Global Ecological Crisis
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Reading The Australian newspaper is normally a very distressing thing for me – the underweight ballerinas/models, the overweight businessmen/politicians, a Cartesian smorgasbord for privatised relations of avoidance – so I generally leave it alone. However I've been privy to free copies over coffee these past few mornings and so was again inclined to dip in. The more fool I.
This is the letter to the editor I wrote out of G20-despair.
Michael Stutchbury's anthropogenic economics, as displayed in 'Earning seat at the table' (Opinion, 29 September), again ignores the relationship between global growth capitalism and the rapidly unfolding Global Ecological Crisis (GEC). Stutchbury champions an economics that is a short-term abstraction – our standard of living has peaked in correlation with global oil supplies – climate change and energy descent will shortly reveal why his favoured economics is a nonsense and how it is at the root of the GEC. An economics based upon a cyclical, reciprocal system is what we need to move quickly towards. To continue to herald a broken-cycle system which will make the Earth uninhabitable is sheer idiocy.But I'm not waiting around for The Australian to publish such views, it feels like many years off, if ever. In the meantime here's where our gleaning waste as family holiday project has gotten us so far.
2 comments:
Well said Patrick!
I also like your idea about the conflict in word 'permanent' - there is a lot of great ideas in your work
Regards
Cathy
thanks cathy,
there's a lot to be said for doing-saying; spending 17 days in suburbia along the coast, collecting petro-chem waste in an era of peak oil certainly adds clarity to the mind. an intensive physical relationship with waste certainly increases the resolve to address it. to paraphrase the 'humanure handbook' guy, we are the only land mammal that pollutes our own drinking water. is it possible for us cease closing the lid on our nefarious activities as if they don't exist? or are we so disembodied now (collectively speaking) that to suggest a cyclical approach to remedy the anthropogenic is just more wishful thinking; more misguided and deluded hopefulness?
industrial civilisation has given us three anti-ecological choices: communism, capitalism and the third option fascism. while two of these ideologies attempted to control people and environments from the top down, capitalism has triumphed by controlling people from the middle out. i call this pop-fascism; a fascism we all own: factory slaves, impoverished environments, oceanic trash vortexes, anthropogenic emissions, dioxins, factory farms, wage-slavery, monocultures, pesticides, status anxiety, greed, emptiness, selfishness, perversity – these are all corollaries of a broken-cycle society.
yours in re-cyclical flux,
p
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