The Way We Were

At the risk of being accused of "old-fartism," I offer the following which a Facebook friend posted. While I don't agree with the implicit and explicit denigration of the young in the post, it does serve as a reminder of certain advantages Western lifestyles of yore possessed.

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the much older lady that she should bring her own grocery bags, because plastic bags are not good for the environment. The woman apologized to the young girl and explained, "We didn't have this 'green thing' back in my earlier days."

The young clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."

The older lady said that she was right -- our generation didn't have the "green thing" in its day. The older lady went on to explain:
Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the "green thing" back in our day.

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags that we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But, too bad we didn't do the "green thing" back then.

We walked up stairs because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn't have the "green thing" in our day.

Back then we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts. Wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.

But that young lady is right; we didn't have the "green thing" back in our day.

Back then we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she's right; we didn't have the "green thing" back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blade in a r azor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn't have the "green thing" back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service in the family's $45,000 SUV or van, which cost what a whole house did before the"green thing." We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the "green thing" back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart ass young person.

In Pursuit Of Answers

Yesterday's post featured the thoughts of my sister-in-law, Ruth, on how to restore humility and a sense of proportion. This morning, she alerted me to the following, a fitting complement to that post.



If you liked the above, this one is even better:

Restoring Humility And Proportion

One of my main nightly rituals is to watch one hour of television news. The first half-hour is devoted to both a local and a regional station, while during the second half-hour I generally watch NBC Nightly News, sometimes switching back and forth between it and Global National. Such a practice usually provides me with an overview of local, national, and international events, while recognizing the limitations that such coverage provides both in depth and selection of stories.

Sometimes during this ritual, I find myself growing philosophical as I bear witness to events that often have a common subtext: the fragility and brevity of life. From the extermination of men, women and children in Syria to the loss of innocent lives in natural disasters and human-caused mayhem, the fact that our lives could end at any time through no fault of our own is never lost on me.

That got me wondering about our species' loss of humility and sense of proportion. We spend so much time getting and spending, to borrow from the poetry of William Wordsworth, that we have lost touch with both ourselves and the world around us. Should you doubt this, just look at the state of the world from an environmental, economic or sociological perspective. If you lack the time, check out one of The Mound's latest posts.

What haunts me is our collective refusal to live with a little dignity, a little restraint and a little gratitude for the very fact of our lives, precious and precarious as they ultimately are. This led me, on a bit of a whim, to post the following on my Facebook account:

A question: How do we, as a species, recover a measure of humility and a realistic sense of proportion?

The most thoughtful response came from my sister-in-law, Ruth, whose meditation follows:

The only place I can begin is with myself. And I think that's where everyone needs to begin. We can be fully present by putting down the "devices" and, for me, getting out into nature where we reconnect with that sense of grandeur and awe. It might be something different for someone else...but whatever gets them into that place where they can slow down and be humbled and grateful. We can meditate to turn off the inner chatter that can make us so unhappy which in turn can help us turn off the messages that buying more stuff will make us happy.

I'm studying to be a spiritual director to help others get to that place where they are in touch with the inner voice of God and their soul. I know it doesn't seem like much...but if even 10% of the population did those few things...in addition to reducing, reusing and recycling, buying organic, supporting local...I think we could begin to regain that sense of our place in the world.

Keep the faith..never give up. But that's in my humble opinion anyway...

Should anyone else like to address this question, I welcome your comments, as always.

Attention, Shoppers: Don't Let The Terrorists Win!

An important message to all Canadians from Stephen Harper:

"I've Gone To The Dark Side": A Guest Post From The Mound Of Sound

I received this essay from Mound yesterday. He asked me to read it carefully before deciding whether to post it, given its dark, apocalyptic overtones. I acquiesced in the Mound's request and concluded there was no way I would not put it on my blog, dealing as it does with issues and truths that, as a species, we have far too long been willfully blind to. My philosophy has always been, 'Better a bitter truth than a sweet lie.'

So, just as Neo does in The Matrix, prepare to swallow a pill that will point you to the harsh realities of our existences:

I have fallen in league with The Dark Mountain.

If you read the final post on The Disaffected Lib you'll understand how effortless it was for me to convert. The Dark Mountain is a place for disaffected artists, writers and thinkers "who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself."

Here (in italics) are excerpts from the Dark Mountain manifesto you may find helpful:

‘Few men realise,’ wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, ‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’ Conrad’s writings exposed the civilisation exported by European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion,’ but their confidence could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly.

Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad’s worldview, suggesting that the novelist ‘thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.’ What both Russell and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.

Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.


Over the six plus years I maintained The Disaffected Lib I explored at some length this business of climate change and the impacts it would inflict on our world. That process led to a host of related realizations, an awareness that anthropogenic global warming, enormously dangerous as it may be, is but one of a matrix of challenges that must all be fixed if we're to resolve any of them.

I gradually became aware of the incredible fragility of this global civilization we have crafted and that its assumed prowess is illusory. As Joseph Conrad and Bertrand Russell warned, our global civilization indeed rests on a foundation of beliefs that, for several decades, have become detached from fact and reality. We have constructed our civilization on myths and probably lethal fantasy.

It's one thing to accept that mankind is using renewable resources at 1.5 times the planet's replenishment rate. It's another thing altogether to realize that our civilization has become dependent on that excessive consumption and that dependency is growing faster with each passing year. We simply cannot do without ever more of something, so many things that can only destroy us.

Proof of the mortal fragility of our global civilization is made out in this addictive dependency on excessive, utterly unsustainable consumption. The evidence is palpable, tangible, even visible to the naked eye from space. From the orbiting International Space Station we see rivers that no longer flow to the sea; spreading deforestation; desertification evidenced in dust clouds that rise in China and are carried on the winds across the Pacific to North America; the contamination of coastal waters from agricultural and industrial runoffs; the tailing ponds of the Athabasca Tar Sands. Satellites record surface subsidence caused by the draining of aquifers for irrigation. At our docks we have the measure of the collapse of global fisheries around the world. Around the world, air, water and soil contamination attests to the ease with which we now overwhelm the environment's capacity to absorb and cleanse our waste. These things, jointly and severally, stand as conclusive proofs of our steadily worsening addiction to excessive, unsustainable consumption.

This is the hallmark of the fragility of our global civilization. In the span of just two centuries, a blip in the history of mankind, we have grown our population sevenfold and we're proposing to extend that to 9 or 10 times or more. At the same time as we're adding new mouths by the hundreds of millions, we're increasing their per capita consumption.

We have grown our global population to such gargantuan proportions through our amazing ability to exploit cheap, abundant, non-renewable resources, especially fossil fuels. We never stop to ponder where those fossil fuels came from. We don't realize that they are the end product of organic life laid down over hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion years or more. How could dragging that resource to be burned at the surface over just a couple of centuries possibly destroy the environment? How could it not?

Growth. Growth, growth, growth. Growth in population. Growth in consumption. Growth in production. Growth in every way imaginable. We are slavishly addicted to exponential growth and it will be the end of us for ours is a decidedly finite planet with finite, life-sustaining resources that we're racing ever faster to exhaust. We have long ago outgrown our planet, our biosphere. If you don't get that, go back three paragraphs to the one that begins "Proof of the mortal fragility...".

I cringe whenever I come across climate change activists touting renewable, alternative energy as the solution to future growth. What growth? What can they possibly mean except growth in production, growth in consumption and, presumably, even further growth in population? When we're already dependent on consuming far more resources than our planet can provide where do we find the room to grow?

Never in the history of our species has there been such wealth. Yet a lot of the wealth manifested in modern luxury and indulgence has been stolen from the generations who will follow us. We're living large and they'll have to pay for it - socially, economically, environmentally. There's an enormous and ugly price they'll have to bear from the degraded environment we're bequeathing them through our selfishness, gluttony and indifference. Even the great Khan did not pillage the future.

Taking up with Dark Mountain is not, as Monbiot, Klein and others suggest, throwing in the towel on environmentalism. It is not capitulation. Does it negate the fight to salvage the environment? Not at all, far from it. The fact remains that, while we probably can't give our grandchildren much better than a severely degraded environment, we can make it far worse than it need be by our business as usual approach.

The fight - to decarbonize our society and our economy - must go on because the alternative is too horrible to tolerate. The fight, however, must not be allowed to eclipse the greater challenge of which climate change is but a part. That greater fight may already be lost before it even began. The fight that may have slipped through our fingers was the struggle to control and direct the means by which mankind shall be restored to harmony with our environment. It was never more than a fight to mitigate the suffering and dislocation in the transition to Mankind 2.0, the species that will survive to rebuild after our civilization collapses.


It is, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight — Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis.

...Increasingly, people are restless. The engineers group themselves into competing teams, but neither side seems to know what to do, and neither seems much different from the other. Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.

...Even within the prosperous and liberal societies of the West progress has, in many ways, failed to deliver the goods. Today’s generation are demonstrably less content, and consequently less optimistic, than those that went before. They work longer hours, with less security, and less chance of leaving behind the social background into which they were born. They fear crime, social breakdown, overdevelopment, environmental collapse. They do not believe that the future will be better than the past. Individually, they are less constrained by class and convention than their parents or grandparents, but more constrained by law, surveillance, state proscription and personal debt. Their physical health is better, their mental health more fragile. Nobody knows what is coming. Nobody wants to look.


Nobody knows what is coming. Nobody wants to look, indeed. Our prime minister doesn't want to look. He certainly doesn't want anyone else looking. His salvation is that his rivals aren't interested in looking either lest they be caught surveying the obvious. It is perhaps unfair to single out our country's political leadership when it's a universal failing that brings us to the edge and over.


We are the first generations to grow up surrounded by evidence that our attempt to separate ourselves from ‘nature’ has been a grim failure, proof not of our genius but our hubris. The attempt to sever the hand from the body has endangered the ‘progress’ we hold so dear, and it has endangered much of ‘nature’ too. The resulting upheaval underlies the crisis we now face.

We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes [50%] more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace — a figure predicted to rise to 80% by mid-century. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us.

And over it all looms runaway climate change. Climate change, which threatens to render all human projects irrelevant; which presents us with detailed evidence of our lack of understanding of the world we inhabit while, at the same time, demonstrating that we are still entirely reliant upon it. Climate change, which highlights in painful colour the head-on crash between civilisation and ‘nature’; which makes plain, more effectively than any carefully constructed argument or optimistically defiant protest, how the machine’s need for permanent growth will require us to destroy ourselves in its name. Climate change, which brings home at last our ultimate powerlessness.

...Of all humanity’s delusions of difference, of its separation from and superiority to the living world which surrounds it, one distinction holds up better than most: we may well be the first species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth. This is a hypothesis we seem intent on putting to the test. We are already responsible for denuding the world of much of its richness, magnificence, beauty, colour and magic, and we show no sign of slowing down. For a very long time, we imagined that ‘nature’ was something that happened elsewhere. The damage we did to it might be regrettable, but needed to be weighed against the benefits here and now. And in the worst case scenario, there would always be some kind of Plan B. Perhaps we would make for the moon, where we could survive in lunar colonies under giant bubbles as we planned our expansion across the galaxy.

But there is no Plan B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have been living all the while. The bubble is that delusion of isolation under which we have laboured for so long. The bubble has cut us off from life on the only planet we have, or are ever likely to have. The bubble is civilisation.


Dark Mountain is a challenge of imagination. It is to imagine survival and going forward.


This is a moment to ask deep questions and to ask them urgently. All around us, shifts are under way which suggest that our whole way of living is already passing into history. It is time to look for new paths and new stories, ones that can lead us through the end of the world as we know it and out the other side. We suspect that by questioning the foundations of civilisation, the myth of human centrality, our imagined isolation, we may find the beginning of such paths.

A Guest Post From The Mound Of Sound

I have missed reading the Mound of Sound since he put his blog, The Disaffected Lib, on hiatus about five weeks ago. A man of wide-ranging interests and passions, his posts on climate change and politics never failed to catch my attention and stimulate my own reading and research.

Yesterday I received an email from Mound; while he is not interested at this point in restarting his own blog, he asked if I would be open to hosting the occasional guest post from him. I responded with both alacrity and pleasure. What follows is the first of what I hope will be a regular guest feature of my blog. Mound's essay might best be described as a unified theory of our collective, global malaise, with corresponding suggested cures.

Enjoy:

For a number of years I posed a challenge to my blog readers. I asked them to think about various woes that afflicted mankind today, among them:

...global warming, including severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity; droughts (both cyclical and persistent); floods; sea level rise including storm surge inundation, erosion and salination of coastal freshwater resources; ocean acidification; deforestation; desertification; air, soil and water contamination of all varieties; resource depletion, particularly the freshwater crisis; species extinction, especially the collapse of global fisheries; species migration and loss of biodiversity; overpopulation and population migration; pest and disease migration; and a host of entirely man-made security challenges including food insecurity; the collapse of social cohesion resulting in political instability, upheaval and civil war; politically engineered inequality; nuclear proliferation; and both superpower and regional arms races.

Then I challenged my readers to identify the common threads that ran through all of these challenges and existential threats. I asserted that these problems shared a common feature - if we were to solve any of them, we must solve them all and, to have much hope of achieving that, we had to understand how they were connected.

At first I had only the vaguest ideas of what the answers to the questions I posed might be. Yet, gradually and with a great deal of time pondering the puzzle, the common threads and the answers began to emerge. It became evident to me that our society, our global society, was created, run and maintained on dysfunctional organization. We were organized dysfunctionally - socially, politically and economically. In the course of this, to keep the party going, we had taken on the characteristics of addiction, final or late stage addiction at that. We were bloated, covered in our own filth, our organs were failing and yet we remained completely powerless to confront our underlying addiction.

There were three lethal processes underway - over-population, over-consumption, and our obsessive compulsion to pursue infinite, exponential growth. We were constantly expanding all of these processes, trying to find new ways, often gimmicks, by which we could temporarily compress them within the very finite boundaries of our planet, our one and only biosphere.

Peter was not only robbing Paul, he was raping him in the process. Anthropogenic global warming? That's a by-product of these three processes. Without cheap, abundant fossil fuels we could not have grown to 7+ billion people en route to 9-billion or more while, at the same time, steadily increasing our per capita ecological footprint. We could not have plundered the world's resources, easily pillaging even our resource reserves, until we are now dependent - to use the junkie's term "hooked" - on devouring 1.5 times Earth's replenishment rate of natural resources every year, a rate that is steadily increasing to propel us to the inevitable day of reckoning.

Like junkies, we fall victim to the powerful and their predatory brutality. Their growth restrained by the realities of a finite world, America's most privileged turned on their own, their once robust middle class, sucking the life out of them in perhaps the greatest unearned transfer of wealth in western history. To achieve this they subverted and overcame democracy, quietly supplanting that with oligarchy and rule by technocrats.

Between an ill-informed electorate, voter suppression, engineered voter apathy, legislated inequality, mass surveillance, gerrymandering, the corruption of elections by tainted money, a 'bought and paid for' Congress and a corporatist Supreme Court, it is obvious that oligarchy has now decisively routed democracy in the United States.

If you think Canada is far behind, think again. Think the Orwellian named, Fair Elections Act. Think CSIS and CSEC. Think of every rotten incident attendant upon petro-statehood. Think of the rise of corporatism and the corporate state, its path greased by today's corporate media cartel.

Above all else, think 'incrementalism'. Our prime minister's former BFF, Tom Flanagan, years ago described incrementalism as the foundation of Harper's approach to government. Radical transformations can be effected if implemented through baby steps over time, small increments that go unnoticed until they accumulate into a mass too great to be undone. This is the very tactic so instrumental in America's transformation from democracy to oligarchy. Twenty, thirty years is all it takes and the deed is done.

I perceive this subversion of democracy and the associated wholesale transfer of economic and political power to a new oligarchy, a modern feudal-corporatist aristocracy, as an entirely foreseeable, perhaps inevitable end product of over-population, over-consumption and endless, exponential growth.

This is bound to end badly. The plutocrats are themselves slavishly addicted to the conditions that underlie our three lethal processes. When growth becomes restrained, disaster capitalism beckons as a means to continue accumulating the residual wealth, however meager, of others. Water can be transformed into a commodity to be supplied to the highest, often the most desperate bidder. The food supply can likewise be commodified unnaturally by the global agri-business and the monopolizing of the best farmlands throughout the world. They're locking up especially productive swathes of farmland even in countries already plagued by chronic food insecurity such as Somalia. Not for nothing is Goldman Sachs' biggest trading desk that dealing with food futures. Vulture capitalism is drawn to global food insecurity like jackals to a rotting corpse. These people are squarely and quite wilfully at odds with humanity itself. They're gaming the market of survival of the most vulnerable and we tolerate that. What have we allowed ourselves to become?

We stand at the edge of abyss and it would be dishonest to claim with any confidence that we still have time to step back. That's not clear but we may have time to act, even if not much. The path back begins with the first step - restoration of democracy. This, for Canada, means the dissolution of the corporate media cartel through forced divestiture of closely held and clustered media outlets. To nurture an informed electorate we need far more voices in the media offering the widest range of opinion. We need to restore an information-based media to remedy the messaging-based, corporate-dominated media. We need a media that is again the watchdog of government rather than its lapdog.

Our leaders need to address the real consequences to the country and our democracy of petro-statehood. Petro-states exhibit fairly uniform behaviours and they're rarely democratic. We need to pattern ourselves more on Norway and far less on Nigeria. We also need to transition, as quickly as the rest of the world, to a decarbonized society and a decarbonized economy. That entails understanding that "because we can" is not synonymous with "because we should."

We need to rehabilitate the heart and lungs of our once healthy, robust middle class - health care and education. These are not expenses but investments and, like all prudent investments, they deliver their return not in short-term profits but in long-term dividends. We have, for too long, sacrificed the safety and security of our future generations for our short-term benefit and we have amassed a huge debt to them and the country that must be honoured. This is a small price to pay.

We must arrest and reverse the scourge of inequality already becoming established in Canada. That entails recognition that most inequality is engineered, the handiwork of legislatures. Very little of it is either market-driven or merit-based. It is the end result of tax policy, subsidies and grants, deferrals and the transfer of natural capital, resources, belonging to the public at far below market value. It is sometimes the result of corruption but more often it results from the fear of our leaders that failure to prostrate the country at the feet of the powerful will diminish us. Bollocks.

We need laws to defend our democratic process against subversion. Those who practice voter manipulation and voter suppression must be stripped of the freedom they would deny to others. Heavy fines and lengthy prison terms are required to reverse this malignancy being introduced by today's Conservatives. These are the acts of individuals wilfully intent on subverting our democracy.

Yes this is a tall order but mainly because these challenges have grown gradually over an extended period of time while we looked the other way. Malignancies are rarely discovered early. What matters is that they are here now, exposed, and we are nearing the point where we have to either find solutions, remedy these excesses, or submit to them. A 3-pack a day smoker can not restore his health by going on a gluten-free diet.

Boxing Day Shopping

It's never enough, is it?