How about adopting this: “We see the light, gather our courage, and do what needs to be done. Consumption is widely and steeply curtailed, fossil fuel use is severely restrained, and living standards as measured by the amount of stuff flowing through our daily lives are dropped to sustainable levels.”
Collapse Is Already Here
Published by auntyuta
Auntie, Sister. Grandmother, Great-Grandmother, Mother and Wife of German Descent I've lived in Australia since 1959 together with my husband Peter. We have four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. I started blogging because I wanted to publish some of my childhood memories. I am blogging now also some of my other memories. I like to publish some photos too as well as a little bit of a diary from the present time. Occasionally I publish a story with a bit of fiction in it. Peter, my husband, is publishing some of his stories under berlioz1935.wordpress.com View all posts by auntyuta
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The entire sequence of events leading to the collapse of a civilisation is collated..albiet accidently but astutely…in Edward Gibbon’s : “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”….and that tome is backed and relived in Theodore Mommsen’s :”The History of Rome” (The fall of Republican Rome)……there cannot be more concise and spectacular example of why, how and what signs are given than those two main epistles…That the West has ignored them as educational and intellectual gifts to humanity by their authors…who sacrificed their professional and physical lives writing them, yet hold them almost unread and indeed misunderstood as two of the greatest works in literature gives clue to the idiocy and complete stupidity of an “educated to idiocy” governing class….
And I have discovered through the study of those ancient empires, that once the Upper-middle classes gain control simultaneously of both the economic management and the political governance of a society, it is the beginning of the end of that society…perhaps even the end of that civilisation….as history has shown.
But hey!…how would I know…I’m just a tradesman carpenter..
To freefall52, thanks for commenting, Joe. I agree the study about the rise and fall of civilisations is most interesting. Isn’t it the case, that after the disintegration of the Roman Empire the “mob” and the barbarians survived and a lot of the Roman culture also survived in some way? I think it is important that our children and their descendants do have a chance of survival. And I think their chance of survival is very limited if we do not learn as a species to “curtail very severely our excessive consumption”! 🙂
It has been noted and I believe it true that Rome had to collapse so that Europe could arise….
I hope, Joe, that mankind is going to survive somehow . . . .
If 28 billionaires own as much as half the world’s population, one has to wonder if the present democracy with its love of market forces is still relevant. Still, the Scandinavian countries seem to outdo the rest of the greedy world in having a democracy that works for most of the people. Low crime rates, good health-care, good education, innovative and doing most about climate change. Having the ‘American dream’ or the ‘Australian dream’ is not equally enjoyed.
I think it is enjoyed by some Gerard, but at the cost of a significant minority. Or maybe in the meantime it is already more or less a majority that is being left out of the ‘good’ life!