The bottom line is TRANSFORMATION

As Naomi Klein says, frequently "There are no solution options left on the table that are not radical." I've found myself having to make this case rather forcefully with a number of people lately who are very much inclined to be "sustainable" but they have great difficulty letting go of the idea that sustainability CAN NOT/DOES NOT mean "greening up" stuff that we do now. They don't get that "going green" wasn't probably EVER a functional response but that it's just not even in the solution window now. Recycling all your cans and using helical light bulbs is so far short of the mark that it almost doesn't move the needle onto the scale. Change really HAS to be  T-R-A-N-S-F-O-R-M-A-T-I-O-N-A-L!! Don't take a page from the "Amish book" - Buy The Book!!!

Further more, it's worth noting that in the same period of the last 6 months I have seen a huge number of folks who have the same romantic notions about "being sustainable" that some white folks here (in the US) had about "being indigenous" about 100 years ago. "The noble red man, aligned with nature, continues to live... blah, blah, blah" and while said "noble red men" have never completely lost track of their culture and heritage, they will be the first to tell you that it wasn't about nobility. It was about doing the best you can under varying circumstances, and it was about a lot of hard work, pretty much all the time. It was also about community that worked together and had not lost its ever present sense of what community means.

These "nouveau natural" people (same genetic lines as the pseudo-indigenous, I'm pretty sure) think they've gotten sustainability religion and what they've gotten is a romantic image of Grandma canning peaches with the scent of the rich peach-ness floating on the air, mingled with cinnamon and clove. The aroma therapy is great, but the vision lacks substance. These folks have not/are not thinking about planting and growing the trees that the peaches came from, protecting the saplings against "too cold" conditions, or "too hot" conditions, recognizing that you will be sharing some of the crop with the birds, and insects (or badgers as the case may be) and so you do what is realistic to make sure that you grow enough for everybody AND you bust a hump when they are ripe to get them off the tree and into the house.

Being ready to light the fire and spin into action on short notice for the canning requirements of the moment as various thinks hit their optimum ripeness and you have to can them before they get past prime, the cleanup and spin-up again, hot on the heals of cleanup if necessary. Getting all the jars ready to rock, with fastidious attention to detail, because slack in the canning department is poison in the winter - Hell, HAVING enough jars to handle the load - most people have NO idea how many jars it takes to can up a winter's worth of food (or more), or for that matter how productive the garden has to be.  Quite obviously, the list goes on...

So, while we are busy engineering the transition I think it is CRITICAL that we remain clear about what we are transitioning to. If it's not transformational relative to now, it's not the right place. How to recover the baby we threw out with the bathwater... that is not a pretty picture to contemplate but if that baby is still alive we NEED to recover it, not just try to make a new one.

Prepare yourself - we are getting ready for the "great reveal" when we discover how much no-shit real work was being done that tempted Western culture to use human slavery first and then hydro-carbon chemical energy slaves and then in a (potentially final) burst of market capitalism excess, newly re-enslaved people as wage slaves to ride herd on the energy slaves for them. Witness the rise and fall of the oligarch supreme. TRANSFORMATION - because hanging on to the tattered remnants of the greatest fail in human history is our death warrant. TRANSFORMATION - because the fundamental survival of life relies on evolution, and the rule of evolution is that when conditions become unsustainable, you change locations, you change your way of being, or you die!