Links and Tweets of the Week: August 22, 2009: The Post-Civilization Edition

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

Finally It’s OK to Talk About Civilization’s Collapse: This blog is mostly about preparing for the collapse, later this century, of our fragile, unsustainable and overwrought civilization. It took me awhile to be honest about this, because you won’t hear any debate about this in any of the mainstream media, or even in most of the alternative media, and it’s certainly not polite conversation at the dinner table or the political rally. But slowly it’s becoming respectable, if still a bit eccentric, to argue that we’re too late to save the world (if it were ever possible) and to start to talk about what comes after civilization. The Transition movement deserves much credit for this. This week, there’s an astonishing dialogue in the Guardian between George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth about whether civilization’s impending collapse should be mitigated (Monbiot) or encouraged (Kingsnorth).

conception of art after the collapse of civilization culture by afterculture

Artists Begin to Document the Story of Civilization’s Collapse: The aforementioned Paul Kingsnorth has started a movement — the Dark Mountain project — of writers and artists to tell the story of civilization’s current demise, and to imagine possibilities for the world that will follow, a world with a much smaller, Uncivilized human population. Thanks to Vera B for the link. Here are the project’s 8 Principles of Uncivilisation:

1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.
2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.
3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.
4. We will reassert the role of story-telling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.
5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.
6. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.
7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.
8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

500sf home above was built using local, healthy, natural materials into a woodland hill in Wales

The Challenge of Building Community: Sharon A, referring to her reluctance to act on what she has written about organizing communities for transition to post-civilization society, writes: “Why was I so reluctant?  Well, because organizing people and setting up models, administering groups and training people to enact models are all things I don’t want to do.  I like writing from home in my pajamas.” She continues:

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Obama Approves Tar Sands Pipeline: If anyone had any reason to believe Obama planned on doing anything real about climate change, you can give it up now. Another capitulation to the oil industry and the corporatists. Guess it’s up to us now.

US Municipalities Sell Overdue Tax Receivables to Corporate Vultures: Miss a payment on your local taxes and you may find that instead of owing the town money, you now owe it to a brutal corporate moneylender who will charge usurous interest rates and penalties and would sooner evict you than try to settle, because it’s more profitable for them.

Changing the Corporation: Why we urgently need to rein in corporate power, and why we will never do so.

Why Progressives Lost the Health Care Debate: George Lakoff does a great study of how incompetent progressives are when they come up against the brilliant PR strategists of the extreme right. This lengthy and smart “it’s not too late” memo is directed right at Obama and says we need to reframe the debate in these terms:

• An American Plan, not a “public option”
• A Health Care Emergency, with people dying for lack of insurance and health care
• Doctor-Patient Care, which is what the plan is really about
• Coverage is Not Care: insurance companies are in business to profit by denying care, rationing care
• Private Taxation, by insurance companies that govern our lives
• Doctors Care, Insurance Companies Don’t
• Insurance Company Bureaucracy: they are inefficient, run by bureaucrats

A Nuremberg for Guantanamo?: The idea of an international tribunal for detainees of the US’ offshore and secret torture prisons has merit, provided the US can stomach acknowledging to the world that it has flagrantly violated international standards of law and decency for eight years.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy, You’re in the Army!: Psychologist Martin Seligman (Authentic Happiness guru) has been hired by the Pentagon to counsel the military rank and file on mental stress so fewer of them will commit suicide.

photo taken in bc interior by viktoria haack

HOW TO SAVE THIS BLOG

The End of Salon Blogs, and the Story of Julie & Julia: Alas, Radio Userland, once a credible player in the blog market and the platform on which this blog has sat for six years, is folding December 31, taking with it Salon Blogs, all my articles, and reader comments on the comments server that never worked right. So watch for a new home for this blog later this year. We were quite a community when we started in 2003 — a couple of hundred of us commenting on each other’s blogs and wondering if anyone else would ever read them. Then there was a breakout success — Julie Powell’s Salon Blog containing the story of her attempt to copy all the recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook. The rest is history.