4 posts tagged “o”
So what are we to do in the meantime, while we wait for collapse, followed by good things? It's no use wasting your energy, running yourself ragged and ageing prematurely, so get plenty of rest, and try to live a slow and measured life. One of the ways industrial society dominates us is through the use of the factory whistle: few of us work in factories, but we are still expected to work a shift. If you can avoid doing that, you will be ahead. Maintain your freedom to decide what to do at each moment, so that you can do each thing at the most opportune time. Specifically try to give yourself as many options as you can, so that if any one thing doesn't seem to be working out, you can switch to another. The future is unpredictable, so try to plan so as to be able to change your plans at any time. Learn to ignore all the people who earn their money by telling you lies. Thanks to them, the world is full of very bad ideas that are accepted as conventional wisdom, so watch out for them and come to your own conclusions. Lastly, people who lack a sense of humour are going to be in for a very hard time, and can drag down those around them. Plus, they are just not that funny. So avoid people who aren't funny, and look for those who can laugh at the world no matter what happens.
Dmitri Orlov, Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation, talk June 16, 2009, Dublin
I regret to say, however, that I am now less inclined than before to believe that we will respond positively to the ecological challenge. Then I saw us confronted with the grand opportunity to create a more humane future, and I believed that the transition to a more ecological enlightened world view had begun. But we have frittered away the two decades since the first Earthday without seizing this grand opportunity. To the extent that we have acted other than symbolically, we have spent the last 20 years doing all the easiest and least painful things. Now we must do the hard things: reshape basic attitudes and expectations, alter established lifestyles, and restructure the economy accordingly. But rather than adopt ecological principles for public policy, we seem to do everything we can do to avoid facing up to the inevitability of limits and of changing our profligate way of life. In other words, time has grown shorter and the problems have become larger and more entrenched, but our resistance to dealing with the constructively has increased.
Worse, the end of the Cold War, far from bringing about an era of universal peace, has made the world more complex, unstable, and dangerous place than it was a decade ago. History has reawakened from nearly a half-century of hibernation, Long frozen political, ethnic, and religious passions have thawed, and the economic struggle both for markets and for resources has simultaneously heated up. The depressing prospect is for widespread conflict and turmoil in many areas of the globe. Preoccupation with geopolitical advantage, military realignments, and economic competitiveness seems likely to preempt the political agenda in the coming decade – hardly the best political environment for making thoughtful and far-sighted decisions about human future based on ecological harmony.
Nevertheless. I have by no means lost heart or hope, and I continue to work for the benefit of the Earth and the life it bears, as well as for the posterity that has never done anything for me. I urge the reader to do the same. Together we may make a difference.
William Ophuls: Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited, 1992
We would make a mess out of our transition if we fail to understand its nature. The terrible possibility before us is that there will be a continued insistence on growth, with our last energies, by economic advisors who do not understand. There would then be no reserves with which to make a change, maintain order, and cushion the impact on human life of a period when population must drop. At some point, great gaunt towers of nuclear power plants, oil wells, and urban clusters would stand empty in the wind for lack of enough technology to keep them running. A new cycle of dinosaurs would have gone its way.
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It is exciting to watch as great changes in energy, economics, and environment unfold in detail day by day. Although we do not yet see much of evidence of it, the energy theories suggest that there will be a large shift of population back to the land, with more feedback of human work to the solar energy chain. We will need plans for helping city people make the transition to farming.
Individuals will be needed more as machines do less. With less energy, there will have to be more intelligent application of our resources to make sensible transitions to steady state. The best of our technology can be miniaturized and used with thrift. Nature will again help us, and more than ever before. We can achieve a better understanding for individuals to guide them in adapting to the increasing need for them. The road from energy crisis to steady state could be difficult but satisfying, with the peace of low energy at its end. Human beings will talk for many years of the flash fire of the twentieth century, its meaning, and its legacy for the continuing balance between humanity and nature.
Howard T and Elisabeth C Odum: Energy Basis for Man and Nature, 1976
The direction of the required change is clear. It is simply not possible over the long run to have liberty without authority, exploitation without husbandry, equality without excellence, individualism without fraternity, self-seeking without morality, or rationality without reason. Above all, it is not possible to have the world without the spirit, for it is as true as it was two millennia ago that man does not live by bread alone. Instead of exploiting matter ever more viciously, we must therefore turn to exploring and bringing into play the most underdeveloped resource on the planet: the human psyche.
This, then, is the phoenix stirring in the ashes of the funeral pyre consuming liberal polity. A politics based on dead matter must have a deadly outcome, but a spiritual politics rooted in the mythic depths of the human psyche and the organic wealth of the natural order can make possible a very different kind of future – one in which all life, human and nonhuman alike, can continue to flourish. Only a renewed connection to the transcendent realm will permit a humanity grown to numerous and too powerful for its own good not just to survive but to achieve the good life in the centuries to come. The exploration of consciousness and the pursuit of self-knowledge can no longer be the work of isolated individuals and groups, as in the past. Rather, society must be reorganized and politics must be reinvented to make the Aristotelian quest for wisdom and virtue, and the Platonic search for truth and beauty, into the raison d’etre of the planetary civilization now struggling to be born.
The essential politics of such civilization are foreshadowed in the final paragraph of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society. The human mind will achieve a genuine mastery over matter only when it has risen above “a mere property career” – that is, when it has finally tamed the self-destructive material dynamic unleashed by the Neolithic Transition and intensified by the Enlightenment. In so doing, humankind will ascend to “the next higher plane of society” – “a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient Gentes.” Thus the problematique of the modern civilization has a genuine “solution.” It is by becoming Thoreau’s more experienced and wiser savages that we can fulfill our true destiny as civilized beings, guarantee the the continuity of the civilization itself, and preserve the real political achievements of the Enlightenment from the forces of endarkenment now threatening to engulf them.
William Ophuls: Requiem for Modern Politics, 1998
