The Cult of Civilization
By Tom Murphy, Do the Math
This post offers ten heretical statements that seem obvious to me, but tend to produce emotionally charged reactions by members of the cult of civilization. Watch yourself, now.
Tag: civilization
A history of true civilisation is not one of monuments
By David Wengrow, Aeon
Civilisation is a way of talking about human history on the largest scale. From the cave paintings of Lascaux to the latest MoMA exhibition, it binds human history together.
We need an ecological civilization before it’s too late
By Jeremy Lent, Patterns of Meaning
In the face of climate breakdown and ecological overshoot, alluring promises of “green growth” are no more than magical thinking. We need to restructure the fundamentals of our global cultural/economic system to cultivate an “ecological civilization.”
The Big Story: Can We Change Civilization by Changing Its Origin Story?
By Samuel Miller McDonald, Activist Lab
The “oil curse” refers to a long-studied phenomenon in which states that adopt petroleum as a significant foundation of their economy tend toward dictatorship. Of the top ten oil producing countries in the world, nine are oligarchies.
Energy Prospects: Little to Smil About?
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
Anyway, this is all vaguely relevant to my present theme, which is some thoughts on Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization: A History (MIT Press, 2017). It’s hard to keep up with Smil’s output, since he seems to produce about three books every year, but I find him an interesting writer.
The Return of the Peasant: or the History of the World in 10½ Blog Posts. 2.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
But how did we get from the Palaeolithic foraging of my last post to the very apogee of mixed agrarianism shown in the picture? I’m glad you asked. To answer it, I need to go to way back when and return to my main historical thread by looking at some of the tensions within…
The Dithering Age: Holocene, Anthropocene, and Chthlucene
By Ramon Elani, The Dark Mountain Project
If people just hear that humans are destroying the environment, they aren’t given much incentive to act or even think much.
The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Two: A Landscape of Hallucinations
By John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report
People raised in urban environments come to treat their mental models as realities, more real than the often-unruly facts on the ground, because everything they encounter in their immediate environments reinforces those models.
The Cimmerian hypothesis (part 1): civilization and barbarism
By John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report
People in civilizations tend to cut themselves off from the immediate experience of nature nature to a much greater extent than the uncivilized do. Does this help explain why civilizations crash and burn so reliably, leaving the barbarians to play drinking games with mead while sitting unsteadily on the smoldering ruins?
Towards the Permacene
By Andy Russell, Autonomy Acres.com
We can take the next step in our evolution, a step towards the Permacene.
The end of the end of nature
By Christy Rodgers, Dark Mountain Project
It seems obvious: to be fully alive you have to interact directly, respectfully and in physical proximity with a variety of other fully living things as much as possible. There is no substitute.
Learning from Captain Ahab – two stories of civilization
By Resilience.org Staff, Resilience.org
Chris Hedges and Greg Grandin both call on Melville's Moby-Dick to bring us commentary on the crisis of our civilization.