6 posts tagged “survival”
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
No, the only fundamentally unsolved problem is the unsteady interregnum between imperial ages which may be dying and a planetary society which struggles to be born is whether the rich and fortunate are imaginative enough and the resentful and underprivileged poor patient enough to begin to establish a true foundation of better sharing, fuller co-operation and joint planetary work. The significance of the Mediterranean setback is quite simple that it underlines how little those nations with the genuine power to act – for conservation, against pollution, for the shared commons – are ready to confront the cost, minimal though it is compared with the gargantuan wastes of war. In short, no problem is insoluble in the creation of a balanced and conserving planet save humanity itself. Can it reach in time the vision of joint survival? Can its inescapable physical interdependence – the chief new insight of our century – induce that vision? We do not know. We have the duty to hope.
Barbara Ward in Progress for a Small Planet, 1979
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?
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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In this time of grave decision, when all the goodness in man must be called forth to subjugate the bad, when our survival depends upon the victory of wisdom and knowledge over stupidity and dogma, we would do well to pay heed to the word of a poet who has expressed the inarticulate thoughts of may of us who look forward hopefully to a more meaningful future for mankind. If the words of Rabindranath Tagore were to become the creed of all men, there would be little doubt that our civilization, and with it our freedom, would survive:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free:
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls:
Where the words come out from the depth of truth;
Where the tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action –
Into the heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Harrison Brown in The Challenge of Man’s Future, 1954
It is only in the last days of the Cosmic Calender that substantial intellectual abilites have evolved on the planet Earth. The coordinated functioning of both cerebral hemispheres is the tool Nature has provided for our survival. We are unlikely to survive if we do not make full and creative use or our human intelligence.
“We are a scientific civilization,” declared Jacob Bronowski. “That means a civilization in which knowledge and integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge….. Knowledge is our destiny.”
Carl Sagan: Dragons of Eden , 1977
