Sad Truths

Wow, another brilliant and challenging article from George Monbiot. I especially appreciate his challenge to back to the land folks (I guess I'm one of them--just ignore my computer), around manufacturing. We obviously will need energy and mining to make gardening tools, butchering tool in the future. Anyway please check out the article. If you don't here are some highlights below:

"The problem we face is not that we have too little fossil fuel, but too much. As oil declines, economies will switch to tar sands, shale gas and coal; as accessible coal declines, they'll switch to ultra-deep reserves (using underground gasification to exploit them) and methane clathrates. The same probably applies to almost all minerals: we will find them, but exploiting them will mean trashing an ever greater proportion of the world's surface. We have enough non-renewable resources of all kinds to complete our wreckage of renewable resources: forests, soil, fish, freshwater, benign weather. Collapse will come one day, but not before we have pulled everything down with us."

"All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order."

I guess I really have to start talking to people about powering down in a real way, make it real to them. I don't feel much like a spokesman but we really need to start talking about these issues. I have no idea how to challenge all the advertising that promotes the destruction of the planet in such a pretty package. We are up against it friends. Again check out that article.