• for: ecological civilization, degrowth, futures, deep ecology, emptiness, polycrisis, human exceptionalism, planned descent
• source
  • The Great Simplifcation
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE39xfNRRyw

• Description

  • Nate hosts this discussion on what constitutes an ecological civilization with guests
    • William Rees
    • Rex Weyler
    • Nora Bateson

• Reflections Overall,

  • an insightful discussion on the polycrisis and
  • reflections on what is in store for civilization.
• There is consensus that
  • what we are experiencing has been decades in the making and
  • the solutions-oriented approach to solving problems has only treated the symptoms and indeed has made things worse.
• There is a strong undercurrent of the emptiness in nature

• Rex

  • emphasized the folly of human exceptionalism that has been socially normalized and which
  • continues to create the major separation that fuels the polycrisis.
  • Not recognizing that we are nature, not recognizing our animal nature
  • we look upon nature with an attitude of controlling nature, rather than flowing with her.
  • advocated Taoism as a more consistent way to frame nature rather than the reductionist, control methodology that separates us from nature.

• Nora's perspective is the folly of abstraction that generates fixed preconceptions of aspects of nature that we then reify.

  • The fixed preconceptions are solidified but they are an oversimplified version of reality,
  • and that oversimplification leads to actualizing the cliche"a little knowledge is dangerous" into civilization
  • in other words, the continuous manufacture of progress traps.

• William sees our impending crash as not only inevitable, but natural.

  • In this, he concurs with Rex's perspective.
  • Human beings are simply another species and like them,
    • we are susceptible to population explosions when negative feedbacks are removed,
    • which can lead to nature self-correcting with mass dieoff when resources are overconsumed.

I found this statement incredibly depressing yet profound. Depressing in the idea that our central task is learning how to die (really who wants to be that morbid and think like that) (potentially digital humanists?), yet profound, because the soldier is not talking about us as individuals, but as a human civilization, as a whole, as a group, as a collective.