REAL Green is for degrowth. REAL Green believes in limits both planetary limits and personal limits. What REAL Green says on the subject is society can not and will not limit itself. This is because of competitive and cooperative globalism in a carbon trap with path dependencies. What this means is we are systematically determined and limited to what we are doing now. If there are any efforts at degrowth and respect for limits it will be around the edges. To change this determined condition is to collapse it. This is the position global society is in but nature has a different scenario. The planetary system is about planetary cycles of the carbon, nutrient, and hydrologic cycles that behave in a way that seeks balance. This means human forcing of the planetary cycles will cause imbalances that self-correct. We are now in a self-correction event. Science tells us this and what it means is an end of business as usual at an unknow point in the future. No amount of FAKE Green techno optimism or Brown DENIALISM will change that. It is determined there will be consequences for the extreme human actions of the Anthropocene. It is science and it is happening.
So, what REAL Green says is decline now and bet the rush. Withdraw to a local that offers relative resilience and sustainability. If you can and if you can’t withdraw in your mind. What this means is an ascetic “characterized by or suggesting the practice of severe self-discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons.” Insert planetary reasons instead of religious and adapt it further with relative effort. This can be a religious experience and or an add on to your higher power purpose. This means Spartan living “showing the indifference to comfort or luxury traditionally associated with ancient Sparta” this is again REAL Green adapted. This means stoic living “a person who can endure pain or hardship without showing their feelings or complaining” again REAL Green adapted.
This adaption is relative to your local and part of your local is your significant others. A local is physical and the abstract of relationships and intelligence. What this means is you have done the Kubler Roth and like Arthur Schopenhauer observed as you do “all truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self-evident.” What this means is the decline of the collapse process has a scientific expression. It is self-evident in human history and planetary ecology. A REAL Green embraces this truth and emulates it with personal lifestyle. A REAL Green lives succession. To live succession means to embrace abandonment, dysfunction, and the irrational of the scientific force of chaos. The act of embracing decline with its destructive effects allows a REAL Green to create constructive forces of change that yield and adapt to the destructive planetary changes and human socioeconomic decline. A REAL Green knows he can’t leave the status quo so he leverages it to leave it as much as he can in relation to what is more resilient and sustainable.
REAL Green is then is a state of mind and action that is a hybrid. You triage out the worst and incorporate the best into an adapted lifestyle. To know what dead wood to clear and what seeds to plant is an individual and local effort constantly being pursued. It revolves around the old ways and the best of the new ways particular to your local but also borrowing from best practices of other locals. The reason this effort has to be constant is entropy never rests. Your local and your life system will be under constant threat. You embrace this as away of life adapting with a lower footprint but higher meaning. This takes you to an ascending level of activity.
A REAL Green is first awakened to the truth of the paradigm of decline. REAL Green then embraces action and goes forth into a collapsing world to build a monastery. The monastery might be very small or larger like a community of enlightened individuals. The monastery is the place where the status quo is adapted in a hybrid life of living in it to survive but leaving it to plant the seeds of a new life that is on the horizon. This may not be your life. It may be for others. REAL Green is other orientated and planetary which means you live a life of making and giving in respect for the planet and your neighbor. You do this relatively and local. The bigger world is crashing down around us. You study this and follow trends not because you think you can change it but because you want to get out ahead of the gradient of the collapse process with proactive efforts that will have staying power. You may only buy yourself a little time in a collapse but REAL Green is about the journey not the destination. We are all dead in the end even the pyramids will be washed away someday. REAL Green is about life now in vitality in a painful world of decline.
“Defending Degrowth is not Malthusian”
https://tinyurl.com/rxf4vub resilience
“In my book I show how such romantic (and related socialist, feminist and anarchist) ideas articulate a notion of limits as a source of freedom and abundance. Likewise, those of us who defend degrowth today do not call for limits because the world is running out of stuff. We are not worried that growth might come to an end – we want to end growth and stop its catastrophic and meaningless path, despoiling the abundance of this planet that we can enjoy in common. To put it differently: environmentalists like us are not warning of limits. We want limits. Limits in order to stop ecological and social destruction. Limits to stop in its tracks a capitalist system that knows no limits and is exploitative and ugly. Limits to leave space for others, human and non-human. Limits bring freedom. A pianist can make infinite music with a limited keyboard. Give the pianist an infinite keyboard, and she or he would paralyze. Limitless choice is debilitating. Capital’s limitless and senseless pursuit of more is not freedom – it is slavery. The call for ‘self-limitation’ is different from (neo)Malthusian views of limits as a natural property of the world. The atmosphere is not a limited ‘sink’ (what a terrible way to think of the sky) – it is we who should limit emissions so as not to screw the climate. The limit is on us, not the sky. There are no ‘natural limits’ that force us to do this or that. There is an ethical and political imperative not to: not to do everything that can be done, not to despoil the beauty we have inherited. Self-limitation the way I see it is not about constraining, but about defining collectively as societies our limits. Collective self-limitation is the essence of democracy. This is why capitalism has always had little tolerance for real democracy.”
REAL Green Adaptation 