I’m pondering the life of Aaron Russo since he passed away recently. I’m wondering if his battle with cancer actually opened doors to a deeper need to find truth, and hence his film “America: Freedom to Fascism.” Perhaps this was his swan song — his own initiation into adulthood?

Thanks for these words and continued food for thought as we move forward into the unknown. Best wishes for the rest of your tour!

You guys are really courageous. I started talking to people about the oil situation 2 years ago. I was ridiculed and put down, really had a hard time. So, you’re sort of doing that X10 with this movie. Oh shit - Climate change, Peak Oil, species loss and - ta da - the really big bomb: over population - ALL AT ONCE. So, I’ve really got to hand it to you. It really is a courageous act. It’s something like being Cassandra, an old testament prophet and, a “bearer of bad news” wrapped into one. It’s going to be tough, but I do think about you two every week and send you love. “Solidarity”, as the old union organizers used to say. Bob

Good Luck on your tour! Hope to see you on the Seattle leg!

Warmly,

Marna

I haven’t read your blog above yet. But I’ve copied it so I can read it at home this evening. So this may be a non sequitur, but I want to pass it on right away. In the current issue of AdBusters magazine there is a copy of a speach that Martin Heidegger wrote in 1955. His point is that to save what is essentially human we have to use not only calculatitive thought (the basis for science and technology) but also meditative thought (the only way to ponder and consider what calculative thought is doing to us and for us). I ended up feeling that while science and technology will continue to evolve (not to say, advance) - Heidegger says science and technology aren’t and can’t be in human control - the main thing we need to do is what we’ve so sadly neglected - think meditatively about what we’ve done, are doing and might do. And do that _befpre_ we move on to additional calculative thought and more projects. Which is _exactly_ what you are inviting us to do. So often we have the impulse, “If the situation is dire, let’s stop talking and get started working already!” But Heidegger says (and much more eloquently that I do) that if we’ve made a mess by overdoing calculative thought and neglecting meditative thought, then the last thing we need is a crash program based on more calculative thought.

And now that I’ve written all this, I can see that this is what you’ve been saying all along - with maybe a little extra underpinning courtesy of MH, most of which I’ve left out. Oh well, we have to keep re-discovering the truth until we know it in our marrow bone. Two or three hundred more “realizations” and I’ll have it.

Paul

John Michael Greer over at has an interesting essay today that underscores a big part of what you and Tim are saying with the doc. He writes eloquently of our cultural story of “The 11th Hour” when someone arrives at the last possible moment to save the day. He then points out that the makes the case that at least 20 years lead time is needed to ‘mitigate’ the effects of peak oil. Now, as you know, I don’t think there is any real mitigating, but even if there were, given that peak has likely already occurred, the 11th hour was 20 years ago. We’re now at the 12th hour, which doesn’t make for such a marketable story. Instead, it calls for, as you point out, stepping into a new, much more meditative story. Or as Greer says it: “I’ve come to think that one of the things we most need just now, in the Peak Oil scene and in modern industrial civilization as a whole, is that time of reflection in the silence that follows when the eleventh hour has come and gone, and the last hope of avoiding the consequences of our actions has vanished down the track into the land of might-have-beens. It’s been pointed out more than once that the process of coming to terms with Peak Oil has more than a little in common with the five stages of grief…”
I hope I’ve made the links accessible. His article is well worth a read.

Best to all,
Dan

http://www.mnforsustain.org/oil_peaking_of_world_oil_production_study_hirsch.htm

My children attend a small, parent-run elementary school. As such, we parents can, if we choose, have a big impact on the shape of our children’s education inside the classroom. One question I’ve been pondering is how to convey the state of the world to this community. Many of the parents are socially aware, but we live in a relatively affluent region, and I fear that the children are heading into the future with all our consumer-culture myths in place.

So I’m wondering what kinds of stories and myths should we be teaching our children instead. I know what the themes of these stories should be: courage, adaptability, self-reliance. But I don’t know the stories themselves or how to transmit them to another generation. Fear seems to be the biggest obstacle — how to prepare them for change without filling their lives with worry?

Anyway, I’m just rambling. Thank you and Tim so much for your eloquent film. I wish there was a children’s version.