May 29, 2013 | Carolyn's Articles
In the light of David Whyte’s poem and the information overload that many of us felt at this conference, I was intrigued by the use of the word “hungry” and “craving” which many participants expressed when they described their longing for spiritual and emotional processes that would facilitate their holding megadoses of new and disturbing information. The attendees at the conference represent only one segment of the collapse-aware population, but as a result of my experience at the conference and traveling throughout the country and working with individuals nationally and around the world, I hear the exact same longing expressed repeatedly and almost verbatim wherever I go. If anyone has any doubt that this aspect of confronting collapse is crucial, they are not listening.
May 27, 2013 | Carolyn's Articles
Today is Memorial Day, created many years ago with the intention of honoring the fallen in battle. While we hold them in our hearts alongside the horrors of war, what must also be remembered and cherished on this day is the earth community in which we are innately and organically embedded. Whatever you believe about NTE, which is really of little importance in the larger scheme of things, we are losing this planet by way of the actions of our very immature, uninitiated, unwizened species. If you can, go out in nature today and reconnect with some aspect of it. Hold it close to your heart as you would your child or a beloved. These are the good ole days, and this is as good as it is likely to get.
May 26, 2013 | Carolyn's Articles
Attendance this year is about the same as last year with a number of new faces as well as a few individuals returning from 2012. This conference, which Orren Whiddon hopes to put in place as an annual event, offers not only the opportunity to “take the temperature” of the collapse-aware community, it provides the opportunity to dialog in depth with many of the notable shapers of our thinking about collapse and our responses to it. Equally rewarding is our dialog with each other, the formation of meaningful friendships, and a taste of what it might be like to journey together through the unraveling.
May 20, 2013 | Collapse of Industrial Civilization
People who are interpreting the collapse – it’s going to be this, it’s going to be that, and myself included – are all operating under the belief systems of the current paradigm while we’re still in that paradigm, and there’s no way we can fully understand a new paradigm until we’ve moved into it, and even then, it will probably take some time for it to truly reveal itself…and who we’ll be. 300 years later, we barely understand The Enlightenment, and there have been two major paradigm shifts since then (oh, you didn’t know about those?).
May 18, 2013 | Climate Change/Environment
If the human species goes down, as in near term extinction, and we take out the Community of Life and the animate Earth along with us, it won’t be our extinction itself that would leave me inconsolable. Extinctions happen; species fail. Were I able to see with the long eye of the Life Force, what I would find irreconcilable is the incommensurability between the ongoing promise of Life’s self-renewal and the paltry, self-serving species that brought it all down.
May 17, 2013 | Feature Articles
May 16, 2013 | Emotional/Spiritual
If we – the masculine within each of as individuals and as a collective – can do that one thing before the chaos sets in, before we choose whatever exit strategy we will ultimately be forced to take, then the end of the human era on this beautiful planet, from a universe-centric perspective, will also have served some higher purpose.
May 16, 2013 | Collapse of Industrial Civilization
Guy McPherson is a deeply kindred soul whose love for all life and sincerity permeates. Michael Sosebee knows how to make and shoot one Hell of a fine film. Brilliant editing. Exquisite music. Well done.
May 11, 2013 | Emotional/Spiritual
A May 2 article in the New York Times “Suicide Rates Rise Sharply In US” informed us that not only have suicide rates increased in the past decade among teens and the elderly, but more surprisingly, they have surged among the baby boomers. Ten days later, an article on the Alternet website asks, “Is Cutthroat Capitalism Pushing A Growing Number Of Baby Boomers To Suicide?” Certainly, we might expect adolescents and the elderly to take their own lives, but why baby boomers—people in the 35-70 age bracket? What is it about this group?
May 7, 2013 | Carolyn's Articles
When I began writing this article, a friend of mine had recently entered hospice. While I was finishing the article, my friend died. She was not in the same town as I, but during the past month, we had been able to speak by phone several times a week. Given my friend’s decline and death and its impact on me, I was not taken aback by Daniel Drumright’s essay “The Irreconcilable Acceptance Of Near-Term Extinction,” posted last week on Guy McPherson’s Nature Bats Last blog.