‘Collapse now and avoid the rush’

It’s taken a while to learn how to make a website so thank you for being curious enough to visit it.  May your curiosity be rewarded. 
I’ve put in lots of links for ongoing reading; to open in a new page either click the scroll wheel, or right mouse-click and ‘Open Link in New Page’.

Selling degrowth is hardly likely to be a popular vote winner (and not made any easier by my eschewing of social media and being, according to some, a cranky old bloke).  I’ve had two goes at running for Council on a degrowth platform and at the last got a 3.22% first preference vote!  Even just trying to get my family to vote for me is hard enough.

So it kinda boils down to this:
We are the oil babies, but we’ve now grown a bit too big for the cot.  In merely the course of my lifetime (and a little before) all the easiest to extract oil has been sucked from the Earth’s land and oceans.  Corporations and capital have gobbled up nonrenewable natural resources, unleashed technology and we’ve bred and bred consumers.  But hey, it’s been good, living at the peak of technology, comfort, travel, food and freedom.  Not so easy being a few hundred years either side of now.

Our economy once was one in which interest rates were positive, profits were made, jobs were to be had and families had a wage to afford a house.  Now its greed and growth for growth’s sake.  Building boxes not to be lived in, flying flights to nowhere, more tunnels for tin tops and mining currencies that can’t be seen.

As this growth treadmill elevates faster and faster we desecrate environments because money monkey printing has made it ‘economic’ to extract and transform lesser quality resources, and consuming more and more energy and materials in the process.  The avalanche of debt lets us consume our planet’s future, and for what?    So we can have more, be more, do more, live more?  Could it should it will it be the End of More?

Now, you may be thinking, so what does this have to do with Council?  Please, please peruse my Policies page on how Council can prepare us to eat rough oats and keep the lights on a few hours at night (joking; (sort of)).  There’s enough policies to outrage everyone, even myself, but hopefully not other species.  You will notice on the Policies page I also have ‘National Policies’ – yes indeed! delusions of grandeur. There’s a page of good music too.

But I’m under no illusion that promoting a degrowth message is hardly likely to end up in people rioting for austerity
“What do we want? LESS!!
When do we want it? NOW!!” 
(though, just a bit later would be more convenient). 

The hardest part about detecting collapse lies not with the data – that is clear as a bell ringing on a still morning – but with the emotional difficulty of accepting it (and then acting on it).

But for us (how, now, here), infinite growth on a finite planet isn’t going to happen. As the squeeze comes on, thinking a bit ahead will help.