Before It's News Interview Regarding "Collapsing Consciously"
Before It’s News Interviews me regarding Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths For Turbulent Times
Before It’s News Interviews me regarding Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths For Turbulent Times
That sense of a journey—waiting for us, forced upon us, or both at once—runs all through Carolyn’s writing, but Collapsing Consciously seems to me to embody it even more clearly than most. Her introduction sets the tone with a discussion of her own journey out of the familiar belief systems of modern American culture, and what follows develops the same wayfaring spirit in a variety of ways. The resulting book once again takes the collective conversation about the deindustrial future further than it has previously gone, pushing past the increasingly sterile debates around peak oil as an abstraction to come to terms with the human realities of loss, awakening, and renewal that accompany every great historical change.
Welcome to our second annual list of the top ten peak oil books. Most of them are explicitly about peak oil, while others deal with energy depletion as a significant factor in the economy or the environment. A couple titles focus on responses to the myriad conundrums that Richard Heinberg has dubbed “peak everything” and that are now converging to create a perfect storm for global industrial civilization.
To get the most out of the book, readers should prepare to take as long as it takes, even setting up an intentionally defined period of time to really leave space to answer its questions. I could see reading just one chapter a month, and dedicating a night or weekend each month to shut everything out simply to explore the questions. Or working with a partner or in groups to get feedback and share ideas.
Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to be a psychotherapist in Ancient Rome in 350 AD. The usual problems would have brought people to my office, of course. Personal troubles, sexual difficulties, family quarrels, mental imbalances. But as I listened daily to my clients’ tales of woe and also picked up wider news in the forums and gossip from my slaves I would have become more and more aware of the larger issues intruding on the decreasingly comfortable lives of all Romans — shortages that our overextended armies could no longer control, the changing complexion of the Roman Legions themselves, northern tribes in rebellion, the gradual disintegration of our political systems, roads and infrastructure. What did it all mean?
Many of us just turn off when confronted by looming predicaments, and why not? What in the world can we do? Quite a lot, says Carolyn Baker. Not to save civilization, but to prepare, in our hearts and minds, for its possible or impending decline.