![]() Royal Bank Plaza Toronto by Amy Allcock It’s been a tiring week — lots of work, lousy weather, and everyone around me seems to be suffering from colds, allergies etc. My stress level is rising, because after weeks of improvement in my health, my fatigue level has risen (and my running performance dropped) this week — the last time this happened was just before the onset of my colitis. Plus, my first out-of-country trip in months is coming up next week, and I find flying to the US gets more stressful with every new xenophobic regulation. And, just to make things worse, my laptop monitor has shorted out (HP Compaq this time, not a Dell — nine months old). So if my blog posts suddenly stop for a few days, you’ll know why. This coming week, I’ll be writing about Kathy Sierra’s brilliant suggestions for engaging presentations and conversations, about Jeff Vail’s rhizome theory (the state of my computer permitting), and, in a multi-part article, about George Monbiot’s important new book Heat. I’m getting increasingly concerned about the (apparent lack of) scalability of bottom-up, networked actions — having seen the ultimate failure of the Dean campaign, the hopelessness of the US political situation when the only alternative (the Democratic party) shows it cannot offer any real alternative to the worst administration in the history of the US, and the struggle to get Intentional Community, community-based energy and food co-ops and other community-based models to catch on. It seems partly to be a matter of attention (not getting enough of it, thanks to the corporatist media and the general attention deficit, ignorance and cynicism of the public), and partly a matter of lack of urgency and lack of resources. We seem to be suffering from terminal inertia at a time when we are running out of time. The floor is yours. Tell us what’s on your mind, and let’s have a conversation about something you care about. |
Navigation
Collapsniks
Albert Bates (US)
Andrew Nikiforuk (CA)
Brutus (US)
Carolyn Baker (US)*
Catherine Ingram (US)
Chris Hedges (US)
Dahr Jamail (US)
Dean Spillane-Walker (US)*
Derrick Jensen (US)
Dougald & Paul (IE/SE)*
Gail Tverberg (US)
Guy McPherson (US)
Honest Sorcerer
Janaia & Robin (US)*
Jem Bendell (UK)
Mari Werner
Michael Dowd (US)*
Nate Hagens (US)
Paul Heft (US)*
Post Carbon Inst. (US)
Resilience (US)
Richard Heinberg (US)
Robert Jensen (US)
Roy Scranton (US)
Sam Mitchell (US)
Tim Watkins (UK)
Umair Haque (UK)
William Rees (CA)
XrayMike (AU)
Radical Non-Duality
Essential Reading
Archive by Category
My Bio, Contact Info, Signature Posts
About the Author (2023)
My Circles
E-mail me
--- My Best 200 Posts, 2003-22 by category, from newest to oldest ---
Collapse Watch:
Hope — On the Balance of Probabilities
The Caste War for the Dregs
Recuperation, Accommodation, Resilience
How Do We Teach the Critical Skills
Collapse Not Apocalypse
Effective Activism
'Making Sense of the World' Reading List
Notes From the Rising Dark
What is Exponential Decay
Collapse: Slowly Then Suddenly
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Making Sense of Who We Are
What Would Net-Zero Emissions Look Like?
Post Collapse with Michael Dowd (video)
Why Economic Collapse Will Precede Climate Collapse
Being Adaptable: A Reminder List
A Culture of Fear
What Will It Take?
A Future Without Us
Dean Walker Interview (video)
The Mushroom at the End of the World
What Would It Take To Live Sustainably?
The New Political Map (Poster)
Beyond Belief
Complexity and Collapse
Requiem for a Species
Civilization Disease
What a Desolated Earth Looks Like
If We Had a Better Story...
Giving Up on Environmentalism
The Hard Part is Finding People Who Care
Going Vegan
The Dark & Gathering Sameness of the World
The End of Philosophy
A Short History of Progress
The Boiling Frog
Our Culture / Ourselves:
A CoVid-19 Recap
What It Means to be Human
A Culture Built on Wrong Models
Understanding Conservatives
Our Unique Capacity for Hatred
Not Meant to Govern Each Other
The Humanist Trap
Credulous
Amazing What People Get Used To
My Reluctant Misanthropy
The Dawn of Everything
Species Shame
Why Misinformation Doesn't Work
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The Right to Die
CoVid-19: Go for Zero
Pollard's Laws
On Caste
The Process of Self-Organization
The Tragic Spread of Misinformation
A Better Way to Work
The Needs of the Moment
Ask Yourself This
What to Believe Now?
Rogue Primate
Conversation & Silence
The Language of Our Eyes
True Story
May I Ask a Question?
Cultural Acedia: When We Can No Longer Care
Useless Advice
Several Short Sentences About Learning
Why I Don't Want to Hear Your Story
A Harvest of Myths
The Qualities of a Great Story
The Trouble With Stories
A Model of Identity & Community
Not Ready to Do What's Needed
A Culture of Dependence
So What's Next
Ten Things to Do When You're Feeling Hopeless
No Use to the World Broken
Living in Another World
Does Language Restrict What We Can Think?
The Value of Conversation Manifesto Nobody Knows Anything
If I Only Had 37 Days
The Only Life We Know
A Long Way Down
No Noble Savages
Figments of Reality
Too Far Ahead
Learning From Nature
The Rogue Animal
How the World Really Works:
Making Sense of Scents
An Age of Wonder
The Truth About Ukraine
Navigating Complexity
The Supply Chain Problem
The Promise of Dialogue
Too Dumb to Take Care of Ourselves
Extinction Capitalism
Homeless
Republicans Slide Into Fascism
All the Things I Was Wrong About
Several Short Sentences About Sharks
How Change Happens
What's the Best Possible Outcome?
The Perpetual Growth Machine
We Make Zero
How Long We've Been Around (graphic)
If You Wanted to Sabotage the Elections
Collective Intelligence & Complexity
Ten Things I Wish I'd Learned Earlier
The Problem With Systems
Against Hope (Video)
The Admission of Necessary Ignorance
Several Short Sentences About Jellyfish
Loren Eiseley, in Verse
A Synopsis of 'Finding the Sweet Spot'
Learning from Indigenous Cultures
The Gift Economy
The Job of the Media
The Wal-Mart Dilemma
The Illusion of the Separate Self, and Free Will:
No Free Will, No Freedom
The Other Side of 'No Me'
This Body Takes Me For a Walk
The Only One Who Really Knew Me
No Free Will — Fightin' Words
The Paradox of the Self
A Radical Non-Duality FAQ
What We Think We Know
Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark
Healing From Ourselves
The Entanglement Hypothesis
Nothing Needs to Happen
Nothing to Say About This
What I Wanted to Believe
A Continuous Reassemblage of Meaning
No Choice But to Misbehave
What's Apparently Happening
A Different Kind of Animal
Happy Now?
This Creature
Did Early Humans Have Selves?
Nothing On Offer Here
Even Simpler and More Hopeless Than That
Glimpses
How Our Bodies Sense the World
Fragments
What Happens in Vagus
We Have No Choice
Never Comfortable in the Skin of Self
Letting Go of the Story of Me
All There Is, Is This
A Theory of No Mind
Creative Works:
Mindful Wanderings (Reflections) (Archive)
A Prayer to No One
Frogs' Hollow (Short Story)
We Do What We Do (Poem)
Negative Assertions (Poem)
Reminder (Short Story)
A Canadian Sorry (Satire)
Under No Illusions (Short Story)
The Ever-Stranger (Poem)
The Fortune Teller (Short Story)
Non-Duality Dude (Play)
Your Self: An Owner's Manual (Satire)
All the Things I Thought I Knew (Short Story)
On the Shoulders of Giants (Short Story)
Improv (Poem)
Calling the Cage Freedom (Short Story)
Rune (Poem)
Only This (Poem)
The Other Extinction (Short Story)
Invisible (Poem)
Disruption (Short Story)
A Thought-Less Experiment (Poem)
Speaking Grosbeak (Short Story)
The Only Way There (Short Story)
The Wild Man (Short Story)
Flywheel (Short Story)
The Opposite of Presence (Satire)
How to Make Love Last (Poem)
The Horses' Bodies (Poem)
Enough (Lament)
Distracted (Short Story)
Worse, Still (Poem)
Conjurer (Satire)
A Conversation (Short Story)
Farewell to Albion (Poem)
My Other Sites
any thoughts on Obama? Seems to be making a lot of waves . . .
Damn it, don’t give up, we need you, Dave. It looks darkest just before the dawn.
Dave,I am sorry to hear that you are worried about your health. I have no clear answers on how to prevent a flare. I am asuming that your are off the steriods now but it is still very soon to have another attack. my best advice is to keep a symptom log (include the smallest things) my sons doctor says the best thing to do at this stage is to pay attention to your nutrition. oh and try to get some rest..Oh did you hear the “Ray of Hope” this week about the new identified gene connection?Valla
You’re right to be concerned about the fecklessness of our world these days. I finally saw The End Of Suburbia this weekend: someone from the Council of Canadians was showing it here in Powell River. Granted, it didn’t get a lot of publicity; still, only about 30 people showed up, and about half of those left when the presenter convened a post-film discussion. Some of the people who stayed for the discussion had some good things to say about ways that our community could start addressing some post-peak issues; but when the time came to put money (time, really) where the mouth was, I & only one other person were volunteered to start work on an energy descent committee. So many years of ‘apathetizing’ the population, and what you get is this: at the time when everyone’s energy is most needed, people are just too fractured and stressed out to think about committing time, energy, imagination to better things. Even at this event, people were talking about how our local government should be doing something… talk about an obvious fact of life cleverly hidden in plain sight: governments are not in the business of solving people’s problems out of some spirit of altruism or common good. Rarely in the past, & decreasingly so nowadays.<br/><br/>And yet, I refuse to get down about this. It’s clearly going to be a long haul to break the spell of common wisdom & careless thinking. Bottom-up change will be slow at first, but I cling to the belief that nothing is more important than educating oneself & preparing to step into the void left when the current structures are suddenly revealed to be worse than useless… & that moment of clarity is coming sooner than I feel ready for.<br/><br/>Let’s hope that revolutionary change is hiding its light under a bushel these days, too busy sharpening the blades to do PR.
I think we can start learning how to do a lot with a little. Like the example in The Tipping Point where the woman wanted to tell others about breast cancer and had a great idea: instead of the church, she used beauty shops. Small things can have a huge impact.I understand your anxiety about the possibility that the planet might be doomed. But if we haste people, it could get worse. Love them, care for them, help them.Dave, just notice how many people are carrying these ideals around. What if we need just a little more to reach critical mass?
It seems partly to be a matter of attention (not getting enough of it, thanks to the corporatist media and the general attention deficit, ignorance and cynicism of the public), and partly a matter of lack of urgency and lack of resources. We seem to be suffering from terminal inertia at a time when we are running out of time. Yes .. and we can’t and shouldn’t stop, just because.
Well, this week I’ve been thinking about the Stern Report, a huge admission from one of the more conservative western governments around. Hah, things must really be bad if Blair and co are saying we have only 10 years to avoid the worse of it. This maybe Blair’s only hope of overcoming the smear the Iraq War has left on his political career.Reactions to the report in Australia have been the typical. The prime minister, John Howard, has stated that we needn’t be so worried about these things and that the report is overly pessimistic. He’s dismissed it without even trying to discredit its economics or science.Hope the Stern report gives some momentum for environmental issues, such as the national “Walk against Warming” that is happening this saturday. I’m organising my own little bunch of people to come along, hope its a bit of fun and demonstrates to the government that there is mass appeal for the policies that would go some way to improving the situation.I’ve been involved in forming the ANU Greens club on campus here at the ANU. Should be interesting to see how it develops.
I didn’t even make the connection when I read this entry last week, that you would be speaking at the KM conference in San Jose this week. It wasn’t until this morning when I was reviewing the list of sessions I had planned to attend for the day that I recognized one of them was yours. It was great to see the environmental information incorporated into your examples in the presentation about making information more meaningful. You should give the same presentation at conferences for environmental scientists, NGO’s, activists and news writers. It can help them understand ways to translate complex scientific data related to the state of the environment and present it in a simplified way that can be understood by a larger audience. Now I have a task to start thinking about how to integrate some of the tools for delivering more meaningful content on my blog sites.
Thanks everyone, especially Wendy for your kind words on my presentation. Tiago, this is an issue that concerns me a great deal — what is the Tipping Point for bottom-up models and experiments, and at what point does the increasing sense of urgency of individuals (pushing them to braver actions) synchronize with the increasing success and knowledge about intentional communities and other sustainable ways of living, to the point they take off? There are so few models to draw on –entrepreneurs who started in their garage, churches that started with a handful of people, political parties that started with one important idea. What are the essential ingredients?
Nice view!Good read!Steven Burda, MBA, http://www.linkedin.com/in/burda
ZjykMS Blogs rating, add your blog to be rated for free:http://blogsrate.net