The last month has been focused on acceptance, and has been building up to the inexorable, immutable, and irrevocable truth that besets us within the confines of the set of predicaments we face. The one thing I constantly see and hear is about all the things that “we” can do to mitigate the situation – all the ways we can “regenerate” nature – and all the ways we can “save the planet.” While I do think that society is beginning to realize that something is wrong, most people are still following the constant narratives being delivered in an attempt to keep the public calm. George Tsakraklides says it best right here, quote:

“The toxic positivity theatre isn’t confined to the corporatocracy. Hope, whether real and justified or morbidly delusional, is an irresistible narcotic for humans.

A hopeful message will always win over bitter truths, and our information machine knows this: news media habitually turn even the most sobering news into fast-consumable entertainment, making a mockery of reality.

It used to be that this was the role of movies: to allow us to experience a funny or terrifying world and entertain ourselves either way, knowing that it is all fake and we are watching from the safety of our sofa. But now the same is done to real, actual news coming from around the world: reality has been gamified, turned into amusement, into a video game in the most morally corrupt, sick, and irresponsible way possible. All of this, in the name of “hope” and “bringing lightness” to our collapse predicament.“

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Hope Dies, Gold Rises

December 5, 2023

Hope Dies, Gold Rises

The primary stages of grief include: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance.

When it comes to grieving over the slow demise of the American economy, sovereign IOU/USD and the absolute failure of our “re-election-only-focused” policy makers, these stages of grief are easy to see yet easier to ignore.

But false hope won’t help us.

Denying a Recession

With the vast majority of sectors that make up the U.S. economy evidencing three months of negative GDP growth while a laundry list of leading homebuilder indicators (housing starts and prospective buyers) drops into recessionary red, I keep wondering when the recession debate will finally end.

Walmart is worrying, Jamie Dimon is worrying, commercial real estate delinquencies are rising and IPO markets are all but dead on arrival.

But that’s just the latest hard data.

One can cite everything from the Conference Board of Leading Indicators, negative M2 growth, yield curve movements and a drying repo market to make it empirically clear that the US is not heading for recession but has already been in one for nearly a year.

In fact, if we were to define a Depression by growth rates of inflation-adjusted GDP per capita, then factually speaking, we have also been in a quantifiable depression for the last 16 years.

Such data, of course, is depressing, but are we all still hoping for kinder facts or a political and monetary Santa Claus to cure our denial?

I for one favor preparation over denial.

Then Comes the Anger

Citizens storming the Capital, or grabbing guitars and singing “I’m taxed to no end and my dollar aint $#!T” are just the first signs of the anger stage.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Hope, on the Balance of Probabilities

January 25, 2023

Hope, on the Balance of Probabilities

my now-slightly-outdated map of worldviews about collapse; right-click and open in a new tab to see it full-sized

It’s interesting to listen to social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger try to reconcile his assessment of the state of the world with his vehement insistence that we have to try as hard we possibly can to avert the ‘metacrisis’ that threatens to bring about the collapse of human civilization and the extinction of most or all life on earth, including humans.

In a recent video, he said:

How can evolutionarily nasty chimpanzees with a high orientation for conflict and irrationality, with nuclear weapons and AI and synthetic biology, with a history of using technology in conflict-oriented and harm-externalizing ways, how can 8 billion of us with exponential tech [increasingly available to all] do a good job of governing that much power? It doesn’t actually look that promising.

Yet he insists that “we cannot know for certain” that we are fucked (or that we are not), so we each have a responsibility to do what we can, working with others, to pull us back from the brink.

His argument reveals a curious quirk about humans and our relationship to complexity, uncertainty, and hope. We seem completely preoccupied with what John Gray calls “the needs of the moment”, and it is clear that this preoccupation has directly produced the metacrisis (a combination of many, unintended, crises and system collapses — economic, ecological, political, social, health, educational, resource, technological, and, for some, spiritual/religious) in which we find ourselves. Yet we continue to cling to hope for our future when all logic says it’s unfounded.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Beyond Hope

November 9, 2021

DERRICK JENSEN

Beyond Hope

THE MOST COMMON WORDS I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We’re fucked. Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have — or rather whatever legal tools they have, which means whatever tools those in power grant them the right to use, which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective — to try to protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the manufacture or release of poisons, to try to stop civilized humans from tormenting some group of plants or animals. Sometimes they’re reduced to trying to protect just one tree.

Here’s how John Osborn, an extraordinary activist and friend, sums up his reasons for doing the work: “As things become increasingly chaotic, I want to make sure some doors remain open. If grizzly bears are still alive in twenty, thirty, and forty years, they may still be alive in fifty. If they’re gone in twenty, they’ll be gone forever.”

But no matter what environmentalists do, our best efforts are insufficient. We’re losing badly, on every front. Those in power are hell-bent on destroying the planet, and most people don’t care.

Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.

To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Against Climate Gloom and Doom

February 2, 2021

Against Climate Gloom and Doom

When given a chance, life finds a way. Here are some reasons to keep hoping — and fighting.

Environmental scholar Elin Kelsey suggests that the conservation of coastal ecosystems hinges on hope. Photo via Shutterstock.

[Editor’s note: As the environmental problems facing our world compound, despair may feel like a rational response. In her new book Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We Think Is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis, environmental scholar Elin Kelsey makes an evidence-based argument for choosing hope over despair. Kelsey holds up examples of how ecosystems — including along our coasts and in our ocean — have managed to rebound from damage when given the chance, illustrating nature’s impressive resilience. By sharing these case studies, Kelsey offers reasons to reject apathy and to mobilize. Only if we believe there’s an opportunity to make a real positive impact will we find the motivation to fight for the protection and restoration of ecosystems we depend on. In this condensed excerpt, Kelsey shares a few hope-filled success stories specific to coastal ecosystems.]

We are living amid a planetary crisis. “I am hopeless,” a student in an environmental study graduate program recently told me. “I’ve seen the science. I am hopeless because the state of the planet is hopeless.”

It’s not surprising she feels so depressingly fatalistic. In his speech at the start of a two-week international conference in Madrid, Spain, in December 2019, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said, “The point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling toward us.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

After the crisis, what kind of world do we want? Post-apocalyptic novels hold lessons — and warnings

April 3, 2020

After the crisis, what kind of world do we want? Post-apocalyptic novels hold lessons — and warnings

‘Art gives me hope. Will we take those values, that hope, and use them to imagine a better collective future?’

Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee in the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.(Dimension Films)

I had planned to write a totally different column this month. I had the idea, the books. I’d started doing the research. Due to COVID-19 forcing me and so many others to stay at home and inside, I had the time.

But, also due to COVID-19, I didn’t have the inclination to continue doing any of it. For over a week now I’ve felt paralyzed, as though I’ve been watching my friends and family members move through a slow motion horror movie. I imagine a lot of people have felt that way over the past few days, weeks and/or months, depending on how deep into this global pandemic they are. With each passing day it has become clearer that life as we’d once known it is ending before our very eyes. Each day I’ve scrolled mindlessly through social media, waiting for the latest news story that might give some sort of discernible shape to our increasingly uncertain collective future.

There have been daily news conferences and updates. There has been emergency legislation introduced and passed. There have been restrictions on how many people can gather in one place, which businesses are allowed to remain open, and how they must operate if they do. It’s suggested that everyone stay in their homes, provided they have homes; that if you do have to go outside, you remain a certain distance away from others.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Loving a vanishing world

May 12, 2019

Loving a vanishing world

I want to talk about power — how much we have, and how we can use it meaningfully.

But I’m going to start with despair. At a beach in British Columbia’s Gulf Islands recently — on my first real vacation in almost three years — I felt much of the loosening that I often feel at the coast. The smell of the sea is home for me, the brush of the waves on the shore, the spark and flutter of sun on the water like innumerable languid butterflies. Breathing at the ocean, I feel different.

I’ve known for a long time that humans and other species are in profound trouble, and that the seas are rising. I’ve known for a long time how much is at risk. I went to BC specifically to have the time to develop my thoughts and write about these risks, and how we can move forward in a way that matters.

So sitting there, on sand and the countless soft shards left behind by clams and mussels and oysters over decades, I couldn’t loose myself of the knowledge that the ocean is beginning to die. There are plastic garbage patches the size of Texas. There are microplastics in almost every tested sea salt. Fish populations are collapsing. Whales and dolphins are suffering profoundly from the din of the sonar used by oil companies and the navy. Seawater is acidifying so fast in the Salish Sea that oysters are struggling to build shells. And perhaps most troubling of all, phytoplankton levels are down 40% since 1950 — and phytoplankton is not only the base of the marine food chain, it also produces most of the ocean’s oxygen, as well as ours (one phytoplankton is so prolific it generates your every fifth breath). This fact, by itself, should be enough to make us address the crises in the natural world immediately.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Barry Lopez on Hope, Capitalism and Environmental Disaster

March 23, 2019

Barry Lopez on Hope, Capitalism and Environmental Disaster

‘The only thing you can’t do in public is to destroy people’s sense of hope.’

‘People have a need to put food on the table and make their car payments and you can’t be angry about that. And if you are, they can’t comprehend your rage. Still, there is a catastrophe right in front of us that’s about to explode.’ Photo from Steven Barclay Agency.

The Tyee: In Orion magazine, Rebecca Solnit once quoted the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder who said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home.” She wrote that “in the bioregional 1970s, going back to the land and consuming less was how the task was framed… The task has only become more urgent as climate change in particular underscores that we need to consume a lot less… We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future.” Is she right? Was Gary Snyder right?

Barry Lopez: They are both right in a sense. It’s important to maintain an international awareness of global problems like methane gas releases and climate change. It’s hard as an American now that we’ve pulled out of the Paris accords not to be embarrassed abroad. But it’s important to get outside the bounds of your own nation state, to see what people are experiencing, and to report on what they are doing about it. If you are not in the Arctic, you simply cannot understand the staggering change that we are experiencing through climate change.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

CRISIS, HOPE, AND PERMACULTURE

January 28, 2019

CRISIS, HOPE, AND PERMACULTURE

A “Green New Deal” is on everyone’s lips, but how do we actually get there? Our brand new “Green is the New Silver (Lining): Crisis, Hope, and Permaculture,” (http://bit.ly/hope-permaculture) the first of 4 videos in our free-to-view “Permaculture Masterclass,” offers one possible answer. And if we do this right, we can go far beyond organic, beyond sustainability — and towards building thriving communities of abundance. You ready?

Why I’m Hopeful

December 25, 2018

Why I’m Hopeful

A more humane, sustainable world lies just beyond the edge of the Status Quo.

Readers often ask me to post something hopeful, and I understand why: doom-and-gloom gets tiresome. Human beings need hope just as they need oxygen, and the destruction of the Status Quo via over-reach and internal contradictions doesn’t leave much to be happy about.

The most hopeful thing in my mind is that the Status Quo is devolving from its internal contradictions and excesses. It is a perverse, intensely destructive system with powerful incentives for predation, exploitation, fraud and complicity.

A more humane, sustainable world lies just beyond the edge of the Status Quo.

I know many smart, well-informed people expect the worst once the Status Quo (the Savior State and its corporatocracy partners) devolves, and there is abundant evidence of the ugliness of human nature under duress.

But we should temper this Id ugliness with the stronger impulses of community and compassion. If greed and rapaciousness were the dominant forces within human nature, then the species would have either died out at its own hand or been limited to small savage populations kept in check by the predation of neighboring groups, none of which could expand much because inner conflict would limit their ability to grow.

The remarkable success of humanity as a species is not simply the result of a big brain, opposable thumbs, year-round sex or even language; it is ultimately the result of social and cultural associations that act as a “network” for storing knowledge and relationships– what we call intellectual and social capital.

I have devoted significant portions of my books–

Survival+

An Unconventional Guide to Investing in Troubled Times

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation

Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform

A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology & Creating Jobs for All

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our opposable thumb

October 11, 2018

Our opposable thumb

“Stereoscopic vision, depth perception, certain emotions and other perceptions, and the ability to stretch our thumbs farther than most other species, the ability to build and destroy things, and many other traits individually or in combination separate us from other species, not necessarily all species though. Other animals with opposable thumbs include gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and other variants of apes; certain frogs, koalas, pandas, possums and opossums, and many birds have an opposable digit of some sort. Many dinosaurs had opposable digits as well. Granted, most of these are primates, as are we. I wonder if rationalization is something unique to humans. The ability to ponder may be as well.”

Humans are not the only species with an opposable thumb. We are not the species with the largest brain. We are not the only species to communicate or walk bipedal. So what does make Homo sapiens unique? Perhaps it has something to do with our imagination, our ability to ponder “what if?” and our stubborn persistence. Long ago I realized that I depend very strongly on my ability to imagine. Confronted by a challenging situation I imagine choices unfolding into the future. “Will this work?” I let my imagination run and a scenario plays out allowing me to decide “yes, I think this will work” or “no, I don’t think this will work.” I wonder, is imagination the real strength of Homo sapiens? It certainly helps when deciding a direction of action if we can picture a scenario in our head and imagine future outcome, assuming our assumptions are correct.

Now let’s take it one step further, what about belief in the absence of knowing? What does it mean that we can act even in the absence of logical argument? True story.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Robert Macfarlane: “the metaphors we use deliver us hope, or they foreclose possibility”

June 5, 2018

Robert Macfarlane: “the metaphors we use deliver us hope, or they foreclose possibility”

They say you should never meet your heroes. They’re wrong. I recently had the huge honour of spending almost an hour in conversation with Robert MacFarlane, author of 9 books including ‘Mountains of the Mind’, ‘The Old Ways’, ‘Landmarks’ and, most recently, ‘The Lost Words’. I have admired Robert’s work for many years, in particular his reflections on imagination and his determination to keep alive, in our minds and our culture, a whole library of words which help us better articulate our place in, and relationship with, the natural world. As well as being a writer, Robert teaches at Cambridge about language and landscape. As he told me, “the convergences of those two things, along with social justice and environmental justice, are the things I’ve written most about”.

Robert is one of the most fascinating people to follow on Twitter, and he had recently tweeted a quote by Rebecca Solnit where she said, “the destruction of the Earth is due in part to a failure of the imagination, or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can’t count what matters.” So, I started by asking him how he would assess the state of health of our collective imagination in 2018? [Robert made a few changes to the transcript of our discussion, so you will find the transcript below more accurate, but we know how you love podcasts, so we’ll share the original audio too].

“Impoverished, vulnerable, but with surprising flourishings. In that quotation Rebecca challenges something she calls “the tyranny of the quantifiable”. Actually I suppose I would oddly say a word for the tyranny of the quantifiable. We need to quantify. It’s vital for change, not least how we measure our baselines – how we keep track of shifting baseline syndrome.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Hope is not weak. Hope swims” – A great book by Solitaire Townsend.

May 3, 2018

“Hope is not weak. Hope swims” – A great book by Solitaire Townsend.

I had big hopes for this book, “The Happy Hero” that Solitaire Townsend published in October 2017. But when the book arrived I was immediately put off by the combination of the cover and the title. I don’t know about you, but I hate the places where you are greeted by one or more smiling faces and – often – by the words “have a nice day.” Maybe there is some market research showing that these things increase sales, but for me they are depressing. The first impression of this book is that it is one of those “self-help” books you find in the bookstores in the halls of airports. Sugar coated pills that help nobody.

But, no. The book is different. Reading it, a poem by Walt Whitman came to my mind, So Long, where he says “This is no book; Who touches this, touches a man“. In this case, it is a woman but, apart from that, for what I can say, this book is very much Solitaire Townsend and Solitaire Townsend is very much this book. And I can tell you that Solitaire is one of the brightest persons I’ve ever met. For one thing, her idea that the “likes” in facebook are the equivalent of money in the sociosphere has changed my view of the world (I discuss her idea in my book “The Seneca Effect.”)

Then, if a book is like a person, it can never be perfect – you may like him or her a lot, but you must accept his/her idiosyncrasies. And not all persons you meet are the kind of person you would want to marry. So, this book has defects, one is the title. Personally, I would have chosen as title the sentence written at p. 61, “Hope is not weak, hope swims”. It is nevertheless a remarkable book. Very remarkable.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Film in the Anthropocene

March 20, 2018

Film in the Anthropocene

Film is of course the art form of Industrial Civilization and its mass culture, whether as a simple historical fact, a manifestation of technical possibility, or in the various ideologies it is adept at expressing.

But it is also the art form of the Anthropocene. I am overstating the case somewhat, but not entirely, when I note that the prevailing message of film is the power of belief and trust. This is most visible in the nearly inevitable Hollywood Plot whereby evil, prejudice, self-doubt, or malevolent aliens are overcome, at the plot’s climax, by a leap of belief or trust that transcends the odds. This is true whether we are talking about Westerns, “Star Wars,” “Rocky,” “Pocahontas,” “Toy Story”—or “A Wrinkle in Time,” which I saw earlier today (don’t ask). Never mind the odds or probable limits. Believe. Trust. Take my hand. Look me in the eyes. Close your eyes. Jump. What film doesn’t contain this moment? The force is always with the film’s hero if only he or she will surrender fussy sensibility and give in to it.

It is easy enough to make a connection between the narrative of belief in yourself against the odds in the context of competitive capitalism, especially as it increasingly becomes a game of roulette in the financialized casino capitalism of today. But the story of self-overcoming through belief in oneself is more broadly suited to the Liberal life-plan of self-creation. You can be whoever you want—as long as you dream big: that’s the narrative line of almost every “age appropriate” (a phrase I use in both of its senses) movie or TV show produced for my children. The meta-myth of Liberalism is that there are no limits, that ideas and ideals can create reality, that any obstacle can be overcome by human ingeniousness–if, that is, we don’t lose faith and fall victim to the sensible or moderate law of averages that are so often represented by the foil if not the antagonist.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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