preparing for collapsatopia...

At my house we talk about What To Do in preparation for the big crash, the Collapse of the Economy As We Know It. Which we assume is not too distant; maybe next week like JH Kunstler is forever promising, or maybe next year, or maybe somehow not for ten or fifteen years.

Realism or Nostalgia?

My students -- most of them born around 1990 -- view the continual proliferation of electronic devices, access to information, instant communication, and incessant downpour of ideas, images, memes, and phrases from all these devices as normal. They expect it to continue. They expect that the information will continue to rain down, heavier and heavier. The mass media, and especially the internet media, continually promise faster and more complete access to information.

I see the current info-spasm of our civilization as a self-limiting condition, an aberration from the human norm. It seems as sustainable as a metastasis, and about as desirable. I anticipate a collapse of energy, of access to information, of complexity. The Transition, the passage Down the mountain.  I don't think that the survivors will be carrying cell phones in 50 years.

So, which of these views is realistic?  which is nostalgic? 

Asymptotically aproaching a zero-point

Been reading Slavov Zizek's (with special accents over the Zs), Living in the End Times.  Dense, heavy with Marxist-Freudian-Lacanian theory. I can make sense of less than half but some is startlingly relevant, stating familiar concepts in a new way.  Here's a characteristic passage:

"At the geological and biological level, [Ed] Ayres enumerates four 'spikes' (or accelerated developments) asymptotically approaching a zero-point at which the quantitative expansion will reach its point of exhaustion and will bring about a qualitative change. These four spikes are: population growth, consumption of resources, carbon gas emissions, and the mass extinction of species. In order to cope with this threat, our collective ideology is mobilizing mechanisms of dissimulation and self-deception which include the direct will to ignorance: 'a general pattern of behavior among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.'  The recent shift in how those in power are reacting to global warming is a blatant display of such dissimulation."

Does that not explain a lot?

Living on Eaarth

Okay, I haven't even seen Bill McKibben's new book Eaarth, but I'm excited about it.  He was on Democracy Now this morning talking about the need we all face to respond to the new conditions on our planet.  This is no longer the Earth I was born on nearly 50 years ago.  It's a changed planet; we changed it.  We are still at it.  And we have to find ways to live here, to adapt our civilization, our culture, our economy, to the new reality. 

I've been depressed and horrified about the state of the environment and living beings since I was, maybe seven years old.  Even then, I worried about pollution, birds and fish and bears being killed.  Today, strangely, I feel excited - in addition to gloomy and terrified.  The situation is dire; we have to respond.  Here on my island, people are talking about the Transition Town movement.  This is a grass-roots effort to create more resiliency in our communities, to become less dependent on global and continental systems of food and energy.   To create more of what we need closer to home, to build up our own resources and capacities.  People are talking about cutting our energy needs and demanding that our state shut down its biggest coal plant.  People are talking about changing our local planning documents to reflect our needs for greater density in town, and less density in the rural areas. We're talking about how to capture more of the rainwater that falls on our island.

Someplace in the nation, people insist that climate change isn't real, or that burning oil and coal didn't cause it, or that we should wait and see before we waste money responding.  To be so alienated from reality seems like a real handicap in terms of survival - it's not very adaptive. 

Our national and state leaders -- at least the ones I helped elect --seem to be trapped in a kind of double consciousness.  One one hand, they can talk about climate change, confirm that it's a serious issue, and promise to address it boldly.  At the same time, they can't begin to acknowledge the scale of social change we face. They are unable to state that our economic fantasies of perpetual growth are incompatible with reality, with chemistry and physics.  They have not begun to talk about, much less act on, the new reality we face.  Surely they're afraid of the political consequences.  I wonder how much these leaders acknowledge in their own hearts the magnitude of the transformation we need.  I hope they do know, and that they are working on ways to help everyone wake up. 

But on this island, adapting to these changes is on our minds and in our daily conversation.  At the Farmer's Market, at the grocery store, at the bakery, on the email, in the meetings, on the ferry.  People are raising chickens and teaching each other what they learned.  Growing gardens, farming on a small scale, talking about the costs of cisterns and harvesting rainwater.  Making goat cheese.  Experimenting with small-scale grain production. Putting solar panels on the roof, or solar hot water.  Planting nut trees.  Restoring the old fruit trees.  Building cider presses. 

"Snows of a thousand winters
Melt in the sun of one summer."

(Kenneth Rexroth, "The Wheel Revolves," the Collected Shorter Poems)