Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Where have all the people gone? Not to mention the citizenry, human beings, neighbors, inhabitants, individuals, men, women, adults, children, workers, employees, employers? Suddenly, everywhere, gone, all of them. Their places taken by consumers.
Civilisation is a story. It is a story about where we have come from and where we are going. There are many ways to tell that story, but one version has been very much the dominant one in the West for the past couple of centuries. We know this story: it’s the one about modern, urban industrial culture’s ineffable superiority over all others; the one about human evolution leading inevitably to this point. It’s the one about winning the war against nature, being the only species which thinks and loves and dreams; it’s the one about machines and circuitry and ingenuity and progress. And it’s true, in some ways, at least as far as it goes. But it may not be going much further.
If I am right, we are now entering a period in which, like it or not, we must finally follow President Carter’s advice to develop a thoughtful energy policy and give up our carefree and careless ways with resources. The quicker we do this, the lower the cost will be. Any improvement at all in lifestyle for our grandchildren will take much more thoughtful behavior from political leaders and more restraint from everyone. Rapid growth is not ours by divine right; it is not even mathematically possible over a sustained period.
We are in an era where the availability of natural resources is not sufficient to support the wealth levels that the developed world has grown accustomed to, along with the speed of growth with which the developing world is trying to approach those same levels.
– Carl Safina: “Modern Times” Really Akin To The “Dark Ages”
– Q&A: Hunter Lovins
– Sir David Attenborough on over-population
– Arguments for constrained capitalism in Asia
– Activists occupy oil rig in fight to prevent Arctic drilling
..we live in a world that we are connected to at every moment, and that world has a future that I and my family will have to live in. Soon. To ignore those two crucial facts–that we belong to the world and that the world has a future–is a form of irresponsibility so large that it overwhelms my much smaller responsibility to do my best to satisfy my family’s desires. So large that it compromises and threatens the integrity of the world.
Put these things together — a tone of hopelessness in the mainstream progressive media, a largely useless outpouring of outrage in the indymedia, a giving up of citizens on the viability of centralized representative governments, reactionary responses to black swan events instead of constructive ones, the ratcheting up of existing systems to prolong the period before tipping points, and a naivete about the powerlessness of even the most powerful in modern complex systems — and what do we have?
Revolutions in human ecology might usefully be grounded in a sense of humanity’s deep past, for that is where our power arrangements began.
Since the crisis of industrial society is being driven by social and economic habits that foster the extravagant use of energy and other resources, it would seem to be obvious that using much less of these things ought to be the foundation of any reasonable response. The fact that so many proposed responses advocate doing almost anything imaginable but using less energy and other resources points straight toward the tangled heart of contemporary nihilism, and suggests a way out.
“You have to decide what it is you are going to stand for,” Day explains. “Water is essential to life. We live in the water of the womb of our mother before we come into the world. We are birthed from water, our bodies are primarily water and we can’t survive without clean water. At some time in your life you have to take a stand.”
In the sphere of disaster recovery there is a term that we can expect to hear a lot in the coming months, even years — “build back better”.
The near-religious belief that economic growth depends not on energy and resources, but solely on increasing innovation, efficiency, trade, and division of labor, can sometimes lead economists to say silly things.
