In this final Frankly of 2023, Nate outlines some global themes that are worth keeping an eye on in 2024. From climate change to domestic and global politics to an unstable financial system, world events continue to converge. How will the social fabric of our society respond as changes to our current way of life continue to grow? How do these seemingly isolated events interconnect and enhance each other? How will governments, businesses, and individuals respond to these circumstances as more people are propelled from the lives we’ve become used to and into an unfolding Great Simplification?
Teaser image credit: Roll-on/roll-off ships, such as this one at Miraflores locks, are among the largest ships to pass through the canal. By Dozenist – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=183148
Nate Hagens is the Director of The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF) an organization focused on educating and preparing society for the coming cultural transition. Allied with leading ecologists, energy experts, politicians and systems thinkers ISEOF assembles road-maps and off-ramps for how human societies can adapt to lower throughput lifestyles.
Nate holds a Masters Degree in Finance with Honors from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. He teaches an Honors course, Reality 101, at the University of Minnesota.
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There are many answers, and maybe none are completely right. But some of them are better than others. You find something that works for you and your land because you kept working at it. That is what most advice leaves out, and that is where the real work is.
Mainstream coverage of off-grid, self-sustaining communities like the one featured in this video tends to be glib and sensational (focusing, for example, on “trash homes”). It’s so much rarer to see in-depth coverage of the full social, technical and ecological aspects of such communities, or intimate glimpses into residents’ daily lives and motivations.
Since stories serve in every culture as the workshops of meaning, the urge to craft new ones may signal our readiness at long last to face up to what’s coming. All stories have characters. The qualities we attach to the ones in leading roles and the fates that befall them as plots unfold tell us a great deal about what we fear and what we value.
