psilocybin has been reported to greatly reduce anxiety and in some cases completely alleviate the fear of death...seems relevant to this conversation.I wonder if the military has looked into this? If you gotta go, you might as well go happy!
Chris, as usual for last ten years, great article.
Question a pro pos future: Have you, or has anyone followed the debate regarding an article on grid stability, claimng the US could run on renewables at low cost by 2050-55 ? If something sounds too good to be true…?
Hint for Crash Course grads, one of their selling points is “It woud help economic growth” ! Both article and review have been on resilience.org
Chris, it would be great if you could do a detailed review for non-techies. Caution: be mindful of your arguments. See “lawsuit”.
The original study, plus peer review is on PNAS website, search: “Jacobson, Clack”. Good summary in Washington Post, August, 2017. Plus, mysterious high stakes law suit against PNAS, filed and withdrawn, see (like it or not) Wikipedia.
https://climatecrocks.com/2018/06/06/thats-why-they-call-them-bubbles-ca…
Quote:
Plunging prices for renewable energy and rapidly increasing investment in low-carbon technologies could leave fossil fuel companies with trillions in stranded assets and spark a global financial crisis, a new study has found.
A sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels before 2035 is likely, according to the study, given the current global investments and economic advantages in a low-carbon transition.
The existence of a “carbon bubble” – assets in fossil fuels that are currently overvalued because, in the medium and long-term, the world will have to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions – has long been proposed by academics, activists and investors. The new study, published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows that a sharp slump in the value of fossil fuels would cause this bubble to burst, and posits that such a slump is likely before 2035 based on current patterns of energy use.Quote:
Bloomberg:
The world’s deepest-pocketed investors are starting to take climate change seriously, according to Amundi SA. “We are really observing a tipping point among the institutional investors on climate change,” said Frederic Samama, co-head of institutional clients at the Paris-based firm. “Until recently, that question was not on their radar screen. It’s changing, and it’s changing super fast.” Risks from global warming range from damage to physical assets from extreme weather to falling prices on fossil fuel-related assets, as the world moves away from burning coal and oil. Bank of England governor Mark Carney has repeatedly warned that these risks are not priced in adequately and that investors may have exposure to a “climate Minsky moment” if they don’t take action.
Another great article Chris. I feel resensitized to the plight of all life and so I’m very sad at our collective situation.
However, I hazard that the spirit and the flesh may not be the same thing.
Tude wrote:
nedyne wrote:
Norman Borlaug is often called "the father of the Green Revolution", and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. I can't help think what the world may look like today if Borlaug instead of working on crop yields starting in the 1940s, had given up his career as a scientist and moved to a rural location to start his homestead and learn all the skills of a self-reliant lifestyle, maybe because he was anticipating a mass starvation and economic collapse. I'm not saying that any one of us will be the next Norman Borlaug, but it does give me food for thought.
Grover,
Knowing Jim from his posting history (and I think I met him once at Rowe), I strongly suspect he sees the large number of diversity positions the way you do, not as a good thing.
But I’ll let him speak for himself.
Grover,
Knowing Jim from his posting history (and I think I met him once at Rowe), I strongly suspect he sees the large number of diversity positions the way you do, not as a good thing.
But I’ll let him speak for himself.
let’s start with food and give Chris the credit of another collective kick-in-the-pants to all of us comfortable, convenience oriented, wasters:
https://watch.cbc.ca/media/media/the-passionate-eye/wasted-the-story-of-food-waste/38e815a-00dec96e505
Well worth the time, if you haven’t already seen it.
nedyne wrote:
Tude wrote:
nedyne wrote:
Norman Borlaug is often called "the father of the Green Revolution", and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. I can't help think what the world may look like today if Borlaug instead of working on crop yields starting in the 1940s, had given up his career as a scientist and moved to a rural location to start his homestead and learn all the skills of a self-reliant lifestyle, maybe because he was anticipating a mass starvation and economic collapse. I'm not saying that any one of us will be the next Norman Borlaug, but it does give me food for thought.
baysailor94044 wrote:
Change the world by letting people live with you (each of us) for free for a while...I have a son… might be interested. Others here may also be interested.
Why are we getting less intelligent?
Web Race: Porn Dominates
Asteroid gold rush could earn everyone on Earth $100 billion.
Pregnant man at London’s Fashion Week.
14 Boys and no regrets
My take at this point is that, not everyone is going to dip their oar in the water. All of those that do, are certainly not going to be rowing in the same direction.
Indeed my intention was to be critical of this insane expansion of administative bloat in the name of the leftist agenda, the intention of which is to subvert the invidual in the name of the collective, artificial, “identity” groups. And yes, we met at Rowe : )
Grover and I see eye to eye… just a misread on his part.
I have been chewing over this article for a couple of days now, especially:
“We are open to any and all ideas about how to build, join or support a movement of like-minded people who are ready and able to shuck the old conventions and start anew which begins by facing the data as we know it today.”
I keep coming back to three core issues.
While Peak Prosperity has done a great job of creating an online community focused on the three Es and building resilience, for it to create real change that online community must be transferred to the real world.
I was listening to a speaker (unfortunately I can’t remember who) and she said that while she rarely, if ever, saw truly sustainable homesteads, she had seen multiple sustainable communities. Humans need communities to survive and prosper, so one of the main goals of the movement would need to be to create an intentional community.
Movements that successfully bring about social change are grassroots movements that work from the bottom up. This does not happen quickly or without organization and planning.
Based on these issues, if you wanted to transfer and create a Peak Prosperity real world community, the first thing to do would be to survey current PP users. The survey could be simple: Would you be willing to join a Peak Prosperity Community Group (PPCG) in your community? Where do you live (zipcode or town and state)? Would you be willing to take a leadership role in organizing the group? and contact information for when/if a group is forming in your area.
Once you had your survey results you would want to focus on the areas with the greatest density of respondents, since a large part of living in a community is physical proximity. In those areas, you could organize a meeting.
For people who do not live in a high density PP area, this does not mean there is nothing they can do. They should look around and find a community group to get involved with, start to make connections, and include and support practices that support a healthier ecosystem and locality.
For people who do live in a high density PP area, you may meet as a group and after the first couple of meetings decided that since your area already has an active Transition Town movement, you are going to join and support it. Excellent! You have just joined a movement of like-minded people and will strengthen and bring more expertise to the movement.
If, however, when you meet as a PPCG and you are the only group in your locality working to create a sustainable community, the PP framework provides and excellent organization structure for your group. You will need the usual officers (President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer) but there should be positions for each of the 3 E’s and for community.
One possibility would be to have an Energy committee, an Economic committee, and an Environment committee. Each would have a chair person who would be on the executive board along with the officers. Each committee would be responsible for organizing speakers, workshops and other activities related to their specific subject, with the understanding that energy and economic actions should support a healthy, functioning community in a healthy, functioning environment.
You would also need to make sure balance is maintained. This duty could fall to the president or vice president or there could be a designated position. Maintaining balance means that each E should get roughly equal attention and that while it is important to learn about the issues, it is equally important to transfer that learning into action, so speakers should be balanced by workshops and activities. Finally for balance, community building and strengthening actives would need to be present throughout.
The community chair and committees would be responsible for including community building activities. These could be practical, but should include many opportunities for socialization and fun, as that is a large part of what binds communities together and forges ties between people.
Within this basic structure, each local group could determine what action items they want to focus on based on specifics to their community and region. A group in the a dry climate may want to focus on rainwater collection and storage, another group may want to focus on sourcing local food from sustainable farms and implementing small scale, high intensity gardening practices, while a third may want to focus on investing in the community to promote and support local businesses who source materials ethically and provide high quality goods and services. There is much room for flexibility to meet the needs of different communities.
While this is not a comprehensive plan, nor the only possible framework, I offer it as a starting point to a discussion/plan that will lead to the formation (or support) of a grassroots movement to form intentional communities with the skills, knowledge and resilience to hopefully survive the future challenges of resource depletion, overshoot and pollution. However, unless we are all ready to get off our devices, roll up our sleeves and get to work in the real world, nothing will change.
So many great comments here and after reading them all and several of them more than once, I think it’s safe to say that there’s real energy here to belong to something that matters.
Whether we call it a movement or not, I think this thing I have in mind is the right idea connected to actions.
I liked the idea that it has to be SIMPLE. Of course it does, especially today where even trying to eat right requires being able to read bar codes for country of origin so that you are not eating organic flown half way around the world and undoing nearly all of the good by paying up for organic.
I am not at all inclined to join up with existing environmental groups because they are either fighting a losing rear-guard action, or not being entirely honest in their effort to gain traction by not discouraging people, or both. For example, try finding any major environmental group that has population growth at the center of its mission. I couldn’t find any. For political/fundraising reasons they don’t dare touch the single most important thing sitting at the center of their entire reason for being.
So what is this ‘right idea?’ I’m not sure yet, but perhaps it’s related to the concept that growth is now our enemy, and no longer our friend? Maybe it’s that infinite growth on a finite planet is not jsut a bad idea, but a suicidal one. Maybe it’s about expanding the idea that none of us own anything but are either renting or extracting things during the time we’re here and that we have a moral obligation to leave something for future generations?
I don’t know, but I do know that anything we come up with has to be framed at the moral level, not the tactical. Controlling or limiting CO2 is a tactic. Voluntary simplicity so the there’s more room for current and future life is a moral issue.
For example, when I was at a Post Carbon fellows meeting, the point was made that if Obama had framed the healthcare debate at the CEO level instead of the COO level he would have had far more success. That is, instead of saying “We need to control health care costs” the message should have been “People deserve equal access to healthcare when they need it.”
You get to the same place, possibly, but moral arguments are always more persuasive than tactical arguments.
Meanwhile this week has been one body-blow after another for ecological news. Australian fish stocks down 30% in recent years (and even that from a baseline already vastly shifted lower), a prominent ecologist in the UK alerting everyone to the bird/insect/wil animal apocolypse unfolding there. Early and very strong storms in the Pacific and Arctic. Reports of bizzare weather from all areas of the globe.
So what’s the SIMPLE organizing idea? What resonates most strongly for you? Which one(s) give you a sense of personal agency, that you could at least modify your own life and actions to align with that message or idea?
What’s the simple organizing idea?
It would be so great if someone posted what it was and we all just agreed. Probably not going to be so simple…
The Default mode network is one of most recent areas of the human mind to have developed. It’s primarily functions are developing a more defined sense of self (ego) and regulating how ordered the mind is and in what direction, thru past/future thinking. Either towards entropy (disorder) or away (order). In the linked article the author suggest the mind can be viewed as a disordering avoiding element of cognition, utilizing “spot light” consciouness as the means for discernment. Which is wonderful if solutions are within the eluminated regions, terrible if more diffuse forms of cognitive functions are needed to see solutions far from spot lighted areas.
Could it be that our minds have become overly ordered? And suggest, to move forward, our minds need to undergo disordering? Before an idea that is outside of our current cognitive reach can be explored or even considered?
The point, as the article suggest, is that brain of the adult-modern human is in a settling rather than expanding phase. Not ideal if you want to get some idea up and running.
We’ve become like the Formula one racing cars, good at a few items and terrible outside our area of expertise. And to go off the race track back into the jungle isn’t what we’re prepared for. The idea can only make sense if it plays out on the race track, yet we’ve run out of gas, the tires shredded and the pit crew has declared mutiny.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020/full
Taking a completely different track from my last post, I came across this organization in Caitlin Johnstone’s most recent blog post. They essentially have what looks like the best plan I’ve seen to take on corruption in the election and law–making process here in the USA. Take a look at their series of videos on their website starting with:
The problem: you probably know about this already, but it’s a very well gone little video.
The solution: describes the anti-corruption act and their plan to bring it first to the local and state levels and then through the power of the states to implement the clean election provisions in it, to the national level by the vastly different incentives of those elected to congress through clean election processes. This page gives details on the components of the proposed law.
I am under no illusion that this is the magic bullet or that it will be even close to 100% effective in cleaing up the political process or that the will of the people will have to evolve significantly before many of the more effective actions to address the 3 E’s can be implemented. But the plan does seem to have a reasonable chance of success and a reasonable potential to buy us some time by opening the way for government to take some positive actions. It would also make Doug’s suggestion of supporting political candidates who align with our goals much more effective by removing much of the pressure for them to bow to the corporate agenda once elected.
Thoughts? Am I missing something?
This is a great discussion. I have long pondered this subject, wondering why it is that the existing movements have not been more successful in gaining traction. I am sure we all feel the frustration.
Perhaps we need to take a page out of the capitalist playbook(?) New ideas are supported/grown via venture capitalist networks and the markets. Can we create a parallel system to launch our desired movement(s)? Just thinking outloud without a concrete idea of what that might actually look like, but hoping the many great minds on this site might be able to take the idea under wing and ponder it.
For a movement to grow it needs widespread support. That support will only come when the ‘investors’ are able to see what is in it for them. The ROI will not be monetary as per the normal system, but something much better - a future that is worth inheriting. We therefore need to target the people who can help make this happen: the big wigs in venture capital, marketing and so on. Get them on board and harness the power of social media in the hopes of the movement going viral. Then we gain some traction and, like any trending thing, push it as far as we can in the hopes of it becoming mainstream.
We here on this site who care so much cannot do this alone. Most of us have not succeeded in getting even those close to us to buy into this type of belief system. We need pros to help us if we want to move this forward.
Food for thought and I hope this triggers some further thinking/brainstorming amongst us.
Jan
Amy8989 wrote:
Humans need communities to survive and prosper,Quote:
so one of the main goals of the movement would need to be to create an intentional community.Quote:
Would you be willing to join a Peak Prosperity Community Group (PPCG) in your community?Quote:
You will need the usual officers (President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer)Quote:
One possibility would be to have an Energy committee, an Economic committee, and an Environment committee. Each would have a chair person who would be on the executive board along with the officers.Ugh. I am sooooo not interested in committees and Robert’s Rules and hierarchy. Count me out if this is how it must be organized. And moreso, I think many of the people you most want to attract are turned off by conventional hierarchical organization.
Quote:
unless we are all ready to get off our devices, roll up our sleeves and get to work in the real world, nothing will change.Hey, something we can agree on! 
Been there, done that, got the boot-tracks up my back. The most important lesson I’ve learned is, if you always do like you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you already got.
Time to break molds. If you feel the need to have a legal entity, set up a hierarchy and control structure that is the minimum required by law — and then totally ignore it, except for statutory filings.
Embrace anarchy. Look into Sociocracy. Do anything other than what’s been done to get us into this mess in the first place!
Maybe I’m missing something, but nearly everybody is talking about “a movement” as if such a thing (undefined here, so far) is just a matter of us getting the right inputs. That is, many commenters seem to have in the back of their mind some kind of formula: Input #1 + Input #2 + Input #3 = “A Movement” that changes the world. Only in 20/20 hindsight would anybody be able to convince me that any mass movement that has “changed the world” in the past is so simple. I think it would be much more realistic in analyzing what “caused” previous mass movements that changed the world to enumerate many, many factors that birthed “the movement” and caused it to be “successful.” And even if we correctly understood all of the factors I think it would be essential to acknowledge and state out loud that the final and most important aspect of a successful mass movement would be its acceptance and adoption by a large enough group of people. But that adoption by a large enough group of people is something that is completely out of the control of the founders and leaders of the “movements.” There have been, in my mind, many worthy impulses that never became mass movements because they never “caught on” with enough people. And I believe PP is currently such an impulse: a very worthy impulse that has (yet) to “catch on” with a large enough group of people. Why that is true is debatable, but I seriously doubt it’s because we haven’t found just the right inputs to make it happen. I’m convinced that “the people” are not ready, or are resistant, or are willfully blind, or… In fact, I believe PP.com would already be a mass movement that would be in the process of changing the world if the world were ready. But the world isn’t ready, or that’s my conviction.
I have several convictions about that I’ve stated before: it’s too late in the game and the great majority of people are currently not ready to 1) face the facts and 2) make the necessary changes. So I’ve concluded we’re not going to have any mass movement that significantly alters our course toward disaster.
Because of that conclusion I’ve drawn, I’m focused on personal changes and preparations, and being ready for the teachable moment that is going to occur when disaster does strike. I’m convinced that the pain (even the horror) of the coming Crash will be our golden opportunity to spark a successful mass movement (though admittedly with a lot less “mass” than we have now). With pain comes insight and change (or at least they can).
There’s another possibility I’ve been considering lately. If there is a God, or Nature, or Evolution guiding and preparing us for what’s coming, could it be that those most likely to survive, prosper and lead us in a new direction are currently isolated from the mass of humanity in some important ways AND that that isolation is going to be part of what enables them/us to survive, prosper and spark a new direction after The Crash? For instance, maybe the worst thing about our coming Disaster is going to be a contagious disease that wipes out a large portion of humanity and those who are currently socially isolated will survive in disproportionate numbers. Or maybe being largely isolated from the modern financial system and its fiat currencies will mark us for survival when most others are marked for extinction. If true, maybe trying to create a “mass movement” would be counterproductive or even fatal for our individual chances of survival. Time will tell, I guess.
“Welcome to the Hunger Games. And may the odds be ever in your favor.”