Yes, we are. It is over.

OK, now I think I get it - intellectually, you and Tim understand TEOTWAWKI but emotionally it really hadn’t sunk in even with the production of WATGo - eh?

The imminent actual demise of industrial human society is impossible for most humans to even imagine, let alone accept.

And now, [actually, long before now] it is only about finding survival tribal members and making those low probability but hopeful preparations.

Love your ways, Sally,

Mike from Spokane

I feel privileged that you made your essay available for us to read. What do I say? I’m a White Guy - yet I’m not. I’m a human, yet I’m not. The situation is serious - yet, on the other hand, on another level, is it?

Don’t know what I’m saying here, only that this knowledge of impending disaster (and yes, I agree with you that it is too late. We won’t change the way we live until we are forced to) has spurred me to seek deeper answers. You know, there’s more to life than living. Wish I had your way with words. All I can do is to empathize whole-heartedly with you, dear.

BTW, Bill McKibben writes wonderful books. I have three of them out of the library as we speak. Try his ‘Deeper Economy’.

William

I suspect that there are forces at work much bigger than the ones you are describing, which you are perhaps unaware of, having taken it on faith that humans are causing global warming, a postulate that has not been proven by the facts. All the planets are heating up..are you aware of this fact? Do you think its because the Martians and the Venusians are burning fossil fuels? Yes, I am being a bit cynical and facetious here, but may we please distinguish between fact and theory for a minute? Man made global warming is a theory, the film by Al Gore is a theory, masquerading as fact…the truth is that all the planets are heating up which can only mean one thing…its the sun, not you and me and our SUV’s. I think it is a natural process, perhaps like getting a fever when there are microbes in you to be burned up. I predict a global cooling, like ice on a broken arm, will follow. The facts actually support this prediction.
A big volcano, like Mt Saint Helens put out more pollution than the entire 20th century has!! The atmosphere weighs 4.5 million billion tons…compare that with the miniscule tonnage of particulates that we have emmitted and you see that yes, there is pollution and yes it has an impact, but no, it has not caused global warming. Maybe the sun, intelligently, reads the planets via the light waves it emits and adjusts its output for the benefit of the planets…if this is the case, then we should be glad for the warming and trust the huge galactic processes that are going on and quit blaming ourselves for doing something we could not possibly do…namely, heat up the planet. I am sure that “global warming” is the same kind of social meme as “overpopulation” and “Arabs hate our freedoms” . Speaking of overpopulation, did you know that every man, woman, and child would fit nicely in the state of Texas and every family of 4 would have an entire city block for themselves? Overpopulation is a theory based on Malthusian mathematics and is not substantiated by the facts. What is called overpopulation is overcrowding in cities. The Club of Rome and other think tanks came up with “overpopulation” in the 1960’s to justify the genocide and forced sterilization that the social engineers (eugenicists)need to control you and me. Global warming is another myth based social meme that is causing you and many others untold anxiety…and I assure you that this is not denial or avoidance…social memes like “19 Islamic terrorists did 911″ have a specific purpose and that is to scare the living shit out of you and me… it is working…but we must see through the devious machinations in which predictable emotional responses like yours are used as weapons of control. I hope you will consider this deeply and do some research into global warming and overpopulation that is deeper and more comprehensive than assuming that think tanks and politicized science is anything more than sophisticated propaganda designed to elicit precisely the kind of response that you are having. No human being can remain sane for long enduring the kind of psychic stresses that you are suffering… I think this is by design…the truth is that we are love but they want us to think that we are separate from that and are under threat…which we are, but its a created enemy through false flag terror.
Bob Cinque

I was glad to see this. The problem is that we don’t just have to “learn what we need to learn so we don’t ever do this again.” We need to stop what we’re doing. As you say, we have to stop “90% of what we’re doing.” With TPTB and virtually everyone else implementing the “secret plan”, stopping all that won’t be easy.

Terry from Lone Star

350 ppm
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007744.html

“The evidence indicates we’ve aimed too high — that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 ppm,” says Jim Hansen.

350: That is the level to which Hansen believes we need to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide (and by implication, other greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere if we want to avoid a series of catastrophic climate tipping points.

The bad news? Atmospheric carbon is already at least 383 ppm, and the rate at which we’re spewing greenhouse gases is increasing. In other words, we’ve seen the credible bar for achieving climate stability drop from 550 to 450 to 350 over roughly the last year.

…Carbon-neutral prosperity is possible. We can design and build a sustainable society within the time we have remaining. The matter hinges entirely on having the will to build it. And that’s what’s going to be tested now, and big time: our will.

Beyond the political barriers, though, I think there are some habits of mind that impede the gathering of that will.

The first is, as we’ve said here frequently, the lack of compelling and credible visions of what that society would look like. Without those visions, it is very difficult for any of us to seriously imagine transformational change.

…The second is that we are in overshoot and time is proving to be the strictest planetary limit of all. It’s bad enough that with each passing day it becomes more difficult to attain a bright green future — it’s worse to know that things are going to get grim, no matter what we do. We have already committed ourselves to climate chaos, an extinction crisis and mass human suffering — though what we do now will greatly determine exactly how awful each of those things gets, and if we act now, we can, in fact, still make it through the window of opportunity. To do that we need to be able to read the bad news and still remember that defeatism serves evil here, and in times like these, optimism is a political act. We need to cultivate a politics of optimism.
(2 January 2008)

Follow-up Column: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007748.html

And these from George Monbiot:

George Monbiot: A Sudden Change of State (The Guardian, July 3, 2007)

Reading a scientific paper on the train this weekend, I found, to my amazement, that my hands were shaking. This has never happened to me before, but nor have I ever read anything like it. Published by a team led by James Hansen at Nasa, it suggests that the grim reports issued
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could be absurdly optimistic…I looked up from the paper, almost expecting to see crowds stampeding
through the streets. I saw people chatting outside a riverside pub. The other passengers on the train snoozed over their newspapers or played on their mobile phones. Unaware of the causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from their likely termination, we drift into catastrophe.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/07/03/a-sudden-change-of-state/

George Monbiot, Updating the Book on Global Warming (Aug. 28, 2007)

“I’m going to start with some bad news, and the bad news is this. Two degrees is no longer the target. And the news is contained in a recent paper written by James Hansen of NASA in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society(1). And what Hansen shows is that the profoundly pessimistic assumptions in the latest IPCC Report are insufficiently pessimistic.

And the reason for this is as follows. The IPCC assumes that the melting of the ice sheets at the poles will take place in a gradual and linear fashion. And Hansen’s own work with the paleontological record shows that that is an “entirely implausible” (to use his term) scenario.

The last time we had two degrees of warming in the Pliocene 55 million years ago, the ice sheets at the poles did not melt - as the IPCC proposes - over a millennia, but within the course of one century. And they did not cause a maximum sea level rise within the course of one century - as predicted by the IPCC - of 59 centimeters, but of 25 meters.”

http://energybulletin.net/34174.html

Note:
25 meters = 82 Feet possible sea level rise!!

I’ve paid some attention to mother earth for some time, learning what I could over the years. I have not been convinced yet that the imminent climate change is wholly the result of human activity. But, as I just indicated, I completely believe the climate is undergoing a change the likes of which humans may never have seen before.

The paradigm of “dominion and control” we humans seem hell-bent on exersizing is, I agree, a non-harmonious illness. But, as powerful as we may think we are, we’re a speck when compared to the mother planet. The time humans have recorded history on this planet is miniscule in geologic terms. Our science seems to have convincingly determined that severe climatic changes are a natural occurrence and, further, that such changes have occured in spans as short as tens of years … quite without any human activity to blame.

What I’m trying to say is that we shouldn’t necessarily feel a terrible guilt for having “ruined the planet”. Nor should we be so arrogant, or dismissive of scientific data, to believe that this change is solely the result of human doings. The effects of Daniel Quinn’s “secret plan” are quite paltry when compared to the planet’s terrifically complex ability to adapt. However we should, by all means, carry a guilt about consuming with reckless abandon. It seems that such gluttony is seen as a failing, on a small, personal scale, but is tolerated - even rewarded - in the large, corporate and national scale.

The imminent climate change is a “black swan”, a disjunctive event that some, including you and your readers, can already see. Things will change; those who are prepared to deal with the existence of a “black swan” will likely fare the most comfortably. It would seem that those who understand “sustainable” does not mean “less unsustainable” should do the best as our environment quickly becomes more challenging.

TEOTWAWKI occurs every day … as does it’s rebirth. A “black swan” that lands right in front of a group - an extremely improbable, extremely significant event we didn’t/couldn’t see coming - simply makes the TEOTWAWKI more dynamic, palpable and spectacular … but it’s still just something that happens every [fill in the blank] cycle.

So, please, remember we silly, pompous humans aren’t really all that capable of wounding mother earth beyond a superficial scrape she can heal without so much as a bandage (and, heck, we are part of the whole system regardless how disconnected we view ourselves). And that climate change is a seemingly capricious whim of mother earth … we get to deal with it whether or not we sped it up, slowed it down, deny it’s happening, accept it or think we can “fix it”.

I’d like to suggest to everyone a reading of a short paper titled “Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks” at
http://www.singinst.org/upload/cognitive-biases.pdf
I found it breathtakingly informative.

Also, a little about “black swans” and distortions (often in science) brought about by the Platonic fallacy can be found summed up nicely on wikipedia at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Taleb
It has helped my thinking; I hope you find it helpful as well … among other things, it helps illuminate why humans tend to ignore what (to us here) seems to be an imminent, significant change.

Take care, Sally, and please continue to allow us to share this journey into the future with you!

While they continue to blame global warming (so called) on pollution, there is strong evidence that our pollution mat be keeping us from serious heat.

Three facts the media and governments refuses to acknowledge.

1. While the period of Sun spots passed what should have been the Solar Minimum five years ago. No one has seen a Sun Spot since. Lack of Sun Spots make the Sun warmer because Sun Spots are cooler places on the sun that don’t radiate as much heat reducing the sun’s average output that we receive.

2. The Mars polar caps are retreating at almost exactly the same rate as the glaciers and polar caps on Earth.

3. The Pan Evaporation Rate (PER) - a measurement taken daily all over the world - has decreased by nearly 25% since the early 50s. It’s called Global Dimming. http://www.scienceblog.org/community/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=111

The PER is measured with a one metre diameter pan that is full of water and in full sunlight. Every day the water is topped up to replace what is lost due to evaporation. The amount needed to top it up is a very accurate measure of the amount of sunlight received and is recorded. Those records go back to the early 1900s because that information is very useful to agriculture.

Putting those three facts together leads naturally to the conclusion that the Sun is warming up. The Sun is known to be a variable star and we have been lucky enough to be in a steady period for many years.

This blog has made your point clear to me. It seems you want us to take no action other than sitting and feeling the enormity of the situation like you do. You seem frustrated that many people, including myself, can’t connect with this message.

Your message would resonate with more people if you described how “sitting, feeling, and pondering” was part of a way forward. For instance, your message is relevant to a way forward since we need new minds and new vision to get us out of this, of which feeling is fundamental. You also make good points that men have much to learn from women about the value of feeling/intuiting as well as thinking. We need ALL forms of knowledge and learning to create a new way of life.

But the pondering and feeling must be part of a CREATIVE process rather than just soaking yourself in grief; Part of a way of LIFE, rather than some global hospice process for the mass die-off. Urging everyone to adopt your emotional approach to the situation is utterly pointless if you believe that it’s too late to do anything but be swept away in a catastrophe. If it’s too late and we’re all going to die, who cares whether we’re sitting and exploring our feelings or having one last giant orgy of consumption?? That’s why people shrug and turn away from your message.

more Martin Prechtel Indigenous Wisdom:

from “Secrets of the Talking Jaguar”
Epilogue: In the Flimsy Hut of the World.

“When I divine the Earth Bodies of many people of today, their worlds look like a post-war country, bombed out, dry, flowerless, and tired. The flat devastation wreaked upon these people’s Earth Body needs renewing. Their World House needs reassembling, replastering; it has to be remembered back to life, so that the faraway native souls, their natural indigenous beings, can return to their homes. Maybe this is why Chiviliu (his Shaman teacher in Guatemala) sent me away, to sing and speak these people’s lives back together. After all, he said that the destruction was coming from them. Our world was being killed by people whose naturalness had been disenfranchised long ago. The violence they leveled upon us came from their soulless minds and angry, homeless souls, looking for permanence through violent business growth, killing, forgetting, and mocking everything that reminded them of their inadequacies.

For their to be a world at all, every indigenous, original and natural thing must start singing its song, dancing its dance, moving and breathing, each according to its own nature, saying its name, manifesting simultaneously its secret spiritual signature. Every Gypsy must be singing her ancient tune, every Bushman, Croat, Arab, Jew, Chuckchee, Hmong, Papuan, Celt, Yoruba, Saxon, Cree, Guarani, Sami, Inuit, Kazaki, Tahitian, Balinese, jaguar, honey creeper, anteater, beetle, butterfly, oak, birch, ceiba, baobab, dog, mosquito, shark, coral, lighting, tornado, mist, mountain, deer, desert, and so on forever, each must be making its magic sound. When any of these stops singing for being killed or destroyed, a piece of the World’s House is lost. This in a village is the equivalent of losing a family. When this happens in the village, it’s a call for all the people to come together to find or renew the family’s lost tribe - or to grieve their gaping loss. Our grief, when deeply expressed communally, as it is in a village, sends the lost sound like an echo back to its home. This puts some mud back into the void left in the World House.

If done passionately, grief strengthens the World House, because the creative substance of our songs is perceived by the spirits as canoes to take the dead home. Our tears are jade beads to adorn the Face of Life, the Earth Fruit.

Shamans say the Village Heart can grow a brand-new World House if it is well-dressed in the layered clothing of each indigenous soul’s magic sound, ancestral songs, and indigenous ingenuity. The wrecked landscape of our World House could sprout a renewed world, but a new language has to be found. We can’t make the old world come alive again, but from its old seeds, the next layer could sprout.

This new language would have to grow from the indigenous hearts we all have hidden. It shouldn’t be the tongue of oneness, not one language, not a computer tongue of homogenization, but a diverse, beautiful, badly made thing whose flimsiness and inefficiency force people to sing together to keep it well-spoken and sung into life over and over again, so that nobody forgets to remember. We need to find gorgeous, unsellable, ritual words to reanimate, remeasure, rebuild, and replaster the ruined, depressed flatness left by the hollow failure of this mechanized, orphaned culture.

For this, we need all peoples: our poets, our shamans, our dreamers, our youth, our elders, our women, our men, our ancestors, and our real old memories from before we were people.

We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten. But our exiled spirits can tell. Deep in our bones resides an ancient, singing couple who just won’t give up making their beautiful, wild noise. The world won’t end if we can find them.”

let’s continue to sing this World House back together Tarrie
it’s the work we came here to do,
“we are the one’s we’ve been waiting for”
love & light in community Vivienn

What I want to say is that most of these comments, even the ones that disagree hugely with the science or spirituality that make sense to me, most of the comments are made respectfully. So they get posted. However I have to say that some of the comments border on lacking respect. Please know that I will not post comments that are blatantly disrespectful. We can tolerate disagreement but will not tolerate disrespect.

If we could sit in a circle for three days, sober up as we contemplate the edge of the roof, assess accurately our predicament, feel our way into the meaning of that predicament for ourselves personally as well as collectively, we might be graced to find that at our cores are some really fine human beings, capable of great collective wisdom, brilliance, and perhaps even some effective action.

I see way too little of that in the world today. And that is what I am advocating here: much quiet, sober, heartfelt, deliberation that makes room for feeling deeply what is currently our situation. If we have to tie up energy to keep ourselves or others from feeling it all very deeply, we then tie up energy in psychological defense that could be utilized in becoming wise and creative and compassionate with ourselves. I have been a psychotherapist for over 25 years and have witnessed routinely the energy that is liberated when people are able to stop defending and start feeling.

There is plenty being written about the facts and figures and schemes and movements. There is very little being written about the process. That piece seems to have my name on it. Thanks for joining, to the limited extent we can via electronic means, in the conversation about “how” we get from denial to creativity.

Best,
Sally

I will sit with you in circle and allow the creative force to come through and show us the ways to greater solutions…….be it through our feelings or our holding space for those in denial preparing for feeling the truth of our existance……….
We need one another………We need one another…………

Sorry to hear about Jenny. She was a unique individual.

David

My heart goes out to you and I wish that I could think of something to say that would comfort you. All of us who love our Mother Earth know your pain and desperation. I wish also that I could tell you that James Hansen is wrong in his projections. However, in the spirit which you have invoked of looking truth in the face, I have to admit that I believe that our situation is as grave as he and McKibben say it is. Furthermore, I do not believe that it can be “fixed” in the conventional sense of the word.

I say this as a scientist with 30 years of research experience. I am trained to look the truth in the eye without blinking. Nevertheless, when I read the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (11/16/07), I could hardly believe my own eyes. Surely, I thought, I must be reading this wrong. I must have made some mistakes in converting from Centigrade to Fahrenheit or from meters to feet. I double- and triple-checked. I could find no errors. I was looking at a Doomsday document.

I had virtually the same reaction as George Monbiot. Why are not people running around screaming I wondered? Why was it not page one news? I Googled the Report one month later. There were about 150 references to it, most of them from Asia and Australia. In the same time period there were over 5,000 references to Brittney Spears

My wife, Lanie and I put on a program, called Oil and Culture at the local library. It is about the end of cheap energy, climate change, and how our cultural beliefs got us into this predicament in the first place. I excerpted and summarized the IPCC Report. I included it in the program. No one commented on it. I emailed it to the head of a local organization concerned with climate change. She replied, thanking me for sending it and said that it was “nice.” Then, I suppose, she turned back to honing her mission statement and giving out compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Your experience at the pond brought back to my mind reading about a similar one that Daniel Quinn had. You probably read his book, Ishmael, but fewer people are acquainted with his autobiography, Providence. It is in the beginning of chapter 7, and was I believe, a pure animist vision. You would probably enjoy reading it and be amused by the circumstances surrounding it.

One thing that you repeated bothered me. It was your references to “white male authority figures.” I think I know what you mean, but by framing it this way, you risk alienating 50% of the human race, and we need all the friends we can find. I suspect that you are really talking about patriarchy, which is one particular kind of culture, although I admit it has become widespread. Yet, we should keep in mind that it is only one kind of culture, and that human beings in their plasticity are capable of forming other kinds of cultures.

In fact, anthropologist’s studies of the still-remaining Hunter Gatherer groups, show a completely different way of relating to the world. Read Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s The Harmless People, and Turnbull’s The Forest People. For a more scholarly account of the culture which undoubtedly prevailed throughout 99% of mankind’s history, see Paul Shepard’s Coming Home to the Pleistocene. It is filled with the insights of a brilliant and profound mind.

To return to my original thoughts about Climate Change and Peak Oil. I do indeed believe that it is too late to change our course. Evolution has shaped our species to react to immediate threats – a saber toothed tiger, a hurricane, Pearl Harbor. I refer you again to Quinn. He has this metaphor of the boiling frog. Toss a frog into a pot of boiling water and he will jump right out. Put him in room temperature water and slowly turn up the flame and he will just sit there until he boils to death. The frog is us. It is not as elegant as Rumi, but you get the idea.

I will send you my IPCC Summary as well as a DVD we made of Oil and Culture. The video amateurish, but not the ideas. We are not professional movie makers as you are, but you may get some laughs, and perhaps you will find some good ideas in it. You are welcome to use them as you see fit.

I am sorry to say it, but I believe that the time has come to circle the wagons. Come to think of it that is an apt metaphor. After all, a wagon is pulled by horses, and it is handmade. I do not believe in Armageddon’s, whether biblical or man-made. I believe that we are not at the edge of a roof, but on a slippery ever-steeper slope. Some of us may be lucky enough to find a way off.

Peace be with you,
Ken Fischman, Ph.D.
.

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/link.php?id=51709

It has been speculated that the emergence of the DR way of life might be the origin of our original distrust of the natural world and other people.

It is Agricultural civilization of course, where surplus food really kicked in and provided the means by which an extremely complex hierarchy of power could arise, with those managing the surplus becoming the original power elite.

Another major factor would be the move from a nomadic to a more sedentary way of life.
But look at it as you may, it would seem that civilization was inevitable because a hierarchial system is the only way to manage large populations.
In the gatherer-hunter stage, egalitarianism was possible because conflicts could be resolved by fission-and-fusion - small groups of people could simply split-off from the larger group and go their own way, and overpopulation and land/resource scarcity eventually makes this impossible, so hierarchial control kicks in to manage the complexity.
The rest…is literally…history.

I think a lot of what we are going through is a secular version of “How could God/Godess Let This Happen?” - the secular version being:

“How could The Cosmos Be Set Up In Such A Way That Human Beings, Simply Following Their Instincts, Overpopulate a Planet To the Point That a Massive Horrible Die-Off becomes Inevitable?”

Personally, I dont think there is an answer, and as for blame, well…you might as well blame the wind.

The Situation is ssssooo mind-boggling that people tend toward denial to save themselves the stress, strain and pain of facing The Situation, which comes down to facing death and…let’s face it…the utter meaninglessness of existence.

One can choose to transcend phenomenal/dualistic existence by the Realization of one’s essence as Infinite-Consciousness, or

one can take the route outlined by Derrick Jensen in Endgame.

There are no easy answers. Warm regards to everyone, Joseph

Or, you can take Derrick Jensen’s route.

Me and my partner are planning a major change in lifestyle, away from mainstream culture, cities, wage slavery and the rat run, to what we dearly hope will be a sustainable future. I think it is partly because of this that my mind has finally allowed me to truly feel the impact of all the individual issues I’ve known about for so long but haven’t let myself feel - that we are fast destroying our only home, that we are gnawing away at it so greedily that soon not enough will be left to sustain us. There is simply no way that our expanding lifestyles and growing population can continue. I’ve been disillusioned with our culture for years, decades even, but I’ve never felt this way before and I wonder how I can have thought myself to be informed and aware when I’ve actually been hiding from the full truth of it. It’s almost as if the plans for our changes have opened up a part of my mind that had been closed off before, because it was too scary to confront.

I spent much of yesterday either sitting stunned or ranting at my man. The same phrase repeated itself over and over in my mind, ‘What have we done? What have we done?’. It’s still difficult to take it all in, and I’m not sure I have yet, but I have never felt so sobered.

I’d like to thank you and Tim for making What a Way to Go - it really brought a lot of information together in a way that needs to be done. I’ve done a lot of reading over the years, but this has helped all that gathered information to gel. It’s also fuelled my long-standing desire to live differently. And we’ve started talking to others - many don’t listen, but a few are asking questions. It’s a start.

We have many challenges ahead; it’s time to get to work on them.

If so, then who cares? If we are “over the hump”, then there is no point in stopping now. We may as well enjoy these last few precious years.

If not, then what’s the rush? If the tipping point is somewhere in the future, then we can safely proceed (and maybe come up with some alternatives) unless and until we reach that point.

How we need more people like you !!!

I can finally admit I feel scared - seriously.

I just thought I was AWOL : )