thanks Alex, I'm working with the Flemish Greens, and have potentially big news after the 22nd <g> Michel On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 12:48 PM Alex Foti <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear friends,
dystopia is near but can still be averted. we shouldn't dive in to despair when movements like Greta's FFF and London's XR and huge surge of greens in Germany and elsewhere point to the fact that the people are finally ready to ditch fossil capitalism. i've recently lost (very suddenly) my beloved dad. so my outlook to life is dark. still he'd have wanted me to fight on even in the face of crushing odds. since last summer i went back to climate activism and was surprised to discover that many of my age (GenX) and millennials i know had done the same, in milano and elsewhere. green is the new red. p2p postcapitalists should join green parties, methinks.
On Sun, Jun 9, 2019 at 5:59 PM Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote:
thanks for reading Slater's loss of faith apocalyptic warning letter below,
Michel
---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Mathijs de Bruin <[email protected]> Date: Sun, Jun 9, 2019 at 12:04 PM Subject: Climate crisis To:
Dear friends,
Not much of an update of my part. Tears are in my eyes as I’ve read Matthew Slater’s post (forwarded below). Knowing him as one of the strongest ‘possibilitists’/optimists who has been working on realistic options for a livable future.
I don’t know what to make of this, how to interpret this, how to deal with this. I do know, that his words are not lightly spoken. I do think we should worry. I feel that our solution(s) are not in maintaining wellbeing, as much as in sticking together. I want to hold your hands as the tsunami is coming, feel your embrace. See what is the best we can do, as *our* world is failing.
To me, in this context, even knowing (and: doing!) what should be done. To choose survival, together, is worthwhile challenge. Even though the fruits of our labour might not be the utopic reality we long and strive for. It might be a different one: parting with grace, embracing what is to come, overcoming despair and: building on what is (or might be) left.
“Alles van waarde is weerloos.” — Lucebert
With love, Mathijs
*Van: *"Matslats - Community currency engineer" <[email protected]> *Onderwerp: **matslats.net <http://matslats.net>: Climate crisis* *Datum: *9 juni 2019 om 10:27:07 WEST *Aan: *[email protected]
<https://cdn.blog.ucsusa.org/wp-content/uploads/polar-vortex-2019-Jan-29.jpg>
I suspected for a long time that our civilisation wasn't viable. When the banks crashed in 2008 I paid attention to a lot of apocalyptic reporting that said we came *this* close to economic Armageddon - whatever that meant. As I better understood how capitalism is a stupid dogma preached increasingly only by self-serving, vain sociopaths <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/give-and-take/201310/does-studying-economics-breed-greed>, how it requires exponential consumption of resources <http://www.missingtheforest.com/capitalisms-problem-exponential-growth-in-a-finite-system>, and how it has failed to respond to increasingly shrill science-based warnings, I came to expect an ugly financial and/or climate collapse as inevitable in my lifetime.
I was alarmed in early April 2018 when the polar vortex broke <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/27/north-pole-temperatures-soar-past-freezing-beast-east-blasts/> and Europe froze, but Jem Bendell's paper, Deep Adaptation: A map for navigating the climate tragedy <http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf> didn't alarm me too much. His favoured theory was a multi-breadbasket failure (MBBF) within 5-10 years; the melting of sea ice at the north pole would disrupt the weather so much that that grain harvests in Russia, USA and Canada would all fail, and that this would probably lead to societal collapse. Fair enough, I said.
Jem's instincts can be uncanny. Last week I heard the news that the polar vortex has shifted over from the less cold north polar ocean to greenland, where more ice remains, and this has meant near incessant rain for grain farmers in USA. By the end of the planting season, only 60% of the fields had been planted, and much of what was planted had drowned. This plus drought in Australia <https://www.world-grain.com/articles/11664-australian-wheat-output-falls-to-11-year-low> and a long Russian winter <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-25/russia-s-wheat-crop-under-threat-from-miserable-start-to-spring> means that we are facing MBBF this year. Suddenly I'm not so sanguine. My last ten years work on complementary currencies has been an expression of optimism I didn't feel, that it was possible for people to self organise and run society differently. I felt even if there was the smallest chance of it being meaningful, in the face of such suffering, working to change the system was meaningful. Now without time to change the system, its hard to find purpose. We've been sunning ourselves on the beach until the tide went out waaaay to far, and now we see the froth of the tsunami on the horizon. Its too late to install the early warning system, too late to reinforce our houses, now we've only got time to run and to hope. Its time for me to admit that the system I was working to change for the better will be destroyed and all my work will be dashed on the rocks. Its too late to build a decentralised energy grid; too late to redesign finance; too late to build a better food system, too late to restore our national manufacturing base; too late to restore our soils, agriculture; too late for carbon capture technologies too late to dismantle the fossil fuel leviathan; too late for every hope I clung to; from last week to this, I don't know who I am any more.
Climate science is far from exact, but when it starts playing out we'd be foolish to say it was wrong. But there's a leap from "crops will fail" to "society will collapse" which is another field entirely. A sensible society could still take steps (that's what Deep Adaptation is about) not so much to reduce carbon emissions but to ensure that resources are shared. But our society is very far from sensible, or even aware of what is coming. A real but manageable hunger crisis, perhaps comparable to the special period in Cuba <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs6xoKmnYq8>, will be compounded by shock, blame, #ClimateGrief <https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/gy48d4/environmental-grief-climate-change-anxiety>, and opportunist elites profiting from pain.
So this winter the global grain reserves will be eaten and as in 2011, the poorer countries will probably experience political unrest fueled by high food prices. Since the north pole is past its tipping point, next year will almost certainly be worse than this, so about 18 months from now, a LOT of people will be freaking out. More than ever before, the food we eat will be taken directly out of the mouths of the starving.
Some people are predicting human extinction <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqIt93dDG1M>, but that seems a rather abstract loss to me. My chest is heavy and my gaze constantly drifts because I'm grieving the failure of our wondrous civilisation, contemplating the expansion of needless suffering, and turning to face a difficult future.
----------------------
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