Robert Jensen

It is ironic that technological fundamentalists believe we can do anything we set our minds to, except limit the voraciousness of the human enterprise. It will be tragic if this fundamentalism continues to determine our course and the scariest dystopian scenarios become our future.

Changing our political and economic systems to make a decent human existence possible in a big-picture future is crucial, but so is learning to live within the existing systems in ways that are decent in small ways today.

Get up in the morning, day after day, try to find something worth doing, and then do it as well as possible, realizing that failure will be routine but that small successes—sometimes really small, maybe even too small to see in the moment—make it possible to continue.

Bob Jensen has written a book with Wes Jackson titled An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity. With a title like that, Jason and Bob have lots of heavy ground to cover, including overshoot, the limits to growth, and the cascading environmental and social crises of our times.

In the face of multiple cascading crises, we have to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, then a little more, and then all the rest of the truth, whether one can bear it or not.

No matter how difficult the transition may be, in the not too distant future we will have to live in far smaller and more flexible social organizations than today’s nation-states and cities.