Solutions?

A lot of my time is spent reading, and over the last few days I’ve read many things on what, can, could, or should be done about the crisis. Not just in the WWO community but in other places like at speaking truth to power, and the energy bulletin. Most things that come forth as solutions strike me as compromises with the now and not really as fixes for the future. But recommending preparation for a low-energy future without all our bells and whistles seems defeatist and unrealistic. We are addicted to our cheap energy and any way other than forward seems unacceptable. James Kunstler laments the same thing in his blog.

While we in the WWO community did many things ourselves to deal with the problems associated with low energy and reported on what we saw or knew in and around our community, no one thing we wrote about affected the final result. Our patroness mentions the “power of negative thinking” as a way to find results for problems we actually take the time to imagine. Makes sense, can’t fix it if you don’t see it as broken, but that’s also the problem. We imagined the problems, and we found some solutions, but nothing on the scale of getting us out of the seriously deep doo-doo we were headed for. Things seem to have stabilized before they got too uncomfortably bad for most people to deal with, but also before we had a chance to find our own solutions.

Some are saying this is a “step-down” event, a plateau before another slide. But for the vast majority of people this will be seen as the resolution of the crisis. With the end of the WWO who’s to tell them no?

Perhaps because a low-energy future requires lower population densities, people tend to shie away from talking about it. No one wants to be seen as a proponent of a mass die off, even among primitivist.

Should in the next two weeks this plateau become a cliff, and we can no longer communicate, I hope that things we have discussed here will be of use to you all as individuals and small communities. I have limited hope for levels above that.

But maybe that’s the solution.