Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In uncertain economic times, people are going to be less interested in something that’s intellectually interesting or idealistic, and they’re going to be much more interested in something that will help them to keep going and feed themselves and take care of their family…
As our technologies have gotten more complex and grown in size, the scale of the problems when failures occur have grown in step. Even when technological complexity works according to plan, the scale of ecological and environmental devastation can be unprecedented, as mountain-top removal in southern Appalachia, the tar sands of Alberta, and the vast dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico remind us daily. It is no coincidence that the destruction of species and ecosystems has reached an epochal level at the same time.
Reduce your consumption. Increase your awareness. Use berms/swales/mulch. Use infiltration as well as storage techniques. Build healthy soil. Change your plant palette. Bucket in the shower. Greywater-plumb your laundry (and consider guerilla greywater too). Use found materials as shade devices. And use rain barrels. Do all of the above in combination, and move into the gardens of the future.
First of all, we have a very fragile economy that could come apart, almost at a moment’s notice. Then we have the political situation in the Middle East, which is forcing oil prices up and which could in turn cause the economy to come apart at the seams at any moment. So putting all those things together, it’s a very, very volatile situation. I think 2011 is going to be an interesting year… in the Chinese sense…
My own argument, which I’ve been making for some years, and which has come to have some little currency in at least some areas of agricultural planning, is that we should turn it around and presume failure. That is, we should ask ourselves “what strategies are most effective and least risky in failure situations…given that systems failures happen all the time.”…It creates, in the end a different way of looking at our world, and one, I would argue, we desperately need.
As I entered the Fred Flinstone structure that characterizes the convention center in Palm Springs, I was intensely curious about what kind of people would come to The Prophet’s Conference on 2012. It was odd enough that I was there. Such an expedition into the high dessert for a weekend of lectures by speakers dispensing insight into the Mayan prophecy required serious wu wu credentials.
I did have a journalist’s curiosity and, having reported mostly from the doomer’s corner concerning planetary demise, I thought there might be interesting parallels in the prophecy corner.
As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country following the wake of Wall Street financial crisis, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her 2007 bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In the book, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic and extreme free market economic policies. “The Wisconsin protests are an incredible example of how to resist the shock doctrine,” Klein says.
And that, I think, is a point where we can talk about differences, where we can talk about whether or not an action–this action by the Wisconsin GOP in particularly–truly is “democratic,” truly does respect the wishes of a community, a state, a people, to govern themselves as they understand themselves. For the Wisconsin understanding is, historically at least, deeply tied up with assumptions about egalitarianism and the public good.
Localism, as has been discussed here in the past, is the idea that central government should be made smaller for ideological reasons, and that power is dispersed to local councils and communities instead. While in some areas of life this is really important, and key for a successful Transition, in terms of climate change, it is a disaster.
If we aren’t living in an “educable moment,” then we must be dumber than a doggone boot. Financial collapse, fiscal crisis, skyrocketing gas prices, global warming, revolutions in crowded countries, unemployment all around… let’s graduate from the College of the 21st Century and recognize the old kindergarten lessons about limits to growth were right after all.
It is ironic that the Dervaes–homestead project originated long ago in a desire to access GMO-free food. Now they have become, in effect, the GMO of the L.A. Green Scene. They are attempting to patent the “seed,” so that no one else is allowed to touch it without paying royalties. Just like Monsanto, they are sic-ing their attorneys on people who are working publicly in good faith to do the right thing.
One could argue that the principles common in addiction recovery hold much wisdom for a transition process. To truly “recover” from an addiction one must go through the transition of recognizing first that one’s way of life is not working—the compulsion with the behavior or substance is getting in the way of one’s relationships, health, future well-being, and growth. In other words, one recognizes their desire to consume is insatiable and destructive, and a change is needed.
