Your angst is palpable. When you grasp that human exceptionalism is a myth, and that we are on auto-pilot as are all species, perhaps you will relax a bit and accept the self-cull were have entered as inevitable. Between wars over resources and ideologies, and the increasing negative feedback from our explosive population growth with fossil fueled technologies, weak links are breaking in many places globally. There is no avoiding this I can envision. Jay Hanson saw it coming two decades ago. See: jayhansonsdieoff.net
Thanks Andy, more thought provoking stuff. I'm not sure I see the functional division of science and indigenous knowledge as quite so didactic, I think it's conflaited with cultural norms and the power dynamics of our times. Look how western civilization exercises it's religeous beliefs. Generally speaking they're a gross corruption of the written instructions outside of Amish communities and their equivalents. I think this mangling of intent is the same basic process that allows peer reviewed science to continue to contribute more to our doom than our future if we just look at the near-term. I too have more hope than is probably wise for the degrowth movement, mostly because I can't imagine a scenario where the observable facts of our predicament don't make a shift in that direction inevitable but that's hopelessly naive and overlooks the zero-sum logic most of our society leaders subscribe to. The question I am now asking myself with increasing frequency is one you touch on repeatedly: if you know that catastrophic climate change is already locked in (let's face it, we've sailed merrily past 1.5 with no evidence whatsoever of actually attempting to reduce gross carbon emmissions or reign in any other the other drivers of our poly-crisis) and that our ecological overshoot is starting to bite with the societal and ecological consequences that come with that, what is the most sane course of bahaviour? It feels antisocial to stop waving the warning flags but there's also the need for a social statement of rejection of the status quo. The more I think about this the more I wonder if it's not a critical aspect of giving ourselves a sense of functional hope that might extend to the wider population and contribute to signaling that a growing minority are rejecting current norms. Of course it's a fraught concept, tangled up as it would be with the disaffected that reject all authority regardless and the growing diaspora of conspiracists. What do you think?
Andy,
Your angst is palpable. When you grasp that human exceptionalism is a myth, and that we are on auto-pilot as are all species, perhaps you will relax a bit and accept the self-cull were have entered as inevitable. Between wars over resources and ideologies, and the increasing negative feedback from our explosive population growth with fossil fueled technologies, weak links are breaking in many places globally. There is no avoiding this I can envision. Jay Hanson saw it coming two decades ago. See: jayhansonsdieoff.net
Thanks Andy, more thought provoking stuff. I'm not sure I see the functional division of science and indigenous knowledge as quite so didactic, I think it's conflaited with cultural norms and the power dynamics of our times. Look how western civilization exercises it's religeous beliefs. Generally speaking they're a gross corruption of the written instructions outside of Amish communities and their equivalents. I think this mangling of intent is the same basic process that allows peer reviewed science to continue to contribute more to our doom than our future if we just look at the near-term. I too have more hope than is probably wise for the degrowth movement, mostly because I can't imagine a scenario where the observable facts of our predicament don't make a shift in that direction inevitable but that's hopelessly naive and overlooks the zero-sum logic most of our society leaders subscribe to. The question I am now asking myself with increasing frequency is one you touch on repeatedly: if you know that catastrophic climate change is already locked in (let's face it, we've sailed merrily past 1.5 with no evidence whatsoever of actually attempting to reduce gross carbon emmissions or reign in any other the other drivers of our poly-crisis) and that our ecological overshoot is starting to bite with the societal and ecological consequences that come with that, what is the most sane course of bahaviour? It feels antisocial to stop waving the warning flags but there's also the need for a social statement of rejection of the status quo. The more I think about this the more I wonder if it's not a critical aspect of giving ourselves a sense of functional hope that might extend to the wider population and contribute to signaling that a growing minority are rejecting current norms. Of course it's a fraught concept, tangled up as it would be with the disaffected that reject all authority regardless and the growing diaspora of conspiracists. What do you think?
Which session at the conference did you attend?