Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
My new job is a little more than five miles from home, and I’ve started biking regularly. This is an extension of an already established habit, so every morning I must make the decision again: today I’m going to put my lunch and other necessities in my backpack, sling it on, put on my helmet, roll my bike out of the hall and through the door, carry it down the steps, get on and go.
While Tainter’s theory of social complexity has much to commend it, in this paper I wish to examine and ultimately challenge Tainter’s conclusion that voluntary simplification is not a viable path to sustainability. In fact, I will argue that it is by far our best bet, even if the odds do not provide grounds for much optimism. Moreover, should sustainability prove too ambitious a goal for industrial civilisation, I contend that simplification remains the most effective means of building ‘resilience’ (i.e. the ability of an individual or community to withstand societal or ecological shocks)
Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in America, shrewdly assesses the current crisis—political, economical, and environmental—and shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities. A vibrant, inspirational force, Boggs has participated in all of the twentieth century’s major social movements—for civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, and more. She draws from seven decades of activist experience, and a rigorous commitment to critical thinking, to redefine “revolution” for our times. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she is 95 years old.
[Her ideas sound remarkably like Transition and similar movements.]
But the more I learn about plants, and the more I gain practical, first-hand experience of how they can support me in my dietary, nutritional, medicinal and even spiritual needs, the less I find myself caring about the big, worldwide questions or about driving at maximum speed towards 100% pure, personal self-sufficiency. I’m already on my way. I can intensify my efforts if I want to get there quicker, but really, what’s the rush? It’s unrealistic to expect somebody to turn all their inherited culture’s ways upside down in one lifetime. I do what I can in my given circumstances.
Several years ago I heard some words that would change the course of my life, both spiritually and in terms of values, ethics and morals. The words were “global crisis”. Being curious, a lover of nature and always in search of wisdom, I realised my inner compass was “guiding me” to something unknown, terrifying and chilling.
– A Climate Scientist Battles Time and Mortality
– Green sculptor-farmer in his studio-yurt: Arlo Acton of North San Juan
– “A Face in the Crowd”: Andy Griffith’s rivetting premiere as a folksy sociopath
– Bookchin on Bookchin: An appeal for support (for a documentary)
– Ivan Illich: Writing on the Web
Brown rice diets, asceticism and vows of silence and/or poverty have much in common with marathons, martial arts, the Aboriginal walkabout, and boot camp. The common theme is ordeal.
Each time we resolve to “never again” punish ourselves with such sacrifice, pain, fatigue and sweat, we wipe all that resolution away in the instant that we reach our goal, when we have our moment of light and love and ecstatic remembrance that this is what life is all about.
Perhaps the pain and disappointment of Rio+20 and all the other conferences that promised so much and delivered so little are mere ordeal, the prelude to the ultimate awakening.
With July Fourth coming up, you can expect to hear lots of discussion on the left and in the green community about how bad “independence” really is — no matter how cool you may think the Founding Fathers were.
Carl Jung and his physicist friend Wolfgang Pauli suggested in a too rarely read 1952 book that synchronicity—an “acausal connecting principle,” to use Jung’s carefully phrased description—brought events that occur at the same time into a relationship of unexpected meaning. Whether or not they were right in general, there are times when synchronicities arrive with all the subtlety of a cold wet mackerel across the face, and last Friday was one of those.
KMO welcomes Mark Robinowitz of OilEmpire.us back to the C-Realm Podcast to discuss why both the mainstream political left as well as the right in the United States cannot address the demands of Peak Oil in a realistic way.
Suppose our unsustainable economy wasn’t in the early stages of complete collapse, and that we weren’t running out of the cheap energy on which our society totally depends, and that we hadn’t so screwed up our environment that we’d precipitated runaway climate change. Everything would be fine, right?
…food is not just a different way to toss your salad; it’s the reworking of a diet in the face of ecological and economic change. No matter how much the media and politicians deny climate change and peak oil, future cooks are thinking ahead, reworking their larders, gaining some knowledge, learning to glean, preserve, bake and grow. We’re prepping for the long term in our kitchens, knowing that the global industrial food system is highly unsustainable, unethical and unkind to man and beast. And that to use nearly 60 percent of the world’s agricultural land for beef production that accounts for less than two percent of the world’s calories is not the way forward.
