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Disorganized thoughts on personal responsibility and other stuff
I have been doing far more thinking than is probably good for me in the past month or two. Some of this has revolved around the spiritual aspect of my life, and a lot of it has revolved around my sense of personal and civic responsibility: namely, what kind of responsibility should I take upon myself in the face of the problems I can see facing both myself and society as I know it.
Allow me to ramble a bit about the environmental and social crises which have me the most concerned. This is not meant to be an exhaustive essay, so there will be no documentation to back up what I'm saying. Nor is this meant to be a politcal post, so even if you think I'm spouting a bunch of liberal rhetorical garbage, while you are welcome to your opinion, bear in mind that I'm not going to engage in debate with you on the topic. Just sayin'.
The environment is in crisis. In fact, the earth is in crisis. The whole planet is warming up at an alarming rate, the weather has gone batshit crazy, the icebergs are melting faster than a snow cone in Arizona in July, there are smog alerts everywhere you turn, oil slicks on the oceans hundreds of kilometers wide, and every day hundreds of species of animals and insects of which we've never even heard go exinct.
If I say the words "peak oil," I know that a good number of the people on my flist will roll their eyes heavenwords and call me an alarmist freak. I don't think I am, though. We're running out of our main source of fuel and energy production, and when I think of all the things we have and do that are directly dependent on petroleum products, my mind boggles: food, water, transportation, everyday household appliances, computers, telephones, hell, even our clothes, all either contain some sort of petroleum product, or are produced using petroleum.
Factor in that, with the arrival of China on the car market, we're adding about half a billion extra cars to the world, which will require oil to make, maintain, and to run, and we've got ourselves one hell of an interesting product.
In another few years, we'll be 7.5 billion people on this planet. The words "carrying capacity" are also the words of alarmist freaks, but I'm not so sure the concept can be so easily dismissed. Our current mode of production, complete with waste and overconsumption in industrialized countries, is going to get us into trouble sooner rather than later.
Which brings me back to, well, me. Here I am, puttering along, only now truly starting to be ecologically responsible, trying to reduce my ecological footprint, etc. So far, so good. I'm still driving a car many days of the week, and I daresay that most of my lifestyle is probably hell on the environment, in spite of my efforts to recycle, to compost, to whatever.
Apart from personally becoming a hippy freak (and I mean that in the kindest way possible), I'm worried that I'm really not doing enough. In essence, I'm not doing my part at all. It won't matter in two years that I've been recycling and walking and composting. Not if the entire world carries on as it has been up until now. Leading through example is great, but it's not enough.
As someone said the other day, it would take internation cooperation at the same level as that seen during World War II to make sure we don't destroy ourselves. Whether it's in two years or ten or even twenty, I am pretty sure that we're seeing the end of the world as we know it (not in an Armaggedon sense, but in a society-can't-carry-on-this-way sense). In our lifetime, society is going to change irrevocably, and right now our chances of surviving that change don't look good.
A few of my friends share this opinion. A few are putting together a contingency plan, to make sure we get through the bad times. I wonder, though, if it's not somewhat selfish of me not to try to raise the alarms elsewhere: to send letters and make phone calls to all the Candian political parties, to ring the bells and at least *try* to make things better. To participate in grassroots movements. To do something, anything, that might work. I can't and don't want to bury my head in the sand, and hope that the political leaders of Canada will somehow fix it. For all of Dion's pretty speeches, it's going to take consensus from all the parties, and all the provinces, that we need to make drastic changes to how this country is run, if we (and the rest of the world) are to have a fighting chance.
The problem is figuring out where to start.
Allow me to ramble a bit about the environmental and social crises which have me the most concerned. This is not meant to be an exhaustive essay, so there will be no documentation to back up what I'm saying. Nor is this meant to be a politcal post, so even if you think I'm spouting a bunch of liberal rhetorical garbage, while you are welcome to your opinion, bear in mind that I'm not going to engage in debate with you on the topic. Just sayin'.
The environment is in crisis. In fact, the earth is in crisis. The whole planet is warming up at an alarming rate, the weather has gone batshit crazy, the icebergs are melting faster than a snow cone in Arizona in July, there are smog alerts everywhere you turn, oil slicks on the oceans hundreds of kilometers wide, and every day hundreds of species of animals and insects of which we've never even heard go exinct.
If I say the words "peak oil," I know that a good number of the people on my flist will roll their eyes heavenwords and call me an alarmist freak. I don't think I am, though. We're running out of our main source of fuel and energy production, and when I think of all the things we have and do that are directly dependent on petroleum products, my mind boggles: food, water, transportation, everyday household appliances, computers, telephones, hell, even our clothes, all either contain some sort of petroleum product, or are produced using petroleum.
Factor in that, with the arrival of China on the car market, we're adding about half a billion extra cars to the world, which will require oil to make, maintain, and to run, and we've got ourselves one hell of an interesting product.
In another few years, we'll be 7.5 billion people on this planet. The words "carrying capacity" are also the words of alarmist freaks, but I'm not so sure the concept can be so easily dismissed. Our current mode of production, complete with waste and overconsumption in industrialized countries, is going to get us into trouble sooner rather than later.
Which brings me back to, well, me. Here I am, puttering along, only now truly starting to be ecologically responsible, trying to reduce my ecological footprint, etc. So far, so good. I'm still driving a car many days of the week, and I daresay that most of my lifestyle is probably hell on the environment, in spite of my efforts to recycle, to compost, to whatever.
Apart from personally becoming a hippy freak (and I mean that in the kindest way possible), I'm worried that I'm really not doing enough. In essence, I'm not doing my part at all. It won't matter in two years that I've been recycling and walking and composting. Not if the entire world carries on as it has been up until now. Leading through example is great, but it's not enough.
As someone said the other day, it would take internation cooperation at the same level as that seen during World War II to make sure we don't destroy ourselves. Whether it's in two years or ten or even twenty, I am pretty sure that we're seeing the end of the world as we know it (not in an Armaggedon sense, but in a society-can't-carry-on-this-way sense). In our lifetime, society is going to change irrevocably, and right now our chances of surviving that change don't look good.
A few of my friends share this opinion. A few are putting together a contingency plan, to make sure we get through the bad times. I wonder, though, if it's not somewhat selfish of me not to try to raise the alarms elsewhere: to send letters and make phone calls to all the Candian political parties, to ring the bells and at least *try* to make things better. To participate in grassroots movements. To do something, anything, that might work. I can't and don't want to bury my head in the sand, and hope that the political leaders of Canada will somehow fix it. For all of Dion's pretty speeches, it's going to take consensus from all the parties, and all the provinces, that we need to make drastic changes to how this country is run, if we (and the rest of the world) are to have a fighting chance.
The problem is figuring out where to start.
Re: "...keep an eye to windward..."
We're social animals; we survive by banding together, sharing, and cooperating, not lurking in our bunkers in a war of all against all. But starving along with everybody else is senseless. And you can't provide for everybody; if you've got enough food for your family, starving your kids to feed others (who should have known better) makes no sense. In some situations there's a fine balance between charity and suicide. What do you do if you've got barely enough for your family to make it through the winter, and a co-worker shows up at your door?
How do you preserve some kind of community, some kind of social compact, when things are really going down the tube?
It gets kind of distressing to think about, actually. But I'd rather do what I can, within reason, to prepare for things falling apart, than do nothing out of distaste. I'll be able to contribute more to the collective throughpulling if I'm alive.
And as Phnee points out, we do have some friends who don't like the way the wind is blowing, and are starting to get prepared too. Which is comforting; hopefully, decades from now in our nursing homes, we'll be able to joke about how silly we were getting all anxious about global warming...
Re: "...keep an eye to windward..."