The spirituality found in low carbon capture is very important to grasp because your personal motivation to find deeper meaning in the ecology of the planet will be tested. The low carbon capture I do in REAL Green revolves around permaculture and conservation. Permaculture, “A system of perennial agriculture emphasizing the use of renewable natural resources and the enrichment of local ecosystems.” Conservation, “Preservation or restoration from loss, damage, or neglect.” Keep in mind REAL Green can be skills based for example a master brewer or carpenter. It can be a care giver or a laborer. It must revolve around localism and the proper scale of a lower footprint. In my REAL Green my intentions are a scaled footprint that primarily comes from permaculture in localism and conservation. REAL Green adds the element of realistic and relative to localism and permaculture. Your people and place are delocalized because of globalism and techno optimism of being modern. You take permaculture and you rationalize it around what you can do within your carbon trap and path dependencies or in other words your determinism. You mean test your scale in this regard.
Not everyone can go local and permaculture. There are few that have the time, resources, and the place to do this. Those who do are vital in regards to a new human that will result from the great turning the planet and civilization are in. A REAL Green has been awakened and goes forth in transformation. In this awakening tech follows spirituality. The spirituality is acceptance of the great turning from growth to decline. This means acceptance of a collpase process. A REAL Green will be the trailblazer of a new way of inhabiting a place and a new people. The spirituality is living in a wisdom that seeks a scaled footprint that is both resilient and sustainable. The REAL is realistic and relative. This collpase process is time based and location based so systematic and geographic. REAL Green wisdom knows proper scale with people and place. This is the key. It starts from behavior and moves to the physical and the lifestyle of how we inhabit our local of people and place.
Low carbon capture is vital to this transformation. Going local in permaculture with a proper footprint scale requires low carbon capture. The basis of an organism is energy conversion to sustain itself. Humans are no different. The problem humans have is the baggage called the brain. We haul around a huge amount of baggage that asks why are we doing this and also the selfish side of the isolation of the human ego. This isolated human ego will destroy everything around it if it finds that to be its advantage. This ego is also capably of great acts of selfless activity in the name of its people and place. The REAL Green awakening goes forth in this selfless activity with the understanding of the baggage of the human ego but also recognizes the empowered ego. If you are going to go local with a properly scaled footprint then you are going to low carbon capture.
Low carbon capture is often not profitable with opportunity cost. Sometimes in fact it is a downcycle. This is the brutal truth to trying to go local and be a permaculturist. You are dealing with dispersed energy and you as a human are greatly out of scale as a modern. How can one find meaning in this distortion of living? The truth is approached through meaning. So, what REAL Green attempts to do is first offer a pathway to meaning in a realistic and relative way that is unique to your people and place. The permaculture of localism is this pathway but this must be grounded in the relative and realistic of your people and place of the status quo. Few around you will be REAL Green orientated and fewer yet will be awakened and transformed on a journey to a REAL Green spirituality. The status quo is brutal for you and your people and place. It is also life giving and vital. This is the Anthropocene so survival is within a human altered planet especially for the delocalized modern. Being green is no longer natural it has to be instituted and formulated.
The opportunity cost, “The cost of an opportunity forgone (and the loss of the benefits that could be received from that opportunity); the most valuable forgone alternative.” Much of a REAL Green low carbon capture is low value high volume. Margins are supper slim. There is not enough time, resources, and labor to achieve perfections. A REAL Green will behold perfection because he is grounded in meaning which has him on a pathway to the truth but he will also see his trap. Then there is the sobriety and the humility of the opportunity cost of living REAL Green and being a successful modern. A successful modern is highly productive in the sense of emergy. “Emergy is the amount of energy that was consumed in direct and indirect transformations to make a product or service.” The modern will want to make a profit and or have an income. Low carbon capture is high volume and low value. Often it is negative and a sink. This happens because of how difficult it is to have a return on ecological investments in a human altered world. As a REAL Green modern you will struggle with the reality of your people and place and your personal needs to be green to bridge this gap.
This gap is for example the time and expense of heating with wood from your private wood lot. This wood lot is you harvesting of dead and dying trees with wildlife and beauty as a concern but the switching of a switch to electric heat and paying the bill from the fruits of your high paying status quo job is your opportunity cost. You may have a garden that takes a lot of effort and resources of time, money, and carbon or just go to the grocery store and get a cornucopia of choices and ease of purchase. Then there is the effort of maintaining land properly in relation to a permaculture localism, wildlife benefit, and beauty. One can throw lots of fossil fuels at this effort. Hire people and sit back and give orders from a beach house in Florida. They can make it look like a golf course which is pleasing to a human’s eye but horrible for the planet how green is all that? There is renewable energy and its cost and return. My system is not paying for itself but it does offer resilience and sustainability in regards to green prepping. If a Texas size storm happens my pipes won’t freeze and my food will not rot. These examples are just a few of the trade-offs from the human baggage of the ego and the reality of a planet with limits.
A properly scaled human within a balanced planetary system in a supportive web of life ecosystem is a REAL effort. A REAL Green will have to utilize low carbon capture to get closer to this meaning but he will also have to maintain his viability in the status quo of profit and income of the Anthropocene. The Key to REAL Green is the physical follows the spiritual. Action follows behavior. This also means the recognition of the planet and the web of life’s disposition. This disposition is now a decline process. The planet has been tipped from the relative balance of the Holocene to the abrupt instability of Anthropocene. The web of life is in a 6th great extinction. To square this requires significant morality and faith base if you want to be both REAL Green and status quo successful.
This discussion may seem wordy but it is critical to see just how thin margins are of meaning with low carbon capture and what is demanded of modern life. Even more significant is there are so few who will choose this path of meaning and even those who chose it many will fail and go back to the status quo. Even a REAL Green master will see a brief window when experience, resources, and time combine to grow something beautiful and meaningful but then this too shall end. The REAL Green master will get old and lose his mental and physical faculties and his REAL Green monestary will turn to dust in an estate sale and the entropy of physical degradation. So, it is this thin veneer of meaning that can be gathered, harvested, and produced by a REAL Green master that possesses the seeds of meaning. This meaning is special meaning of planetary acquiescence. What this means is the web of life and the planet will support you in this difficult journey. The meaning you gather will not be yours but will be yours to apply to your local of people and place. Good luck and may the planet touch you!
REAL Green Adaptation 