EcoSociety

I just went to the local waste collection point in town in order to drop off some large items of recycling. They call this place a ‘Recycling Centre’ but most of what goes on there seems to be for landfill.

However, after sorting and placing my waste in the right places I went over to one of the large waste containers as usual to see if there was anything of use in there. I saw two lovely wooden chairs in near perfect condition and as I leaned in to do my recycling duty an attendant called over ‘you can’t take that’.

It appears that there is some rule that says it is illegal, theft even, to take items that have been deposited as ‘waste’ even if they are clearly recyclable.

OK, so I am now writing to my local council (Monmouthshire, UK) to ask why they have such a rule.

Do you still think that Peak Oil is nonsense?

Do you think that the End of Suburbia is a fantasy?

Now, if you are waking up to the reality that most sane people have recognised for the past decade (and many visionaries pointed to 3-4 decades ago) then may I have your ear for the next message:

Oil is a minor part of the overall problem. Yes, oil has created the technologically based way of life we take for granted, fuelled the agricultural revolution, but also brought us rapidly to the point where we’ll have to do without it. We have squandered it.

The next problem is how to repair the 25% of topsoil that we have deliberately washed into the oceans. I hope George Bush has it in his prayers because there is no technological answer to that one.

We have moved from Agrarian to Industrial civilisation, now in the throes of the information age, but our only real hope is a transformation to a horticultural civilisation (while retaining our current ability to communicate globally) and while leaving the rest of nature to go wild, to heal, if we humans are to have any chance of survival one hundred years from now.

Without fossil fuel based fertilisers (and oil to fuel the farm machinery) our only extant option for feeding our populations is a new agricultural revolution in which we repair the ecosystem from our backyard outwards, from the bottom up, not from some complex remote sensing satellite. We could all start today by putting our shit in the soil in the yard rather than washing it out to sea. It’s so simple but from a human motivation point of view it sounds absurd. We have to convince millions of nature deprived people that soil under the finger nails is civilised - against hundreds if not thousands of years of enculturation against nature. George Bush, give us a technological answer to this problem please?

And before you respond, Peak Uranium will quickly follow Peak Oil. If we go down the nuclear route without a safety net then it will confirm my suspicion that the human race just isn’t fitted for this planet.

The coming horticultural revolution will mean that we have to live our lives and consume, and take responsibility for this planet, locally. The permacultural village, with the best of human knowledge to date, with global communications, may just give us a chance.

Any alternatives to offer?

Energy challenge: We’ll have to fix it ourselves

“IT’S ON US hard and fast, and it’s real. It’s been coming for 35 years, just as those bedraggled environmentalists said, but we chose to ignore it and party on. What do we do now?

In the short term, say next winter and maybe many winters beyond, we’re basically on our own. What we can’t do is depend on governments for much.

…

Having failed to lead, governments will have to follow.”

Want to lead? You can start by becoming more self-reliant, perhaps start growing you own food in a window box. Sow the seeds of change, trace the Roots of Change, change your habits, DO SOMETHING.

Now that the war of eastern and western culture is coming to an apogee under authoritarian states representing right wing islam and right wing christianity, maybe it’s time to break the emotional spell which holds millions in thrall to corrupted religion. These corrupted and authoritarian views offer emotional certainty to their followers but little else in contribution to humanity apart from the prospect of damaging and potentially apocalyptic conflict.

Add some rationality to your emotion, get some balanced open source consensual religion, for example:

www.yoism.org

The 7 Main Beliefs

These are the fundamental beliefs and values that—following The Way of Yo—the community has come to adopt. These beliefs form the current foundation for Yoan thought and practice. When we take a careful look at human history, we see that those societies whose core beliefs did not include most of these ideas and values were misguided, at best, and stagnant, unstable, suffering, or ill, at worst. To heal ourselves and our world we turn to these principles—the stronger our commitment to them, the stronger we are.

1. Yo - Yo is the name we give to the Divine Mystery that manifests as our world of experience. The Way of Yo is based on a religious meme system that is consistent with the world as it is directly experienced today by people everywhere.
2. Empiricism - Personal experience and intersubjective verification provide the foundation for belief. We reject truth based solely on authority. This is the basis for our faith in the Open Source Truth Process.
3. Community - Healthy communities are the foundation for emotional well being and spiritual fulfillment.
4. Evolution - We turn to the theory of evolution, our only “scientific theory of creation,” in order to develop a valid understanding of the forces that brought the human species into being, that “shaped” us into what we are. This enables us to see ourselves more clearly and to take actions that are consistent with the realities about who we are.
5. Democracy - Until a more effective and just model for organizing human affairs is demonstrated, Yoans participate in the attempt to develop democracy’s untapped potential.
6. Environmentalism - As traveling companions—hurtling through space inside a limited, closed ecosystem—we are all inter-dependent keepers of what Buckminster Fuller called “Spaceship Earth.”
7. Growth - We must all work to continually introduce others to these values and beliefs by engaging their minds and by building welcoming communities that truly transform our relationships and inspire others to do the same.

Together with The Five Pillars, The Ten Sacred Principles, The Open Source Truth Process, and creating Heaven on Earth, the Main Beliefs form the core of Yoism.

I believe that the days of centralised power are numbered, and that a re-tribalisation of society is inevitable, if sometimes painful, process. The applied theories of politics, economics and industry have made a sick society; it is time for new approaches. We live in the post-industrial world, and have an immense amount of sophisticated information and technology which enables us to exchange information while living in a village situation.
-Bill Mollison,  Introduction to Permaculture (1991)

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The UK green Party put this forward. I make no political point, other than that they are right on this: Efficiency and renewables. Reduce Reuse and Recycle = Efficiency and Renewability. With Peak Uranium perhaps 30-40 years away what is the point of continuing to make ourselves dependent on finite energy sources?

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NUCLEAR NOT THE ANSWER TO RISING FUEL PRICES, SAYS GREEN PRINCIPAL SPEAKER

Green Party Principal Speaker Caroline Lucas has today attacked Gordon Brown’s comments that the Government would press ahead with a new generation of nuclear power.  She condemned the Prime Minister’s decision as “a knee-jerk response that scares the British people into blindly accepting nuclear power as our only option”.

Dr Lucas, a long-standing campaigner against nuclear energy, criticised Gordon Brown after he declared that the Government would not only replace the UK’s existing nuclear power stations but would also seek to expand Britain’s nuclear capacity.

She said: “Gordon Brown is guilty of the most staggering failure of political vision.

“It simply isn’t true that nuclear power is the answer to rising fuel prices, since the earliest that a new nuclear power station could come on stream is around 2017.

“New nuclear power stations will spell disaster for national and environmental security - the astronomical costs of cleaning up the deadly radioactive waste is already £70bn and rising, and switching to nuclear power couldn’t possibly deliver any meaningful cuts in fuel prices or CO2 for almost 10 years.

“Gordon Brown should be looking at the real solutions that can reassure the British people that there are safer, more effective and more sustainable answers to the energy crisis, and inspiring a new direction on housing insulation, improved efficiency and renewables - not administering a knee-jerk response that scares them into blindly accepting nuclear as our only option.

“The reason that Germany has 300 times as much solar power and 10 times as much wind power than the UK is simply because German politicians, led by the Greens, have had the political will to lead the way. And on energy efficiency, the government’s own figures show there is the potential to save over 30% of all energy used in the UK solely through efficiency measures that would also save money overall.”

Dr. Lucas continued

“The reality is that nuclear power is not just unsafe and unsustainable, it’s entirely unnecessary. A combination of renewables, energy efficiency, decentralised energy and demand reduction will provide cheaper energy and deliver energy security and emissions cuts much more quickly, safely and effectively.

“The UK has a real opportunity to lead the way in the development of alternative sources of renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, yet the Government prefers to hold on to its ambition of introducing more dirty, dangerous and expensive nuclear power instead.”

I sent this missive off to some newspapers today, including local ones. Please, please, make your own Green views known to your political representatives and the newspapers and radio and TV, at local, regional, and national level. It may seems like a drop in the ocean (and it is) but if we all stand by and do nothing (ever heard of the psychological phenomenon of the bystander effect?) then nothing will happen.

Sir

Gordon Brown announces that we must step up North Sea oil production and build more nuclear capacity. This while his advisors are most likely telling him that increasing supply will not provide a solution to our dependence on a high level of energy and resource consumption. And of course, successive governments have understood this problem for decades and have done nothing effective about it.

I did not hear the Prime Minister’s plans and timescale for the development of a completely renewable energy infrastructure before Peak Uranium arrives 30-40 years from now. As if we have not learned enough about economic dependency on non-renewable energy sources during the past century.

The Prime Minister was elected to bear the weight of tough decisions in the best interest of the British people. He must do so now. The most viable long-term option is to conserve energy and to use North Sea oil as a resource for building a renewable energy, low pollution, low consumption, fully sustainable economic infrastructure. This must begin immediately. Continuing to dig the hole of conventional economic growth is an abdication of his responsibility at this tipping point in our country’s history.

A truly sustainable, localised, resilient, decentralised, renewable energy based economic model is viable (for example the Transition Town movement). Local responsibility means direct environmental and resource responsibility. Local responsibility would cure not only the symptoms but the cause of the excessive energy and material consumption that results in environmental destruction, untold human death and suffering, illness, dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Small is Beautiful, efficient, and healthy for us and our planet; a human scale approach and the only long-term solution for mankind.

The entire political class has a duty to back the Prime Minister in taking the hard and unpalatable decisions necessary to effect rapid change and achieve true sustainability now. This will be good for the British people and for our autonomy. He needs to state the obvious: ‘enough is enough’ and that we must embrace the challenges and opportunities of an economic, industrial, agricultural and social revolution. A Marshall plan for an ecological century. We need bold and visionary leadership. Anything less is contempt for our children and grandchildren.

This video from Hereford Steiner school (shortly to become the first UK eco-academy) shows the students using a horse drawn plough.

The senior member of the ploughing team took part in his first ploughing match in the 20’s when tractors were only beginning to steal the limelight - he is likely also to see their demise.

John Robb appears to be writing a solution to his book Brave New War in terms of what makes a resilient community.

David Fleming (UK, originator of TEQ’s) is due to shortly publish Lean Logic: The Book of Environmental Manners

Many other analysts, writers, and thinkers are coming to similar conclusions:

• Those who enter Ecotopia (as opposed to those who perish en route) will live in localised communities, autonomous holons.
• These communities must survive only on what the community’s land can provide.
• There will be no power over other humans or nature - quite the opposite, we will all nurture each other. Love in the ultimate sense of the word.

What is the Drug War? Why are we fighting against an ‘enemy’ we haven’t yet fully assessed. In short, why are we making preemptive strikes when the subject of drug consumption is in fact a conceptual muddle.

The War on Drugs is a solution which emerged from the culture wars after the 60s and 70s fully formed (the muddle ensures that there appears to be a problem to address) for the undefined and esoteric problems that received wisdom now tells us is a direct result of the consumption of herbal and synthetic compounds affecting the ‘centre’ of human processes - the individual mind. All other premises are now off the agenda, especially the positive effects. This includes the potential social and ecologically positive effects of herbs, entheogens, and synthetic drugs like LSD.

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