Seeing More Clearly
How have we tolerated the dissonance between our comfortable lifestyles and the deadly costs trailing along behind them?
How have we tolerated the dissonance between our comfortable lifestyles and the deadly costs trailing along behind them?
As a comprehensive guide to the intractable challenges facing our society and how best to navigate them, The Crash Course has few rivals.
It’s not that nobody wants to work; it’s that there is no work that can support life within this culture. This is ‘they are killing us’ exemplified. And a large number of people are choosing life.
As the global polycrisis worsens, transformational change will be significantly encumbered by crises, breakdown, and collapse scenarios.
We can salvage the good things that modernity has brought that can be taken with us. We can mourn the good things that we will lose.
It matters which world we think is ending, and it matters what we tell each other is worth doing in such a time.
And what I take from this is that we don’t get to choose whether or not there is an ending. We only get to choose what kind of ending we have, and therefore what we have left to build from.
When the high-energy authoritarian political centres fail, which ultimately they will, my hope is that some of these ‘irrelevant’ places will have forged resilient material cultures and mature political institutions that will enable them to usher our descendants into the next chapter of human history.
Perhaps we’ll be forced to return to mud baths and vigorous scratching, but hopefully our innovative minds will keep our skin moist and itch-free.
Since our civilization is not built on a foundation of sustainable principles, it is no surprise that we find it now to be utterly unsustainable.
Today, ecologist, political scientist, and author Patrick Ophuls joins Nate to discuss his new book, The Tragedy of Industrial Civilization and The Future of Politics.
We’re currently on a pathway to collapse, but the future doesn’t have to be bleak. We can develop communities where we take care of one another and the ecosystems we inhabit.