A New Covenant With Nature At The End of Economic Growth with Richard Heinberg
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- As the availability of cheap, abundant energy and critical global resources increase in scarcity, what will this mean for Mendocino County if we keep business as usual practices? How can our communities adapt to these most significant changes ahead?
- How will these changes to critical infrastructure impact all if outside corporate business continues to regulate and control our centralized food, health and transportation services?
- How can we adapt much more self-sufficient, localized models within our local communities where we live to transition and thrive?
- How can we develop new paradigms of greater conscious awareness to include Rights of Nature so that precious natural resources and wildlife habitats can continue to exist and flourish?
Richard Heinberg, PhD, is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators. He is the author of ten books including: End of Growth (August 2011), Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (2007), Party’ Over (2003), Cloning the Buddha: The Moral Impact of Biotechnology (1999), A New Covenant With Nature: Notes on the End of Civilization and the Renewal of Culture (1996), Memories & Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age (1995)
A New Covenant With Nature
LIVING THE NEW MYTH
More important than broadcasting the story, however, is living it. We can discover its truth only by testing it in the laboratory of our behavior and perceptions. Of course, such an effort only makes sense if one already has some intuitive sense of the new myth’s truth and necessity — which, I believe, many people have. Those of us who see the need to limit population growth and to foster economic equality and democracy; who are seeking ways to honor natural cycles, energies, and balances and to nurture the feminine principle in the world and in our own consciousnesses are all already drawn to the invisible outline of this new vision of human purpose and meaning.
As the old myth crumbles, taking with it institutions, economies, and lives, perhaps we need a story to make sense of the deepening chaos and to guide us toward a more coherent and sustainable pattern of existence. But that new story will serve us well only if it draws its power from the depths of our being, where culture, nature, and spirit all converge. Is it a fact, or is it only wishful thinking? — that as the cement facade of civilization grows more impressive it also becomes more brittle. Cracks continually appear. And through those cracks we see the human vulnerability and woundedness of those who inhabit the edifice.
Deeper still, we occasionally catch a glimpse of light-aflame blazing at the core of humanity, a fire that burns at the heart of creation. This fire is the source from which new cultures and new species spring; it is the generative potential of life itself. And here lies our hope: In the heat of world destruction and world renewal, can we but learn to dwell in that flame.
The End of Growth
Introduction: The New Normal
The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling: Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.
The “growth” we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy (with more people being served and more money changing hands) and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it.
Mandatory Food and Farming Transition Necessary
“The only way to avert a food crisis resulting from oil and natural gas price hikes and supply disruptions while also reversing agriculture’s contribution to climate change is to proactively and methodically remove fossil fuels from the food system.
It must be borne in mind that the removal of fossil fuels from the food system is inevitable: maintenance of the current system is simply not
an option over the long term. Only the amount of time available for thetransition process, and the strategies for pursuing it, should be matters for debate.”
Given the degree to which the modern food system has become dependent on fossil fuels, many proposals for de-linking food and fossil fuels are likely to appear radical. However, efforts toward this end must be judged not by the degree to which they preserve the status quo, but by their likely ability to solve the fundamental challenge that will face us: the need to feed a global population of seven billion with a diminishing supply of fuels available to fertilize, plow, and irrigate fields and to harvest and transport crops.
Additionally, it should be noted that it is in farmers’ interest to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, as this builds resilience against future resource scarcity and price volatility.
See also Amid The Architecture Of Declining Capitalism: Memes, Death Genes And Real Estate Schemes