Jul 27, 2013 | Emotional/Spiritual
We have a winner: According to the American Journal of Public Health, motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death by injury between 2008 and 2009. However, that dubious distinction has been replaced by a disturbing new cause: Today, the form of death by injury that takes more American lives than any other is suicide.The indicated change in death by injury is the culmination of a decade-long trend, and it appears that the primary reason may be the economic downturn in the U.S. and around the world. In the U.S., the rate of death by suicide increased by 15 percent over the past ten years. In Greece, the suicide rate for men rose by 24 percent between 2007 and 2009, according to The New York Times, and by another 40 percent in 2012. Suicides motivated by economic crisis grew by 52 percent in Italy in 2010, the most recent year for which statistics were available. What we do know is that researchers say the trend is intensifying at alarming rates wherever austerity measures have taken place and as the economic downturn continues to worsen.
Jul 15, 2013 | New Cosmology
Throughout the history of life on earth, humans have created stories to explain their origins on earth and their role on the planet. The New Cosmology is a New Story of the universe and our role in it. The cosmologies of some of the earliest humans depicted their relationships with the heavens, the land, the elements, and how interactions with these gave birth to their tribes and sustained them throughout their time on earth. Origin stories from the earliest humans depict their interdependence with the rest of the universe and clearly communicate an intimacy with nature and the cosmos on which their lives depended for survival.
Jul 9, 2013 | Collapse of Industrial Civilization
For me there are three enormous obstacles to exiting empire, all of which are related to the internal dynamics of empire programming, and they are so profound that, on one level, radically altering one’s living arrangements may be the least daunting facet of making the break.
May 20, 2013 | Collapse of Industrial Civilization
People who are interpreting the collapse – it’s going to be this, it’s going to be that, and myself included – are all operating under the belief systems of the current paradigm while we’re still in that paradigm, and there’s no way we can fully understand a new paradigm until we’ve moved into it, and even then, it will probably take some time for it to truly reveal itself…and who we’ll be. 300 years later, we barely understand The Enlightenment, and there have been two major paradigm shifts since then (oh, you didn’t know about those?).
Apr 12, 2013 | Carolyn's Articles
With The Age of Limits our purpose was twofold, to speak the words… Decline, Collapse, and Die Off. Words that are truly devastating in their scope—and to create a conversational format based on face to face human interaction, without the deceptive anonymity of pixels on a screen. In these ways The Age of Limits was a great first year success as attendees stepped into the conversational space to share their own experiences and understanding of the emergent collapse, stepping outside of the emotional refuge of quantitative analysis, blog posts and comment streams to engage one another on a human and personal level. As this engagement progressed, as our temporary weekend community matured, people began to take risks and reveal their private emotional processing of collapse…and their own part in it. And this process of risk taking, of emotional self revelation, became itself one of the powerful currents of the event; a point well illustrated by our video of attendee interactions, and an outcome that was not anticipated by myself as the organizer. Lesson learned.
Mar 22, 2013 | Preparation
The Age of Limits directly addresses our developing understanding of the core issues relating to the emerging decline of the western industrialized model and the practical adaptations and preparations that apply on the personal, family and local levels. In-depth conversations with John Michael Greer, Carolyn Baker, Guy McPherson, Gail Tverberg, Albert Bates, and Dmitry Orlov–May 17-22, 2013
Feb 1, 2013 | Options/ New Paradigm
In the twenty-first century, industrial civilization is crumbling around us, and we are compelled to notice that a number of Enlightenment assumptions no longer apply or at the very least, have outlived their utility in a world unraveling. One of these is the notion that the universe is rational and orderly. The word that perhaps best describes the current era is chaos. So does this mean that reason is dead, and chaos reigns? Does it mean that we must choose which of the two is actually true, despite what our instincts tell us?
Jan 14, 2013 | Collapse of Industrial Civilization
Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change”describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
Jan 4, 2013 | Options/ New Paradigm
In a time of decline, demise, unraveling and what is very likely to be the collapse of industrial civilization and the paradigm on which it rests, it is crucial, in my opinion, to grasp and nourish the opposite of descent by attending to all that may facilitate an ascent to a rebirth of humanity. Descent, in fact, is only one half of the story of civilization that is now playing out its last act. From the ashes of that collapsed paradigm, another will emerge, and our work in current time is to forge a framework with which it can be constructed—a skeleton of sanity, sagacity, creativity, compassion, and vision to be enfleshed on the bare bones of what we modestly call “preparation,” knowing that today’s preparation is tomorrow’s next culture.
Dec 31, 2012 | Feature Articles, Society In Decline
Make no mistake: the solution is complex and must dealt with from a wide range of issues including gun control, mental health, socio-economic and cultural issues, government, movies and video violence, and other contributing factors. There can be no doubt that this is a problem with men.
