Culture Change Letter #238 - Pardon the attention-getter title, but don't you agree that surviving both collapse and climate catastrophe can put you in an advantageous position -- missionary and otherwise -- for attracting mates?
Your role, after the corporate economy is gone and after you can't drive to Las Vegas, for example, will be to somehow bolster or support the surviving population of your community.
There are many important ways to do this. One of them involves, yes, extra love making -- especially if collapse or climate developments have resulted in die-off, and you collectively recognize the need to maintain or increase numbers. Procreation, though, is not everything, when bonding is even more important.
In the 1990s our Auto-Free Times magazine editorialized that people must re-form tribes. (This had nothing to do with sex, but sex is never far from anyone's mind.) Only a few of us heard the call. We've tried to be ready to heed it, or at least we're ready to be ready. Those who have been paying attention to the fatal flaws of the dominant system have relished our solidarity and mutual aid that we managed to practice in the hostile context of the mass illusion. For us, the globalized economy has been an unnecessary evil that gets in the way of convivial survival and thriving in a more natural, human fashion.
Now that a better, ancient way is around the corner, as the inflated technological Babylon falls, it's a good idea to dream and think of what we want. Getting there takes some cojones or a free mind, with a character and set of ethics not averse to changing one's tired or cherished habits. The future belongs to the quick and the healthy.
Now that collapse has begun and it's clear it can only worsen -- if you understand where the consumer abundance has come from and how the huge population has been supported -- here are twelve new steps to go with our year-2000 Pledge for Climate Protection's ten steps (that fortuitously addressed petrocollapse as well in the Ten Steps):
☛ Embrace collapse
☛ Unplug your global-warming machines
☛ Unplug yourself from "the Matrix"
☛ Question jobs. Your time has to belong to you, as you enter into cooperative arrangements for meeting basic needs.
☛ Tell the truth all day long. The time for hiding it and going with the flow of toxic society must end now.
☛ Get a gun and ammunition for self defense?
☛ Discuss future scenarios with loved ones or any friends who are aware of the true state of affairs
☛ Do an inventory of your skills and survival materials
☛ Learn about non-consumerist or post-collapse societies such as the former USSR. Study Dmitry Orlov's writings.
☛ Go on a fast to detoxify and raise your immunity. Good practice for involuntarily lean days and nights, and it may help to appear thin-looking so as to be passed over as a meal. Water-only fasting is ideal for the cleansing, if you can take a break from stress to rest. See Fasting for healing and inner peace. Sex is possible but not great during fasting, but the increased virility and desire are one pay-off from successful fasting. There may not be much petrochemical-pharmaceuticals and the rest of Western technological medical care anyway.
☛ Wake up and forget the government. The government is not only a false source of security; it is part of or controlled by the financial greed-machine whose failure has burst our bubble of trust of the clever, upstanding pin-stripe-suit bankers. It's time to restore pride in self-sufficiency and go back to being part of strong communities. Otherwise, no sex, no nothin'.
Top scientists say CO2 enough to melt the poles
"New science from American Academy shows climate out of control. Horrible news plus: Dr. V Ramanathan says planet already heated 2.4 degrees C! Masked only by smog. Will the economic downturn bring a heat wave, as factories close?" [radio show]
Bubbles of warming, beneath the ice
"As permafrost thaws in the Arctic, huge pockets of methane -- a potent greenhouse gas -- could be released into the atmosphere. Experts are only beginning to understand how disastrous that could be."
By Margot Roosevelt, Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2009
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