Thinking Globally

Sunday, June 3, 2018

we have 3 dangers—energy depletion, climate change and overpopulation

deal with one, and one or both of the other two will come up behind you and bite you in the ass

Gail Tverberg says:

June 3, 2018 at 9:24 am

We probably could add maintaining our financial system to the list as well. Fixing any of the three problems you listed tends to collapse the financial system.

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Artleads says:

June 3, 2018 at 4:13 pm

If you fix one sub system as if it wasn’t networked, that wouldn’t be understanding the nature of that subsystem, which is that it is intricately networked with others. So if you tried to fix CC by eliminating coal, it WOULD wreck the economic system, and everything else. But if you tried to fix CC by stopping deforestation, doing reforestation, stopping construction, stopping road paving, etc, that would not necessarily wreck the economic system. Those measures would mitigate the polluting effects of coal. Instead, if your course is to build solar panels intended to run industrial civilization on them, then you increase the use of coal and the pollution from coal. Nothing is improved.

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I find big things easier to comprehend than little things. Since most people (in the Western world at any rate) are just the opposite, I’m always going against the grain. I can’t find any corroboration for my view that it is very easy to correct Earth’s climate and other critical woes if we think big enough. And it’s tempting to go off in a corner and leave the world to its dealings.

Despite what astronauts say about Earth’s unity, beauty and fragility when seen from afar, policy to give meaning to that vision is absent. The awe-stricken astronauts were working at the level of sensibility and feeling, and these are never the concern of policy.

After I wrote my first blog post (“How To Do Everything,” below) I heard about the book “Endgame” by Derrick Jensen, for which the author won The Press Action Person of the Year award. Although I’m puzzled by Jensen’s radical views and by the acclaim given him, what he wrote stopped me in my tracks. Could it be that I received no corroboration for my views because there was none to be found within the broad culture?

Among the premises in Endgame :

Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.

I reread my post, and the main fault I now find with it is the perhaps naïve assumption that it lies within the power of government to save the planet from the dire consequences wrought by industrial civilization. Ain’t gonna happen, most likely.

But I question whether direct acts of violence against civilization (as Jensen advocates) is the answer – these will most likely happen anyway -- or whether it is feasible, as an alternate strategy, to take peaceful but subversive actions to protect and restore the planet. As an example, what if it were feasible to cover dysfunctional paving everywhere (paving that does not use the sun’s energy to do anything useful) with vegetation (a simple, non-technologic solution to climate change)? It can’t be denied that looking at Earth as a seamless orb that depends on vegetation for its survival is something that civilization has proven hopeless at doing.

During the coming year I want to investigate, to my satisfaction, how or whether the broader society, driven by a revolution in the humanities and the arts, could potentially reverse this direction. (Examining the feasibility of a worldwide survey of land-use plans is one possible way to start.)

Can what is harmful in civilization be transcended through civilization itself?

Thinking Globally

Sunday, June 3, 2018

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