People find themselves in the situation of passengers on a plane that has taken off for the Global, to whom the pilot has announced that he has had to turn around because one can no longer land at that airport, and who then hear with terror… that the emergency landing strip, the Local, is also inaccessible. - Bruno Latour, quoted in At Work In The Ruins by Dougald Hine
I think that industrial consumer civilization is not possible to run indefinitely. I think that it is not possible to 'Great Swap' different sources of energy and materials and keep running industrial consumer civilization in anything like its current form, to point at just one of the terminal flaws in the current arrangement.
So it isn’t that I think our civilization and lifestyles ought to change, although I do; it's that I think our civilization and lifestyles will change regardless of whether we want them to or not. It’s thus not so much about “being good” as it is about “not being stupid any longer,” technically speaking.
Since our civilization, society and lives will change/are changing, the pragmatic questions are:
What are the realistic options (that aren't based on fairy tales) that I can do something about, and what do I need to do to move in that direction?
How can I make changes in that direction now, on my own terms, with room to experiment and make recoverable mistakes, and not only when I'm forced to by the unfolding catastrophes as a result of resource constraints and climate change catastrophes?
For almost everyone interested in this work, the place to start is at the personal and household scale.
Why? Because everyone, except for those incarcerated, have agency over their personal lives. It's a scope and scale over which they have authority and responsibility: they don't need to ask permission, they don't need legislation to change, they don't need to convince anyone else. They can just get going right now, today.
God damn, people are so close to being awesome and we fuck it up so hard. Imagine if all our energy went into cool stuff instead of bullshit. - My Friend Bryan
Microretreat
I needed some time to think away from screens so I threw some gear onto my bike and hooked a right out the driveway. An hour and a half later I made camp here for the night and watched the sun go down over the Sierra with my notebook on my lap.
Further Reading
At Work In The Ruins, by Dougald Hines. I’ll be talking more about this book.