Website review: Beyond hope and doom: Time for a pe...
laodan discovered this in Economics
•2 reviews since Mar 3, 2008
economics
•energybulletin.net/41149.html
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laodan discovered 5 months ago- Beyond hope and doom: Time for a peak oil pep talk in Energy Bulletin by Richard Heinberg
Awareness of Peak Oil, Climate Change, impending global economic implosion, topsoil depletion, biodiversity collapse, and the thousand other dire threats crashing down upon us at the dawn of the new millennium constitutes an enormous psychological burden... Planetary worries can be even more debilitating. What if there simply is no hope? Beyond hope and doom: Time for a peak oil pep talk The search for knowledge, in our times of word abundance, unmistakeably drives us straight to a wall of doubt that sends to us flash-back questions such as "where are the answers to the knowledge we gain about the sheer misery that we and our modern societies are inflicting upon the principle of life on earth?". in "Beyond hope and doom" Richard Heinberg is asking that kind of question but he is not giving us any plausible answer. Writing that "We're all in this together. Let's rely on one another's reserves of psychological strength when we need to, and provide strength for others when we can." only envisions a psychological remedy to forget about the enormity of the misery that we are inflicting upon the principle of life on earth. Sharon Astyk writes that "we must find a way to hallow, or at least apply meaning, to our descent". Hallowing the descent The only meaning I can see in humanity diving into its own collapse is that humanity is only a necessity for itself. The principle of life does not need humanity to sustain its own existence but humanity, at least at its operating level, needs the consciousness about itself as it relates with the whole to assure its own reproduction. This kind of finality in the conclusion generates another set of question: "If humanity is of no particular necessity for anything else than itself than perhaps we its conscious particles, functioning as its operating principle, have a vested interest to protect it from itself". This it seems to me constitutes the ultimate intellectual rejection of modernity and the principle of equality that it generated as an invisible strategy to maximize the expansion of economic demand so that the logic of capital could generate ever more surplus of capital. But then how do we stop this societal cancer? For Dmitry Orlov "Rather than attempting to undertake the Herculean task of mitigating the unmitigatable-attempting to stop the world and point it in a different direction-it seems far better to turn inward and work to transform yourself into someone who might stand a chance, given the world's assumed trajectory". This is the start of the answer on how to stop the societal cancer. But it is not the end of the answer! Communities and neighborhoods will inevitably address the end of the answers. Or at least they will try to do just that, for, without communities the individuals simply die. Review of Dmitry Orlov's Re-inventing Collapse I personally like the optimism of James Lovelock""There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."" 'Enjoy life while you can' James LOVELOCK's website We're drunk and we're at the edge of the roof.
- Beyond hope and doom: Time for a peak oil pep talk in Energy Bulletin by Richard Heinberg
- berrypicker rated 4 months ago
- From the page: "Awareness of Peak Oil, Climate Change, impending global economic implosion, topsoil depletion, biodiversity collapse, and the thousand other dire threats crashing down upon us at the dawn of the new millennium constitutes an enormous psychological burden, one so onerous that most people (and institutions) respond with a battery of psychological defenses-mostly versions of denial and distraction-in an effort to keep conscious awareness comfortably distanced from stark reality..... I conclude that the healthiest response to dire knowledge is to do something practical and constructive in response, preferably in collaboration with others, both because the worst can probably still be avoided and because engaged action makes us feel better"
