Make Like a Hockey Stick…
I’d just returned from a trip to town and was describing to Todd the latest assaults on the natural world (called “development” by the locals) I’d seen driving home. “Get me the puck outta here!” I cried.
what
“It’s a joke from elementary school… One person says “Hey… you… make like a hockey stick!” and the other says “Huh?” and the first person says “Get the puck outta here!”
I get it its like make like a tree and leave make like an atom and split make like a baby and head out make like a bakery truck and haul buns
“Yeah, Todd. Like that.”
so where you wanna go
“I don’t know. All I know is that, at least once a day, I look up to the heavens and call out to the mother-ship, to the gods, to whom it may concern: ‘Get me outta here!’”
but so far youre still here
“I’m still here. But I’m going crazy. There are hockey sticks all over the place now. You’ve seen ‘em.”
“Here’s one for temperature and one specifically for CO2. And here’s one for oil. Here’s one for population. And here’s one for the extinction event inside of which we’re living (scroll down a bit). Here’s one for the US National Debt. We put hockey sticks in What a Way to Go. You can’t get away from them.”
you can if all you do is watch game shows and gilligans island and american idol
“Yeah, well… that’s not an option for me.”
I know dude but still
“They’re everywhere, Todd! Not just in articles and magazines. I see them all over the place. It’s like… every last aspect of life inside civilization is ramping up, following a hockey stick curve. It used to be that you might see one new strip mall every few years. Now you see a few new strip malls every year. It used to be a new housing development would come to your town and it would be big news. Now, it would be big news only if NO new housing developments were coming.”
it really upsets you to see the destruction right near your home doesnt it
“Yeah, Todd. It really does. It’s so very sad. And so absurd. We’re now under mandatory water restrictions – some local cities are just a couple of months away from completely depleting their normal water sources – the drought goes on and on and we’re building thousands upon thousands of new homes and businesses? It’s madness. I wake every morning to the sound of nearby bulldozers. And I live in a rural county! I’m going crazy!”
I bet if you put traffic on a graph it would look like a hockey stick and athletes salaries and movie production costs and consumer debt and the number of meals people eat out and how many credit cards people have and and
“And government corruption? What would that look like if you could graph it? Or corporate cynicism? How about graphs for political bullshit and religious extremism, for depression and suicide and drug use and anger and fear and hopelessness and anomie? Hockey stick after hockey stick after hockey stick. It’s everywhere, Todd. Everything is faster and faster more and more. Everything is speeding up.”
I stopped. My back has been hurting with these long hours at the computer, getting ready for the next screening tour. I stood and stretched my agitated body and sat back down.
it pretty much has to doesnt it
“Has to what?”
speed up
“Yeah, I guess it does.”
I mean you saw money as debt right you read albert bartlett you know how it works
Yeah, I know how it works. It’s how exponential growth curves always look. And as Dr. Albert Bartlett, Professor of Physics at UC Boulder, now retired, says, “the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Go read his essay, Arithmetic, Population and Energy. You’ll see what he means.
I sighed heavily, and looked up once again to the heavens. “You remember that website we looked at last week? Growth is Madness! That’s exactly right. And our culture is mad at its very core, because it’s founded on growth.”
dude I used to work at a bank you know
“When I was in college I went to hockey games regularly. It’s clear that there are two basic ways to use a hockey stick, though the latter is not exactly sanctioned: to pass and shoot the puck, and to beat the hell out of somebody. Both uses serve the end result of scoring a goal and winning the game.”
and all these hockey sticks graphs youre talking about are like theyre like people trying to pass and shoot so they can win the game of like making money and being happy and comfortable and stuff but they are also measures of how were beating the hell out of the planet and each other and how far over the cliff were going
“And they’re all of a piece, Todd. All tied together. The economy requires growth, faster and faster and more and more. This requires faster and faster and more and more debt, faster and faster and more and more resource use, faster and faster and more and more production, faster and faster and more and more fucked-over land and water and sky and life.”
it sounds like a law firm - faster faster more and more
“Since the system is inherently unsustainable (which means… ahem… that it can’t be sustained…) it requires faster and faster and more and more government and corporate shenanigans, faster and faster and more and more competition between people (and let’s remember, please, that corporations are people too!). Faster and faster and more and more explaining is required from politicians, advertisers, religious leaders and the like. We’ll need faster and faster and more and more use of drugs and medicines and television and all the other narcotics we use to dull the pain. We’ll see faster and faster and more and more screwed up relationships and messed up kids and racial and ethnic scapegoating. It’s a perfect shitstorm, Todd. Or, as Kunstler calls it, a clusterfuck. Hold onto your hats!”
so the hockey stick is only half of the graph
“That’s exactly right, Todd. What goes up must come down and all that. We live on a finite planet. So no physical growth can be maintained forever. Like, duh. Those hockey sticks are only the rising half of the curve. Every one of them will reach a peak and then start back down. The hockey sticks will turn into bell curves, some with very steep cliffs on the downward side. Lots of the oil extraction curves for individual countries already show this (scroll down a bit). We shot. We scored. And now those hockey sticks are going to beat the hell out of us.”
when you talk like this you make me glad that Im already dead
“There’s times that I envy you, buddy. How’s it going on the other side, anyways? Your Mom talk to you yet?”
yeah shes not so freaked out any more I found a way to talk to her through her ipod she wears it when shes walking it takes more energy than the stickies but its my mom dude
“Glad to hear it, my friend. Does she know you’re working with me these days? Has she seen the doc yet?
not yet but she might come to one of your screenings in washington
“Cool. I’d like to meet her.”
you still looking to hop a ride on the next passing vogon constructor fleet spaceship
“I guess not, Todd. I mean… there are other hockey sticks appearing now too… growing edges in awareness, and love… compassion… caring for the life of the Earth…. relationship and surrender and community and vision and real power and maturity, all right in the heart of Empire. And these are all things that CAN keep growing forever. The seeds of the next paradigm are being planted today, here in the crumbling ruins of the current one. So I gotta stay, no matter how much I might want to leave. We’ve got work to do. It’s what I signed up for.”
I guess Im signed up for that too
“Yeah. Good to know. So, you ready to hit the road?”
first stop west virginia right
“Right.”
See ya’ll.
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September 27th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Bumper sticker idea:
HOCKEY STICKS
OF COMPASSION
;^)
September 27th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
The missing analogy is Competition. That’s what the hockey stick REALLY represents. People convinced by belief and lizard brains that they have to compete with each other and against nature; OUR nature. We ARE entwined with nature, yet we compete against it.
Another point that we forgot long ago about reCreational sports: The rules are supposed to be followed. The point to the rules is not to protect someone, but to teach yourself how to control your abilities better than you would without the rules. Getting angry is easy; using it to win a game without killing someone is much harder, but it exercises our ability to control ourselves.
The graphs are all missing the rule: “No High Sticking”.
People are all missing the same rule: “Play Fair, Cooperate, and leave the field how you found it.”
We shouldn’t need goalie masks for everything we do.
We have opportunities at this point in time to fight off the oppressions of faith with logic and common sense. Co-operate instead of compete, live locally, build communities that aren’t based upon authoritative rituals and fear, put down weapons and hammer them into tools. Will there be bad people trying to take things that they don’t work for? Of course. That’s what society needs to work to minimize. It doesn’t matter what we believe; Nature will decide if we have something to offer as a species. If we don’t cooperate, then our destiny is sealed.
Species compete against each other, but only within the bounds of nature’s rules. In the long term, they are all cooperating to create more usefulness than was there when they started.
September 27th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Economic growth is a pyramid scheme. The dirty secret of the American economy is that it based almost entirely upon the creation and servicing of suburban sprawl. Cutting back on the population growth “hockey stick” graph will cause all other meaningful graphs to respond favorably (”corporate profits” and “concentrations of wealth” graphs deemed irrelevant). I can’t think of any other comment worthy graph that will have such a powerful underlying effect upon all the others. It’s time we as a species cut back dramatically on our baby emissions; either by consensual, or by imposed coercion. All other conservation and activism shall remain impotent if we continue to turn a blind eye to the real plaque of our century. I think most people choose to remain in denial because they can’t be an armchair web activist on this one. They have to actually modify their own behavior, sacrifice personally for the sake of the world by denying it their genes. It is seemingly the most difficult thing for us to discuss and the matter which we most need to be discussing, and acting upon. Thank you for not breeding!
Baby not on board, Zimba
“The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.
The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. “Freedom is the recognition of necessity” — and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.” -Garrett Hardin (1968)
September 28th, 2007 at 8:26 am
Tim,
Your statement, “The seeds of the next paradigm are being planted today, here in the crumbling ruins of the current one,” is very apt. John Michael Greer of The Archdruid Report has an interesting essay entitled
Civilization and Succession that compares industrial civilization to invasive weeds that may overrun an ecosystem in the short term, but are doomed by their own ’success’. In nature - you know, that ‘thing’ we think we’re apart from, rather than a part of - a more stable climax community inevitably succeeds the weeds. He makes an interesting comparison between societies that maximize production at the expense of sustainability and those that maximize sustainability at the expense of production. As with your seed analogy, he says “…the more efficient … human ecologies of the future have been sending up visible shoots since the 1970s, in the form of a rapidly spreading network of small organic farms, local farmer’s markets, appropriate technology, and alternative ways of thinking about the world, among many other things.” When I read ‘alternative ways of thinking about the world’, I thought immediately of you, Sally, and WAWTG.
October 1st, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Monday 10/01: While we all are watching the Dow go over 14,000 today in the midst of a financial crisis that could spell disaster for the economy, we also need to watch Oil prices, the falling dollar, peak water and peak food.
Yes food. We habitually think that feeding ourselves is only a grocery store away. For me, going to the grocery store has gotten depressing…not for a lack of thousands of choices of restuarant food…but for the continuously rising prices that don’t go down again, when gas prices go down. Also, the realization that most of the products are junk or unnecessary to have 3 square meals a day. The message is “have some peking duck”, or this or that sauce and make a gourmet meal. How about just making a well balanced meal while we can still do it. Food has become an art form, and eating an entertainment.
And speaking of food, this morning I was up on Stan Goff’s site and watched a video of how we get our meat. I had to turn it off within 30 seconds of watching animals being bashed, tortured, strangled, beaten to death, and so on. It was at least as horrible as watching real shots of the Iraq war. I feel for humanity, but I feel we, as humans have some degree of choice. But animals in capitivity do not, and when they are born into a herd destined for your plate, they are treated so horribly it is beyond words. A spiritual mentor of mine said once that the energy or vibration of fear is left in the meat we eat. In the store it looks reasonably packaged and pretty heading right for our ovens. But the torture of animals is a barbaric quality in humanity. If we are to keep animals for food, don’t they have the right to decent living conditions and a humane death?
My next door neighbor was an old guy who had a 12 acre farm. He kept chickens and cows, and occasionally geese. I once asked him if he butchered his cows, and he said he was so attached to them that he would only kill them once they were very old. And he hated doing even that much. As for me, my denial was shattered. Living harmoniously with nature includes the animals we raise for whatever purpose. But I can’t participate in the factory farms where they torture these poor animals. I am going vegan