting, especially if you have large windows (east or south facing are best) with a sill, or a porch or patio to work with. My preference tends to be window planting, although I have to secure the seedlings against my cat’s invasion…
(9 Sept 2009)
