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In our quest to make a better world, we often strive for more efficient use of resources. But is the goal of efficiency the right one? Our guest this week on Sea Change Radio, Low Tech Magazine founder, Kris De Decker, makes a compelling case for the abandonment of efficiency as the barometer for planetary stewardship. He proposes we use the simpler, but perhaps more painful objective of sufficiency. De Decker argues that pursuing greener, more efficient methods and technologies is, more often than not, a fool’s errand. He maintains that the human appetite for comfort, growth, and acquisition tends to turn efficiencies into increased consumption, and that the only way to truly fight climate change is for all of us to recognize that enough is, well, enough.
Sissyfuss on Mon, 12th Feb 2018 9:10 am
Jevons Paradox is now Deckers Dilemma. With cancer monkeys having it all is not enough.
Davy on Mon, 12th Feb 2018 9:44 am
This guy is great. I have been saying many of the same thing in my rants. Low tech, sufficiency, “no”, “less”, downsize with dignity, and “real” green. Let’s get real and honest though, efficiency, high tech, and affluence sell so if you want to promote the former you must include the latter into the struggle at reforming the status quo. I also rant to those dooming and prepping use the status quo to leave it. Don’t be an angel with iron wings. Don’t be a fake green hypocrite but be real green whenever you can. Being real green is beyond most because it requires alternative living. Real is being part of the cyclical planetary system. It means adapting your behavior towards this natural blueprint of success and away from status quo of human exceptionalism and manifest destiny of development that is linear and disregards limits. Increased affluence beyond a point is not success it is cancer.
If we have any chance going forward it will be through a hybrid of the new and old filtered through real wisdom. It will be the best of both applied in a practical way. This “new” wisdom is not from the status quo where there is multiple fake social narratives of wisdom. These are hijacked version embraced by all aspects of civilization. The new wisdom is the old wisdom we sacrificed for affluence. This hijacking is who and what we are now and it is clearly wrong in regards to planetary scaling. That said this wrong must be the starting point for getting to right. Right is what man used to be long before we modernized. Not that all modernization is wrong. What is wrong with modernization is the pursuit of individual discretionary wants based on price and markets. Affluence with little regard for other humans and the natural commons is not right but it is the status quo. The markets and the politics of modernism is flawed and it is further flawed by overpopulation and overshoot but this is all we have. It is competitive cooperation and we are stuck with it.
Since there is no going back there is now about adaptation and mitigation of the mess we have gotten ourselves into. This mess we cannot extricate ourselves from whole but we can adapt and to live another day. We can mitigate this by perusing low tech solutions. We can go local, seasonal, and intermittent. We can embrace resilience and sustainability while we understand efficiency strategies inevitably are part of this effort. We can’t reject efficiency but we must be very careful to avoid applying the efficient for “MOAR” instead of “Less”. Today efficiency appears to most often just contribute to more consumption.
The spiritual is part of this. Community is the vehicle. We must understand civilization is a lost cause with a short shelf life. Local community with spiritual meaning can replace this loss of hope. We once had a grand feeling of manifest destiny of ever increasing techno development that has driven us through the latest period of modernism. This is a failure. We can spiritually embrace real green and turn away from the Moar of modernism. This moar has corrupted both the brown and fake green that are the forces at work today. We can speak out to those who will listen and tell them they are fools for wanting their cake and eat it. We can tell them the satisfaction of being real and honest. We can tell them meaning is found through humility and the acceptance of truth good or bad in our regards. The truth today is obviously we are wrong and our civilization is self-destructing.
Civilization is clearly late term and on a gradient of decline so we must also be honest that there is only so much we can do in regards to our part we play in this. We can yield to these greater forces and harness them to transform our lives from what could be to something better. In any case hope and time will be in short supply. In this regard then it is about giving thanks for today and attempting to avoid too much preoccupation with fantasy futures of happy endings. This is not going to end well and humility and honesty are needed for realism of the pain and suffering ahead. We should also leave the past as one who would avoid kicking a mean dog. Let that mean dog sleep and look at the trap we are in together and try to get along. If we can’t get along and try to harness what is left in lifeboats then all that is really left is hospices.
MASTERMIND on Mon, 12th Feb 2018 9:49 am
Davy
Your word salad rants are getting a little old..Smoke a joint and chill the fuck out!
Davy on Mon, 12th Feb 2018 9:59 am
mm, poor guy, has to struggle with writing a paragraph and of course it must be backed up with multiple and redundant 10 year old peer reviewed out of date reports. If I see another I think I will puke. lol. Then there is the sexual deviancy and suicidal tendencies that belongs to juveniles just discovering the joys of masturbation. LMFAO, no wonder mm can’t write more than a few sentences. My rants have a place for some who visit but for the subhuman here they are a source of annoyance and that gives me enjoyment also. If forces dumbasses to try to say something and what happens is they can’t.
MASTERMIND on Mon, 12th Feb 2018 10:25 am
Davy what peer reviewed article is ten years old and out of date?
NASA Peer Reviewed Study: Industrial Civilization is Headed for Irreversible Collapse (Motesharrei, 2014)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615
The Royal Society: Peer Reviewed Study, Now for the First Time A Global Collapse Appears Likely (Ehrlich, 2013)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3574335/
Peer Reviewed Study: Limits to Growth was Right. Research Shows We’re Nearing Global Collapse (Turner, 2014)
http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf
Anonymouse1 on Mon, 12th Feb 2018 5:52 pm
No one reads your boring, rambling, nutter diatribes exceptionalist. Just like no one pays any attention to your somewhat shorter, cut and pastes.
Still, kind of funny, in a pathetic sort of way, is watching you argue with your sock over which one of your personality disorders is the dumber of the two.
Davy on Mon, 12th Feb 2018 6:28 pm
Sure they do mousie and that is why you hate yourself. You know deep down inside you are an idiot incapable of normal comments or debate. I can comment and debate you can’t. You represent the worst of what is coming out of Canada. A struggling dumbass that finds pleasure in stalking and pricking. The only subject that energizes you is either jew baiting or anti-American nonesense you make up most of the time.