Building Community

Youth climate movement worthy, needs to include peak oil

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A new youth climate movement lead by Alec Loorz, who is suing the US government on behalf of his generation over lack of action on climate, seeks to raise awareness and move the climate conversation to an actionable tipping point. While his iMatter movement inspires, and shows the best in youth, iMatter hasn’t included climate’s twin issue —peak oil— and it faults their parents and grandparents for causing the problem, rather than recognizing that youth today are the inheritors of the work of energy and environmental giants that came before them.

The self-inflicted injury of emotional callousness

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It’s not resource depletion, peak oil, climate change, rising population, corporatocracy or environmental devastation that will be the cause of our demise. Nor is the problem a political stalemate or the stranded costs of our investments in useless, outmoded or destructive technology. These are the not the problems, really: they are the symptoms. Our callousness plays a causal role here, empowering all of these immanent threats to humanity. Change that and we start to change everything.

Economic Resilience #5. A multiplicity of financial vehicles

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Previously in this discussion of what we can do about economic contraction, we reminded each other than the economy is basically the sum total of transactions between people. At that same basic level, “money” is simply the markers we use to record those transactions. There is no mandate that transactions between people can only be counted via one kind of marker. In fact, plenty of perfectly valid and life-supporting transactions can be accomplished without any markers at all.

Conversation leads to positive connections

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Take stock of your conversation skills. Our competitiveness has bled into our conversation. We compete for attention, trying to turn the conversation to ourselves rather than listening to the other person. Some dominate, hogging most of the air space. Others argue, wanting to impress, rather than just connecting as friends and equals.

What must we do?

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We must not work or think on a heroic scale. In our age of global industrialism, heroes too likely risk the lives of places and things they do not see. We must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification ever for permanent ecological damage. If this imposes the verdict of guilt upon us all, so be it.

Grace Lee Boggs on Detroit and “The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century”

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We discuss the state of the economy in Detroit, “ground zero” for the economic downturn in the United States, with civil rights activist and author, Grace Lee Boggs. “I think it’s very difficult for someone who doesn’t live in Detroit to say you can look at a vacant lot and, instead of seeing devastation, see hope,” says Boggs, “see the opportunity to grow your own food, see an opportunity to give young people a sense of process, that’s very difficult in the city, that the vacant lot represents the possibilities for a cultural revolution.”