 We explore powerful trends transforming our world and three scenarios for the future: 1) business as usual, 2) unstoppable decline, and 3) profound maturation.
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Your conversations are so interesting and scarey at the same time. I know you are not dooms-dayers, just doing your bit to help us all WAKE-UP! It’s so sad what we are doing to our beautiful planet. I truly am concerned for our future and hope that we can all pull together to help save ourselves. I live in Brisbane and we have just been through devastating floods and so we are witnessing Mother Earth in action and the problems that we all have to deal with as the climate changes. On the positive side, I have also been witness to the compassion that consequently arose from the devastation. Traffic jams because so many volunteers were reaching out to give a hand to their fellow man. There is hope…we need to cling to this and keep reaching out to each other and pray that it’s not to late. I will be sharing your info with my friends in the hope that eventually we will start to open our eyes and realise that we must all do our bit to save Gaia.
Wonderful, thank You.
I’m doing them one a day and sharing a few words on facebook along the way.
Great action idea! I love examples of small and steady steps in the direction of our dreams. Thank you.
A heartfelt thanks to both of you for making these dialogues available free of charge. I am hoping to be able to share them with family & friends and hopefully initiate a dialogue. Over the last 15-20 years I have enjoyed reading every book written by both of you, each has helped me to awaken and to live more consciously and for that, I am deeply grateful. This particular conversation (“Our World in Transition”) is a difficult one. It’s upsetting, and I have to be careful to not give up or just blame the politicians and the corporations and our consumer society for the state of the world. As much as I am horrified every day, when I see the mountains of garbage my very small group of co-workers create, I have also seen glimmers of hope in conversations with young people who are waking up and beginning to look at the world differently. I don’t have any answers, but I think this is a time when asking ourselves some simple deeply felt questions might be more important than having the answers: What do we really need? What is enough? How can we share the resources we have, how can we heal ourselves, our society and our planet? How can we be more present to Life and to each other? what can I do (or not do)? What’s important? It will take nothing less than a total transformation of human consciousness to get out of this mess and I for one, believe it’s possible, if we each start in our own world, staying present, staying awake, talk to each other, and be willing to think outside of the box.
Gentlemen:
Once again, a thoughtful – and provocative – dialogue. And, once again, thank you for doing this – I only wish it was on prime-time mainstream media, but then I doubt that more than a few would find it interesting within the context of their overbusy lives, which is really sad and really too bad.
Of the many writers that I have read, including the two you mentioned, who have documented their thoughts and research in both fiction and non-fiction form relative to our current situation, there appears to be a definitive split between those who think “we can figure it out and go on as usual” and those who believe “we’re doomed and might as well get used to it”. While the third scenario Duane presented; maturation, is rarely mentioned. And appealing as it is, I wonder how possible it might be considering the population load the planet is now carrying and the the projected increase of that factor, especially in the face of ‘peak oil’, probably to be followed by ‘peak natural gas’ from which most of the fertilizer for food production is derived.
My thoughts on the matter – and I think about it a lot since I’m an old guy like the two of you and have a fair amount of time on my hands – fall somewhere between the ‘doom’ and ‘maturation’ scenarios. When I lean toward doom it’s because I believe the game is up; that we’ve run out of time already and I see little or no movement on the part of The Powers That Be or anyone else toward any significant change.
On the other hand, there is an enormous amount of chatter (and not a little documentation of actual application) on the internet about such things as sustainability, permaculture, Transition Towns & etc. that bodes well for a possible future that might bring western culture out of its current state of adolescence and into a way of living harmoniously with the planet, albeit within a vastly different environment from that we have enjoyed in the recent past.
Whether we-all can pull this off in time is anybody’s guess…..
Heartfelted thanks ~ ♡
I would love to hear your thoughts on my burning question:
How can we give rise to the possible?
WE: Ones – from all over the world- who concluded that human life in its current state.. the way it is being lived by the masses of humanity just do not make sense.. and something has to change.. and this change has to start with me..
Thanks Pete and Duane! These tapes will be invaluable supplements to our teaching and community building here in the Sierra foothills. We use Chris Martenson’s Crash Course as the starting point, and follow this with a deep-dive individual and collective planning process. Our evolviong community is always looking for reinforcing information as well as new information. Well done! congratulations! Thank you!
I am extremely grateful for these eyeopener thoughts
I share it with pleasure on facebook
thank you
Gentlemen you give one pause, for thought, we can’t go on as usual, for example oil “mis-use”.
Oil next to Corn and Water, play such a big part in our lives, i.e., oil is used, for more than fuel.
Petro-Chemicals, which you touched on in your first show, with Pesticides, but there are plastics, paint,
Pharmaceuticals, etc., etc.
Water is becoming a problem locally in my area NC and SC are fighting over one river already, so that topic is a hot button everybody should be concerned with, on every geopolitical level.
Corn may seem like a mundane subject, but if we continue, to use it as aBio-Fuel Source, it is going, to become a big subject:Cattle Feed(questionable use at best); high-frutose-corn syrup; etc., etc., source become more expensive. Thus,the previously mentioned use as a Bio-Fuel, brings water and oil into play, because both are use in bringing Corn, to market, so when the cost, of these inputs are put into play, it’s a blind-alley, that is not sustainable, like a lot, of choices in other fields.
The point being you both are right no point, of the mess we are in can be taken in isolation, because as planet watcher put it, it’s not as much the planet we have, to watch-out for it’s us as a species, we have to be worried about. Why, because if we screw-up as a species and cause our on extinction, the planet will go on, with-out us very nicely. Think about it, in short, we need Earth, but it doesn’t need us.
THANK YOU. PEGGY
GOOG TO HEAR ALL OF YOUR LISTED PROGRAMS THANKS
Nice show and some very relavent topics for discussion. I apreciate your viewpoint on climate changing. I don’t think people are as skeptical about the change as they are about the cause. Al Gore seems to think that we are the cause and he should make a load of $$$ cramming the so called cure down our throat. There has been obvious collusion between many scientists to sell us on the agenda of coperate greeney green. Just remember when we think we have it all figured out the universe will prove us to be a blink in time. Take a look at the solutions proposed by Lyndon Larouche with the Nowapa project, to distribute water to arrid regions of the southern americas.