Wake Up America
Thanks to Joyce Tarnow for this article by James Howard Kunstler. Despite the title, it is relevant globally.
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Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for “solutions.” This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.
I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our “Happy Motoring” utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts.
For full article, visit:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp
September 11th, 2008 at 8:28 am
A MATTER OF SCALE
The idea “small is beautiful” is not a new notion; the adoption of such an idea leads to sustainable behavior. Surely the reasonable and sensible embrace of a “beautiful, low-consumption lifestyle” for the sake of a better life for a democratic majority of people; for the promotion of global biodiversity; for the protection of the environment; and for the preservation of Earth as a fit place for human habitation, could be one of the most powerfully sustainable and immediately effective behavioral changes the leaders of the family of humanity have made in a very long time.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
September 20th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Repower America by doing things in new, different and better ways: by living SUSTAINABLY.
We in the family of humanity are going to be forced to do better in our efforts to communicate in a more reality-oriented way about ominously looming threats of an human-driven, global calamity of some kind. If we keep doing precisely what our leaders are saying and doing now, the future for our children looks bleak. We can surely do more and do it better. After all, human beings are remarkably intelligent, ingenious and adaptive.
Before we can determine what new and different to do, perhaps a brief analysis of our current, distinctly human-induced, global predicament is in order. Consider for a moment some of the ways in which my generation of leaders has gone so terribly wrong.
First, the leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors.
We religiously promote our widely shared and consensually-validated fantasies of `real’ endless economic growth and soon to become unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources and frangible ecosystems upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.
Second, my not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the “what’s in it for me generation.” We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the vital understanding that humans are no more or less than magnificent living beings with “feet of clay.”
Perhaps we live in unsustainable ways in our planetary home; but we are proud of it nonetheless. Certainly, we will “have our cake and eat it, too.” We will own fleets of cars, fly around in thousands of private jets, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, frequent exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. We will live long, large and free. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold the much of the world’s wealth and the extraordinary power great wealth purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our `inalienable rights’ to outrageously consume Earth’s limited resources; to recklessly expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; and to carelessly consent to the unbridled global growth of human numbers so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire.
We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe….. the thousands of greedy little kings of capital concentration, big business potentates and governmental sinecurists. We enjoy freedom and living without limits. Of course, we adamantly eschew any talk of the personal responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms or discussions of the existence of biophysical limitations of any kind.
We deny the existence of human limits and Earth’s limitations.
Please understand that we do not want anyone presenting us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making….a manmade world filling up with gigantic enterprises, virtual mountains of material possessions, and boundless amounts of filthy lucre.
Third, most of our top rank experts appear not to have found adequate ways of communicating to the family of humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the rapacious dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet’s environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding at breakneck speed toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic `wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Who knows, perhaps we can realistically and hopefully hold onto the expectation that behavioral changes in the direction of sustainable production, per human consumption, and propagation are in the offing…..changes that save both the economy and the Creation.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:53 am
One more wake up call: No bail-out from global warming………..
http://www.oregonlive.com/commentary/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1224199517206370.xml&co ll=7
There’s no bailout for the next crisis
Monday, October 20, 2008 The Oregonian
The recent haggling over how to solve the nation’s economic crisis seems to have done little to ease the anxieties of either Wall Street or Main Street. And with good reason: Intuitively, we know we haven’t seen the worst of it yet.
Watching a lifetime of stock options head south? Worried about where you’ll find the money to pay for college or about the spiraling costs of health care? Certainly nothing could hurt worse than a foreclosure, could it? Well, maybe it could. If $700 billion sounds like a lot, try fathoming $9 trillion — roughly 13 times the cost of today’s hotly debated bailout. That’s the projected cost of letting global climate change go unaddressed within this decade.
The thorough shakeup of today’s economic climate foreshadows an even more disastrous global crisis heading our way. The same belief in unlimited, unchecked growth (some would say outright greed) that fattened our economy on a diet of junk bonds and hollow lending is also strip-mining our planet’s environment of the currency that nature safely invested for us over millions of years, and upon which all life — including our own — depends.
The concept of peak oil is not just some naysayers’ delusion. According to the U.S. Energy Department’s own findings, commonly called the Hirsch report and issued in 2005, it’s an unavoidable reality, one that is hurtling toward us faster than we know what to do about.
But like the blind eye that was turned on the proliferation of high-risk, foolhardy mortgages in the midst of a slowing economy, we’ve bolstered our bravado in the face of such warnings while enthusing about drilling offshore and in the arctic.
While we’ve been busy digging our fossil-fuel foundations out from under us with the same kind of naive bluster and faith in infinite growth that gutted the economy, we’ve also been busy ruining things at the top as our upper atmosphere becomes choked with carbon dioxide, leaving us in an environmental demise of our own doing.
When it comes to the economy, a few sleights of hand and a heavy toll on taxpayers, all partisan bickering aside, can be called upon to help us avert disaster and restore faith in the unlimited expansion model. But when it comes to nature’s bank, cashing out is forever. No amount of midnight meetings, government-ordered buyouts or credit freezes can save a habitat laid fallow by years of unregulated dumping of chemical waste, nor can they lower our thermostats to an inhabitable temperature in the face of global warming.
Sound policy and the pursuit of new technologies might ameliorate some of our excesses, helping to slow down the rate of climate change and postponing the date of disaster. But like the banking and credit crisis that arrived to the surprise of so many experts — despite the many warnings sounded years earlier — environmental failure is going to rear its ugly head someday.
And when mother earth forecloses on us, there will be nowhere else to go.
Lisa Weasel is an associate professor of biology at Portland State University and a board member of The Greenhouse Network.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
October 24th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Thanks to all at PMC for what is being communicated so effectively in this blog.
Please understand that Dr. Lisa Weasel is an honorable scientist. She neither hides, nor hides from, the empirical evidence to which she refers in her letter, “There’s no bailout for the next crisis” (see above). At least to me, her behavior is exemplary. We need to see her example displayed in the actions of many other scientists who presently seem to be unwilling to communicate what their science tells them is real and true.
So far as I can tell, Dr. Weasel does not formulate policy or engage in action planning. She does the work scientists are supposed to be doing: helping people see the world we inhabit as it is.
Of course, her reporting is off-putting precisely because the message from science is apparently unforeseen, distinctly discomforting and most unwelcome.
Reports of good science, when that science is new, is routinely difficult to acknowledge, much less address. But that is what we are called upon to do. Grasping good science and adjusting to whatsoever could be real is required of us, I suppose. Nothing else will do as an adequate substitute. It appears that the human community could soon have genuine challenges to overcome.
Despite all the efforts of denialists and naysayers, scientists need to do their duty, as Lisa Weasel is doing, by urging the family of humanity to open our eyes and see what looms ominously before us on the far horizon. By avoiding science, we are losing the exquisite value found in one of God’s gifts to humanity.
Ignoring Dr. Weasel’s science cannot be allowed to prevail, even though her reasonable and sensible evidence comes into conflict with what culture prescribes as real and true. Is it possible that the standard for determining what is real and true in our culture is often this: whatsoever is widely shared, consensually validated and judged to be economically expedient, politically convenient, socially agreeable is true and real? In that case, Dr. Weasel’s science does present our culture with evidence of inconvenient truths.
Each culture presents its membership with much that is real and also much less that is illusory. From the standpoint of a psychologist, because humans are shaped early and pervasively by cultural transmissions in our perception of reality, it looks like an evolutionary challenge for humankind to see the world as it is.
It appears that cultural transmissions or memes generated within a culture may at times mesmerize human beings in that widely shared and closely held memes occasionally “produce” illusions of the world as it is. Dr. Weasel’s research seems to be disturbing in some basic way because her work comes into conflict with certain culturally derived notions held by leaders of our culture about what it means to be human and about the “placement” of humankind within the natural order of living things. Unexpected scientific evidence of this particular kind is uniformly difficult for people to see immediately, I suppose, because such evidence undercuts the ‘pedestal’ from which human beings prefer to arrogantly look upon other creatures and nature. We humans may introject culturally biased and scientifically unsupported transmissions (i.e., memes) that confuse human reasoning and promote a certain cortical conceitedness which is not helpful when trying to see what is real or to recognize certain requirements of practical reality. For a very long time cultural transmissions or memes appear to have been passed from generation to generation, distorting human perceptions and making it difficult for us to see scientific evidence for what is real about it.
When a psychological practitioner like myself thinks a patient is suffering from a mental illness, that determination is a matter of evidence-based clinical judgment. However, general standards of what is normal are not clinical judgments (and sometimes do not objectively correlate with reality), but are often unverified, specious ‘evidence’ of cultural norms and social conventions that contain occasional misperceptions of what is real. Because some misperceptions are valued by those who share them, these memes get passed along as if they represented reality.
In cases of deeply disturbed mental patients, they are inclined to distort reality so drastically that their distortions are not widely shared and closely held by other people. Instead, these mistaken impressions are labeled as examples of craziness and disregarded. By contrast, human aggregations in governments, social organizations and cultures appear not to misperceive and misrepresent reality so sharply, yet distortions of what is somehow real are still taken to be true and shared as if factual by aggregates of people.
A term of art in psychology is useful here, folie a deux. The term means that two people share an identical distortion of reality. This understanding leads to other terms, folie a deux cent million for a social order or folie a deux billion for a culture. These terms refer to misperceived aspects of reality commonly shared and held by many people in aggregates. One way to define the highest standard of what is normal for the individual and for people in aggregations is in terms of being able to see what is reasonably and sensibly free of illusion, what appears to be real based on scientific evidence. Hence, in taking note of the process of humankind becoming evermore aware in the passage of space-time of whatsoever is somehow real by means of acquiring good scientific evidence, we can track the evolution of science.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
November 27th, 2008 at 7:57 am
GUEST COLUMN by Steven Earl Salmony
November 26, 2008
Chapel Hill(NC)News
http://www.chapelhillnews.com...
Billions end up paying for excesses of the wealthy on Wall St.
Our lexicon of business activities is being expanded daily, thanks to the “wonder boys” on Wall Street. We are learning about derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, recapitalization, puts, short selling and so on. We are gaining a new vocabulary from the recent meltdown of the financial system and expected slowdown of the real economy worldwide.
Where did this debacle begin? Well, it began in the center of the human community’s banking and investment houses in the financial district of NYC. Supposedly, the “brightest and best” among us go to Wall Street, know what they are doing and do the right thing. Unfortunately, such assumptions turn out to be colossal mistakes.
How did this calamity occur and why is the human family in such dire economic straits? It appears that grotesque greed and a culture of corruption have come to dominate significant operating systems of the global political economy.
Powerful people in high offices within huge business institutions with access to great wealth are recklessly and deleteriously manipulating the unbridled expansion of the global economy in the small, finite planetary home God blesses us to inhabit.
Self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe have surreptitiously “manufactured” a subprime “asset bubble” and perversely fostered its uneconomic growth within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, this asset bubble did what bubbles do. The subprime bubble burst and made a mess. Global credit markets have frozen, stock prices are tumbling and the value of the dollar is gyrating.
Evidently organizers, managers and whiz kids overseeing the global economy, and the unraveling (i.e., deleveraging) of the worldwide subprime swindle are running the artificially designed financial system of the global economy as a pyramid scheme. This is to say that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth funneled pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated. Note that 30 percent of annual corporate profits end up in the accounts of a tiny number of people. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. Does the economy of the family of humanity exist primarily to provide wealth to the already stupendously wealthy? The “bankstas” among us evidently think so.
In the 1980s, this extremely inequitable method of distributing wealth and arranging business activities was called a “trickle-down” economy. We have been repeatedly told how this ‘rational’ economic scheme is good because it “raises all ships.” And yet, from my limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources now appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The ’ships’ carrying these billions of less fortunate people (i.e., more people than lived on Earth in the year of my birth) do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/content.html?contentid=1176