Discuss: Destined for Failure

Diane said
<understand the value of energy and its undeniable power to have created this fantasy world we now live in,>
The real problem is that we did not understand that using that energy came at an appreciable cost - the associated production of material wastes. The damage has been done with climate change being one aspect.

Your observations of the chronic failure of our educators are accurate Jason and it is no mistake that the more highly paid and educated they are the more delusional their behaviour. At heart is their incapacity to embrace fundamental physics and most live in grand denial of the Conservation Principle of Energy. It is this failure that results in their chronic ecological illiteracy. It is no mistake that the most illiterate are the supposed “ecology” and “energy” experts, for their lifestyles are in extreme dissonance with their knowledge. I have explored how this dissonance is reflected in their use of key symbols. The problem is so endemic that I have drafted a speech that President Elect Barack Obama will have to deliver if he is to divert us from our current decline into catastrophic war. For those interested it is at
http://www.bonusjoules.co.nz/Sustainability Principle/Barack Obama speech on energy.htm

“no one should graduate who doesn’t know what oil has done for us—and especially what it has done to us: made us fat, lazy, stupid, and incompetent”

On behalf of all the fat, lazy, stupid, incompetent and illiterate metripolitanos out here, I just want to say how grateful we are that there are still some people who can tell the difference between fantasy and reality.  :-)

What a perceptive comment, Rick. It was never as simple as Barbara makes it sound. I sometimes wonder whether the whole environmental movement (of which I’m a part) isn’t fundamentally based on nostalgia for a recent past that has been colored by our wishes.

Addendum: Referring to Rick’s 1st comment.

Here in Oregon it has just been reported that the prez of OU gets over $700,000 in salary, plus perks, and the prez of tax-supported Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) had salary and perks this year of over $1.1 million. Try to picture these characters, and for that matter any prez of a large university, out digging in the campus garden . . . .

Never as simple as Barbara makes it sound?
I beg to differ and agree wholeheartedly with Rick that oil has made us fat, lazy, stupid, and incompetent.I will add moral superiority to the list and that far reaching lack of moral shame amongst humankind.Lack of shame for the huge mess made for our young ones to clean up.
I do not speak here from a stance of a solution coming out of another ideology but from a life as gardener, wildlife biologist, farmer, environmentalist and mother.

Here is a quote from Robert Graves from a lecture on Human Culture. “The decline of a true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they have lost their personality and become instruments of other people’s wills.”

Think about what is being said here, it is about connections or links that people can no longer make. That essential unity with the soil has been broken and hence our inner landscape as human beings can no longer link to the outer landscape of nature.

It is simple, only we haven’t had the forces necessary to think, feel and excercise our wills, those forces , not substances, that will lead us back into the realm of life. A life that serves as a living legacy and an archive for the future.
It is possible for us to walk a practical path with spiritual feet and that can be as simple as giving your kitchen scraps to feed the micro
organisms and worms in your compost heap.
Consciousness , a life of consciousness which to me does not include stupidity, fat, lazy and incompetent.
How many of you know that there was once in Oakland, California the Composting Corporation of America started by E.Pfeiffer
and that this fertile soil was sent out to many farms and nurseries across the country? Yes, in the early 1950’s, read about this in Secrets of the Soil and see if you can figure out why this practical solution to waste was shutdown.
I am currently writing a book on wolves who I studied in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. What I looked at here was the food habits and social organization of two wolf packs.
Even wolves serve as models for the human population now that food supply and social organization are staring one another in the face in the human culture.
The solutions are not going to come from a book, or another research project, or another course on stress management,or another machine, they will come from seeing the connections in nature that are simple, life affirming,practical and real.

to Dave McArthur ~ the link you posted: http://www.bonusjoules.co.nz/Sustainability is a dead end.  please repost, i’d be very interested to read it.

i’ve long been waving my hands in frustration and disgust at the mainstream education system these days, that teaches children and ‘adults’ virtually nothing about taking care of ourselves in the authentic ways: emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically. 

i like the bluntness of this article and the tone of putting a mirror where society hasn’t wanted to acknowledge it’s needed.