Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Just when you thought weird weather and dying oceans might get us all thinking about how to reduce human impact on this little planet we call home, along comes Breakthrough Institute to propose a “solution” worthy of the Army Corps of Engineers: “We screwed it up, so we should take charge of it.”
The overarching goal at the upcoming Rio+20 summit must be achieving sustainable prosperity for all. Within this broad objective, the subject is bracketed, if you will, by two of the greatest challenges faced by the international community: the greatest social challenge, world poverty, and the greatest environmental challenge, climate change. There can be no sustainable prosperity without victory on these two fronts.
Nate Hagens speaks at the ASPO 2012 International Conference. Nate overviews the fundamental flaws in current economic thinking – the elephants in the room.
Subscribe to a magazine such as Adventure Cycling or Google your way to any of hundreds of bicycle travel blogs and you will quickly learn that average people do travel by bicycle . . . all the time. And it’s not surprising. Cycling is more efficient than any other method of travel.
That’s when you see the past and the future in your own hands. How everything hinges ultimately on our own efforts: Who will dig the land, who will shape the land, what is it worth, and in what spirit will this work be done? Up until the 1950s half the population in Suffolk worked on the land; now it’s 0.5 percent. The country has become something we understand at arm’s length, a Suffolk of industrial agriculture, fringed with nature tourism and leisure. And yet in our hearts, somewhere, we know there is a deeper relationship we have with our homeland, and if we were wise, we would be seeking it out.
Concerned citizens who seek to reduce their individual impact on climate change are often misguided in their choices. Transportation? Household energy use? Food? Where can the individual make the greatest impact? Our panel of experts pokes holes in current myths and reveals how we can truly create change.
The people of Hawaii have lived an incredible story of cultural assimilation. Numerous external influences on the island have driven a process of creation and destruction, resulting in innovative musical styles. Now, Hawaii faces difficult challenges with food security and genetically modified seeds as it survives the dying values of a corporate culture. Can we learn from the adaptability of the Hawaiian people to facilitate a process of cultural change in Western society?
– Albert Bates: Slavery 2.0
– Carolyn Baker: Masculine, Feminine, Collapse, And The Next Culture
– Andrew Nikiforuk: You and Your Slaves
– Ivan Illich: Energy and Equity
I am certainly aware of the irony of porting a model for the simulation of economic decline to the flagship of techno-narcissistic consumerism, klickibunti self-distraction, and perpetual remote controlling of human resources. But, you know, the spirit speaks in many tongues.
There is certainly something to gain by playing with the model rather than merely studying formulas or staring at static graphs. Just like the Pythagoreans presumably played with pebbles to gain a feeling for the relation between triangles and squares, you may develop a feeling for the precariousness of stability and, perhaps, understand how inevitable and fierce a destiny is able to fulfill itself.
Over the last few months, the effects of peak oil — and the broader predicament of industrial civilization — have become steadily more visible; over the same time period, claims that peak oil and the predicament of industrial civilization don’t matter, and everything is just fine, have become steadily more shrill. Counterintuitive though this relation of stimulus to response may seem to be, it’s anything but accidental, and may foretell a significant cultural shift in the offing. Despite a lack of psychic antennae, the Archdruid explains.
Einstein used to quip that you can’t solve a problem from the mindset that created the problem. “It shall require,” he said, “a substantially new way of thinking .” We’ll be lucky if our kids don’t put two and two together while we’re around. There are signs that they’ve already figured out that we’re screwing things up badly.
From the beginning, Climate and Capitalism has been devoted to “making the greens more red, and the reds more green.” So it was with great anticipation that I picked up a book that makes “a double appeal upon which the future success of everything depends: to ecologists, to think about social arrangements and power relationships; to those who think about social arrangements, to take the true measure of the ecological crisis and how it relates to justice.”
