thoughts regarding our generation of social changers
The recent deaths of my very-Green friends David and Madelyn got me to thinking.
We’re aging out now. Here are some reflections:
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The extent of overshoot is way greater than most of us could have recognized. The modern monstrosity has grown incrementally. We’ve all become so used to the insane pace and scale of it that we tend not to fully appreciate its scope and depth.
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But now … Peak Everything in our time: https://richardheinberg.com/bookshelf/peak-everything
Having developed over five millennia, it could take a millennium for the Leviathan to be dismantled and transformed. The process will involve waves of countercultural resistance, rejection, and refusal; cultivation of alternative institutions and communities.
I believe the first wave was what we called “The Sixties”: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/889404.Sources
The Movement for a New Society. We naively hoped to realize the vision in our own time. We could not have known the scope of the problem. We didn’t understand about the idea of waves of social change; about the process, the inevitable dissipation.
Residue of that first wave: Green politics, deep ecology, social ecology, bioregionalism, ecovillages, ecosocialism. That’s not insignificant! Yet our generation of social changers tended to wind up disappointed … feeling like so little in the way of tangible transformation came of it. Well, we took three steps on a hundred-step journey. Maybe during the next wave they will take four steps. That would be great.
