Category: Ecological Collapse

Ecological Collapse, Intentional Communities, Politics & Culture, Uncategorized

The Cheat Code for Preventing and/or Surviving the coming Collapse (Part 1)

Utopias are often just premature truths. Alphonse de Lamartine The Bad News I haven’t looked into any concrete stats on this, but my sense is that there is growing popular suspicion that something very big is coming to an end. We might not know what that ‘something’ is, exactly (Civilization? Industrialism? Capitalism?), but with every passing season, the lurking shadow of collapse is taking shape … Continue reading The Cheat Code for Preventing and/or Surviving the coming Collapse (Part 1)

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Ecological Collapse, Intentional Communities, Politics & Culture

Reversing The Fall: Our Next Demographic Transition

Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable — and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way. Daniel Quinn Our way of life doesn’t need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life. Lierre Keith In this blog, I have written extensively about the need for building concrete model communities as triggers for wider social change. … Continue reading Reversing The Fall: Our Next Demographic Transition

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Ecological Collapse, Intentional Communities, Modern Money Theory, Politics & Culture, Uncategorized, Universal Basic Income

Our Civilization’s Crisis of Place

I want to leave my country without leaving my home. Kirkpatrick Sale We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. Joni Mitchell A couple months ago, my wife and I finally got down to Costa Rica on vacation, for 10 glorious days. We have been trying to get there for a while now, but you know… pandemic and post-pandemic and all that. As we … Continue reading Our Civilization’s Crisis of Place

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Ecological Collapse, Intentional Communities, Politics & Culture, Uncategorized

Three C-Words We Need to Embrace: Contraction, Community & Cleanup

Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world so far by trial and error; unlike other creatures, we have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown too small to forgive us any big mistakes. Ronald Wright Because the future has no image, the utopian imagination must reclaim, must resurrect, past ruins … Continue reading Three C-Words We Need to Embrace: Contraction, Community & Cleanup

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Ecological Collapse, Intentional Communities, Modern Money Theory, Politics & Culture, Uncategorized, Universal Basic Income

Recapitulation: How to Save the World

The order which has been taken for granted suddenly appears queer and contingent. There is an appearance of the contingency of order. This is the main value of utopias. At a time when everything is blocked by systems which have failed but which cannot be beaten…utopia is our resource. The utopia seems to say something plausible, but it also says something that is crazy. By … Continue reading Recapitulation: How to Save the World

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Ecological Collapse, Economics, Intentional Communities, Politics & Culture

The Great Interregnum

To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment….would result in the demolition of society. Karl Polanyi The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Antonio Gramsci As the planet flounders and fails under … Continue reading The Great Interregnum

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Ecological Collapse, Intentional Communities, Politics & Culture, Uncategorized, Universal Basic Income

Avoiding Armageddon: (2) Cracking the utopia code

The development of new, alternative perspectives define utopia’s most basic function. May we not say then that imagination itself – through its utopian function – has a constitutive role in helping us to rethink the nature of our social life? Is not utopia – this leap outside – the way in which we radically rethink what is family, what is consumption, what is authority, what is religion and so … Continue reading Avoiding Armageddon: (2) Cracking the utopia code

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Ecological Collapse, Intentional Communities, Modern Money Theory, Politics & Culture, Universal Basic Income

Avoiding Armageddon: (1) How to circumvent the Polarization Industrial Complex

If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. Abraham Lincoln In a pair of earlier posts about Rescuing the Future, we looked at the competing delusions on offer from our mainstream political camps, and how Covid has laid waste to these fantasies, leaving us floundering and exhausted. We are mired in an almost cosmic sense of “stuckness,” a foreboding that … Continue reading Avoiding Armageddon: (1) How to circumvent the Polarization Industrial Complex

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Ecological Collapse, Intentional Communities, Politics & Culture, Uncategorized

Rescuing the Future – Part 2

Our way of life doesn’t need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life. Lierre Keith (Bright Green Lies, 2021) In Part 1, we looked the landscape of our bankrupt popular visions of the future, visions that have been exposed as detached from reality, as Covid, Trumpism, and ecological destruction have shredded any shared sense that things might ever … Continue reading Rescuing the Future – Part 2

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Coronavirus, Ecological Collapse, Economics, Intentional Communities, Politics & Culture, Uncategorized

Rescuing the Future – Part 1

What if this ongoing fear of ‘collapse’ … is a narrative designed to quell a worse fear: that things might not collapse, but continue like this? That the Earth’s final wild frontiers may be tamed and diluted, ravaged and destroyed, and that we would not care much because we were too busy following the logic of our narrative to its endpoint, becoming our machines – … Continue reading Rescuing the Future – Part 1

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