Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It is from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that Stefan Geyer, an artist and hotelier with many talents, models his book Zen in the Art of Permaculture Design on. The book, a light, bright blue novelette, is Geyer’s meditation on a life of permaculture and meaning, and hints how to use permaculture design to shift one’s perception to both the natural world and our own human nature using the lens of Zen Buddhism techniques.
These firemen drove straight into a firestorm that was much larger than they expected. Once there, they looked around for something they could save – and set to work saving it. We live in the age of the Anthropocene, a firestorm that is likely to be so much larger than we expected. How can we, in an analogous way, find our own “Line of Sorrow” and work to save what can be saved?
How do you envision yourself at age eighty? Do you want to be active, mobile, and of sound mind and body? Or do you think you’ll be lucky just to be alive? Good health is not luck.
Only a few generations ago we made many things by hand. Over the last 50 years store bought products have replaced handmade goods. Few people still work with their hands, and I often wonder what we have lost in this process? What have we lost when we no longer enjoy or even know how to make things with our hands?
Humans aren’t made to process an unlimited amount of trauma. In fact, we’re wired to protect ourselves against it. Smith tells me that seeing so much destruction and feeling incapable of doing anything leads to a kind of moral distress.
It’s easy to get struck by existential dread when you’re reading about climate change. Personally I think there hasn’t been enough attention on the psychological effects of this. Although you can find a few fantastic articles on the subject – such as this one from Grist. My personal favourite antidote for climate fear is to throw yourself into pragmatic climate action.
It’s been pointed out countless times that humankind’s current ecological crisis stems from our conviction that we’re apart from nature. Scott Brown’s book Active Peace takes a closer look at what lies beneath this mistaken belief, which he contends has deeply wounded all of us psychologically.
I sometimes call it toxic knowledge: once you know about overpopulation, overshoot, depletion, climate change, and the dynamics of societal collapse, you can’t unknow it, and your every subsequent thought is tinted.
It’s as though every waking minute has to be filled with some kind of stimulation, the “intensification of nervous stimulation” which Matthew B Crawford in The World Beyond Your Head argues is increasingly underpinning our world.
There has been a loss of autonomy among societies and individuals, who have become dependent upon a system which is destructive not only to the planet but also to the group or individual themselves.
Americans are literally and figuratively in the driver’s seat of world oil consumption.
Seventeen simple sayings for scholar-activists.
