The strange attraction of ‘The End of Days’ mindset

Personally, I am attracted to the idea [yes it may just be a conspiracy theory] that the world is ruled by plutocrats who somehow believe they will – when the shit hits the fan – be able to retire to Planet B. Or at least an island they own, or a mountain top somewhere. And there they’ll retire to a bunker and await the rapture, or some such epiphany that miraculously fixes everything and lets them get back to business as usual.

Going dry

Seems we never learn... A post on The Historiographer.

THE ANTHROPOCENE

Mementoes set in stone, of stone read by the earth’s lithographers who are wondering where to set the golden spike for this age. Marking slow time: eons, eras, periods, epochs, passages once set by gods or no gods. Rocky signatures etched by the slow swing of something other than the swifter acts of Man/Woman.

Planting the Anthropocene’s golden spike

An extract from an article Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Although there is a strong agreement among scientists that human activity has pushed the earth out of the stable patterns of the Holocene, debate is far from settled about whether this constitutes a new geological epoch and, if so, where to plant the golden spike … Continue reading Planting the Anthropocene’s golden spike →

Foreword from a draft non fiction text

The fossil fooled I began to write this book on the first of January 2020, hoping this will be a year and decade of better vision than we have shown so far (forgive the pun). As I write, much of Australia burns. This fire season began in August 2019, some say July. The fires are … Continue reading Foreword from a draft non fiction text →

Greta and the trolls

Isn't it fitting that Greta should hail from a nordic region, more-or-less the homeplace, I think, of trolls and other things nasty, like Ragnarok. What is it that brings them out whenever she gets a post or mention on social media.

Figment of imagination

I once could not imagine that someone human could not respond somehow, at some time or another, to the natural world. Impossible, I would have said. No matter how entrenched in the urban one was, how enmeshed by the artificial, surely the whir of a bird’s wings, the flash of a butterfly’s colour, the shape … Continue reading Figment of imagination →

Are we locked in a dance to the death (economically anyway) with fossil fuels

factors other than the purely economic must be taken into account. The problem with our purely economic thinking is that it is tainted with neoliberalist assumptions about worth. Humans, certainly all the ones in the first world, have been programmed to accept the notion that economic growth, most particularly at the personal level, is essential. To challenge this paradigm is to adopt the denialist annoying Greta Thunberg ‘how dare you’ stance. But in fact what we do need to do - if you factor anything other than pure Homo economicus thinking - is to do away with stuff. Perhaps take a significant dip in our GDP rich life. Give up some goods, some cargo, some economic cudos. Will we be poorer for it? Will our health go into decline? Will our world become much smaller? Perhaps we’ll travel less, the carbon load of flying is prohibitive. But will we be poorer? Will our air and waterways be cleaner? Will some of the wilderness be restored? Will we rediscover community? I don’t know, but I don’t think we can continue with business as usual. Because business isn’t (despite what they tell us) everything. We can choose to remain fossil fooled or we can choose not to be.