The popular discourse concerning peak oil and climate change includes concerns about collapse of the civilization as we know it today, imploding economies and the longevity of the American Way of Life. These euphemisms obscure the realty that survival is not an abstraction about societies, economies and cultures but rather about life and death of billions of people. Thus a change to a different way of living – a low energy way – is not negotiable. We need to reduce our use of fossil fuel or we will die. Skills of low energy living, proven over thousands of years, have atrophied in our culture and must be relearned. This will not be an easy process; hundreds of community practices must be rediscovered.
Plan C addresses the issue of survival by offering ideas and techniques for living with less. The strategies and tactics described are tools for a life long effort towards becoming a different kind of human being. My wish is that you, readers of this book, will find the creative seed within yourselves to transform your lives with all your heart, soul and strength, and, with joy and spirit, do this with your neighbors in your communities for the future of humankind and for all life on earth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I grasp the hands of those next (to) me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work.” It will not easy. But what generation has ever been given a chance and a challenge to transform its world?
Yet great and grave though the problems that confront us are, mankind has a powerful armamentarium with which to engage them – its collective genius and its seemingly unquenchable spirit. That spirit and that genius, nonetheless, can wither and come to naught without both a feasible plan and the will to carry it out. And they can work at cross purposes where combined with arrogance in seeking the conquest of nature rather than a harmonious balance with it. Instead intellect and spirit must be joined with historical perspective, a keen awareness of limitations, and a clear perception of the relevance of all strands in the web of life in generating a formula for the bounteous, long-term continuance of our species on an uncrowded and ecologically wholesome earth. Better management of the planet and its resources at all levels is called for. That starts with a flexible, legislatively based agenda for action, arrived at by way of a searching and balanced discussion and assessment of alternatives and their consequences. I have sought in these last chapters to contribute to such a discussion. I also suggest some interim actions. But a public will to equal the task at hand is of the essence. And the tides of time are running low.
Preston Cloud: Cosmos, Earth and Man, 1978
I am a novelist. I have no theory, no system nor ideology to propose or to defend. It just seems to me that we are facing a unique alternative: either learn the resigned courage of being poor or find again the inflexible courage to be rich. In both cases, so-called Christian charity will prove itself powerless. The times will be cruel.
Jean Raspail in Le Camp de Saints, 1973 (preface 1985)
Preserving and increasing options is a major component of a self-saving world. Making it a habit would be a part of the answer to the question, How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? Time-inclusive thinking began when the first farmers planted their seeds instead of eating them (it must have seemed a risky investment). The story of civilization is the story of ever new forms of thinking ahead and the results of those forms. How the story will play out we have no way of knowing. The product of even the most imaginative and prudent forethought is not certainty but surprise. This is the reward for infinite-game generosity. Surprise plus memory equals learning. Endless surprise, diligent memory, endless learning. …
Stewart Brand in The Clock of the Long Now, 1999,
So human progenies, if unrestrain’d,
By climate friended, and by food sustain’d
O’er seas and soils, prolific hordes! would spread
Erelong, and deluge their terraqueous bed;
But war, and pestilence, disease, and dearth,
Sweep the superfluous myriads from the earth.
Thus while new forms reviving tribes acquire
Each passing moment, as the old expire;
Like insects swarming in the noontide bower,
Rise into being, and exist an hour;
The births and deaths contend with equal strife,
And every pore of Nature teems with Life;
Which buds or breaths from Indus to the Poles,
And Earth’s vast surface kindles, as it rolls!
Erasmus Darwin in The Temple Of Nature Or The Origin Of Society, 1803, (Canto IV)
Among those concerned about population and development, there were always two mainstreams: Population optimists and population pessimists. The optimists did not just consider all problems solvable. They consider the population growth of the present time the best proof for a positive connection between population and economic growth. Pessimists consider the growing population primarily a treat: From general poverty over famine to a general destabilization of the society.
We are not agreeing with any of these “schools of thought”. Because this book shows: Population development and human development are closely related. But there is no linear connection between the population of a region and the the standard of living of this region. Therefore will the last dilemma mentioned in this book remain unsolved: That our development efforts is aiming at a standard of living, that can not be sustained (can not be made general in an ecological perspective).
Rainer Münz et al in Wie schnell wächst die Zahl der Menschen?, (How fast is the population growing?) 2007
Exposing Man’s mind to the laws of Nature may help him discover and apply whatever insight and foresight he possesses for dealing with the problems of relationships to himself and others, and to the universe. This way of thinking about Man and Nature and relationship and wisdom is new to most, and to be of value will require modern patterns of perceiving one’s self and others. New attitudes and behavioural patterns will follow.
It is simpler to conceive such notions than to apply them in everyday life. Nevertheless, it is far easier to reach objectives based upon sound concepts and hypotheses than upon those without basis. Hence the challenge with which Man is generally confronted at this point is to see himself as a biological and metabiological entity, possessing attributes capable of reversing some of the devolutionary trends. There attributes can also be directed and disciplined to facilitated and increase the probability of achieving a greater measure of fulfilment in life that has been possible until now.
Paradoxically, this challenge and hope exist in the face of enigmas more difficult to overcome than ever before, because greater opportunities for fulfillment are matched by correspondingly greater obstacles. For this reason, wisdom, understood as a new kind of strength, is a paramount necessity for Man. Now, even more that ever before, it is required as a basis for fitness, to maintain life itself on the face of this planet, and as an alternative to paths toward alienation or despair.
Jonas Salk in The Survival of the Wisest, 1973
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Until we succeed at nurturing these additional cognitive skills, "trends and their implied problems," will remain hidden behind problems displayed by immediate conditions. Civil laws and religious codes will fail to create behaviors that keep human population in a graceful balance with the available resources and technology. Outside of an enlightened autocracy, a rapidly decreasing population will not be an institutional agenda. For it to become part of a democracy’s agenda, it would first have to be part of a majority of the constituency’s agenda. Achieving a graceful life for all, independent of institutional action would require this level of thinking to be the possession of most members of the global community. And this would require nurturing each individual’s thinking processes well beyond what we have accomplished in the past.
It is not a simple task, but achieving a graceful social existence depends on it.
Jack Alpert in Nurture can change our course (article) 2004
Natural resources are the building blocks of civilization and an essential requirement of daily existence. The inhabitants of planet Earth have been blessed with a vast supply of most basic materials. But we are placing increased pressures on these supplies, and in some cases we face, in our lifetimes, or those of our children, the prospect of severe resource depletion. If we rely on warfare to settle these disputes over raw materials, the human toll will be great. To avoid this fate, and to ensure an adequate supply of essential materials, we must work now to establish a global system of resource conservation and collaboration.
Michael T Klare in Resource Wars, 2001
When the vague indications for a novel thinking beyond the capitalist paradigm should ever turn into political and societal changes, than intellectual insight alone, be it important and necessary, will not suffice. A radical transformation apparently demands more, either the final collapse, which can no longer be ruled out, or the emergence of a novel consciousness reaching beyond our narrow, selfish, anxious I. A consciousness based on an identification with the surrounding world, a feeling of being a part of the entirety, of which we indeed are a part, of which we are fed, supported and kept alive, a consciousness which needs no rules, which can be eluded, no moral imperative, which are considered depressing and restricting. A consciousness which considers that what is hurting the biosphere also is an injury and a treat of ourselves.
There are very little signs of the emergence of such a consciousness. But it is our only hope.
The real progress in our world is the development from the simple to the complex, a real act of creation, because in each step novel qualities emerge, which are not inherent in the parts of the created systems.
It is time for this development in each of us and in our surroundings, to provide a new step in our consciousness of the total. This is my attempt, pulled between despair, anger and hope, to give a small contribution thereto.
Lothar Mayer in Ein system siegt sich zu Tode (A system is winning for Death) 1992
