Here it is election season again. Various people, liberal and conservative are asking us to make them our “leaders”. I have no doubt that many of these people are very nice people with the best of intentions. The problem is with reality. When you factor in Climate Change, Peak Oil and the level of economic collapse & human suffering that will accompany these things, it is not an exaggeration to say that we need a complete, bottom-to-top restructuring of human civilization and we need it right fucking now. Actually, we needed it 30 years ago, but that’s not gonna happen. Any politician attempting to bring about 10% of the desperately needed change is going to be committing political suicide. So a strong, environmentally conscious, progressive liberal democrat will essentially say “You’ve GOT to vote for me. I’m gonna do 2% of what needs to be done and my Republican opponent is only going to do 1%! So you see, I’m TWICE as good as my opponent. So, it’s extremely important that you vote for me!”
So therefore, nothing meaningful is going to be done to address Climate Change, the end of fossil fuels, limits to growth, population overshoot, increased toxicity in the environment or anything else. Our magnificent leaders are going to keep applying crazy glue, band aids, chewing gum and duct tape to this utterly unsustainable paradigm until the whole thing just falls over and goes KABOOM!
Listen to the following four words: SUSTAINABILITY IS NOT OPTIONAL. We have no choice in the matter. We WILL achieve complete, total sustainability. Whatever we fail to do voluntarily, we WILL do involuntarily. So go ahead and enjoy voting. I’m sure that some of the people you vote for will be reasonably nice and well intentioned. Please just understand that as a civilization, we are perhaps walking in the correct direction, but it is on the deck of a ship that is speeding in the wrong direction. To carry the ship metaphor a little further, just imagine that we live on a flat Earth and when we sail to the edge, we fall off.