Home » Posts tagged 'age of consequences'
Tag Archives: age of consequences
Courtney White’s THE AGE OF CONSQUENCES: A Chronicle of Concern and Hope
(Counterpoint Press, January 2015, 261 pages, $21.99)
Reviewed by Frank Kaminski
“I consider myself to be a professional daydreamer,” reads the opening line of Courtney White’s Internet bio page. And indeed, White–a fine, imaginative thinker and writer who happens to be related to the legendary William Faulkner–has done a prodigious amount of fruitful daydreaming about the future. This dreaming isn’t of the blithely pie-in-the-sky variety, though. The term White has coined for the era in which humanity now lives, the “Age of Consequences,” will have an ominous ring to many ears. Yet his book of the same title brims with such well-founded optimism that potential readers who yearn for the “hope” promised by its subtitle, A Chronicle of Concern and Hope, won’t be disappointed.
White is very good. Even apart from the stellar literary quality of his books and articles, he has vast amounts of firsthand experience in the things about which he writes. A longtime rancher and conservation activist, he has worked extensively to develop and promote nature-based approaches to solving environmental problems. Some examples include using cattle (often assumed to be a menace to land health) to restore desertified landscapes; devising rainwater collection systems that, even in desert settings, can meet a household’s water needs; and harnessing the natural process of photosynthesis to mitigate climate change. In his writings, talks and activism, White strives to show how small, practical steps like these, rather than ever-more-grandiose advancements in industrial-age technology, are the real answer to meeting the calamities before us.
The pieces collected in The Age of Consequences were all written for the millennial generation, to which White’s two children belong. White first started writing them on Earth Day 2008, driven by a need to preserve some record of today’s issues for posterity.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
An Unprecedented Future
An Unprecedented Future
I can see The Age of Consequences from my home.
We live on a former ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico, that is now a subdivision with more than two thousand houses. Due to its proximity to a center of colonial Spanish, Mexican, and American administrations, as well as the Santa Fe Trail, the land where live has hosted a variety of livestock for nearly 400 years. In the 1950s, the owner of the 13,000-acre ranch invested in new wells, dirt tanks, roads and a ranch house complex, complete with a swimming pool, in an effort to create a prosperous cattle operation on the property. This effort continued for two decades, right up to the day the ranch was sold to a real estate company, who had a different definition of prosperity in mind.
Of all the artifacts left over from the ranch’s heyday, the one that I’ve watched closely over the years are the old dirt roads.
When we moved to the subdivision in 2003, the former ranch roads were still in decent shape, especially in the greenbelts where houses were excluded. Mostly two-tracks, the roads were easy to follow. As my wife and I walked our dogs and chatted side-by-side, we could pick out features of the ranch as we strolled, including dirt tanks for cattle and evidence of tree-cutting from days long gone. There was a timelessness at play in these parts of the old ranch, a feeling that despite the crop of houses, the land in between hadn’t changed much over the decades – a feeling that history would endure somehow.
I don’t feel that way anymore.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Age of Consequences
The Age of Consequences
I have a new book out from Counterpoint Press! It is titled The Age of Consequences: a Chronicle of Concern and Hope and it includes an Introduction by Wendell Berry. Here is a brief description, followed by a selection from the Prologue. For a review (and to order) see:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-61902-454-0
This is a book about questions and answers.
We live in what sustainability pioneer Wes Jackson calls “the most important moment in human history,” meaning we live at a decisive moment of action. The various challenges confronting us are like a bright warning light shining in the dashboard of a speeding vehicle calledCivilization, accompanied by an insistent and annoying buzzing sound, requiring immediate attention. I call this moment the Age of Consequences – a time when the worrying consequences of our hard partying over the past sixty years have begun to bite hard, raising difficult and anguished questions.
How do you explain to your children, for example, what we’ve done to the planet – to their planet? How do you explain to them not only our actions but our inaction as well? It’s not enough simply to say that adults behave in complex, confusing, and often contradictory ways because children today can see the warning light in Civilization’s dashboard for themselves. When they point, what do we say?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
