The View from my Bicycle [COLUMN]

The Transition Will Be Wrenching

It's been an interesting weekend. In a short space of time my girlfriend has gotten a job, lost her job, crashed her car, and I've gotten my car back with a R10 500 bill to pay on it. My thoughts though have been on something else altogether though. I hope you'll take time out and share these ideas and impressions with me. First, a primer from Theoildrum.com:

Successful adaptation to issues surrounding resource depletion will require (at least)
1) the ability to think about the future,
2) the recognition that if nothing is done the future will be worse off than the present and 3)the ability to act now, while time and resources are still available to act.
Many reading this site qualify for at least 2 of the above. My own sharing of discoveries, analysis and opinions about Peak Oil with friends, family and acquaintances over the past 5 years, has met with a wide disparity of reactions. There is a significant group of people that fall into the category of 'thanks, but I don't want to know anymore about this topic'. They don't often use those exact words, but might reply to an email about Cantarell decline rates with a picture of their son at baseball practice

If we do nothing the world - Nature - will come up with something. A solution to the problem of people. If we do something, we still have a choice in the matter.

Let me explain using a specific and current example. If we somehow beat this swine flu epidemic that is spreading, suppose we engineer a miracle gene and this protects us, and no one dies (or the threat is for all intents and purposes contained) that means the original problem - a world with 7 billion people - is undiminished. So we may have been very clever but the original threat has only worsened. It won't take nature long to come up with another killer scheme to cull us to a more manageable size. If one simply studies microbial behaviour we can see that clearly virusses are on the rampage.

People seem to think we are above Nature, and to think otherwise demeans us. Here's an interesting analogy. Our body is comprised of a symphony of organisms without which we wouldn't be able to survive. I'm talking about the billions of bacteria that inhabit our stomachs, and help us to break down ordinary food and turn it into blood. Even our own bodies work in synergy with nature. Our living tissue needs sunshine and air and water to function. All of this comes from nature, and functions well when these substances are clean and abundant.

Over the weekend I watched some amazing documentaries all with one theme in common. Nature. One of them, di Caprio's THE 11TH HOUR, was full of interesting thoughts on the environment. I recalled as I watched it that some climate pornographers [also known as journalists who don't know what they're talking about] reviewed 11TH HOUR and dismissively sniffed: "Nothing new, just rehashing what we already know about Climate Change, a more lively version of An Inconvenient Truth. It's probably not even real anyway folks." That's a great example right there of just how fucked up the average person is, how uninformed we are. Now what we do is we compare one urgent missive to another, and instead of agreeing that the message is vital and meaningful, we arrogantly declare: "THAT ONE WAS BETTER. OH I'VE HEARD THIS ALL BEFORE. AND THIS IS NOTHING NEW. IT'S ALL HYPE ANYWAY." Never mind that the people interviewed in these things are some of the most intelligent people - scientists and other experts - in the world.

WE'VE HEARD IT ALL BEFORE

The average person is able to identify around 1000 corporate logos. You may think that's an excessive figure until you go into your average convenience store and you see 10 different chocolates, 10 different chewing gums, 20 different cigarette brands, 30 different beer brands, 40 different wine brands, and then everything from headache powder to pens, lighters, toothpaste, clothes and petrol branded. I challenge any person to tell me the names of 10 species of plant outside their window. 10 plants that you walk by each and every day.

The reason of course is that the subsystem called Economics is based on growth, and has become such a monstrous system, is threatens to overload the whole system. How did this happen? Corporations. Multinationals. They have one singular motive. Profits. Make money. Take resources, carve them up, chop them up and sell them. People have rights. Resources don't. They belong to people. And there's your problem.

One scientist in 11TH HOUR said that nature provides a lot of services to us for free. Soil rehabilitation, climate control (forests), air conditioning and cleaning, toxic control (mushrooms suck poisonous metals out of the soil, as do various algaes). The world economy is worth around $18 trillion (based on 3 years ago). If we attempted to replace the mechanisms in nature with our own, it would cost $35 trillion. And yet we continue to operate as though our economics makes sense. And when these systems are criticised we say: WE'VE HEARD ALL THAT BEFORE.

Meanwhile what we've lost is a feeling of beauty in the world. We make up for this by attempting to possess the world. We numb our senses from morning to night, and we don't know why. Our happiness is diminishing by the day. We have less time for each other and ourselves. A thing is really a thief of time, because we work and work and when we're not working we're shopping, and all we have to show for all this is pollution and stuff in our homes. Each thing can be represented by hundreds of hours working in the office, time away from home, away from family. And of course you never get enough of what you don't really want. And we don't know what we want.

We are the species at the top of the food chain. Every naturalist or biologist knows that the species at the top is the most vulnerable. Any disturbance in the lower order affects everything else. And by the time it gets to the top, those changes can be wrenching. And occur suddenly.
Top predators like Cheetahs, polar bears, some species of shark, birds of prey, all face the same wrenching change because something is happening to the ground, to the waters and to the atmosphere that is degrading the quality of life for the ordinary creatures that live there. What is it? Pollution. On a planet-wide scale.

And all of this degradation happened thanks to a system we call Consumer Democracy. It's based on giving people what they want. The problem is people want what isn't good for them. In terms of food we like to eat food that tastes good. So we do. The result is heart disease and cancers are at the highest rates in our species in the history of our species. Your chance of getting heart disease is 50%, and cancer is around 25%. All because we can't control what we put into our bodies. How can an intelligent species lose its way like this?

$500 billion is spent on advertising each year. We're told what to eat, what to wear, where to buy it, where and how to live and if we can't afford it that doesn't matter. Because what matters to us is convenience, and that's all that matters. The media is the instrument by which all the hogwash and bullshit that goes into our hearts and minds is broadcast. We hear a certain amount from family and friends, but now our primary provider of information is the media. We end up living in our own homes, driving cars and surrounding ourselves with things because that's what the media programs us to do. Media provides us with our knowledge, not nature.

Even so, Deepak Chopra has said that people are doing the best they can given their level of awareness. Well, we need to raise this awareness. The Media is the Great Sabotager of this process. Because the Media are owned by corporations, and advertising is a major source of revenue for them. So it is no surprise that the 'News' is very low grade knowledge. And it's no wonder that when people come across cogent information (on blogs) or otherwise not in some branded publication or released by Warner Brothers they sniff at it, thinking it must be inferior.
It's not.
We need to begin a cultural transformation from well-having to well-being.

This process begins by thinking for yourself. Thinking critically. Reading books. Newspapers have some baseline information, but very little of it is meaningful. It's useful for one thing - background. Knowing what the contemporary corporate-endorsed view is.

Personally, my suggestion to addressing this large, overwhelming crisis and malaise is quite simple. Lightness. Get yourself on a regimen of exercise and healthy eating. If you begin to lose weight it's working. If it's not, you're either not serious or disciplined enough, or what you're doing is not working, or both. When we begin to care about what we put into our bodies, and see how difficult this process is, and the sort of discipline it takes to resist the ordinary messages we get thrown at us to EAT THIS HAMBURGER and DRINK THAT COLA WITH ZERO SUGAR and ENJOY VITAMIN ENRICHED MARGARINE you realise that it's not conspiracy theory, corporations aren't out there to hypnotise us - they're just there to make money. They don't have our interests at heart, just interest on interest.

When you care enough about your own health and see the results of lowering your meat intake and drinking more water and eating more fruits and vegetables, these results tend to speak louder than an advertising jingle or a good slogan. You tend to want to enhance these results even more. Eventually you become lighter, healthier and more attractive. People will want to hear a catchphrase, a simple slogan for how you transformed yourself in what was a subtle, a difficult, but a fairly straightforward process. To get light and stay light you will need discipline. That will require a change in your thinking about yourself and the world. Respect yourself, respect the world. Realise and take your part in it. Because you already are.