4 Matching Annotations
- Jul 2023
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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- for: ecological civilization, degrowth, futures, deep ecology, emptiness, polycrisis, human exceptionalism, planned descent
- source
- The Great Simplifcation
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE39xfNRRyw
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Description
- Nate hosts this discussion on what constitutes an ecological civilization with guests
- William Rees
- Rex Weyler
- Nora Bateson
- Nate hosts this discussion on what constitutes an ecological civilization with guests
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think things will unfold exactly as nature requires that they do. There will be, unless humans actively and intelligently implement our own process of negative feedbacks so that we withdraw our dominance from the ecosystems of which we are apart, then nature will do it for 01:26:57 us.
- for: planned descent
- negative feedbacks are nature's way of handling explosive overshoot
- if we are a wise species, we would do it ourselves.
- for: planned descent
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So I think it's fairly clear that we agree there's going to be contraction. And the question then becomes ,what are we really talking about? And I think as a rough way to begin thinking about this, could the world with 8 billion people live sustainably in the absence of fossil fuel?
- for: planned descent
- William Rees talks about planned descent, planning to start breeding animals of servitude again to replace all the mechanized, fossil fuel systems, plus one or two acres to sustain those draft animals.
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because contraction is inevitable, the question then is how do we do that best together? And that the wisdom in that is not 00:57:31 going to be packaged in a book. The wisdom of that is going to be in the particular and a sensitivity to the particular
- for: contraction, planned descent, overshoot,
- comment
- Nora basically advocates for spontaneity, winging it, but with tools at your disposal to emerge solutions as appropriate.
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