A Crash Course(?)

Terry Thomsen from The Inside Story sent me a really interesting link last night: Chris Martenson's Blog.

I started watching his "Crash Course" last evening. It began with an outline of the basis of the US (and world) economic system and provided some fascinating insights about recent bank collapses and the property market bubble. He then provided some very clear and chilling analysis of the effects of climate change, peak oil, the aging population and currrent human resource use. The course is a series of short lectures that take about 2-3 hours to watch/ listen to, but once I'd started I found them just riveting and well put together. I think they are REALLY important.

Chris's descriptions of what is happening right now reminded me strongly of the descriptions that Jared Diamond provided in his book "Collapse" about societies which .... well ... collapsed, although I feel as if I may be lapsing into the rhetoric of "I have a nightmare" which, as my last post implies, may not be productive.

What I particularly liked about Chris's articles were his own attitude that this is a really exciting time to be living and that we really need to be thinking about and planning for the things that are coming. We need a vision of how the world might look in the future! As Chris points out, we will have to lead more simple lives and we'll have a more simple society with lower standards of living, out of necessity but that could well mean a better quality of life!

I recommend you have a look at this site and in particular at the crash course.

I have a dream!

I read a great paper today given to me by Simon Lambert of Lincoln University. In it Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham (I think) discuss building and acknowledging "new", or perhaps unrecognised, forms of economy. It's quite heavy going, but it made me feel that perhaps I am a real social scientist after all.

Trouble with me is that I'm always being criticised for not being critical enough. But I don't always want to be critical, because to find new ways forward you have to be open and interested in the possibilities, not busy shutting them down. In effect then critique can be too limiting. But then again some critiques do interest me because they can offer new ways of looking at the world I'm focused on.

What excited me about Gibson and Graham was their argument that academics can help foster new forms of economy by focusing on interesting things that are going on already and illuminating them for others to see. Their argument is that we often get stuck on seeing the bad, but we need to find ways to find and highlight the good.

This reminds me of a conversation that I had with Marie McEntee of Auckland Uni. today, who pointed out that Martin Luther King was looking forward to what could be when he said "I have a dream", whereas all we hear environmentalists talking about is "we have a nightmare". Its easier for people to respond to the positive than the negative. Its a bit like the idea that when you are driving or mountain biking, you need to look hard at where it is you want to go (the space!) and not to focus on that which you want to avoid (the lampost, or the steep bank below!).

What then are our dreams for a better economic system or a better environment or a better society?