Aven
Just one recommendation this week, because I had too much thinking to do after reading it to read anything else. Brian Calvert of High County News wrote an essay on confronting despair in the age of ecocide and it should be required reading for anyone who works in the environmental field. Or cares about the environment. Or lives on planet earth, for that matter. It’s not exactly a hopeful piece (okay, not at all), but it does contain a useful iteration of the only helpful advice on living through the collapse that I’ve found:
“One day my ashes will be scattered in the eroding mountains, and our civilization, like that of Ozymandias, crumble, and the Earth be swallowed by our dying red star. This is no cause for despair; it is a reminder to be meaningful, to be makers instead of takers, to be of service to something — beauty, justice, loved ones, strangers, lilacs, worms.”
Kristin
I like the general premise of this article about claiming capitalism is the real problem, but… but… it made me wonder is the prime directive of capitalism really “to churn nature and humans into capital?” That is the prime directive an economy must follow to maximize GDP, but economist Jospeh Stiglitz and others have proposed alternatives to GDP, and with a different yardstick could capitalism have a different prime objective?
David Frum reviewed a book that makes the interesting and timely argument that democracies need an effective conservative party.
Some perspectives on mental health: how to beat anxiety; or maybe don’t beat it, listen to Kierkegaard and embrace it because you cannot live an authentic life without grappling with anxiety; but if you are feeling too stressed you can counteract it by cultivating empathetic joy (kind of the opposite of schadenfreude).
