Culture & Behavior

Recovering environmentalists

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In Extraenvironmentalist #46 we speak first with Paul Kingsnorth on why he’s withdrawn from the mainstream environmental movement and its discussions of sustainability…Then, Michael M’Gonigle joins us to talk about the importance of creating an exit-environmentalism that allows us to leave a global system which is falling apart…Finally, John Michael Greer takes root in a new recurring and irregular segment to talk about denial and his take on the environmental movement…

Postcard from Transition Ibiza and Can Masdeu, Barcelona

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Last summer I was inspired by the film ‘Paths Through Utopias’ – documenting a road trip around Europe visiting communities who are already living post-Transition futures, to varying degrees – to make my own journey to see some real-life examples of the world we’re trying to create. Having spent the last decade or so with pictures in my head of how I’d like the world to be, and trying to work towards building a new world in the shell of the old with very few tangible reference points, I needed real life visions, sustenance and some confirmation I was on the right path. I was also about to initiate Transition Dartmouth Park and felt like I needed some inspiration.

In yourself right now is the only place you’ve got

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Modern Americans are perhaps the least self-reliant and most other-reliant people ever in the history of humanity. That might be OK if we were reliant on our friends, family and neighbors for food, clothing and companionship. But sadly most of us are really just dependent on big corporations and workers across the globe to grow our food, make our stuff and inform and entertain us.

Bill McKibben is wrong, we must not forget that “We have met the enemy and he is us”

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Bill McKibben has once again put his heart and soul into an attempt to stop global warming. That’s more than most of us can say, and I’m afraid much more than I can say. Remember that. He is, like every living, breathing being on this earth, our friend. The stunningly well-written call to arms has apparently at this time already been read 450,000 times on-line and received 3105 written comments. The attention is well-deserved. He tells us, as do the oppressive heat and drought that have overtaken the earth, that the time is now to protect our home from turning into a living – or dying – hell.

For all that, I have a bone to pick with Bill McKibben.

Energy ethics for survival of people in nature

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Cultural values are group norms or rules for behavior that make a culture work. Ethical values are our cultural DNA. But our values can change in response to the conditions of the economy and environment. Our current value system is no longer working—money, science, laws, mores, politics, religion, and culture are becoming less meaningful to many…The survival of the whole system is at stake, and ethics will begin to shift as old ways of doing and being endanger humanity…

Dog days

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There is an elegiac beauty in loss (or what we imagine is loss), to coming home, to realising your limits, to deepening your experience, to loving the neighbourhood, the people in the room, a humble dish of new potatoes, the small strip of seashore I go to each day, where once I could roam the world like Alexander. In fact when you look back and see the track you have made, the dance you have made with your fellows, that’s when you understand everything, the beauty of it all – even the hard times. We’re trying as a people to get back on track against all odds.

Carving up Africa’s hunger markets

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In mid-May 2012, the United Nations Development Programme (the UNDP) released its Africa Human Development report for 2012. Entitled ‘Towards a Food Secure Future’, the report is unremarkable for its assessments and language – these have changed but little where Africa is concerned over the last 30 years – and is remarkable for the implications it contains concerning the agriculture and food focus to human development.

The Upside of Default

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A growing number of observers are starting to edge nervously around the possibility that the global financial industry may be headed for some very rough sailing this autumn — potentially even a major crash. Inevitably, the blogosphere is starting to churn out claims that this will lead to the apocalyptic collapse for which so many people seem to be longing just now. There may be a brighter side to the approaching mess, however; setting aside a cheap magazine, the Archdruid explains.

The hardest battle

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Comparing the world to a prison or a hospital in which we are all inmates or patients is hardly original. Patrick McGoohan did the former, and TS Eliot did the latter. They are clever, moving allegories, but not terribly useful. The mysterious enemy of The Prisoner turns out to be his own ego. But our modern global imprisonment is subtler: It is our culture that has imprisoned us, a culture evolved in the belief that this is what’s best for the survival and continued expansion of the species.

Building a civil economy

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Modern economics assumes that human beings are fundamentally self-interested. This essay will challenge that assumption, drawing in part on the ideas of Karl Polanyi, Marcel Mauss, Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni. By contrast with the idea of the self-interested homo oeconomicus (central to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations), my argument is that humans are more relational, ‘gift-exchanging animals’ who are naturally disposed to cooperate for mutual benefit. In the following I will attempt to show how such an alternative anthropology can translate into a ‘civil economy’ and transformative policy ideas: rebuilding our economy and embedding welfare in communities.

Destroying the Commons: How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta

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Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive. Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear. That should be a matter of serious immediate concern. What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine what kind of world will greet that event. It is not an attractive prospect if present tendencies persist — not least, because the Great Charter is being shredded before our eyes.