This, I think is causing much denial in some and despair in others. What are the chances of us changing the economic system without a massive social collapse before or during?

* Inconvenient Truth presenter * Green Party of Canada candidate

1. What would it look like if organic food were cheaper than food laced with pesticides?  Well, we'd all be buying organic, and farmers wouldn't be using pesticides.

2. What would it look like if it became cheaper to hire people, and more exensive to pollute?  There would be more employment, and less pollution.

3. What would it look like if gasoline became significantly more expensive, and a national income supplement were financed from the revenues?  There would be fewer and smaller cars on the road, and poverty would be reduced.

This is a world within our reach.  All it would take is getting governments to adopt green tax shifting.  That is of course a tall order - it will need significant political will.  And that will happen once the majority of the public supports it strongly.  In order for that to happen, we need to start imagining it and talking about it.

The depressing stuff, though I see it and know it to be depressing,  ends up energizing me instead.  I think this is because I'm a designer and planner and it just gives me more to work on.  People who don't have a background in design tend to assume that the status quo has more power than it does or that a clearly articulated vision is an inevitable trajectory, rather than something to be countered, revised/revisioned, and editted into something presentable, livable and lovable.

The references above give good exposure to the possible basics of a delightful, sustainable future from several angles.

As a result, as I see it, the really important question is "Why do most in our culture people have such a tragically pessimistic view of our future?" I know of no one who has given a more persuasive answer than Daniel Quinn, best known as the author of Ishmael, though it was his The Story of B that had the greatest impact on me and is my favorite of his books. He's explored that question in several of his books, but his speech "The Little Engine That Couldn't: How We're Preparing Ourselves and Our Children for Extinction" is a concise yet powerful answer.

"You can never get enough of what you do not really want." - Huston Smith

1.  Conserve Energy - the easiest, cheapest, and fastest method of reducing greenhouse emissions and downsizing our power requirements.

2.  Replace Oil Based Transport - Replace IC cars with Plug in hybrids and Battery Electric Cars and make all transport electric or electric hybrid.  Make sure that all the PHEVs and BEVS can participate in Vehicle to Grid.  Clean up cities and promote public transport and bicyles/walking.

3.  Increase Renewables to 75% - use the battery storage potential of millions of AC electric cars to allow renewables - solarPV, solar thermal, wind, wave tidal and biomass to increase share of power generation to 75%.

4.  Convert All Coal Thermal Plants to IGCC - get rid of all coal thermal plants and use a mixture of natural gas, stored renewable hydrogen and gasified coal to fuel flexible and fast reacting gas turbines that can interact automatically with renewable power.  

5.  Transform the current vunerable, monolithic and centralised electricity grid into a fault tolerant, decentralised smart grid based on small self contained, but communicating, cells.

Pessimism is not quite the same thing as living with the reasonable, realistic expectation of bad things to come.  Pessimism tends to drain us of will and energy, and to render us deficient in our moral duties to ourselves and to the world.  Rather, what seems to be called for here is a kind of Stoicism: distinguishing between what lies within our power and what does not, and carrying on resolutely with what we can truly do.

And that is not a joyless activity.  In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates in his prison cell teaches that philosophy is a preparation for death.  And the awareness of his approaching death does not dismay him at all.  He knows that by faithfully doing well throughout his life what he alone could do, he was living in union with the Logos, which pervades the world, and governs it, and comforts it.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

The doom an gloom messages that people say we need are so counterproductive, they simply turn people away. Its not suprising people don't behave more sustainably when it's something they 'should' do. They should also pay the bills, get more exercise, eat healthier, spend more time with their family etc. We have so many short term pressures that we struggle to meet. We can't expect people to change the way they behave to be more sustainable, if we don't make it something they want to do. We must make it exciting, personally relevant, link individual action to collective action and big, positive impacts, and then celebrate the positive changes people make.

Excuse the rant, but this is something we at Futerra have researched to death when we wrote the recommendations for the UK government's Climate Change Communications Strategy. It's also something that we all know deep down if we look hard enough; the things that I enjoy doing I try to make time for them, the things that make me feel powerless and gloomy I try and avoid, both consciously and subconsciously.

 

David Willans Consultant Futerra Sustainability Communications Ltd

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2006/7/11/2100485.html

The crazier the nuclear/hydrogen economy advocates get the more their slips are showing.  That is how.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Communism turns into murderous, totalitarian dictatorships wherever it is attempted on a large scale.

Please try to avoid confusing historical "communisms" with any communisms we may want to create in the future.  There are no longer any peasant nations, nor any traditional empires; the world (outside of a few marginal nations) has been industrialized, and integrated by one world-wide web.  Let's try to imagine what we can do with this world, and not with the barbaric worlds of 1917 or 1945.

We need to return to small-scale capitalism with local business owners; sorry, no more global corporations.

There are good reasons why corporations (and not small businesses) dominate capitalism.  Corporations can move to wherever business conditions are best.  Having more money to spend on raw materials, they can buy in bulk much more easily than can a small business.  They can produce more easily, too, being able to construct large plants as opposed to small ones.  Individual franchises that cannot turn a profit can be closed down, their assets sold to benefit the large corporation; when small businesses cannot turn a profit, they go bankrupt, and that's the end of it.  These are important advantages when operating in commercial areas with small profit margins and uncertain business conditions.

And what is to stop a world of small business owners from uniting in "large business" consortiums?  Once you create a world where businesses have the power to determine the shape of society, you then have to ask questions of what said businesses will do with that power.

A world of small businesses that stayed small would have to be a sort of museum world, where strong transnational states would prop up "small businesses" against ongoing threats of bankruptcy so that ecotourists to "small business world" in humongous small business Disneylands could visit and gape and spend their tourist moneys.  Maybe outside of each "small business" a stereo system could have a cute, cuddly choir singing "It's a Small Business, After All" to the tune of "It's a Small World, After All"...

No, what the world really needs is a global human society where production follows the pattern that Joel Kovel (following Enrique Leff) called "ecological production."  Ecological production, mind you, is the production of ecologies, not of commodities.  There is already a practice of ecological production, namely permaculture, and a science of ecological production, namely, agroecology.  Now as for a social form corresponding to these modes of production, I would side with Joel Kovel in calling it "ecosocialism," but clearly that brings up the question of "what's in a name."  Let me suggest, however, that this whole question of future social forms has been probed before, namely  by John Bellamy Foster.  There's also Robert Newman's cute little piece, for those who feel baffled by all the history lessons.  At any rate, it pays us to keep focused upon what it is the world needs in order to survive, while thinking creatively about governance.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Imagine a world in which prices were adjusted to bring our economy closer to sustainability.  A few examples:

   1. What would it look like if organic food were cheaper than food laced with pesticides?  Well, we'd all be buying organic, and farmers wouldn't be using pesticides.

   2. What would it look like if it became cheaper to hire people, and more exensive to pollute?  There would be more employment, and less pollution.

   3. What would it look like if gasoline became significantly more expensive, and a national income supplement were financed from the revenues?  There would be fewer and smaller cars on the road, and poverty would be reduced.

A world where government has the power to "adjust prices" in such a way was the world of populist Keynesianism, of the historical period between World War II and the 1970s.  At that point, governments all became more and more like what William I. Robinson called the "transnational state" -- the state as just one of many enabling bodies for transnational capitalism, subordinate to transnational entites like NATO or the European Union or the WTO or the World Bank/ IMF or the various international trade agreements.

We need to do more than indulge nostalgia for a world gone by.  We need to think about the shape of a future world.

I suppose that a farming industry that didn't have to meet enormous production goals in order to operate on small profit margins wouldn't have to subsidize the pesticide industry.

If it were cheaper to hire people, then it would be less profitable to work for a living, no?

If gasoline were significantly more expensive, then running a business would run into significantly higher transportation costs, no?  Businesses won't like that.

Reclaiming government so we can get it to do what we want is an admirable project.  But we can't be stuck in the trap of imagining that, once we have government, all we need to do is juggle "prices" while maintaining the function of government as a conduit for business.  Let me suggest replacing the 1-2-3 above with another 1-2-3:

1.  If we re-organized the universities to teach sustainable agriculture while phasing out the pesticide industries altogether.

2.  If we guaranteed universal employment, and put everyone to world on this matter of "ecological production."

3.  If we phased out the old, gasguzzling transportation systems and created new, low energy ones.

This summer is a different story - I feel full of hope because I'm doing my part to improve the world I live in by doing the following:

• ride my bike to work everyday and for short trips in my neighborhood
  
• purchased a Terra Pass for my car so that I now off-set my carbon emissions with renewable energy certificates
  
• use an old-fashioned reel mower instead of my gas powered lawn mower
  
• buy more organic food and try to buy local
  
• learn about new renewable energy projects and business everyday on RenewableEnergyAccess.com
  
• offset the carbon emissions created by my use of electricity through GreenAmerica and I've replaced many of the incandescent bulbs in my house with CFL's

For people interested in the upside of an environmental vision of the future, I recommend reading Ecotopia by Callenbach

To create an ecotopia, the residents of the West Coast would have to do something much more politically radical than voting Democrat.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

While the present capitalistic economy is used in terribly destructive ways throughout the world, it's only a tool. What matters is not the tool but the mind of the tool-user, and the worldview which provides the framework that defines the limits of what that mind can think.

But if I am to become a nuclear power, certain social relations have to be there in the first place.  There has to be a command structure, and I have to be on top of it.  There has to be a resource base to provide the raw materials for atomic weaponry.  There have to be teams of technologists in my employ, to make the stuff operational.

The same thing is true of "present capitalistic economy."  It isn't "just a tool" -- it is a set of social relations, of owners to workers, of managers to subordinates, of landlords to tenants. These social relations determine who gets to decide and what happens thereafter regardless of the mindset or worldview of those playing the capitalist game.

Now, let's compare the atomic-weapons social structure with the capitalist social structure.  It's all very well for anti-nuclear activists to tell the world's powers "don't use atomic weapons."  But if the nuclear-weapons social structure is mobilized, if the resources are used and the technologists are hired and if all the systems are standing by, waiting to fire up those weapons, then the threat is always there.

The same thing is true of capitalism.  We can tell the power-brokers at the top of the capitalist system "don't do destructive things," but if the system is still mobilized to do those destructive things, then the threat is still there.

The main difference between capitalism and nuclear politics is that capitalism is less violent and more insidious than nuclear politics.  However, our governments are not setting off nuclear weapons, but capitalism is dismantling ecosystems.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Doom and gloom are not inevitable;

Breath deep the gathering gloom
Watch lights fade from every room
Bedsitter people look back and lament
Another day's useless energy spent.
Impassioned lovers wrestle as one,
Lonely man cries for love and has none.
New mother picks up and suckles her son,
Senior citizens wish they were young.
Cold hearted orb that rules the night,
Removes the colours from our sight.
Red is grey and yellow white.
But we decide which is right.
And which is an illusion...

(you know the author)

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

In the article she was told how little she actually conserves by riding, compared to the overall consumption that's taking place worldwide, to wit she replied, "But if you're not doing something and the next family isn't doing anything, then who will?".  That pretty much sums it up.  

Yes, we can explain and complain about the corporate exacto that's taking place, but that's all based on choices that each of us make when we vote with our dollars.  For an interesting story on overcoming the economics, do a search on Texas Instruments and the Rocky Mountain Institute.  It's a wonderful story of how an American company using American consulting was able to compete, and even save money, producing here at home instead of overseas.  And, we need to share this information at every level - until like the author promotes - it becomes part of our vision of life.

I recommend we spend more time on our knees... and by that I mean, planting trees, flowers, organic gardens, peanut instead of grass, natives instead of tropicals, etc.  Let's get firmly planted on what's effective, then do it.  Spend wisely, save wisely, be neighborly, and be charitable each time your heart or 'still voice' speaks to you.  I'll see you out there, on my bike of course... JD Howell

JD & Kelley Howell of Eugene, OR. visit us: Cut20.blogspot.com

To think we can continue on with huge "green" adjustments and avoid what appears set in place feels naiive to me . . . unless the whole world got on board with these changes NOW. I work for that, for that is the best work around. That said, I say, dig in, embrace what is happening as part of the pagentry of life on Earth, don't get lost in despair, but rather celebrate the beauty of being alive in a time where we can truly witness the frightening majesty of this great being, Earth.  And trust. Enjoy being here now in the midst of the crushing beauty of it all and trust that there will be a time on Earth after this one, with a much smaller population who have gotten a message that we have forgotten as a people, and live it in a way we (asise from small numbers) cannot. The Earth is sacred. All life is sacred. Wild is the Way. Protect, celebrate, live in gratitude and balance no matter what.  "Never again" they will say when they gaze at the distant ruins of Nukes,  sky scrapers and the machinery of war.

Visit Artforthesky.com to see how large numbers of people can demonstrate their gratitude and trust in the Mystery, what ever it has to offer us.

DD

But I see possibilities for reversing the process and getting back to a rational world, which we learn to take care of, as well as all its inhabitants. I think we're in for some "interesting" times, but pro-active measures are possible. Hopefully we'll remember the mistakes we've made and move to an economic system with a better balance between free-enterprise (short-term concern for ourselves) and socialism (long-term cooperation, synergy, concern for all), where wealth is proportional to one's real social contributions, avoiding capitalism, where it's the rich that get richer.

Dan

Amen and Namaste

Al

City Hippy
http://www.cityhippy.net

Sorry, the world doesn't turn to the Karen timeclock.  Some people are just discovering about the grim possibilities. Kudos for Al Gore for using his popularity and media access to inform the masses.  Let them be afraid.  Let them grieve.  Let them worry.  This will all come to a productive end in due time.

You and those in the know go ahead and get started on the ecotopia and lead the way with a carrot, not with a stick.  (Your soapbox piece hit me more like a stick than a carrot).  Others will catch up with you, on their own timetable.  Meanwhile, it might be helpful for you develop a smidgen of tolerance, empathy and diplomacy.  It might actually help others get with the program a bit faster too.

Perhaps the new paradigm that will enthuse people is one wherelife -- in all its forms -- is given priority over abstractions like profit, marketing, and competition that seem to inevitably lead to war, crime, and enslavement. A humane world where Economics serve the people rather than vice-versa.

We also need to provide answers to the question of "What can we doNOW?" Specific, practical stuff thatanyonecan do. Recently I saw a home-made bumper sticker that Read"Low RPM -- Low Co2 ... Yea Green!!!" Here's a few other notions:

1. Begin by voluntarily reducing our driving speeds, and pressure our governments to post--and enforce --lower speed limits.
   
2. Whenever possible walk, or run, or take a bus.
   
3. Find sources of good news, and pass them on.
   
4. Recognize, admire, reward "green acts."
   
5. Find more gentle pleasures and stop courting strong sensory stimulus ("highs").

6. Consume less sugar, especially pop drinks in vending machines. It's good for our teeth and tissue, and nibbles at Big Sugar's. purse.
   
7. Ask people to add to this list.

Victoria, BC

The issue is not too many people, rather too much stuff consuming too much energy.  We are clever animals.  We can fix that problem.

Voluntary simplicity is actually quite enjoyable, peaceful, and secure.

Thanks for the great article, Karen.

thanks for mentioning this story.  I was wondering if it was going to receive any attention in Grist -- if it has already, it slipped past me -- , seeing that there is a reference to Grist (p. 48: "Their [i.e., of those who are still reliant on print journalism] younger counterparts get their news from places like Grist.org ... ," which of course made my Jurassic heart sing with joy), and Chip Giller is briefly quoted.  (Another joyful detail is the fetching photo of young Adrian Grenier, revealing his insulation.)

I applaud your wife's efforts in making her commute as green as possible.  Given Florida's climate, that should be considered little short of heroic.  Presumably her ride is on pretty flat land -- or so I hope, for her sake.

But is not the observation that follows, that her carbon savings amount practically to nothing, likely to encourage the pessimistic, apocalyptic attitude that Karen Hurley is lamenting?  I like Kelley's response, to the effect of Pirkei Avot's "If not you, who?  If not now, when?"  We must always encourage everyone's personal choices in the face of this crisis, and not minimize their value, however little effective in the big picture they may seem to be.

And imposing any kind of conformity of outlook seems wrong-headed as well.  Not everyone would agree that your wife has chosen wisely to have a job so far from where she lives.  But that is her choice, and I for one shall not judge her.

On the whole, though, I found the Newsweek article rather depressing and unimaginative.  Following Kelley's rhetorical question, it says, "On that very question the course of civilization may rest."  That sounds reasonable enough.  But in fact the tenor of the article is to attract Republicans, business people, people who have their eye constantly on the bottom line; the point is not to improve civilization at all, but to illustrate how certain green solutions here and there can help it carry on as always.  The sidebar about how George W. Bush can be described as green-friendly is especially biased in his favor, and does no justice to his many environmentalist critics.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

    One of the topics that keeps popping up in various places on the blogs is the question of "what will the future look like?"

    It seems that the far future is too uncertain and scary, so some people prefer to deal only with the problem.  And others look only at small steps that can make us feel better, without dealing with the bigger issues.

    We often say that modern American society is not sustainable.  This is a pretty frightening statement.  But, we rarely talk about what that really means (maybe because we're not really sure, or haven't thought out the details.)

    What kind of sustainable world can nine billion people live in?  What has to happen for them all to have a relatively decent life?  What is a relatively decent life?

    If we are asking people to sacrifice, how can we show them that everyone will sacrifice?  People may be reluctant to sacrifice if they believe that they will be giving something up, and people higher up the social ladder will not.

    Karen is right to point out that if we can cooperate and solve our problems, the future, even with nine billion people, doesn't have to be so bad.

    A Chinese joke.  A wealthy man is walking down the beach talking on his cell phone, working even at the seashore.  Suddenly he sees a poor man lying in the sand watching the waves.  He stops and tells the man that it is a beautiful day and he should be out fishing.  The man asks why, and the wealthy man says "If you go out and fish every day, you will make a lot of money, then you can buy your own boat.  If you keep working, you can buy several boats, later a whole fleet.  Then when you are rich you can come to the seashore and lie in the sand and enjoy watching the waves."  The poor man smiled and said "I'm already doing that."

patrick

I am delighted to observe that David had a reaction to the W sidebar similar to my own.

Patrick, I love the cell-phone-on-the-beach story.  According to what I have read, the Chinese, as well as other East Asians, communicate much more by phone, cell-phone especially, and much less by e-mail, than do Americans, because their etiquette frowns on leaving messages instead of speaking directly in real time with the person you want to talk to.  For the same reason, answering machines and voice mail are relatively little used.  If that is true, then the cell-phone in the Chinese beach joke is an even more vivid symbol of terrific mental concentration regrettably misdirected.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

One of the topics that keeps popping up in various places on the blogs is the question of "what will the future look like?"

and it's a question that will always be unanswerable -- we cannot tell what the future will look like because we co-create the future.

The demand to know exactly what the future will look like is, in the end, a totalitarian demand.  All human freedom to shape the future in another direction must be eliminated in order to satisfy it.

This is why good theory avoids the "blueprint approach" -- the reader of good theory must work together with the writer of good theory, and each has her own ideas.

Good theory, then, focuses upon the direction in which the future is to be created.  It starts, once again, by asking that question John Lennon asked in that song "Why?" on the Imagine album: "How can I go forward if I don't know which way I'm facing?"

About Karen Hurley's dichotomy of pessimism v. optimism: I think that most American children will reflect the pessimism of the elementary schoolkids she observed, more often than not.  The reason for this is that American children, like children around the world, are being raised to become English-speaking consumers within the paradigm of the "educational security state," which makes them into little "units" buttressing the military and the economy.  See Joel Spring's Pedagogies of Globalization for details.

This problem of "how can I go forward if I don't know which way I'm facing?" is especially acute in education.  The big teacher's union, the NEA, recently conducted a vote on the current reality of life in schools, namely the No Child Left Behind act.  What it found was that a "majority dislikes the No Child Left Behind Act but would rather modify it than repeal it."  Let's see: they dislike the law, but they've bought into it, so they only want to modify it.  Why have they bought into the law?  "Union leaders say the basic intentions of No Child Left Behind - quality schools and skilled teachers - are good."  

Ah, but these same schools, with these same teachers, are producing a world that thinks it is going to become some kind of dystopia where all of nature is half-dead and people's lives are spent in front of their computers.  What good are "quality schools and skilled teachers" if they all work, via No Child Left Behind, to produce this dystopia?

No Child Left Behind is a high-stakes testing regime that, more or less, requires students to become little test-takers before they become human beings.  The schools, in the service of NCLB, become well-managed little factories churning out test-results in the same way in which the assembly lines at the Lipton factory in Santa Cruz (where I once worked) churn out packages of Cup-Of-Soup.  

We can be optimistic all we want, but if we cannot move in a positive direction, then our optimism will be for nothing.  What I've been suggesting here is that we need to move in a direction away from capitalism, more specifically, away from the regime based on exchange-value and toward alternatives based on use-value as recommended in Joel's book.  For our schools, what this means is that we reject No Child Left Behind, which straitjackets all but the wealthiest schools into a managerial paradigm aimed at "production for exchange" (i.e. produced test scores being exchanged for Federal money).  It also means that we use the creative resources of the entire educational community (teachers, students, parents etc.) to focus upon what it means to educate children toward the creation of a decent future.

My point is this: we're not going to get to that optimistic future we cherish if we recognize that the direction in which we're going is the wrong one, but all we can recommend to change our direction is chickensh*t reform.  Alcoholics aren't cured by "cutting down."  This goes for No Child Left Behind, global warming, the Two-Party System, or capitalism.  People are free to do far more than move in the existing social grooves; it's time we showed it.

Oh, yeah.  None of you recognized the "Late Lament," Graeme Edge's contribution to the end of the Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed.  Come on, people!  Know your music history!

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Unlike the Doors, whom I dissed not long ago, to poor Ffletcher's chagrin, as being overestimated, the Moody Blues were never quite so widely admired.  To their niche audience, I say, fine, take them, you can have them.  Crosby Stills Nash and Young on the other hand are well nigh perfect.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

(As for Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young: the star of  CSN, in my humble opinion, was and is Crosby, and Young can still produce sparks, if for the fact that he tries so hard... the Moody Blues lost their charm after breaking up in the '70s, anyway...)

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

   First of all, less people have computers than in America.  That would tend to mean fewer emails.  I have noticed that when I teach graduate students (mostly computer owners) I get many more emails than when I teach first year students (not allowed in their dorms).

   In China, many many more people have cellphones than line based home or office phones, so answering machines never really caught on.  

   People do send each other short messages by the zillions (official count) which is hardly speaking directly in real time to the people you are talking too.

   But doesn't everyone prefer to speak to people they need to reach directly in real time?

patrick

Here's the expanded list:

Ernest Callenbach's "Ecotopia Emerging," probably more important than ever

Gioconda Belli's "Waslala," one of the most powerful ecological and utopian novels of recent years, unfortunately available only in Spanish and German

E.F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful. Economics as if People Mattered." Needs no comment

A collection of short stories, edited by Kim Stanley Robinson "Future Primitive. The New Ecotopias"

"The Green Reader. Essays Toward a Sustainable Future," edited by Andrew Dobson

And last but not least a title that says it all: "Fighting for Hope" by Petra Kelly

Enjoy!

And thanks, Patrick, as always, for your invaluable observations.  I do not know who my source was on the "loss of face" business; Nicholas Kristof perhaps.

We never answer our phone, by the way, and consider the recent message-leaving devices a terrific blessing.  My husband bought his very first cellphone the other day, so that his mother could have one number to reach him while we are traveling in New England.  But there too, I doubt he will be carrying it with him all the time, just checking for messages in the evening.

Which suggests a can-you-name-this-tune question for our music historian, Legume Sam:

<<
People like us
   Who would answer the
   Telephone

People like us
   Growin' big as a house

People like us
   Gonna make it because:

We don't want freedom

We don't want justice

We just wa-a-a-ant
   Someone to love.
>>

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Swimme's co-author, Thomas Berry, is/was a Catholic priest.  I heard him speak here at Columbia around 25 years ago, and already then he was definitely a senior citizen.  He was plainly saintly, and lovable.

SMLowry, your summary of Swimme's thought is fascinating, and promising, though not quite my style.  What I like most is the emphasis on open-mindedness, and on discovering new ways to articulate our identity and exercise our activity out of thoughtful reflexion on the past, our personal past, humanity's past, the universe's past.

But what I rather dread is the negative reaction of environmentalist activists, who may find in all this a kind of smugness and complacency which is wrong to put aside the "proper" crisis mentality, and so does little to encourage effective activism.  Well, alas, there will always be purists, puritans, in every community with a cause, who love to excommunicate and condemn.  

Toward the end, you wrote, "We are part of the intelligence and the perfect timing of the universe. And perhaps one of the most important things we can do is to find what we love, what brings us joy -- and Do It!"

"Intelligence of the universe" is very good; the idea is expressed in different ways in countless traditions, but I think we all understand what we mean.  Earlier, I used the term "Logos," by which I mean no doubt the same as you.

"Perfect timing" is more difficult.  The problem of evil is insoluble, and hangs too huge in the metaphysical/ethical firmament for most people to be comfortable with "perfect."  We all know that there has been infinite suffering and waste of life, that there is no reason to think that is going to change any time soon, and that that is the true moral foundation of all history, of all the stories we tell.  I do believe there is an explanation; but even to suggest that there is an explanation inevitably and deservedly sounds inhumane.  So "perfect timing" is, shall we say, not altogether convincing.

"What we love, what brings us joy" is OK, in a Joseph-Campbell-ish way, so long as we do not pay as much attention to it as did he, and as apparently his disciples do.  Much better as a motivation for good action would be "whom we love."

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Global warming is here, by the way...100 degrees and up and high humidity and I expect it to get worse as the years roll on...

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

In 2060, we will look back on the present era as a vast transition, a bottleneck between the past and present. The population will stabilize around 10 billion and begin to drop slowly. The developing world will then be the developed world, and with this development will come a worldwide reduction in hunger, disease, illiteracy and intolerance. With a better understanding of nutrition and the application of permaculture techniques on a broad, but locally based scale, everyone will eat well. A scientific research colony on Mars will highlight the riches we enjoy here on Earth while helping humanity take the first step in spreading wonderful life to the lifeless parts of universe, to one day creating ecosystems instead of destroying them. The forces of social progress will continue - the rights of women and people with different colored skin will be brought as far again as they have been in the past fifty years, or more. Queer rights will be at least as universal as women's rights are now, and we will in earnest begin extending some rights to other social, intelligent creatures. Animal rights will be granted a tremendous boon when natural animal tissue cultures can be grown in isolation. "Vat meat" will be cheaper and less resource-intensive than the present system. When people do not rely on factory farms or even death to eat meat, the justifications for the present system will be stripped away. Partisanship and in-group/out-group variation will always exist, and the world would be sad without diversity and stupid without disagreement ... yet separate groups will find ways to work together on the issues that most can agree with: clean air and water, health and education, the importance of community and family. Cities, towns, villages, and lonely farmland alike will be structured to support people. Walking and biking (and unicycling, rollerskating, skateboarding, skipping, hang-gliding, and dancing) to work will be a joy, a time to see your friends and the beauty around you, without any fearing for your life. The presently large and growing homeschooling, unschooling, and alternative education movement will come of age and begin working with the public education system to create free schooling that works, access to knowledge and mentors and tools that is an integrated, productive, voluntary part of society instead of institutionalization that segregates and silences its often-unwilling subjects. With the empowerment of children will come the empowerment of their parents and teachers and the minimization of bureaucracy. Radio/computer/communications technology will remain fairly decentralized, uncensored, and accessible to amateurs and hackers and everyone else. Electric cars will be used for some public transportation, and emergency response, and perhaps the occasional road trip, but the days of a daily automotive commute will be a peculiar quirk of history. Global shipping will be by means of advanced LTA (Lighter Than Air) technology, safe, stately, silent, fuel-efficient blimps. The oceans and forests will fall quiet again and the native inhabitants of the ocaen will be able to find their mates and prey. All lighting will be by means of smart LEDs, designed to reduce glare and eliminate wasteful spillover. Every child will know what stars look like; every child will know what silence sounds like. Productive gardens and native habitat will be everywhere, on rooftops and balconies, in houses and shared public spaces, outside of stores, lining walkways, and hanging in the air. We will honor warriors and lament wars. "Public breastfeeding" will be simply "breastfeeding". Economics will become a science; the philosophy behind applied economics will shift away from growth and the idea that markets are self-evidently moral; markets will be treated as powerful but neutral tools that can be used to shape the world towards agreed-upon issues. Most people, even Americans, will be bilingual (or more), speaking from birth an increasingly global language as well as a local native language. Cradle to Cradle design won; our technological resources will be recaptured with an efficiency asymptotically approaching 100%; it will become cheap and easy to recover our waste from an earlier, more thoughtless era and the landfills will be emptied and filtered clean. With increasingly efficient technology and the leveling off and then decreasing population and global development, misguided "growth" and further appropriation of resources will not be necessary - we will have "enough", and then we will have "more than enough"[.]

She dreamed of a future where cars were obsolete. She wrote the above in a car, as we were driving across the country so she could start gradschool. She put her laptop away to take a break. An hour later a truck hit us from behind, and she was killed.

I hope this doesn't sound too preachy. Neither of us were the sort. This was by far the longest post she ever composed for Grist ... I think this thread really had her excited. She was a psychologist, and she always thought people could make a difference, but first they had to convince themselves it was possible.

All positive waves to your healing platypus.  She surely would want that.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

What a vision. I'm so sorry.

Not knowing what was coming, I started reading, "In 2060, we will look back ... ," and thought, "God love these kids, who can look ahead, and expect to be alive in 2060."

In spite of ironically missing that she was not herself part of her own vision of the future, Julieclipse was without a doubt a true prophet, of the best kind.  

God love that kid.

What field was she going to be studying, in graduate school?

"And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars, for ever and ever." -- Daniel 12:3.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

What field was she going to be studying, in graduate school?

Psychology. Specifically, animal cognition. She worked with dolphins as an undergraduate, and was about to begin studying songbirds as well.

As hard as she worked at that, saving the world was practically a second career for her. She helped change a lot of minds and habits locally. She hardly ever used a car, even in cities that did their best to make alternatives impossible. She was also a web developer, and was working on some ambitious on-line resources for green consumers. When we can, some of us geeks who loved her hope to finish what she started.

      Thank you for sharing your loss with us.  It is our loss as well.

patrick

You personally might not be directly interested in her work in animal cognition.  But that kind of research is of terrific importance to the developing area of animal rights ethics.  If to your knowledge Julia wrote anything on the subject -- and I mean not so much hard scientific papers as more speculative essays -- , it would probably be valuable to retrieve what there is, and salvage and edit what you can, and publish it somehow.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Let us distinguish between seeing the probability of a grim future and being blind to all possibility of hope.  The former is both realistic and useful.  When Bush was trying to drum up support for the war in Iraq, he made it seem like it would be easy, swift, and clean.  If more people had listened to the dark (and, it turns out, realistic) predictions, he would never have gotten the support that let him invade, and worse to do so with troop levels below what many in the military wanted to do the job thoroughly.  Back on the topic of the environment, we are told that voluntary reductions in pollutants, new technology years from development, etc. means that a greener future will come easily and without fundamental change.  Balderdash.  Unlike Iraq, this is not a struggle we can avoid, so we need to acknowledge the worst-case scenario in order to mobilize a response of magnitude befitting the problem.  On the other hand, I totally agree that putting forth ONLY doomsday scenarios is counterproductive if we want people to change.  Learned helplessness leads to inaction.  We must be able to see that there is light at the end of the tunnel without underestimating the tunnel's length, darkness, and frequent potentially deadly wrong turns.

We are strong enough to acknowledge the full, fell darkness of the possible future without giving up.  Consider the Lord of the Rings when Frodo and Sam are in the last legs of their journey to take the Ring to Mount Doom.  (spoilers for the few people who have neither read the book nor seen the movie).  They face near-impossible odds and unspeakably bleak conditions.  Frodo can no longer picture the Shire, his dear home, or anything except the burden of the Ring.  Sam retains hope longer, but in the end even he realizes that there is no conceivable way they will make a return journey, but he does not break:  "[...] even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength, almost grim, as the will hardened in him, and he felt through all his limbs a thrill, as if he was turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue"(Return of the King, Book 6, ch. 3).  Hopeless, they go on, until Sam must carry Frodo, until they both must crawl.  Yet they DO destroy the Ring and even survive, though it costs Frodo a finger.  Our task is not so grim as the hobbits', but I think things could get worse before they get better.  We may need that same perseverance beyond rational hope, that capacity to keep on keeping on because giving up is even more pointless.  By all means envision the green utopian future.  It IS within our capacity.  Just don't assume that's where we're going without tremendous effort, will, brains, teamwork, and yes, sacrifice.

In the box on the right side at that link are four scenarios developed to prompt thinking about what we want and where we are going.  The fact that the futures project was conducted by the Chief Financial Officer of EPA is connected to the need to plan future expenditures by the Agency.  To set our eyes on the future gives us the direction to steer our course.

If more people had listened to the dark (and, it turns out, realistic) predictions, he would never have gotten the support that let him invade, and worse to do so with troop levels below what many in the military wanted to do the job thoroughly.

Now, much as I appreciated Biogrrl's excellent points about the scene, there, with Frodo and Samwise on Mount Doom, it must be said, here, that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was probably a consensus decision of the elites all along, from Bush I to Clinton's to Bush II's administration.  And in the US the elites pretty much get what they want.

Clinton tried to satisfy this demand by overthrowing Saddam Hussein, through the CIA.  A consistent policy directive, throughout these Administrations, called for Saddam Hussein's removal.  The point of the ongoing embargo on Iraq was to keep Iraq's oil in the ground until such time as it could be appropriated by the US or its proxies.  The only question was how it was to be done.  Clinton's failure in removing Saddam Hussein doubtless convinced the elites that more extreme measures had to be taken, and so George W. Bush was shepherded into the White House to "finish the job."

The elites knew all about Peak Oil -- if they hadn't known already, certainly Matthew Simmons told them.  And I don't think they had any plans to allow Saddam Hussein to peg his precious oil reserves to the Euro, either, not with the US government trillions of dollars in debt.  Hussein's threats against Israel made his removal almost a sure thing from their perspective.

The clincher must have been the Saudi request that US troops be removed from Saudi soil.  The Saudi government faced a serious threat from its revivalist, Muslim Brother wing (the bunch that gave us Osama bin Laden), which wanted the (US) infidel and its troops out of Saudi Arabia.  But it's not as if the US could continue to control the oil reserves from afar -- there had to be some sort of major Mideast US troop presence.  A country had to be found to house it.  And, sure enough, soon after the invasion, US troops were removed from Saudi Arabia, and inserted into Iraq.

I don't think there was any point at which this trajectory of events could have been derailed.  Winning the 2000 Presidential election didn't empower Al Gore to do anything.  And certainly the largest demonstrations in American history didn't stop Bush.  

I think that the idea that the US invasion of Iraq has been "a disaster" is in error.  Both major parties, publicly or privately, plan to "win the war in Iraq" regardless of the cost in time or money.  15 percent of the world's oil reserves are under that land -- the cheapest energy we will ever see is right there in Iraq.  They'll never give it up.  The so-called "civil war"?  All imperial powers have used a divide-and-conquer strategy to keep the natives in line.  This is more of the same.

Things turned out differently than in Tolkien's story.  In our world, Sauron has the ring, and he's using it as only he knows how.  The so-called "Left" in this country votes for the Democrats, who only oppose Sauron because they want his ring and his power.  The Democrats would doubtless bring Morgoth back from the Void, if they only knew how, in order to dislodge Sauron.  Dumping the Dems would be would be in our interests, if we care about them anymore.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

Included in "The Tolkien Reader" is a short play of his, based on a fragmentary Old English poem, "The Battle of Maldon," about a hopeless battle fought by an army of English against Norse invaders.  In the introduction to his play, Tolkien writes:
<<
Near the end of the surviving fragment an old retainer, Beorhtwold, as he prepares to die in the last desperate stand, utters the famous words, a summing up of the heroic code, that are here spoken in a dream by Torhthelm: "Hige sceal the heardra, heorte the cenre, / mod sceal the mare the ure maegen lytlath."  "Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessons."
>>

That, along with the Pauline "hoping against hope," is the ethic underlying the actions of Frodo and Sam in Mordor.  In fact, it is extremely close, verbally, to the passage you quote about Sam.  (As for Frodo, though, Tolkien pushes the psychological edge to such an extent that his motivation is nearly unintelligible.)

Comparable is the rather more tranquil Stoicism that I was recommending earlier in this thread.  One of the most famous Stoics of all time is the much-admired second-century Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius.  Remember, he was played by the late Richard Harris in Ridley Scott's "Gladiator," and was pretty much all that I liked in that movie; I like especially the opening scene, as, with profound regret at the horrible loss of life, Marcus observes the Romans doing their typical methodical job in cutting the courageous Marcomanni to pieces.  In retrospect, the historical Marcus's moral decisions do not always stand up to scrutiny.  But he seems to have maintained a consistently responsible, hopeful attitude in the face of gloomy necessity, the "fell darkness."


Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

That vision thing--we need to envision a healthy, bright future, and maintain that as the only acceptable goal.  Then any attempt to lower our standard would become unacceptable, and destructive corporate marketing would lose its power to sway.

You know how when one person takes pride in their house, other houses in the neighborhood are inspired to do the same?  We need to protect our families, our vision, and let our commitment to a bright future catch on.

Prominent environmentalist David Suzuki has published a book entitled "Good News for a Change", which is completely filled with good news environmental stories.  Check it out at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0773733078/103-4090290-2086253?v=glance&...

Adam