Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
To survive the triple threats of global climate change, fossil fuel depletion, and population overshoot, humans will have to do some pretty sophisticated problem-solving very quickly. But most of us already have an ancient, tried-and-true resource built into our lives that can also help us tackle the coming challenges: our kin.
Many people (even if only on a subconscious level) are waiting for technology to rush in like a superhero to vanquish these crises and lead the way to a sustainable future. But technology won’t be our great green savior, at least not without first wrestling with the tough moral dilemmas of our time. In a new manifesto, #NoApp4That, I question the pervasive belief that technology alone will save us.
Environmentalists are hypocrites, right? They condemn all sorts of behaviours like driving cars or taking plane flights in which they themselves indulge, and they want to deny poor people the right to the same luxuries by saying that the economic growth which promises to widen access to such luxuries is unsustainable.
Disciplined work habits established early on affect all aspects of our culture, from school and the workplace to the arts and civic sphere. That there is a drift backwards into adolescence that pervades our culture — whether it’s reading cartoonish literature designed for an underdeveloped mind or a political sphere that is dominated by…well, let’s not go there — is extremely alarming.
So why do we need an official Transition Movement? Maybe it was meant to light the sky like a flare in the dark and then fade away leaving only the inspiring retinal afterimages. Maybe the movement doesn’t need an organization. Maybe it isn’t really a movement at all?
We might be annihilating life on earth but this is not something about which we have no choice. In fact, each and every one of us has a choice: we can choose to do nothing, we can wait for (or even lobby) others to act, or we can take powerful action ourselves. But unless you search your heart and make a conscious and deliberate choice to commit yourself to act powerfully, your unconscious choice will effectively be the first one
I will present what may be the movement’s biggest task: crafting ways and means for it to actually take power across the world so that the desires of the vast majority of the world’s residents (including the non-human creatures among us) can be the benchmark against which we measure our chances for arriving in mid-century in a world characterized not by multiple crises…
It’s been pointed out countless times that humankind’s current ecological crisis stems from our conviction that we’re apart from nature. Scott Brown’s book Active Peace takes a closer look at what lies beneath this mistaken belief, which he contends has deeply wounded all of us psychologically.
Can you feel capitalism dying around you? There is a mental disease of late-stage capitalism causing deep worry and anxiety, prompting feelings of severe isolation and humiliation, combined with a profound sense of powerlessness for millions of people around the world. The question I ask today is What are YOU going to do about it?
I started to write a brief review of David W. Orr’s 2016 book Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward. I found, however, that a longer “essay” was what I felt called to write. Orr’s book is the best thing I have read on the overall social-change challenges of this century.
It’s true: apocalyptic warnings don’t move most people. Or, rather, they move most people away from the source of discomfort, so they simply tune out. But it’s also true that people feel a sense of deep, unacknowledged unease when they are fed “solutions” that they instinctively know are false or insufficient.
The problem of legislative gridlock and failed governance is not going to be solved anytime soon by routinely voting the out’s in and the in’ s out over the course of an election cycle or two–then rinsing and repeating. The question we are left with is: what’s a practical alternative? Unfortunately, I don’t have a pat or complete answer I do, however, have a suggestion that the clean energy and climate defending communities might want to discuss amongst themselves.
