Chris Clugston on energy bulletin.
Message to mainstream America: our American way of life—300+ million people enjoying historically unprecedented living standards—has been enabled by our increasingly dysfunctional ecological and economic behavior over the past 200 years. Our existing way of life is therefore unsustainable; in fact, America is facing imminent societal collapse.
Message to the informed few: we must overcome our tendency to waste increasingly limited time and resources on futile attempts to resolve problems associated with natural resource depletion, or natural habitat degradation, or climate change, or overpopulation, or the economic crisis du jour. These problems will only be resolved through the resolution of our fundamental “predicament”: our American way of life is unsustainable.
There is only one solution to our predicament, and to all of its derivative ecological and economic problems. We must, as a society, transition quickly and beginning immediately to a sustainable lifestyle paradigm, one in which we live entirely within our means ecologically and economically—forever. Any alternative course of action will, at best, only briefly postpone societal collapse.
The solution to our predicament is simple and straightforward; it is our incessant attempts to evade, avoid, and circumvent this solution that are complicated, convoluted, and ultimately suicidal.
As we repeatedly have said. The article goes on to give some explanations, finishing with:
The Party is Over
Our American way of life is NOT sustainable—it is not even close. We have only two choices going forward: we can choose to transition voluntarily to a sustainable lifestyle paradigm, in which we live within our means ecologically and economically—forever. Or we can allow Nature to orchestrate our transition to sustainability, through societal collapse, in the not-too-distant future. The results in either case will be devastating in terms of population level reduction and living standard degradation; Nature’s way will be horrific.
America’s Transition to Sustainability
Given our existing worldview and resource utilization behavior, our current choice lies somewhere between “business as usual” and “lip service”—we are on the road to imminent societal collapse.
An American Cultural Revolution, through which we change fundamentally both our distorted worldview and our dysfunctional resource utilization behavior, is our only sane choice…
For many, even within the ‘developed’ nations, the american way (the way of empire) has not created a ‘party’, but rather slavery, exploitation and scarcity. Many people will be glad to see an end to this.
