By Shrishtee Bajpai, Ashish Kothari, Global Tapestry of Alternatives
As we've seen, the few environmental movements that have succeeded in the long run are almost all built around certain ideas of the relationship between humans and certain spaces.
By Craig Collins, Resilience.org
Hydrocarbon addiction is extremely insidious because it afflicts your entire species. Recognizing it is much harder when everyone is addicted.
By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog
The first step: admit we are powerless over this addiction to the expansive energies of money and oil. And admit that life on earth has become unmanageable.
By Sian Sullivan, Sian Sullivan blog
In the famous 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and associated programmes, the first step is to recognise that you are indeed addicted. That you are bound to a substance over which you do not have control, such that this substance has become your ‘higher power’, its material qualities and structures of access determining one’s activities and choices in the world.
By Tracy Barnett, Lyla June Johnston, Esperanza Project
But there is another way to live, which involves re-localizing goods and services. Please bear in mind we will have to do this either way. We can quit oil on our own now in a graceful way that our children will be proud of, or we can keep going and be forced to quit when we are not ready. Now is the time to start working together to be free from this addiction.
By Craig Collins, Resilience.org
I’m a fossil fuel junkie. I drive a car and use electricity. My computer, TV, telephone, refrigerator, stove, lights, water, and sewage all run on carbon-based energy.[1] All of the materials used to build my house and furniture were made with hydrocarbons. The wood, sheetrock, cement, metals, glass, wiring, pvc pipes, and other plastics were all manufactured with carboniferous energy. My high-energy lifestyle mainlines fossil fuels.
By Finnian Murtagh, Red Pepper
Identifying where our campaigning aims overlap through a fossil fuel lens will enable us to expel the industry on a grand scale, and in turn enable us to transform our city on an equally grand scale- fairly, cleanly, and democratically.
By Brian Miller, South Roane Agrarian
For all intents and purposes, we are the beneficiaries of a slave economy. We may have exchanged human chattel for the energy slaves contained in a barrel of oil and the machines that consume it, but the economics work out the same and we can’t walk away without giving up status and wealth.
By Brad Hornick, Socialistproject.ca
Fossil Fuel Addiction is killing the planet.
By Michael Klare, TomDispatch
Of all the preposterous, irresponsible headlines that have appeared on the front page of the New York Times in recent years, few have exceeded the inanity of this one from early March: “U.S. Hopes Boom in Natural Gas Can Curb Putin.”
By John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report
Man, the conqueror of Nature, died Monday night of a petroleum overdose, the medical examiner’s office confirmed this morning. The abstract representation of the human race was 408 years old.
By Neil Comley, Open Democracy
Aaron Peters and Tony Curzon Price, in their important exchange about workfare, both seem to accept a basically techno-utopian view of the future of hyper-automation. But this view ignores two crucial factors which make the fundamental picture much less rosy: the environmental constraint and global-scale immiseration on a global scale. Ivan Illich's ‘Energy & Equity’ (1973) is still the right place to start to understand the nexus involved.