I can so relate to the fear of disapproval. I have such a thin skin that even an on-line anonymous argument in a forum can get me riled up for a day. Sounds like you’ve made great progress in the ego-shredding, and that’s a real inspiration and great reminder to me that it can be done. I need to practice!!

But I’m still of mixed mind when it comes to whether or not to tell my story, my journey to the realizations I now embrace. That’s because I’m pretty much striking out each and every time. And I’m not even being righteous or condescending — I’d like to think that I’m “sober and measured” like Richard Heinberg.

The crux of the problem seems to be Belief Systems. Everybody has them, whether they’re based on fact or not. Having a dialog seems impossible. As you well know, Denial is everywhere but so is Disinformation. The issues at hand shouldn’t be debatable, any more than the question of whether or not the earth is round or flat, but unfortunately that’s where we end up.

And I’m at the point where I truly believe Richard Heinberg’s words are correct — that it’s too late for mitigation. Try telling that to someone who believes technology will come to the rescue, or other such fairy tales.

So I’ve given up and am hunkering down, refining my gardening skills, spending more time with those I love, writing music again, and generally trying to “be the change that I want to see in the world.”

But it’s lonely out here, even though I’m not alone. Not enough people get it, and time is running out for them to mitigate their own lives. I’m less fearful about how I will cope during the transition and collapse, and more fearful of how they will be forced by necessity to confront years of denial and/or ignorance without having done even a modicum of preparation for change.

Sorry to end on a down note — but I guess that’s appropriate. After all, a pessimist is an informed optimist.

Best regards to you and Tim,

Kit

I sometimes reflect on our individual and collective behaviors as manifestations of our being critters. And I wonder if the increase in anger has something to do with being in an overcrowded world and in urban areas overcrowded to the point where you cannot access the basics to survive (food, fuel, water).

I live in a very rural, isolated, and extremely low population part of the earth, that also has the high biomass production capacity due to our rain and snowfall and rich prairie soils. Here, we survive by cooperating and so we are “nice” at all costs. We don’t fight out loud, we demur and defer to each other. Making a community decision can be painful because it’s all “well your idea is good, so is yours.”

So perhaps some of the anger comes from a population of animals with instinctive feelings of the scarcity underpining their existence. It’s instinctive.

Best,

Kathy

Good to read a blog entry from you after so many months. I think dropping your defenses when confronted by someone who is angry after viewing WAWTG is a good response. Someone who just realized that their “world view” has no future is really in need of understanding so it would be better not to keep beating someone over the head by defending the message/messenger.

The consumerist lifestyle is largely unexamined (due to overwhelming media propaganda) by the “average” American but it is a primary driver of our politics (economics) with all that it entails…debt, resource depletion, overpopulation, environmental degradation…and it primarily benefits the rich who are addicted to “making” money.

The collapse of finance capitalism last September is now bringing these connections into sharper focus for a lot of Americans who have seen their “Investments” lose their value as their debts increase while their house values and incomes decline.

Who would have thought that the collapse of financial capitalism would “light the fuse” to trigger the end of economic growth? We all thought it would be peak-oil but we may not have seen the connection between peak-oil and peak capitalism. Actually, Dmitry Orlov covered that notion pretty well in his writing and blogging over the past several years.

As Jay Hanson aptly puts it when he says that capitalism is nothing but a con game designed to turn the planet’s resources into garbage so the rich can make money. It is a completely irrational way to live and the irrationality of it is starting to become more apparent. My worry is if the reaction to the “end of the American dream” is violence against the rich and their government then it presents us with a whole other range of options for discussion and action.

You should do another WAWTG screening tour on the basis that there are a lot more people in pain and questioning what is causing their pain makes them ripe for viewing WAWTG as it may help them begin to understand the forces and trends they were only vaguely aware of in their lives. Go for it!

Comforting the disturbed is good work. You have been doing it your whole life and if disturbing the comfortable happens, then so be it.

tim

“Drowning people are often full of panic and can drag rescuers down with them. Do everything in your power to avoid this danger.”

What Heinberg and many othel liberals have in common is that they’ve essentially had a very poor strategy when it comes to saving the planet. The strategy’s been mostly built around talking to psychopaths and expecting to get a great transformation at the other end, or talking to people who probably won’t get it and who wouldn’t do a thing about it even if they did. Doing that and expecting better results is loony.

Now that things are looking very ugly, for the n-th time in these people’s lives (not saying things aren’t grim, just saying it’s often not the first time these people have reached that conclusion), instead of actually figuring out a more rounded strategy and giving it all they can, these people are proposing that we accept there’s essentially no point in trying to save the planet, and no better chance of success at that if we try even harder, work better strategies and put ourselves into it completely.

You don’t get results by dabbling. When the news is grim, first of all, turn off the tube etc. if that’s where you were getting your anxiety rush from, figure out what’s real for you, build a strategy around changing that and then go for the win. Screw all the people saying it’s too late. This isn’t about you or me feeling good about ourselves.

I some times wonder, myself, if this anger means people are finally realizing that they’re not really in control? Our culture seems to operate from the stand point that we (the people of the earth) are the ones in control of everything here, and that we can write our own destiny. What if that’s just not true? What if, like Daniel Quinn has pointed out, that we are subject to the laws of the community of life like everything else that lives here (including extinction)? I would guess “SCARY” for a lot of people who have been told and taught their whole life “If you try hard enough you can make anything possible”.

I personally have begun to take comfort in the fact that we (our culture) are not in control of all this, and we’re not going to unlock all the secrets of the universe. I take to take comfort in knowing that humans are no more important than any other life here and that the earth did fine before we got here, and will do fine if we disappear. It’s no more dependent on us being here than the dinosaur. It’s humbling for me to think of it in those terms, but it’s the best I can do.

I read your blogs out of order - I read “Frak” first, then this one. And now I’m feeling wistful, wishing you and Tim were living nearby again. But I was too “busy” when when you were here; and why would it be different if you returned? I wonder why I’m feeling “full of melancholy thoughtfulness” - maybe because you… struck so close to home with this blog. So, I’m feeling touched someplace deep that feels like home, the home I carry around inside me.
In particular, when you said, “What is it that people want? They want the world to be fixed, and they want it done without a lot of pain or loss. They want everyone to wake up… They want reality to be different,” I thought, yup, _that’s_ what I was expecting/wanting/demanding. Now I can see that what I wanted was for us to have taken a different fork in the road about 10,000 years ago. Sounds more silly than sad when I say it that way.
Before you made it so clear, perhaps I was thinking that if I, or someone else (Sally & Tim? Al Gore?) did something… I don’t know what, but _something_, it would all turn out all right. We’d all be heros, pitching in together, feeling so right and so alive… And maybe that is where some of my desperation (and anger) came from - thinking that we _were_ drunk on the edge of the roof, but if we could just sober up a little, we’d be OK. That our fate was hanging by a thread.
But if the wrong turn was thousands of years ago, or even hundreds… the time for the hero’s story is past. It’s time for a different kind of story. A story that doesn’t have only two possible endings: a) kill the dragon and live happily ever after, or b) get eaten by the dragon.
What was the right attitude for indigenous people of this continent when Europeans were flooding over everything? When was _that_ too late? 1492? Plymouth Rock? Jamestown? Wounded Knee? I know it’s not too late, even now, to do something good, to make amends, in part. But at the heart of it, it really has been too late for a long, long time, hasn’t it? And could we, even if we had Mr. Peabody’s Wayback machine, tell anyone who was there what to do to prevent it from becoming “too late”? What if what made it too late wasn’t an act or an event, but something inherent in us?
And now, the great flood that is beginning to wash over all of us is ourselves.

It’s almost 4:00 a.m. and I’m about as far down the rabbit hole as I can go for one night.

Paul

I haven’t read but a few entries in your blog but would like to know more of how you are becoming sustainable and how your life is changing. Anna