Reality Check

Reality Check

Does anyone really understand what “sustainable” actually means? Where do we go to get the “truth” about what our future is becoming? Are the ”Thought Leaders” abandoning us in their retreat into so-called “sustainable communities?” Is this a movement of people who are living within the so-called “privileged class” that will leave the 40-hour work week public behind - those who struggle enough just to pay all the bills - so they can act out their personal versions of “Survival of The Fittest?”

Dr. Simon Michaux is working actively as one of our many canaries singing as loudly as possible from our systemic cage. My admiration for his work as a physicist and geologist led me to a deeper understanding of our “circular economy.” In our current economy, we take materials from the Earth, make products from them, and eventually throw them away as waste - the process is linear. In a circular economy, by contrast, we stop waste from being produced in the first place.

Yet the solution of creating a “sustainable city” so to speak, leaves me grasping at details that don’t seem to include the thrust and hum of the greater global culture we live in.

It is difficult to describe the stomach drop/heart palpating feeling I had when I read about the profound environmental destruction propagated by the use of solar power for electricity. The mountains destroyed for the few precious minerals required for the on-going production of solar electricity smashed any notion I may have had that any solution for “sustainable energy” actually exists.

The logistics of off-the-grid living may be far less attractive once we realize what the details of those lives will actually look and feel like. 

We are embedded in a system that is collapsing. Love, respect, trust, and honor seem to have failed us within our political environment. World leaders have dropped the ball, and collapsed into deluded thinking about what needs to happen to prevent the collapse of our ecosphere. Today I read the headline: “Fury after Exxon chief says the public is to blame for climate failures.” 

Unconditional love seems to be missing from the business-as-usual class of world actors. “We the people” agree about this. Will these bad actors throw their nukes at us in a fit of anger and powerlessness? This reality vibrates at the core of our current meta-crisis. 

Survival bunkers as a backup plan? Really? Can we have a new system after the economic crisis? Who owns what? Who controls what? While systems collapse a new system will emerge, yet not a system that will attend to any version of unconditional love. Appalling situations seem clearly on the horizon. As I write - ruling elite families invest in opulent survival bunkers that will not be open to any family save their own.

Cut the population down to 1 billion. Right. Through what process? A COVID-styled plague? This is another popular solution among the ruling elite. Yet there are more of us than them. 

Science is now telling us that endocrine disruption is quite literally raining down on us, yet who is offering any solution? Petrochemicals are in the food chain. Rising infertility and cancer are clear and current side effects. 

Strategies of the great reset - off we go into densely populated cities. Rewild the rest. Control the population in those cities. Control the public. The ruling elite have plans. Plans that are glaringly bereft of unconditional love. Does this perspective make me an alarmist or a realist? 

Evolution will save us. This is the gist of the message. Cognitive dissonance is beginning to set in. What is real? What is likely? How will this reality affect my personal future?

Let's imagine for a minute that we have had a global collapse, and I am now in what we know as a “sustainable” community. Let's sort through the practicality of this solution. Because we no longer feel ok about destroying entire mountains for the minerals needed for solar power, hydropower is limited to locations, and fossil fuels are no longer an option - how will you be lighting your off-the-grid cabin in your sustainable community? 

Do you have a hand-powered oil press and the right seeds needed to make oil for sooty lamp use? Do you have bee hives to produce the wax needed for candles? Do you have the knowledge base to forage successfully if, say, a bad storm came at the wrong moment and eliminated the planned food sources for the year? Are you willing to dig worms and bugs for protein? What will you do if the landscape is so denuded that your only source of vitamin C is a tea of boiled pine needles?

Agricultural vulnerability. Weather vulnerability. Energy vulnerability. Waves of innovation will soon be crashing over our current cultural systems out of stark necessity. Yet what happens to the ordinary people who are freezing and starving during the messy transitions that appear inevitable? Are our critical thinkers truly evaluating the current evidence? A parallel system is actually the rise of evolution out of our current death culture - one that is built on our unsustainable need to accumulate “things” more commonly known as “products.”  

In this scenario, developing and generative AI will view us as the problem. Our world economic culture is stuck in an unsustainable juggernaut. People are more protective of status and belongings than they are about people and their plight in the global cultures around us. To quote Dr. Michaux “Are the stupid leading the blind? Or are the blind leading the stupid?” If we can no longer rob our natural environment to “grow” or survive, what will we depend on next?

I read a recent article about land owners in South Carolina who want to pass a bill making it legal to shoot and kill a homeless person caught squatting on their land. It reminds me about the pictures of Texas border patrol guards on horseback with whips, hunting down desperate migrants who just crossed their border. Humanity is now in the crosshairs of the ruling elite.

Nature has guaranteed us evolution. Cruel as she can be, the true nature of evolution is embedded in those first four letters…love. Evol and volution are our operating instructions as a humanity. When love is propelled forward through the arch of simple volution - humanity will evolve accordingly.

In today’s world our current reality hits me like a crumpled piece of paper holding an unexpected message carried by the wind. Where did it come from, and where is it going? What could it possibly say other than evolve?