What if we could return to the heart of ourselves, heal the alienation that needs to be fed over and over again by external rewards?

I don’t think we can begin to heal the world until we no longer need to project our alienation onto it, until we begin to rediscover life and being alive as good in themselves.

In the short run, we need economic incentives to try to affect the current disastrous path we are on. But this will only perhaps buy us a little more time until we can do the work of healing the human spirit and getting ourselves back into balance with the nature that is our true home.

Thanks always, Stephen

Please consider that great wealth and the political power it purchases are derived from unbridled greed and that greediness is everywhere incentivized. Then we can see how greed rather than doing what is good comes to effectively rule the world in our time.

What if economic incentives rewarded doing right things and put at a disadvantage doing greedy things? Would that allow us to move forward along another path marked by mitigating the noticeably disasterous global ecological effects of rampant human selfishness and, thereby, to go a long way toward resolving the human-driven global challenges already visible in the offing?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGHrWPtCvg0

To order the Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, click here.

I agree completely with the last 2 paragraphs of your comment.

Global Warming (GW) deniers are not reachable or not reachable in sufficient numbers for it to warrant further investment of time. We have frittered away the time needed to “transition” smoothly to a green energy future. Some northern European countries – Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland – have made steps in the right direction. Enough? Time will tell..

The stranglehold by the media is too great to break. GW denial is now at the level of “mass hypnosis” or “collective psychosis”, a self-reinforcing, collective delusional system leading to disaster. Is that not madness?

Observe the “climategate” swindle: a good portion of the public is befuddled by the fossil fuel lobby spin. They seem unable to grasp that the PHYSICAL FACTS of global warming have not changed one iota by what Prof A says about Prof B. Yet, could anything be simpler..

For this reason, I have decided to invest my time in the Transition Towns (TT) initiative.

The following link gives access to the Transition Handbook, a 165 page manifesto, well written, of the movement:

http://resiliencecycle.ning.com/profiles/blogs/des-documents-interessants

This is the first document in the list. One thing I find admirable in the philosophy of TT is the recognition that GW and Peak Oil are linked processes which interact in complex and unpredictable ways over time and differentially between regions. They cannot be dealt with in isolation from each other (“Cartesian” or linear approach to problem solving). Instead the emphasis must be on (re-)building COMMUNITY RESILIENCE, the capacity of communities to withstand the shocks of the emerging “New Economy” (post peak oil)

In any case, I appreciate your comment. I don’t mean to imply that we can suddenly turn away from agriculture and become hunters-gatherers again. I am not a ‘deep’ ecologist in that sense. But we do need to move away from agriculture and industrialization as we have known it, modes of production that involve using and storing more than we need, which has fueled the engine of human population growth now choking the planet – esp. since that population is inheriting the same expectations of extraction and consumption.

We need to begin the process of bringing the industrial (including agriculture) way of life down as gently as we can, while tending to matters of justice and equity while we do so.

I guess a little voice tells me that we will not do this by deliberation or conscious choice, because the stakes of wealth and power and expectations are now too great, and those dynamisms are enforced by ‘weapons of mass destruction.’

So we will learn the hard way. In the meantime, we need to support resilient communities that begin to create amidst the wreckage another way of life. And we need to hold together as much as we can the eco-communities that the Earth needs in order to regenerate itself in some new balance of life.

Margaret