Comments for WHAT TO DO? WHAT TO DO? Taking Action In The Face Of Collapse at http://atlanticfreepress.com , comment 1 to 1 out of 1 comments http://atlanticfreepress.com Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:32:28 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/1955-what-to-do-what-to-do-taking-action-in-the-face-of-collapse.html#comment-2508 I stumbled here through a link posted on The Oil Drum. Sometimes the universe works in very mysterious ways. I've just come out of a two-year episode of despair brought on by realizing the "sacred truths" you talk about. what brought me out was a spiritual (NOT religious, as you perceptively point out) transformation that I describe briefly in http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sprituality.html, "The Spiritual Effects of Comprehending the Global Crisis". Upon more reflection it turns out that the spiritual perception that I describe as pantheist is more correctly and usefully understood as a conversion to Deep Ecology as defined by Arne Naess in 1972. I completely agree that such a spiritual realization is essential if one is to emerge from the inevitable despair and resume a functional life. Likewise on point 2 - my family is so completely aware of the issues that I have been kindly (and sometimes pointedly) told to shut up, they get it already, please come back when I have a positive thought or two to share. "finding your work" is of course the next step. Even if your day job is already useful, ethical and life-affirming, what should one's "night job" be in relation to these issues? Writing, speaking and local organizing of one sort or another seem to be obvious choices. As regards simplification, may I recommend the book "Radical Simplicity" by Jim Merkel? It's a great guide by someone who has walked this path and helped to blaze the trail. Finally, what about hope? After all, the last thing to come out of Pandora's box was "Hope". Since we are staring deeply into that box right now, what new revelation might we take as a hopeful sign? The state of affairs right now seem utterly hopeless. Ecological devastation, oil depletion, population growth and socioeconomic instability are converging to give humanity the thrashing of its life, in the process reducing the human community to perhaps one billion members before the end of the century. In fact there is a hopeful sign, but only if you change your perspective. Start from these three realizations: [i]The genetic imperatives that drive our reproduction, consumption and competition guarantees that we will not change our civilization's value set voluntarily or preemptively.[/i] [i]Humanity is like yeast[/i]. We reporduce and consume until our ecological niche is stripped of resources and poisoned by waste, then we die off. [i]Humanity is like cockroaches[/i]. We are resourceful, adaptive and hardy, and you can't kill us all. These three facts mean that some portion of humanity will survive to regroup and rebuild in a massively damaged, resource-poor world. On our way through the bottleneck we will lose much of our physical and social capital. The one good thing about this, from a species, biosphere and planetary perspective is that the existing socioeconomic structures will be forcibly and involuntarily stripped away, leaving room for new structures to take thwir place. The question for me has become, "How do we ensure that the seeds are in place for a value set that will survive through and bloom after the bottleneck, a value set that will ensure that the next cycle of civilization has a chance at sustainability even in such a badly damaged, resource-poor world?" I've become convinced over the last couple of months that the seeds have already been planted. They are even resilient enough to make it through, and carry the correct values. Paul Hawken has just written a book called "Blessed Unrest" in which he describes a set of one to two million local, independent, citizen-run environmental and social justice groups. These groups exist world-wide, and are each is acting on local problems of its own choosing. There is no overarching ideology beyond "making the world a better place", there is no organization, no white male vertebrate leader setting the agenda. As a result the movement is extremely resilient - no government action anywhere can shut it down, even though individual groups may be suppressed. These groups make up the largest (though unrecognized) social movement the world has ever seen. Hawken sees this movement as part of humanity's immune system. While I like the metaphor and think it is exactly correct, I believe the importance of these groups is much greater than just their efforts to mitigate an unavoidable collapse. These groups have been called into existence by the world's dis-ease, and do two things: they work to fix local problems now (which will mitigate some local effects of the collapse), but more importantly they act as carriers for the values of cooperation, consensus, nurturing, recognition of interdependence, acceptance of limits, universal justice and the respect for other life. Those are precisely the values that a civilization will need to achieve stability and sustainability. To top it all off, many of these groups are led by women or espouse specifically matriarchal values, oine attribute I see as essential for any sustainable civilization. At the risk of sounding sentimental, I call these groups [i]the antibodies in Gaia's bloodstream[/i]. I am convinced we will not save this civilization, but I'm equally convinced that thanks to the seeds that have already been planted in these groups we have a shot at a much better one in a couple of hundred years. The crucial change in perspective required to see the hope in this is to stop looking from here forward into the decline, and instead look backward from a position out two hundred years and imagine what it will take to rebuild a truly sustainable civilization from the ashes of this one. The values required are already embodied in a resilient organization, enough of whose elements will survive to transmit a sustainable value set into the ecologicaly damaged, resource-depleted world we will bequeath to the future. - a guest Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:22:14 +0100