ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The concept of endless economic growth, accepted as sacrosanct by both U.S. mainstream political parties, and internalized as the dominant mode of mind by the general population of the corporate/consumer state is mirrored in the exponential mathematics of a malignancy.

Cancer, if given voice, would proclaim itself to be a believer in “free market values”…devoted to the principle of endless growth…until, of course, it would silence its own voice by killing its host.

Likewise, all life seeks limits or prematurely dooms itself.

The same holds true with addiction to unlimited economic expansion…the craving for incessant ascension is, in fact, a doomed Icarusian flight.

In our time, politics as usual has failed to address the most pressing issues of the age: The manner by which neoliberal economic agendas exploit the masses in the service of a corrupt elite, and in so doing, decimating individual hopes and aspirations, as, all the while, the environmental dangers, endemic to the unchecked system, imperil the survival of humankind.

Although, alarmingly, both political parties continue to serve the status quo: Contemporary conservatives promote–in fact, seem to outright revel in–the litanies of a gospel of global-wide destruction (in the case of religious fundamentalists even going so far as to implore the forces of heaven, with fervid prayers, to expedite doomsday’s date of arrival) by means of militarist aggression and environmental carnage–while squeamish liberals are devotees of the cliché-worshipping temple of incremental change.

From the right flank of this disastrous cosmology of convenience, Rick Santarium insists that a literal interpretation and societal application of “The Scriptures” i.e., an ad hoc collection of the laws, legends and beliefs of Middle Eastern, Bronze Age, hill country barbarians will remedy our national woes. Accordingly, what is one to make of this lovely bit of wisdom from Isaiah (13:9,15–18)?

“Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger . . . Every one that is found shall be thrust through . . . Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes . . . and their wives ravished. Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them. . . [T]hey shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children.”

Lovely, huh? Surely, we’ve evolved past such barbaric sentiments. What kind of a blood-besotted people would accept such an abomination to the tenets of modern civilization and basic human decency?

Tragically, this is who: Both political parties of U.S. duopoly and their supporters, comprising a nation of people, who by large majorities support, for example, the Obama administration’s policy of warfare waged by predator drone attack. Military actions that often result in an Old Testament-style “dashing to pieces” the bodies of children. 

What does it matter now to the dead whether the reason given for perpetrating these monstrous acts are based on Santarium’s psychotic concretization of religious lore or Obama’s slick, national security state rationalizations?

As neocons press the petal to the metal of the war machine, mainstream liberal apologists for the status quo, luxuriating upon the hurtling juggernaut, counsel us that any change in direction and velocity must be incremental, as they proffer other brain-dead, political clichés about the need for”civility” and “political realism” involving the criteria of sausage making.

First, clichés are zombies; they are dead to the novelty of the living moment, and they eat the brains of inspiration. They are worse than lazy thinking–they are putrefied thought. Worse, clichés will not die, because they are already dead. Burn them with fire…reduce them to ashes…let the ash mulch the soil where future inspiration will grow.

Second, an incremental approach is an utterly useless, if not delusional, response to the situation. The U.S., through the decades of the post-war era, has been moving with increasing rapidity towards becoming an outright national security/corporate authoritarian state. At this point, this much is evident regarding mainstream liberals who tout the virtues of “incremental change”: they, from their comfortable perch of privilege, do so, because they harbor scant desire to alter the present order.

Still, mainstream liberals are baffled as to why people find them so unbearable, when, in their swoons of self-regard, they believe themselves to be oh-so reasonable sorts who selflessly wish everyone the best.

If you are an advocate of incrementalism, then you co-sign the present order–and the present order consists of corporate/military/police state dominance over almost every aspect of life in the U.S. In short, “reasonable”, “well-meaning” liberals–you are complicit in crimes against human dignity when you bandy your incremental change fantasies.

This is what your reasonable, well-meaning, piecemeal approach is worth…Not a drop of blood of the innocent slaughtered in your predator drone-besotted president’s wars of imperium whose blood-drenched deeds you co-sign with your casuistry. Your faux civil pose is worth about a handful of dust. Obama apologists you can keep making excuses for dear leader–although, it strains credulity as to how anyone with a working moral compass can continue to defend him, or any leader, who has proven himself to be a stalwart defender of the dominant order.

Regarding which, the defining trait of the financial and corporate elite, who lord over the present system has proven to be an all-consuming lust for riches that an individual could not spend in a thousand lifetimes. Their concept of what constitutes acts of trade and commerce is analogous to what pornography is to erotica. Accordingly, one would regard the greedheads of the one percent with the same compassion that one grants to a porn addict, if not for the fact that acts of autoeroticism are not responsible for climate chaos nor did the activity bring down the global economy.

In contrast, this ongoing, noxious, degrading circle jerk of the elite did.

And this brings us to what is at the root of the current siege mentality of the architects and operatives of the corporate/militarist state: Below the armament-bristling surface, and at the dark heart of the subterfuge of one percenters’ yawns this abysmal psychology: If an individual insists on existing in a fortified tower of the mind, the truths of his own heart, as well as those arriving from the soul of the world, will appear to him to be acts of sedition; the longings of his own heart for compassion will be misinterpreted as signs of weakness and emotionally displaced as a malignant, paranoid fantasy in which his own desire for resonate human contact will seem to be the attack of an invading army of rebels.

By reflex (mirrored outwardly in the modus operandi of the one percent against a rising, global chorus of political protest and social unrest) he will attempt to block out and silence the admonitions of his own besieged heart, doubling down on his paranoid actions, until the fortifications in and around himself (the mass psychology of a national security state) have grown to titanic proportions.

An inhuman system that has come to stand for little but the empty perpetuation of itself, according to the metaphoric lexicon of the ancient Greeks, is tantamount to approaching existence as a Titan–and they did not mean the metaphoric designation to be taken as laudatory: The Greek poets believed an evincing of titanic traits was an anathema to human life and an affront to the gods.

According to Homer, after returning from a long military campaign, the reluctant warrior, Hector, who upon seeing his young son, Astyanax, for the first time, in a misguided attempt to bestow a hug on his son, pressed the boy, with too much force, to his armored breastplate, causing the child to cry out in pain. Upon noticing his son’s distress, Hector eased the pressure (an act of sensitivity; conversely, some father’s never notice the agony they inflict on their sons in their wrong-headed attempts to show their love).

Then Hector held the boy skyward and offered him to Zeus. We should all be so lucky.

Zeus, after all, is the father of the gods; therefore, Hector granted his son the right to choose his own unique destiny; he was given free will.

In contrast, at present, the collective fathers of this culture have given us–and we now give our own children–to the Titans of the corporate/militarist state. Titans, who, as Titans are prone to do, eat their young.

According to Greek mythology, human beings could not exist on earth until Zeus banished and imprisoned his father, Cronus, a Titan, and the other Titans to the depths of Hades.

In human terms, we call this an uprising.

At present, daily life has become defined by the caprice of titanic forces (forces that devour our humanity). Fellow human beings, we are long overdue for this: The hour has arrived to demand an end to the destructive reign of these self-serving elites who have proven, time and time again, they care nothing about the suffering they bring to humanity nor the damage they inflict on this living planet.

In our time, when feedback loops of methane gas are melting arctic ice at an exponential rate, yet the powers that be continue their pursuit of ruthless agendas that perpetuate this death-worshiping trajectory, it is evident that politics as usual has failed.

Incremental change will not slow a runaway train. Awareness and action might. In our case, at this late date, if the corporate elite, who control the agendas of the state, are not challenged and brought to heel, and soon, then there is little else left for us to do, other than become hospice workers for our doomed species.

Even the notion of (much less the cultural imperative) of constant, endless growth causes one to feel diminished. Resultantly, the imagination seeks to fall in love with limits–a process we mislabel as depression, a form of repressed grieving that brings feelings of powerlessness, but when tweaked by an active participation in confronting malignant power can be transformed into a life-vivifying vehemence to bring meaning and structure to an overly complex system.

“All around us, the fundamentals of life are crying out to be shaped, or created.”–Joseph Beuys

Conversely, personal devotion to a fear-bulwarked, habitually self-serving egoism, as opposed to embracing a soul-infused selfhood, creates a catastrophe of malignant greed–a disastrously narrow, resonance-bereft approach to consciousness that alone cannot carry the multiverse of the self into the world. Hence, a selfish man’s relentless obsession to possess the bounty of our planet can never assuage his sense of insecurity and emptiness, not even if all the plundered riches of the ravaged earth were laid before him for his taking.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook.

Only connect

This is how we learn to think as Nature thinks.

Gregory Bateson

One night, just after moving to California in 1976, as a young man fresh out of college, I had a vivid  dream.  In the dream, I was driving my VW bug on an isolated stretch of highway when I saw three mushroom clouds rising on the horizon.  Terrified, I pulled off the road and entered a clinic where I found myself aiding sufferers of the nuclear fallout.  I was there for some time before I decided to leave, worried that I myself might become sick from working so closely with the patients.  I next stumbled across some long-haired young men sweating in the sun, hand-building a small but sturdy wooden bridge across a dry creek bed.  It was hard work.  One guy had his shoulder wedged against the bank, straining with all his might to get a good fit with the bridge support against the side. The guys looked askance at me and complained, “Remember when we saw you last and said the next time you see us it will be too late?  Well, it is…”

This dream comes back to me from time to time and I continue to reflect on its meaning in my life, “dreaming the dream onwards”, as the Jungians would say.  It remains a little haunting.  It still provokes me to ask some disturbing questions, all these years later.  Do mushroom clouds “on the horizon” warn of apocalypse still to come?  What is the meaning of the clinic and the people I am caring for?  What is the disease I am afraid of contracting?  What does it mean to leave there?  Who are those long-haired guys, and what is the meaning of the “small but sturdy wooden bridge” they are building?  And what is with the dry creek bed?  Why build a bridge across that?  Why are they angry with me?  What difference could I have made?  Am I partly responsible for this awful state of affairs?  And it’s too late?  Well, if it’s too late, why bother?

Thirty years ago I wondered about this dream in the context of the nuclear threat.

My M.A. thesis in Psychology was titled “Saving the Bomb: An Archetypal Look at the Nuclear Threat”.  It is easy to forget how tense things were back then.  It was a time of MAD (mutually assured destruction) as the stated foreign policy position of both the Soviet Union and theUS.  President Ronald Reagan joked on air “We begin bombing in five minutes…”  Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Nuclear Freeze, SoNoMore Atomics, etc.  Remember?   In my paper I hypothesized that the bomb was an image of death, and the “ultimate limit” to all our fantasies of growth and materialism.   At that time I was grasping for the words to articulate what was really just an intuition, a sense that this growth just could not continue on the same way in the future.  How could it?  There was just too much, too fast, and everything at an ever-increasing rate.  “Future Shock”.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but like many of my generation experiencing a kind of spiritual malaise, I knew something was out of balance, even if I couldn’t rationally explain it.  Was the bomb some dark “cure” for this overgrowth that really is overkill?  Something had to happen.  Nothing grows forever, does it?

 One day, twenty plus years later I heard a snippet of an interview on a Santa Rosa radio station where the speaker posited the possibility of homeless people squatting in San Francisco International Airport, because the airlines had gone broke after there was not enough fuel to fly them anymore.  It’s interesting to note how in this information age so much comes at you, and so little of it really speaks to you.  Well, this spoke to me.  I can’t remember how long it was after hearing that sentence on the radio that I sped to the bookstore, but I’m sure it was that same day.  The speaker was Richard Heinberg, and the book, of course, was The Party’s Over.

 The book’s thesis about Peak Oil was so simple, its implications so obvious.  I have not looked at the world in the same way since.  From then on I could not help but imagine disturbing images of the world as it might appear “post peak”, as fossil fuels decline.  My head became filled with new questions.  Driving by the neatly mowed and nicely watered grassy median on my way to work I wondered “Who is going to mow this when there is no gas?”  Will the streets be lined with abandoned cars?  Where will my water come from when the diesel pump onSonoma Ave.dries up?  Who will take my garbage, how will I dispose of my sewage?  Where will my food come from when fossil fuel fertilizer becomes scarce?  I saw all the millions of plastic things surrounding me with new eyes:  my plastic razor, my keyboard, every single container in my garage and on the store shelf.  It went on and on.  I looked at a map of theUSand it seemed as if all the roads and highways were like  drying-up blood vessels and capillaries in the human body that would lead to the death of the country—our fossil fuel life-blood drying up.  “Oh, my God,” I thought, “millions of people are going to die!”  I looked at my beautiful little boy and wondered if he might be one of them.  Not only did I wonder if he would ever drive a car, or fly toEuropeand explore it as I had as a youth, but I wondered, “Will he survive?”

 We made it through the nuclear threat, (so far, thank God) but now, here it was again, the image of an ultimate limit, not apocalyptic in its suddenness, perhaps, but far more certain, in fact, inevitable.  Someday we would run out of fossil fuel.  This was an inescapable fact.  Someday sooner, perhaps very soon, this “running out” would start.

 Peak Oil, of course, isn’t so much about “no gas” as it is about the consequences of a never-again increasing supply of fossil fuel.  This is why it made such sense to me.  Here, for the first time is the limit I wondered about years ago.  Things were out of balance because the supply of fossil fuel made available to humans was always increasing.  Our life was built on more cheap energy, all the time.  The pace of modern life was always increasing because there was always more energy being pumped into it.  It’s as if the whole twentieth century is one big algal bloom, economies, population, industrial production, transportation, all increasing without a second thought, because it could, because it had to.  After a couple of generations that knew no difference, the whole of the civilized world came to expect this condition of unending, ever increasing growth as natural.   If anyone thought to say “Slow down” or even “Where are we going?” they were looked at as if they were crazy.  Why would anyone want to slow prosperity?  The standard of living of the whole world was increasing, what is wrong with that? 

 There was, of course, one big problem: out of control growth, like cancer, was killing its host, the earth.  Irony of ironies, Peak Oil, so potentially devastating for our industrial culture in this limit to further material growth  and population might just prove to be the necessary cure for our suffering earth.

 So here I am, along with so many others, with this new awareness, struggling with the question, “What to do?”  Though I clearly see the implications of Peak Oil, I remain a cautious and conventional person. I am a husband and father, a suburban homeowner and a high school teacher.  I read about others making great life changes in the face of Peak Oil, and am humbled by the courage of many of my peers.  So, what do I do?  “Buy gold!”  “Sell that house, before it loses all its value!”  “Move to the watery Northwest!”  “Join an intentional community!” “Solar Panels!”  “Rainwater Cisterns!”  “Learn how to shoot!”

Years ago, when I was a prayerful young man, I would pray for two things, the wisdom to know the right thing to do, and the courage to do it.  Am I condemned now to sense what is going on, but not have the guts to make the big changes appropriate to my vision of the future?  This is a particularly touchy subject in the Carhart household, for family and friends who know me well attribute my interest in the subject of Peak Oil as “Doug’s Apocalyptic Thing”, and remembering my years of anguish struggling with the MA thesis, look at me with patient understanding and wait for the subject to change.  It’s never a popular Thanksgiving comment is it, to wonder out loud, “I wonder how many gallons of diesel it took to ship these cranberries here today…” 

So, I struggle privately with what I should do.  Money limits some options.  I struggle, like most all in the middle class, just to make ends meet.  I cannot sell my house and move toWidbyIsland(or wherever) because my house, like so many others, is underwater.  I have no money to buy gold, let alone put in a cistern rainwater catchment, solar panel, or grease conversion kit on my diesel VW.

So then, what is my work in these times of such fundamental change?  Well, I am a High School teacher.  That’s what I do.  I have four classes full of longhaired (and not so long-haired) young men and women.  I want to give them a sense of purpose and meaning for their future.  But how do I when I myself remain so pessimistic?   Dare I say that I think they will be riding horses or bikes to work when they are my age?  Dare I utter “fifty million farmers” and all that implies?  Dare I share the fact that the earth can only support about half its current population without fossil fuel fertilizer to grow crops?  As their teacher, how can I inspire hope when I feel so hopeless? 

 So I remain careful in what I say to them.  One of he most influential commentators on the nuclear threat, Robert Jay Lifton wrote of “Psychic Numbing”, describing the kind of “desensitized” attitude people must affect in the face of overwhelming threat, like the nuclear threat, and now, perhaps Peak Oil as well.  He insisted the cure for this kind of numbing was to find an “animating relationship” to the problem.  Empowerment.  The problem is that my students, like 99% of all of us, remain in denial about Peak Oil.  Understandably, they defend themselves from the reality of the situation with the whole range of current addictions: materialism, media, technology, drugs and alcohol, gang identifications, the social obsessions of adolescence, the current not so civil war between “Left” and “Right”, and so on.  I don’t want to drive them further into denial by presenting them with my fearful scenarios of the future unless I can offer some empowering solutions to help them form Lifton’s “animating relationship” to the problem.  If all I have to offer my students is fear and dread, it’s a good thing I am keeping my mouth shut for now.  But, really, is my silence the best I have to offer?

So, I guess the real question is “What animates me and gives me hope?” 

 Perhaps it’s time to return to my dream and revisit those images with this new question in mind.  Here’s what I think now.  In reality, I am still isolated in the clinic of my psyche, nursing my fears about the dangers rising on the horizon.  I am the patient there.  The contagious disease is hopelessness.  All hope is not lost, however, because the dream says that somehow I will find my way out of my isolation and hook up with other men hard at work.  How that will happen, I don’t know.  I just “find myself” there. And even though it’s “too late”, there they will be, determined and purposeful.  But how can that be?  If it’s too late, why bother?  How can one muster that kind of strength and determination in a world where it’s already too late? 

Well, if one world is ending, mustn’t another be beginning?   Maybe “too late” refers to an old world already passed.  Isn’t that world already gone anyway, with the mushroom clouds foretelling its destruction?   If it’s too late to revivify the old world, (of what, materialism? consumerism? unending growth? profit?…)  that must mean there is a new world already beginning, one full of new meaning and new purpose.  Meaning and purpose that we don’t fully comprehend yet.  This is why bridges must now be built, because a new world is coming to birth right before our eyes, and new connections needing our hands to make them are waiting to be formed.  Bridges over ancient streambeds of long since evaporated wisdom and spiritual truth, archetypal waters from our preindustrial selves… Isn’t it really an act of prescience and hope to be building a bridge in anticipation of a truth that has not yet returned?    What have we been thirsting for all this time really, that our material riches could not satisfy?   

 The bridge in the dream might provide an answer.  Perhaps it’s a symbol of connection.  We can agree that the modern industrial age has certainly severed our sense of connection to nature, and even to ourselves.  Cheap fossil fuels gave us the illusion we could dominate, subjugate and use the natural world for our own ends, and in the process we forgot that we are a part of the world, not above it.   It cut us off from our sense of our own natural selves and our sense of community with our neighbors.  After 150 years of fossil fuel driven growth we have forgotten what this sense of connectedness feels like.  Perhaps my dream says, “Prepare the ground for its return, build the bridges of connection.  In the future this energy will flow again.” 

 This is not to say that the transition will be easy.  The Jungians warn us not to “sweeten the image”.  I’m afraid we are in for an awful, difficult time.  In my dream it was very hard work to build that one sturdy little bridge.  I still fear that there will be great social unrest and many deaths as the old world passes away.  Is there any way around mass starvation?   Will there be mass suicides as people grapple with their own sense of hopelessness.   The collapse of unending growth as a dominant paradigm, is, after all, the death of a worldview that has been the whole reason d’être of the industry and economy of the twentieth century.

 There can be no rebirth without the requisite death that precedes it, so a “Great Turning”, yes, but A Great Death, also.  This is all the more reason why we need each other during this changing of worlds.  As in all healthy ecosystems, the wider a person’s web of supportive interrelationships, the greater their chance of survival.

 We all have our own way of building bridges.  Some people organize, some join, some network very consciously, some are good “connecters” just by the power of their personality, some ask good questions, some research and publish, some build, some fight.    There are as many ways as there are types of people, I guess. 

So, what is my way?  What is the bridge I should be helping to build?  I don’t know, I guess the way I connect with others regarding this issue is still taking shape.  Perhaps this little paper is my first informal reaching-out.  Maybe I’ll walk over and show it to those guys building that sturdy little bridge over there, and see what they say.  They sure look like they could use a hand… 

Doug Carhart lives in Santa Rosa, California. He may be contacted at: dfcarhart@yahoo.com

REPOSTED FROM ENERGY BULLETIN

Ro Randall is a psychotherapist and long time climate change activist. Among other works, she is the author of Loss and Climate Change: The Cost of Parallel Narratives. She spoke to NLP’s Alex Doherty.

Typically psychoanalysis is characterised as an inward looking approach to mental health, emphasising the effects of upbringing and the power of an individual’s unconscious. In contrast you argue for the importance of societal factors, including  the knowledge of catastrophic climate change, to psychoanalytic practice. Why?

The simplest way of looking at this is to observe that social, political and environmental events impact on the minds of individuals. They produce emotional responses in all of us – responses which can range from horror to empathy, from concern to indifference. At one end of the scale, public events can create space for people’s imaginative creativity. At the other end they may trigger primitive anxieties to do with survival and existence.

If public events become traumatic or even just begin to pose threats to people’s well-being or accustomed ways of life, then we might expect to find psychological reactions to this, just as you would to any other threat. Psychoanalysis suggests that these psychological reactions are unlikely to be simple and straightforward. It assumes that the individual psyche is a place of conflict, typified by competing desires, impulses and injunctions, a system with many parts in dynamic interplay, shaped by personal history where individual responses are shaped as much by unconscious desires as by rational understanding and decision. Most critically, psychoanalysis argues that the human mind is equipped to defend against too much painful experience and most people unconsciously resist engaging with matters that will be too disturbing.

So although on the one hand you might expect that people would become anxious, guilty, stressed, sleepless, despairing or depressed about the news of catastrophic climate change, on the other hand you might expect that they would bring all their complex defences to bear on the matter. These defences can manifest as apathy and indifference as Renee Lertzman describes, as outright denial as we see in some reactions to climate change, or in compensatory activities which numb or distract from awareness. You might see the preoccupations with shopping and acquisition of material goods in this light. More dangerously you might anticipate the projection of the problem elsewhere, with excluded or less powerful groups being blamed.

What is critical in determining how people react is often how safe it is to respond openly and with the full range of affect. When politicians and global corporations fail to take responsibility or offer mixed messages about the seriousness of the problem, this may produce states of confusion or increase the indifferent and apathetic defences in the population as a whole. Psychotherapists talk about the need for ‘containment’ – some sense of safety and trust – if difficult subjects are to be thought about. The absence of such containment produces confusion, defensiveness and a retreat into irrationality. People become unable to solve problems creatively. In the privacy of the consulting room this containment is provided by the therapist. In the public sphere it is more likely to result from leadership, the narratives used, the realism of the solutions suggested and the opportunities for genuine citizen involvement in shaping them. If people can’t express, share and symbolise these difficult experiences the long-term effect is likely to be an increase in irrationality, apocalyptic thinking, denial or self-destructive activities, none of which are good for anyone’s mental health.

What I have described above is a simplification however. It suggests that there is an inner mind and an outer reality and of course that is not really true. It is probably more helpful to think about the co-creation of complex psycho-social realities where there is a dynamic relationship between what we like to think of as ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. Paul Hoggett’s work on structures of feeling (in his book Politics, Identity and Emotion) is very helpful in delineating some of the ways that economic, social and institutional forces create or block the possibilities for social experience to be expressed, processed and symbolised. This makes it clear that there are political, and not just personal consequences when we fail to deal adequately with the ways that people feel about major world events. Individual mental health may suffer but we may also find ourselves gripped by social movements that actively refuse to deal with the difficult subjects of the day.

In an article you wrote in 2010 you claimed that:

“In this late modern period, psychoanalytic concerns have shifted from Freud’s preoccupations with the vicissitudes of instinctual life to a preoccupation with the self and questions of life-meaning and identity. The questions and issues that patients bring to the consulting room have changed.” 

Why do you think that the concerns of patients have shifted to these more existential questions?

People’s experience of themselves is different in different social periods. To be young now is a very different matter from being young 50 years ago for example. As someone who was young in the 1960s I suppose I’ve witnessed this shift from a world of relatively stable social roles and expectations to one characterised by fluidity and uncertainty. The questions: “Who am I? What do I want to be?” wouldn’t have made sense to my parents, were novel and exciting to my generation, and are commonplace and the stuff of endless self-help books today.

Sociologists like Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens describe this late modern period as one where questions of anxiety, choice and identity dominate personal life. The solid reference points of the modern period, defining role, place, rights and responsibilities have been replaced by a myriad of competing and confusing choices. You don’t grow up knowing where you fit in and what the future holds for you. Identity is no longer a given, something which people are born into, but something to be constantly constructed and in particular to be shopped for, whether the shopping is for actual material objects, or for lifestyle, career or relationship. One can be, or aspire, to anything, while human bonds are provisional, temporary and contingent. Even people whose lives are in reality very constricted are encouraged to imagine that the world is their oyster and that they could – through winning the lottery, or appearing on reality TV – become who they desire to be.

Wrapped up in this of course are the demands of capital. Putting it rather crudely you might say that not only is capital’s need for a flexible workforce well served by a population that must turn its hand to anything but capital’s never-ending need for new markets is well served by a population that is pre-occupied by the self. Goods can be marketed as meanings to identify with, the hope of change can be invested in objects, shopping can become the preferred means of exercising power.

Psychologically, what this does is make people more narcissistically vulnerable – questions of self-esteem, shame, the boundary between self and other, the integrity and representation of the bodily self for example, become more critical in people’s lives and so this is what appears in the consulting room.

You have suggested that there are serious psychological consequences for those engaged in climate campaigning . Can you describe those consequences?

I’ve been concerned by the extent of ‘burn-out’ I’ve come across – in particular states of exhaustion, the development of cynicism and despair. But also the opposite of these in the form of a kind of ‘pollyanna-ish’ defensiveness where people convince themselves that all is solvable, either through technology or through local community action. I think both of these tendencies have increased post-Copenhagen, along with a tendency for campaigners sometimes to blame each other rather than the powerful actors in the political system. This is a common response amongst groups experiencing failure – you begin by minutely examining the reasons for the lack of success and end by attacking each other or alternatively withdrawing altogether.

There is also a dynamic where campaigners become the conscience of society, carrying the responsibility that others find too hard or too unpalatable to acknowledge. In this role, where they carry the guilt of others, they are vulnerable to projections of being moralising or alternatively that they are saintly and heroic. These kinds of projections are one of the ways that wider society can ignore the issues campaigners raise. The effect on campaigners is either that they act in to the projection, becoming inwardly overwhelmed and outwardly more angry, moralising or saintly. I described these processes in more detail in my 2005 paper ‘A new climate for psychotherapy?’

It’s hard to put yourself constantly in the position of knowing about difficult or traumatic events, particularly if your efforts to change things meet with constant indifference and opposition. You can’t avoid being distressed, anxious and angry about what you encounter so we shouldn’t be surprised by these responses. Again, what I think are needed are opportunities for reflective practice – situations where people can safely talk about their responses to the increasingly difficult circumstances of their work. I don’t think there is much tradition of this amongst campaigners and it would be interesting to explore how to develop it.

Given the likely awesome consequences of climate change and the increasingly dim prospects of averting disaster is despair not an appropriate response? Can one be both happy and aware of the terrible realities of climate change?

Yes. Despair is an appropriate response, but it’s important to see despair as part of the process of coming to terms with loss. It is no longer possible to believe that we will avert the catastrophic consequences of climate change and that is a terrible knowledge to absorb. It will produce in anyone who allows themselves to face it, the blackest, bleakest moments. However, to remain consumed by despair, to be despairing about everything, to insist on the primacy of this personal emotional response, is in the end to be in a narcissistic place. There has to be a process of coming through the rage at the idiocy of the politicians, the sadness at the destruction of the natural world, and the grief at what future generations will face, to the knowledge that there are still ethical decisions to be taken and responsible actions that matter. We cannot avert the consequences of climate change but we can still work for a world that faces those consequences equitably, justly and responsibly. And we should not punish ourselves for our failure to do more by refusing to take joy in a sunset, or delight in a child’s first steps or laugh and crack jokes with friends.

Freud is famously credited with seeing the purpose of psychoanalysis as to transform “…hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” (The quote is from the last paragraph of Studies on Hysteria.) It might be best to hope, not to be happy, but to hope to develop the strength to face what the future brings and to anticipate finding in that future times of love, joy, generosity and exuberance, as well as times of struggle and hardship.

You can learn more about Ro and her work at her website.

Alex Doherty is a co-editor of New Left Project. You can follow him on twitter @alexdoherty7

Except where otherwise noted, content on the New Left Project site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License

About Ro Randall: I am a psychoanalytically trained psychotherapist and have been involved in the environmental movement since my 20s when I was part of the editorial collective of ‘Undercurrents’ magazine. I founded the Cambridge based charity Cambridge Carbon Footprint, and developed the award winning Carbon Conversations project which uses a psychological, small-group approach to helping people reduce carbon emissions.

I am the author of ‘A New Climate for Psychotherapy?’, an exploration of resistance to action on climate change, of ‘Loss and climate change: the cost of parallel narratives’ and of ‘Carbon Conversations‘ the handbook used by Carbon Conversations groups.

I also facilitate workshops on climate change communication and community engagement and offer consultancy to business on employee engagement in carbon reduction. I was previously a lecturer with the Open University and an independent consultant for the development of distance learning materials.

RE-POSTED FROM ENERGY BULLETIN

As economies contract, a global popular uprising confronts power elites over access to the essentials of human existence. What are the underlying dynamics of the conflict, and how is it likely to play out?

1. Prologue

As the world economy crashes against debt and resource limits, more and more countries are responding by attempting to salvage what are actually their most expendable features—corrupt, insolvent banks and bloated militaries—while leaving the majority of their people to languish in “austerity.” The result, predictably, is a global uprising. This current set of conditions and responses will lead, sooner or later, to social as well as economic upheaval—and a collapse of the support infrastructure on which billions depend for their very survival.

Nations could, in principle, forestall social collapse by providing the basics of existence (food, water, housing, medical care, family planning, education, employment for those able to work, and public safety) universally and in a way that could be sustained for some time, while paying for this by deliberately shrinking other features of society—starting with military and financial sectors—and by taxing the wealthy. The cost of covering the basics for everyone is within the means of most nations. Providing human necessities would not remove all fundamental problems now converging (climate change, resource depletion, and the need for fundamental economic reforms), but it would provide a platform of social stability and equity to give the world time to grapple with deeper, existential challenges.

Unfortunately, many governments are averse to this course of action. In fact, they will most likely continue to do what they are doing now—cannibalizing the resources of society at large in order to prop up megabanks and military establishments.

Even if they do provide universal safety nets, ongoing economic contraction may still likely result in conflict, though in this instance it would arise from groups opposed to the perceived failures of “big government.”

In either instance, it will increasingly be up to households and communities to provide the basics for themselves while reducing their dependence upon, and vulnerability to, centralized systems of financial and governmental power. This is a strategy that will require sustained effort and one that will in many cases be discouraged and even criminalized by national authorities.

The decentralization of food, finance, education, and other basic societal support systems has been advocated for decades by theorists on the far left and far right of the political spectrum. Some efforts toward decentralization (such as the local food movement) have resulted in the development of niche markets. However, here we are describing not just the incremental growth of social movements or marginal industries, but what may become the signal economic and social trend for the remainder of the 21^st century—a trend that is currently ignored and resisted by governmental, economic, and media elites who can’t imagine an alternative beyond the dichotomies of free enterprise versus planned economy, or Keynesian stimulus versus austerity.

The decentralized provision of basic necessities is not likely to flow from a utopian vision of a perfect or even improved society (as have some social movements of the past). It will emerge instead from iterative human responses to a daunting and worsening set of environmental and economic problems, and it will in many instances be impeded and opposed by politicians, bankers, and industrialists. It is this contest between traditional power elites on one hand, and growing masses of disenfranchised poor and formerly middle-class people attempting to provide the necessities of life for themselves in the context of a shrinking economy, that is shaping up to be the fight of the century.

2. When civilizations decline

In his benchmark 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, archaeologist Joseph Tainter explained the rise and demise of civilizations in terms of complexity. He used the word complexity to refer to “the size of a society, the number and distinctiveness of its parts, the variety of specialized social roles that it incorporates, the number of distinct social personalities present, and the variety of mechanisms for organizing these into a coherent, functioning whole.”¹

Civilizations are complex societies organized around cities; they obtain their food from agriculture (field crops), use writing and mathematics, and maintain full-time division of labor. They are centralized, with people and resources constantly flowing from the hinterlands toward urban hubs. Thousands of human cultures have flourished throughout the human past, but there have been only about 24 civilizations. And all (except our current global industrial civilization—so far) have collapsed.

Tainter describes the growth of civilization as a process of investing societal resources in the development of ever-greater complexity in order to solve problems. For example, in village-based tribal societies an arms race between tribes can erupt, requiring each village to become more centralized and complexly organized in order to fend off attacks. But complexity costs energy. As Tainter puts it, “More complex societies are costlier to maintain than simpler ones and require higher support levels per capita.” Since available energy and resources are limited, a point therefore comes when increasing investments become too costly and yield declining marginal returns. Even the maintenance of existing levels of complexity costs too much (citizens may experience this as onerous levels of taxation), and a general simplification and decentralization of society ensues—a process colloquially referred to as collapse.

During such times societies typically see sharply declining population levels, and the survivors experience severe hardship. Elites lose their grip on power. Domestic revolutions and foreign wars erupt. People flee cities and establish new, smaller communities in the hinterlands. Governments fall and new sets of power relations emerge.

It is frightening to think about what collapse would mean for our current global civilization. Nevertheless, as we are about to see, there are good reasons for concluding that it is reaching limits of centralization and complexity, that marginal returns on investments in complexity are declining, and that simplification and decentralization are inevitable.

Thinking in terms of simplification, contraction, and decentralization is more accurate and helpful, and probably less scary, than contemplating collapse. It also opens avenues for foreseeing, reshaping, and even harnessing inevitable social processes as to minimize hardship and maximize possible benefits.

3. The premise: why contraction, simplification, and decentralization are inevitable

The premise that a simplification of global industrial civilization is soon inevitable is the summarized conclusion of a robust discourse developed in scores of books and hundreds of scientific papers during the past four decades, drawing upon developments in the studies of ecology, the history of civilizations, the economics of energy, and systems theory. This premise can be stated as follows:

• The dramatic increase in societal complexity seen during the past two centuries (measured, for example, in a relentless trend toward urbanization and soaring volumes of trade) resulted primarily from increasing rates of energy flow for manufacturing and transport. Fossil fuels provided by far the biggest energy subsidy in human history, and were responsible for industrialization, urbanization, and massive population growth.
• Today, as conventional fossil fuels rapidly deplete, world energy flows appear set to decline. While there are enormous amounts of unconventional fossil fuels yet to be exploited, these will be so costly to extract—in monetary, energy, and environmental terms—that continued growth in available fossil energy supplies is unlikely; meanwhile alternative energy sources remain largely undeveloped and will require extraordinary levels of investment if they are to make up for declines in fossil energy.
• Declining rates of energy flow and declining energy quality will have predictable direct effects: higher energy prices, the need for increased energy efficiency in all sectors of society, and the need for the direction of an ever-greater proportion of increasingly scarce investment capital toward the energy sector.
• Some of the effects of declining energy will be non-linear and unpredictable, and could lead to a general collapse of civilization. Economic contraction will not be as gradual and orderly as economic expansion has been. The indirect and non-linear effects of declining energy may include an uncontrollable and catastrophic unwinding of the global system of credit, finance, and trade, or the dramatic expansion of warfare as a result of heightened competition for energy resources or the protection of trade privileges.
• Large-scale trade requires money, and so economic growth has required an ongoing expansion of currency, credit, and debt. It is possible, however, for credit and debt to expand faster than the energy-fed “real” economy of manufacturing and trade; when this happens, the result is a credit/debt bubble, which must eventually deflate—usually resulting in massive destruction of capital and extreme economic distress. During the past few decades, the industrialized world has inflated the largest credit/debt bubble in human history.
• As resource consumption has burgeoned during the past century, so have environmental impacts. Droughts and floods are increasing in frequency and worsening in intensity, straining food systems while also imposing direct monetary costs (many of which are ultimately borne by the insurance industry). These impacts—primarily arising from global climate change—now threaten to undermine not only economic growth, but also the ecological basis of civilization.

To summarize this already brief summary: Due to energy limits, overwhelming debt burdens, and accumulating environmental impacts, the world has reached a point where continued economic growth may be unachievable. Instead of increasing its complexity, therefore, society will—for the foreseeable future, and probably in fits and starts—be shedding complexity.

General economic contraction has arguably already begun in Europe and the US. The signs are everywhere. High unemployment levels, declining energy consumption, and jittery markets herald what some bearish financial analysts describe as a “greater depression” perhaps lasting until mid-century (see, for example, George Soros’s comments in a recent Newsweek interview). But even that stark assessment misses the true dimensions of the crisis because it focuses only on its financial and social manifestations while ignoring its energy and ecological basis.

Whether or not the root causes of worldwide economic turmoil are generally understood, that turmoil is already impacting political systems as well as the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people. Banks that innovated their way into insolvency in the years leading up to 2008 have been bailed out by governments and central banks fearful to avert a contagious deflationary destruction of global capital. Meanwhile, governments that borrowed heavily during the last decade or two with the expectation that further economic growth would swell tax revenues and make it easy to repay debts now find themselves with declining revenues and rising borrowing costs—a sure formula for default.

In a few instances, the very financial institutions that some governments temporarily saved from insolvency are now undermining the economies of other governments by forcing a downgrade of their credit ratings, making debt rollovers more difficult. Those latter governments are being given an ultimatum: reduce domestic spending or face exclusion from the system of global capital. But in many cases domestic spending is all that’s keeping the national economy functioning. Increasingly, even in countries recently considered good credit risks, the costs of preventing a collapse of the financial sector are being shifted to the general populace by way of austerity measures that result in economic contraction and general misery.

A global popular uprising is the predictable result of governments’ cuts in social services, their efforts to shield wealthy investors from consequences of their own greed, and rising food and fuel prices. Throughout the past year, recurring protests have erupted in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North America. The long-range aims of protesters are in many cases yet to be articulated, but the immediate reasons for the protests are not hard to discern. As food and fuel prices squeeze, poor people naturally feel the pinch first. When the poor are still able to get by, they are often reluctant to risk assembling in the street to oppose corrupt, entrenched regimes. When they can no longer make ends meet, the risks of protest seem less significant—there is nothing to lose; life is intolerable anyway. Widespread protest opens the opportunity for needed political and economic reforms, but it also leads to the prospect of bloody crackdowns and reduced social and political stability.

4. Scenarios for societal simplification

If this premise is correct, then two scenarios can easily be envisioned:

A. Continued pursuit of business-as-usual. In this scenario, policy makers desperately try to re-start economic growth with stimulus spending and bailouts; all efforts are directed toward increasing, or at least maintaining, the complexity and centralization of society. Deficits are disregarded.

This was the general strategy for many governments in late 2008 and throughout 2009 as they grappled with the first phase of the global financial crisis. The US and stronger members of the EU experienced tangible but limited success at engineering a recovery and averting a deflationary meltdown of their economies through deficit spending. However, the fundamental problems that led to the crisis were merely papered over. Most of the largest banks are still functionally insolvent, with temporarily hidden “toxic assets” still weighing on their balance sheets.

The limits of this course of action are revealing themselves as the US “recovery” fails to gain traction, Chinese growth winds down, and the EU slips into recession. Further stimulus spending would require another massive round of government borrowing, and that would face strong domestic political headwinds as well as resistance from the financial community (taking the form of credit downgrades, which would make further borrowing more expensive).

Meanwhile, despite much talk about the potential for low-grade alternative fossil fuels such as tar sands and shale oil, world energy supplies are in essentially the same straits as they were at the start of the 2008 crisis (which, it is important to recall, was partly triggered by a historic oil price spike). And without increasing and affordable energy flows a genuine economic recovery (meaning a return to growth in manufacturing and trade) is probably not possible. Thus financial pump priming will yield diminishing returns.

The pursuit of business-as-usual appears to lead us back to the sort of turmoil seen in 2008; however, next time the situation will be worse, as most of the available stimulus/bailout “ammunition” is already used up. If governments and central banks are able to get ahead of debt deflation and deleveraging by massive “printing” of new money, the eventual result will be hyperinflation and currency collapse.

B. Simplification by austerity. In this scenario, nations pull back from their current state of over-indebtedness and placate bond markets by cutting domestic social spending and withdrawing social safety nets put in place during the past few decades of steady growth. This strategy is being adopted by the US and many EU nations, partly out of perceived necessity and partly on the advice of economists who promise that domestic social spending cuts (along with privatization of government services) will spur more private-sector economic activity and thereby jumpstart a sustainable recovery.

The evidence for the efficacy of austerity as a path to increased economic health is spotty at best in “normal” economic times. Under current circumstances, the evidence is overwhelming that austerity leads to declining economic performance as well as social unraveling. In nations where the austerity prescription has been most vigorously applied (Ireland, Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal), contraction is accelerating and popular protest is on the rise. Even Germany, Europe’s strongest economy, is being impacted—its economy contracted in Q4 of 2011. As Jeff Madrick argued recently in the New York Review of Books, policy makers are failing to see that rising deficits are more a symptom of slower economic growth than the cause.

Austerity is having similar effects in states, counties, and cities in the US. State and local governments have cut roughly half a million jobs during the past two years; had they kept hiring at their previous pace to keep up with population growth, they would instead have added a half-million jobs. Meanwhile, due to declining tax revenues, local governments are allowing paved roads to turn to gravel, closing libraries and parks, and laying off public employees.

It’s not hard to recognize a self-reinforcing feedback loop at work here. A shrinking economy means lower tax revenues, which make it harder for governments to repay debt. In order to avoid a credit downgrade, governments must cut spending. This shrinks the economy further, eventually resulting in credit downgrades anyway. That in turn raises the cost of borrowing. So government must cut spending even further to remain credit-worthy. The need for social spending explodes as unemployment, homelessness, and malnutrition increase, while the availability of social services declines. The only apparent way out of this death spiral is a revival of rapid economic growth. But if the premise above is correct, that is a mere pipedream.

Both of these scenarios lead to unacceptable and unstable outcomes. Are there no other possibilities? Well, yes. Here are two.

C. Centralized provision of the basics. In this scenario, nations directly provide jobs and basic necessities to the general public while deliberately simplifying, downsizing, or eliminating expendable features of society such as the financial sector and the military and taxing wealthy individuals, banks, and businesses.

In many cases, centralized provision of basic necessities is relatively cheap and efficient. For example, since the beginning of the current financial crisis the US government has gone about creating jobs mainly through channeling tax breaks and stimulus spending to the private sector, but this has turned out to be an extremely costly and inefficient way of providing jobs, far more of which could be called into existence (per dollar spent) by direct government hiring². Similarly, the new (yet to be implemented) US federal policy of increasing the public’s access to health care by requiring individuals to purchase private medical insurance is more costly than simply providing a universal government-run health insurance program. If Britain’s experience during and immediately after World War II is any guide, then better access to higher-quality food could be ensured with a government-run rationing program than through a fully privatized food system. And government banks could arguably provide a more reliable public service than private banks, which funnel enormous streams of unearned income to bankers and investors. If all this sounds like an argument for utopian socialism, read on—it’s not. But there are indeed real benefits to be reaped from government provision of necessities, and it would be foolish to ignore them.

A parallel line of reasoning goes like this. Immediately after natural disasters and huge industrial accidents, people impacted typically turn to the state for aid. As the global climate chaotically changes, and as the hunt for ever-lower-grade fossil energy sources forces companies to drill deeper and in more sensitive areas, we will undoubtedly see worsening weather crises, environmental degradation and pollution, and industrial accidents such as oil spills. Inevitably, more and more families and communities will be relying upon state-provided aid for disaster relief.³

Many people would be tempted to view an expansion of state support services with alarm, as the ballooning of the powers of an already bloated central government. There may be substance to this fear, depending on how the strategy is pursued. But it is important to remember that the economy as a whole, in this scenario, would be contracting—and would continue to contract—due to resource limits. Think of state provision of services not as utopian socialism (whether that phrase is viewed positively or negatively), but as a strategic reorganization of society in pursuit of greater efficiency in times of scarcity. Perhaps the best analogy would be with wartime rationing—a practice in which government takes on a larger role in managing distribution so as to free up resources for fighting a common enemy.

How to pay for such an expansion of services in a time of over-indebtedness and scarce credit? The financial industry could be downsized by taxing financial transactions and unearned income. Further, the national government could create its own financing directly, without having to borrow from banks. One might think that if government can just create as much money as it wants, then it could do away with scarcity altogether. But in the end it’s not just money that makes the world go ’round. With energy and resources in short supply, the economy would continue to shrink no matter how much money the central government printed; over-printing would simply result in hyperinflation. However, up to a point, efficiency gains and equitable distribution could reduce human misery even as the economic pie continued to shrink.

Some nations have already begun to make policy shifts along the lines suggested in this scenario: Ecuador, for example, has expanded direct public employment, enforced social security provisions for all workers, diversified its economy to reduce dependence on oil exports, and enlarged public banking operations.⁴

For some large industrial nations, such as the US, entrenched interests (principally, the fossil-fuel, financial, and weapons industries) would work to prevent movement in these directions—as they are already doing. Meanwhile, the fact that the economy was still contracting even in the face of strenuous government efforts might lead many people to believe that contraction was occurring because of government, and so popular opposition to government (from some quarters at least) might increase. Government might be motivated to crush such dissent in order to maintain stability (this, of course, is what far-right anti-government groups most fear). A nation that remained stuck in option C for decades would likely come to resemble the Soviet Union or Cuba. It might also resort to extreme efforts to stoke patriotic sentiment as a way of justifying repression of dissent.

In any case, it’s hard to say how long this strategy could be maintained in the face of declining energy supplies. Eventually, central authorities’ ability to operate and repair the infrastructure necessary to continue supporting the general citizenry might erode to the point that the center would no longer hold. At that stage, Strategy C would fade out and Strategy D would fade in.

D. Local provision of the basics. Suppose that as economies contract national governments fail to step up to provide the basics of existence to their citizens. Or (as just discussed) suppose those efforts wane over time due to an inability to maintain national-scale infrastructure. In this final scenario, the provision of basic necessities is organized by local governments, ad hoc social movements, and non-governmental organizations. These could include small businesses, churches and cults, street gangs with an expanded mission, and formal or informal co-operative enterprises of all sorts.

In the absence of global transport networks, electricity grids, and other elements of infrastructure that bind modern nations together, whatever levels of support that can originate locally would provide a mere shadow of the standard of living currently enjoyed by middle-class Americans or Europeans. Just one telling example: we will likely never see families getting together in church basements to manufacture laptop computers or cell phones from scratch. The ongoing local provision of food and simple manufactured goods is a reasonable possibility, given intelligent, cooperative effort; for the most part, however, during the next few decades a truly local economy will be mostly a salvage economy (as described by John Michael Greer in The Ecotechnic Future , pp. 70 ff.).

If central governments seek to maintain their complexity at the expense of locales, then conflict between communities and sputtering national or global power hubs is likely. Communities may begin to withdraw streams of support from central authorities—and not only governmental authorities, but financial and corporate ones as well.

In recent decades, communities have seen it as being in their interest to give national and global corporations tax breaks and other subsides for locating factories and stores within the local tax-shed. Analysis after-the-fact is showing that in many instances this was a poor bargain: tax revenues have been insufficient to make up for new infrastructure costs (roads, sewer, water); meanwhile, most of the wealth generated by factories and mega-store outlets tends to find its way to distant corporate headquarters and to Wall Street investors (see Michael Shuman, the Small-Mart Revolution). Increasingly, communities are recognizing big chain-retail corporations (and big banks as well) as parasites siphoning away local capital, and are looking for ways to support small, local businesses instead.

City and county governments are just beginning to adopt a similar attitude toward federal and state governments. Formerly, larger governmental entities provided subsidies for local infrastructure projects and anti-poverty programs. As funding streams for those projects and programs dry up, local governments find themselves increasingly in competition with their cash-starved big brothers.

If communities are being hit by declining tax revenues, competition with larger governments, and the predatory practices of mega-corporations and banks, then non-profit organizations—which support tens of thousands of local arts, education, and charity efforts—face perhaps even greater challenges. The current philanthropic model rests entirely upon assumed economic growth: foundation grants come from returns on investments. As growth slows and reverses, the world of non-profit organizations will shake and crumble, and the casualties will include thousands of aid agencies, environmental organizations devoted to protecting regional habitat, symphony orchestras, dance ensembles, museums, art galleries, and on and on.

If national government loses its grip, with local governments pinched simultaneously from above and below, and with non-profit organizations starved for funding, from where will come the means to support the local citizenry? Local businesses and co-ops (including cooperative banks, otherwise known as credit unions) could shoulder some of the burden if they are able to remain profitable and avoid falling victim to big banks and mega-corporations before the latter go under.

The next line of support would come from the volunteer efforts of people willing to work hard for the common good. Every town and city is replete with churches and service organizations. Many of these would be well placed to help educate and organize the general populace to facilitate survival and recovery—especially some of the more recent arrivals, such as the Transition Initiatives, which already have collapse preparedness as a raison d’être. In the best instance, volunteer efforts would get under way well before crisis hits, organizing farmers’ markets, ride- and car-share programs, local currencies, and “buy local” campaigns. There is a growing body of literature intended to help that pre-crisis effort; the latest worthy entry in that field is Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity, by Michael Shuman.

The final source of support would consist of families and neighborhoods banding together to do whatever is necessary to survive—grow gardens, keep chickens, reuse, repurpose, repair, defend, share, and, if all else fails, learn to do without. People would move into shared housing to cut costs. They would look out for one another to maintain safety and security. These extreme-local practices would sometimes fly against the headwinds of local and national regulations. In those cases, even if they’re in no place to help materially, local governments could lend a hand simply by getting out of the way—for example, by changing zoning ordinances to allow new uses of space. (See, for example, this helpful article on how counties can use land banks and eminent domain to take over unused real estate and make it available for community use.⁵) Thus enabled, neighborhood committees could identify vacant houses and commercial spaces, and turn these into community gardens and meeting centers. In return, as neighborhoods network with other neighborhoods, a stronger social fabric might re-invigorate local government.

As discussed above, movements to support localization—however benign their motives—may be perceived as a threat by national authorities. This is all the more likely as the Occupy movement organizes popular resistance to traditional power elites.

Where national governments see local citizens’ demands for greater autonomy as menacing, the response could include surveillance, denial of public assembly, infiltration of protest organizations, militarization of the police, the development of an increasing array of non-lethal weapons for use against protesters, the adoption of laws that abrogate the rights to trial and evidentiary hearings, torture, and the deployment of death squads. Chris Hedges, in a recent article⁶, tellingly quoted Canadian activist Leah Henderson’s letter to fellow dissidents before being sent to prison: “My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction. . . . It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems [emphasis added] and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”

Altogether, the road to localism may not be as easy and cheerful a path as some proponents portray. It will be filled with hard work, pitfalls, conflicts, and struggle—as well as comradeship, community, and comity. Its ultimate advantage: the primary trends of the current century (discussed above) seem to lead ultimately in this direction. If all else fails, the local matrix of neighbors, family, and friends will offer our last refuge.

5. Complications

Scenarios are not forecasts; they are planning tools. As prophecies, they’re not much more reliable than dreams. What really happens in the years ahead will be shaped as much by “black swan” events as by trends in resource depletion or credit markets. We know that environmental impacts from climate change will intensify, but we don’t know exactly where, when, or how severely those impacts will manifest; meanwhile, there is always the possibility of a massive environmental disaster not caused by human activity (such as an earthquake or volcanic eruption) occurring in such a location or on such a scale as to substantially alter the course of world events. Wars are also impossible to predict in terms of intensity and outcome, yet we know that geopolitical tensions are building. It is just possible (not very, but just) that some new energy technology—such as cold fusion—could reset the collapse clock, enabling the global economy to lurch along for another couple of decades before humanity breaches its next crucial natural limit. The simplification of society is likely to be a complicated and surprising process. Nevertheless, the four scenarios offered here do provide a rudimentary map of some of the main possibilities.

These scenarios are not mutually exclusive. A single nation might traverse two, three, or all of them over a period of years or decades.

If our premise is correct, then Strategy A (the pursuit of business-as-usual) is inherently untenable even over the short term; it must soon give way to B, C, or D.

Strategy B (austerity) seems to lead, via social and economic disintegration, quickly to D (local provision of the basics), as evidenced in a recent New York Times article about Greeks reverting to subsistence farming in the face of government cutbacks.

Strategy C (central provision of the basics) would probably lead to D as well, though the path would likely take longer—possibly much longer—to traverse. In other words, all roads appear to lead eventually to localism; the question is: how and when shall we arrive there, and in what condition?

The route via austerity has the virtue of being quicker, but only because it induces more misery more suddenly.

Centralized provision of essentials might be merely a way of prolonging the agony of collapse—unless authorities understand the inevitable trend of events and deliberately plan for a gradual shift from central to local provision of basic needs. The US could do this by, for example, enacting agricultural policies to favor small commercial farms and subsistence farms while removing subsidies from big agribusiness. Outsourcing, off-shoring, and other practices that serve the interests of global capital at the expense of local communities could be discouraged through regulation and taxation, while domestic manufacturers could be favored. (This “protectionism” would no doubt be decried both domestically and internationally.) Altogether, the planned transition from C to D may constitute its own scenario, perhaps the best of the lot in its likely outcomes.

The success of governments in navigating the transitions ahead may depend on measurable qualities and characteristics of governance itself. In this regard, there could be useful clues to be gleaned from the World Governance Index, which assesses governments according to criteria of peace and security, rule of law, human rights and participation, sustainable development, and human development. For 2011, the US ranked number 32 (and falling: it was number 28 in 2008)—behind Uruguay, Estonia, and Portugal, but ahead of China (number 140) and Russia (number 148).

On the other hand, “collapse preparedness” (Dmitry Orlov’s memorable phrase) may co-exist with governmental practices that appear inefficient and even repressive in pre-collapse conditions. In his book Reinventing Collapse, Orlov makes the case that the Soviet Union, for all its dreariness and poor governance, provided more collapse preparedness than does the US today, partly because people’s expectations in the USSR were already low after decades spent barely getting by. Or was the USSR’s high level of collapse preparedness largely a matter of its having long guaranteed the very basics of existence to its people? No one became homeless when the Soviet system disintegrated, since no one had a mortgage to be foreclosed upon; when the economy crashed, people simply stayed where they were.

In the era of economic contraction governmental competence will not determine all the prospects of nations. Demographics will also be decisive: Egypt’s political and social tumult has been driven not just by weariness with corruption, but also by high birth rates—which have led to 83 percent unemployment for those between 15 and 29, inadequate education, high poverty rates, and a growing inability of the nation to feed itself (about half of Egypt’s food is now imported). Perhaps it could be argued that one of the first signs of competent governance is effective population policy.

For the sake of any national policy maker who may be reading this essay, here are a few take-home bullet points that summarize most of the advice that can be gleaned from our scenario exercise:

• Guarantee the basics of existence to the general public for as long as possible.
• At the same time, promote local production of essential goods, strengthen local social interconnectivity, and shore up local economies.
• Promote environmental protection and resource conservation, reducing reliance of fossil fuels in every way possible.
• Stabilize population levels.
• Foster sound governance (especially in terms of participation and transparency).
• Provide universal education in practical skills (gardening, cooking, bicycle repair, sewing, etc.) as well as in basic academic subjects (reading, math, science, critical thinking, and history). And finally,
• Don’t be evil—that is, don’t succumb to the temptation to deploy military tactics against your own people as you feel your grip on power slipping; the process of decentralization is inexorable, so plan to facilitate it.

One wonders how many big-government centralists of the left, right, or center—who often see the stability of the state, the status of their own careers, and the ultimate good of the people as being virtually identical—are likely to embrace such a prescription.

6. Final thoughts

To reiterate the theme of this essay one last time: The decline in resources available to support societal complexity will generate a centrifugal force breaking up existing economic and governmental power structures everywhere. As a result there is a fight brewing—a protracted and intense one, impacting most countries if not all—over access to a shrinking economic pie. It will manifest not only as competition among nations, but also as conflicts within nations between power elites and the increasingly impoverished masses.

History teaches us at least as much as scenario exercises can. The convergence of debt bubbles, economic contraction, and extreme inequality is hardly unique to our historical moment. A particularly instructive and fateful previous instance occurred in France in the late 18^th century. The result then was the French Revolution, which brought with it war, despotism, mass executions—and an utter failure to address underlying economic problems. (See three excellent short videos about the French Revolution here, here, and here). So often, as in this case, nations suffering under economic contraction, rather than downsizing their armies so as to free up resources, double down on militarism by going to war, hoping thereby both to win spoils and to give mobs of angry young men a target for their frustrations other than their own government. The gambit seldom succeeds; Napoleon made it work for a while, but not long. France and (most of) its people did survive the tumult. But then, at the dawn of the 19^th century Europe was on the cusp of another revolution—the fossil-fueled Industrial Revolution—and decades of economic growth shimmered on the horizon. Today we are just starting our long slide down the decline side of the fossil fuel supply curve. Will we handle the inevitable social conflicts more wisely than the French did? Will we learn from history?

Sometimes historic social conflict has taken the form of right-wing groups fighting to oppose and overthrow left-democratic national governments (Germany in the 1920s), sometimes as leftist groups battling center-right or far-right governments (Nicaragua in the 1960s and ’70s). There is plenty of potential for both brands of conflict within today’s countries, which vary greatly in terms of their likely trajectories. If you’re a mobile global citizen who has the luxury of choosing a country of residence, perhaps this essay can help in assessing your prospects.

Thinking in big-picture terms is useful for those who have access to information and time for reflection; it provides a sense of perspective and a potential for more effective action. For those of us who sit, Arjuna-like, before the battlefield of the 21^st century, the question presents itself: What is our appropriate role? Shall we engage in conflict? Or would it be better to prevent conflict, resolve conflict, or avoid conflict? Differing circumstances and personal temperaments will lead to differing answers. If this essay were a polemic, it might incite readers to resist and oppose those wielding centralized political and economic power. But that is not my purpose here; rather, it is merely to survey the landscape of conflict so as to see where the points of leverage may lie; it is up to readers to do with this very rudimentary analysis what they will.

If the premise and scenarios outlined above are even vaguely accurate, then localism will sooner or later be our fate and our strategy for survival. It seems fairly clear that, whatever our stance regarding conflict, efforts spent now to learn practical skills, become more self-sufficient, and form bonds of trust with neighbors will pay off in the long run.

Reference

1. Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies, by Joseph A. Tainter

2. Navigating the Jobs Crisis – Pavlina R. Tcherneva, The Huffington Post

3. Why Climate Change Will Make You Love Big Government – Christian Parenti, Energy Bulletin

4. Could Ecuador be the most radical and exciting place on Earth? – Jayati Ghosh, The Guardian

5. Occupy the Neighborhood: How Counties Can Use Land Banks and Eminent Domain – Ellen Brown, Truthout

6. What Happened to Canada? – Chris Hedges, Truthout

 Originally published as Richard Heinberg’s Museletter #237

Image credit: Frayed Knot firemind/flickr

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Source URL: http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-02-16/fight-century

Links:
[1] http://www.postcarbon.org/article/714558-the-fight-of-the-century
[2] http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780521386739-1
[3] http://rt.com/usa/news/george-soros-class-war-619/
[4] http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jan/06/europe-cutting-hope/
[5] http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9780865716391-2
[6] http://small-mart.org/bookstore
[7] http://www.postcarbon.org/ldls
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/world/europe/amid-economic-strife-greeks-look-to-farming-past.html?_r=1
[9] http://www.world-governance.org/spip.php?article469
[10] http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780865716858-0
[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvSod16wfgg
[12] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTMFtLAS90Q
[13] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyZsLYxaIuM
[14] http://dieoff.org/page134.htm
[15] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pavlina-r-tcherneva/navigating-the-jobs-crisi_b_370387.html
[16] http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-01-27/why-climate-change-will-make-you-love-big-government
[17] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/19/ecuador-radical-exciting-place
[18] http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-neighborhood/1326472096
[19] http://www.truth-out.org/what-happened-canada/1327935024
[20] http://richardheinberg.com/category/museletter
[21] http://www.flickr.com/photos/firemind/56172457/sizes/m/in/photostream/
[22] http://www.postcarbon.org/eog
[23] http://bit.ly/whokilledgrowth
[24] http://www.postcarbon.org/donate
[25] http://www.postcarbon.org/publications/newsletters/
[26] http://www.postcarbon.org/about/reposting_policy/

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That the real, physical world is the source of our own lives, and the lives of others. A weakened planet is less capable of supporting life, human or otherwise.

Thus the health of the real world is primary, more important than any social or economic system, because all social or economic systems are dependent upon a living planet.

It is self-evident that to value a social system that harms the planet’s capacity to support life over life itself is to be out of touch with physical reality.

That any way of life based on the use of nonrenewable resources is by definition not sustainable.

That any way of life based on the hyper-exploitation of renewable resources is by definition not sustainable: if, for example, fewer salmon return every year, eventually there will be none. This means that for a way of life to be sustainable, it must not harm native communities: native prairies, native forests, native fisheries, and so on.

That the real world is interdependent, such that harm done to rivers harms those humans and nonhumans whose lives depend on these rivers, harms forests and prairies and wetlands surrounding these rivers, harms the oceans into which these rivers flow. Harm done to mountains harms the rivers flowing through them. Harm done to oceans harms everyone directly or indirectly connected to them.

That you cannot argue with physics. If you burn carbon-based fuels, this carbon will go into the air, and have effects in the real world.

That creating and releasing poisons into the world will poison humans and nonhumans.

That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to create poisons for which there is no antidote.

That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to create messes that cannot be cleaned up.

That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to destroy places humans or nonhumans need to survive.

That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to drive human cultures or nonhuman species extinct.

That reality trumps all belief systems: what you believe is not nearly so important as what is real.

That on a finite planet you cannot have an economy based on or requiring growth. At least you cannot have one and expect to either have a planet or a future.

That the current way of life is not sustainable, and will collapse. The only real questions are what will be left of the world after that collapse, and how bad things will be for the humans and nonhumans who come after. We hold it as self-evident that we should do all that we can to make sure that as much of the real, physical world remains intact until the collapse of the current system, and that humans and nonhumans should be as prepared as possible for this collapse.

That the health of local economies are more important than the health of a global economy.

That a global economy should not be allowed to harm local economies or land bases.

That corporations are not living beings. They are certainly not human beings.

That corporations do not in any real sense exist. They are legal fictions. Limited liability corporations are institutions created explicitly to separate humans from the effects of their actions—making them, by definition, inhuman and inhumane. To the degree that we desire to live in a human and humane world—and, really, to the degree that we wish to survive—limited liability corporations need to be eliminated.

That the health of human and nonhuman communities is more important than the profits of corporations.

We hold it as self-evident, as the Declaration of Independence states, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it. . . .” Further, we hold it as self-evident that it would be more precise to say that it is not the Right of the People, nor even their responsibility, but instead something more like breathing—something that if we fail to do we die.

If we as a People fail to rid our communities of destructive institutions, those institutions will destroy our communities. And if we in our communities cannot provide meaningful and nondestructive ways for people to gain food, clothing, and shelter then we must recognize it’s not just specific destructive institutions but the entire economic system that is pushing the natural world past breaking points. Capitalism is killing the planet. Industrial civilization is killing the planet.

Once we’ve recognized the destructiveness of capitalism and industrial civilization—both of which are based on systematically converting a living planet into dead commodities—we’ve no choice, unless we wish to sign our own and our children’s death warrants, but to fight for all we’re worth and in every way we can to overturn it.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Former IMF chief economist Joseph Stiglitz has a message for everybody who’s sitting around waiting for the economy to “get back to normal.”

Stop waiting. ‘Cause that train’s gone, and it ain’t coming back. And the sooner we accept that “normal,” as post WWII America knew and loved it, will not be an option in this century, the sooner we’ll get ourselves moving forward on the path toward a new kind of prosperity. The only real question now is: What future awaits us on the other side of the coming shift?

In a don’t-miss article in this month’s Vanity Fair, Stiglitz argues that our current economic woes are the result of a deep structural shift in the economy — a once-in-a-lifetime phase change that happens whenever the foundations of an old economic order are disrupted, and a new basis of wealth creation comes forward to take its place. The last time this happened was in the 1920s and 1930s, when a US economy that was built on farm output became the victim of its own success. Advances in farming led to a food glut. As food prices plummeted, farmers had less money to spend. This, in turn, depressed manufacturing and led to job losses in the cities, too. Land values in both places declined, impoverishing families and trapping them in place.

We remember this as the Great Depression. It lingered until the government stepped in — largely through the war effort — with unprecedented education, housing, transportation, and research investments that created new pathways for all those surplus farmers to come in off the farm, for the factory hands to get back to work, and for both groups to move into the modern industrial middle-class.

Stiglitz thinks that we’re going through much the same kind of process again now, as the postwar manufacturing-based economy that saved us 80 years ago moves offshore, leaving our manufacturing workforce just as surplus and idle as those 1920s farmers were. In his view, the current phase shift is taking us away from industry-as-we’ve-known-it, and on into an economy that will have us relying more and more on many different kinds of knowledge work. (This isn’t a new thesis; Daniel Bell was writing about it back in 1973.) But Stiglitz goes on to point out that because people are misunderstanding the moment, we’re investing in the wrong things.

Austerity and debt reduction will get us nowhere, in this view. In particular: it won’t change the fact that we have too many manufacturing workers and too few information workers. Stiglitz argues forcefully that this gap is likely to remain open until our governments make a long-term commitment to do what they did in the 1940s — that is, fund the kind of aggressive education, research, and infrastructure investments that will finally get us fully transitioned to the new phase. The current economic crisis is doomed to last exactly as long as we delay put off building that necessary to the new information economy. When we come out the other side, there will still be farmers and manufacturers — but even they will be leveraging the power of the Internet to create new wealth. Everybody will.

But Stiglitz is far from the only theorist who’s trying to look beyond the phase change, and figure out what new form wealth might take when we get to the far side of it.

Another one is Thomas Homer-Dixon, a Canadian economist who wrote The Upside of Down. Homer-Dixon marshals evidence that all great empires rise and fall by controlling the dominant energy supply of their age. The Romans used roads and aqueducts to harness solar energy (in the form of food) from around the Mediterranean basin, and used that surplus to fund the most complex society of its time. The Dutch empire rose on its superior ability to master wind technologies — the windmill and the ship — to extend its land holdings, run early manufacturing industries, and extend its trading reach around the globe. The British empire rose on coal-powered steam engines, which gave it more productive industries, railroads, electrical generators, and faster ships. The US eclipsed the Brits due to its vast wealth in oil — a far more concentrated and fungible fuel — and inventions from cars and planes to plastics and fertilizers that allowed it to make the most of its advantages. And the Chinese are now making huge investments in renewable energy and safer, more efficient second-generation nuclear power, which they can use to fuel their ascent to global primacy.

The bottom line in Homer-Dixon’s theory is this: Everything that Americans understand as “wealth” under the current paradigm comes from oil. It’s the foundation of our entire economy, and the ground our superpower status stands on. Our cities are built on the assumption of cheap, plentiful oil. Our consuming patterns are made possible by a fleet of oil-burning trucks, ships, and planes that bring us goods made in oil-driven factories. Our warmaking machine, which is largely tasked with protecting our oil interests around the world, is the single largest consumer of energy on the planet. Even our food is created with vast oil-based inputs of fertilizer and pesticides; and we enjoy a year-round variety of foods (bananas! chocolate! coffee!) that is unprecedented in human history because oil makes cheap transport and refrigeration possible.

And the pain and fear caused when we’re forced to face this fundamental fact explains quite a bit about why ideas like climate change and peak oil are so viscerally terrifying to so many Americans. (In many right-wing circles, denial about the American oil addiction is now a core piece of their political identity. It’s considered anti-American to even suggest that getting off oil is necessary or possible.) We are so deeply invested in oil, in so many ways, that it’s almost impossible for us to envision a world beyond it. We stand to lose so much that it’s hard to fathom it all.

And this, says Homer-Dixon, is why no empire has ever survived an energy-related phase shift with its full power intact: the reigning hegemons are always too deeply invested in the current system to recognize the change, let alone respond to it in time. And so they are always superceded by some upstart that’s motivated to put more resources and risk into aggressively developing the next source. The decline of oil as the energy reality of the world has deep implications for every aspect of American life in the coming century. It’s a phase shift at the deepest level.

Other theorists, including Gar Alperovitz, Jeffery Sachs and Umair Haque, agree that there’s a phase shift happening under our feet — but they believe the real shift lies in the changing structure of capitalism itself. Forming markets is a core human activity that we’re not any more likely to abandon than eating or breathing. But our understanding of the purpose and value of markets — and the role of capital within them — is overdue for a profound change. Haque argues that “twentieth-century capitalism’s cornerstones shift costs to and borrow benefits from people, communities, society, the natural world, or future generations.” But, he continues, “both cost shifting and benefit borrowing are forms of economic harm that are unfair, non-consensual, and often irreversible.” The result is a great imbalance that we are finally being forced to fully reckon with, one that will call us to radically change our focus, creating a totally new kind of capitalism.

Haque makes a distinction between “thin” and “thick” value. Things with “thin” value tend to be artificial, unsustainable, and meaningless to anyone but the people who produce and consume them. Hummers, McMansions and Big Macs are all examples of thin value items. They’re produced without any recognition of our larger values context or the externalized costs to the community, and consuming them tends to add to the overall imbalance in our economy. Thin value, he writes, is “profit that is in many ways a financial fiction, because it fails to exceed a fuller, truer economic cost of capital.” And the phase shift is evident in the fact that the companies that are falling hardest right now are the ones whose past profits have relied most heavily on monetizing our common wealth for private profit.

“Thick” value — produced by companies that practice “constructive capitalism” — is value that is sustainable, that has a moral component that matters, and that multiplies itself. Companies that practice it tend to win because they produce things that have a deeper meaning to people. Their real wealth isn’t what they’re able to extract from the rest of us, but in their long, deep, trusting relationships with their customers. The world is shifting from the economics of a game reserve to those of an ark, says Haque. The companies that are thriving now are the ones that increasing their focus on “constructive advantage” — “how free a company is of deep debt to people, communities, society, the natural world, or future generations.” While this focus-shift is far from complete, the current economy abounds with firms that are showing us a new way forward. (Apple is a prime example of a company that creates “thick value,” but we’ve seen recently that its commitment to this ideal has some rather glaring thin spots.)

Alperovitz’ vision extends this by revamping how wealth flows in society. He points to a quiet revolution that’s already much further along than anybody realizes — the move toward worker- or consumer-owned cooperative businesses, in which distant shareholders are replaced by local stakeholders who have a deep personal interest in how every aspect of the business is run. Already, four in 10 Americans belong to some type of co-op business (if you have a Costco or a credit union card in your wallet, you’re already on board here); and America’s 30,000 cooperatives provide over 2 million jobs. (Many, many more fun facts here.) The UN has declared 2012 to be the Year of the Co-Op, in recognition of the fact that nearly half the world’s population now belongs to cooperatives. Co-ops are already forming a formidable challenge to Wall Street-driven 20th-century capitalism, and their expansion through the coming century would represent a massive redistribution of labor and wealth — a phase shift that favors the direction Haque suggests.

These are just a handful of the many serious theorists out there describing the deep structural changes we’re undergoing. Not all of them, to be sure, are this cheery (and I’ve made my own contributions to the dystopian canon in the past). There are so many now, in fact, that their very numbers might taken as evidence that we’re going through something uniquely new and deep. Our government is broken. Our economy is broken. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Our major institutions — education, religion, culture — are inadequate to the tasks at hand.

These are all signs of an old world passing away, clearing the way for a new one to arise in its place. And the sooner we let go of our assumption that going back is desirable, or even possible, the sooner we’ll be able to fully embrace the new things that lie ahead.

Sara Robinson is Alternet’s senior editor in charge of the Visions page. A trained social futurist, she’s particularly interested change resistance movements. She does foresight and strategic planning consulting for a wide range of progressive groups.

© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/154056/

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

We need to develop a new economy because the current version is not working. The industrial economy is destroying every aspect of the living planet. And, as it turns out, we need a living planet for our own survival.

In this essay, I briefly describe the horrors of the current interconnected, globalized, planet-destroying house of cards. Then I articulate another way, which is not difficult to do: It would pose quite a challenge to come up with a worse way, and we have several models from which to choose. I will focus on two such models, agrarian anarchy and the post-industrial Stone Age.

What’s wrong?

Detailing all that is wrong with the industrial economy would require libraries full of books. The cryptic version includes, at a minimum, the following: (1) an industrial economy at the apex of western civilization, a set of living arrangements that transfers financial wealth from the poor to the wealthy; (2) human-population overshoot on an overcrowded planet; (3) runaway climate change on an overheated planet; and (4) wholesale destruction of the living planet. The latter brings an extinction rate of a few hundred species each day, along with destruction of potable water and living soil.

In short, as I wrote in the leading journal in my discipline, “the modern world essentially requires one to live immorally. There is no doubt that a society that enslaves, tortures, and kills people and abuses the lands and waters needed for the survival of our species and others is immoral, yet these actions are produced with stunning efficiency by the world’s industrial economy, as epitomized by American empire. Most people know that Big Energy poisons our water, Big Ag controls our food supply, Big Pharma controls the behavior of our children, Wall Street controls the flow of money, Big Ad controls the messages we receive every day, and the criminally rich get richer through exploitation of an immoral system. This is how America works. And, through it all, we think we live moral lives in the land of the free.”

It should be clear that the industrial economy is making us sick, mentally and physically, and also greatly reducing habitat for our species on Earth. As a result, I’m a big fan of terminating this set of living arrangements — that is, I’m a fan of terminating industrialized civilization — and replacing it with a more sane and durable set of living arrangements.

Alternatives

Alternatives abound, and generally rest along a continuum ranging from the current system to the post-industrial Stone Age. I will consider three points along the continuum: (1) the current system, which must be replaced if we are to persist as a species beyond a few decades, (2) agrarian anarchy, and (3) the post-industrial Stone Age.

The current system: industrial economy

The contemporary version of civilization is creating a dire set of predicaments: human-population overshoot, climate chaos, and an unparalleled extinction crisis. It is the primary problem we face. As such, I think it’s time to leave it behind before it leaves us. Considering the ongoing, accelerating collapse of the industrial economy and the virtual absence of national- or international-level discussion about mitigation, I strongly suspect our society is headed for the post-industrial Stone Age within a matter of years, not decades. But communities and the individuals comprising communities have the option of choosing between agrarian anarchy and the post-industrial Stone Age.

Agrarian anarchy

Anarchy assumes the absence of direct or coercive government as a political ideal, while proposing cooperative and voluntary association between individuals and groups as the principal mode for organizing society. This close-to-nature, close-to-our-neighbors approach was the Jeffersonian ideal for the United States, as evidenced by Monticello and the occasional one-liner from Thomas Jefferson. It was also the model promoted by Henry David Thoreau and, more recently, radical thinkers such as Wendell Berry (farmer, writer), Noam Chomsky (linguist, philosopher), Howard Zinn (recently deceased historian), and Tucson-based iconoclastic author Edward Abbey.

Consider, for example, a few well-known lines from Thomas Jefferson: (1) “The result of our experiment will be, that man may be trusted to govern themselves without a master”; (2) I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it”; and (3) “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” Although Jefferson did not call himself an anarchist, his words and ideals indicate he strongly supported the rights and role of individuals, as well as a small government that minimally oversaw the citizenry. The Greco-Latin roots of anarchy suggest the absence of a ruler, which seems like a good idea to me.

Like Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau idealized an agricultural society that was close to nature. Thoreau was a staunch defender of agrarian anarchy, and he focused even more closely on the individual than did Jefferson: “That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” To my knowledge, no state governments believe we’ve yet reached that point.

Fast forward to the late twentieth century, and we find several other philosophers defending agrarian anarchy. Perhaps the best known examples are Wendell Berry, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn, but the clearest voice for agrarian anarchy came from Edward Abbey in the years before he died in 1989: (1) “Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners”; (2) “Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others”; and (3) “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

In my dreams, industrialized nations are headed for agrarian anarchy. Many countries have been there for years and can show us the way, if only we allow them. If a region never acquired ready access to cheap fossil fuels, agrarian anarchy was an obvious approach. How else but a strong sense of self-reliance and dependence on neighbors to grow and distribute all food locally? How else but reliance on those same traits to secure the water supply, and protect it from the insults of industry? How else to develop a human community dominated by mutual respect and mutual trust? Contrary to our current set of living arrangements, no currency is needed: barter fills the bill. Better yet, a gift economy is well-suited to agrarian anarchy.

Post-industrial Stone Age

The first two million years of the human experience, and the first few hundred thousand years for our own species, was spent with relatively small communities living close to the land that supported them. These humans knew each other and they knew the plants and animals with which they shared the area. They had minimal impact on the lands and waters that supported them. These humans spent a few hours each week doing what we call “work,” making sure the members of the community were well-hydrated, well-fed, and warm. This was a durable set of living arrangements, as characterized by its longevity and minimal impact on Earth.

We arrogantly and disparagingly refer to this time as the Stone Age.

The first civilization arose a few thousand years ago. Civilization is characterized by cities. In other words, civilization is defined by by human populations too large to be supported in the local area. Cities require use of clear air, clean water, and healthy food from adjacent wildlands, as well as materials to ensure body temperature is maintained at about 37 C. In exchange, cities export dirty air, polluted water, and garbage to outlying areas. Most civilized people think this is a wonderful exchange, although it is unsustainable by definition because there are limits on nature’s abundance.

The current version of civilization, the world’s industrial economy, is the least sustainable model to date, in part because it requires growth for its survival: Civilizations, like organisms, grow or die. This finite planet cannot support infinite growth.

The world’s industrial economy mainlines ready supplies of inexpensive crude oil. The lifeblood of western civilization, cheap oil infuses our daily lives. Petroleum products transport us easily and conveniently, thus allowing for exchange of materials and ideas. Without inexpensive crude oil to deliver water, food, and building materials, the world’s industrial economy declines.

Each of the six worldwide economic recessions since 1972 was preceded by a spike in the price of crude oil, and the days of cheap oil are behind us. At the global level, peak extraction of crude oil occurred in May 2005. A modest decline in available crude oil, coupled with increased industrialization in lesser-developed countries such as China, India, and Brazil, indicates further spikes in the price of oil lie in our future. That the world has nearly a trillion barrels of crude oil remaining to exploit hardly matters: The price of oil is key to growth of the industrial economy. There is little doubt that future spikes in the price of oil will prove sufficient to terminate the industrial economy, taking us on a one-way trip to the post-industrial Stone Age. Already, expensive oil is overwhelming the ability of central banks and central governments to provide the illusion of economic growth by printing fiat currency. As nearly occurred in 2008 in the wake of oil priced at $147.27 per barrel, western civilization faces an abrupt termination in the face of expensive crude oil.

It is unclear what the future holds. I suspect completion of the ongoing collapse of the industrial economy will engender short-term but large-scale mortality of humans. Shortly thereafter, all “renewable” energy systems will fail because they depend heavily on maintenance and support from oil-driven industries. The batteries associated with most home-based PV solar and wind-energy systems have a life of a decade or so. When collapse of the industrial economy is complete and is followed by inability to generate electricity via “renewable” systems, it seems humans will be forced to live — yet again — close to our neighbors and close to the natural systems that allow for our survival. That is, we’ll be immersed in the post-industrial Stone Age, albeit with plenty of technology that was not present during the Neolithic period. The simplest of these technologies, including knives and jars, will be readily usable for a long time. The more complex technologies, especially those relying on electricity, will fade quickly from our memories.

An economy based on gift exchange

The current version of the industrial economy has most people obsessed with the tertiary economy (symbolic, green pieces of paper and magnetized particles on hard drives). A few thoughtful individuals focus instead on the secondary economy (the items we use in our daily lives), which rests firmly on the foundational but rarely contemplated primary economy. The primary economy is comprised of the raw materials we use to survive, and perhaps even thrive. Faith in the symbols characterizing the tertiary economy will be lost when people recognize there are too few items of use (secondary economy) and too few underlying materials (primary economy). One result will be a profound loss of power in the symbols.

An economy based on exchange of gifts worked for the first two million years of the human experience and, due to collapse of the industrial economy certain to result from ongoing decline of fossil-fuel energy, we’re headed toward a similar set of circumstances. We would do well to allow history to serve as a guide to our fossil-fuel-free future. Our current monetary system is based on faith in symbols and it appears to give us something for nothing. Instead, it steals our sense of community.

People with an abundance of paper wealth have no need to build their human community. Their wealth allows them to buy goods and services, so they need not know the names of the people providing the services. Ditto for the names of the plants, animals, soils, and water providing the services on which we depend for our survival.

On the other hand, financially poor people depend heavily on their neighbors. The rural poor recognize that those neighbors include non-humans as well as humans. True community is woven from gifts, and the gifts come from the lands and waters that support us, as well as from our human neighbors.

A personal example

I had the brass ring. And I let it go. My parents were lifelong educators. So are my only brother and my only sister. Among them, only I reached the pinnacle of the educational world: I was a tenured full professor by the age of 40. I walked away from that life, which I loved, an act that made most people think I’d lost my mind. I walked away after trying to change the morally bankrupt system in which we are immersed when I realized the system was changing me, and not for the better.

I let go of the brass ring after I realized the first step toward destroying this irredeemably corrupt system is to leave it. Because I was born into captivity and assimilated into the normalcy bias of a world gone bonkers, I left later than I should have, and long after I realized the immorality of the system. A large part of this delay resulted from my inability to identify where and how to leave the system. I had come to see the industrial economy at the apex of western civilization as a horrific system but, because it was the only system I ever knew, I didn’t know how to escape it. Finally, after several years of thought and a few aborted attempts to reach escape velocity, my wife and I developed a set of living arrangements on a small property with another small family where we try to model agrarian anarchy.

When I finally tossed aside the brass ring, I worked cooperatively with others to develop to transition toward a gift economy embedded in agrarian anarchy. I live in a small, sparsely populated valley where gifts are the rule, not the exception. I share a small property with a small family of humans, as well as goats, ducks, chickens, and gardens. We have attempted, and continue to attempt, to develop a durable set of living arrangements with particular attention to securing potable, healthy food, appropriate body temperature, and a decent human community. Living in agrarian anarchy in a human community at the edge of empire, I’ve taken responsibility for myself and my neighbors, human and otherwise.

This way of living is far superior to my former life. I drink pure water extracted from a local well with PV solar and hand pumps. I eat healthy, whole foods, much of which is grown on this property. I burn no fossil fuels during my daily life in a well-insulated, off-grid home. I know my neighbors, human and otherwise, and they know me.

Finally, very late in an unexamined life, I came to see the horrors of the way we live, and I let go. Please join me.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

“When the poet stands at nadir the world must indeed be upside-down. If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.”— Excerpt from, The Time of the Assassins, a study of Rimbaud, by Henry Miller

There is no reality-based argument denying this: The present system, as defined by the neoliberal economic order, is as destructive to the balance of nature as it is to the individual, both body and psyche. One’s body grows obese while Arctic ice and wetlands shrink. Biodiversity decreases as psyches are commodified by ever-proliferating, corporatist/consumer state banality.

But the raging soul of the world will not be assaulted without consequence. Mind and body are intertwined and inseparable from nature, and, when nature responds to our assaults, her replies are known to humankind as the stuff of mythic tragedy and natural catastrophe.

“When the poet lives his hell, it is no longer possible for the common man to escape it.”— Excerpt from, The Time of the Assassins, a study of Rimbaud, by Henry Miller

But take heart. As the saying goes, it is always darkest right before it goes completely black.

Rejoice in this: Seeds of futurity require the darkness within soil to dream.

“To go into the dark with a light is to know the light. /To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,/ and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,/ and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”– Wendell Berry, To Know The Dark

What “tangible” and “constructive” things can a poetic sensibility contribute to everyday existence? Here’s one: The atomized denizens of neoliberal culture are in dire need of a novel yet durable sensibility, one bearing the creativity and stamina required, for example, to withstand the police state rebuffs inflicted by the ruthless authoritarian keepers of the present order…as is the case, when OWS dissidents initiate attempts to retake, inhabit, and re-imagine public space.

Yet, while it is all well and good to be politically enlightened, approaching the tumult of human events guided by reason and restraint, if the self is not saturated in poetry, one will inhabit a dismal tower looking over a desiccated wasteland.

The crackpot realist’s notion that poetry has no value other than what can be quantified in practical terms emerges from the same mindset that deems nature to be merely worth what it can be rendered down to as a commodity. The trees of a rain forest can be pulped to paper cups. A human being is only the content of his resume. The underlying meaning of this sentiment: The value of one’s existence is derived by the act of being an asset of the 1%.

Resultantly, the tattered remnants of the neoliberal imagination (embodied in lofty but content-devoid Obama speechifying and the clown car demolition derby of Republican politics) spends its days in a broken tower of the mind, insulated from this reality: The exponentially increasing consequences (e.g., economic collapse, perpetual war, ecocide) created by the excesses of the present paradigm will shake those insular towers to theirs foundations, and, will inevitably caused the structures to totter and collapse.

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;

And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave

Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score

Of broken intervals…And I, their sexton slave!

– Hart Crane , excerpt from The Broken Tower

We have been “sexton slave” to this destructive order long enough; its lodestar is a death star.

In polar opposition, a poetic view of existence insists that one embrace the sorrow that comes at the end of things. The times have bestowed on us a shuffle to the graveside of our culture, and, we, like members of a New Orleans-style, second line, funeral procession, must allow our hearts to be saturated by sorrowful songs. Yet when the service is complete, the march away from the boneyard should shake the air with the ebullient noise borne of insistent brass.

“Often we’re not so much afraid of our own limitations, as we are of the infinite within us.”–Nelson Mandela (from an interview from his prison cell, conducted by the late Irish poet and priest, John O’Donnahey)

In this way, we are nourished by the ineffable, whereby unseen components of consciousness provide us the strength to carry the weight of darkness. Therefore, to those who demand this of poets: that all ideas, notions, flights of imagination, revelries, swoons of intuition, Rabelaisian rancor, metaphysical overreach, unnerving apprehensions, and inspired misapprehensions be tamed, rendered practical, and only considered fit to be broached in reputable company when these things bring “concrete” answers to polite dialog–I ask you this, if the defining aspects of our existence were constructed of concrete, would not the world be made of the material of a prison?

Moreover, is this not the building material and psychic criteria comprising the neoliberal paradigm? Is it any wonder that the concept of freedom is under siege?

Carl Jung averred, when a disconnect occurs between the inner life of the individual and the outward exigencies of daily life that “the Gods […] become diseases.” One way, this assertion can be taken is: There are multiple forces, tangible and intangible, in play in our lives and the trajectory of events e.g., the personal, in the form of the ghosts of trauma that haunt individual memory, but there exist, as well, extant and within, the collective spirit of an age. Tragically, in our own time, within the precincts of power, our national house of spirits has become a madhouse.

Yet beneath the gibbering cacophony of the insane asylums of past eras, beneath the haze of pharmacologically induced stupors of the institutions of the present, there exists much pain. This is the toll taken by a manic flight from honest suffering. At present, this is what we’re given in our age of cultural and political disconnect and its attendant sense of nebulous dread.

Paradoxically, while the forces of nature are impersonal, the dilemma feels very personal. Therefore, on this journey to the end of empire, when impersonal elements are in play, one can become alienated from the dehumanizing trajectory of the times. Likewise, as exemplified by the U.S. political system, what process is more impersonal than the process of decay? Apropos, the air is permeated with a reek of putrefaction.

Yet the earth is kind, for one can use putrescent material in the process of renewal. The loam of earth is enriched by the rancid…just don’t swallow it down whole…doing so, will cause you to become ill.

Importantly, because a cultural breakdown is occurring, and culture carries the criteria of psyche, the acts of social engagement through dissent, cultural re-imagining and rebuilding can have a propitious effect upon individual consciousness, an endeavor James Hillman termed “soul-making”. Remember to disguise yourself as yourself when approached by ghosts of calcified habit and gods of tumultuous change. This is essential: Because what takes hold and brings about the collapse of an empire…is a loss of collective soul e.g., the type of loss of meaning and purpose evinced when only a meaningless, zombie-like drive remains, because, even though, the culture is dead, it refuses to accept the shroud of the earth’s enveloping soil…to have its decomposing remains broken down and returned to the cycle of all things.

As circumstances stand, at present, for the 1%, their refusal to accept the inevitable has yielded grave ramifications for the people, fauna, and flora of the planet. Although, due to their seemingly vacuum-sealed insularity, ensured by vast wealth, the economic and political elite have yet to be touched by the consequences of their actions, much less forced down to earth.

Of course, this behavior defies logic, is in breach of the law, and is an affront to any workable code of ethics–as well as, stands in defiance to the laws of nature, including the force of gravity. But you can count on this, “the unseen hand of the market” (actually the buckling backs of the 1%) can’t hold up the 99%’s swaying tower of hubris for much longer, and when it comes down, stand clear, for there are no bystanders when an empire crumbles.

“That’s just the way it is.”

As exhibited by the often bland, “normal” outward appearance of a serial killer, when the apologists and operatives of an exploitive, destructive system appear to be reasonable, they can go about their business without creating general alarm. By the same token, while many present day Republicans are zealots–barnburners raving into the flames of the conflagrations created by the militarist/national security/police/prison industrial state–Barack Obama and the Democratic Party serve as normalizers of the pathologies of late empire.

In this manner, atrocious acts can be committed by the state, with increasing frequency, because, over the passage of time, such outrages will have been allowed to pass into the realm of the mundane, and are thus bestowed with a patina of acceptability.

In nineteenth century Britain, the sugar that sweetened the tea of oh-so civilized, afternoon teatime was harvested by brutalized, Caribbean slaves, who rarely lived past the age of thirty, as, for example, in our time, in our blood-wrought moments of normalcy, we trudge about in sweatshop sewn clothing, brandishing i-Phones manufactured by factory enslaved teenage girls who are forced to work 14 hour plus shifts.

“That’s just the way it is” might be one of the most soul-defying phrases in the human lexicon.

Contrast this with the OSW slogan, “The beginning is near.” Hold both sentiments in your mind and discover which one allows your own heart to beat in sync with the heart of the world, and which will grant the imagination and stamina required to remake the world anew.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” – Carl Jung

APOCALYPTICISM is an actual word. According to Wikipedia, it is “the religious belief that there will be an apocalypse, a term which originally referred to a revelation of God’s will, but now usually refers to belief that the world will come to an end time very soon, even within one’s own lifetime.”

The idea that “the world will end” is not limited to fire and brimstone. Various New Agers believe that 2012 will result in an alignment of the galactic something or other, fulfilling the Hopi prophecy of the Blue Kachina and the reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles…and stuff…then we will enter a golden age. Sound familiar?

Darin Drda, author of The Four Global Truths, writes:

Although they speak different languages, both tell the same story: the fate of life on Earth will be determined by forces beyond humanity’s control. This idea strikes me as a very dangerous one, certain to accelerate our collective journey down the road to ruin. What’s more, it doesn’t jive with the powerful and paradigm-shifting insight of 20th century physics that reality is participatory.

In 2011, TIME magazine dubbed “The Protestor” Person of the Year, their cover emblazoned with a shrouded figure peering out from behind a kerchief. I believe the more accurate label would have been “The Participant” – to reflect the global awakening that is gaining steam around the globe. From the streets of Cairo, to the towers of Wall St, as Charles Eisenstein intoned “We the people are awakening and we will not go back to sleep.”

The true definition of ‘apocalypse’ is more akin to ‘the lifting of the veil.’ What has long been hidden shall be revealed. Is it possible to understand this potential, and how to apply it, without falling victim to the aforementioned ‘isms of divine destruction, collapse, or extraterrestrial saviours?

Daniel Pinchbeck points the way in his book 2012: The Return of Queztalcoatl. He suggests we are being called to participate in a shift in human consciousness, catalyzed by the crises that appear to be culminating in this age.

“Right now, we are being forced to witness the shadow of the psyche projected into material form through systemic misuse of technology, biospheric destruction, and corrupt geopolitics based on entrenched egotism and greed. [...]

Like the coiled arms of the galaxy, the development of consciousness appears to follow a spiral, sidereal motion, represented by the archetypal symbol of the mandala, which is universal in sacred art.

Whether found in dreams or wheat fields, mandalas symbolize stages in a psychic process – the helical approach of the psyche toward integration of the ego and the self or higher self, through the difficult work of illuminating the dark matter within the unconscious.”

The dark matter of our unconscious has created the human world we inhabit, including the crises that we appear unable to solve. Our old story of the Self, that we are “isolated beings in an indifferent universe” (and all it’s variations), is breaking down, because in fact, it was never objectively real in the first place. It was constructed by our level of consciousness.

The new consciousness struggles to be born.

The Occupy Movement seemingly embodied this desire to participate one again, erupting onto the collective stage late last year. And yet, even as creative direct-actions continue, many camps are struggling with the old patterns of Separation – the idea that to change the world we must apply Force. If only we could exert enough pressure on the “bad” elements of our society, we can keep humanity’s innate greed and destruction at bay.

But that’s not enough.

Spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl, in a fascinating interview from early on in the Occupations, said “Most of the people want to change fully, but they don’t want to engage fully, because it confronts your life and the depths of who you are,” says . “When people are confronted to make a shift in their consciousness, they stay with the [old patterns].”

This is why the current Occupations are embroiled in conflict. The repressed trauma and old wounds of Separation have now found an outlet, and any attempts to stifle them, even in the name of achieving organizational unity, will meet more resistance.

Thomas continues:

It cannot be a movement that is against something. Most movements that are against something are stuck being against. And they are not for something better. And you need to have more people that are for something better. For the light, not against the structure.

Around awake people, more awakening will happen. Awakening is spiral. If you spend time with someone who is more awake than you, then chances are your consciousness will be elevated. And if through your practice, you manage to stabilize your consciousness at this level it will become your reality as well.

What is needed at this time is those who can hold a global awareness. People who are grounded, that are literally coming from the future. They look the same, but they are motivated from a different place. If you are coming from the future, and you embody this, then the future will manifest around you.

This future ‘global awareness’ unfolds from the consciousness of the Connected Self.

Darin Drda explains:

We are not, as the old guard preaches, feeble and passive observers of a fixed, objective order or cogs in a giant, lifeless machine. Nor are we, as the new guard intones, the all-powerful masters of our own destiny, capable of instantly conjuring anything we want out of pixie dust and wishful thinking. We are co-creative participants in a great cosmic adventure, the outcome of which must always remain unknown.

In summary: consciousness creates our world. Our current story is now breaking down, an inevitable conclusion to the unconscious shadows we have collectively repressed. The Apocalypse is about uncovering/reintegrating our projections, essentially forcing us: not to evolve, but to make a CHOICE to evolve.

This choice is crucial. Without choice, we are merely pawns of fate, adrift in an indifferent cosmos.

Instead, we are called to embody this new consciousness, not as an opinion, but as a lived relationship with ourselves and the Other. While we can only do this on an individual level, we need other “awakened beings” to hold us at this higher note until we can stabilize – and then help others do the same.

This is the true meaning of the apt quoted maxim “Be the change you want to see in the world.” We must literally BE from the future – retrieving a higher order of self that does not recreate the past. We must resist the death throes of our old institutions, even while we flow towards our new ones. We must bow humbly to our ancestors and their echoes of pain, include the injustice of the present, and embrace the uncertainty of our Great Transition.

If this sounds ambitious, consider the words of Arundhati Roy:

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”