Thursday, October 13, 2011

"silver lining of mass destruction caused by climate change is that a new culture will emerge that will drop 'shopping' cold turkey"

Will climate change lead to culture change? - CSMonitor.com
Some worry that society will have to suffer total collapse and rebuild itself in the face of climate change. But does it really have to be that drastic?
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This will be a petty (but insightful) blog post about another author thinking about how will adapt to climate change. Paul Gilding (ex-Greenpeace thinker) anticipates that climate change and resource depletion will force us to cast away our old consumption based "American Dream" conception of the "good life" and embrace a more Berkeley lifestyle. Apparently, he believes that a silver lining of mass destruction caused by climate change is that a new culture will emerge that will drop "shopping" cold turkey.

1 comment:

Garry said...

Gee, where have we heard this before? From 1960's hippies? Oh yeah, here it is:

"Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston is the seminal utopian novel by Ernest Callenbach, published in 1975. The society described in the book is one of the first ecological utopias and was influential on the counterculture, and the green movement in the 1970s and thereafter.... During the 1970s when Ecotopia was written and published “many prominent counterculture and new left thinkers decried the consumption and overabundance that they perceived as characteristic of post-World War Two America[1]”.... This book was “a protest against consumerism and materialism, among other aspects of American life[3]”.... the preferred lifestyle that includes celebrating gender roles, official encouragement of maintaining racial segregation, discouraging monogamy, promoting sexual freedom. A disdain for television is manifested by promoting popular communal combat "sport" events designed to end in bloodshed and even death. Liberal cannabis use, as well as... a defense strategy focused both on developing a highly advanced arms industry while also maintaining hidden WMD within major US population centers to discourage reconquest."

Hmmm. Ecofreaks, potheads, racists, sexually promiscuous, and favoring communal death matches and nuclear extortion. Sounds just about right for our modern-day "greens" and Occupier neo-hippies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotopia