Writer and homesteader Ellen LaConte has a new book titled Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it.

The book first diagnoses our condition . . .

Economic and polar meltdowns, inept, corrupt and bankrupt governments, long-term double-digit unemployment, climate instability, failing social services, collapsing ecosystems, a widening wealth-poverty gap, unprecedented species extinctions, mass migrations, peak fossil fuels, religious, ethnic and resource wars, spreading hunger, poverty, chaos and disease. . .

Why is so much going wrong everywhere at once? The global economy has gone viral. It is ravaging Earth’s immune system, triggering a Critical Mass of mutually reinforcing environmental, economic, social, cultural and political crises that are compromising the ability of Earth’s human and natural communities to provide for, protect and heal themselves.

The prognosis? If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, Life will last but Life as we know it—and a lot of us—won’t.

. . . and then offers a course of treatment:

What should we do instead? We should remember that Life rules, we don’t. The global economy operates as if it were larger than Life. It isn’t. As if it had multiple Earth’s to supply its appetites. It doesn’t. . .

Among the rules written into Life’s Economic Survival Protocol are local self-reliance, intercommunity and regional functional cooperation, non-carbon energy sourcing, resource conservation, sharing and recycling, and organically democratic methods of self-organization and governance. . .

We can learn Life’s rules and adopt lifeways that are at once authentically conservative, deeply green and profoundly liberating.

Robert Jensen interviews LaConte at Energy Bulletin. She reminds us something we seem to have forgotten – that humans are but bit players in a much bigger system.

The largest context – the largest high-functioning complex system within which we live our lives – is not the nation, nation-state system or global economic system but Life itself, the whole-earth, emergent and self-maintaining system of natural communities and ecosystems. That system, the ecosphere, teaches us the physical laws, the relationships and behaviors discovered in physics, biology and ecology and exemplified by the so-called “mystical” spiritual teachers, that we have to obey if we want to remain viable as a species.

The global economy has become pathological and is undermining the ability of human and natural communities to provide for, protect, defend and heal themselves – and here’s where LaConte invokes the analogy of AIDS/HIV:

I think we are presently at the HIV stage of the disease; it hasn’t quite yet become full-blown planetary AIDS. But I insist in the book that doing more of what we’ve been doing to exceed Earth’s physical means as well as our own fiscal ones — in other words, trying to heal and grow the very kind and scope of economy that caused this disease — is akin to injecting a patient who already has HIV with more HIV. That’s precisely what we’re doing.

Lynn Margolis argued in Symbiotic Planet that much of evolution on Earth is better explained by symbiosis – “the living together in physical contact of organisms of different species” – than by competition. LaConte similarly sees life on Earth as a cross-species, communitarian phenomenon. We’re not the “masters of the universe” we’ve come to believe we are, but rather a small part of a larger system. The most important and hardest lesson we will need to learn as a species is self-limitation. We have to stop behaving as if we were larger than or apart from Life and become constructive participants in it. If we fail to do so – if we don’t choose to transform ourselves and our lifeways – Life will force us to. Life rules, we don’t, and Life will not hesitate to rule harshly and even rule us out.

How can we possibly give up on economic growth? LaConte suggests focusing on what we need, as human beings.

Like everyone else, I need food, clean air and water, clothing, some sort of shelter, preferably warm in winter, occasional medicine or medical care, spiritual and physical exercise, colleagues, friends, family, if possible books, lots of quiet, a garden to work in, woods and wild not too far off. To love and be loved. To carry no debt. To believe there is some sort of livable, desirable future for the next seven generations. . . . To be happy, I need good work to do, work that I feel is, in my late mentor Helen Nearing’s terms, “contributory.”

We could all agree to get to work to fulfill that vision.

The Little Book of Life’s Rules for Surviving Critical Mass, a pocket version of key economic survival principles and practices culled from Life Rules, is soon to be serialized in posts at LaConte’s website.

The fight to stop global warming is over – and we have lost.

George Monbiot faces the harsh reality in a piece in the U.K. Guardian:

But the harsh reality we have to grasp is that the process is dead. . .

In terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It’s not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and grand announcements we spiralled backwards. . . .

[N]one of [the cuts supposedly achieved so far] are real. Missing from the proposed cuts are the net greenhouse gas emissions we have outsourced to other countries and now import in the form of manufactured goods. Were these included in the UK’s accounts, alongside the aviation, shipping and tourism gases excluded from official figures, Britain’s emissions would rise by 48%. Rather than cutting our contribution to global warming by 19% since 1990, as the government boasts, we have increased it by about 29%. It’s the same story in most developed nations. Our apparent success results entirely from failures elsewhere.

Hanging over everything is the growing recognition that the United States isn’t going to play. Not this year, perhaps not in any year.

What all this means is that there is not a single effective instrument for containing man-made global warming anywhere on earth. The response to climate change, which was described by Lord Stern as “a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen”, is the greatest political failure the world has ever seen.

“The greatest market failure the world has seen” doesn’t quite get at the depth of the crisis we face. Global warming is not merely the result of a failure of the market. It’s a failure of capitalism itself: the destruction of the biosphere  is an inescapable conclusion of capitalism’s economic logic. With global warming, the time of consequences has arrived.

Frank Rotering writes at the Energy Bulletin that economics over the past five centuries has almost exclusively meant the study of production and consumption under capitalism, assuming without question a deep commitment to growth, blind to the natural world and any concept of limits. The commitment to growth spanned the political spectrum, on the right it was used to justify capital’s rule and to facilitate business and on the left to facilitate social justice. All who believe in or benefit from the gospel of growth, whether from the capitalist class or those on the left who seek only to modify the way wealth is distributed rather than to question the pursuit of wealth itself, will fiercely resist any changes that could threaten their power and privileges.

The ecological crisis is a crisis of capitalism. While we have proven incapable of even honestly confronting our predicament, Nature will solve the ecological crisis for us. Out of the ashes, if we are fortunate, we may be offered the opportunity to cobble together a new way of life based on humility and sound ecological principles.

Next time – if we’re lucky enough to get another chance – maybe we’ll get it right.

Peak oil is no longer debatable: the period of peak is already being lived, as can be seen in this chart posted at The Oil Drum: Europe.

Since 2005 world liquids production has been bound between 80 and 82 million barrels per day. This plateau has been sustained by the increase of natural gas liquids, with pure crude in decline since 2005.

What are the implications of this momentous event? According to the recently-leaked Bundeswehr analysis Peak oil: Implications of Resource Scarcity on Security, not good for business as usual. Rick Munroe sums up their thinking at The Energy Bulletin:

The authors warn against “a false assumption [that] a phase of slow reduction in the amount of oil leads to an equally slow reduction in economic capacity” (p. 47). Instead, they warn that a rapid chain reaction of downward trends could be set in motion: a loss of confidence in the market, recession, increasing unemployment, rising food prices, and extreme pressure on government budgets. Many of these conditions are self-reinforcing, so there is the potential for a tipping point to be reached, leading to a medium-term scenario whereby “the global economic system and every market-based economy collapses” (p. 49, in bold). The authors then offer further theoretically possible consequences: crashing financial markets, a loss of confidence in currencies, mass unemployment, the collapse of critical infrastructure, and famine.

Munroe quotes from the analysis itself:

The abovementioned chain of events shows clearly that the energy supply of the economic cycle must be assured. The energy supply must be sufficient to allow positive economic growth. A shrinking economy over an indeterminate period presents a highly unstable situation which inevitably leads to system collapse. The risks to security posed by such a development cannot even be estimated. (p. 50.)

What we have – as Richard Heinberg points out – is a crisis not just of the economy, but also of economic theory and philosophy. The belief that economies can and should perpetually grow is an error, an error that rests on a deeper and subtler error – that Nature is merely a subset of the human economy rather than the other way around. Nature rules. Our economy is destined to shrink, not grow.

As evidenced by the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, western civilization since at least the ancient Greeks has known that if one transgresses the bounds of Nature one inevitably pays the price in retribution exacted by the gods. But then there’s Cassandra’s curse: remonstrances from their poets did not do the Athenians any good. The Athenian republic turned into the Athenian empire and then collapsed when its economy could no longer support its bloated military. Sound familiar?

In our hubris, we’ve once again forgotten that Nature rules. We’ve been ignoring our Cassandras for decades now. Peak oil will prove a reminder of ancient truths.

Amanda Gelder has a great interview with Jeremy Rifkin at Culturelab. What I find most intriguing are the connections Rifken draws among psychology, politics, and economics. We find ourselves in a pickle of historic proportions at the moment at least in part because of errors in thinking about these things.

I’ll try to pull together a couple of threads to focus on economic thinking and its relationship to the global crisis we face:

The Enlightenment view is that human beings are rational, detached agents that pursue our own self-interests and our nation states reflect that view. . .

A lot of interesting new discoveries in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, child development, anthropology and more suggest that human nature might not be what Enlightenment philosophers suggested. For instance, the discovery of mirror neurons suggests that we are not wired for autonomy or utility but for empathic distress; we are a social species.

* * *

Geopolitics is an extension of the Enlightenment view of human nature, the idea that we pursue our utilitarian pleasures and individual self-interests. In geopolitics, the nation-state becomes a macro view of that. Nations deal with nations by being rational, detached and calculating, pursuing self-interests, excercising power and acquiring more capital and wealth. That’s why Copenhagen failed. The world leaders weren’t thinking biosphere, they were thinking geopolitics. Everyone was looking out for their nation’s self-interest.

* * *

A lot of business people would say that you can’t be empathic in the market. But the market is a secondary institution–it’s an extension of culture. The real invisible hand of the market is trust, which is the result of empathic engagement. The only way you can have a market is if you have a shared narrative. The market is not a utilitarian frame of reference, it only exists by the social trust that allows people to engage in anonymous settings and believe that their engagements will be honored. When that trust fails, markets collapse and that’s what is happening now.

Rifken thinks the new world of distributed knowledge and distributed energy means we’ve moving from Homo sapien to Homo empathicus. His vision is attractive. I wish I could share his optimism. Still, we too often forget that philosophy does not live just in acedemia – it has real world implications. The “market” we have come to deify today is really nothing more than a myth, a powerful one that has turned destructive and threatens to consume civilization itself.

Rifkin has just published a new 600-page book, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, in which he expands on the ideas explored in the interview. I recall in my college days (note we were flower children of the 60s) reading books about evolving human consciousness.  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s  The Phenomenon of Man. Lancelot Law Whyte’s The Next Development in Man. Remember Charles Reich’s The Greening of America? Answer: not without some embarrassment.

So count me skeptical. My remaining aspirations are much less ambitious than forging a new human consciousness, rather just to eat well and live warmly in an increasingly uncertain world.

Boreal forests and peatlands store more carbon than any other ecosystem, far more than tropical forests which have received more attention.

Boreal forests, found in Canada, Russia, Scandinavia and parts of the United States, cover 11 percent of the earth and store 22 percent of all carbon on the land surface in soil, permafrost, peatlands and wetlands. But this carbon is “the carbon the world forgot,” says this report from the Canadian Boreal Initiative. In cold climate boreal forests, much of the carbon in vegetation never fully decomposes and is gradually pushed into thick layers of peat and permafrost and stored for thousands of years. But this stored carbon is released as greenhouse gases when the forests are logged or soils are disturbed by logging, mining, and other industrial activities, including tar sands extraction and processing.

While boreal forests are under attack, the Greenland ice sheet is loosing mass at an accelerating rate. So reports a new study published in the journal Science. The mass loss is equally distributed between increased iceberg production, driven by acceleration of Greenland’s fast-flowing outlet glaciers, and increased meltwater production at the ice sheet surface. Recent warm summers further accelerated the mass loss to 273 Gt per year (1 Gt is the mass of 1 cubic kilometer of water), in the period 2006-2008, which represents 0.75 mm of global sea level rise per year. The Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to cause a global sea level rise of seven metres. Since 2000, the ice sheet has lost about 1500 Gt in total, representing on average a global sea level rise of about half a millimetre per year, or 5 mm since 2000.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) reports that a warming climate has resulted in twice as many daily record high temperatures than record lows over the last decade across the continental United States.

If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even. Much of the nation’s warming is occurring at night, when temperatures are dipping less often to record lows. This finding is consistent with years of climate model research showing that higher overnight lows should be expected with climate change. The scientists’ modeling projects that in all likely scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions, record daily highs should increasingly outpace record lows over time. If nations continue to increase their emissions of greenhouse gases in a “business as usual” scenario, the U.S. ratio of daily record high to record low temperatures would increase to about 20-to-1 by mid-century and 50-to-1 by 2100.

I am frequently asked why this blog seems to publish almost nothing but discouraging, depressing news. My answer: because that’s the reality we have to come to grips with. We have no alternative but to embrace that reality and deal with it as best and as gracefully as we can.

Joanna Macy in an article at Yes Magazine encourages us to embrace our feelings of despair,  anguish and outrage at the fact that we are destroying our world:

Let’s drop the notion that we can manage our planet for our own comfort and profit—or even that we can now be its ultimate redeemers. It is a delusion. Let’s accept, in its place, the radical uncertainty of our time, even the uncertainty of survival. . . .

Uncertainty, when accepted, sheds a bright light on the power of intention. Intention is what you can count on: not the outcome, but the motivation you bring, the vision you hold, the compass setting you choose to follow. Our intention and resolve can save us from getting lost in grief.

Macy’s use of the word intention encompasses the ancient meaning of the word faith: the duty of fulfilling one’s trust, from the Latin fides and its root fider. This sense of faith as “loyalty based on promise or duty” is preserved today in “keep one’s faith”; in the Marine Corps slogan “semper fidelis (semper fi); and in common usage of faithful and faithless, which contain no notion of any divinity (faith in the religious sense of “mental acceptance of something as true” stems only from about the 14th century).

What is required from us is faith: the resolve to embrace whatever fate awaits us and do the best we can, no matter what the outcome may be.

Speaking the truth is essential to our task. As Macy concludes:

Speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity. That solidarity, with our neighbors and all that lives, is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.

When we stop distracting ourselves by trying to figure the chances of success or failure, our minds and hearts are liberated into the present moment. This moment then becomes alive, charged with possibilities, as we realize how lucky we are to be alive now, to take part in this planetary adventure.

In a moving and important article at Grist, Adam Sacks argues that climate activists have made a disastrous mistake in framing climate change as an emissions problem. The root cause of climate change is our culture – our worship of technology and growth.

Greenhouse gases are not the cause of global warming. They are but a symptom of:

300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations. . . [T]he seductive promise of endless growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat, led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on Earth.

Global warming isn’t the only symptom:

[I]f planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water, air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans; nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry—to name just a few.

Sacks says the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions is absolutely over, and we have lost – and that we need to find the courage to tell this hard truth.

Because of the vast inertial mass of the oceans, which absorb temperature and carbon dioxide, there’s a lag of several decades between greenhouse-gas emissions and their effects. The starting changes we are already seeing today are thus the result of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide of well under 340 parts per million (ppm). Today, atmospheric CO2 is 387.81ppm and increasing at almost 2 ppm per year.

Then there are positive feedback loops, which we don’t understand and which haven’t been included in our climate change models.

And then there are “tipping points,” points at which change becomes non-linear. We don’t know where these tipping points may be, where Earth’s climate may suddenly shift into a different state as it has many times before in Earth’s history.

As Sacks says, these bitter climate truths are fundamentally bitter cultural truths.

Endless growth is an impossibility in the physical world, always—but always—ending in overshot and collapse.  Collapse: with a bang or a whimper, most likely both.  We are already witnessing it, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable.  We simply cannot go on living this way. Our version of life on earth has come to an end.

I think the course of action urged by Sacks is the only sane and honorable one:

The sooner we embrace the truth, the sooner we can begin the real work.

This passage on the Peak Oil News site conveys the powerful message that the myth of growth has proven a failure:

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100.

This extraordinary ramping up of global economic activity has no historical precedent. It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology on which we depend for survival. And it has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems.

For the most part, we avoid the stark reality of these numbers. The default assumption is that – financial crises aside – growth will continue indefinitely. Not just for the poorest countries, where a better quality of life is undeniably needed, but even for the richest nations where the cornucopia of material wealth adds little to happiness and is beginning to threaten the foundations of our well-being.

The reasons for this collective blindness are easy enough to find. The modern economy is structurally reliant on economic growth for its stability. When growth falters – as it has done recently – politicians panic. Businesses struggle to survive. People lose their jobs and sometimes their homes. A spiral of recession looms. Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries.

But question it we must. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the two billion people who still live on less than $2 a day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems on which we depend for survival. It has failed, spectacularly, in its own terms, to provide economic stability and secure people’s livelihoods.

This passage is attributed to the report Prosperity Without Growth, recently released by the U.K. Sustainable Development Commission – the government’s “independent watchdog on sustainable development.” The mystery is, I can’t find anything like it anywhere – in the report itself, in the summary, in any press releases, in any interviews with the report’s author. WTF?

Oops – there it is, right in the Forward.

Telling people they can have it all – fix the climate and solve the energy crisis while continuing business-as-usual – is not the way to motivate people to insist on action. Instead, it sends out the message, “relax, everything’s going to be okay.”

Joseph Romm in a blog post lauds a McKinsey Global Institute report – “The carbon productivity challenge: Curbing climate change and sustaining economic growth” – for taking on the “myth” that addressing climate change “will hurt economic growth and force consumers to make unwanted changes in their lifestyle.”

The McKinsey Global Institute insists that “any successful program of action on climate change must support two objectives – stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) and maintaining economic growth.” Joseph Romm, by agreeing, is harming rather than advancing the mission of his blog undertaking, which is to foment prompt and effective action to stop climate change.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, economic growth has rested and continues to rest on increased energy consumption.  We are now seeing the results of that endeavor. As the size of the human economy has increased to take up and dominate an ever larger portion of the global ecosystem, it is bumping up against limits to both resource sources and sinks. Infinite exponential growth within a closed system is an absurd idea. Pursuing it will inevitably lead to collapse from one or a collection of system failures.

As Jim Kunstler warns, a campaign to sustain the unsustainable will amount to a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources.

Romm is not unaware of our fossil fuel predicament.  He’s outlined a road to a carbon-free future, so understands the scale of the problem.

Can we use energy more efficiently? Of course. Most of the energy we use is wasted, largely because of the unsustainable way we live now. We need more than a technological fix. We need to take a holistic approach to thinking about how society as a whole should be organized to achieve our goals. And where we live has more to do with the amount of energy we use – and the amount of energy we could save – than almost any other factor.

Can we transition to a way of living that is decent and satisfying while not dependent on fossil fuels? Yes – but not if we squander precious resources and time trying to hang on to the status quo.

The biggest myth in the way of adjusting to our new reality is that economic growth is necessary for and leads to increased human happiness. GDP was initially to serve as a proxy yardstick, an indirect measure of human well being. But like the broomstick in the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, the yardstick has taken over and is out of control.

We have become blinded by growth to the extent that in pursuing it, the ability of Earth to sustain humans and countless other species is being radically disturbed. It’s past time for the master to return, break the spell, and save the day – before it’s too late.

The biggest obstacle to coming to grips with our energy and climate situation is our faith in progress: “Oh, they’ll think of something.” No matter what, the future will be richer, better, brighter than today. Ironically, our faith in progress relieves us of the responsibility to act.

We believe that history as a whole moves inevitably in a single direction, and we call that direction “progress.” The ideologies of our time – capitalism, communism, socialism, liberalism, progressivism – share this underlying faith, the latter even encapsulating the myth in its name.

John Michael Greer points out that this miasma has a name: historicism. This is the belief that history as a whole moves inevitably in a single direction that can be known in advance by human beings. We are captives of historicism. It is so pervasive that we are unaware of its existence. Blind to its existence, we are blind to reality.

It hasn’t always been so. Cultures have more often seen history as cyclical rather than linear. Just as the seasons follow each other year after year, years of plenty are followed by years of privation – so don’t ever get too full of yourself in the good times, prepare for the worst which is sure to follow. On a larger scale, civilizations rise, peak, and then decline and even disappear. We see theories seeking to explain the rise and fall of civilizations related in the works of Tainter and Diamond.

America’s founders were well versed in the history of Rome, of its theme of decay from its peak as a republic, to empire and corruption, then to decay, defeat and dissolution. They were under no illusion that this new country, which aspired to the glory that was Rome’s, was immune to Rome’s temptations or fate. But as Tainter pointed out, there is only a tenuous connection between any concept of “progress” and the rise and fall of a civilization. Most of the people who lived within the bounds of the Roman Empire were either unaffected by or were actually better off as a result of its demise.

History has no direction, at least none that can be foreseen. At best, like evolution, any “direction” can be discerned and described only in retrospect, and it makes no sense whatever to describe that direction as “progress” – or even “decay.” It simply is what it is.

Where we are in history can never be known. This civilization which we think so inevitable, so real, will inevitably vanish – as will humans as a species, the Earth, the universe itself. How the future unfolds – at least our little piece of it, our time on Earth – is our story, our history. The author of that story – the “they” in “they’ll think of something” is us. We’ll see.

Wendell Berry writes at OrganicToBe.org (also at The Energy Bulletin) that small farms and other locally-run enterprises are failing because the pattern they belong to is failing. The principal reason for this failure the universal adoption of industrial values which see things and places as assets, all relations as mechanical, and competitiveness as the prime human motivator.

Berry lists the values associated with the family farm: conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community – values suited to a world lived in by human beings, not to a world exploited by managers, stockholders, and experts.

I think Berry is more right than he knows. We must transform our economy and rebuild it based on the human-scale values he treasures.

“The economy” is no more than an abstraction, a description of how we extract our living from and survive in this world. Valuing it more than the global ecosystem on which it depends is blindness and folly. As we see the world economy collapse around us, the evidence is compelling that industrial values – which place “the economy” above all else – are ultimately destructive of life itself.

Conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community: as Berry says, these are the values that offer us survival, not just as farmers, but as human beings. And Berry is right that the transformation that is required cannot be left to others:

“It] cannot be accomplished by the governments, the corporations, or the universities; if it is to be done, the farmers themselves, their families, and their neighbors will have to do it.”