for - from - Fair Share Commons discussion thread - Marie - discussing the use of the word "capital" in "spiritual capital" - webcast - Great Simplification - On the Origins of Energy Blindness - Steve Keen - Energy Blindness

for - Nate Hagens - The Great Simplification - toxic power - Ashley Hodgson

for - nature-based carbon sequestration - reestablish whale populations - Nate Hagen - The Great Simplification - David King - climate crisis - solutions - progress trap - overfishing - whales

• for: three great separations, alienation, financial capital vs social capital, the great simplification, linked in post - social capital

• for: The Great Simplifcation, Nate Hagen, The Great Complexification, The Great Alienation, three great separations

• comment

  • Last night, I had a thought about Nate Hagen's "The Great Simplification" project. Seeing Annilina's post this morning made me think of a recent film I annotated on the isolated Jarawa people living on a once desolate island off the coast of India
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FNdvlO6bPG60%2F&group=world
  • Watching the events of modern Indians exploited the Jarawa is like watching colonialism unfold in realtime.
  • The Jarawa people interviewed said how they are happy with the life they have lived before modernity discovered them.
  • Progress, especially the Western flavored one beginning with Colonialism, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution has set a trajectory for what we might call "The Great Complexification".
    • Remember when watches and clocks were all mechanical spring and windup? Now billions of them depend on batteries. Do we really need to modernize everything? It simply creates more waste and greater demands on nature for natural resources. Do we really need exponentially increase stuff with an Internet of Things?
  • Western influenced progress has led us into multiple progress traps, which now make up the many threads of the current polycrisis.
    • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=progress+trap
  • Along with the Great Complexification, we also have the Great Alienation. John Ikard writes of the "Three Great Separations":
    • the agricultural revolution
    • the industrial revolution
    • the industrial agricultural revolution
      • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Finthesetimes.com%2Farticle%2Findustrial-agricultural-revolution-planet-earth-david-korten&group=world
  • These created successively more alienation. As progress marched towards modernity, we created more and more technology that broke apart community and making us dependent on transportation and communication technology to maintain it or some proxy of it. Today, we live in cities teeming with millions, yet there is widespread alienation in the mere act of walking or driving down a crowded street.
  • It is the irony of modernity that it packs so many people into small spaces, and yet we are all estranged to each other.

• 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.

Title: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation Author: Nate Hagen Guest: Peter Whybrow, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and author Date: 6 July, 2022