RE: [pf]2. Binary thinking and methods of sustainability

David M. remarked (entire post included below):  "I see us at the beginning
of a several-decade transition (hopefully) to sustainability, possibly by
means of contraction and convergence."

I have noticed a shift in my own outlook and attitude, the last year or so.
For my entire life up to now I have thought in terms of "fixability" of our
system.  But no more.  The scale and inertia is too great.  The avarice and
greed and fear and other deadly sins that are so thoroughly embedded in and
incessantly promoted and also denied by both the elite and the popular
cultures are too pervasive.  It's like I have travelled to another
land...that pervasive "reality" or paradigm simply isn't mine anymore.  I
think Mike Weber's assessment, expressed a couple of days ago, is probably
true:  the only way to combat this evil colossus is to turn 180 degrees and
walk away from it.  No looking back.  Stop feeding it, Mike said.

As sad as the terrorist attack today on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon is, it is sobering to simultanously hold in awareness the fact that
chickens always do come home to roost.  One of many fundamental precepts of
Christianity, the spiritual path often proudly held up as the moral
foundation of the United States of America, states "As you sow, so shall you
reap".  The USA, for a century (at least!) set upon dominating the rest of
the world to its own hubristic advantage, received abundantly, today.
Woefully, the fruit is rotten and maggot-ridden...a poison, bereft of
nutrition.

'Auwe no ho'i e.........  'Auwe.........  'Auwe.............................

Kaleopono


> -----Original Message-----
> From: David MacClement [mailto:davd@ihug.co.nz]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 1:25 PM
> To: Positive Futures list
> Subject: Re: [pf]2. Binary thinking and methods of sustainability
>
>
> At 04:45 12/9/2001 +1200, David Mac sent-on his June 1999 piece {at:
> http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pfvs/2001III/msg01251.html } :-
> >>... leaving some outside coercion, like a legal system ... as the only
> way to get enough human activities changed soon enough to save the earth's
> ecology.
> >** Methods _are_ important as well as aims; so what methods might work?
> >>
>
> At 12:21 11/9/2001 -0500, Jill wrote {at:
> http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pfvs/2001III/msg01252.html } :-
> >I am eager for the particulars of how this strong democracy will take
> place, ... strong democracy is advocated as the only "method" that is
> flexible enough to deal with the changing reality of sustainability.
> >
> >                                    Jill
> {And in http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pfvs/2001III/msg01257.html  she
> comments: "I don't think it any more callous to discuss such things today
> as on any day - perhaps it is even more relevant."}
>
> · Jill has currently paused in her reading of _The Local Politics
> of Global
> Sustainability_ (Prugh, Costanza and Daly). I haven't read it; I haven't
> read any political/social-change books since I got started on David
> Korten's _When Corporations Rule The World_, and expanded my "the
> bad guys"
> list to include almost all the "top 750" corporations, as well as the US,
> British and (to some extent) Japanese governments.
>   That's coming to mean, what with big-box stores, and main-media and
> government conformism to the "threatening economic growth is treason"
> mind-set, that there's less and less available to civil society, you and
> me, to have effective direction-and-control over. Depressing to me, though
> I struggle on regardless.
>
> · It may be that I should read Prugh, Costanza and Daly; it might give me
> hope, get me energised.
>
>
> · However, I mainly wanted to comment on: "the changing reality of
> sustainability"; I agree that what is sustainable changes with time. Years
> ago I pointed out that IMO New Zealand in the early 1950s was nearly
> sustainable (i.e. if the whole world was brought up and down to
> that level,
> the world could have been kept sustainable from then on), but that in the
> late 1990s the sustainable level had decreased to something like a country
> Thailander's level. (Because of increased population and greater
> consumerism by the rich.)
>
> · I see us at the beginning of a several-decade transition (hopefully) to
> sustainability, possibly by means of contraction and convergence. I agree
> with Jill that “strong democracy is ... the only "method" that is flexible
> enough to deal with the changing reality of sustainability”, but I don't
> see that delightful problem, “dealing with the changing reality of
> sustainability”, facing us right now.
>
> · No, in the political arena (Jill's interest), the problem in democracies
> is convincing ordinary people that there is a huge problem with the way
> things are being done at present, but that also there are ways of dealing
> with it, involving the-man-in-the-street as well as corporations (and
> governments - they just tag along, IMO).
>
> · In the real world, (Jill's daily life), the big question facing
> us all is
> the preservation of as much of the geography/ecology of the world (in
> linked patches, usually) as possible, together with the preservation of
> ordinary mid-20th-century small-town-USA civil life, against the
> ravages of
> the current extremely exploitative economic system. (Small is Beautiful!)
>   So that when sustainability becomes a real possibility, there will be
> something to build from, somewhere to start in re-colonising the wasteland
> that unrestrained capitalism is causing, on the land and in
> people's hearts
> and minds.
>
> David.
> David MacClement [davd @ ihug.co.nz] (remove spaces)
> http://davd.tripod.com/GrRR-010907_titles.html#top
> http://www.geocities.com/davd.geo/index.html#top
> ***********************************************
>
>
>

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