{"id":34217,"date":"2018-05-14T06:02:32","date_gmt":"2018-05-14T11:02:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34217"},"modified":"2018-05-14T06:02:32","modified_gmt":"2018-05-14T11:02:32","slug":"to-be-or-not-to-be-the-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34217","title":{"rendered":"To be or not to be the change"},"content":{"rendered":"
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To be or not to be the change<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Coming up on Small Farm Future \u2013 some posts on the hows and whys of social transformation towards more sustainable societies, which have been prefigured in recent posts like this one<\/a> on \u2018self-systemic\u2019 agriculture and my previous one<\/a> on utopias \u2013 perhaps particularly in relation to the ensuing discussion about individualism and collectivism. Here, I\u2019ll look at the question of transformation via personal consumption choices in societies of mass consumption, which I touched on a while back<\/a>. That discussion prompted Peter Kalmas, climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution<\/a><\/em> to get in touch and kindly send me his book.<\/p>\n

Maybe first I should set out a brief position statement. As I see it, the world is beset with enormous inequities, creating a lot of human misery, and looming environmental crises, creating yet more human (and non-human) misery. The dominant paradigm for tackling these problems involves lifting people out of poverty through growing the capitalist global economy, and mitigating the environmental problems caused by this economic growth through technical innovation. I don\u2019t think this will work on either count \u2013 it won\u2019t lift many people out of poverty and it won\u2019t succeed in mitigating environmental problems. If we continue down this path, it seems to me likely that there will be major breakdowns in human social systems and in the Earth\u2019s biophysical systems. In fact, there already are. These may proliferate in all sorts of surprising and dystopian ways, but I don\u2019t see much point in speculating about how such \u2018collapse\u2019 scenarios may unfold. I do see a point in speculating about alternative scenarios that may create better outcomes, and in particular about how such scenarios may emerge from present social processes, because that may give some kind of a handle on how to increase the probability of those better outcomes occurring. So that, generally speaking, is what I want to focus my writing around.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To be or not to be the change Coming up on Small Farm Future \u2013 some posts on the hows and whys of social transformation towards more sustainable societies, which have been prefigured in recent posts like this one on \u2018self-systemic\u2019 agriculture and my previous one on utopias \u2013 perhaps particularly in relation to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[17183,4609,15683,3880,9738,12545],"class_list":["post-34217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-biophysical-limits","tag-change","tag-chris-smaje","tag-dystopia","tag-small-farm-future","tag-social-transformation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34217"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34218,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34217\/revisions\/34218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}