/tag/climate%20change

8 quotes tagged 'climate change'

Publisher: psychedelicsalon.com (2013)

https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-365-effects-of-psychedelics-on-society/

Maybe there's a planetary regulating system and people are simply cells in a larger organism and when it comes time for something to happen which maybe means all life leaves the planet or something, then the equivalent of hormones are produced in the environment to initiate this morphogenetic rescripting of what is going on and suddenly animals which were perfectly happy hunting on the velts of Africa begin making art, watching the stars and moving into history for the purpose of saving the planet. I really like to think that we are biologically regulated and that history is a biological phenomenon under the control of the environment. It isn't something that is going against the environment. \n\nNow the objection to that is that it looks so bad - it looks cancerous - but the obvious counter to that is birth! I mean, birth is - there's a lot of bloodshed, people make sounds as though they were in great pain - they are in great pain - it has all the attributes that we associate with the violent termination of the organism and yet it is the precise opposite: it is the birthing of the new generation. It is unavoidable and it is perfectly natural. \n\nAs a woman grows pregnant and she loses her sylph-like form and becomes heavier and clumsy and all these changes which go on in pregnancy - maybe something like what has happened to the Earth over the last 20,000 years. The Earth is pregnant with humanity and perhaps much else. Obviously you just look at the Earth and humanity and you say, 'These two can't stay together much longer. They're becoming a problem.' The mother can't function, the child is in danger, and like the birth situation where if the child is not eventually birthed, toxemia will set in. Then everything goes haywire, then both parties are in danger and their has to be emergency intervention. I don't really think we've reached that point, but I think we have come to term. As you know, concerning birth, transition is the psychedelic compression of it all, where it all comes together, and it seems like it is impossible and overwhelming and is going on forever, and then it ends, and the baby is born and everything is seen to be alright. \n\nI think the 20th century is not a metaphor that we are birthing the new soul of humanity - it's actually happening and it's ripping our society and planet to pieces, but what will come out of it is the meaning of our destiny, perhaps the meaning of the planetary destiny and I hope that we are going to be privileged to be midwives of this process. To be there on that great day when it all makes sense and then you can turn and look back at the process - the wars and revolutions and pogroms and migrations and the whole thing and say, 'Now I understand what all that was about.'\n\nThat's I think the real promise of getting with nature through the psychedelics: being in on that process, because if you're in on that process, anxiety will leave you. You will not define yourself as a victim, you will define yourself as a privileged spectator.

Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush

Author: John Michael Greer

Publisher: Founders House (2015)

67-69

Nobody wants to be reminded that using less, so that our grandchildren would have enough, was the road we didn't take at the end of the Seventies. Still, the road we did take was always destined to be a dead end, and as we move deeper into the first half of the twenty-first century, the end of that road is starting to come into sight. At this point, we're faced with the prospect of using less energy, not because we choose to do so but because the energy that would be needed to do otherwise isn't there any more. That's the problem with living as though there's no tomorrow, of course: tomorrow inevitably shows up anyway. \n This late in the game, our remaining options are starkly limited, and most of the proposals you'll hear these days are simply variations on the theme of chasing business as usual right over the nearest cliff. Whether it's Stewart Brand's nukes, 'Drill Baby Drill,' ethanol or algal biodiesel or some other kind of energy vaporware, the subtext to every widely touted response to our predicament is that we don't need to use less. The same thing's just as true of most of the ideologies that claim to offer a more global response to that predicament; the one common thread that unites the neoprimitivists who claim to long for a return to the hunter-gatherer life, the conspiracy theorists who spend their days in an increasingly frantic orgy of fingerpointing, and the apocalypticists who craft ever more elaborate justifications for the claim that somebody or other will change the world for us, is that each of these ideologies, and plenty others like them, function covertly as justifications to allow believers to keep on living an ordinary American lifestyle right up to the moment that it drops away beneath their feet. \n The one option that doesn't do this is the one next to nobody is willing to talk about, and that's the option of using less. \n Mention that option in public, and inevitably you'll hear a dozen different reasons why it can't help and won't matter and isn't practical anyway. Can it help? Of course it can; in a time when world crude oil production has been bouncing against a hard ceiling for most of a decade and most other energy sources are under growing strain, any decrease in the amount of energy being wasted on nonessentials makes it a little easier to keep essential services up and running. Will it matter? Of course it will; as we move into a future of hard energy constraints, the fast at least a few people get through the learning curve of conservation, appropriate tech, and simply making do with less, the easier it will be for the rest of society to follow their lead and learn from their experience, if only when all the other choices have been foreclosed. Is it practical? Of course it is; the average European gets by comfortably on one third the annual energy budget as the average American, and it's been my experience that most middle class Americans can slash their energy use by a third or more in one year by a relatively simple program of home weatherizing and lifestyle changes. \n I'd like to suggest, in fact, that at this point in the trajectory of industrial civilization, any proposal that doesn't make using less energy a central strategy simply isn't serious. It's hard to think of any dimension of our predicament that can't be bettered, often dramatically, by using less energy, and even harder to think of any project that will yield significant gains as long as Americans cling to a lifestyle that history is about to relegate to the compost bin. I'd also like to suggest that any proposal that does start out with using less energy should not be taken seriously until and unless the people proposing it actually do use less energy themselves, preferably by adopting the measures they urge on others. \n That's how effective movements for social change happen, after all. Individuals start them by making changes in their own lives; as the number of people making those changes grows, networks emerge to share information, resources, and encouragement; the networks become the frame of a subculture, and as momentum builds, the subculture becomes a movement. It's indicative that the two movements that had the most impact on American culture in the second half of the twentieth century - feminism and Christian fundamentalism - both emerged this way, starting with individuals who changed their own lives, while any number of movements that tried to make change from the top down - again the climate change movement is a good example - failed to achieve their ends.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

Author: Thomas L. Friedman

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (2008)

As Lester Brown put it, we as a society, 'have been behaving just like Enron, the rogue energy giant, at the height of its folly.' We rack up stunning profits and GDP numbers every year, and they look great on paper 'because we've been hiding some of the costs off the books.' Mother Nature has not been fooled. That is why we are having climate change. That which is not priced is not valued, and if our open lands, clean air, clean water, and healthy forests are not valued, the earth, when it is this flat and this crowded, will become a very hot, no-cost landfill very fast. When markets underprice goods and services by failing to price their externalities, and the impact of that underpricing has highly negative economic, health, and national security implications, it's the job of government to step in and shape the market to correct that failure.

I cannot stress this point enough. If you take only one thing away from this book, please take this: We are not going to regulate our way out of the problems of the Energy-Climate Era. We can only innovate our way out, and the only way to do that is to mobilize the most effective and prolific system for transformational innovation and commercialization of new products ever created on the face of the earth - the U.S. marketplace. There is only one thing bigger than Mother Nature and that is Father Profit, and we have not even begun to enlist him in this struggle.

'How can we afford to transform our whole economy in order to prevent climate change, when climate change could turn out to be a hoax or a fad and we could misallocate all that capital?,' my answer is always the same: If climate change is a hoax, it is the most wonderful hoax ever perpetrated on the United States of America. Because transforming our economy to clean power and energy efficiency to mitigate global warming and the other challenges of the Energy-Climate Era is the equivalent of training for the Olympic triathlon: If you make it to the Olympics, you have a much better chance of winning, because you've developed every muscle. If you don't make it to the Olympics, you're still healthier, stronger, fitter, and more likely to live longer and win every other race in life. And as with the triathlon, you don't just improve one muscle or skill, but many, which become mutually reinforcing and improve the health of your whole system.

Mother Nature 'is just chemistry, biology, and physics,' Watson likes to say. 'Everything she does is just the sum of those three things. She's completely amoral. She doesn't care about poetry or art or whether you go to church. You can't negotiate with her, and you can't spin her and you can't evade her rules. All you can do is fit in as a species. And when a species doesn't learn to fit in with Mother Nature, it gets kicked out.' It's that simple, says Watson, and that's why 'every day you look in the mirror now, you're seeing an endangered species.

We can no longer expect to enjoy peace and security, economic growth, and human rights if we continue to ignore the key problems of the Energy-Climate Era: energy supply and demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, energy poverty, and biodiversity loss. How we handle these five problems will determine whether we have peace and security, economic growth, and human rights in the coming years.

555

The core argument is very simple: America has a problem and the world has a problem. America's problem is that it has lost its way in recent years - partly because of 9/11 and partly because of the bad habits that we have let build up over the last three decades, bad habits that have weakened our society's ability and willingness to take on big challenges.\n\n 'The world also has a problem: it is getting hot, flat, and crowded. That is, global warming, the stunning rise of middle classes all over the world, and rapid population growth have converged in a way that could make our planet dangerously unstable. In particular, the convergence of hot, flat, and crowded is tightening energy supplies, intensifying the extinction of plants and animals, deepening energy poverty, strengthening petrodictatorship, and accelerating climate change. How we address these interwoven global trends will determine a lot about the quality of life on earth in the twenty-first century.