I have been noticing recently that I just wasn't feeling that hippy any more. I was in a stage where the future of everything in my life was pretty uncertain and the fact that the earth appears pretty clearly to have already hit some environment tipping points resulted in my being a in a bit of an "I give up" stage.
It is hard to think not using the car or heater is going to help much while feeling certain that there will be major climactic change within my lifetime.
"The problem isn't the problem. It's your attitude to the problem that's the problem."
- Unknown
My current attitude after recognising that and a generally more positive mental outlook is that I live in a time where I can get cheap manufactered stuff and use energy profligately. I will enjoy life, but be aware of the effect I have. I bought a new little electric fan heater. Boo! but I love my fan heater! It makes me feel happy and loved and comfy almost no matter what else is going on. I bought an efficient ceramic one. I try not to over use it and I use it in small rooms and do my best to make it easy to heat. eg close doors, windows, blinds to make best use of the sun or reduce heat loss.
I am going on a flight for my holiday. Its the 1st one I've been on in years. I will avoid flying but hey its insanely fast and convenient and stupidly cheap. I expect once you added in the output costs like pollution effects they should be many times more than they are. My current thought is might be my last flight until there are solar airships.
I think we've hit tipping points and problems are coming. Very doomer of me but hey. We need to start seriously thinking about survival on earth as a hostile environment. Exactly the problems we will have in space colonisation.
Right now humanity is a virus and dosn't deserve to get into space. But the way forward I see it is we have to learn to live in harmony with our ecosystem and be aware we have an effect on it.
We need to learn to make self sufficient cities. Not reliant on high energy transport. The requirements here are a strange mix of permaculture and space station technologies.
The way I see it we have to quickly shift Green ala Transition Towns and hope we hold the ecosystem together well enough to let our technologies advance to a stage where strong AI, space colonisation, ecosystem manipulation (shudder), nanotechnology give us technological solutions to the soon to be very big problem of keeping humans alive on the ecosystem they need and have messed with so badly.
And then hope our sentient nanocloud overlords see some worth in us.
1 comments:
Oh boy, Andrew. Could I add to all that you have said one moderating factor: the company you keep. There is a section of the environmental movement which is good at being highly visible and making lots of noise - and casting lots of doom and gloom. However, I have been blessed in recent times by people -in Melbourne and now in Brisbane where I have been attending the Oceania Conference of the International Association for Community Development - who acknowledge the work to be done but are truly people of hope.
Now is a time of great opportunity and it is an opportunity to do new things, make new connections, and build new linkages. And don't make it all technical. Technology will always have a role - but the basic building block is our human relationships and how those relationships interact with the planet and with other species. So when we talk about these relationships we are talking about attitudes - attitudes of love, hope, community, joy, and life-full-ness. So choose the company you keep to blow away the blues and innoculate yourself against a siege mentality. Both spell illth not health.
Blessings and bliss to you both -
And I haven't forgotten that I need to return the TT Handbook to you and Belinda.
And pop over to The Network at http://misseaglesnetwork.blogspot.com and scroll down a little to read the Declaration of Intent to work towards community centred economies which has come from the IACD Conference. And there are a couple of good click throughs re social enterprise on the sidebar.
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