Imagination is the problem. Today’s activist imagine a solution. There are solutions just not the kind they are imagining. There are no solutions to a tipped planet and a civilization in decline. Extinction events feed upon themselves. Civilizations unravel in a self-organizing way. So instead of imagination lets talk about acceptance. The cold hard reality of a great turning on all level. The only beneficial level can be the spiritual asset of meaning that is found in acceptance. Meaning comes from honesty and acceptance not imagination. Human imagination is what got us to this point. Now we are carbon trapped in path dependencies and we are not going to imagine our way out of this.
Imagining Degrowth is not a solution either at the top. It is a solution if you embrace acceptance and go local. Degrowth by small groups and individuals is called for. Higher up you go in human organization the less ability there is for any constructive change in degrowth. This is just the reality of humans and their condition of being unbalance at higher population and complexity levels. You can’t negotiate this issue. It is an inherent condition of planetary physics. Our greatest minds are trapped in their minds concerning this. They have all kinds of wonderful ways of being in denial. Study after study is produced with this same fatal flaw. This is why all human civilizations fail and our global one will too. The planet and the web of life manage species in this way and we globals are no different.
Where imagination come in then is once there is acceptance. An acceptance awakened individual and or small groups can imagine solutions at the local level. Here the awakening becomes both degrowth and growth. The degrowth is declining in place into localism. It is embracing intermitency, seasonality, and low carbon capture. It is about low tech or no tech mixed and fused with those great products and knowledge from the modern. It is a hybridization that allows constructive growth within the niches formed from destructive change. Imagination follows when an awakened individual taps into the truth and finds spiritual meaning from decline. This spiritual meaning then finds roots in proper living. In the case of the modern man this is a retreat in force at the local level utilizing all those wonderful force multipliers of the modern world. It is not what you see today with the resilience movements at the top. It is not preaching false hope to the masses. It is not you can have your cake of affluence and eat it. It is utilizing affluence as it dissipates and thereby creating a niche or refuge from the coming storm of destructive change
The only way this can be done properly is at the grassroots level and even more restrictive is only a few have the right stuff. This is why those who do possess the right stuff are so important. They are the seeds of regrowth. If humans don’t go extinct then they will be the new humans. The global is wrapped up in a great systematic unwinding forced on it by three forces. The planet is tipped into abrupt change with climate. Vital systems like the hydrologic, nutrient, and carbon cycles are now breaching stable states. This is planetary phase change. The web of life is in a succession with extinction, ecosystem decline and localized failure. Human civilization is now turning from growth to decline with the systematic chaos of abandonment, dysfunction, and the irrational. The place this can be mitigated and adapted to is the small scale. An analogy is the little mammal and the dinosaur.
Resilience and sustainability is really only at the grassroots level of individual and small group. This is not to say these larger scale movements are not great for us all just don’t expect solutions here. These seeds of change need these top-level movements for knowledge and good products. The awakened individual and small group should realize the futility of the various movements that seek a global impact for the trap they are in. Focus your energy at what is right in front of you locally. Here is where you will achieve something. These higher-level efforts are doomed to failure because of the nature of the Tower of Babel of competitive cooperation of globalism.
This is planetary determinism. It is systematic and cannot be negotiated. That said many good ideas are hatched at the highest levels just not real solutions. Those lower down can utilize great stuff from above. At the bottom individuals and groups can use the status quo to leave it. At the top they are trapped in the status quo. The status quo cannot be adapted because the planet and the web of life are on a gradient of destructive change.
Resilience lacks radicality. Let’s cultivate our imagination seriously
REAL Green Adaptation 