The technocrats who gave us the Green Revolution “believed that managing this industrial style of agriculture within an increasingly globalized economic system was withing the scope of their confidence.” But the Green Revolution was possible only through the industrialization of agriculture, in India and beyond. The immediate consequences were indeed remarkably green on the surface, and Norman Borlaug (1914-2009) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. The consequences have been devastating, however, as commoditization of markets has taken over agriculture and eating ceased being an agricultural act (6). Technological fundamentalists act as if codified human knowledge is adequate to run the world. No, not necessarily. The book outlines why the authors think there is no solution. The planet has to drastically reduce in population and man has to stop reliance on high energy resources to survive. However there is no description how this change would be managed or any idea at all on mitigation for the problems. You're left to assume that various disasters will devastate the planet and the survivors will get by as best they can. Since ‘Brave New War’, Robb has been a go-to for those trying to apply Boyd to business, by nimble maneuver in a complex environment. They could’t quite grasp Robb saying it’s different now, that network trends toward centralization now requires alignment for reputation purposes. So what is in the book? They discuss the importance of environmental and geographic factors in history, the need for anticapitalist perspectives and for social justice. Then the overall problems of “size, scale, scope, and speed.” One useful concept was the “Overton window,” which postulates that political leaders only consider policies which already have wide public support — which explains much of the environmental crisis.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse” by Wes Jackson An Excerpt from “An Inconvenient Apocalypse” by Wes Jackson

We also have these incredible capacities for collaboration, cooperation, empathy, compassion, right? So human nature is real. but it’s variable. But there is what Wes and I, borrowing from our friend, Bill Veatch, call human carbon nature. That we’re also just organisms. We are biological entities. And Wes has long said, you know, probably the easiest definition of life on Earth is, life is the scramble for energy rich carbon. And human beings have just gotten incredibly good at getting at that carbon. Now, we can make choices to control the way we do it today. But we also have to realize that part of human nature is that biological desire to maximize our use of energy. Howard Odum called it the maximum power principle. And it’s not just a human creation, it’s part of life on this planet. Well, again, it doesn’t absolve everybody who’s doing bad things. It doesn’t mean that if you’re the CEO of an oil company, you get to say, “Well, that’s just the way it rolls.” We have to be accountable for our actions. And we have to understand the deeper forces that shape our actions. Both things are true. Here’s suggesting that “royal” psychology is just a fancy way of saying power corrupts. And that by saying “corrupt” we mean that the rational, practical basis of behavior has been replaced by one that is irrational and instinctive–i.e.the competitive drive for dominance. Surely the above is correct in saying that we need to face reality but by putting that facing up into moral terms it is itself not facing the reality that humans, like all our ecosystem companions, commit behaviors that are only “sins” when they violate the prime directive of social and therefore species survival.

Does this really apply to the so-called American democracy in the 21 st century? Well, we are a “nation that has been at war – either in shooting wars or cold war for domination – for our entire lives (since World War II; we are participating in both, one by proxy, in early 2023). Economic inequality and the resulting suffering have deepened in our lifetimes, facilitated by a government so captured by concentrated wealth that attempts to renew the moderate New Deal-era social contract seem radical to many.” And we are left with a culture “competent to implement almost anything (relating to government power) and to imagine almost nothing.” Just another example of fundamentalism thriving in the absence of imagination, “where both the Right and the so-called Left either endorses or capitulates to royal power.” Yes, “royal tradition” applies to us. There is no sugar coating the threats, they are real and forthcoming. “We conclude that there are no workable solutions to the most pressing problems of our historical moment. The best we can do is minimize the suffering and destruction.”

An Inconvenient Apocalypse | NHBS Good Reads An Inconvenient Apocalypse | NHBS Good Reads

Yeah. And of course, keeping people alive requires resources. It requires incredible amounts of energy and technology. And what happens when that energy and technology is no longer available, or available only to the most wealthy? You know, these are not only difficult personal questions, or incredibly difficult social questions. Yet, I think they’re questions we’re going to have to face. You know, one way you can think about this is that the future of all of us is going to be a kind of triage. So most people know that when doctors are working on a battlefield or come into a natural disaster, or if the emergency room is full of patients after a crisis, doctors have to make some pretty hard decisions about how to prioritize care. And it means often letting the most ill, the most injured die because the resources are better spent trying to keep a lot of people who are not quite as ill, or quite as injured. Well, that’s, you know, doctors are trained to do this. We allow doctors to do that, because we trust that training. But there’s going to be a time when we’re going to be engaged in a kind of cultural triage. How do we take limited resources and try to use them for the collective good? And how do we accept these limits, including limits on the length of our lives? Well, you might remember when the Republican Party accused the Democrats of wanting to create death panels. You know, to kill grandma and grandpa early, you know, to save money. And the culture went bananas over that. Now, of course, the Democrats hadn’t proposed death panels, but that’s where we’re heading. And at this point, nobody in the mainstream political arena is willing to even talk about it. And of course, you can’t solve problems if you can’t talk about them. Provides a list of the main societal threats. “The decline of key natural resources and an emerging global resource crisis, especially in water.” Take the most complex technology and move to Mars? If any survive there, many more will still perish here on Earth. Describes what it means to be apocalyptic now. “First, while the end of the world is likely not at hand (at least not until the sun burns out in several billion years), some things will end, such as the unsustainable and unjust economic, political, and cultural systems that currently dominate human societies.” The nature of all living organisms, so this book argues, is to go after 'dense energy,' resulting eventually in crisis. If that is so, then the human organism is facing a tough question: Can we overcome our own nature? Courageous and humble, bold and provocative, the authors of An Inconvenient Apocalypse do not settle for superficial answers." —Donald Worster, author of Shrinking the Earth

Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity

Harrowing and accessible, this is just the thing for readers interested in a sociological or philosophical examination of the climate crisis." The question is how can we deal with this most humanly (and that should include the rest of life’s creation)? The current problem is seen as global warming or climate change. It saddens me deeply to see many people just ignoring this as a problem or taking the views of a minority of science literature that the problem does not exist against the vast majority of climate science experts that we are approaching a pivot point where problems will escalate. Maybe we start by banning land ‘ownership’ by corporations? Nationalize agricultural land (National Farms?) and institute a program of long-term leases (100 years?) to small farmers? Ban the practice of separating the top layers of land and the ‘rights’ to the minerals beneath it? Scale: What is the appropriate scale of the human community? While evolutionary psychology consists mostly of just-so stories, convincing research by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar has demonstrated that the size of a truly human community has definite limits: Social group: 150; Close friends: 50; Very close friends: 15; Inner circle: 5. This seems exactly right, despite the number of Facebook “friends” in the world. Port William (2) and Yoknapatawpha of William Faulkner both fit into this schema, for example, though as exemplars of a different quality.

AN INCONVENIENT APOCALYPSE: - Mud City Press AN INCONVENIENT APOCALYPSE: - Mud City Press

The book reads well. It’s infused with provocative questions and existential philosophy. The authors are reasonable and highly sensitive to social justice. The nature of all living organisms, so this book argues, is to go after 'dense energy', resulting eventually in crisis. If that is so, then the human organism is facing a tough question: Can we overcome our own nature? Courageous and humble, bold and provocative, the authors of An Inconvenient Apocalypse do not settle for superficial answers." b. the ability, or not, to return materials to the place they originated. Does nature do “transport”? Geology does transport, the water cycle and rivers do transport, and that’s about it. Everything else is returned to almost the same place it was sourced. Nature recycles, re-uses, wrings every last bit of energy and nutrition from what it sources, and all of the materials are replenished via energy harvested from the sun, via plants, to feed the cycle anew. Local can recycle, but once and done linear global/national supply chains cannot do this. Describes the concept of the saving remnant. “The term is used in various ways, but at the core is a faith that even in the face of an overwhelming catastrophe, a saving remnant will survive and become the basis for renewed community life.”Apocalypse in the present context does not mean “lakes of fire, rivers of blood, or bodies raptured up to heaven.” But it does require that we change our consciousness when hope for meaningful change within the existing political culture and economy is no longer productive and we must deal with our problems dramatically different ways: “Invoking the apocalyptic recognizes the end of something…not about rapture but a rupture severe enough to change the nature of the whole game.” It is way past time to climb out of that Overton Window and look around with eyes that see. In the words of James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Thus, the summation from J&J: So, there’s not a lot of specifics here, though it is a useful starting point for discussion. It would be interesting to have people read the book and talk about it, to see where people are on the subject. Thesis discussed. “Our thesis is that while not every individual or culture is equally culpable, the human failure over the past ten thousand years is the result of the imperative of all life to seek out energy-rich carbon.” A wonderfully argued essay that diagnoses many problems. I, too, find Wendell Berry’s ideas remarkable (the essay on how any moderately sized farm can be run using horses rather than gas-powered machinery is worth seeking out). Scope: Our magical thinking about the relationship of the growth economy and the ecosphere in a finite world allows us to believe that an economics of endless growth will not end badly. This bleak future is “not pleasant…to ponder and prepare for, so it’s not surprising that many people, especially those in societies where affluence is based on dense energy and advanced technology, clamor for solutions to be able to keep the energy flowing and the technology advancing.” Thus, our civil religion tainted by technological fundamentalism becomes necessary [(5); the term is originally from David W. Orr]. Regarding fundamentalism of any kind – scientistic instead of scientific, religious, political, economic – I follow Janisse Ray who wrote that “ fundamentalism thrives only where imagination has died” (paraphrase from Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home, 2004). Along with fundamentalism comes the naked hubris leading us to believe that humans understand complex questions definitively. No, we never do.

An Inconvenient Apocalypse with Bob Jensen (Bonus episode of An Inconvenient Apocalypse with Bob Jensen (Bonus episode of

This is not the message a techno-optimist-technological-fundamentalist member of the professional-managerial class wants to hear. John Robb’s latest conversation is on a podcast named ‘ No Way Out‘. That refers to Boyd’s original name for the Conceptual Spiral of the OODA loop. It refers to “the requirement to re-orient and break models” in an uncertain world. If you are looking to know what causes climate change, there are far better books out there. This book has a more philosophical bend.We’re spending a lot of effort to re-state and amplify the symptoms (environmental degradation), and I think most NC readers already understand that part of the problem-space. Well, I do worry about it. And in fact, I’ve been talking to a new friend who’s writing a book on ecofascists, and you know, hanging out in their chat rooms. And they’re pretty scary people. And he asked me, “If you sound some of the same alarms as they do, don’t you worry?” And I said, I worry about not sounding the alarm. So let me explain what I mean. If ordinary people can sense that, you know, this bright, shiny future of wind turbines, and solar energy, and electric vehicles that were being sold isn’t really honest. That is, there are problems beyond those high-tech solutions. If ordinary people sense that, and I think are starting to sense it, and will increasingly sense it in the future, and the progressive left people with concerns about inequality, injustice, which I have deeply and have always tried to act on. If people like us don’t talk about that reality, then essentially, we cede that turf to the right and to the ego fascists. My definition of an “economy” is “how and from where do you get what you need to operate your household”. Nuclear fusion is one example of this: Even though the technology remains decades away (if it is, indeed, feasible – there have been many false alarms), the prospect that we could master fusion and release essentially unlimited sources of energy with little ecological cost offers a powerful, addictive toke of “hopium.” This kind of news has the same numbing effect of watching a series of flashy, over-rehearsed TED talks: One gets the sense that the most intractable problems are being dealt with, and therefore one can get on with binge-watching Netflix or mining Bitcoin, or whatever distraction one finds most seductive.