'Lessons from the Edge' is very dark. I'm surprised so many people manage to sit on the edge of the cliff for so long, still hoping somehow that people will en masse turn around and embrace a world-saving anti-consumption attitude of love and interdependence.

Personally I spent too long working in finance to believe that any significant number of people can overcome their own conditioning towards over-consumption & self-importance by their own efforts.

At some point, hope of success has to go away. That doesn't stop the work though. You don't stop loving God just because you can't persuade anyone by force of argument to turn away from sin.

Apparently we're all prophets now.
Tessa Lowe | Homepage | 09.11.09 - 10:12 am | #

http://www.worldchanging.com/arc...ves/ 010672.html

Did you read this one?

I'm not sure how I feel about it.

I do agree with the sentiment behind this paragraph:-
The Transition movement seems saturated with what Michael Lerner called "surplus powerlessness" disguised as practicality. All over the world, groups of people with graduate degrees, affluence, decades of work experience, varieties of advanced training and technological capacities beyond the imagining of our great-grandparents are coming together, looking into the face of apocalypse... and deciding to start a seed exchange or a kids clothing swap.

And I agree with the writer that most people (especially myself) have (perhaps prematurely) given up on change through political systems they don't understand or haven't the heart or courage to engage with. A friend who is a green councillor in Watford told me that he got into local politics when he attended some council meetings as an observer and discovered how clueless everyone was, and how he could get things changed, even without being elected, by simply understanding how the system worked.

I feel in my heart that I don't want to get involved with civic leadership because it's so full of nastiness. And no doubt that's how the people who benefit would like things to stay.

But more significantly, I don't want to get involved with civic leadership because I've no sense of a vision as to what my alternative is. Or rather, I do, but it's not something a political system is empowered to affect - hearts and minds. I strongly suspect that if I were to pick up the hammer of local government, everything would begin to look like a (very idolatrous) nail.

So in that sense, I completely understand why TT try to create a subculture of relationships and sharing independent of mainstream politics. But at the same time, seed exchanges and kids clothing swaps will never be radical enough, and might even delude communities into thinking they're saved, with only the barest flicker of repentance.

Still, I thank God for every heart that is moved to reverence creation - which includes all humanity.

And loving the creator himself is only a heartbeat from loving his creation, as I discovered when I asked God to give me evidence of his existence. 'How about creation?' he said, 'And the fact that you're here, right now, just in this one moment, and only in this body, to witness it?'

'Oh, right,' says I, smiling.
Tessa Lowe | Homepage | 09.11.09 - 12:32 pm | #

Odd reading the original Steffen article only after reading Rob Hopkins response. My sympathies are with Rob.

But on the whole I do think it is too late to prevent trauma. I'm presently most interested in how to voyage through the wilderness - and there might be a post on that before long.
Sam Norton | Homepage | 09.11.09 - 12:57 pm | #