Green Prep the world of Growth

There is a surreal divide between the macro and micro of the social narrative these days.  Increasingly at the micro level awakened individuals are embracing a decline process as their basis of meaning.  Alternatively, at the macro level the status quo continues to push a normality of growth.  The latest pandemic crisis has only been a bump in the thinking with talk of different shaped recoveries.  I tend to acknowledge both views but compartmentalized.  The compartmentalization is based upon reality.

The reality of the awakened individual is based on honest science with a common sense view of the world.  Look around and decline is everywhere.  Planetary systems are disturbed from stasis from the normal human experience of the last many centuries.  The web of life is in succession with extinctions and localized ecosystem failure.  Overall, the global ecosystem is in decline seen with oceans, rainforest, and the high arctic.

The reality found in the global narrative of civilization is mixed with acknowledgement of various declines but with an undertone of techno optimism.  There are the Green New deals for carbon issues.  There is a feeling population growth will stabilize and be accompanied with sustainable development.  There seems to be a collective survival and growth instinct that permeates any discussion.  Collpase talk is almost always moderated or dismissed.  This leaves it to awakened individuals to lead the way with strategies for mitigation and adaptation to a reality of planetary and life web declines.

REAL Green is eclectic on the subject.  It embraces decline and this is both with a quick and a process decline.  In a deeper look REAL Green sees an overall decline process with localized failures.  This is mirrored by the global ecosystem.  The awakened individual is embracing the planet for their reality.  REAL Green is eclectic because it realizes the individual, though awakened, is trapped in the Anthropocene of human growth.  This macro human narrative is one of growth and survival.  It can be no other way or the whole basis of maintaining our species fails.  Confidence is liquidity and it takes economic activity to feed people.  If the dominant narrative were one of decline and collpase economic activity would crater and the Ponzi of human civilization implode.

I say Ponzi because current human narrative is of continued growth but on a finite planet.  This is incongruous and represents a collective neurosis.  Nonetheless REAL Green embraces this collective neurosis as reality and uses it to leave it.  Growth is used to degrowth.  Growth activity is maintained for survival but focused on green activity and prepping for decline.  REAL Green calls this green prepping.  Preppers get a bad rap but green prepping is different.  It is the natural combination of sustainability and resilience with the focus on localism and degrowth.  This results in increased resilience and sustainability and equates to a lower planetary footprint.

REAL Green achieves this through behavior first.  The retreat is a retreat in force.  It acknowledged death of things and possible early mortality.  It uses this behavioral honesty to focus on a journey with a lifeboat of things and a hospice of behavior.  Palliative care for those who will be lost and example setting for those who will need guidance for the difficult journey into decline.  This poverty of things is made up by a spiritual windfall.  Meaning in the pursuit of the truth makes up for the Spartan of an ascetic life in the difficult world of low carbon capture.  Localism and low carbon living are both harder in regards to comfort and difficult to maintain in this world of hyper capitalism.  So, the collpase process becomes the lubrication for green prepping that ultimately leads the individual to a lower planetary footprint in an increased resilience and sustainability to local shocks.  The individual cannot transcend collpase but they can adapt and mitigate the process and be better prepared for the event when they come as they surely will.

Business-as-Usual Porn – or, We Need to Talk about Collapse

Business-as-Usual Porn – or, We Need to Talk about Collapse

“I think we need to talk openly and calmly about the possibility of societal or civilizational collapse arising from humanity’s present predicaments. And that’s mostly what I want to pursue in this post – not so much what the likelihood or the underlying mechanisms of collapse might be, but the idea that it would be useful if, as a society, we could talk about it.  Maybe that’s happening in one sense. The noises offstage from scientists, multilateral agencies, social critics and political activists about the possibility of collapse are getting louder1. Inevitably, so is the pushback from those arguing that this is so much overheated rhetoric, and everything’s just fine2. My sense is that there’s far greater empirical weight behind the former than the latter position, but it’s the latter one that seems to dominate public discourse. There’s precious little public and media attention to the rather big news that the way we live may soon be ending. Indeed, people who say such things are generally relegated from serious debate, and sometimes accused of peddling ‘collapse porn’ with their mawkish tales of impending doom3. It’s a curious phrase. Inasmuch as pornography presents people with something that they guiltily want to see, but in unrealistic and idealized ways that hide the reality of the relationships involved and erode their integrity, perhaps we should rather be talking about ‘business as usual porn’.”