Mar 28 2010

Its about Energy, stupid… and Empathy

(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

So…its not just us who think this way. Well, you guys know that but sometimes I don’t.

This piece is an absolute MUST READ by Jeremy Rifkin.

Today, we are on the cusp of another historic convergence of energy and communication–a third industrial revolution–that could extend empathic sensibility to the biosphere itself and all of life on Earth. The distributed Internet revolution is coming together with distributed renewable energies, making possible a sustainable, post-carbon economy that is both globally connected and locally managed.

Photobucket

boo.fucking.yah!

In this new era of distributed energy, governing institutions will more resemble the workings of the ecosystems they manage. Just as habitats function within ecosystems, and ecosystems within the biosphere in a web of interrelationships, governing institutions will similarly function in a collaborative network of relationships with localities, regions, and nations all embedded within the continent as a whole. This new complex political organism operates like the biosphere it attends, synergistically and reciprocally. This is biosphere politics.

We know this, right? You, you and you.

The new biosphere politics transcends traditional right/left distinctions so characteristic of the geopolitics of the modern market economy and nation-state era. The new divide is generational and contrasts the traditional top-down model of structuring family life, education, commerce, and governance with a younger generation whose thinking is more relational and distributed, whose nature is more collaborative and cosmopolitan, and whose work and social spaces favor open-source commons. For the Internet generation, “quality of life” becomes as important as individual opportunity in fashioning a new dream for the 21st century.

I’m sending this link to everybody I know.

He concludes with:  “The transition to biosphere consciousness has already begun.”

The transition to biosphere consciousness has already begun. All over the world, a younger generation is beginning to realize that one’s daily consumption of energy and other resources ultimately affects the lives of every other human being and every other creature that inhabits the Earth.

The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth. But our rush to universal empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change. Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?

Just… go read the whole piece. {sigh} Another book to add to my wish list.

14 comments

Skip to comment form

  1. for my daughter’s sake…

    Photobucket

    • Edger on March 28, 2010 at 18:27
    • #

    It’s been a long haul.

    Alan Watts in the mid sixties:

    Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body–a center which “confronts an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came into this world.” “You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.”

    This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin.

    The first result of this illusion is that our attitude to the world “outside” us is largely hostile. We are forever “conquering” nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order. In America the great symbols of this conquest are the bulldozer and the rocket–the instrument that batters the hills into flat tracts for little boxes made of ticky-tacky and the great phallic projectile that blasts the sky. (Nonetheless, we have fine architects who know how to fit houses into hills without ruining the landscape, and astronomers who know that the earth is already way out in space, and that our first need for exploring other worlds is sensitive electronic instruments which, like our eyes, will bring the most distant objects into our own brains.)

    The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events–that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies–and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.

    • banger on March 29, 2010 at 00:10
    • #

    The Emphatic Civilization can’t happen until people grow some courage. It won’t just happen. The killers who have no limits to what they want to do or are allowed to do will just kill the emphatic people and steal their money, mates and children. We have to figure out what to do with that segment of the population that the American oligarchy depends on to staff its security services and prison guards.

    Respectfully, though I think Rifkin is offering a good path to salvation I’m afraid we still have to deal with the violent and their controllers. As a practical matter, I don’t see empathy growing — I mainly see avoidance, denial, fantasizing (about empathy, spiritual growth etc.) and so on. There are a lot of ripe individuals but there’s nothing to join, no movement, no shelter, no sustenance for those of us who are dissidents other than places like this. But we need to keep looking and thank you for adding to the mix.

    BTW, I do have my own “path” to explore –I will start to write about it as soon as I finish a project I’m working on right now.

  4. The recognition and isolation of a new era in evolution, the era of noogenesis, obliges us to distinguish correlatively a support proportionate to the operation—that is to say, yet another membrane in the majestic assembly of telluric layers.  A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious reflection.  The point of ignition grows larger.  The fire spreads in ever widening circles till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence.  Only one interpretation, only one name can be found worthy of this grand phenomenon.  Much more coherent and just as extensive as any preceding layer, it is really a new layer, the ‘thinking layer’, which, since its germination at the end of the Teritiary period, has spread over and above the world of plants and animals.  In other words, outside and above the biosphere there is the noosphere.

    …Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Phenomenon of Man”, Book 3, “Thought”, Chapter 1, 1.c, “The Threshold of the Terrestrial Planet: The Noosphere.

    Read and be inspired!  

  5. but the videos are coming out.

    http://www.google.com/#hl=en&s…

  6. monday monday…

  7. …Rifkin puts this in a much more accessable, modern idiom than Teilhard de Chardin, but the ultimate message is much the same.  

    Good find.  I’ll link to it.  

Comments have been disabled.