Culture & Behavior

Vandana Shiva x3

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In this interview for CSSC Encounters, Dr. Vandana Shiva gives the history of her engagement and explains the situation we are in now, facing a new fascism as corporations and governments merge. Still, she is always using an optimistic tone, in spite of corporate grabs of our common heritage, the natural world — a world caught in a system where the ecology and the economy are fierce enemies, when they should have been best friends. How to reunite them? Vandana gives the answer, through true community! (plus two more talks).

Transition and activism: a response

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Perhaps the route to real change, long-lasting and deep change, isn’t through deepening polarity, but through a re-weaving of what has been torn apart, a seeking of common ground, an appeal to universal values, creating a safe space where people can sit together and not feel judged, and through the creation of viable, nurturing and life-affirming alternatives that have a strong and broad sense of ownership.

Lock on – notes towards an article on activism and transition

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For a long time we have been able to be the audience to history, to live our lives theoretically. We can watch everything on our screens, at arm’s length. But now history is coming into our streets and into our lives and we need to know how to act, or support those who act on our behalf. If we cheer for those bold protesters in Tahrir Square, in Wisconsin, for the thousands of campaign groups that Paul Hawken wrote about in Blessed Unrest, we need also to cheer for those who occupy Fortnum and Masons and the Royal Bank of Scotland, who protest against the corporations who threaten those fragile eco-systems on which we depend.

In the world, at the limits to growth

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A battered and highly unstable world economy is probably at the peak of global energy and food production, and declines may be imminent. Yet our tightly interconnected and globalised civilisation, and the economy that maintain it require increasing such production to remain functional. As a result, Ireland is unlikely ever to come out of recession, and the world is not in the middle of a financial crisis but at the edge of a civilisational one.

We urgently need to re-assess where we are, the assumptions that underpin our interpretations of the world, what is likely to happen, and how we might move forward.

Memorial Day, 2030

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We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source — if not the source — of two of our biggest recent wars.

Transition’s life as a straw man

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I am currently reading Carl Sagan’s excellent book “The Demon-haunted World: science as a candle in the dark”, which I picked up for a song in a second hand bookshop when I was last in London. Here he sets out what not to do when trying to assess the validity of an argument, and common ways that people make flawed arguments. One of those is creating a straw man, which he defines as “caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack”. Having spent Monday morning debating on ABC Radio in Australia with someone who has done just this, I wanted to offer a few thoughts on being a straw man.

A fashion for austerity

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The recent flurry of media stories about last weekend’s failed prophecy of the Rapture — think of it as a dry run for 2012 — raises several points relevant to the peak oil movement as the end of the age of cheap energy starts to catch the attention of the mainstream. The most intriguing is the possibility — dismissed by a great many peak oil writers just now, but by no means impossible — that the movement toward radically less energy use that’s so desperately needed in the industrial world right now might actually become a popular fad. Could that actually happen, and if it did, what might the implications be?

Mountebank wins Nobel for infinite planet theory

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Few people have read the dense volumes published by the economist Milton Mountebank, but his work has affected you, me and every single person on the planet. Dr. Mountebank has revolutionized economic thought, and now he has been recognized for his singular efforts. Yesterday at a gala reception in Stockholm, Sweden, the chairman of Sveriges Riksbank, Peter Norborg, presented Dr. Mountebank with the Nobel Prize in Economics for his lifetime of work on infinite planet theory.