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Sunday, January 11, 2009 at 7:46pm.
Alexis Zeigler, author of Culture Change, Real Solutions for Peak Oil and Global Warming
Website
Description
Climate change and other ecological limits are increasingly clear as we approach the limits of growth on a finite Earth. exhaustibility of fossil fuel has been apparent for decades.
Why have we not responded? Why is our culture so blind to ecological limits? Humans as individuals are capable of intelligent planning, but America blunders along as if there were no tomorrow. Why is our culture so blind to its own future? Many large societies seem to share the same lack of vision. Why is this, and what can be done about it?
What if the solutions to our environmental crises were apparent? Are the solutions difficult, or simply outside of our current range of vision? Real solutions mean moving beyond corporate greenwashing and politics. We need to create a citizen's movement that can fundamentally restructure our economy and our culture. Alexis Zeigler, author of the new book, Culture Change: Civil Liberty, Peak
Oil, and the End of Empire will conduct a presentation and discussion of these issues.
Contact: conev.org, [email protected], 434-409-6006
From the back cover of Culture Change:
While we are daily witness to the powers of progress manifest in the extraordinary mechanical technologies we have developed in the industrial age, we remain woefully unaware of the most basic causes of social change in our society. Our lack of social awareness does not result from the difficulty of understanding social problems, it results from the active repression of such awareness.
The political resistance movements that developed in the twentieth century were adapted to conditions of economic growth. When an economy is growing, petitioning through political and legal means to assure increasing access to rights and wealth for traditionally disenfranchised groups met with a measure of success, and that success was the foundation for further movement building. Those movements cannot, as they are currently structured, guide us through the coming age.
Many of the problems that we see as having purely political roots are strongly influenced by economic and ecological factors. Social issues that may seem far apart, such as ecological stress and women's rights for instance, have common roots. In the modern context, much of the political unraveling that we are witnessing can be understood in terms of the limitations of growth of modern industrialism.
The growth of fundamentalism and militarism, the decline of civil liberty and the environment, all of these problems are going to get worse if we do not find a new means to address them.
There are real solutions to these problems, but they are going to involve a quantum leap, both in thought and in action, beyond our current methods of political engagement. The solutions themselves are not even terribly difficult, they are simply well outside of our current range of vision and will.