Hey folks, I am new here.

I work with EcoGather, which is a part of Sterling College. We host free weekly community discussions on Zoom. We cover a broad range of topics appropriate for people already totally collapse aware and those that are not there yet. I think the topics we cover are relevant wherever you are on your journey. I have talked to friends I have met in this space and ones I brought to it, and they have found it both a gentle introduction and exploration (i.e. if you are trying to 'convince' a loved one, for example, this is a good space to bring them), and a place to explore concepts even deeper (i.e. we don't just spend the whole time rehashing the reasons to accept collapse, we go deeper). Anyway, if this is something that interests you, or you know someone you think would benefit, check out the list of upcoming topics on our website!

And, we are also offering some synchronous courses, that we would like to have a broader impact, as we consider them existentially important information. Consider joining, if its of interest to you, or share with others you think might be interested! Thanks!!

Change-Shaping Series: Connection-based Training for Good Troublemakers

This is mostly self-paced with online materials and live meetings about twice a month, starting January 10th and running until June. It covers topics that help us build strong engaged communities, reduce polarization, and tackle the challenges we face together. There is a $75 commitment fee, but if that presents a barrier EcoGather will work with you.  To learn more and apply: https://www.ce.sterlingcollege.edu/change

Climate + Change: How to Comprehend & Meaningfully Respond to the Defining Crisis of Our Time

This donation-based course runs from February 7th to March 18th, has two 1.5 hour meetings per week and online companion materials. To learn more and apply: https://www.ce.sterlingcollege.edu/climateandchange

Dear r/CollapseAwareBurltnVt, I hope it's appropriate to post here about the collapse-focused program I've been running via Sterling College for the past four years.

Here are full details about the next 9-week intensive (starting January 8th, 2024, with guests including Nate Hagens, Vandana Shiva and Rob Hopkins). More than happy to answer any questions that folk may have!

https://www.darkoptimism.org/2023/10/28/surviving-the-future-the-deeper-dive-2024/

https://preview.redd.it/g5ae8vugq6xb1.jpg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=854c3f5be005fc6574fd2db7327d969399b608bc

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Rented on Youtube for two bucks.

This is free speech. "Don't do this."

It kept us on the edge of our seats. Great story, great telling, finally doomers can feel represented.

https://www.degrowus.org/virtual-assembly-2023

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https://preview.redd.it/zxpsjtslfhwa1.jpg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a68608783f1dd836688eb8e99e0ef3e5a0b845c1

Andreas Malm says he has no hope in ‘dominant classes’, and urges more radical approach to climate activism

Is eco-terrorism now self-defence? Inside explosive film How to Blow Up a Pipeline

I have watched a lot of John Liu videos and admire his work. He has founded this org and wonder what you make of it. This is the email I got. At the bottom is a link to their website.

We’re writing with exciting news! We’re pleased to announce that, after careful consideration, Ecosystem Restoration Camps has changed its name to Ecosystem Restoration Communities.

We’d like to share why this small but significant development reflects the much bigger journey we’ve been on together over the past six years. 

From tiny shoots to mighty forests 

In 2016, the first Ecosystem Restoration Camp was established in Spain by a small but pioneering group of earth restorers. Since then, we have transformed into a thriving international movement of more than 60 communities in over 30 countries worldwide, working together locally and globally on what our founder John Liu calls the ‘Great Work of Our Time’.

Along the way, we discovered many like-minded supporters who shared our vision for ecosystem restoration and quickly got behind us. Like a mycelial network, we started working together and despite living in a variety of landscapes and locations, we were united by the wish to restore ecological function around the world so that people and other living things can live together in harmony. 

In 2021, in recognition of the incredible restoration work taking place around the globe, the United Nations made us an official supporting partner of their Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. 

Growing and changing together 

When we first started out, the term ‘camps’ reflected our aim to establish non-permanent camping sites on degraded lands where people from around the world could gather together to work on ecosystem restoration.   

Yet over time, our focus has increasingly shifted away from camps towards engaging with and mobilizing local communities – an approach that not only supports lower personal carbon footprints, but is also in line with inspiring and attracting local people to contribute to regenerative practices and join the worldwide effort to restore degraded ecosystems. 

We’ve also evolved considerably as an organization since 2016, and the experiences now on offer are as varied as the communities that make up the movement. Beyond ecosystem restoration experiences alone, we now facilitate a wide range of educational courses, research & internship opportunities, a global knowledge exchange platform and more.

Since our focus, organization and offer has shifted so significantly, it feels like the right time for our name to evolve too. 

Why camps became communities 

By moving from camps to communities, we want to demonstrate that we’re a living, growing, international community with common interests, ideals and goals.

We believe the word ‘communities’ is more aligned with what we have evolved into and it feels more expansive, inclusive and encompassing the diversity of work now taking place.

Our name change also represents what many earth restorers already know: that ecosystem restoration can’t take place in isolated camps, since this naturally symbiotic process is intricately entwined with local landscapes and lives.

In becoming Ecosystem Restoration Communities, we’re acknowledging the importance of these interconnected relationships and reaffirming our wish to work even more collaboratively in future. 

Continuing the Great Work 

Whilst our name might be changing, we’re still passionate about continuing the Great Work of our Time: empowering ordinary, everyday people to take the lead in restoring the earth and working together to repair damaged ecosystems. 

In just six years, nearly 21,000 earth restorers have already planted around 2.7 million plants and trees in over 9 thousand hectares of degraded land worldwide. The collective ambition of restoration initiatives currently in the movement is to restore 3.1 million hectares, and this ambition will grow as our organization expands. As a movement, our big goal is to have one million people come together by 2030 to reverse ecological destruction and restore biodiversity in hundreds of communities around the world. 

We’d like to thank all our supporters, partners and earth restorers for joining us on the journey and all the incredible achievements so far. As Ecosystem Restoration Communities, we can’t wait to see what we’ll grow together next! 

Best wishes,

The Ecosystem Restoration Communities team

PS Go here to discover our new website!

What do you think of this group?
https://deepgreenresistance.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VonJfBgHUSA&ab_channel=DemocracyNow%21

Extinction Rebellion may or may not be your thing, but activists under its banner deserve our respect, and would welcome our participation. Here's their most recent newsletter.

Rebels block entrance to private-jet port.

And here's another way to join the fight for a new world, a conference in Montreal, May 18-21, called The Great Transition.

We live in an era of global crisis – ecological, economic, social, and political – that requires a civilizational shift away from all dimensions of the capitalist system. For example, the resurgence of unabashed white supremacy and right-wing nationalist populism is a global phenomenon disproportionately affecting marginalized groups. The worsening of the ecological crisis, coupled with a climate of war, is also reviving a patriarchal culture emphasizing control over nature and over women’s bodies.

Thus, the international event The Great Transition: Fighting Back in Times of Global Crisis invites citizens of various backgrounds (activists, trade unionists, members of political parties, students, or academics) to reflect on these questions along three axes: Repoliticizing, Imagining, and Achieving.

Registration has not yet opened, soon they say. Cost? don't know. Cheap I assume, but who can afford a hotel room? Schedule your hostel. Anyone know someone I could stay with?

What's wrong with a farm that uses artificial light to grow food? Don't we already have a source of light that is free and ubiquitous? How does it make sense to use energy - almost always with a carbon footprint - to adapt to carbon release driven climate disruption? Check out this article by Adele Peters from Fast Company.

Even a small, 10,000-square-foot farm might have a lighting bill over $100,000 or even $200,000 a year, he says. Running air conditioners and other equipment adds to the energy used.

“In a typical cold climate, you would need about five acres of solar panels to grow one acre of lettuce,” says Kale Harbick, a USDA researcher who studies controlled-environment agriculture. A hypothetical skyscraper filled with lettuce would require solar panels covering an area the size of Manhattan.

Fifth Season['s]... farm proved that automation could run its operations. But it also had to pay the high salaries of a team of robotics and software engineers. “When you have a commodity-type market such as leafy greens, it’s really hard to find enough margin to be able to have your unit sales cover the cost of the broader enterprise,” he says. 

Some American startups also have a suite of well-paid executives even before they’re making a profit. “A lot of these companies are still floating on venture capital,” says Stein. “What’s the first thing that they do? They hire all their friends. And they blow out the administrative salaries on the operating side.” ... The company’s total revenue for the first three quarters of last year was $10 million, but most of that was used on up to $7 million in severance payments when it fired two executives. 

Money is a convenient and efficient way to track the allocation of resources in a society too large for reciprocity to suffice. But can we afford wealth accumulation as a goal? Is wealth accumulation necessary for the functioning of a strong market economy? Can a market economy operate with other goals? Why not use the surplus value to improve people's lives and keep nature healthy?

Externalization of costs and internalization of benefits is the definition of the modern corporation, and among those externalized costs is the destruction of nature, leading to the anticipated collapse of the biosphere, civilization, democratic governments. We have a lot to be angry about, and there is something we can do.

We need to redefine our "goods". A "good" person doesn't get rich, but ensures that the community they live in is healthy and spends their money to support local people, a "good" company insists on paying a living wage, "good" laws do not allow speculative investment in housing or land, companies are easier to create and cheaper to operate when they are owned by their workers, And so on. Add your own.

Money isn't the problem, our values and our policies make money the problem. Right now they are engineered to convenience the accumulation of wealth by the wealthy, and to drain the wealth of people who have too little. We need to change our values and policies to make money work for the common good, to cause wealth to be distributed as a public good.

I've brainstormed a few questions that may be worth considering over time as we become more collapse aware, and begin to watch things play out. This is not by any means a complete list of considerations that are and will be worth thinking about. In no particular order:

1. What are important questions and considerations going forward?

2. What kinds of actions might help a person ease themselves or their community into a future with less energy and more uncertainty?

3. What forms of community will be helpful in the future?

4. What (if anything) will be worth sustaining or carrying forward from modern techno-industrial society?

5. What parts of modern society will be able to be sustained in a future with less energy?

6. What time frame is useful when considering these questions?

7. How important are distinctions such as Myself, Humanity, Life, Earth, etc.?

8. What role and how much of a role does collapse awareness or acceptance play in deciding what is important and worth pursuing? Are some things worthwhile with or without collapse?

9. What does it mean to be an ancestor of the future?

10. What does it mean to NOT be an ancestor of the future?

11. Is planning for 1 year or 10 years or 100 years more important? How to decide? What things become more and less important as time horizons shift?

12. Is the size of the impact of collapse aware actions important?

13. How important is a shared understanding of collapse when forming community?

14. How will fun and recreation change in the future?

15. How can a person from modern techno-industrial society help foster indigenous life-ways?

16. What appropriate technologies will be both useful and viable in the future?

Not sure if any of the ideas presented in the following articles will resonate with anyone, but they might bring up topics that warrant further discussion at a meeting.

http://paulchefurka.ca/LadderOfAwareness.html

http://paulchefurka.ca/FindingTheGift.html

Collapse acceptance benefits https://youtu.be/mhKbOtZM01c

Collapse acceptance actions https://youtu.be/O4Yx-aO36Mg

I'd provide my own commentary but I'm on break at work and I've gotta get back to it.

Preppers, techies, hippies, and yuppies are converging on the American West, the safest place to “exit” a society gone haywire. In Vanity Fair By James Pogue February 21, 2023

The elites of the far right don't trust corporate CEOs? Wait, I thought they were the Corporate CEOs! So if everyone is running for the hills, who's minding the store?

Read this article and hear the great-great-grand-daughter of John D. Rockefeller claim that Rockefeller cared about the country. OK, I guess in the vision that killing Native Americans, polluting and desecrating landscapes, and bamboozling Americans into abandoning street cars counts as acceptable costs for caring. I think she means something different than I would, if I said " with a lot of these executives [today]. They’re now trying to, it seems to me, break the country down.”

This article confuses the xxxx out of me. In his article, James Pugh reports that

Wealthy and well-connected preppers and back-to-the-landers have been moving west, many of them at least tangentially involved in the edgy online realm of thought known as the dissident right. Tech executives and crypto investors are creating secretive groups to help people “exit”—a term that has taken on almost mystical significance in some circles recently—from our liberal society, tech-dominated lives, and fraying system.

Wait, liberalism is to blame for ecosystem collapse? I thought that individualism and cost-externalization is the problem. Moreover, he tells us,

According to this view, the American empire is in danger of fading, weakened by a greedy and insulated oligarchy with more loyalty to their pals in London and Tokyo than to their fellow Americans. The elite have driven regular people into a serflike existence, putting money above every other source of value or meaning: national interest, local cultures, our long-term financial stability, even the environment.

So if the oligarchy isn't the far right, who the hell is it? There is some serious mixing of messages here.

Here is Ron DeSantis claiming to be a peasant:

“These people at the World Economic Forum,” DeSantis told the National Conservatism Conference in September, “they just view us as a bunch of peasants. I can tell you, things like the World Economic Forum are dead on arrival in the state of Florida.”

Go read, and give us your take.

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The buffalo were grazing by the highway on the outskirts of the richest county in the richest country in the history of the world.

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It was a clear morning in the Tetons, and with binoculars it was possible to see all the way across the valley known, since prehistory, as one of the most secure and comfortable little basins in all of the Mountain West—named, for one of the first white trappers to winter there, Jackson’s Hole. The landscape may have looked like wilderness to the caravanning tourists in $200,000 Sprinter vans and thousands more in athleisure who now flood Teton County year-round. But it is also a kind of hyperreality of money—tens of thousands of acres and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of conservation easements—in what may be the world’s most unequal political jurisdiction. Above the ospreys and eagles, there was a constant traffic of small jets and private aircraft, humming into and out of a town that has become a modern refuge for people with remote jobs and portfolios fattened by one of history’s great asset bubbles, many of them driven to the Northern Rockies by a worry or wariness that the rest of America is on its way toward environmental, political, or economic breakdown. Or some combination of the above.

Hey Group,

Here are the meeting notes from 2/19. Our discussion was lively and uncovered a lot of good questions.

• Agriculture practices and sustainability:

We learned from one member that organic farming is extremely difficult because fossil fuel derivative fertilizer is incredibility powerful for plants, and also creates less notorious food due to soil composition.  From that came a idea about what to do about community farming practices, how can we education collapse aware folks to be prepared to farm themselves, what does post collapse community based farming look like? These questions remained largely unanswered. 

• We Discussed 'Environmental shocks that cascade through societies' graph. (Attached on this post aswell)
• We shared an example of Environmental collapse on a local, national ,global level
• A idea about formulating a guide plan for households and local communities on collapse preparedness. A list of tools to have, where seedbanks are, collapse education, re-drawing town spaces for post- collapse success.
• It was brought up: How do we effectively reach out out to the greater community. Post meeting discussion had the idea of reaching out to almost collapse aware groups (Environmental groups) and see what strategies are effective to make them collapse aware and work our way down to the lay person. gathering feedback along the way.
• A great analogy was given. (pennies in a container with a glass bottom). Analogies are the most effective way to provide complex topics in bite sized forms.
• The group was asked to define collapse to them. definitions given: "can get needs met by current means" "A slow and long process of weakening systems that eventually all let go on the suspension of global society" "losing control"
• An educational collapse point was brought up. "Its important to remember what was and why it didn't work. thats how we can grow out of this"

Feel Free to comment on any thoughts you have

In this segment of On The Media, Oreskes explains how America's industrial elites convinced Americans that the personal pursuit of wealth is a fundamental human right, that government could only interfere with those rights, and that regulation of industry was therefor bad. Thus the gas-guzzling automobile and a house in the suburb, became symbols of freedom.

In the next segment, Meiville helps us understand the Communist Manifesto in our times.

From the Website:

For decades the so-called "free market" has been seen as a fundamental part of American society, often lauded in debates about the success of capitalism. But with wealth inequality in the U.S. at an all-time high, debates about capitalism have ramped up. This week, Brooke sits down with Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University and the co-author with Erik M. Conway of “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market,” to trace the evolution of what Oreskes calls "free-market fundamentalism" back to a century-old public relations campaign that still impacts American politics.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/history-free-market-fundamentalism-on-the-media

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He began as a pro-union democrat, and emerged as an anti-union republican

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The Communist Manifesto was first penned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, a year simmering with revolutionary possibility in Europe. In the years since, the text has served as a refuge, and an inspiration, for those betrayed by the free market. It has ebbed in and out of popularity, its sales rising by 700 percent in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and may be, according to some accounts, the second best-selling book in the world after the Bible. It’s a phantom, always lingering, not quite out of sight. China Miéville writes speculative fiction, but his latest book, “A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto," traces the subversive text's place in the world throughout history. This week, he chats with Brooke about why the text refuses to fade from our consciousness, and how best to read it at this moment in time.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/communist-manifesto-through-ages-on-the-media

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Capitalism is not so inevitable, The examples of Communism aren't examples, and we have choices.

Just wanted to thank everyone from the meeting tonight. I'm excited to see what this local community can become, and seeing what part I may be able to play in that. Looking forward to developing ideas and understanding and finding ways of channeling community and understanding of collapse into positive action.

I listened today to her interview with Nate Hagens. I was stunned. If you followed the link with Mark Mills, below, you got the details of the minerals shortage. Lazard shows how minerals explains Putin's war in Ukraine, China's belt and road, the US blowing up Nordstrom 2 and US imperialism (long term effort to marginalize Russia), and how resource wars will devastate our efforts to turn back global heating. Lazard tells us that production of an EV car requires 500% of the minerals that are needed to produce a fossil carbon fueled car, and to operate a "renewable energy" infrastructure requires 700% of the minerals that it takes to operate our current system. This what is meant by "If we de-carbonize, we re-materialize". Building out renewable energy, she tells us, will kill the planet while we try to save it from fossil carbon. And the leading powers, (US, Russia, China, and Europe) have started fighting over them already. This isn't a no-win choice, but winning means being happy with simpler, much lower energy technology. But tell that to the investors down on the street by the wall, and the politicians who guide the actual international agenda.

Then I listened to Lazard's Ted Talk. Maybe the most important Ted Talk this year. In addition to the points she made in Nate's podcast, she lays out a plan to save life on Earth. Spoiler: she's not super optimistic.

First, science. Science can tell us exactly where it is safe to mine and where it isn't, from an ecological perspective. Where it is not safe to mine, we need to act as though these minerals did not exist and establish protected areas under which no mining licensing can take place. Where mining does take place, we can integrate socioeconomic and ecological regeneration within business models.

Second, a global public good regime. If decarbonization is a matter of human survival, then the materials that we need in order to decarbonize should be managed collectively under a global public good regime. The alternative is conflict and planetary breakdown. So while we figure out exactly how to design this regime, the countries at the heart of the scramble for resources should receive adequate support, competent and coherent support to face off the joint challenges of geopolitical competition and climate disruptions on the other hand

Third, changing the way that we do business and economics. We can't just switch from one energy system to another. What we need instead is to reduce our need for energy and for materials. And that starts with massive public and private investments into circular economic models that favor recyclability and material substitution. Now, we know that this is a necessary step, but not a sufficient one. So what we also need to do is to develop ecological assessments for supply chains that account for greenhouse gas emissions, but also for water, soil, biodiversity, material and energy footprint all at once.

Fourth, innovation. All of this can only happen if we start shifting our thinking about innovation. Innovation in our times is about bringing back economic footprint within planetary boundaries. Anything else, even the coolest of new products, if it isn't aligned with that goal, it's not innovation, it's business as usual. [First,] we need to tackle fundamental issues around economic redistribution on a global scale. [Then,] we need a geopolitical de-escalation around decarbonization and regeneration. We've translated that into a concept we've called ecological diplomacy. [Because] ecological integrity is the foundation for all types of security. Which makes it the one common denominator that we can work on rebuilding collectively.

I've listened to both once now, and I'm sure I'll listen again tomorrow to get details I missed the first time. [you just got some.]

The chances that Industrial civilization will persist are not high. Let's say abysmal. But the investor class doesn't want to hear that. So they listen attentively to a gut-wrenching take-down of the minerals market ability to provide materials to the transition, learning that the cost of minerals will charge up and be a great commodities bet. I'm so relieved. What will they spend their money on when there is nothing to buy? Well, the wires in the house will buy you two years of grain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOEGKDVvsg&ab_channel=SKAGENFondene

https://preview.redd.it/bbrk4zedvhia1.png?width=657&format=png&auto=webp&s=f6bea5eaa417e65f08acd0ce4864e2e07613513f

In the Global North, we often view the energy transition through the lens of whether it is biophysically or financially possible - what we often don’t think about are the effects this transition - successful or not - will have on the stability of the environment and peace in the Global South. To delve more into this topic, I am joined today by environmental peacemaker and mediator Olivia Lazard to unpack the relationship between mineral deposits, conflict-vulnerable zones, and high biodiversity areas that together create additional risks for geopolitical and climate stability. 

Read the full article, and listen to Olivia Lazard.

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Global reserves of minerals required for green energy technologies overlaid with fragility and corruption measures. Source: Fund for Peace, 2018; Transparency International, 2017; U.S. Geological Survey, 2018.

Since we have all heard the parable of the tree falling in the forest, we think we have learned its lesson & we can move on. But wait, have we? I posed this question once, and got the severe look of ridicule. “What kind of stupid question is that? Of course it does.”

I wanted to show how smart I was, but there was no opening here (probably said conversant was tired of “smart guys”). No one in present company wanted to hear about the phenomenology of vibrating air molecules or the conversion of energy transmitted via waves into a perception of sound in the brain. The answer, in present company, was singular, obvious and lacking any significance, except in its manner of distinguishing me as an idiot.

As a young human, with a curious but untrained mind, I heard over and over people say, “I am right, my religion is right, theirs is wrong.”. To this human, that led naturally to the question “How can all of these different points of view be correct, when they each claim the other is wrong?” And by extension, “Under what circumstances, in what model of the universe, is this diversity logical and coherent?”

To find this explanation is the goal of science and philosophy, but not of politics, and scientists and philosophers are easily drawn into the struggles for power of their times. Hence, it is the rare science (quantum mechanics? Astrophysics?) whose predictions do not have political implications, and whose politics are more about personal prestige than about whose political ideology will prevail.

An example of this contestation is the argument of Statistical Thermodynamics that if you could reverse the motions of all particles and photons, you could reconstruct the pre-entropic environment, and thus show the universe is deterministic. For both empirical and theoretical reasons this logic is absurd and fatuous, but so what? It serves the interest of those who make the claim, and without accountability to anyone who might know better, they get to repeat the claim.

Similarly, even while the oil majors understood that atmospheric heating due to CO2 emissions was a real thing, and predicted accurately how much heating would occur, the effort they made was to hide the science they had performed, and to systematically cast doubt on the independent science that was showing this effect. They even went so far as to use the successful campaign to stop Chloro-flouro-carbons as a guide for how to defeat an anti-oil campaign. (Luisa Neubauer, Jan 31 2023, Ted Talk, “The fairy tales of the Fossil Fuel Industry”). Having money to contribute to the campaigns of politicians, having executives on the boards of universities such as Harvard, those who argue for the centrality of fossil-carbon to the economy prove yet again that power (adroit use of the maximum power principle) matters much more than validity in the construction of social reality.

Ecological Economics is candid about its engagement with values and politics, and though it pursues science, does not escape politics; its ideological nemesis, Neo-liberal economics, has no motivation to be candid. Its practitioners sit at the top of the social heap across all of the powerful institutions, and all they need is to maintain their control of the conversation, and they will remain at the top of the heap. For now.

Both claim to be “right”. Both have socially constructed realities which argue for and justify the positions each takes. But how can both be right while both others are wrong?

It depends upon what you want to do with the information. For the anti-intellectual who feels put down by smart people who argue over the details of sense-perception and brain phenomenology, there is no subtlety, and no utility in the question of whether the tree makes a noise as it falls. Such a question has no impact on whether the tree can be cut up for firewood or sold for lumber.

The Neo liberal economist is similarly disinterested. If the question is “If pollution is spilled on someone else’s land, should I care?”, to say “Yes” would be inconvenient, because to say Yes would concede a limitation on the activity of producing profit. But the question is asked by the Ecological Economist precisely because the pollution is inconvenient. So whose inconvenience takes priority? Back to “What will the answer be used for?”

For the Neo -Liberal economist, the only rhetoric or explanation that is needed is that which appeases the audience or diverts attention from their culpability in the pollution, and maintains the flow of profits. They have not asked “How are we wrong?”, or “How are our ideological foes correct?”. Even knowing the science, they make their decisions in the margin. “What makes us money today?” Hence they can be placed in the tribe that simply declares “We’re right, they’re wrong.”

For the Ecological Economist, the only rhetoric or explanation that is needed is that which correctly assesses the conditions of the bio-sphere, which weights the future as equal to the present, which describes every life as valuable, which questions itself to produce the most authentic picture of what is true. This is the tribe that can listen to a Neo-liberal economist, can demonstrate how that model is incomplete, and describe its effects. But might have difficulty getting its vision across to an un-attentive audience.

Neo-liberal logic can be explained in terms of the Maximum Power Principle, and in terms of “market share”. If you do not use the power you have to acquire and use more power, you will lose power, market share, and the capacity to do what you do. You are all-in, or all-out. This principle has guided the evolution of technology, cultural norms, and biological forms, since the beginning of time. However, this principles does not operate in isolation.

The fabric of life that is controlled by natural selection eventually will include co-evolved systems, entangled relations of production, consumption, predation and parasitism, and ultimately, memory. Each and every living thing holds an embodied “memory” of the place in which it lives, of the foods it eats and who it is predated by, and every space occupied by living things holds “memories” of the creatures that live there. The MPP – natural selection – operates in the margin to produce these systems with memories, and these memories are necessary for the system and the elements of the system (species) to reproduce themselves. These memory entangled systems then produce, then are, buffers upon which the stability of the system famously depends.

Pollution is a trace of memory. The trees in a forest and the stumps of those trees is a trace of memory. So while human technology and cultural norms have evolved according to the MPP, natural selection and the MPP must respond to the memories it has of prior action, and even as Neo-liberal economics seeks stridently to overlook that memory, seeks to avoid the expense of cleaning up, declares its “right to leave a mess”, the break down of those systems so damaged eventually will overwhelm that short term system. The form of that overwhelm may indeed be bio-spheric collapse. How extensive is that collapse depends on when the power is taken away.

So whose inconvenience takes priority might depend upon your point of view. Are you profiting from the current systems? Are you comfortable but worried about the suffering of others? Are you suffering from the system that prioritizes profit over health? The answer of whose inconvenience you care about depends upon what you intend to do with the information. We share the same physics and thermodynamics, but I intend to inconvenience pollution as much as possible.

I listened to a podcast today in which Charlie Gardner, a member of scientist rebellion, tells us "The time for civil disobedience is now."

“Scientists have been warning about the dangers of climate change for decades, but with little success at convincing society to slow the rate of greenhouse gas emissions. Why? What is wrong with the conventional academic’s theory of change, that providing information to key stakeholders will enable more effective climate policymaking?"These questions have been central to Dr Charlie Gardner’s career and development, and this conversation tracks his experiences moving from a leading Conservation Scientist in Madagascar working right on the frontier of biodiversity loss, through to being one of the leading figures in Scientist Rebellion.”

In addition to anything else that anyone wants to talk about, that's on my agenda. Comment below to share your agenda item.

If you are not yet on our list, and you would like t know where the meeting is, or get an invitation to join us by video link, please write to me at CollapseAware_Vermont@proton.me. We meet at 4PM ET.

In this podcast from the European Society for Ecological Economics, Charlie Gardner tells his story of becoming an activist scientist. His message for us: The time for civil disobedience has come. What is the pinch point we need to throw our bodies on?

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Here is an effort to re-imagine the world, to re-examine the human vision of the possible, the desirable, future. The Deep Commons

Rachel Donald's Planet Critical is one of my favorites. In this letter (The Right To Develop Food Security: What does industrialization look like when everyone is fed?) she discusses her interview with Max Ajl,, but I had just listened an interview with Fadhel Kaboub, and her thoughts seemed to connect the ideas of both wisemen. Shocking to me was the ongoing colonialism of the south by the north, as trillions of dollars of value are expatriated from the south, even as countries of the south struggle to pay loans, and international organizations celebrate when the north pledges a mere hundred billion dollars to help with development. Hmm. Listen to Fadhel to learn more about that.

Max Ajl discusses the need to allow small-hold farmers to return to the land and grow food. The food production markets in the South are distorted by the demands of the north, which explains some of the trade imbalance.

This is relevant to a Collapse Aware community because in many ways the Collapse is underway, and has been for many years, in the Global south. Many of them had, and some still have, indigenous people who cared for the forests and lands, but colonialism collapsed these societies as they conquered and extracted. Extraction remains one of the few sources of income for these countries, so now their ecosystems are collapsed or collapsing, also.

Biospheric Collapse, as it is happening and we are anticipating it, is a result of the colonialist/industrialist/financialist drive for profit and infinite growth. We are all complicit in the destruction of ecosystems by supporting a consumerist economy. Collapse aware folks, who strive to get off the grid, who strive to grow their own food, who strive to connect with their neighbors and engage in labor sharing and mutual aid, help to undermine the consumerist economy, and thus act in solidarity with the people of the south.