Banff Transition

Post-Carbon Institute: “As the world economy crashes against debt and resource limits, more and more countries are responding by attempting to salvage what are actually their most expendable features—corrupt, insolvent banks and bloated militaries—while leaving the majority of their people to languish in “austerity.” The result, predictably, is a global uprising. This current set of conditions and responses will lead, sooner or later, to social as well as economic upheaval—and a collapse of the support infrastructure on which billions depend for their very survival. …

“[I]t will increasingly be up to households and communities to provide the basics for themselves while reducing their dependence upon, and vulnerability to, centralized systems of financial and governmental power. This is a strategy that will require sustained effort and one that will in many cases be discouraged and even criminalized by national authorities.The decentralization of food, finance, education, and other basic societal support systems has been advocated for decades by theorists on the far left and far right of the political spectrum.”

ClubOrlov: “A lot of people just don’t have the right character to deal with collapse. They’ll be running around trying to fix things. That’s the opposite of what they should be doing.”

Boing Boing: ” A circle of army ants, each one following the ant in front, becomes locked into a circular mill. They will continue to circle each other until they all die.”

Harper’s Magazine: “Nietzsche’s mature view is thus that community cannot exist without being gathered and preserved by a Gesamtkunstwerk. There cannot be genuine community without (in the broadest possible sense of the term) a ‘church.’ And community is important, for only if there exists a community to which we feel we are, in our own way, as we say, ‘making a contribution’ can we live meaningful, flourishing lives. As to the content of a communal religion–as to what would play the exemplary role played in Christianity by its saints and martyrs–he has no view. That content may vary widely depending on the cultural tradition of the community concerned. Nietzsche’s only stipulation is that the sacred figures in any healthy religion must be, like the Greek gods, glorifications of human potential rather than, like the Christian gods, anti-human ideals. The new religious festival will celebrate rather than condemn sexuality, will be a festival of life rather than death”

The Oil Drum: “Can Sustainable Development be sustainable? Naturally not, for merging together two antonymous concepts, it simply cannot exist. So why is this oxymoron in the order of the day? Why does it get such attention? Why are so many so willing to discuss it so passionately? Sustainable Development is one of several philosophical concepts (having as much eeriness as mythology) that emerged in the wake of a series of decades of breathtaking, unprecedented growth. Growth as in development, the physical expansion of the Human-sphere, its population and interactive processes with nature, harnessing energy and concentrated matter, deploying waste heat and dispersing matter. These mythological concepts are simply a reflex of a society intoxicated with growth in front of the first signs of physical constraints to its development.