how to save the world

image by AI; my own prompt — ‘me’ imagining worst-case scenarios Every day, something happens that gets me anxious or upset. Technology failures, news about outrageous events, abuses and other horrors, meanness and unfairness by people I know or observe. Small worrisome physical or mental health issues. Dismay and shame at my own behaviours. Dread about something terrible that someone who I don’t even know says they will do tomorrow. Re-thinking something I or someone else did yesterday, or…

This is a work of fiction. image by AI; my own prompt I had been blathering on about our lack of free will, in my usual annoying way, when my friend said to me: “You keep insisting that we have no free will, and no ‘self’ even to have it. But at the same time you say that we are somehow able to become more ‘self-aware’, enough to recognize our conditioning for what it is, so when we are ‘self-aware’ we aren’t so reactive.” I nodded. She went on: “But if there’s no ‘self’, how can there be…

This is #54 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community. my own photo, from a number of years ago As I trace the path around the lake, I stop to watch a mother pushing a baby carriage who is talking to her baby and pointing excitedly at a mother goose and her goslings nearby. It’s obvious what the woman is thinking. But what, I wonder, is the baby thinking? Is the baby thinking at all? How exactly…

Yes, this is a rant. image by AI; my own prompt Travel by Canadians to the US is down almost 50% from last year’s already drastically reduced levels. Part of this is a quiet Canadian protest against US imperialist foreign policy — Trump’s arrogant assumption that Canadians wouldn’t find the idea of being a US state repulsive, his threats of annexation, his endless tariff wars against former US allies, and the US Uniparty’s financial, political, and military support for Israel’s genocides and…

Screencap of Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s interview of Tim Minchin The idea that asking good questions is the best way to contribute to learning and intellectual discussions is probably as old as civilization. I’ve written about the value of questions often on this blog, notably in a post summarizing the six qualities of a good question, the six benefits of asking questions, and the six types of question that can achieve these benefits. But recently it occurred to me that there’s a seventh quality,…

image by AI; my own prompt I am reading Italo Calvino’s last and unfinished work Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Or, I should probably say, I am half-heartedly trying to read it, since it is all over the place, and packed with references to literature some of which was written millennia ago, some of it in dead languages, that I find utterly unfathomable. Still, he’s a good writer, in the sense that he has interesting ideas and keeps things moving along, so I persevere. The book is a…

image by AI; my own prompt Each month I’m finding it harder and harder to distinguish news and articles about “politics and economics as usual” from news and articles about collapse. I guess that means collapse — economic, political, ecological and all the rest of our complex civilization systems — is now well and truly underway. When I started writing about this 23 years ago, it was still considered a lunatic fringe theory. Sixty+ years since Silent Spring. Fifty+ since The Limits to Growth.…

“Preserve your memories: They’re all that’s left you.” — Simon and Garfunkel, Bookends “The thing about time is that time isn’t really real.” — James Taylor, Secret O’ Life “How come I miss what I never knew?” — James Taylor, Baby Boom Baby “We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space.” — Joshua Rothman image by AI; my own prompt — ‘me’ imagining worst-case scenarios A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a café when an older woman (even older…

Cartoon from the Calvin & Hobbes Treasury As I’ve explained often on this blog, I believe our behaviour is completely conditioned by our biology and our culture, subject to the circumstances of the moment. An unfortunate consequence of that fact is that our beliefs and behaviours can be cynically conditioned by others for their own purposes. Or stated in simpler terms — We can be played. One of the arenas in which this conditioning plays out is in the media — not only the traditional…

image by AI, of course; my own prompt Climate change may be a mechanism through which the planet eases its human burden…[or] new patterns of disease could trim the human population…War could have a major impact…weapons of mass destruction — notably biological and (soon) genetic weapons, more fearsome than before…It is not the number of states that makes this technology ungovernable. It is technology itself. The ability to design new viruses for use in genocidal weapons does not require enormous…

image by AI; my own prompt In a time of growing chaos, precarity, scarcity, anger, obscene inequality, economic and ecological decline, and untold war-mongering, fear-mongering and suffering, when we’re fed a firehose diet of context-free soundbites, incompetent ‘leader’ hysterics and histrionics, and unsupported, outraged opinion masquerading as journalism, it’s probably not surprising that a lot of people will glom on to anyone and anything that says the future will be (or can be) bright and…

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the sixteenth of a series of articles on some of these signposts. Blinken/Biden testimony — anti-genocide protesters, 2023; video from CBC Humans, it is said, can be made to accept and believe almost anything, if we’re conditioned long and hard enough. Joseph Goebbels notoriously…

forms of activism, adapted from the book Deep Green Resistance The latest impassioned article from Patrick Lawrence, entitled We Must Learn to Disobey, asserts: The fate of democracy, whether it endures or disappears, is decided in the minds and hearts of its citizens before it is decided in legislatures, in elections, in courts, or in any of the other institutions on which a republic rests… [After the invasion of Iraq and the failure of protests against it,] Americans began to assume they were…

This is #53 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community. My neighbourhood: Lafarge Lake with its running track and sports fields far right-centre, with Pinecone Burke Provincial Park above it, and the Pacific Coast mountains behind that. Running diagonally lower left to centre is Hoy Creek and its ‘linear park’ trails, with Westwood Plateau above it. When I wander around my neighbourhood,…

Three current events are on a collision course, and the result of that collision is likely to be a global economic collapse: The global debt crisis, with trillions of dollars of debt coming due, most of it in $US, at a time lenders are neither able nor willing to renew the loans, at least not at today’s interest rates. The end of cheap energy, aggravated and accelerated by the Trump Administration’s deranged, illegal, and ruinous US-Israel War on Iran. Unsustainable and mostly worthless…

No, the title of this post isn’t misspelt. The post is about how this ‘me’, this brain’s construct that evolved to try to make sense of the world, has seemingly come to terms with itself. That’s not to imply ‘I’ actually had a role in this, or that there’s some advice or prescription in this post. It’s just an observation of what seems to be happening in this brain. For what, if anything, that’s worth. It’s pretty clear that we are living in an incredibly stressful time, and chronic stress…

image by Layers on Pixabay Last year I wrote about how chronic precarity seems to affect us mentally, and concluded: Now, thanks largely to our own unintended blunders, 8.1 billion of us are seemingly both at the mercy of chance and at the mercy of others with whom we must share limited and diminishing resources. Not surprising, then, that we’re increasingly angry, distrustful, fearful, anxious, blameful, exclusionary, self-inuring, feeling helpless and hopeless, mentally struggling, and…

earthset from the moon, from the Artemis II crew, via NASA There should be a name for the paradox in which a large group of individuals, each biophilic by nature, each doing their best under the circumstances, each quietly knowing the consequences of runaway ecological collapse, the exhaustion of cheap energy, endless wars, and relentlessly drawing more and more from the resources future generations and the rest of life on Earth need for their very survival, who somehow nevertheless behave…

This is the third of a series of articles — opinionated, fanciful writings, speculations — about The World After Collapse. It draws on what I’ve learned about pre-civilization humans and other large-brained creatures, and speculates on how, after civilization’s fall is complete — probably centuries from now — the remnants of the human species might be unrecognizably different from how we behave and think now. But they may be also ‘recognizably’ similar to how we know, deep down inside, we…