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Having read Solderpunk's most recent post
Vodka and Cigarettes Sustainability
I've got my head swimming with a lot of thoughts.
I'm getting some of them out now and hoping I can better organize them later.
First, I agree that circular-economy zero-waste stuff is probably a pipe dream, something that makes a nice story to tell ourselves while not doing all that we can now. People I know and respect believe that if we can just really commit to renewable power sources and research technology even harder we can invent our way out of environmental trouble. I'm not optimistic about that approach, at least not in the near-term. I do agree with the idea, though, that wasting *less* is still a really good thing to do: at the very least to buy us time and autonomy. I'll get back to the second part in a moment.
Also, like Solderpunk, I'm not willing to support any kind of authoritarianism in order to make people have fewer children and consume less resources.
But I suppose my views on all of this fundamentally come down to this axiom: I think in the absence of an extractive global economy with outsized power in a small number of indviduals, it will be hard but not impossible to move towards an actually sustainable---in Solderpunk's terms "water and granola" sustainable---world.
I mean environmental causes are actually incredibly popular. The idea of "saving the planet" has had massive support my whole fucking life for god's sake. I think a large part of the problem is that your average person has very little they can really do about any of this because the levers of power are mostly held by your Amazons, your Walmarts, your Googles, your Exxons and your Foxconns.
But what do we do about any of that short of mass murder of major corporate executives? Well, presuming you---like me---would vastly prefer a non-violent solution then I think this is where grass roots efforts to increase autonomy and reduce dependence on these major corporations lies.
I'm not saying it'll be easy, but I think we could do something like what Illich proposes in Tools for Conviviality: we can move towards more local manufacturing and trade, slowly disentangling the global economy---so very slowly so we don't cause mass death from starvation &c.---and gut these world powers simply by refusing to participate in the economic shell game they've set up for us.
Once we make headway towards that goal, I think it's not actually crazy to think we can start down the path of water and granola sustainability.