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.

Victor Anderson has a great article in the U.K. Guardian pointing out that all human economic activity depends upon “wild land.” Lose wild land, and we lose the ecosystem services that sustain us. But wild land is woefully undervalued.

The ecosystems and biodiversity which underpin all economic activity depend largely on ‘wild land’ – very much a poor relation in the competition with agriculture and urbanisation, both of which have massive economic forces in their favour.

Agriculture is driven by the demand for food. This demand is growing because of the rising population and more demand for meat, which requires more land than crops. Urbanisation is backed by the economic power of manufacturing, and the influx of economic migrants from countryside to towns and cities.

Wild land has no such strong purchasing power to defend its position and, therefore, is set to decline, affecting biodiversity and ecosystems with disastrous consequences leading to reduction of tropical forest area, loss of species, and reduced capacity for absorbing carbon.

It is not essential for land to be left wild to be productive ecologically: agriculture and urban areas can be designed in ways which maintain ecosystems. But whether land is left wild or combined with other uses, the survival of the services ecosystems provide – such as genetic resources, good quality soil, available water, pollination - is an essential underpinning of the world economy and people’s livelihoods.

Anderson’s article is a good reminder that land use as we practice it in Oregon is – or should be – about preserving land solely for economic exploitation. It’s about more than saving farm land for agriculture, saving forest land for timber production, and making the best use of urban land. It’s about saving the world that sustains us all.

We forget at our peril: God is great; humans, insignificant.

For the last six or seven years something has been seriously wrong with the global supply of oil. It hasn’t been increasing, as shown in this graph posted by David Cohen in a piece titled Peak oil – where do we stand.

On a yearly basis, conventional oil production (crude oil plus lease condensate) peaked in 2005. On a monthly basis, conventional oil production peaked in July 2008. That doesn’t necessarily mean these peaks will not be surpassed in the future – but it’s clear that the years of steadily rising oil production are over.

Cohen points out the world is now in the position of having put all of its future oil production eggs in one risky basket – the Saudi basket.

When push comes to shove in terms of global demand, how much oil is Saudi Arabia willing [or able] to produce? We really don’t know.

One result of constrained oil production was the great oil price spike to $147 a barrel in the summer of 2008, which was (to mix a metaphor) the straw that popped the great financial/credit bubble that had been growing in the U.S. and Europe for several decades. It didn’t take declining supplies of oil to cause incalculable damage to the world’s economy. All it took was for supplies to stop increasing.

As Tom Whipple observes in his article Peak Oil Crisis: The Midterms, politicians from both political parties are running on a platform of a return to the good times and economic growth that we in America have known for much of our lifetimes. Telling it like it is – that there will be little or no economic growth for a long time and growing impoverishment of most of the population – would be political suicide. Our politics have become completely disconnected with reality:

The unwillingness of both parties to deal with the real issue — that the fossil fuel age is coming to an end and that we must rapidly restructure our economy and lifestyles — means that sensible proposals are completely absent from the political dialogue.

The dénouement:

We are actually going to drive ourselves over a great economic cliff with banners of “growth,” “jobs,” “return to the good old days,” and “no taxes” streaming in the wind. It is going to be one hell of a train wreck – unlike anything the American people have ever known.

For decades, increases in global oil production have been accompanied by economic growth. Current economic theories take increasing energy supplies in general and oil production in particular for granted.  Charles Hall cautioned, at the seventh Advances in Energy Studies Conference in Barcelona, that current economic theories are quite probably not true, going forward. We need new economic theories applicable to the downslope we are approaching.

Mark Brown at the same conference argued that we need more than just new economic theories: we need to change our way of being.

The problem is not just resource availability nor is it finding another energy source. The problem is BUSINESS AS USUAL. The environmental, social, and economic consequences of unlimited cheap energy might be even worse than limited fossil fuels. Our fascination and addiction with continued growth may have unbelievable consequences in the long run. Faced with the possibility of unlimited growth, and its coupled consequences, one can only hope that we fail in our attempts to solve this current crisis so that our focus will turn to living within the planet’s carrying capacity.

Unfortunately, political leaders, here and around the globe, are not listening, and are continuing to pursue growth even though it can no longer be denied that emissions stemming from economic growth are destroying the planet. When they work up enough courage to consider any action at all, the best they can come up with is market-based “solutions” that avoid real change, instead promoting the same economic model responsible for the crisis.

Laura Carlsen has it exactly right:

If the world that defends our current model of production and consumption prevails, the planet will edge ever closer to catastrophe.

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.

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.

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.

There’s an article posted at Reality Sandwich titled “Money and the Turning of the Age” in which author Charles Eisenstein compares economists to a priesthood that engages in “magico-religious thinking.” By manipulating symbols, economists hope to manipulate the reality those symbols represent.

Magico-religious thinking normally seems to work:

Whether it is a shamanic rite, the signing of an appropriations bill, or the posting of an account balance, when a ritual is embedded in a story that people believe, they act accordingly, playing out the roles the story assigns to them, and responding to the reality the story establishes.

When shamanic rites fail, the community is in big trouble. Picture the Aztec priests and their bloody human sacrifices – rituals meant to repay the community’s debt to the gods. Things seemed to work just swell, for centuries – until Hernan Cortéz appeared on the scene. Reality abruptly changed, and the old rituals no longer had the power to control it.

Where reality has come to flatly contradict belief systems, the drastic disconnect can lead to apocalyptic manifestations of magico-religious thinking. The Ghost Dance of the Native American plains tribes is a classic example of a desperate attempt to regain some semblance of a way of life that has collapsed and is forever gone.

Despite our nation’s genuflections to piety, growth is our real god. Faced with an unprecedented global economic crisis, we are now frantically going through all of the rituals trying to placate the economic god and return to his good graces.

We believe that human beings through their cleverness “created” growth and that our priesthood could control it through ever more sophisticated rituals we called “economic policy.” But growth was a function of underlying geophysical factors: energy from fossil fuels, an abundance of untapped resources including fresh water, minerals and ores, forests, fisheries, healthy ecosystems, and an underpopulated Earth whose “sinks” had not yet begun to become overwhelmed with humanity’s wastes.

Reality has changed, and no number of shamanic rituals will bring yesterday’s world back.

The new reality demands a decisive shift away from growth, towards managing decline. Yet as reports from the just-concluded G-20 meeting show, the world’s political leaders and economic priesthood retains its belief that the global economy should “recover” – and its faith that it will. President Obama is a member in good standing of the church of growth.

Galileo is (apocryphally) rumored to have muttered of Earth under his breath, after being forced at threat of torture to repent of Copernican sympathies: “But it does!” (move, revolving around the sun). Even under the threat of excommunication, there are a growing number of people muttering Galileo-like today, daring to speak out a Nietzschean truth: the god of growth is dead.

For example, Cameron Leake writes at The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand about the Commonwealth Government’s National Aviation Policy (NAP) Green paper, which predicts that domestic aviation demand will increase by 4% per annum until 2025-2026. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, there is no mention of peak oil or its impacts in the Green Paper. Leake’s analysis factors in the likely impact of peak oil:

Rather than continue policies based on the flawed assumption of perpetual growth, Leake proposes an alternative aviation policy designed to manage the decline in aviation that will be an inevitable consequence of peak oil.

James Hansen, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says scientists now have a moral obligation to become politically active and demand drastic action to cut carbon emissions and avert irreversible shifts in Earth’s climate. On next Thursday’s Climate Change Day of Action, Hansen will be leading a protest in Coventry, England, aimed at stopping the construction of new coal-fired power stations and and at thwarting plans for the expansion of airports, such as the third runway at Heathrow.

Says Hansen:

We can no longer allow politicians and business to twist and ignore science.

The god of growth is indeed dead, and his priesthood becomes ever more superfluous and its machinations irrelevant. It remains to be seen how long it will be before the world awakes from the dream of growth. We have yet to imagine what new story will take its place. Want to bet that we’ll reach an accommodation with the new reality without an economist’s version of a Ghost Dance?