[Oe List ...] Another book
Jeanette Stanfield
jstanfield at ica-associates.ca
Mon Feb 15 05:51:07 CST 2010
I have been reading a book mentioned earlier on this list serve:
Revolution or Renaissance: Making the transition from an Economic Age
to a Cultural Age by Paul Schafer. Paul shares his thinking on what
it is going to take to shift human society from finding our meaning in
the economic, producing, growing etc into a Cultural age in which
cultural development in the context of the natural, historical and
global environment becomes our central concern . What if the criteria
for how developed each country is was set in a new context of cultural
development? Anyhow I recommend the book. It gives new significance
to the work all of us have been doing for many years now.
Jeanette Stanfield
On 14-Feb-10, at 10:14 PM, Isobel and Jim Bishop wrote:
> Dear Herman,
> Thank you so much for posting this on the Listserve.
> Your description of this Book makes me really want to have a deep
> read of it. Our son Peter ( who spent his entire Middle School in
> Chicago, and then graduated from Jesse H Jones HIgh School in
> Houston-) has been discussing Planet destabilization with his Dad
> Jim, at their weekly lunch- and he is worried. I think this Book
> may be helpful to him and others, as a long range view towards hope.
> Thank you again, and to the listserve.
>
> Greetings from hot and humid Sydney, to all.....
> Isobel Bishop.
> On 26/01/2010, at 1:30 AM, Herman Greene wrote:
>
>> I have just finished David Orr’s Down to the Wire. It is gripping
>> and deeply insightful.
>>
>>
>> David Orr’s book is about the nature of the challenges that face us
>> and what needs to happen. Even after reading many books on where we
>> are, Orr’s book jarred me. He made it plain that there are no short-
>> term or easy fixes and also that there is no way to avoid further,
>> severely negative, decline in the environment resulting from human
>> activities to date.[1] He says we are in the period of the “long
>> emergency” and rather than speak of climate change we should talk
>> of planet destabilization. Adaptation as well as mitigation will be
>> required. The consequences will also require an overhaul of our
>> politics, our economies and our ways of living. Our larger task
>> will be to transform the mode of human civilizational presence on
>> Earth to one that is coherent with the functioning of Earth (or one
>> could also say, as Thomas Berry does, to benign presence or to a
>> mutually enhancing relationship with the other Earth components.)[2]
>>
>> David Orr identifies three tasks for transformational leadership in
>> “the Great Work”[3] of changing this framework.
>>
>> 1. We will need leaders first, with the courage to help
>> people understand and face what will be increasingly difficult
>> circumstances.[4]
>> 2. Second in the “long emergency”[5] leaders will need
>> uncommon clarity about our best economic and energy options.
>> 3. The third quality of leadership in these circumstances is
>> the capacity to foster a vision of a humane and decent future.
>>
>>
>> _____________________________________________
>> Herman F. Greene, Esq.
>> Greene Law, PLLC
>> 2516 Winningham Drive
>> Chapel Hill, NC 27516
>> 919-624-0579 (ph)
>> 919-942-4358 (f)
>> Skype: hgreene-nc
>> hgreene at greenelawnc.com
>> www.greenelawnc.com
>>
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>>
>> [1] Based on my study of the subject, I believe there is little
>> chance that Earth will avoid a 2o C rise in global average
>> temperature in this century and it could be more. See, .e.g. ,
>> European Environment Agency, “CSI 013 - Atmospheric Greenhouse Gas
>> Concentrations -Assessment” (April 2008). The tendency is to see a
>> 2o C rise as a safe target. Orr considers this an unfortunate
>> delusion. He quotes an email to him from George Woodwell, founder
>> of the Woods Hole Research Center, which said:
>>
>> There is an unfortunate fiction abroad that if we can hold
>> temperature rise to 2 or 3 degrees C we can accommodate the
>> changes. The proposition is the worst of wishful thinking. At
>> present temperatures, which would drift upward if the atmospheric
>> burden were stabilized now [(which it isn’t)], we are watching the
>> melting of glaciers, frozen soil, and the accelerated decay of
>> large organic stores of carbon in soils but especially in high
>> latitude solids and tundra peat. A 2 degree [C] average rise in
>> temperature will be 4-6 degrees [C] or more in higher latitudes,
>> enough to trigger the release of potentially massive additional
>> quantities of carbon dioxide and methane [that] would push the
>> issue of control well beyond human reach.
>>
>> In other words, there are going to be massive consequences flowing
>> from human activity to date, without even factoring in the
>> projected accelerated emissions and other activities that are now
>> occurring and will occur. No government or nation is prepared for
>> what lies ahead. Summing this up, Orr writes: “We are now in a
>> close race between our capacity to change at a global scale and the
>> forces that we have unleashed.” (p.4)
>>
>> [2] This is what Thomas Berry calls “the Great Work.”
>>
>> [3] See footnote 5 and accompanying text.
>>
>> [4] To quote Orr again, unfortunately
>>
>> with a few exceptions, climate change is still regarded as a
>> problem to be fixed by small changes, perhaps profitably, and not
>> as a series of dilemmas or as a challenge to consumerism, the
>> growth economy or—in a more abstract but no less real way—to our
>> institutions, organizations, philosophies, and paradigms. (p. 6)
>>
>> [5] Orr borrows this term from the book by James Howard Kunstler
>> entitled The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes
>> of the Twenty-First Century. Kunstler’s work is also very insightful.
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