NASA is soliciting ideas for a nuclear reactor on the moon. To power space stuff. Oh my God, NO. Does human invasiveness and arrogance know no bounds???!! In a soulless colonizer culture, nothing is sacred.
In other capitalist-industrialist-colonizer culture news, hopium-dispensing green-tech pundits seeking a way to power civilization without any of us in the rich countries having to change our hoggish ways plan on poking lots of holes in the earth, and fracturing rocks, to tap into geothermal heat that is WAY below the earth’s surface. (It’s one of the ideas presented by one of the speakers in TED Countdown at COP26, Session 1. An hour and 20 minute video well worth watching in its entirety, and you know my fidgety self who has trouble sitting through vids doesn’t say that lightly!)
I’m not talking basic low-tech homescale tunnels-a-few-feet-deep-in-the-ground kind of geothermal. I’m talking miles-deep, earthquake-causing geothermal. Now I’m no engineer, but poking a bunch of deep holes into a molten-cored planet just doesn’t sound like a safe idea at all.
Bad news and bad ideas aside, I feel deeply grateful and privileged to be part of a group and movement that’s pursuing radical creativity; deep cultural restructuring; looking in the mirror and getting ruthlessly honest; learning and practicing the old good eco-centric ways; exploring what aspects of modernity might be genuinely worth carrying into the future and what is best consigned to the compost bin of history. Much love and gratitude to all my fellow permaculturists, Deep Adaptation folks, and Transformative Adventurers!
Following is a list of Facebook groups where most or all of the people agree that there is no “magical green energy” we can just switch over to and carry on with our hoggish, depraved ways. Groups where the focus is voluntary self-restraint.
Riot for Austerity group; Transformative Adventures group (Permaculture Landscape Transformation via Transformative Adventures); Deep Adaptation group; Degrowth – join the revolution group; The Non-Consumer Advocate group; Zero Waste, Zero Judgment group.
In the thread I started in the TA group to voice my disgust about the idea of nukes on the moon, and my wariness about geothermal, a guy commented that geothermal is much better than coal.
We (inhabitants/inmates of colonialist industrialist culture) totally lose touch with how violent our whole culture is. Every aspect from how we grow our food to how we extract our energy to how we treat fellow human beings and other species. We act like the only way to get our needs met is to destroy land and communities. It’s not.
Permaculture helps us see more clearly and build alternative, ethical, abundant paths.
Destroying land and ecosystems “less” is not enough. We have to regenerate ecosystems and reform our disconnect from nature including fellow humans and all other species. Mountaintop removal should never have happened, nuclear on the moon should never happen, disturbing the ground to the extent of causing earthquakes should never happen. I realize some people think the destruction is necessary or at least worth the trade-off; I’m just not one of them.
If we radically reduced our demand for fuel, water, etc., our whole landscape (physical, economic, social) would shift.
We keep acting as if voluntarily curbing our sick, morally bankrupt, energy-hoggish ways is not a real option.
And, miles into the earth sounds miles too far to me.
What would indigenous cultures do? is what I ask myself more and more these days.
I am just one person, and a nobody in the grand scheme of things. But I put my opinions out there in case others might feel as I do. Many of us do, and we need to help and support each other to keep up the movement.
Many people would not be willing to sacrifice the trappings of a typical USAmerican middle-class lifestyle to avoid continuing to desecrate the Earth, ecosystems, the communities of fellow humans. But, there are also many of us who would be more than willing … and, more and more of us are talking with each other and getting organized.
People who worship techno-hopium, and hate hearing about radical reduction and conservation, tend to take an all-or-nothing stance. That’s a trap that many humans keep falling into. “Oh, what, you want to force everyone to live in caves with no light and no medicine yadda yadda?”
Nope.
Contrary to popular belief, living at a small fraction of the average USAmerican’s footprint is rather nondramatically easy. Almost anticlimactically easy — though for sure there are challenges, most coming from poor, wasteful top-down design, hypercentralized systems, and anti-eco social norms that ridicule reverence for nature, and shame humble thrift.
A movement called the Riot for Austerity (90 percent reduction challenge) has been going on for years. Lots of us have voluntarily reduced our footprint to 20 percent or even sometimes 5-10 percent of the USA average resident’s.
And it’s voluntary. We are out to make radical conservation cool.
Besides this movement, there are other movements/groups such as Degrowth, Anti-consumerism, and Deep Adaptation — all brimming with people sharing their voluntary reduction wins and encouraging each other on.
Will it work? I don’t know, but I am putting my heart and my “vote” into it. We’ve all gotta make a stand for something, if we want things to change. So this is what I’m betting on.
I’m just one person but there are many others.
In this talk, Sid Smith gives a great overview of EROI and how it’s dropped over the past decades. He also summarizes some “energy savior” technologies and why each one won’t save us. And, he presents a sketch of what a powered-down world might look like and how our lives could be much richer for it.
Sid Smith how to enjoy end of world