CB: So Michael, as a subscriber to Truth to Power's Daily News Digest, I know that every day you see the headlines regarding skyrocketing food prices. Can you say a bit about why you think this is happening?

MB: Well, I think what we're seeing with food prices, with spot shortages and commodities in various places around the world is just the beginning of a much larger situation. Fundamentally, what's happening is that as the cost of fossil fuels goes up, then the whole agricultural production system is affected because the whole system is dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizers for fuel, pesticides, and herbicides. The cost of all of these is going up, and we're just now reaching the point where, as the era of cheap fossil fuels ends, and as fossil fuels continue to become increasingly expensive, the entire global industrial agricultural system is going to collapse. We are seeing the very beginnings of that right now, and for most people, especially here in America, it seems very remote, but it will have tremendous impact here in this country within the next two or three years.

CB: What would you say to people who would argue that actually the price of oil has gone down and doesn't seem to be rising much?

MB: Well, the price of oil fluctuates a lot, but the trajectory is steadily upward. Since we've reached the point on the planet where we're beyond Peak Oil, that is, we've burned more than half the oil that's on the planet, it is inevitable that oil from here on out will be harder to get out of the ground and more and more expensive. This is not a bullet we can dodge.

CB: Currently Transition Colorado is working very hard at finalizing your first Eat Local Campaign for Boulder County. You have the Boulder County Commissioners on board and the Boulder City Council as well. Transition Colorado could have chosen to focus on a number of other issues this year. Why is this event so urgent, in your opinion, and what do you hope to accomplish by organizing it?

MB: As we've been emphasizing the need for relocalization and our community's needing to be able to meet our most essential needs locally instead of being dependent on globalized systems, we've seen that the area where we are most vulnerable here in Boulder County is food. At the moment we're spending about $700 million a year on food. From all that we can tell from the limited data that's available, less than 1% of that is being spent on food being grown in Boulder County. That's a tiny, tiny amount. So currently, our food shed, which is kind of like a watershed, stretches across the globe. We're bringing in food from China, South America, Europe, and as the industrial agricultural system begins to fail, we have no choice but to shrink our food shed to be much, much more local. And it looks like we don't have much time to do that. The impact on industrial agriculture will begin to unfold within the next two-three years, so we need to quickly rebuild local food and farming.

Fortunately, there has been a tremendous amount of work done by people like Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Joel Salatin-people who have been working on these issues for years and have helped to educate millions and millions of people about the importance of local, organic food. So there's a great readiness and a rising demand for locally grown, organic food. So what that means is that this is an area where we can have the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time. It's not everything that we need to do in terms of relocalization, but it is maybe the most important thing.

There are lots of reasons for this besides needing to meet our food needs locally. There's a benefit to health that comes from local, fresh, organic food. One of the most important but perhaps least recognized issues in the transitioning from an industrial, fossil fuels agricultural system to a localized organic system is that the latter will greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We're beginning to understand now that the way we grow and process our food, the way we ship it-all of that, contributes about 31% to our greenhouse gas emission. So here in Boulder, while there's a lot of effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through pretty advanced climate action plans, there is no discussion of the impact of food and farming and greenhouse gas emission. So this is one area where we can make a huge difference in a very short period of time. And since no one else locally is taking that issue on, we will and we are because we must. This is also an area where Transition initiatives around the country can demonstrate leadership.

CB: This leads me to ask the next question which is: What should individuals be doing in terms of creating their own food security? And what should neighborhoods and communities be doing to create food security for their place?

MB: For a long time now we've been saying that it's a good idea for everyone to learn to grow at least some of their own food. This is something that everyone can do, no matter where they live, even if they live in a high-rise apartment building. They can grow at least some of their food. Initially it's not so much about how much food they might each produce, but it's about learning the skills. It's about reconnecting with the natural processes and cycles of life and beginning to understand soil, how to build it and restore it. These are skills we have become very disconnected from and that will be essential for all of us in the future.

So we think that those kinds of skills are going to be more important to food security than storing up lots of food. We can always grow food. As we're compelled increasingly to eat seasonally again, we're going to have to learn how to preserve food from harvest so that we can consume it during the winter months. So we get to learn all those things like canning, drying food-ways that we can feed ourselves year-round. We've gotten so accustomed to being able to eat whatever we want anytime we want it. We just go to the grocery store. We've become totally dependent on this system, and we've lost those basic skills. That's the more real aspect of food security.

On a neighborhood level, I think one of the most important things we can do is to organize as neighbors to support each other. A lot of people can't have their own gardens. They might be able to have a window box garden or some tomato plants on their porch, but they can't really produce much. But community gardens can easily be organized. Again, it's not so much about the amount that's grown, but rather about the process of people working together and rebuilding those fundamental connections between people. Those kinds of connections have been at the heart of civilization from the beginning, and they have eroded away the last two hundred years or so.

On a broader level within a local food shed, let's say an area of a couple hundred miles or so, such as in Boulder County, we need to focus collectively on greatly increasing food production. 75% of our agricultural land here in Boulder County is being used either for pasture land for animals or to grow crops to feed animals. We need to be using much more of that land to grow food for our own people. Agriculture has gotten focused over the last century on exporting commodity crops to other countries and has totally lost site of the need to feed our own people. We need to reverse that priority and make the purpose of local farming and the whole food system to feed our own people first, then export surplus once those local needs have been met. It's a huge transition we have to go through, but that's ultimately where our food security will come from.

CB: One of the presentations you frequently do is entitled "The Extent of Our Predicament". In a few words, what is the extent of our predicament, and what should we be doing to deal with that predicament?

MB: First of all, what inspired me to talk about this is Gus Speth's book The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability where he concludes that we will never do what is necessary until we understand the full extent of our predicament. So I've been speaking more and more about our predicament in terms of first of all, the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels-the reality that we will never be able to replace the amount of energy we're burning in fossil fuels today and that we will have no choice but to dramatically reduce our energy consumption. That's the first realization that we have to come to.

The second is that climate change is going to change the face of the planet and will certainly change the trajectory of the human presence on the planet, and this will happen much more quickly and much more painfully than almost any of us is willing to think about. But we need to begin. Primarily because of our use of fossil fuels and our profligate burning of fossil fuels, we've unleashed profound changes in our climate that are probably going to give us the equivalent of a species near-death experience. The near-death experiences for many individuals will be a profound wake up call and will produce a shift from an aimless, dissipated, wasted life to a focus on purpose and service. Climate change is likely to be affording us as a species, that kind of opportunity.

The third aspect of our predicament is the reality is that our economic system will not recover but will go into a steeper decline, eventually plunging into an irreversible global depression that will last beyond our lifetimes. Of course, it's because our entire global economic system has been based on cheap fossil fuels and the American dollar. The whole system now is beginning to collapse. So we need to understand that the global systems on which we've come to depend are already failing, and they will fail dramatically in the future. So we have to rebuild from the ground up our capacity to live well, to live meaningfully, in a healthy and productive manner on this planet.

CB: Michael you often speak of the "evolutionary threshold" on which humanity stands in the present moment. What do you mean by this?

MB: I think that where we are as a species and what gives me hope perhaps, is the realization that we are a very young species in the universe. We are living in a time where we are beginning to emerge from our species adolescence into adulthood. It's not a very comfortable time just as is often the case for adolescents when they begin to shift into early adulthood, but that's what's up for us, and as we shift into adulthood, we'll have to live very, very differently. But seeing it that way is very good news because it means that as a species it means that we're not doomed, we're not fatally flawed-it just means that it's time for us to grow up together. Of course, in order to do that, we're going to have to make some pretty significant changes. We're going to have to put behind us our childish way of living, our very selfish way of living, but we certainly have an opportunity to begin to realize the potential and destiny of the human species.

There's no guarantee that we'll make this transition. In fact, there are a lot of reasons to doubt that we'll be able to do this. In our adolescence, the problems we've created for ourselves are so overwhelming that if we don't make the course correction very quickly, the window of opportunity will have passed, and we will not survive. But right now, the window is still open, and if enough people can wake up to our predicament and put into place the basic processes and structures that will enable what's best about the human species-what's the most important, what's the most precious about our species in order to survive beyond this transition, then ultimately humanity will fulfill its purpose and destiny.

CB: Thank you Michael for taking this time to talk about the crucial role of local food and farming. For readers in Boulder County, please attend the Eat Local Campaign. For readers elsewhere, check out the Eat Local website and think about how you might implement a local food and farming campaign in your place.

Michael Brownlee is the Co-Director of Transition Colorado, Boulder County

The "worst case scenario" has gone from neglible according to BP's site specific plan, and the BP Regional Gulf of Mexico Splill plan, the likelihood of well problems was infinitesimal and the damage should that occur minimal. The plan for dealing with a well blowout more than a mile under water were essentially the same as if that well were on dry land. I suspect that such an insane assumption also impacted the environmental impacts. On land, one could do a number of things to isolate a blown well - containment dams, moats, etc. However, even in shallow water such containment is not possible.

That "worst case" has grown and grown. The implications magnifying as people look at what is happening, and what is happening goes far beyond "decades to return to normal." The "worst case" could mean more than the Gulf of Mexico becoming a dead zone, to damaging the oceans and its inhabitants beyond recovery. In other words, the worst case could be an ocean killer and that would decimate - if not ultimately eradicate - virtually all life on the planet.

Before one leaps to the conclusion that the claim of possible planetary death is "tin foil hat" alarmism, think a moment about what is peice-meal coming into reality. The oil is not just on the surface, but throughout the entire water column from ocean floor to surface. Those plumes in the water column that BP denied, are now proven. The dispersant (Corexit) that BP continues to liberally dump is full of toxic chemicals, and does little more than make it look like there is less oil on the surface. In other words, liberal amounts of poison are being dumped in the Gulf for cosmetic purposes. The dispersant is making cleanup more difficult, and introducing another slew of toxicity into the ocean food chain.

We were told, that the oil would remain in the ocean and not be transported by rain. Now we know that it is raining oil from Louisiana to Florida (and perhaps beyond). Oil (and dispersant) continues to push into the marshes an bayoos of the Gulf coast, but has also jumped a steady progression of disaster by showing up in Lake Ponchartrain in New Orleans.

The Gulf Coast houses 40 percent of the breeding and nursing grounds for the entire United States. All of that is at risk - or already damaged. It is almost a certainty that the oil will leave the Gulf and enter the Atlantic. There is little doubt that it will impact the East Coast - and its fisheries. Once in the Atlantic, it will have various sea life impacts all the way to the Arctic - including hitting the North Sea fisheries of Europe. Along the way, it will decimate - if not drive into extinction - a number of species. One that is already endangered because of its desirability and over-fishing is the blue fin tuna. This fish breeds and migrates through the Gulf of Mexico.

We then have a different toxic effect from the well blow out. One is the dramatic increase in methane which is now at levels which are "one million times greater than normal" in some areas of the Gulf. This is enough to "potentially deplete oxygen" in those areas and create dead zones. Methane is also a highly potentn global warming gas. The massive amounts of oil are also raising arsenic levels in the Gulf. This is happening because oil is interfering with the normal process whereby arsenic bonds with material on the seabed and then gets buried by sediment. The oil in the water means that arsenic is staying suspended and then aggregates in the the food chain. Arsenic bio-accumulates - meaning that lower level food chain absorbs arsenic which is then taken up by others who then are eaten by another species etc. At each step along the way the accumulation of arsenic increases. Those at the top of the food chain (humans, the fish we eat, etc) end up ingesting the highest levels of arsenic.

Much of the environmental impact concern has been to species in direct contact with the oil and other toxic substances. Increasingly, there is concern for species that migrate through the region (birds and aquatic life) who are nwo likely to be negatively impacted. Over a million birds migrating between North and South America, as well as a feew species which migrate globally are now in the crosshairs of the toxic stew that now makes up the Gulf and Gulf Coast.

The disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has an ever-growing footprint that is extending far beyond the Gulf and could become hemispheric at least. With that growing wave of destruction goes the human and social impacts. These casualties include tens of thousands jobs and multi-generational, regional cultural decimation, destruction of a significant food supply for the U.S. and elsewhere, loss of entire communities, and unknown health impacts which may go on for decades at the least.

Even if the well was killed today, the damage has been done, and it is possible that BP will have difficulty killing the well. It is within the realm of possibility that the well casing is damaged beyond usefulness. It is possible that given the nature of the seabed around the well, that the seabed could collapse and create and ongoing oil seep of unknown proportions. It is possible that the pipe will collapse as they try to shoot drilling mud at high pressure.

So what does responsibility mean? What does "making it right" mean? The damages from BP's disastrous activity in the Gulf of Mexico go beyond any type of economic damages. You cannot bring back people's livelihood when the basis of that livelihood is detroyed. You cannot bring back species driven into extinction with a few well placed donations. You cannot put global warming gases back in the bottle.

Certainly there are things that BP can and should do. Among those things is to NOT continue reckless drilling around the globe.

The fraying ligature of the landscape of the United States reveals an inner geography of alienation and anomie. Living on the island of Manhattan, I daily negotiate an urban layout of practical, but identity-decimating grids -- a cityscape of harsh, inhuman right angles ... a geography that renders street encounters abrupt, curt and intrusive.

After a time, one begins, by reflex, to buffer oneself against such intrusions, withdrawing inward ... becoming a self-enclosed, walking fortress, shielding oneself from the degradations of these impersonal affronts (that feel altogether personal) -- with I-Pods, Blackberries, and other vestments attendant to the muttered prayers of the self-absorbed.

While above the street -- corporate towers -- that are steel and concrete kingdoms of blind, willful ascension -- blot the skyline ... these structures flee upward, as if to escape the implications of life lived at street level and sharing in the consequences of decisions made within their sterile, insular sanctums of power and cupidity.

This is architecture as blind hubris: creations made by the hands of mortal men ... yet failing to have any connection to the ground, these buildings crowd out the real estate of the sacred. Moreover, their manic skyward thrust leaves them, and those imprisoned within, bereft of roots that reach down into the renewing loam of the earth, to where mortal vanity is delivered to dust and desperate hopes rot and transubstantiate into the compost that nourishes new life.

And blooms of renewal, I suspect, will not be found online as well. The electronic sheen of social media sites is no substitute for communal fabric. There is no animal musk nor angelic apprehensions to en-soul the flesh and tease wisdom out of obdurate will ... No matter how many restless shades want to friend you on FaceBook nor ghostly texts descend upon you in an unholy Pentecost of Tweets, online exchanges will continue to leave you restless, hollow, and yearning for the colors and cacophony of an authentic agora.

The adolescent purgatory of FaceBook -- with its castings into the Eternal Now of instant praise, acceptance, and rejection -- reflects, magnifies, and acerbates the perpetual adolescence of the contemporary culture of the United States, intensifying its shallow longings and displaced panics, its narcissistic rage and obsession with the superficial. It devours libido, by providing a pixilated facsimile of the primal dance of human endeavor, leaving one's heart churning in thwarted yearning, locked an evanescent embrace with electronic phantoms, as one, paradoxically, attempts to live out unfulfilled desires by means of hollow communion with the soul-negating source of his alienation.

One can never get enough of what one doesn't need. Ergo, the compulsions and panic of millions of hungry ghosts will hold an ongoing, hollow mass online, in a futile campaign to regain form, gain direction, and walk in meaning and beauty among the things of the world, but instead will remain imprisoned within the very system that condemned them to this fate.

And this is the place, we, as a culture, will remain, for a time. This electronic inferno will be our vale and mountaintop, our sanctuary and leviathan. We will stare baffled into its vastness, stupefied and lost within its proliferate array of depersonalizing distractions and seductions. The more we try to lose ourselves in it, by surrendering to its shimmering surface attractions, the more tightly we will become bound in the bondage of self.

Naturally, living in the grinding maw of such monsters of alienation will engulf one with ennui and angst. Moreover, the judgment of anyone claiming not to be afflicted should be regarded as suspect.

Possessed by this mode of being: we languish in a zoo of our own making where we gaze, without comprehension, at the confines of our enclosure, chew our paws, pace the cage, and are restless for mealtime. Like an animal in a cage, we are no longer what we were meant to be ... we have forgotten what it is to be alive. With the exception of superficial form, we begin to lose our affinity to what makes us recognizable as a human being and as an animal -- for we have become simply a sad thing that waits for lunch. And I defy any caged clock-watcher in a cubicle to defy that point.

Restless and agitated in our confinement, we sink further into anomie ... into the benumbing embrace of comfort zones (over-eating, anti-depressants, consumerism as emotional distraction, addiction to electronic media) where we chose safety over the truth of our being. In these cages of inauthenticity, our heart's longings and human needs are held in stasis by the perfunctory persona we cultivated for approval and acceptance; there, consigned to a barren region of mind where one is rewarded for docility and duplicity, one languishes, bereft of eros and pothos ... unconsciously self-convicted and sentenced for the crime of being a serial betrayer of one's essential self.

So much of the criteria of the modern condition has atomized us, stripped us, collectively, of ritual, purpose and meaning, and placed us in the midst of what T.S. Eliot expressed in prosody as a "heap of broken images."

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
--From: The Waste Land

There is danger, of course, in such places -- but there is also the possibility of renewal.

Personal and historical traumas leave a legacy of bewilderment. And being bewildered i.e., being in a psychic wilderness, lost, having wandered or been cast past the known horizon of experience ... is to be in position to engage the novel, be in the thrall of unfolding mystery, and wander in a soul-suffused landscape of the sublime.

A state of alienation is right where we should be: To be able to adapt to a culture dedicated to little more than finding efficient means of exploiting the hours of the greater public's lives for the benefit of a greedy few ... would be a tragedy. Living within this culture should bring on despair ... It is a leviathan that has devoured your existence. Do you think you can renovate the belly of the beast ... set up a time-share with Jonah and Pinocchio there ... and live in comfort?

Should not one stagger and stammer in mortification when shown a handful of dust?

Moreover, the solution we are offered -- making ourselves a dwelling within a prison of consumer kitsch -- should and does only bring on more anomie. Eliot wrote the following regarding a psyche attempting to adapt to a dying culture:

[...] Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
--From: The Journey of the Magi,

One of the notions, as Rilke might put it, that is "brooding like a seed" in my psyche has been the distinction James Hillman makes between civilization and culture. Hillman avers that, and I agree, civilization is a dead thing -- an edifice of crumbling marble enshrined in an eros-devoid museum of the mind where we do little more than give empty, obligatory homage to a fossilized tableaux ... our forced reverence is but a perfunctory prayer muttered before the iconography of a dead religion; in contrast, culture is a living, breathing phenomenon of the collective mind, heart, and soul of the people within it. Its logos inhabits the very air of existence, permeating it like the sound of birdsong, and cricket and cicada stridulation throughout a high summer night.

Moreover, he avers that culture is akin to a madhouse; in fact, the solution lies in the back ward of the asylum, the area where are housed the hopeless cases. In other words, like Dante ... proceed to the place you most fear looking upon, embrace it, and hear its awful keening and heart-opening agonies. There is the location of rebirth, the last circle of hell ... retreating to a comfort zone will simply leave the situation is stasis.

So the question arises: How does one enter the soul-making shabbiness of the human condition, even though, as always, we are powerless against the trajectory of history and lost within the mad proliferation of culture -- and, as Bob Dylan limned in lyric regarding the alienation this situation evokes, "[one has] no direction home?"

Try this: embrace the bracing pain of your alienation: make a home in being lost. Gaze with wonder of upon the sacred scenery of your bewilderment ... Wandering in the wilderness is a holy state.

Wendell Berry believes such ventures to be one of the true vocations of the soul:

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
--Wendell Berry

In other words, in times such as ours, when we embrace our alienation then we will be welcomed home ... to share a common shelter with the multitudes who are also lost.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

About one year after Barack Obama became President, I noticed on one radical left website the words "the ‘hopium' is wearing off." While the majority of Americans believe that Obama is a better President than George W. Bush, Jr., it has now become painfully obvious that Obama's leadership has offered little divergence from the policies of the Bush administration. In the throes of what can only be described honestly as the Second Great Depression, Americans suffering from a deluge of unemployment, foreclosures, bankruptcies, loss of health insurance and retirement savings have not yet fully confronted their despair. They pretend that a return to unlimited growth and delirious consumerism is possible and even likely in the long term, but all the while, just beneath the surface of that chimera the demon of despair is growing increasingly restless and ominous.

Despair moves us to confront existential questions, and let's remember that that big word isn't just a philosophical term but directly refers to our existence. Existential questions are questions of meaning and purpose-questions about the human condition such as: Why do the innocent suffer? Why do those who commit brutal acts so often go unpunished? If there is a God, why do these things happen? Why am I here?

Despair also brings us face to face with an emptiness that is at our core, regardless of how fulfilled and serene we feel. And while some theologians would assert that the emptiness is a God-shaped void that only religion can fill, I would argue that the emptiness cannot be filled by anyone or anything because it is a fundamental reality of the human condition. However, I hasten to add that the pain of the void can be minimized in a variety of ways.

Citizens of industrial civilization have attempted for centuries to fill the void by cherishing the delusions of unlimited growth, unbridled progress, the acquisition of material wealth, the sanctity of the family, the piety of organized religion, the status of obtaining advanced degrees, and of course, the use of substances to obviate or medicate the sensation of emptiness. As civilization continues to deteriorate, and as fewer and fewer options for filling the void are available, the masses will be brutally confronted with their own despair. When the people, things, and activities that have provided meaning for them throughout their lives no longer exist, we are likely to witness madness and suicide on an unprecedented scale. I state this, dear reader, not to incite fear, but to prepare us for a milieu of chaos resulting from a pandemic of meaninglessness as nearly all of that which has provided meaning for so many is swept away.

What is more, I realize that anyone reading these words may be at times overwhelmed with despair. This is difficult to avoid when contemplating the scale of horror that humans have inflicted on the planet in terms of wars, resource depletion, environmental devastation, and innumerable forms of injustice and brutality. Unless one lives a hermetically sealed life, one encounters these realities daily.

When I first published Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse, I was afraid that it would be reviled at the worst and virtually ignored at best. While it is true that it did not and will not become a best-seller, I have been astounded at the book's success and the comments I have received from readers. Consistently they report that Sacred Demise profoundly lowered their level of despair by catalyzing a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. In most cases, readers completed the book, or re-read it, and took away a palpable appreciation of the demise and what is truly sacred about it.

As I engage with collapse-aware individuals and communities throughout the world, what I consistently hear is the profound alienation they feel in a world unraveling. We all have personal wounds that evoke despair, but as psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan notes in her book, Healing Through The Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear and Despair, "Despair grows not only out of our personal wounds, losses, and disappointments, but also out of our needs for community and a shared sense of meaning-spiritual necessities for which we harbor a profound and aching, though largely unconscious, nostalgia."

Greenspan also notes that often our personal despair will not let up until we confront our despair for the world. You may be familiar with Joanna Macy's despair and empowerment workshops, designed to help people face their despair and create community with others who are engaged in similar work. Macy believes that despair is to be trusted because it is a natural, visceral response to a planet in crisis inhabited by beings who are committing suicide.

Generally, the psychotherapy profession does not address despair for the world. In fact, if you were to walk into a therapist's office and say that you feel grief and despair for the world, you are likely to be labeled depressed, paranoid, phobic, or pathologized in some other way, presented with myriad reasons why your despair is unwarranted in a world so full of glorious potential, and probably asked to consider taking an antidepressant. It is likely that unless you consult a therapist who is fully informed regarding the coming chaos, you will need to find support from other individuals similarly informed and share your feelings about the future with them.

Joanna Macy speaks to this directly:

But because of the individualistic bias of mainstream psychotherapy, we have been conditioned to assume that we are essentially separate selves, driven by aggressive impulses, competing for a place in the sun. In the light of these assumptions, psychotherapists tend to view our affective responses to the plight of our world as dysfunctional and give them short shrift. As a result, we have trouble crediting the notion that concerns for the general welfare might be genuine enough and acute enough to cause distress. Assuming that all our drives are ego-generated, therapists tend to regard feelings of despair for our planet as manifestations of some private neurosis.

This is precisely why in recent months I have begun a Transition Counseling practice, which some people have called "Collapse Coaching", that offers people an opportunity to share their feelings about the future and receive support and practical input regarding preparation. I believe that increasingly we will need this kind of coaching in our communities as the wheels fly off of a civilization dependent on cheap fossil fuels for its operation and the illusion of endless growth and consumption for its motivation.

When we do not acknowledge despair, it reinforces our tendency toward numbness, the preferred "feeling state" of most citizens of modern culture. If we remind ourselves that emotion has the word motion in it, and if we consciously allow the despair, yes even dialog with it, asking it what it wants from us, we may find that it is indeed an ally.

In reality, despair presents us with an opportunity to enhance our sense of meaning and purpose. As Greenspan states: "Despair is faith's darker handmaiden. There is no faith without doubt and despair, just as there is no good without evil, no day without night. To be authentic, faith must be all-inclusive-encompassing Auschwitz as much as it encompasses paradise." If you bristle at the word faith, feel free to replace it with meaning, purpose, inspiration, or some other word.

The human psyche is extremely comfortable in the territory of despair. For this reason, we need to trust our despair and allow it to guide us to the transformation that is waiting to happen within us. We also need to remember that we feel our despair in the context of a world that is withering and a species that is rushing headlong toward extinction. Our personal despair and the wider story of despair cannot be separated. This does not mean that we stay stuck in blame and abdicate personal responsibility where it should be claimed. What it does mean, however, is that suffering is both personal and collective, and that the latter is larger than our personal egos. It may be that despair is a catalyst not only for our personal transformation, but also that of our species.

Thus arises another opportunity to remind us all that service in the world is often an excellent antidote to despair. Service can give our lives meaning and help place our personal story in the context of the larger story of a civilization that has reached its growth limits and is currently in demise. However, we do not need to reach our limits of soul growth as individuals. In fact, the more we acknowledge our limitations of material growth, acquisition, and control, the more expansive our souls are likely to become, and service frequently enhances the process.

Yet another tool for soothing our despair is to follow the example of Wendell Berry in his beautiful poem which opens this article. In it he states that when despair for the world grows in him, he consciously enters nature and allows it to comfort him so that for a time, he can rest in the grace of the world and experience himself as free. Yet it is not only comfort he receives but the "peace of wild things." But how can "wild" be synonymous with "peaceful"? Isn't wild unpredictable and therefore anxiety-producing? Could this actually be one of the most important antidotes to despair: Wild, unpredictable, capricious, even dangerous? Is not part of our death-like despair the lack of wildness? Psychologist Bill Plotkin states in Nature And The Human Soul that "Something in us is truly wild and wants to stay that way through our entire life. It is the source of our deepest creativity and freedom."

I want to underscore Wendell Berry's advice. I am blessed to live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado. Recently, I have committed to journeying twice a month into the mountains and spending sacred time in some isolated places there. It may be as short as one hour or as long as an entire day. While I have taken many extended trips into the mountains earlier in my life, having lived at the foot of Pikes Peak in my late-twenties, I now journey into the mountains more contemplatively and for shorter periods of time.

My intention when taking these short trips is exactly the same as Wendell Berry's. I go in order to "rest in the grace" that is there. It is a comforting, soothing, inspiring, and restorative experience. However, without exception, grief comes, whether I invite it or not. It is quite simply, ever-present these days as I allow myself to become intimate with nature--and I give my grief to the earth. Sometimes I do it by lying face down on the earth and sobbing. Sometimes by standing with my back pressed firmly against a towering pine tree and feeling its strength coursing through my body until I break into laughter. Sometimes by sitting in the soil and sifting it tenderly through my fingers as tears of both sorrow and joy flow.

Part of me realizes that it is only a matter of time until the lush landscape into which I have immersed my body and soul will be destroyed by climate change. In Colorado, this is already happening with the death of incalculable numbers of trees infected by the pine beetle. Another part of me is also keenly aware of the earth's magnificent history of regenerating herself. The very elements of nature in which I revel on these journeys are remnants of the earth that have been destroyed in eons past. Perhaps in a million years, the landscape in which I sit, that may be destroyed in my lifetime, will metamorphose into another lovely landscape or other elements that will provide comfort and revitalization for some other members of the earth community.

Somehow, when I return from my short mountain getaways, I am buoyed; I feel some distance from my despair for the world, and I am renewed in body and soul. It is as if I have spent hours communing intimately with a dear friend. And even as I return to the low-intensity urban community in which I live, my "friend" remains in my heart. She is still up there in the mountains, and I can return to her, but more importantly, she is in my body, and I take her with me as I do the work I came here to do. Even if she is made extinct, she is within me, and her palpable sacred presence within cannot be made extinct. I am exhilarated by her effervescent, wild fecundity, and my despair recedes. I feel my wildness; industrial civilization has not killed it because my wildness inspires me to find meaning in the madness of a collapsing world. And it compels me to write these words and to invite you to immerse yourself in your wildness, as well as your gifts of service, because when you do, it will be impossible to be driven by despair.

___________________________________________________________________

This article is an excerpt from Carolyn's forthcoming book Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Toolkit For Inner Transition which will contain a treasure-trove of exercises and resources of emotional and spiritual preparation for an uncertain future.

In October, 2010, Carolyn will lead a 2-day workshop in Boulder, Colorado on "Sacred Demise and The Soul of Transition". For more information, contact Carolyn@carolynbaker.net

No wonder that people easily spend decades eating unhealthy foods or living a sedentary lifestyle, or both, without appreciating or internalizing the inevitable negative and serious health impacts, from heart disease to all kinds of cancers, for example.

No wonder that all kinds of technologies that offer immediate rewards or benefits are embraced while long term negative impacts are easily ignored. Maybe cell phones really do cause brain cancer. Maybe deep ocean drilling for oil will fail and cause exactly what we are now witnessing in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP fiasco.

But we like cell phones and we refuse to take the many actions to rid society of its addiction to petroleum and so we willingly accept our time blindness no matter how many experts and researchers try to warn us about the terrible long term impacts. In other words, near term benefits blind us to long term costs. As economists might say, those long term costs are heavily discounted.

It is not just that individuals are time blind, but that there is collective time blindness. It is so powerful that conventional institutions we think of as protecting people and society are impotent. That's how powerful time blindness is.

Worse yet, the really smart people know how to take advantage of mass time blindness. Think of business and corporations that create mass market products and technologies that seduce people because their negative consequences fall victim to deeply embedded time blindness. Think of all the Ponzi schemes that have victimized so many people out of many billions of dollars. By the time that negative impacts occur it startles and amazes people as if they could not have been predicted. Wrong! In all cases of catastrophes and crises there is always a record of some people correctly forecasting them. But they are ignored. Why? Time blindness. That vision of an awful, deadly future becomes invisible because of our time blindness, or it merely is seen as fantasy, speculation or entertainment.

Want another example? Try the classic one of over population: Too many humans on planet Earth using too many resources. Those not falling prey to time blindness have been trying to warn humanity for a very long time that a lower birth rate and fewer people would actually result in high quality of life for people, with less social conflicts, wars and terrorism. Also think global warming or climate change. Though there are clear impacts now, major calamities will become future shocks because of so much time blindness.

We ignore time blindness at our peril. The real lesson of the BP oil disaster is far more significant than merely one technology or one incompetent and immoral company that wrecks havoc and pain on so many people as well as ruining so much of the natural environment. We need to spend a lot more time understanding intrinsic time blindness as a kind of mental disability, and how to teach people to avoid it. One person has been doing just that for decades. Check out the work of Jack Alpert at skil.org.

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn at delusionaldemocracy.com.]

There is magic about those sun-sparkled coasts, translucent, shimmering, sapphire sea, later turning peach, apricot, deep blush, then seeming near blackberry as the sun falls and the dusk, then dark, takes over. Then the great pelicans sit sentry, on remains of old breakwaters, silhouetted against the moon's silvered light.

An all time memory is of the Mexican coast on the Gulf. One day remains apart, on some special mental shelf for treasures, oft taken down, wondered at, minutely re-savoured. Four of us hired a boat for the day, the others wanted to fish for marlin, I to relish the glittering ocean and sun. Lying below the little open wheelhouse, the old, toothless boatman and I quickly formed a bond. His boat was his life, he was an extention of it and it of him. His eyesight was phenominal. "Look, look", he'd say, pointing somewhere into the distant horizon: "tuna .." I could see nothing, but a few miles towards the spot, sure enough, the ocean boiled and churned with the great shoal.

Shark fins often glided along side the boat, their sleek elegance visible below the surface

Another: "look ..", a pointed, gnarled finger, and there would be the unmistakable spout from a whale, then a great, seemingly ocean-shuddering, roll or two. The Gulf hosts twenty nine marine mammal species, alone, including blue, beaked, fin, dwarf sperm and humpback whale. On 16th June, the first whale, a sperm whale, was found dead off Mississipi. Whales are thought to live up to one hundred and thirty years. The July 1st issue of "Nature" reveals remains of a sperm whale in Peru, thought to be thirteen and a half million years old. The whale is also thought to possibly be the world's oldest species. If the oil industry turns out to be the biggest threat they have ever faced, that will be quite a first.

As ever, the old man of the sea, saw the dolphins before I did : "look, look, look ...." they leapt, in their joyous pairs, in perfect synchrony. As the boat neared, they surrounded it, cavorting in fours, sixes, eights, twelves, higher and higher, over and over. Attempting to capture the images, the lens appeared less than clear, then I realized it was not the lens, but the tears streaming down my face, in response to witnessing overwhelming minutes of beauty beyond imagination. Suddenly, was a certainty of feeling blessed, to understand poet John Gillespie Magee's words : "...in the sunlit silence, put out my hand, and touched the face of God."

Fifty dolphin have so far, been reported found dead. Experts estimate only one tenth of species which die will be washed up. The full toll of big oil's "collateral damage", now, previously and in the future, will likely never be known.

When my friends hauled in a huge marlin, which had fought for its life with wile and valor, the old man of the sea said again: "Look. Watch." The great creature lay in the sun, gasping on the deck, its body glittering all over, in sequin-like, opalescence. "Watch", he repeated. In seconds, the lights started to go out and the magnificent creature became just a very large, dark, lump of flesh. Killing for sport is another obscenity.

As the sun lowered, we headed for the shore. Approaching it, the boatman ("Watch...") put his arms above his head, steering with his knees. Instantly, the sky darkened with birds, appeared seemingly from no where. They called, swooped, rose, fell, circled. He leant in to the bait bucket and threw the remains, bit by bit, in to the air. Every morsel was expertly caught. Not one missed, dropped. The bucket empty, his hands went back on the wheel, the birds did a farewell fly past and departed in to the dusk. In the shallower waters shoals of vibrantly coloured fish, darted between the delicate coral reefs.

Bird species of the region include albatrosses, petrels, shearwaters, frigatebirds, cormorants, gannets, boobies, gulls, terns and skimmers. With temperatures of one hundred degrees and birds becoming oil covered, experts warn they are boiling, alive. The thick, tarry oil, absorbs the heat

The many turtle species lay their eggs on or near the beach where they were born. Conservationists are removing eggs to unpolluted shores hundreds of miles away, where hopefully they will survive but another extraordinary natural miracle will have been severed. Four hundred and thirty two turtles have been found dead since April.

The Gulf's Loggerhead turtle's hatchlings follow the light of the moon to reach the ocean and swim to safety, away from land's predators, when they emerge from the egg. For the tiny moon followers, the ocean itself has become their ultimate predator.

Inspite of the scale of this environmental death warrant, Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal, supports a legal action to reverse the Presidential six month moratorium on deep water drilling, in place to allow time to determine the exact cause of the spill, thus, hopefully, avoiding a repetition. Jindal views the cost in jobs as too high. Oil jobs, that is. And as the hurricane season has moved in with the great winds spreading unleashed deadly pollutants, farther and wider.

Dahr Jamail, in Louisiana, writes of a poignant, differing view. Locals have erected white crosses, each representing something loved and lost: "Family time, crabs, white trout, camping, diving, walking the dog on the beach, sea shells, sea turtles, dolphins, barbecues, shrimp, shark, sand between my toes, boogie boarding, mullet, marsh, palm trees." (Christian Science Monitor, 22nd June 2010.) The crosses will undoubtedly multiply.

Mexico's ancient mariner was utterly in tune with with his universe and all which shared it with him. A reverence a million miles from those who think only to ravage it.

Television, cell phone, computer glowed before me: The media nimbus boiled: its hypnagogia-like flux of imagery, its counterfeit immediacy and proffered flummery insistent to drowned out auras of extinction rising from veritable nature; the earth's warnings rising like musical notes ... swelling, reverberating, enveloping us. In the Gulf of Mexico ... literally falling to earth as chemical rain.

I stood dazzled before the scintillating doomscape of the Anthropocene Epoch. It has entered me ... It has made me and undone me. It tells me who I am; it holds me near, enclosing me in the thrall of the false intimacy of its endless spectacle.

Some mornings, I don't think I can compose myself to face it.

But, most days, I make a start: Gathering up and patching together this tattered flesh-garment of DNA. Then: I call to order my swarming termite-cathedral mind ... take a head count of this aggregate of disparate personage deemed me ... attempt to quiet this nattering self nettled by formless dread ... console this besieged I who awakens in redemptive bed ... torn from reverie with dreaming-ocean cosmos to shuffle to toilet for Newtonian piss, to sink for anti-entropic teeth brushing, then commit to wave-particle duality decision of dressing ... in order to meet the manifold machinery of the empire's manifest death-urge revelry.

Awake, dressed, and partially reconstituted, I left the house:

The age of insistent junk rose to meet me: junk groaned and snarled past me on roadways; junk words -- mouthed into junk cell phones; junk pixels -- texted and twittered into meaningless air.

So many enchanted by junk incantations, staring at glowing, tinny appliances like idiots entranced by shiny objects ... giving over the fleeting hours of finite life in the service of Lord Junk -- as sky and sea choke in the miasmic wake of our joyless binge -- and the earth's entropic furies gather.

We stare at our glowing appliances while exquisite things are extinguished, forever ... mistaking configurations of pixels for the breath and brilliance of the world.

I thought of Lorca; in truth, preposterously, I attempted to pray to Lorca who advised that one should listen for the heart of god beating within the monster of the world.

But I am losing heart searching for the monster's heart. Thus far: finding only my own spleen. For this reason: our collectives striving and private equivocations seem the thanotopic dream of destroyer gods: The nightmare manifested before us as strip malls and shopping plazas ... constructed of bones of extinct species; interiors of suburban subdivisions shuffling with resentful phantoms ... estranged from the libido of culture and communion; dead zone freeways ... the air shaken and riven by the roar of its death-enamered fury.

Before me: Atlanta Georgia, USA ... glazed in asphalt inferno of late-June.

Yet, held in the heat-pummeled air above, I saw fuchsia mimosa blossoms hoisting defiant flags above the misery of traffic.

The effrontery of those spindly blooms of fuchsia, its colors as raw as my own nettled heart. It hurt deep within my chest even to gaze upon such a shade of unconquerable pink.

I want to shake branches of flowering mimosa in the faces of the ministers and minions of junk ... to see ... if they become stricken as I was -- as tickled pink as I am.

Later, will I hear reports on the evening news of a million human beings in their offices and cubicles afflicted with seemingly out-of-context desires ... suffering from spontaneous longings for the caress of blossom-scented winds ... suddenly struck by an ungovernable need to emerge unto city streets and genuflect before the spindling glory of these seditious flowers?

So, in short, the ministrations of the mimosa convinced me to keep on living. But I had little appetite for the endeavor.

The meals prepared from this harvest of junk turned my stomach. I clamped my teeth tight against it. I kept searching for hope's greenhouse -- where blooms of human understanding open and breathe -- but I kept wandering into the empire's slaughtering barn.

I began to mutter, "awful."

"Awful. Awful. Awful."

Then I chanted it aloud, "Awful. Awful. Awful."

Then and there, I decided I would make "awful" my morning and evening prayer.

"He's awful, She's awful -- This food is awful -- The news is awful -- Our leaders are awful. You awful people have created such an awful mess by living out the awful implications of your awful lives that all mirrors should be renamed awful frames.

I ask you, Rilke: What awful angels swim through the poisoned sky?

Anticipating the question, Rilke, a century prior, answered:

" I don't have much knowledge yet in grief --
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:

then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you."

So I riffed on it and rasp it, snarled it and sobbed it, whispered it to myself and posited it in public places. I warbled it and choked on it, laughed about it and wept over it.

I returned home laughing and sobbing. I could no longer keep the floodgates closed: The things of the world, massive and minuscule, tragic and preposterous, came coursing into my consciousness: giant squids and chihuahuas arrived, death camps and Dollywood arose, diamonds and Skiddles were proffered, world-destroying comets and blue snow cones hurdled through deep space, while killing sprees and hand jobs, inspired exchanges and insipid palaver, grace and goofiness transpired on earth as always.

My wife found me in this state, both yearning and mortified, hungry and queasy, desperate for solitude and yet longing to be touched.

She reached for me as the two fronts within me met, merging the moist breeze of the tropics and the cold wind of the Arctic ... creating pelting hail and huge, warm raindrops ... engendering weeping and caressing -- as inundating sorrow mingled with torrents of desire.

All the while, I was stammering, "awful, awful, awful," but the pleasure struck me momentarily monosyllabic and only an ecstatic "A-W-E" issued from me.

Shuddering ... awestruck, awfully grateful, I collapsed onto her -- awed by the sublime of our simpatico breathing -- awed by the soft light of scented candles lambent upon her skin --awed by her generosity in faking her own orgasm concurrent with my own (sometimes there is surpassing grace in such small, selfless lies).

And of equal importance: awed by all the awful things that waited outside of our room that I resolved I would try to endure and transmute into song.

As I drifted towards sleep, I said Kaddish for my convictions. I dreamed my lips left impressions traced in ash. Braille sheet-music caressed me from the breeze of an electric fan. All of my points of reference floated away from me like transmigrating galaxies. Everything was adrift: mind, sorrows, heart and heavens.

Upon awakening in bed with my wife of many years, I turned to her and asked, "Pardon me, but have we met?"

I fumbled for conversation ... wanting to make a good first impression.

"Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky." --Rainer Maria Rilke

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/

In some spiritual and psychological circles we often hear unambiguous proscriptions against the emotion of anger. However, in many indigenous traditions, anger is not experienced with the same suspicion one finds in Western psycho-spiritual circles. While ancient teachings regarding anger do not condone aggression, they do not unequivocally assume that feeling the emotion of anger will lead to hostility or violence. In fact, they tend to revere anger as an innate human emotion which may be utilized on behalf of the earth community without inflicting harm. Ancient teachings often include practices for "uploading" the raw emotion of anger to higher chakras or physiological energy centers on behalf of preserving boundaries or protecting the innocent-both of which are characteristics of the non-aggressive warrior.

Anger is one of the Five Stages of Grief articulated by the death and dying researcher, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. As I noted in Sacred Demise, in the context of those stages, anger shows up in reaction to a loss. First we feel shock and denial, then move into anger which may include frustration, anxiety, irritation, embarrassment, and shame. Subsequently, we move into depression and grief, followed by bargaining, then acceptance and re-investment in our lives. As Kubler-Ross emphasizes, none of the stages are neatly detached from the others. We tend to move through them fluidly, with each stage somewhat blurring into the next stage or containing remnants of the last one.

In the process of preparing emotionally to navigate the coming chaos, it is crucial to examine each stage of grief, to note where we have been in the process, to look at where we are in the moment, and to honor each emotion along the way. Many people today are stuck in anger because they have not allowed themselves to move through it into mindful grieving. In fact, I believe that the United States, and many nations throughout the world are currently mired in anger. In 2009, author and spiritual teacher Caroline Myss, stated in her article "An Epidemic of Global Anger": "We are a community of nations on fire with anger. And we are getting angrier by the day. Whether we look at the increase in uprisings occurring around the world or at the escalating tension brewing in America, what is becoming more apparent is that we are witnessing a rapidly increasing rate of global anger, so much so that it qualifies as an epidemic."

Many Americans are enraged at their government. Some who have been researching the demise of the current paradigm and understand the self-destructive aspects of corporate capitalism, the limits of economic growth, and the unsustainability of a civilization dependent on fossil fuels feel angry because their leaders refuse to acknowledge what is so. As their minds have been awakened, so have their emotions, and anger has been part of the process. But as they have come to understand that industrial civilization itself is collapsing, they are likely to have stopped wanting to repair and improve it and have begun to entertain a larger picture of how they could join with allies in constructing a new paradigm and a new culture.

It is likely that for these individuals, anger metamorphosed into deep grief or despair as a feeling of powerlessness to "fix" civilization set in. Implicit in the emotion of anger is the sense that something can or must be done to alter the that has evoked anger. As one comes to understand the inevitability of the unraveling of industrial civilization and the futility of attempting to prevent it, one may in fact experience a sense of relief that collapse is beyond control and proceeds in its own way, in its own time. One grasps that our mandate as a species is to move with the demise, not against it, and find within the unraveling a greater purpose than the one civilization has offered, proceeding with the work we came here to do. At that point, even though we may carry some residue of denial or anger, and even though our willingness to see what is so puts us directly in the path of deep grief, the embrace of our purpose and our role in the collapse process, is in itself a re-investment in our lives and the well being of the earth community.

However, the individuals I have just been describing do not comprise the vast majority of those in the United States or the world who are fixated in anger because they are also fixated in denial. One cannot move through the Five Stages of Grief if one does not move beyond denial. Refusing to see what is so guarantees that the journey through the stages will not occur. So whether one is an enraged Muslim suicide bomber or a vitriolic white, middle class Tea Party enthusiast, one's emotional state and behavior belie an inordinately diminished perspective of reality, resulting in a desperate need for vituperative scapegoating. In other words, fixation in anger.

The Mary Oliver poem above about loving the world which in part means reveling in the sensual delight of nature which means becoming "accustomed to savoring that which is momentous, concealed within bare bones simplicity." It also means a profound gratitude which the poem describes as "mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here." The world has given us stupendous gifts which Oliver says causes her to "stand still and learn to be astonished."

But does our gratitude for the world mean that we should never be angry about the injustice or self and eco-destruction its inhabitants have perpetrated upon each other and the earth community? Certainly not, but being deeply connected with our purpose in the world provides perspective that buoys us and allows us to keep moving forward when the magnetic pull to become fixated in anger may feel irresistible.

When we are intimately familiar with our purpose, we understand that the world is not paradise, it is not a vacation resort, and it is not a place to which we have come to live in perpetual bliss. Rather, the world is comprised of both the magnificent wonderment and extraordinary beauty depicted by Mary Oliver as well as the horrors engineered by a species about to become successful in its incalculable attempts to commit suicide.

Author and spiritual teacher, Marshall Vian Summers, writes in his book Greater Community Spirituality:

Be without judgment of the world. If the world were a perfect place, you would not need to come here. If the world were a place that functioned harmoniously, without friction or conflict, this would not be the place for you....The world is your place to work and to give. Its pleasures are small but real. Its pains and difficulties are great. The world cannot give you what you seek, for what you seek you have brought with you from beyond the world.

That which we have brought with us from beyond is something greater than our personality or human ego. Summers refers to it as Knowledge, and others use terms like the sacred, spirit, the Self, the divine within. However we choose to name that part of ourselves, it comprises our core. I believe that the more intimately familiar we are with it, the less we expect from the world, and the more we are willing to serve the world in order to imbue it with the sacred. Loving the world, as Oliver names it, is not about sentimental emotion, but about a commitment to the work we came here to do which by definition, serves the earth community.

The mathematical cosmologist, Brian Swimme, in his extraordinary lecture series, "The Powers of The Universe"clearly articulates this concept. Cataclysm, he notes, is one of the inherent powers of the universe, and "it is currently happening on our planet. The choice before us is whether we will participate consciously." Participating means that "as all the structures that are destroying the earth are collapsing, they are releasing us into the essential nature of who we are." While this awareness does not remove our anger or our anguish, it brings us face to face with the deeper meaning of the collapse of industrial civilization and our purpose in it.

I believe that the world of the future will be a chaotic world which will be, among other things, an angry world, especially in the initial stages of the demise of the current civilization. In a December, 2009 article "America The Traumatized" , Adele Stan argues that a series of events that occurred in the first decade of the twenty-first century have made us a PTSD nation--and that was before the BP oil disaster of 2010. Until we understand trauma and post-traumatic stress, the need to blame the traumatizing event or person(s) who inflicted it is exceedingly compelling. When we do grasp the magnitude of trauma and its consequences, we come to understand how futile is our rage in the face of an inundation of horror.

I write these words more than two months after the BP Gulf of Mexico cataclysm. Am I angry as I witness the horror? Am I enraged at the lies of BP with regard to its prior knowledge regarding the safety of the Deepwater Horizon rig? Am I livid when I hear the stories of people who tried to warn the corporation that its bypassing of standard international safety regulations would result in catastrophe? Does white hot rage pulse through my body as I witness BP's CEO, Tony Hayward, taking a yachting trip and begging to "get his life back" as the entire world lays the blame for this debacle at his door and as the entire ecosystem is now in the path of the destruction visited upon it by a multitude of corporations and CEO's of BP's and Tony Hayward's ilk? Am I incensed when I see millions of people immersed in an epic blame-fest, pointing fingers and mouthing incessant sentences beginning with "they shoulda, coulda, woulda"?

The answer to all of those questions is a resounding "yes", and from the moment the catastrophe was first made public, I realized the probable scope of it, and I saw the word t-r-a-u-m-a writ large all over it. What purpose at this point will my anger serve? How could I be seduced by the inherent assumption in my anger that the there is a possibility that the situation can be remedied? In my opinion, the BP oil disaster of 2010 is nothing less than 100 Hurricane Katrinas in slow motion. It is an unfathomable game-changer-perhaps the tipping point in humanity's destruction of this planet. As I witness countless animals dripping and dying from disgusting quantities of crude oil resembling raw sewage suffocating their bodies; as I consider that perhaps 40-50% of the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico will soon be covered with petroleum; as I reflect on the spread of the spill into other oceans and the death of plankton and the ultimate devastation of the food chain; as I consider the economic devastation of a section of the country that comprises about 20 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, and as I speculate that perhaps the entire Gulf Coast region may become uninhabitable, I see, hear, and feel nothing but trauma. Furthermore, if the entire population of the United States were not already suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, it is now.

Yet what I have personally discovered about my anger over the years is neither that I shouldn't have anger or that I should discharge it whenever I feel like it, but rather, to approach my anger mindfully. A stellar article by Holistic Psychologist, Jennifer Franklin, entitled "Mindfulness In Practice: Anger Management" defines mindfulness this way: "To be mindful is to be conscious, more awake, more informed about how one lives one's life.

Being more mindful, therefore, allows us to make more awake or informed choices in every moment. Our words and actions would be more mindful if we were more awake or conscious in those moments in which when we choose them." According to psychotherapist Richard Pfeiffer, quoted in the article, anger is a neurological response process that essentially prepares us to fight or flee.

We have many options for creating more mindfulness within ourselves. Meditation is, of course, one of the principal tools for strengthening mindfulness, even if the meditation is not the specific technique called "mindfulness meditation." It is important to remember that mindfulness isn't so much about becoming mindful of the world around us, although that generally accrues from a meditation practice, but rather, mindfulness is about being mindful of ourselves. It helps us become centered observers of our own process.

For example, the Dr. Franklin's article offers the classic example of road rage and how it can be handled mindfully instead of reactively:

When you exercise mindfulness, you exercise non-reactivity or the capacity to stay centered, grounded, and unshaken in response to a stimulus. Now, don't confuse non-reactivity with non-feeling. Let's use road rage as an example. You're driving, and someone cuts you off, and in response to being cut off you flip the driver the bird. You've just behaved reactively.

Contrast that with what non-reactivity would look like in that scenario: You are cut off by the driver, and rather than focusing your attention on the event itself, you focus it on you. You focus it on the sensations you are feeling in your body, most likely a fast heart rate, perhaps a tightness in the chest, or constricted breathing. Then you shift your attention to your breathing, sending the breath into the parts of your body that are feeling the anger-your heart, your chest-wherever it is for you. In the time it took you to do this exercise, you never even thought about flipping the driver the bird because you were too busy focusing on your reaction; that driver has probably gone on his or her merry way by now. This is non-reactivity.

Non-reactivity allows us to feel all of our feelings but not react to them. We feel them until we organically feel something else or until we decide mindfully, with awareness and choicefulness, that either we want to focus on something else or we want to act.

As I sit with the BP disaster, other emotions course through my body-deep, deep grief; fear, despair, and helplessness, and I have to wonder about the emotions of the earth itself. And since I believe that Gaia is a living, breathing organism, I must correct my use of "the earth itself" and state unequivocally that I believe she must be very, very angry. Within the past two years prior to the BP disaster, we have witnessed what many believe is an unprecedented number of natural disasters. Although officials from the U.S. Geological Survey insist that the number of earthquakes has not increased in recent years, many question that conclusion. Is Gaia "working through" her Five Stages of Grief? And if she is angry, what might she do next?

Perhaps those questions feel too anthropocentric to the reader, so I refer to the natural process of homeostasis which is "the ability of a system or living organism to adjust its internal environment to maintain a stable equilibrium." When a system is out of balance, some internal process attempts to adjust the imbalance and return it to a state of balanced functioning.

In a 2008 interview with C-Realm Podcast, Albert Bartlett, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of The Essential Exponential for Our Planet, stated, regarding population and unlimited growth, "If we don't stop it now, then Nature will stop it through a big die-off." Bartlett argues that population and growth spell annihilation for the planet if humans do not radically change their ways of occupying our planet.

One might argue that if Bartlett's theory is so, it is all a matter of simple physics and that speaking of earth's anger is pure anthropocentrism. Yet the distinguished doctor of medicine and biophysics, James Lovelock, who penned the book The Revenge of Gaia, argues in that work, as he does in many places, that humans have created out-of-control global warming and climate change which are now wreaking revenge on our species. Lovelock too may be indulging in rampant anthropocentrism, but if the earth itself has conscious self-awareness, both Bartlett and Lovelock may be onto something.

While we cannot validate with certainty earth's anger, we can certainly attest to our own in the face of humanity's devastation of the ecosystem. And while I do not concur with some in the field of psychology who argue that anger isn't really a fundamental human emotion but a kind of mask for other feelings such as fear and grief, I do believe that in the case of our anger toward members of our species who are committing ecological suicide, it is crucial that we connect with our grief and terror regarding the state of the planet and the dire consequences of the project of industrial civilization which we are now beginning to experience.

In the short term, anger may be useful in motivating us to act-to prepare for the coming chaos, to help raise the awareness of others, and to inspire others to prepare, but if we allow ourselves to fully grasp the calamitous reality of the future into which we are moving, I believe that our anger will soon be eclipsed by fear, grief, and despair. My forthcoming book, Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Toolkit for Inner Transition, provides an extensive array of options for utilizing all emotions we might encounter in a world unraveling in order to sustain and protect ourselves.

Among the myriad reactions I hear to the BP disaster from the folks with whom I interact, the one that overshadows all others is anguish. We hold hands across the sand and bodies of water, we pray, and we talk to our friends, but fundamentally, we are absolutely powerless to remedy or reverse what occurred on April 20. We knew our planet was in a state of full-blown collapse, but we didn't expect it to unfold this way. As one friend recently said to me, "It's just a matter of time now." I could have said, "Until what?" but I long ago learned not to ask questions I already know the answer to. My friend and I could just as well have been standing on the deck of the Titanic having the same conversation.

In an angry, chaotic world, it will be important for us to read the deeper emotions that underlie the rage we are likely to see erupting in society and in our communities. We will need to fortify ourselves emotionally and logistically from the collateral damage that myriad wounded-animal outbursts from others could inflict upon us, and even more importantly, not allow our egos to succumb to the momentary pleasure our own indulgence in rage might afford. At the same time we validate the rage our fellow humans feel, our compassion must penetrate the vitriol and understand the shipwreck that any human soul might become after years of sailing the waters of dogged denial and unwarranted faith in the American dream. If you are reading these words, it is likely that you have awakened from the dream or are in the process of doing so. Millions more never have and never will. How will we hold all of our emotions in the face of the rage their sense of betrayal will evoke in them? How will we go on loving the world?

**Portions of this article are excerpted from Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Toolkit For Inner Transition, By Carolyn Baker,  which will be submitted for publication in the fall of 2010.

President Obama missed what the BP oil spill disaster is really about. Though unquestionably an environmental disaster, the BP oil spill is much much more.

The BP oil spill is part of the same problem as the financial crisis: The BP oil spill and the banking crisis are two examples of the era we are living in, the era of corporate anarchy.

In a nutshell, in this era of corporate anarchy, corporations do not have to abide by any rules--none at all. Legal, moral, ethical, even financial rules are irrelevant. They have all been rescinded in the pursuit of profit--literally nothing else matters.

As a result, corporations currently exist in a state of almost pure anarchy--but an anarchy directly related to their size: The larger the corporation, the greater its absolute freedom to do and act as it pleases. That's why so many medium-sized corporations are hell-bent on growth over profits: The biggest of them all, like BP and Goldman Sachs, live in a positively Hobbesian State of Nature, free to do as they please, with nary a consequence.

The added bonus to this, though, is that the largest corporations have convinced the governments and the people of the "Too Big To Fail" fallacy--they have convinced the world that if they cease to exist, the sky will fall atop our collective heads. So if they fail, they must be saved--without argument, without penalty, and without reform.

Let's take BP: British Petroleum caused the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. There were various Federal Government agencies charged with supervising their operations--but all of those agencies deferred to BP, before the accident. As a large corporation--one of the largest oil companies in the world--BP operated more or less without any Government supervision. As is emerging, because of this lax and toothless supervision, safety rules and procedures were ignored. Insane risks were taken. No safety contingency plans were drawn up.

From what some memos are saying, disaster was inevitable.

Once the accident happened, BP controlled the information it released concerning the disaster. BP unilaterally decided not to proceed with an immediate top-kill of the well--instead, BP risked a wider disaster, in order to save the oil field by drilling a "relief well". BP's reasoning was simple: By implementing an immediate top-kill, BP would have sacrificed the oil field (and lost its investment) in order to save the environment. BP did not do this. Instead, it tried to stretch out the process, so as to salvage the oil field (and the profits) with the "relief well". But when it became impossible to hide the extent of the damage--when the smell of oil permeated the clear skies of Louisiana a hundred miles from the site of the spill--BP tried to implement the top-kill. We know how that ended.

Where was Authority? Where was Someone In Charge? The fact was, there was no one in charge. There was no one supervising--or at any rate, the ones who were supposed to be supervising had had their teeth yanked. And BP knew it--so they did whatever they wanted, regardless of the risks, or the costs.

Worst of all, BP realizes that, if it finally cannot get a handle on the oil spill disaster, they can simply fob it off on the U.S. Government--in other words, the people of the United States will wind up cleaning BP's mess. BP knows that no one will hold it accountable--BP knows that it will get away with it.

No one was holding the banks accountable either. It's no accident that American and European banks nearly went broke, but banks here in Chile sailed along smoothly: That's because banks here are regulated up the wazoo. They literally can't fart without an independent banking inspector supervising them, and then getting a stamped form in triplicate. When Chile's banks went bust in the crisis of 1980, it put paid to any illusions that the banks knew what they were doing--the government bailed out the banks then, but kept them under glass ever after.

But in Europe and America, the story was the Greenspan Put. Easy Al was so convinced that the banks would "self-regulate" that he pulled the teeth of the Fed, the banks regulatory agency, and let the "free market" have its way.

With this free pass, what do you think the banks did? They went anarchic--they invented all sorts of clever "financial products" that exponentially increased risk, rather than mitigating it. We all saw how that movie ended. When Lehman busted and the credit markets froze, a slap-dash improvised "rescue package" was drawn up, then the $700 billion TARP, then Quantitative Easing, all of these efforts lubed up with a lot of talk to "strengthening the regulatory environment" and "protecting the financial markets".

The upshot? The banks did whatever they pleased--with no supervision. And when their recklessness led inevitably to the catastrophe in the Fall of '08, the banks got bailed out--with no repercussions. The biggest ones even managed to turn a profit off the tax payer-funded bail-outs!

Even after the worst of the crisis--when the effects of no regulation and no supervision were clearly understood--nothing happened. The zero-regulation, zero-supervision regime continued.

This isn't the case for people, for individuals: People are regulated, people are controlled. Individuals are supervised and limited in what they can do and say--and no one complains. On the contrary--everyone is relieved, because it protects us all from the unreasonable behavior of an individual.

As an individual, I am limited in countless ways, from the trivial, like jaywalking, to the severe, like murder. I can't even speak up and yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater--I would be arrested for inciting a panic, the general good of avoiding a potentially lethal stampede overriding my need to express myself by yelling "Fire!" when there is none.

Curiously, individuals--ordinary people--are being supervised and regulated more and more stringently. Yet at the same time, corporations are becoming more and more free to do as they please. No one notices how strange this is--we have even lost the social framework to even talkabout regulating and supervising corporations, because too many foolish pundits equate supervision and regulation with Socialism. Yet curiously, personal freedom is being chipped away, day by day, without a peep from these pundits.

Meanwhile, the banks run amok.

Meanwhile, BP runs amok.

We can look at other industries--Big Pharma, for one--but there's no real need: Big Pharma will fit the same pattern as BP and the banks. Get so big that you can do whatever you want, and no one will challenge you, not even the government. Carry out practices that will inevitably create a crisis--like unsafe drilling, like toxic bonds--and be confident that you will be bailed out.

Bailed out, and allowed to continue, unfettered. "Allowed" to continue, unfettered? I'm sorry, I mis-spoke: Encouraged to continue, unfettered.

This era of corporate anarchy is reaching a crisis point--we can all sense it. Yet the leadership in the United States and Europe is making no effort to solve the root problem. Perhaps they don't see the problem. Perhaps they are beholden to corporate masters. Whatever the case, in his speech, President Obama made ridiculous references to "clean energy" while ignoring the cause of the BP oil spill disaster, the cause of the financial crisis, the cause of the spiralling health-care costs--the corporate anarchy that underlines them all.

This era of corporate anarchy is wrecking the world--literally, if you've been tuning in to images of the oil billowing out a mile down in the Gulf of Mexico.

I think we are at the fork in the road: One path leads to revolutionary change, if not outright revolution. The other, appeasement and stasis, as the corporations grind the country down.

My own sense is, there will be no revolutionary change. The corporations won. They won when they convinced the best and brightest--of which I used to be--that the only path to success was through a corporate career. No necessarily through for-profit corporations--Lefties never seem to quite get how pernicious and corporatist the non-profits really are; or perhaps they do know, but are clever enough not to criticize them, since those non-profits and NGO's pay for their meals.

Obama is a corporatist--he's one of Them. So there'll be more bullshit talk about "clean energy" and "energy independence", while the root cause--corporate anarchy--is left undisturbed.

Once again: Thank God I no longer live in America. It's too sad a thing, to watch while a great nation slowly goes down the tubes.

Gonzalo Lira, a novelist and filmmaker (and economist) currently living in Chile and writing at Gonzalo Lira

Big oil spills are no longer news in this vast, tropical land. The Niger Delta -- where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface -- has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless.

BP is talking about cleaning up the mess they made. But what does clean-up really mean? Is it no visible oil on the surface of the water?  How can life survive after being embraced by oil?  What fish or birds would ever want to make love?  

In the Niger Delta the villain is Shell. Oil leaks in the region are also a result of oil thieves and aging pipelines, no longer properly being maintained. The people in the Niger Delta have been battling for years to control their destiny and protect their environment.

One wonders what will happen here in the United States? Will a populist movement organize against a big oil company? Will the "small" people fight back?

It might be a good idea to bring Nigerian fishermen and folks from Louisiana to Washington and have them sit side by side and tell their stories. There is a similar (if not singular) narrative taking place and it is beginning to sound too much like science-fiction.

The fear of a black planet could be one engulfed by oil.

Writing way back in the year 1900, poet James Elroy Flecker summed up the view the Western world held of the region at the time;

Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells, When shadows pass gigantic on the sand, And softly through the silence beat the bells, Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

Dating back over 6000 years, some of the earliest indications of mining anywhere in the world come from Afghanistan. Afghanistan, for example, has always been a well-known source of precious and semi-precious stones and above all its lapis lazuli. The blue lapis lazuli stone in the famous funeral mask of the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen was reportedly exported from Badakhshan in Afghanistan to Egypt in 1300 BC.

During the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, geological investigations were closed to the Western world. The Soviets, however, did carry out sporadic mining surveys in the country neatly cataloguing these on charts and maps. Though much of this record was destroyed during the armed resistance to the Soviet occupation, and later during the messy Taliban rule, some did survive.

It was thus that in 2004, when the Americans undertook the so called reconstruction effort in Afghanistan, some geologists came across fascinating sets of old Soviet charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul. The information more than hinted at major mineral deposits in the country.

That got the US Geological Survey team's antennae up. They promptly got an old Orion P-3 aircraft, configured it with advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment, loaded it up with the Russian survey charts and maps and began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan's mineral resources. They flew well over 70 per cent of the country in the year 2006. The data they put together was so promising that they returned in 2007, this time with instruments that offered a 3-D contour of mineral deposits deep below the surface. In the end, what was started as a hunch turned out to be the most wide-ranging geological survey ever conducted in Afghanistan. The results, not shared internationally till then, were breathtaking.

Due to the universally slow pace of bureaucracy, however, files containing this astonishing array of records kept gathering dust for next the two years in US filing cabinets. It was only in 2009 that a Pentagon task force called 'Business Development Task Force' (whatever it stands for) stumbled upon this wealth of information. Not very much later the Pentagon task force brought in teams of American mining experts and had them poring over the survey's findings. Eureka!, the experts shouted to themselves at the end of the study, with their head honchos reaching for the nearest telephones simultaneously.

The Times broke the story in a screaming headline on June 13, 2010. Reportedly, the deposits are so rich in quality and quantity that according to the NYT "Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world." Having a worth of approximately one trillion US dollars, Afghanistan is said to be loaded with bulging veins of gold, copper, iron, cobalt and critical industrial metals like Lithium. The country's present gross domestic product stands at a puny $12 billion.

The biggest mineral deposits discovered so far are of iron and copper. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, and some rare earth elements. An internal Pentagon memo, according to the same report, states that "Afghanistan could become the 'Saudi Arabia of lithium'." Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command called it a 'stunning potential'. Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines, said, "this will become the backbone of the Afghan economy."

Intriguingly, the Times slipped in another interesting report the very next day i.e. on June 14th. According to this one, the bidding for rights to explore the reserves could begin in as little as six months and that Afghan officials believed that there was even more wealth than announced so far. According to these officials, it was so because, "in part the surveyors did not examine closely the entire country and at least 30 percent of it has yet to be fully investigated."

The NYT articles of the 13th and 14th June surreptitiously raise two other issues. One, the Taliban could now fight ever more viciously for their country's untapped wealth. And two, regional actors like China are likely to warm up to the idea of having these untold riches just in their backyard.

Well!!! One could let the two stories go by as straightforward reporting but for one other report. In this report of 14th June, the viability of President Obama's plan to begin pulling out by July 2011 has been questioned. Ever ready regional specialist Bruce Reidel of Brookings Institution, who helped formulate the administration's first Afghan strategy in early 2009 has been reported as saying, "things are not looking good, there's not much sign of the turnaround that people were hoping for." While Mr. Reidel did say that pouring in more troops was politically infeasible, he also added, "pulling out altogether would make the United States vulnerable to a terrorist attack organized by Al Qaeda and originating in a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan."

Now the scribe could have simply said 'eat your heart out Dick Cheney' and let the news slip by as sensational but routine, or draw certain not so routine conclusions from the reportage. Just some of these are;

1. The mineral finds were too big a news to keep under wraps any longer.

2. The time to share the lolly i.e. the bidding time, was just around the corner at which time the sudden announcement of the finds would have looked even more suspicious.

3. The current American Administration, which had promised a pullout in a rush of blood at the start, is increasingly finding out that the withdrawal option not only means a loss of face, it is also not possible to just fold up and go home. (discussed elsewhere in greater details)

Essentially, then, it all boils down to this for the good old US of A. Cut and run and be damned, or stay and fight and be damned but have your pockets full by the time the bullhorn is sounded.

So yes, eat your heart out Dick Cheney for you missed it by a click but urge Dubya's successors to start building the world's second largest embassy in Kabul, the first one having been already built in the other colony.

To the grand strategic thinkers of Pakistani variety especially, therefore, one has this to say; start getting your danders up, but make haste slowly this time for no one is going any where any time too soon. Let the grand masters have their fill of the Manna first.

And to the poor Afghans unable to extract from the bowels of the earth what is rightfully theirs, this, "God sends the meat but the devil sends the cooks."

The latest International Energy Outlook, an annual forecast by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, provides a cautionary "what if" for the global energy future if current policies remain unchanged. Driven by population and economic growth in developing countries, the world in 2035 would be more dependent on fossil fuels than ever, it finds. Countries overall would be consuming 49 percent more energy and spewing 43 percent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2035 than in 2007.

Highlights of the international outlook were released in late May, and the full report will be available in July. Earlier this year, Miller-McCune.com reported on the administration's energy forecast for the U.S. to 2035.

The burgeoning world demand for energy comes in part from an extra 1.8 billion people by 2035, for a total population of 8.5 billion. The fastest-growing regions are India, the Middle East, Africa and Central and South America -- in short, much of the developing world.

In addition to population, the outlook finds, strong growth in gross domestic product would help fuel an 84 percent increase in energy consumption in those countries and China by 2035, absent any new national policies or binding international agreements on climate change. Coal consumption would increase by more than 50 percent, with most of the increase coming from Asia, minus Japan and South Korea. In 2035, coal still would fuel the largest share -- 43 percent -- of the world's electricity.

At the same time, 30 countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Iceland and much of the European Union, would see an increase of 14 percent in their energy consumption by 2035. These countries have been undergoing a transition from manufacturing to service economies, and their gross domestic product is projected to grow only half as fast as in the rest of the world. Their population also would grow more slowly. Europe, for example, would grow 0.2 percent yearly, compared to a 1.7 percent in Africa.

The global recession has had a profound impact on energy demand, causing it to contract by 1.2 percent in 2008 and 2.2 percent in 2009, as manufacturing sharply declined, along with consumer demand for goods and services. But the outlook shows that oil consumption will rise again this year and every year after that, and oil will remain the world's largest energy source. If energy policies remain unchanged, an estimated 26 million extra barrels of oil per day would be needed by 2035 to meet the world demand.

As the price of oil increases to $133 per barrel in 2035, the outlook finds, nuclear power would become competitive with fossil fuels, resulting in a 70 percent increase in electricity generation from nuclear power, mostly in Asia and Central and South America. With the exception of hydropower and wind power, most renewable sources of energy would not be economically competitive with fossil fuels.

"Typically," the outlook states, "government incentives or policies provide the primary support for construction of renewable generation facilities."

Of course, energy policy is not likely to stay static for the next 25 years.

The U.S. House of Representatives in 2009 approved a bill that aims to cut greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, roughly in line with the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Senate Democrats introduced similar legislation last month.

Getting the votes for policy change will be an uphill battle, though. Today, the Senate debated a resolution that challenges U.S. regulatory power over greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. It would bar the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases at power plants, oil refineries and other large-scale industrial facilities. The resolution, introduced by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, was defeated on a 47-53 vote.

"The Clean Air Act was written by Congress to regulate criteria pollutants, not greenhouse gases, and its implementation remains subject to oversight and guidance from elected representatives," Murkowski said in a press release earlier this year. "We should continue our work to pass meaningful energy and climate legislation, but in the meantime, we cannot turn a blind eye to the EPA's efforts to impose back-door climate regulations with no input from Congress."

Senior administration officials have said they would have recommended a presidential veto if the Senate approved the resolution. In a statement to the Senate this week, the Office of Management and Budget said the resolution would block the administration's efforts to promote fuel economy standards, reduce the impacts of catastrophic oil spills and jump-start investment in renewable energy.

Further, the office said, the resolution "would increase the nation's dependence on oil and other fossil fuels and block efforts to cut pollution that threatens our health and well-being"; and is "contrary to the widely-accepted scientific consensus that greenhouse gases are at increasingly dangerous concentrations and are contributing to the threat of climate change."

Among the principal factors leading up to the April 20 oil rig explosion, and the subsequent uncontrolled eruption from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, was the absence of any regulations on the profit-driven operations of the energy industry. Government agencies under both Bush and Obama pushed for the expansion of deep-sea oil drilling and rubber-stamped all the decisions made by BP.

One measure of this influence is money. Through a combination of large individual gifts, Political Action Committees and other indirect channels, the oil and gas industry pumped over $250 million into federal campaign coffers over the past 20 years, according to a new report from the Center for Responsive Politics.

This does not include lobbying. The industry spent $174 million last year alone on lobbying the federal government, the third largest of 121 industries. BP, for its part, spent $16 million last year. All told, since 1998 the oil lobby has committed $1 billion to exert its influence on public policy.

"The oil and gas industry has long been one of the most influential in Washington. They are truly a powerhouse industry," Center for Responsive Politics Communications Director Dave Levinthal told the WSWS.

Levinthal explained, "At any time there are dozens of pieces of legislation on the table and lots of diverging interests. Still, the confluence of all this oil industry money in politics above all purchases access. It gets company executives into the game. The amount of influence they get one can only dream of if you don't have millions to spend."

One direct result is that the industry has been allowed to regulate itself. The federal agency with responsibility for oversight and regulation of oil drilling, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), routinely allows extensive offshore drilling without requiring obligatory environmental reviews and permits. MMS waived basic safety precautions that might have prevented the spill.

While the public disgust in the wake of the disaster has skyrocketed, it has not stalled the collusion between government and Big Oil. In fact, the opposite is true. Halliburton, the energy company involved in making the cement casings for the rig, which may have ultimately contributed to the explosion, last month ramped up its political spending to the highest levels since just before the 2008 elections.

Just one week prior to appearing before an investigative subcommittee of the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, Halliburton donated $1,500 to the campaign fund of the ranking Republican, Joe Barton (Texas), according to a report by Politico.

In May, Halliburton also contributed donations of $1,000 on Senator Mike Crapo (Idaho) of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Senator Richard Burr (North Carolina) of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Both committees are holding their own hearings to investigate the oil disaster.

Along similar lines, Democratic Senator turned lobbyist John Breaux, who now represents some clients in the oil and gas industry, is working to ensure oil industry representation on the five member "independent" presidential commission to investigate the spill. Breaux told the New Orleans newspaper Times-Picayune, "The commission shouldn't consist of all environmentalists, or all industry people. You need to have a mix."

One of Obama's two choices to head the commission is former Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly, who currently sits on the board of directors of oil giant ConocoPhillips.

Congressional donations, not surprisingly, are highest to committee members who play integral roles in crafting legislation affecting the oil industry. Members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee received an average of about $52,000 from individuals and groups associated with the oil and gas industry this election cycle. However contributions are near ubiquitous: 78 percent of House members and 84 percent of Senators received funding from oil and gas this past election cycle.

Both parties have received millions, though donations to Republicans have outweighed Democrats over the years about three to one. Nonetheless, President Obama was the second largest recipient of all candidates for federal office from the oil industry in 2008, pulling in just shy of one million. Only Republican presidential challenger John McCain received more.

BP executives, however, contributed twice as much to Obama, the largest single recipient of the company's funds.

This current election season, several candidates have already received over $100,000 from the oil industry. Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas) leads the way with over $280,000 collected thus far. Lincoln currently sits on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Republican Senators David Vitter and Lisa Murkowski--from the oil states of Louisiana and Alaska, respectively--both pulled in over $200,000 to date.

The influence extends beyond the executive and legislative branches of government. According to the National Law Journal, seven of the 12 federal judges in the Eastern District of Louisiana have recused themselves from hearing oil spill cases, citing connections to the oil industry.

The ties uniting government officials with the oil industry are intertwined further by the "revolving door" between political office and industry employment. Just within the Department of Interior, these connections are everywhere.

The Obama administration appointed Sylvia Baca, a BP executive, to serve as a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management. Baca was appointed last June by Obama's Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, who himself has extensive ties to the oil industry and has long promoted off-shore oil drilling.

Bush administration Interior Secretary Gale Norton, after leaving the government took a position as general counsel for Royal Dutch Shell.

Outside the Interior Department, Obama's Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, headed a research institute at the University of California, Berkeley, which was funded by BP with a $500 million grant. On becoming Energy Secretary, Chu selected BP's chief scientist, Steven Koonin, to be the DOE undersecretary for science.

One of the most egregious examples is Steve Griles, who served as Deputy Secretary of the Interior Department and a representative on Dick Cheney's energy task force. After leaving office to start up his own energy lobbying firm, Griles was convicted of obstructing justice in the investigation of lobbyist Jack A. Abramoff. A federal judge sentenced Griles to 10 months in prison.

The movement between political positions and lobbying firms is very widespread. Of BP's 37 registered lobbyists identified by Center for Responsive Politics, 22 have held positions within the executive or legislative branches or as senior staffers.

Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall underscored these connections in an investigation released last month that confirmed allegations of MMS employees accepting gifts from oil and gas companies and other misconduct. In the report she wrote, "Of greatest concern to me is the environment in which these inspectors operate--particularly the ease with which they move between industry and government."

Mandy Smithberger, from the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight put it more bluntly in an interview with the Associated Press. "To say that MMS has had a revolving door problem doesn't even begin to describe how profoundly this agency has entangled itself with industry. The revolving door has spun so readily in this case that the lines between the regulators and the regulated are now virtually nonexistent."

Somehow I cannot do that, and it leaves me 'dazed and confused' when the mass of information that is available reveals quite transparently that all the major disaster news items are related and that the sum total of them all is that on our current course, we are all facing dramatic and perhaps traumatic changes to our lifestyles. Today's news items that leave me dazed and confused run the full spectrum of scary items: Euro devaluation; massive oil pools in Gulf of Mexico heading towards Gulf Stream; Arctic long term ice rotting away; 145th Canadian and 1000th U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan; Israel continues occupying Palestine.

Economics

The global economy appears to be nothing more than a giant Ponzi scheme that will fall apart as soon as a critical person, institute, or mass of investors stops believing they can reap more profits from it. Finance capitalism displays its fault lines all across Europe as the EU in conjunction with the IMF and World Bank - the Washington consensus - bailed out Greece. This imposes on Greece an austerity program that has long proven that it does more to impoverish the middle and lower classes offering more regressive taxation accompanied by a decline in social services and social benefits ranging from medical services, through education to pensions and income assistance.

The bailouts in Greece and the resulting market chaos from a frightened financial sector will take its toll, as usual with the masses absorbing most of the losses in the form of higher taxes and degraded services, public and private. With one big thump, neo-liberalism and its finance capitalism has arrived in Greece, soon perhaps to be followed by Spain, Portugal, Italy and who know what others to join Latvia, Estonia, and Iceland as failing Euro-states.

For all the rhetoric spewed out by global economists, it only goes to strengthen my long held belief that economists are essentially useless and the "science" of economics is an oxymoron as it is based on invented formulas from imagined markets. It also strengthens my fear that sometime soon, combined with all the other elements in the economic news concerning banks and mortgages and employment stats, something catastrophic will happen to make everyone's savings and earnings next to worthless.

Oiling the Military

And then when it costs an estimated one million dollars a day to maintain one U.S. soldier in the Middle East, it only emphasizes how the military is very much involved with our current global economy, in more ways than one. Along with the cost of the war - in the hundreds of billions of dollars, leading into the trillions - are the costs to the occupied countries from a wide range of parameters including civilian infrastructure (housing, water, electricity, schools, and hospitals), chemical poisons (from various ordinances including depleted uranium and white phosphorous), internal refugees, and the destruction of local economies, increasing the chances of graft, oppression, and criminal activities.

Which still omits the purpose behind the wars in the first place, supposedly based on a global war on terror, and the spreading of democracy and freedom throughout the Middle East...while the reality of the wars is the opportunistic events of 9/11 enabling an excuse to become a global military hegemon trying to capture the oil, gas, and mineral wealth of the region at the same time containing the rising power of China and the re-assertiveness of Russia.

Of course the part of the military news reported this week is the 145th Canadian soldier and the 1000th U.S. soldier to die in Afghanistan, most of them from IEDs buried at roadside or in car bombs, as with this incident in Kabul. Broadly suggested on the patriotic front is that we must all support our troops, something I find hard to do when Canadian troops are not much more than allies for the U.S.'s intent on military control of the world. Seldom is mention given to the thousands, hundreds of thousands, of the local populations killed directly from military action or indirectly from its many collateral consequences. An indigenous person who fights against foreign occupation immediately becomes a terrorist, yet the real terror being spread comes from the reported imminent assault by U.S./NATO forces against Kandahar, even though similar actions in the much less populated villages of Marjah has been an understated failure.

Another tie in militarily is of course Iran and Israel. With Israel thumbing their collective noses at the U.S. administration, unthreatened by U.S. military strength as it has its own finely tuned military - supported in a large part through U.S. 'aid' and supplies of high tech military equipment - the U.S./Israel/Iran triangle creates the fearful situation of another impending military action, perhaps leading into the use of nuclear weapons depending on the fierceness or not of Iranian resistance. That scenario is currently tempered by the news report of Brazil's Lula reaching a limited agreement with Iran and Turkey on the transportation and servicing of enriched uranium, but it waits to be seen how the U.S. and Israel argue their way around this diplomatic action that bypasses their efforts at control.

And then on into Pakistan, 'Obama's war' of choice, undeclared, fought through covert operations within the population and within the government agencies, while a large clear majority of the citizens see the U.S. as the biggest threat to the country. It is also fought through high tech warriors at computers well away from the actual situations, relying on nothing more than their own gut level despisal of the indigenous populations. The Pakistan situation goes to show that the main U.S. response to its declining global economic role, its reliance on oil for the vast majority of its economic demands, its only true method of resolving any situation it does not like, is to send in the military. Who's next? Iran? Venezuela? Korea? As the U.S. empire becomes even more aggressive militarily, I can only think again, we're all facing something quite dramatic and traumatic!

More oil

Totally unrelated to all this military and economic garbage, at least as presented by the media, are the two news items this week that supposedly have an impact on the environment. Which they do, but their impact and significance go far beyond the reporting of the actual information as narrowly presented in the news and most commentaries.

The biggest news is that of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It has had no real impact on the economy, other than the regional economy of tourism and fisheries along the Gulf Coast, but no earth shaking effect on the dollar or the overall economy, perhaps more significant if it reaches the Gulf Stream and on into the Atlantic.... Yet it is all too representative of the overall economy. The necessity for oil in our high energy, easy energy economy, the disdain for environmental safeguards, placing profits above the environment we live in, the ignoring of information concerning the drilling operations such as the partial failure of a rubberized protective pressure gasket signals that the corporate world, the supra-national corporations that have effectively superseded governments in many areas, could care less about anything but their own profits.

Our easy energy economy relies on oil and its derivative products. Everything we do, everything we have, is all related to the easy energy provided by oil, a resource that is at or very near its peak, with not a slow rundown on a bell curve at the end, but a roller coaster style drop off as extraction becomes more difficult for a variety of reasons. Our agriculture runs on oil, from the fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides through to its transportation thousands of miles away to the homes of those that can afford the luxury of thousand mile meals. Our health structures, medicines, tourism, our whole civic structure based on the automobile, the world of plastics, the energy needed to make and use all the consumptive demands of our society rely on oil.

All that consumption is expressed in the other news item concerning the Arctic ice cover. The climate change deniers will not go away, but there is irrefutable evidence that the climate is changing. That evidence comes in part from the Arctic ice, now with only twenty per cent of it remaining as long term multi-year ice, the rest is new annual ice. The surprise comes from the awareness that although the winter ice appeared to have regained its cover - as it had - the multi-year ice had diminished greatly and what was left was a conglomeration of rotten ice and new ice. More evidence comes from the indigenous people, the Inuit, who have lived there for millennia and now are unable to read the ice and weather patterns as they change rapidly from their long ancestral observations. The culture changes with it as new names for new phenomena of weather and flora and fauna are being introduced.

All that oil, coal, and natural gas, our natural heritage from millions of years ago when the climate created an enormous energy bounty harvested naturally from the sun, we have squandered on an easy fast paced uncaring life in the short term for a decidedly undetermined, uncertain, and freaky future. The developed countries bounty comes from the easy energy domination of oil and the corporate structures controlling global wealth and global finances. Our changing climate with its wider range of variability is very much still an unknown...but what is known is that the ice cover, which was forecast to be gone in a century or so from the Arctic ocean, is now possibly going to disappear completely (except for winter ice cover) within a decade or so.

There in the Arctic is the confluence of our oily greed, our uncaring effluent affluence, our military solutions to world problems. When I look at the responses to natural and man made disasters around the world I shudder to think what would be the consequence of another major military action that could result in the use of nuclear weapons. I shudder to think what the climate might throw at us as it continues along its unpredictable responses to the carbon energy we are pumping back into the atmosphere. The economy, which in the news is generally front and center, becomes a matter of worthlessness when faced with what could be large and sudden changes in the status of global energy and weather systems.

Solutions....

I sometimes wonder if there are any realistic solutions given human nature, its short term perspectives, its vanity, and its supposed intelligence that somehow always seems to create some form of blowback for its actions. There are solutions, ones that would still create dramatic change but hopefully soften the trauma for everyone. The changes need to be significant and not just the cosmetic panaceas that cover - and conceal - the symptoms but do little for the actual underlying problem of living in a militarized consumptive finance-oriented society

In no particular order, as they are all complementary actions, there are several ideas that need to be put into action, hopefully through a rapid evolution of common sense intelligence toward the planet and its inhabitants, as revolutionary ideas while founded on good ideas and great plans, often create a deterioration into violence that nullifies the intent of the actions in the first place.

Israel/Palestine/Iran and the rest of the Middle East

Israel/Palestine are the symbolic focus of the militarized activity in the Middle East and South Asia. The tie in between the Israeli and U.S. military in all its components (industry, politics, technology, finance) demonstrates the perversity of human nature in relation to a falsely created 'other'. The 'other' for the Israelis occupying Palestinian lands are the Palestinian 'terrorists' conveniently supported by the U.S. designation of any thought or action against their occupying forces as being terroristic. The solution to any problem in for both countries has proven to be some kind of military violence, neither truly wishing to negotiate, with its implications of equal bargaining rights and acknowledgement of legitimate grievances on the part of the occupied and subjugated peoples.

This part of the solution is simple but I do not see it happening. The occupiers need to go home. The brief spate of democracy that went awry - with Hezbollah gaining recognition in Lebanon, Hamas defeating Fatah in Palestine, the Shia's gaining power in Iraq with a challenge to U.S. occupation, and Egypt cracking down violently on its renewed opposition to autocratic rule - challenged the very theoretical philosophical rhetoric of democracy and freedom that these countries pretend to uphold. This part of the solution should happen, but it won't, as the other imperial factors of resources and finances are slowly nibbling away at the security and wealth of the 'homeland'. The empire will not go away peacefully.

Corporations

Another solution not likely to happen due to the power structures involved and the political and military tie ins is that of controlling the corporations. The supranational corporations - many larger than governments, most having entitlements to sue, threaten, lobby and challenge national governments that even the local citizens do not have, all provided by agreements that were decided upon in thoroughly non-democratic fashion - need to be shut down. Perhaps not totally disbanded, but they need to have their political and legal powers greatly curtailed if not abolished.

Corporations are set up for one purpose - to create wealth for the owners and avoid legal responsibility for anything else while doing so. The big corporations need to be brought under national civilian control, meaning essentially under national law based on human rights, social rights, and environmental responsibility. Responsibilities for the environment, workers conditions and rights, product recycling should all be implemented at both the global and national level. The cost of doing business should include the real costs on the environment and the people that work and live in that environment. Failing that, they should simply be disbanded - nationalized and broken apart.

There would be of course much screeching and crying about the loss of wealth and the loss of employment and the crashing of the global GDP and all the other economic ills that our current finance capitalism and debt burdened financing are creating anyway. With the environment threatened and in return giving humanity a literal unexpected blowback, with the economy teetering on the edge of chaos, the main solution will come from taking away the power of the corporations over the legitimate concerns of a country's citizens.

Many of these corporations rely on the 'hidden fist' of the military for their survival, both for capturing and harnessing resources and markets, but also as part and parcel of the militarily financed corporations that create so much havoc globally. To think they will go peacefully away when their very foundation is threatened by the shrinking energy resources of the world is illusory. Citizens and duly elected governments need to stand up for their integrity and get rid of the power of the corporations that truly rule our lives.

Think skeptically, act positively - live locally, think globally

The foundations of a soft-landing for the restructuring of our relationship with the environment and the decreasing ease of carbon based energy resources needs to start with information and education. With human intelligence and craftiness much could be done to alleviate any hard landings from environmental change, economic collapse, and the loss of easy energy. I have to question whether any government, whether any group really has the power to do this as the inertia within a society based on fast fuel and ease of transportation and manufacturing energy will be hard to transform.

The elites in society will wish to remain the elites and hoard as much wealth and power they can retain as events change around them. Very few people will be accepting of giving up their privileges, very few will be accepting of giving up their easy entertainment and comfortable thoughtless manners that lead us closer and closer to an ultimate need to change and restructure. Change is certain. The environment will dictate that to us very soon, denial or not. The loss of carbon energy will dictate that to us very soon, denial or not.

I expect the news not to change much. What I can hope for is that as many citizens as are able will read and inform themselves about all the global concerns by comparing and contrasting the words with the actions of the current powers, corporate, political, and military. They truly create a dissonant sound, confusing, obfuscating, lying and concealing. Read, be informed, think skeoyically, act positively (act actively - be an activist, let your voice be heard), live locally while thinking globally. In the meantime, I remain, still, dazed at the possible significance of it all for my future and current and future generations of my family, confused by the apparent inability of others to see that action and not complacence is needed to make real progress towards a successful future.

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles' work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications.

As hundreds of thousands of gallons a day of oil (liberally seasoned with the Corexit dispersant) flow into the Gulf of Mexico, but we are told that the Gulf is large and the spill a minute amount within that vastness. Now we are watching the viscous oil killing the marshes of Louisiana and making its way around the Gulf - to Florida today.

And within that stinking sludge we see the birds and wildlife who have become so coated it is difficult to tell what they are.

Across the Gulf is an ever-growing "sheen" of oil - moving with the wind and the tide. However, not all the oil is on the surface. An unknown amount moves through the various depths and are subject to the complex edies and currents of any large body of water. In the Gulf of Mexico, the strongest current is the "Loop Current." That flow is already circulating the oil around the Gulf of Mexico including towards Cuba.

As the gushing oil has moved east, there is now public admission that the Atlantic is also at risk - particularly the East Coast of the U.S. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research produced a simulation (below) and reported "Ocean currents likely to carry oil along Atlantic coast".

The simulation shows that the oil could hit not just the East Coast of the United States, but continue to drift towards the Mid-Atlantic - and the North Atlantic current. That path will ultimately take it to the Arctic. In its wake, will swim and feed the marine life of the coasts and marshes; the fish and mammals, the plankton and crabs. It will impact the entire marine food chain. While most of the impact will likely contaminate the life of the Gulf, it seems highly unlikely that it will stay there.

The BP disaster, also known as the Macondo Prospect well, could continue to gush until at least August 2010 - and perhaps much longer. Millions of gallons of oil and natural gas will create growing dead zones and plumes that capture all life in its wake. The Gulf of Mexico could indeed become a "dead sea" for decades. The question is whether the Atlantic will share that fate.

President Obama has shown no effective leadership or any proportional response to this multi-catastrophe. All those who rightfully criticized President George W. Bush for his mishandling of the Katrina nightmare should wake up and see that Obama is failing to use every ounce of federal resources to compensate for the total failure of BP to stop the oil hemorrhaging from the floor of the Gulf. The BP failure to stop the gushing oil spill is sadly consistent with its failure to prevent the firestorm on the oil rig to begin with.

Where is the national outrage? Where are the loud calls from everyone and the media demanding a stronger a federal response? Where is Obama's clear anger and appropriate firing of many federal officials, starting with the Interior Secretary? Where is the Justice Department doing its job of quickly starting criminal prosecutions of BP and its two major contractors?

All Americans, regardless of their partisan positions, should be hollering incessantly for Obama to wake up and take this catastrophe a lot more seriously.

We should be sending a clear message that this BP oil spill catastrophe will justify preventing Obama from getting a second term. Maybe that would work to get this smarmy politician to do what is right and necessary for millions of Americans that will suffer a long time because of this corporate failure.

Obama should have seen this BP oil spill as an environmental invasion just as serious as a traditional invasion by an armed force or some awful terrorist attack. He should have mobilized the enormous federal resources in countless areas to not only deal with the oil invasion and contamination of countless natural resources but, even more critically, to stop the damn gushing of oil at the sea bottom.

It is only a matter of time until the horrendous quantities of oil wrap around Florida and then up the East coast. Maybe then more Americans will get as excited and alarmed as those poor people along the Gulf directly in the path of the oil invasion.

Maybe then President Obama will finally and belatedly show some presidential leadership. Maybe not.

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com.]

Access to safe water is essential for life. People need water to drink, for cooking, for laundry, dishwashing and personal hygiene. When safe water is not readily available, life becomes extremely difficult.

While the tap water was not safe on the night of May 1 and into May 2, there was a rush on bottled water in stores all over the area. Along with the rush for safe water came reports that store chains and owners were taking advantage of the situation and overcharging customers. According to the Boston Globe, one resident of the Jamaica Plain neighborhood found a case of water being sold for more than $52 in a 7-Eleven store in her community.

Water should be a guaranteed right for all and it should be free. But under capitalism, it is a commodity sold to make a profit. Those who cannot afford the asking price must simply suffer.

Many truck drivers and grocery store workers in the Boston area were called in and forced to work on Sunday, their day off, in order to meet the city's demand for bottled water. With jobs under constant threat in our current economy, these workers likely did not feel that they could say "no" to "requests" from their bosses to work these extra hours.

On May 3, it was announced that local towns in the area would distribute water to residents for free. The locations for distribution included surrounding suburbs and towns but not a single location within the city of Boston. Working people within the city, many of whom do not have access to a car, had no way to access these free supplies.

The clamp that broke and caused the crisis was less than 10 years old, said officials of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. According to the Boston Globe, the state Water Infrastructure Finance Commission met for the first time after the crisis was over to discuss the water system, which probably needs billions of dollars in upgrades and repairs.

The recent emergency may seem like an unusual event. However, lacking access to safe tap water is not a new scenario to many working people in and around Boston. An organization called Massachusetts Global Action has found that people who live in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan, which are low-income communities of color, are 10 times more likely than residents of wealthier neighborhoods to experience a water shutoff as a consequence of bill non-payment. Further, as the proportion of people of color increases in a city ward, there is a disproportionate likelihood that water will be shut off in a resident's home if a bill is not paid, according to Massachusetts Global Action. So while all 2 million people in the Greater Boston Area experienced this water crisis together, it is a constant threat for many working people in the city.

Water is a human right that should be guaranteed to all people. This "crisis" revealed that it is not guaranteed to the working people of Boston, nor is it freely available to most working people around the country. We must fight back against the system of capitalism that puts a price on a most basic and necessary resource for human survival, water.

Essentially what Williams tells us is that the Deep Water drilling operation was under unparalleled pressure to drill faster and deeper, cutting corners and defying essential aspects of the industry's well established drilling protocol. We can argue about whether BP and other oil giants are ramping up drilling due to the end of cheap and abundant oil on this planet or simply because of greed and a voracious obsession with profits. To engage in that kind of debate, however, is to ignore the most fundamental issue at the root of this disaster. Corporate culture, media, politicians, and the misguided American public are all failing to grasp the issue, and I suggest, are behaving like enablers responding to an addict's fatal overdose, as well as failing to recognize the extent to which they themselves are addicts.

Let me clarify: The addict is the oblivious citizen of industrial civilization who delusionally demands that he/she must at all costs maintain a lifestyle made possible by cheap hydrocarbon energy. That citizen overdosed on April 20, 2010 and may have taken the planet to their grave with them.

Now let me count the ways in which this cataclysmic oil spill is very much like a fatal drug overdose. In order to fully understand the analogy, it's necessary to grasp the extent to which the culture of industrial civilization is addictive. What makes it addictive?

Quite simply, an uncompromising-yes relentless insistence on maintaining the lifestyle to which it has become addicted, and like the addict, willing to do whatever it takes to do so, despite voluminous evidence to the contrary. This includes evidence that the addiction itself will ultimately and invariably prove fatal for the addict, for the addict has little interest in rational, scientific research. He is obsessed with only one thing: lifestyle. It doesn't matter what it costs him or anyone else. Life is all about the next fix, period. The fix could be a possession, a person, or a position in life.

So when the addict, the culture of empire, overdoses and takes everyone and everything with him, he can use the defense mechanism of blame. It wasn't my lifestyle that caused this, he says, but the corporation that pumped the oil. Furthermore, it was the administration's fault for not adopting tougher regulation. While these factors may have entered into the equation, they are not the fundamental issue. Focus on blame works beautifully for awhile to distract attention from the devastation caused by the addict. But eventually, it wears thin.

Another favorite distracting tactic of the addict is "Look how I'm trying to fix it." He mobilizes his enablers to convince the world that something is being done to reverse the repercussions of his latest shitstorm. First we'll try a dome structure to cover the oil leak and capture the oil. Or if that doesn't work, we'll blast garbage into the leak. Or if that doesn't work, we'll use a siphoning tube. In fact, even as I write this article, BP is proclaiming that it has "turned a corner" in the oil spill. This should reassure all the oil addicts, facilitating their craving and assuaging any embarrassing traces of guilt. It's all better now; this temporary nightmare is going to go away. Ya see, human ingenuity, especially of the corporate kind, will solve all problems and clean up all messes created by the addict.

Then there's my favorite addict appeasement approach: alternative energy. Don't worry, says the enabler. We'll get wind or solar or something online for you as soon as we can so that your lifestyle won't miss a beat. Yes, that may take fifty years, but meanwhile, we'll think of something to keep it going for you because this is America, and the lights never permanently go out here.

Before the addict experiences a fatal overdose and ravages everyone and everything around him, there is always the choice to end the addiction and enter treatment. Treatment involves withdrawal from the substance, then taking a long, exhaustive, meticulous look inside oneself to confront the demon of the addiction. Much support is necessary; the addict cannot make the journey alone.

The Transition Handbook frames our dependence on hydrocarbon energy in terms of an addiction. We can blame, rationalize, project, deny-we can employ whatever defense mechanism we choose from humanity's vast repertoire of them, but like the hard core addict, the human race is committing suicide. It is willing to kill every form of life in the oceans, cause the extinction of every species on earth, pollute every cubic inch of breathable air, poison every drop of water on the planet, and yes, enable an unfathomable cataclysm such as we are witnessing in the Gulf of Mexico at this moment, in order to perpetuate the lifestyle to which it feels entitled. Like all addictions, this one is both irrational and insane.

Every person who has chosen to research Peak Oil, climate change, global economic meltdown, species extinction, and population overshoot is not unlike an addict who has some moment of clarity in which he can actually choose to walk to the nearest rehab facility and fall on his face screaming for help. None of us can do that investigative work without the massive support of other "cheap energy addicts in recovery". None of us can do it without a spiritual as well as a logistical recovery program which all authentic recovery absolutely requires.

Like the recovering addict there will be moments of terror about what the future holds, and the greater the devastation we have created, such as the largest oil spill in the history of the world, the more daunting the future will feel. Like the recovery of the addict, our recovery will require rigorous honesty and a commitment to finding meaning and purpose, not in the substance, which is killing us and the planet, but in a different kind of lifestyle. This will be a lifestyle of simplicity, cooperation, and deep connection with nature and our fellow humans. It may mean alterations in our behavior that feel like sacrifices until we realize that the joy, meaning, and contentment they bring us are what we wanted all along.

Therefore, as we witness the spread of the most devastating and widespread oil slick in history; as we see the photos of oil saturated wildlife and watch frantic fisherman in despair because they have lost their livelihood; as we watch enablers blaming and scrambling to fix the un-fixable, let us do as they say in Twelve Step programs, and take a searching and fearless moral (and energy) inventory of our lives and notice where we are in our recovery from addiction to cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Richard Heinberg's book The Party's Over documents how brief in the history of the human race the party was, how much fun it was, and of course, how lethal it was and is. So while the enablers are blaming and fixing, it behooves all of us to ask of ourselves the toughest question of all: What are we doing to recover?

These days, wherever I speak or conduct a public event, and whenever I check my inbox for email, I hear similar stories of conflict or estrangement in the lives of courageous men and women who have chosen to dig deeper into the state of the macrocosm, only vaguely aware of what it might bring forth within the microcosm of their own lives. Onerous it is to be preparing for the future-contemplating and acting on the weighty issues of where to live, how to earn a livelihood, what skills to learn, and how best to fortify oneself for survival in an unraveling world, but it is nothing like having loved ones distancing or parting ways when one wants and needs them now more than ever.

Sometimes it's about fear for the well being of loved ones; sometimes it's about wanting to share something as momentous as collapse and transition with our best friend who also happens to be our beloved. Sometimes it's about wanting to be validated, heard, and seen. Maybe it's just about wanting help with the extensive, arduous tasks of preparation. But sadly, perhaps tragically, in countless instances, the kind of joining for which our hearts desperately yearn cannot happen-for whatever reason. That doesn't make our loved ones sick, bad, crazy, or stupid, but it does mean that we have reached a threshold in our relationship with them that will result in distance, perhaps permanent estrangement.

How do we cope with this? After all, isn't human connection the larger hope we hold for this transition? Isn't that what's it's all about?

Nothing I could say would make this easy, but perhaps the pain can be tempered with a larger perspective.

First, we need to remind ourselves that in the milieu of industrial civilization, we have all been thoroughly indoctrinated in the "necessity" of romantic partnership. If by a certain age we don't have a partner or have lost too many of them, we are deemed terminally defective. This is, like it or not, particularly true for women.

Furthermore, facing the future alone is frightening, and again, I believe this is especially true for women. Wouldn't it be nice, we think, to go through the transition with a partner or with all of our family members? We'd be safer, and so would they. And what a bond we could forge with each other, holding each others' hands at the end of the world as we have known it and working together to create a new one!

Yet I am becoming increasingly convinced that the transition we are heading into is going to change everything, and I mean everything. Far beyond the amount of oil we use, electricity we have available, food we grow, or skills we learn, if we survive physically, we will be transformed, re-made, and utterly metamorphosed at our core. In fact, this process challenges us, I believe, to become a new kind of human being. Can this happen if we are surrounded by exactly the people we would like to be surrounded by? Perhaps-and then again, perhaps not.

What is certain is that we cannot navigate collapse and transition alone; we must have allies, but it may be that we do not get to choose entirely who those allies are. Our most intimate companions may be strangers we barely know, and our strongest adversaries may be people we thought we could always rely on.

What I'm referring to here is the non-rational, soul level of transition that is beyond our control or reasoning or planning. It has to do with doing what we have come here to do and fulfilling a greater purpose-one that may be only dimly visible to us now. This may require joining with people we do not even yet know and parting with those who cannot walk where we feel compelled to journey.

Not for one moment would I minimize the grief many people are walking through as they find loved ones distancing from or leaving them. The loss is heart-wrenching, and it must be felt.

All of this is part of the burden of letting ourselves know what is so. Truth is no free lunch; it always exacts a price. Small wonder then that the overwhelming majority of humanity has no interest in knowing it. And really, why would anyone sign up for knowing the exact state of our planet? As my friend Mike Ruppert says, it really is much easier on a sinking Titanic to state unequivocally that the ship is unsinkable or to saunter into the bar and order a drink.

In a chaotic world of endings, unraveling, catastrophe, or protracted demise, relationship will be a pivotal issue. For this reason, the survivalist mentality which purports to "go it alone" with an "every man for himself" attitude, not only will not serve those who embrace it, but will profoundly put their physical survival at risk. For our well being, we will absolutely require connection with other human beings in times of chaos and crisis. Therefore, cultivating a broader perspective of relationship in advance of the coming chaos may be exceedingly useful in learning how to navigate relationship challenges in the future-challenges on which our survival may depend.

In today's affluent milieu of social networking, fitness and body obsession, tanning salons, fine dining and dance clubbing, the roles that civilization has proscribed for men and women are maintained and nurtured impeccably. In navigating the dating scene in an effort to secure a partner, men generally prefer to present themselves as well-groomed, sensitive gentlemen, and women typically project intelligence and self-sufficiency alongside beauty and sexual prowess. The protocol for relationships between the genders is civil and respectful. But imagine a world in chaos where projecting the current popular persona of one's gender is rendered irrelevant or even dangerous. Stereotypes and the roles we consent to play will no longer serve us because in that world, survival will be paramount.

For this reason, it behooves anyone consciously preparing emotionally and spiritually for a chaotic future to forge strong relationships with friends, neighbors, and family members. In fact, I believe it is wise to consider all of the relationships we have in our lives as sacred in that they are venues for learning about and cultivating our inner world. Even more importantly, they are opportunities for serving the earth community with whom we are inextricably connected by living out our purpose. In this way we begin to understand the relationships in our lives as part of our preparation for the future because they are as essential for our inevitable well being as food, water, shelter, or weapons. In fact, they may constitute the ultimate advantage.

And if relationships are part of our preparation for the future, we will need to forge ones that are mutually supportive and sustainable. We will need to deeply evaluate our relationships and ponder which ones enhance our preparation and which ones do not. While this may sound heartless, we have only to recall the familiar example of the airline flight attendant who admonishes us to first put on our oxygen masks before putting them on our loved ones.

As we allow ourselves to be schooled by our relationships, we recognize places where we have fallen short of how we prefer to relate to another, places where we have transgressed boundaries, failed to be present, subtly or blatantly abandoned others, failed to speak our truth, or perhaps, spoken our truth so forcefully and insensitively that we have inadvertently hurt the very ones we care about deeply. From our errors we can learn how we need to be in relationship and increasingly glimpse the momentousness of our connection with every person in our world. Quite naturally we may entertain the notion that people are in our lives and we are in theirs for specific purposes, and though we may never know the totality of the purpose, from hindsight we gradually understand that some purpose was served.

Not only must we, in my opinion, contemplate relationships between ourselves and other humans, but between ourselves and everything in our lives, for the truth is that we have a relationship with our homes, our possessions, our pets, our careers, our roles, our communities, our neighbors, our past, our present, and our future. If we are willing to consciously examine each of those relationships in terms of the purpose they serve in our lives, we participate in a deeper evaluation of them and thereby clarify their place in our lives. As a result, we counteract a tendency to wed our identity to people, places, and things while paradoxically making it possible to cherish them more because we are more keenly aware of their purpose in our lives. Likewise, this deep evaluation may precipitate a natural letting go of those things in our lives which drain our energy or finances or which make our lives more complicated and less resilient at a time in human history when survival depends on simplicity and the ability to adapt.

Stripped of that to which we have wedded our identity, collapse and transition will compel us to confront questions of purpose on a regular basis, perhaps hourly-perhaps moment to moment. We are likely to find ourselves contemplating every meaningful relationship in our lives, and many that seem devoid of meaning. Relating to diverse human beings and their idiosyncrasies, even depending for survival on individuals we may never have encountered in a less chaotic world, could become our new normal.

Schooled as we are to grapple with the tangible, logistic aspects of the "End of Suburbia" such as being forced to downscale everything we do as a result of Peak Oil, we may have failed to notice that the collapse of industrial civilization will produce not only an outer transition but an inner one as well. Are we preparing for the inner transition to the same extent that we are preparing for the outer one? The relationships in our lives may be the first, but not the last, arena of our lives that compels us to address inner preparation.

Poetry, the language of soul, often captures meaning more aptly than rational, linear prose. The Spanish poet, Juan Ramon Jimenez, in his poem "Oceans" captures best the distress, as well as the possibility that unwanted losses offer us even as we agonize through them:

I have a feeling that my boat

And we are standing now, quietly, in the new life?

Portions of this article are excerpted from Carolyn Baker's forthcoming book Navigating The Coming Chaos: Tools For Inner Transition.

Here is how it's done.

The indoctrination lectures proceed from the general to specific. Throughout these lectures, the teachers convince the young recruits, of whom there is no dearth in the impoverished region they come from, that their religion is the most superior in the universe. That theirs is the only true religion with all the rest being false or erroneous. And that the adherents of those other religions are actually an impediment in the total spread of the one true religion. These initial lectures are given with a fiery rhetoric, laced with suitable quotes from the holy book and traditions.

Next, through daily teachings of hour's long sessions, it is instilled in the recruits' minds that the path they have chosen i.e. the propagation of this one true religion and the subjugation of all the rest, is essentially struggling in the cause of God. That this struggle (fight, jihad, sacrifice), though difficult, is ordained by God. They are constantly bombarded by relevant verses. They are told that heavens and its untold pleasures are the reward for those who die while fighting in the cause of God.

This first indoctrination step, acting as a foundation for what is to come, is easy really. The students having been born into their religion are already convinced of everything that is told to them. The lessons only come to them as reinforcements to what they already believed. Yet the fierier the rhetoric, the better is the impact on the young minds.

Soon afterwards they are introduced to the implement that will launch them on that one-way journey to the heavens--the suicide jacket.

Starting from the trigger mechanism to its contents and effects, with painstaking thoroughness, the children are taught about the suicide jacket. They are taught that it usually consists of several pockets filled with plates or sticks of explosives. That the explosive is surrounded by material for fragmentation effects. That the resultant shrapnel is responsible for most of the bomb's lethality i.e. about 90% of all casualties caused by an exploding suicide jacket. That a "loaded" jacket may weigh between 5 to 20 kilograms, with 60-40 ratio of explosive to shrapnel material and may be easily hidden under loose flowing garments. That for excellent shrapnel effects, any small metal pieces could be used but the best are ball bearing, nails, screws, nuts and metal wire. That the most dangerous and widely used shrapnel are ball bearing that are 3 to 7 millimeters in diameter.

In the evenings further indoctrination classes are held. In a sweet lilting voice the teacher explains to the children that modernity and secular culture of the West are abominable sins. That the import of Western culture is leading the faithful away from God. That the unbelief of the West is so grave a sin that it merits death whenever it becomes a hurdle to the spread of the one true religion. That God has humiliated the recruit's nation only because his brethren have strayed from the path of God. And that is why He has made the infidel, sin-loving people masters of the entire planet. Why else would God allow the 'Jew loving Americans' to be present in the Holy land?

By the end of these lectures, the recruit is usually filled with a feeling of utter humiliation and blinding rage. A consuming hatred for infidels and their local lackeys (no distinction is made between the two) comes as a natural accompaniment of course.

At night the children are made to sleep cuddling their suicide jackets to get used to a garment they will be wearing till the gates of heaven. From their onwards, of course, it will be silken robes till eternity. They dream of that through the night.

So goes the cycle of lectures and practical drills for months. On the last day of the training, they are taken to a special hall. Painted on the walls of which are beautiful images of lush green vistas, dotted with fruit laden trees, interspersed with streams of milk and honey. In attendance in the images are lovely dove-eyed females that are beaming inviting smiles at the onlookers. Here the recruits are told that their training is over and they now have to wait for the calling--a proposition almost unbearable for some of the impatient ones. Two last instructions are given;

1. Not to feel guilty for the victims. The suicide bomber is carrying them to the heavens with him. They will in fact be waiting at the gates of heaven to greet him with garlands.

2. To look down while pulling the handle on the suicide jacket. This will ensure that their faces are blown in to a million little pieces. That not only guarantees that the infidels cannot track down their identities to this training institution, others' chances of ascension to heavens are also preserved.

The Unmaking?

To decide whether an unmaking of a suicide bomber is really possible in the short term, is easy really. All we have to do is ask a few questions of ourselves. Done honestly, this exercise will throw up the answer by itself. These are;

Is a suicide bomber just a madcap or a coward? Is he not a child of faultless faith only carrying out his duty to his beliefs to the very end? It's just that he is extreme in his faith. Does he not think that he is acting rationally within the framework of his religious beliefs? And if we all kneeled to his brand of divinity, will he stop killing us? And what are the guarantees that after him, no other group will arise that wants to kill us "within the framework of their religious beliefs"?

Can some of the leading problems in trouble hotspots of the world i.e. the Palestine, Kashmir or the Darfur region of Sudan, to name just three, not be solved in a jiffy if the protagonists in these disputes convert into the religion of the opponent? That is to say that all the Jews of Israel and Christians of Darfur converted en mass into Islam and the Muslims of Kashmir into Hinduism--or vice versa. What is left to fight over? Did God first make us to be born into different religions and then gave us more reasons to kill each other than to love? Is that what it is?

Is a suicide bomber, an extremist basically, not a weed that only grows in a garden of the faithful sustained by the 'holy' water of faith? After all, he can never take life form in societies whose maintenance is done on a diet of reason, logic, evidence and rationality. No one has ever heard of an extremely reasonable person killing others in the name of reason. In other words, while the rest of us may take refuge in the fact that perhaps 99% of us are just moderates in faith, is this '99% moderates' in faith not essentially the environ for a suicide bomber to germinate in?

And what is religious moderation any way? Will religious moderation allow us to think that our rival belief systems are equally true, or even moderately true? Can we then make a moderate move from one religion to another and not be labeled as apostates and killed? Can a moderately religious person think that stoning to death (a Jewish practice originally) is a barbaric punishment or that there is no place for such a punishment in a religion and escape being branded as non-believer by the rest? Or would a moderate think that the punishment may be given sometimes only to erring adults but the stones be of 'moderate' i.e. medium size? What religious moderation?

Is not the only reason why anyone is "moderate" in matters of faith these days is that he has absorbed some of the progress of the last two thousand years of human thought in philosophy, science, politics, jurisprudence, etc., just to name a few? Is it not that religious moderation originates in the fact that today even the most illiterate person among us simply knows more about his surroundings than anyone did two to three thousand years ago?

Is it not that that religious moderation does not allow us anything very critical to be said about religious extremism? Yes, moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but do they not want us to keep repeating basically the same mantra that the extremist does?

These questions, I am afraid, have to be asked, however terrible their implication. The moment these are answered honestly, and the answers contemplated upon with continued honesty, the unmaking of the suicide bomber begins.

Till then--Bon voyage!

Even if the materials, called dispersants, are effective, BP has already bought up more than a third of the world's supply. If the leak from 5,000 feet beneath the surface continues for weeks, or months, that stockpile could run out.

On Thursday BP began using the chemical compounds to dissolve the crude oil, both on the surface and deep below, deploying an estimated 100,000 gallons. Dispersing the oil is considered one of the best ways to protect birds and keep the slick from making landfall. But the dispersants contain harmful toxins of their own and can concentrate leftover oil toxins in the water, where they can kill fish and migrate great distances.

The exact makeup of the dispersants is kept secret under competitive trade laws, but a worker safety sheet for one product, called Corexit, says it includes 2-butoxyethanol, a compound associated with headaches, vomiting and reproductive problems at high doses.

"There is a chemical toxicity to the dispersant compound that in many ways is worse than oil," said Richard Charter, a foremost expert on marine biology and oil spills who is a senior policy advisor for Marine Programs for Defenders of Wildlife and is chairman of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council. "It's a trade off - you're damned if you do damned if you don't -- of trying to minimize the damage coming to shore, but in so doing you may be more seriously damaging the ecosystem offshore."

BP did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Dispersants are mixtures of solvents, surfactants and other additives that break up the surface tension of an oil slick and make oil more soluble in water, according to a paper published by the National Academy of Sciences. They are spread over or in the water in very low concentration - a single gallon may cover several acres.

Once they are dispersed, the tiny droplets of oil are more likely to sink or remain suspended in deep water rather than floating to the surface and collecting in a continuous slick. Dispersed oil can spread quickly in three directions instead of two and is more easily dissipated by waves and turbulence that break it up further and help many of its most toxic hydrocarbons evaporate.

But the dispersed oil can also collect on the seabed, where it becomes food for microscopic organisms at the bottom of the food chain and eventually winds up in shellfish and other organisms. The evaporation process can also concentrate the toxic compounds left behind, particularly oil-derived compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs.

According to a 2005 National Academy of Sciences report, the dispersants and the oil they leave behind can kill fish eggs. A study of oil dispersal in Coos Bay, Ore. found that PAH accumulated in mussels, the Academy's paper noted. Another study examining fish health after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989 found that PAHs affected the developing hearts of Pacific herring and pink salmon embryos. The research suggests the dispersal of the oil that's leaking in the Gulf could affect the seafood industry there.

"One of the most difficult decisions that oil spill responders and natural resource managers face during a spill is evaluating the trade-offs associated with dispersant use," said the Academy report, titled Oil Spill Dispersants, Efficacy and Effects. "There is insufficient understanding of the fate of dispersed oil in aquatic ecosystems."

A version of Corexit was widely used after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and, according to a literature review performed by the group the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, was later linked with health impacts in people including respiratory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders. But the Academy report makes clear that the dispersants used today are less toxic than those used a decade ago.

"There is a certain amount of toxicity," said Robin Rorick, director of marine and security operations at the American Petroleum Institute. "We view dispersant use as a tool in a toolbox. It's a function of conducting a net environmental benefit analysis and determining the best bang for your buck."

Charter, the marine expert, cautioned the dispersants should be carefully considered for the right reasons.

"Right now there is a headlong rush to get this oil out of sight out of mind," Charter said. "You can throw every resource we have at this spill. You can call out the Marine Corps and the National Guard. This is so big that it is unlikely that any amount of response is going to make much of a dent in the impacts. It's going to be mostly watching it happen."

Ryan Knutson contributed to this report

The media has largely kept quiet on the human impact of the disaster, with only the occasional local paper bearing a story on one or another of the missing workers.

One of those killed on the rig was Karl Kleppinger, 38, of Natchez, Mississippi, who leaves behind a wife, Tracy, and a 17 year-old son, Aaron. The World Socialist Web Site spoke with the Kleppingers' attorney, Steve Gordon, whose law firm, Gordon, Elias, & Seely L.L.P., is representing the family against British Petroleum, rig operator Transocean, and other rig subcontractors.

"The human tragedy has been less visible, because the workers who were killed came from all over the Gulf Coast, from Texas, Louisiana," Gordon said.

Gordon said that Kleppinger was a "simple man" who had fought in the first Gulf War before beginning work on oil rigs.

"Karl was a floor hand, worked for Transocean for 10 years," Gordon said. "He never missed one hitch." Gordon said that Karl once volunteered to rescue a deep-water drill ship in the gulf and helped save the vessel from going under, even though he was never trained as a diver.

The family is suing the company for damages under the Merchant Marine Act, also known as the Jones Act, which requires the owners of ships and oil rigs to pay reparations to families killed in "unseaworthy" craft or under unsafe conditions.

Gordon said that the Kleppingers' employer, Transocean, bears the main responsibility for his death, but that other parties are guilty of negligence, including BP and Halliburton, which was contracted to do cementing work on the rig.

"The impetus of these companies is profit, not safety," Gordon said. "As a result, a horrific event occurred that will affect the lives of a lot of people, and certainly the environment for decades."

"The companies like to say that there is a safety culture." Gordon added, "But the safety culture is subordinate to the profits culture."

Gordon said that in the immediate aftermath of the explosion survivors were held offshore and not allowed to talk to their families until 3:00 in the morning on Thursday, 29 hours after the blast.

"The company lawyers took statements from them and would not let them talk to their families," Gordon said. "So for about 17 hours they played around with these guys. They're not even admitting they did it."

Gordon said several other lawsuits are being launched by survivors and the families of the victims.

Thus far BP has admitted responsibility for all environmental damage due to the spill, but the company has refused to accept responsibility for its role in the deaths of the workers.

The men killed in the disaster leave behind mourning families and communities. They include:

• Adam Weise, who was mourned at a vigil attended by hundreds of people in his community of Yorktown, Texas, last week. "Adam was my baby, just 24 years old," the man's mother, Arlene Weise told reporters.

• Aaron Dale Burkeen, a 37-year-old resident of Neshoba County, near Philadelphia, Mississippi. A local paper reported that Burkeen was responsible for getting the other crew members to safety before leaving, but was unable to get off the rig in time. He is survived by a wife and two children, ages 14 and 6.

• Donald Clark, 49, of Newellton, Louisiana, was scheduled to leave the rig on April 21, the day after the explosion.

• Roy Kemp, 27, Jonesville, Louisiana, leaves behind two daughters, one three years old, the other three months old, and his wife, Tracy.

• Jason Anderson, of Bay City, Texas, also leaves behind two children.

• Stephen Curtis, 39, of Georgetown, Louisiana, is also survived by two children. He had been working in the oil industry for 17 years, following in the footsteps of his father, Howard, who worked as a diver-welder for 34 years.

• Gordon Jones, 28, of Louisiana, leaves behind a son and a pregnant wife, Michelle.

• Blair Manuel, 56, of Gonzales, Louisiana, worked as a chemical engineer on the rig. He had three daughters and was engaged to be married.

• Dewey Revette, 48, from State Line, Mississippi, worked for Transocean for 29 years as a driller, and was also a father.

• Shane Roshto, 22, was from Franklin County, Mississippi. His widow, Natalie Roshto, has also launched a lawsuit against Transocean, BP, and Halliburton.

These men add to a large death toll on Gulf Coast oil rigs in recent years, giving the lie to claims that offshore oil drilling is now a safe industry. A recent review by federal regulators found that on Gulf of Mexico oil rigs there have been, since 2001, 69 workers killed, 858 fires and 1,349 injuries.

A search of its web site reveals that the White House has issued no statement of condolence for the victims of this most recent disaster.

Hey! let's do this everywhere! The Arctic Ocean and off the coast of Alaska where the conditions are far more extreme and the environment is also incredibly fragile.

Yes. Drill baby drill. Getting the oil and natural gas (and coal) are worth any cost.

Of course, now the news has changed. President Obama has placed a moratorium on exploratory off-shore drilling until the investigation into this incident is done. That 1,000 barrel oil leak has been upgraded to 5,000 barrels a day - or a quarter million gallons of oil into the Gulf a day. There are no real estimates of how long it will take to stop three leaks from this one well. (Don't you think there is a certain irony to calling 5000 barrels oil a day blasting into the Gulf of Mexico a "leak." )

The media is doing the usual - not challenging outright lies. The clip below is from MSNBC Nightly News for April 29, 2010 (full segment). In this 30 second clip, the BP representative boldly claims that "No one in the history of the industry has ever had to fight a leak 5,000 feet down."

Now that isn't really true, and there is at least one very recent example. In November of 2009, the Montara oil leak in the Timor Sea off the coast of Australia was finally stopped after leaking an estimated 300-400 barrels a day for more than two months. As with the BP leak, the Montara platform caught fire, but that was after the leak - not before it. That raises the question of which came first with the Gulf platform - the leak or the fire. Also, the Montara platform did not collapse into the sea. However, the Montara leak was also deep water - namely it was almost 1.5 miles down, and not the supposed 1 mile of the BP well.

Currently, the leak is big news as it hits the sensitive U.S. coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico. However, this leak could continue for months - and into the depths of hurricane season. Do you think we will get the ongoing reports of what is happening with the "leak," or with the 250,000 gallons of oil per day that will flow unchecked into the Gulf? Somehow, I doubt that. Just as the "recovery" from Hurricane Katrina has largely slipped off the public radar.

The Montara well was owned by PTTEP Australasia which is a company based in Thailand. They have refused to release final report from their leak, but the Montara well was insured, but the capping operations reportedly exceeded their insurance. I have seen no reports thus far regarding how much insurance BP has on their platform.

Perhaps we should put BP in touch with PTTEP for a few pointers on dealing with a deep drill "leak." Perhaps we should ask MSNBC why they don't challenge blatant lies from officials (corporate or political).

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From Rachel Maddow Show

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Montara Oil Leak - Australia
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Biodiversity survey of the Montara field oil leak. World Wildlife Fund.

Yes, to the number. I was Number 15. I needed to remember this fact at all times. I also needed to be constantly aware of the identities of Number 14 and Number 16. This was to ensure the lineup was adhered to without fail wherever we were - whether lining up outside the Great Hall of the People, standing in line to shake Li Changchun's hand, or sitting in the large, well-lit room among a circle of editors. The editors sat and assiduously listened to Li, who spoke with the authority and power of a man known to be Number 5 in China. Or was it Number 3? Frankly, I cannot remember; I was nervously trying to remember my own number, and the ones before and immediately behind me.

I was in Beijing to attend the China Daily-Asia News Network Conference. This was focused on climate change and the environmental challenges facing Asian countries, especially following the failure of the Copenhagen meeting last December. Media producers grappled with their responsibility towards the increasingly pressing subject. Chinese government officials labored to showcase their country's efforts in lowering carbon emissions, carefully juxtaposing their success with the failures of Western governments, and the US government in particular.

Major polluters took on the position that their companies were incessantly trying to curb emissions, and some went as far as to discuss the need to "educate the public" regarding their responsibility towards the environment. It took me a while to wrap my head around this one: the world's largest contributors to environmental damage reaching out to the public and asking them to play a positive role in challenging global warming and climate change? Go figure.

At times, and despite clearly sincere efforts put forward by newspaper editors, the whole event seemed an exercise in futility. The government official, as all government officials everywhere, blames some other official of some other government. The polluters argue that they too are doing their part, and are in fact practically adopting progressive stances.

A leading Coca-Cola Company executive who addressed the conference, for instance, sounded more like an environmental champion, a Greenpeace activist even. In the meanwhile, media men and women stood quietly puzzled; they needed the ad revenues from the company (and other similar companies), along with governmental approval to make their work possible. At the same time, they are, in theory, the voice of the voiceless, the representatives of those who are suffering, and will continue to suffer, as a result of the dramatic, rapid and destructive environmental challenges.

It's a stand-still. The trio has every interest in keeping the discussion alive, but very little reason to move forward in any substantive way. Any discussion of lowering carbon emission becomes immediately political: fingerprinting, accusations and more. A new cold war around the theme of global warming is already underway. The "US vs China" scenario will remain until a paradigm shift takes place. Meanwhile, the Maldives will continue to sink, followed by 14% of Bangladesh.

So what are the media to do? Most of them rely on the same business model that requires the constant funding of the same companies, and often governments that have themselves disproportionately polluted our environment. These companies and governments have also stifled the debate on finding a sensible exit from the quagmire in every way imaginable.

Perhaps the media should be reconsidering the entire business model. Those who are sincere in wanting to educate, engage and influence the public sphere need to first liberate themselves as far as possible from the controlling grip of corporations. Only then will they be able help us to act upon the challenges facing our world as a result of man-made environmental disasters

Until this happens, we will continue to talk gibberish, using all the right terms, all the positive clichés, and yet we will achieve nothing but a few feel-good moments at yet another conference in yet another crowded city, itself polluted to the core.

Now back to Li, No 5 (or 3). The man was in fact much more pleasant than one would expect, considering the very rigid protocols and security checks that greeted us. He spoke comfortably and freely. He joked often. He spoke of the need for a unified Asian media voice to counter the influence of Western media. He challenged accusations that China is a closed society, and spoke of the rapidly growing number of websites, blogs, and the increasing access of foreign journalists and media to his country.

In fact, the discussions at the forum by various Chinese officials and by Li himself were filled with juxtapositions and comparisons between China and the West, "us vs them", "they say, we say ..." The editors from Number 1 through Number 18 (myself included) listened and politely nodded.

If the world can indeed afford a new cold war on political, economic and trade grounds, the environment can hardly afford such quarrels. The icecaps are melting; the Borneo rainforests are shrinking by the day; the list of endangered species is growing; drought, floods and other such tragedies are affecting millions, destroying lives and scarring generations.

The fact remains that human suffering simply cannot be politicized. And it must no longer be held hostage to numbers, clichés and slogans.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is, "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), which is now available for pre-orders at Amazon..

Check out this short film (in English and Arabic) about my latest book: My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story.

Intersecting with the water crisis is the current economic situation with the rising economic power of India and China and their roughly 2.5 billion population making increasing demands on energy and food resources. Oil is at or near its peak, and while it may not be noticeable in the near future, its increasing scarcity and difficulty with extraction will cause the price to rise inexorably, creating further economic hardship and alternate demands on the environment.

Global Warring

A new text by Cleo Paskal [1] highlights the intersection of these environmental, economic and political crises and how they will redraw the world map. Her writing is not of the apocalyptic nature, not describing the horrors of a post-nuclear holocaust period nor the horrors of the survivalist's imagination when the economy and the environment tank together and suddenly we need to become self reliant in a much more primitive sense.

Instead, it is a strong academic analysis of the current geopolitical/environmental interactions that could possibly - in spite of the denials above - spell 'doom'. Her information is concise and wisely presented, without exaggeration or resorting to hyperbolic disasters. She describes the rising power of China and India, beset with their own environmental challenges, but "planning for the [long-term] future" as they "graduate more than half a million engineers and scientists a year." The U.S. is viewed from the Katrina perspective and its demonstration that the U.S. cannot manage a single environmental disaster let alone be "prepared to manage repeated major domestic environmental disasters."

Paskal is clear with her goal of using "the best science available to understand the implications of the inevitable in order to minimize the geopolitical, economic and security fallout" of climate change. [italics added]. She is not operating from theory but from history with "myriad examples of the environment affecting war and politics." Her stated goal, with which she succeeds is to "demonstrate that environmental change is about to have enormous, and specific, geopolitical, economic and security consequences for all of us."

The chapter on the Middle East is titled "Today's Weather - Intolerable with periods of Uninhabitable." Historically the problem with the fertile crescent "was too many people, too little food and water, and too few places to secure more supplies."

Her closing, after many well argued presentations says that with "all the threads together, the world of tomorrow looks chaotic and violent. Even more so than usual. And even more than expected." Our current "social, political, security and economic structures [are built] on the assumption that there are certain geophysical and climatic constants to act as a foundation. There aren't. There never have been. And there never will be." So now you can go read the apocalyptic and survivalist authors, as this relatively calm academic analysis arrives at a pretty gloomy and scary picture.

Water...and Israel

Water is a large part of Paskal's discussion. Storms are becoming more violent and less predictable. The monsoons are undergoing new vagaries. Rivers are exploited to make them toxic sewers and/or to have them run dry before they reach the sea. All this is supported by the current National Geographic special issue "Water - Our Thirsty World." [2] After discussing the current fresh water status, the glacial melt of the Himalayas, the monsoons, the 'holiness' of certain water sources, the "burden of thirst", California's "Pipe Dream" situated on a highly active seismic zone, the topic of water in Israel is addressed.

Generally I have criticized the Geographic for its frequent attempts to 'balance' arguments, arguments often between powerful corporations and weaker NGOs and citizens groups, or between environmental agencies and the more powerful governments. Balance is not good journalism when the power of circumstances and events lies strongly and critically with one side, at which point an analytical advocacy is by far the greater route to take.

I feared this article on Israeli water might strive for 'balance' but there are some strong references that indicate that the National Geographic editors are beginning to question the power equation in Israel. The article, "Parting the Waters", [3] is essentially about the Jordan River, that a " six-year drought and expanding population conspire to make it a fresh source of conflict among the Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians vying for the river's life giving supply." The article continues that the "lower Jordan is practically devoid of clean water, bearing instead a toxic brew of saline water and liquid waste that ranges from raw sewage to agricultural runoff....The fight over the Jordan illustrates the potential for conflict over water that exists throughout the world."

Yet it is more than potential in Israel/Palestine, it is kinetic...actualized. While the politicians describe the occupation and annexations in terms of religion, the building of the wall as a prevention against terror, and the savage attacks on the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Jordan as attacks against terror, one of the principal underlying causes is water resources. Of global military conflicts over water "since 1950, 32 took place in the Middle East, 30 of them involved Israel and its Arab neighbours."

The article tries to be optimistic, quoting one source as saying "water is just too important to go to war over...people need water, and that's a huge incentive to work things out." Unfortunately, that optimism is not apparent in the actions of the Israelis. The author recognizes that the West Bank Palestinians are under Israeli military rule, that Israel harvests much of the ground water and of the flow of the Jordan, denying access to the Palestinians. Turn about, when water is scarce, the Palestinians must buy it from Israel, paying money for water removed from their territory, water that lowers the water table for the fewer and fewer remaining wells. Another source is quoted, while looking at a Mekorot [Israel's national water authority] well, "This is what water theft looks like in this part of the world."

Balance and context

The attempted balance is interesting. The chief Israeli water negotiator (and one has to wonder how much 'negotiation' actually takes place under military control), Noah Kinnarth, tries to argue that the underground water "knows no borders" and that the Palestinians think that the water that falls in the West Bank belongs to them." What a novel idea, your own rainfall belonging to you. Kinnarth's final twist is that with Oslo "we agreed to share that water. They just can't seem to get their act together to do it."

I am uncertain of the author's intent here. The latter statement is obviously completely out of context - as a militarily occupied territory under variable and oppressive military law, with valuable agricultural land and water resources being remove through illegal expropriation and the winding turns of the Wall, with its leaders continually being arrested, tortured, and or assassinated - could hardly be expected "to get their act together." Does the author let the statement stand out of context through his own prejudice or ignorance? Or is he allowing it to stand on its own demerits, expecting the readers to fill in the nuances of his presentation, combining his statements about military occupation, the drilling of wells, and the ignorance of the Israeli 'negotiator's' statement?

I will give the benefit of the doubt to the author this time, as the final comment goes to a Palestinian farmer, Muhammed Salamain in the village of Auja. He has had no running water for five weeks, does not have enough water to irrigate crops, cannot access the aquifer, and summarizes, "we are powerless to do anything about it." To get to the water he needs in the Jordan, he would "have to jump an electric fence, cross a minefield, and fight the Israeli army." And he can't get his act together? No wonder.

Israel, war and water...and the U.S.

The Israeli's have always wanted the full landscape of Eretz Israel, purportedly for religious reasons, but geopolitically the scarce water resources have had significant influence on their actions towards limiting access to the Jordan, the annexation of the Golan Heights, and the occupation and attacks on Lebanon. Combining the geographic narrative with the Paskal presentation, Israel sits in a precarious yet powerful position.

With the strongest military in the region, one of the strongest in the world with many nuclear devices, with its need for control of water for a burgeoning population - the Palestinian population growth rate is higher - and its short lines of access to oil and gas resources for energy and industry, Israel is well situated to take advantage of any turmoil caused by the intersection of global environmental catastrophes and geopolitical catastrophes of its own or others making. Should the rest of the world devolve into chaos without taking Israel with it, the water is there for the taking, the oil is there for the taking, and the Palestinians are there for removal.

This is a rather grim finale to the interpretation of these two items. However, both geopolitics and the global climate are unpredictable, with many unexpected occurrences and outcomes. Again Iran enters the picture, not as an imminent threat, but as a created threat that will allow Israel to rationalize more authoritative action of whatever kind it wants in order to secure its future needs.

The U.S. plays a large role in this, but as per Paskal, "power is imperceptibly shifting away from the United States....there is a growing movement away from overt alignment with the States....Authoritarian regimes benefit from having an enemy....the US military is becoming [?] unpopular and politically marginalized globally...." China and India are taking up the slack.

Israel is powerful, yet at the same time extremely vulnerable, sitting in a precarious geopolitical situation. Surrounded by hostile yet compliant neighbours - ranging from the U.S. supported Egyptians, Saudis, and Jordanians, and the more antagonistic governments of Lebanon and Turkey - relying on power alone, as seen with the U.S. and its attempts at global military control, creates many unexpected feedbacks, many distortions in the economy and social/cultural fabric of the country. Israel has recognized the environmental threat, and is using its military to control as much of it as it can.

The lessons of history, natural history and geopolitical history, would indicate that a different approach is needed. Restoring the rights of the Palestinians in either a functional contiguous independent state or in a truly democratic bi-national state, would relieve enormous geopolitical pressure, and make the quest for environmental survival that much stronger.

[1]Paskal, Cleo. Global Warring - How Environmental, Economic and Political crises Will Redraw the World Map. Key Porter Books, Toronto, Canada. 2010.

[2] __________ "Water - Our Thirsty World." National Geographic, April, 2010.

[3] Belt, Don. "Parting the Waters," National Geographic, April, 2010. pp. 154 - 171.

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles' work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications.

I was inspired to focus on Kathleen because she is a friend and because I had firsthand awareness of her passionate commitment to a local cause-a commitment that shared by a small community of activists, has now made an enormous difference not only for Vermonters, but for all of New England and perhaps the rest of the country also.

In fact, in an article "David vs. Goliath Vermont Style", Charlotte Dennett, who ran for Attorney General in Vermont in 2008 stated on February 26:

A driving snowstorm could not keep Vermonters away from the statehouse in Montpelier yesterday as the Vermont Senate convened a historic debate and then voted on the future of the state's aging nuclear power plant.

Some 1300 people - most of them standing before live video coverage outside the small, overcrowded Senate chamber -- listened to several hours of respectful debate that even included the proposition of building a new nuclear power plant in Vermont as per President Obama's pro-nuclear agenda. But when it was all over, senators from both parties resoundingly voted against a last-minute amendment for a new plant to replace the old one, and similarly defeated re-licensure of Vermont Yankee in 2012 by a vote of 26 to 4. Amidst cheers, clapping and hugs from the victors, it was clearly another Vermont moment for a state that prides itself on being cutting edge on social, political and environmental issues. As the only state in the nation that by statute allows its legislature to decide whether to re-license a nuclear power plant, the vote is likely to have wide-reaching ramifications, including for residents of Massachusetts who live near the Vermont Yankee plant.

I caught up with Kathleen by phone on the day of the Senate's historic vote and she graciously gave me this interview. 

Kathleen, please tell us what motivated you initially to begin organizing for the closure of Vermont Yankee.

In my work, I am standing on the shoulders of many anti-nuclear activists who have worked tirelessly over the years fighting a corrupt nuclear industry that cares more about its proliferation than the health of the people who are affected.

Last week's vote against the relicensing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant near Brattleboro is considered historic because it has allowed the voices of Vermont people to be heard through their elected leaders who voted against allowing Vermont Yankee to continue past its expected lifetime of 2012. It has allowed the people to say what Entergy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have been doing: Allowing contamination of the air we breathe and the water we drink, and that is not acceptable. The NRC has never said no to the nuclear industry, and I feel that the NRC is corrupt and is in collusion with the industry, allowing aging nuclear power plants numerous license amendments and exemptions from safety testing over the years.

What specific research did you do on the medical dangers of Vermont Yankee? Tell us a bit about what you discovered.

 As a registered nurse and after many years of working in the medical profession, I am acutely aware of the health and environmental dangers that make people sick. Myself a breast cancer survivor, I have watched over the years as the incidence of breast cancer continues to increase with nobody asking the right questions. One out of 13 women got breast cancer when I was first diagnosed in 1984. Today the incidence is one woman out of eight. What is that about? Passionately wanting to protect my family and my community, I have committed myself to the crusade to stop the relicensing of what my research revealed: that thyroid cancer, a marker for radiation exposure was on the rise in women not only in Vermont but across the country.

Although I am only one of hundreds of Vermonters against Yankee I was irate when the Vermont Department of Public Health re-wrote Vermont's radiation protection regulations weakening the laws to allow Vermont Yankee an uprate in 2006 which also allowed greater amounts of radioactive contaminants to be emitted from the site. The ionizing radiation to which people are exposed as a result of Vermont Yankee's operations is a known human carcinogen. No dose is without risk, and the best science today tells us that even very low doses of radiation pose a risk over a person's lifetime.

The NRC and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who are in charge of radiation protection are still using standards that do not take into account the differences in susceptibility to radiation-induced cancer, with women facing a risk about 50 percent higher than men while the risk for children is several times higher. What is happening to the health of women and children is not being captured in national or state health statistics because the data being publicized on men and women is condensed and aggregated over 5 years so that the public health significance is being lost. It is a national issue because the Center for Disease Control (CDC) does not have jurisdiction over the NRC. Nobody does. The NRC is charged with protecting the public, but all we see here in Vermont is the NRC protecting the industry that pays their salaries 

Tell us what else motivates you.

I have been an activist my whole life. My parents instilled in me that it was important to contribute to community life and work toward making this world a better place for the children and generations who come after us. Being political is one way but not the only way. Choices we make, where we live, what we buy, who we support, are all ways we can make a difference. You find your passion. What I am doing to expose the corruption of the NRC and the nuclear industry and its health effects on future generations is mine. 

What specific research did you do on Vermont Yankee? Tell us a bit about what you discovered.

In the United States, the NRC's technical and safety regulations governing nuclear power plants are developed by the private nuclear industry using voluntary consensus standards. The owners of the nuclear power plants, the suppliers and manufacturers who sell the nuclear fuel, as well as the builders of nuclear power plants, are providing the oversight on themselves--policing their own industry just like the banking and financial industry did before their massive taxpayer bailout. Most of those standards in use are outdated but are still in use by the nuclear industry. They would never pass muster today knowing what we know.

Of course, what we know today as far as the effect of radioactive contamination is being ignored. The NRC is allowing radioactive tritium contamination across the country. Tritium caused mutagic effects on DNA especially in the unborn, but the NRC thinks it's OK for the decrepit, aging plants to wash it away in our rivers. That's OK with them, but it's not to the kids or women drinking that water downstream. The NRC tells us it will not harm us and no one has the jurisdiction over them to dispute what they say or are allowed to do.

One of the arguments against voting down Yankee's relicensing was economic. Supporters of Yankee argued that closing the power plant would hurt Vermont economically and cause utility rate increases. Opponents of Yankee argued that closing Yankee would provide an excellent opportunity to enhance the state's economy by investing in renewables and making the state more self-sufficient. Tell us your thoughts on this issue.

Vermont needs jobs but not at the cost of the health of our women children and future generations. Besides, look at all the work they are doing there now digging wells to see if they can make the tritium disappear. Today it's reported that the cesium they found deep in the ground was from Chernobyl.  Believe that one. A nuclear accident from 1986 is still contaminating our soil in Vermont. That does not make me feel any safer. There will be plenty of jobs cleaning up the radioactive contamination at Vermont Yankee. However, the industry is not mandated to clean it up. Besides that, there is nowhere to ship the radioactive waste on site, so Vermont Yankee supporters can work there guarding it for infinity. Vermont wants the site returned to a green field. Let's see what the NRC does about that.

The industry's rhetoric about jobs and such is not trumped by the deceit and lies they have demonstrated, and I believe those are only the tip of the iceberg. It was recently revealed that Neil Sheehan, our NRC spokesman, did not think it was a public concern nor important enough to report to the public that over a million gallons of tritium- laced water was dumped into the Hudson river by Entergy's Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant--the drinking water supply of New York  City! We only find this out because of a whistleblower. If a whistleblower goes to the NRC with a complaint, the NRC does not have to report it to the public. In my opinion, the NRC is deeply corrupted.

I know that you and your family have made some personal changes in lifestyle in order to utilize renewable energy rather than rely on the conventional power grid in Vermont. Can you tell us about those?

Changing one's lifestyle is a personal process that is never finished as there is always more you can do. Reducing our carbon footprint one step at a time is the right choice for us. What we do is personal for us, and everyone needs to be thoughtful to make that commitment. Our biggest commitment is choosing to live in the city of Rutland and help the city survive rough times. We can walk or bike anywhere we need to go. 

I'm also aware that you are passionately committed to your local community of Rutland. You are involved in the local food coop there and in the arts in your town. Tell us more about what you're doing and why you feel it's so important.

Rutland is a city without an interstate so it is not easy to get here. We are surrounded by mountains and farmland, and some of us want to keep it that way. We don't have urban sprawl. We have no buses into the city but we do have Amtrak, and that needs to be seriously upgraded.  Vermont relies heavily on the economic engine of tourism. Many of us rely on the Killington Ski Area and tourism for work even though those are seasonal and minimal wage job opportunities for a relatively well educated population. It is a choice many are making, and we all come together as a community via the local food coop and a year-round farmer's market. Our family is promoting walking gently on the earth with the annual Rutland Long Trail festival coming into its fourth year, celebrated in August in the heart of Rutland. As the city goes, so does the rest of Rutland County, so what we do here is very important. We need to be vigilant in preserving and developing the assets we do enjoy.  

Is there anything else you'd like to tell us about your journey of activism in the past couple of decades or that you'd like to add about Vermont's decision not to relicense Yankee?

This fight is far from over. The people of Vermont through this vote have flexed their muscle. The NRC is put on notice. They are not considered trustworthy. Will they mandate that Entergy clean up its mess and leave Vermont Yankee as a green field? The fight has only begun.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The February 24 decision by the Vermont Senate not to relicense Vermont Yankee was a stunning triumph of activism and local political action by citizens passionately committed to their place and its environment. When we juxtapose it with the paralysis of our pathetically corrupt federal system, it is all the more remarkable. It is testimony to the power of local communities cooperating to defend and protect the integrity of their place, their people, and their land base. I reiterate what I have stated repeatedly: All solutions are local, and if it's not local, it's not a solution.

Kathleen Krevetski lives with her husband Wayne in Rutland, Vermont, and they have come to think of themselves as urban homesteaders. Check our http://www.longtrailfestivalvt.com/ or visit the festival on August 7, 2010

I have lived with a pack for almost 20 years. I can say with certainty that they have a life of their own. The dynamics of relationships among the dogs are fascinating and they fit their pack life and responsibilities around our human doings. The dogs within the pack all have their own responsibilities from who watches the door and warns of intruders to who "relay" barks, to who has perimeter duty. In packs which howl, there is the one who starts the howl and who ends it. The order of the pack and who has what rights in what area is made by some determination of their own.

In relationship to the human members, they each have their own relationship, but there is a pack influence that is clearly evident. Who is responsible for keeping an eye on what member. Who follows and who watches. While we humans are officially in charge, there is only so much intervention into the actual day to day functioning of the canine members that is effective. In my experience, determining who has what job is not a human's to determine.

When a member of the pack is lost, it is crushing for the entire pack. The loss is felt on many levels, and they grieve. This is not anthropomorphism on my part. I have watched that grieving process too many times. While each dog expresses their loss in their own way, it is clear that they mourn the loss in an emotional way. Their process is also much different in some ways that human grieving. I believe this is because their sense of smell plays such a big part in their lives. When they smell the missing pack member, it reignites the hope they will reappear. It also reignites the sense of loss.

I am writing this now because we have lost two members of our pack in a short period of time. While the loss of these two close companions is huge, so is the potential loss of the pack continuity.

We spay and neuter our dogs, so our dogs do not reproduce. However, they do pass on the pack knowledge and (dare I say) culture. Our most current pack was Ben and Grady's pack. We have had dogs come into this pack. First Aerie, and then for a period of time Maddy and Buddy who eventually moved to Seattle. But Ben and Grady moved from becoming two dogs as part of the household to a pack when Aerie came to us. Sadly, she died an untimely death due to being poisoned.

What had been forged with Aerie was a pack. I don;t know that I can explain the transformation even though I lived through it. With Aerie's entrance into the family the whole dynamic among the dogs changed. The relationships became much more complex and richer in some ways. Their relationship to the human members of the pack also changed in more subtle ways. Humans calculated into their lives in a different way. They became more emotionally complete and balanced somehow. When Aerie died, the "pack" component remained, but it was clear that the balance was wrong.

By the spring after Aerie's death two pups - Crow and Fox - came to join Ben and Grady. They trained those pups to be dogs, but they also formed a complex pack with a rich life that we were honored to be a part of. As they started reaching adolescence, Ben and Grady went from being a pack with pups for who they were surrogate parents (a task Grady definitely did not like) to a rebalanced pack again.

First, Ben passed and the pack went on with Grady essentially taking on full pack leadership. One of the most amazing things was Ben's passing. He had seriously injured himself and could not stand any longer. Grady, Fox, and Crow all kept a close eye on him. Each would check on him. Crow took a tennis ball down and carefully placed it within his reach (Ben was an avid ball player). It was one of the most touching things I have ever seen.

When Grady passed, Fox and Crow were adrift. They clearly carried the social "mark" of Ben and Grady, but they were a pack missing something. Neither had ever had to be "in charge" and they leaned on each other heavily. The following summer Cody joined us. He raised his share of hell in terms of how things were supposed to work He was nine months old and not a malleable puppy. However, over time things settled down and Cody took his place in the pack and learned our pack's rules. He was a "pushy" dog and He and Fox came to a compromise. Fox was in charge outside and Cody was in charge inside. Crow of course refused to acknowledge either of them being in charge and was the real leader of the pack.

Cody was the anchor of the next generation of our pack which started with Ben and Grady. Then, on December 31, 2009, we lost Cody to a hemangiosarcoma. There was nothing to be done. Crow and Fox were stunned and bereft, and so were we. We had not just lost a dear companion, but now the future existence of this pack was at risk. We had been keeping an eye open for another pack member before Cody's death. We now started looking more closely, but no likely dog presented him or herself.

Then, just as we were starting to adjust to the loss of Cody, we got hit with another loss. Our dear Crow went into massive convulsions which were caused either by a brain tumor or pancreatic cancer. The prognosis was more than grim for even a short term (week or two) improvement, and virtually no hope beyond that. So we gave her back to the universe. This loss was devastating on so many levels. It was devastating as the loss of a dear companion, particularly following on the loss of our Cosmic Clown Cody. It was a devastating loss to Fox who had now lost his entire pack, but also his sister from whom he had never been separated. It was also the loss of a significant part of the pack's knowledge.

With the loss of both Cody and Crow, all of the pack's responsibilities fell on Fox. He was now a pack leader without a pack - they had all been ripped from him. He was not just a dog alone. He was a grieving one dog pack. His response, and our own loss, was tearing us all apart.

We checked the Humane Society site for the 100th time, and there was a dog who had that certain look in her eye. So we immediately loaded Fox into the car and headed off to the shelter. Upon arrival, we said that we wanted to meet "Missy." We met her and she seemed a sweet and calm creature, so we asked to have Fox meet her. The meeting went better than we ever expected. It seemed that they could become friends so we adopted her and brought her home. She and Fox are still figuring each other out, and "Missy", who we have renamed Mossy, is trying to adapt to living in this new home.

We are not sure what will happen from here. We do not know if Mossy will learn the pack knowledge. We will likely be getting another member once Mossy is secure and settled in and Fox feels more confident with her. Our pack - Ben and Grady's pack - is still at risk of "dying." That will only magnify the loss.

The dying out of a pack is like the dying out of a tribe. Once it is gone, it is gone - forever. You can build a new pack, but it will be another pack. While over the years, as members come into and leave the pack the individual personalities leave their stamp, there is a certain "feel" to the pack. I can't explain it.

For now, we grieve the losses and cling to each other (human and canine) to find what comfort we can. We hold hope for a firm bonding of Mossy into our lives, our hearts, and our pack.

The founders of our current pack Ben and Grady. Ben is the German Shepherd, and Grady a dingo and border collie cross.

Ben (right) and Grady were joined by Aerie (left).

Grady, Fox and Crow.

Cody

Fox (foreground) with Crow and Rowan.

Sir Fox

Mossy on her first night in her new home.

During the past year, Hollywood has brought forth an array of post-apocalyptic movies such as "2012" and "The Road", but "The Book of Eli" is unique in this genre by way of a message that supersedes a abject survivalism as the bottom line theme. The message was intentional for screenplay author, Gary Whitta, who comments that "faith and hope have as much value to humanity as sustenance and safety." In other words, "The Book of Eli" is about much more than first-chakra survival in a world where little else matters and where most people are fighting, moment to moment, to simply stay alive.

The story focuses on a man in the not-too-distant future who has become a warrior, not by choice but by necessity, 30 years after what is referred to as "the flash" and the subsequent war that left the earth a catastrophic wasteland. Few people are alive who remember what the world was like before those cataclysmic events, and the rest are illiterate with no sense of history or purpose beyond finding food, water, and shelter.

For three decades, Eli (Denzel Washington) has been walking and wandering in response to a voice that he says came from inside him to protect the book (a bible) that he found amid the rubble of cataclysm, and keep heading west. Along the way he witnesses myriad injustices and wrongs he could help right, but instead, he chooses to abide with his instructions and avoid such entanglements.

We wonder why a bible in such a world makes any difference, but we soon discover that the war may have erupted in part because of religion and the power and control some people usurped in its name. Almost all bibles were burned after the war, and we assume it was for this reason. One man besides Eli in the current intellectual wasteland understands the power of books and reading them, and especially the power of the bible as a tool of control. That man is Carnegie (Gary Oldman)-an ironic name given that the nineteenth-century steel tycoon, Andrew Carnegie, donated millions to the building and maintenance of libraries in the United States. After encountering Eli and learning that he has a bible, the Carnegie of Whitta's screenplay is relentless in his quest to obtain it and is willing to do whatever it takes to do so because he shamelessly declares that "if we have the book, we can control people". But from Eli's perspective, nothing and no one will stand in the way of fulfilling his mission and following the instructions to keep walking west.

Some reviewers have described the milieu of "The Book of Eli" as a "Mad Max" scenario, but it seems important to note that the latter movie was made in the 80s in the throes of Reagan's "morning in America" when consumerism on steroids and off-the-scale narcissism ruled. Thus, in those days, movie-goers could only find the world of Mad Max bizarre and purely mythical whereas today, as we find ourselves sinking deeper into the Second Great Depression, fraught with the ramifications of Peak Oil, climate change, and global economic devastation, that particular scenario feels increasingly more plausible.

In Eli's world of abject lawlessness, ruled by roving gangs and petty dictators like Carnegie, life is all about survival and the physical strength it takes to maintain it. What we consider today basic necessities of life, such as soap, toothpaste, and shampoo have disappeared, and most humans are creatures that can only be described as vile in their lack of hygiene as well as their lack of any moral compass.

For Eli, however, life is about so much more than food, water, and shelter, and that is precisely what makes his character and this particular movie unique. He is cherishing what seems to have eluded everyone else around him-a profound spiritual connection. Forget that it's a bible he's carrying. Forget that his spirituality has a distinctly Christian flavor. As anyone who sees the movie is likely to agree, he could have been carrying the I Ching or the Bhagavad Gita or the Koran. Please dear reader/moviegoer, do not get ensnared here by whatever axes you have to grind with religion. The point is that it was Eli's connection with the sacred that sustained him emotionally in a world of madness and mayhem.

And yes, a world of cannibalism where people who eat human flesh develop uncontrollable, chronic trembling, particularly of the hands, and those whose hands do not tremble are proud to be "not one of them". It's a world of ghastly abuse of women-gang rape and sexual slavery. In fact, as I witnessed the treatment of women in this film, I reflected on complaints I've heard from many of my female friends about the portrayal of women in James Howard Kunstler's novel A World Made By Hand. And while I agree that the portrayal in that novel was grim, what I also believe is that it was probably understated in terms of how life for women in a post-collapse, savage world is likely to become.

As a result, Eli holds values unknown to those around him. He's kind and caring, but he's not a pacifist; he kills to defend his life and protect the innocent. He feels and expresses gratitude before meals for the food he is privileged to have and for the mentoring friendship he develops with a young woman who insists on walking alongside him as he continues his journey. Her insistence is driven by her admiration of him as well as the misery of her life in the town controlled by Carnegie. She is Solara (Mila Kunis), and she has no concept of life before "the flash" and "the war"-a time when Eli says, "We had more than we ever needed, we didn't realize how precious it was, and we threw stuff away that people would kill for today." Sound familiar?

Eli further shows us how human he is as he cherishes a battered IPod he charges along the way from parts of an old car battery or wherever he can occasionally find electricity. Early in the movie he falls asleep to Al Green singing "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?" In fact, the lyrics are quite ironic given Eli's situation:

And how can you mend a broken heart?
How can you stop the rain from falling down?
How can you stop the sun from shining?
What makes the world go round?
How can you mend this broken man?
How can a loser ever win?
Please help me mend my broken heart

And let me live again

I have stated repeatedly that I do not know how the collapse of industrial civilization will play out, and I have also stated in my book, Sacred Demise, and elsewhere, that without a profound spiritual connection-a solid sense of meaning and purpose for our existence, a collapsing, transitioning world will be untenable and unbearable. "The Book of Eli" portrays precisely why that is so. And like no other futuristic movie of our time, it depicts poignantly why and how the demise and its ensuing journey are sacred.

Curiously, this movie appears in our culture at the same time as James Cameron's latest blockbuster, "Avatar." Deeply embedded in many of Cameron's movies is a spiritual or archetypal theme, and "Avatar" is perhaps the most obvious example. Although it offers a much more pleasant viewing experience, it is profoundly connected with "The Book of Eli" on one level because if the lessons "Avatar" illustrates to the human race are not learned, the irrevocable result will be "The Book of Eli."

I could say much more about the movie depicting Gary Whitta's screenplay which I passionately urge you to see, but I really do not want to dilute its impact. While it is not all darkness and horror, it doesn't offer the traditional happy ending but rather one possibility of transition to a new paradigm of wisdom our species. "The Book of Eli" reveals where we are headed, but more importantly, the difference one human being's relationship with something greater makes for himself and for future generations.

Then along came Mr. Wonderful with his irresistible smile and infectious inspiration. He wooed you with his charm, that smile, and his engaging discourse-so articulate by comparison with the unintelligible babbling you had put up with for eight years. He cared about you and your children. No longer were you alone; like Martin Luther King, he had a dream-a dream congruent with yours, and the passion you both shared for the dream was hypnotic and felt deeply spiritual. You actually thought that he was a messenger sent from another world to rescue you and take you out of the nightmare. He used transcendent terms like "hope", "change", "yes we can." And not only were you totally surrendered to his embrace, but you begged everyone else to do the same. He's our only hope, you told them and yourself. You could scarcely contain your ecstasy when they all chose him in the last hours of the eight years you had all excruciatingly endured.

It was a new day, one year ago at this time. Your sighs of relief could not have been longer or deeper. You and your children were now safe at last.

But today, you ponder reflectively the past year, and what you have now come to understand is that the hero you married is a prisoner. You believed him when he told you he was free and at liberty to make the changes he proclaimed. You trusted him, committed yourself to him, and fought for him. And now you discover that he's betrayed you and that his actions really aren't that divergent from his predecessor's. In fact, he is a prisoner of the same forces that terrorized you for the previous eight years. Fooled again. Betrayed. You sink into despair and depression. You talk to your friends-the others who also believed in him. You feel those old and familiar emotions you felt from 2001-2008 that you thought you'd never have to feel again. "What can we do?" you ask. "What are our options?"

The affair is over, and you don't know whether to cry, rage, get drunk, stay stoned, or rethink leaving the country. You've married a prisoner; you've made another bad choice. You feel bitter and perhaps a little self-loathing. In fact, you want to take a shower because you feel dirty all over.

OK, I could be talking about a real love affair here between two people-one a professional con artist and the other, an enabler. Or I could be talking about a nation of hopeful citizens who wanted to believe so desperately that their new hero would reverse the course set forth by the sociopaths of the previous administration and lead them forward to a better, more humane life, a more bonded community, a saner world for themselves and their children.

What we all must ask ourselves at the end of a relationship that turned out badly-a relationship at the end of which we felt betrayed and disappointed is quite simply: What is my part? Why did I make this choice? What did I not wish to see? What were the red flags I chose to ignore?

This week, Michael Moore was interviewed by Democracy Now and confessed his sense of betrayal and disappointment with Obama's first year. What I heard from him and hear from almost every progressive liberal who expresses similar sentiments is a jaw-dropping naïveté regarding the nomination of candidate Obama and the system he represents. It is the epitome of the definition of insanity: repeating a behavior proven erroneous without exception, time after time, yet expecting that the next time, the result will be different.

Yet both sadly and fortunately, as is true whenever the betrayer shows his true colors, this is a teaching moment for the enablers. And this particular teaching moment is more important, more momentous than any in our national history. Why? Because of what is at stake in terms of the future of the planet, and that future is inextricably connected with a paradigm to which we have been "married" as a people since the birth of our nation.

Last week's Supreme Court ruling lifting limits on campaign financing by corporations was truly the last nail in the coffin of democracy and sealed the fundamental definition of fascism attributed to Mussolini which was simply, "the corporate state." Abramoff rules, and politicians no longer have any reason to function other than corporate whores. As a friend suggested to me a few days ago, members of Congress should now dress themselves in NASCAR uniforms indicating which corporations own them so that we don't need to bother researching the facts but can see them wearing the information on their bodies.

During the 2007-2008 hyperventilating euphoria of progressives regarding the candidacy of Obama, my website, Speaking Truth to Power, was exposing Obama's corporate connections and forecasting that little if anything would significantly change with his election. I was labeled Debbie Downer from Doom and Gloomville and called a conspiracy nut. And so here we are: Revelations from Matt Taibbi and others regarding Goldman Sachs as the largest contributor to Obama's election campaign, an escalation of war in Afghanistan above and beyond the proportions of Bush's war in Iraq, Obama's sanctioning of Bush's policies on torture, Obama's prone position in relation to Wall St. and his choice to surround himself with economic advisors who were directly responsible for creating economic collapse-I could continue ad nauseum. The similitude between the policies of Bush II and Obama are so glaring that last week, progressive journalist, Danny Schechter, asked, "Has Obama Become Bush II?" (I am particularly fond of the Photoshopped image attending the article-a picture worth more than a thousand words.)

In this teaching moment, those disappointed and despairing of their tryst with Obama have a golden opportunity to ask themselves what his betrayal of them reveals regarding the political and economic systems of America and the reality that no politician can even be nominated for the Presidency by the two-party monstrosity, let alone elected, unless that candidate is permanently dressed in his or her NASCAR uniform. If you do not ask this question, you will continue living out the definition of insanity with every national election because you refuse to look deeply at the fundamentals of how the corporate state functions. You will cover its rotting stench with come cloying cologne of "hope" and thereby not only enable your betrayers but waste precious time by not attending to life and death issues.

My 2006 book, U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You, endeavored first and foremost to leave the reader with an understanding of who owns and operates the American political system. Others have offered their brilliant analyses-Naomi Klein in Shock Doctrine, Mike Ruppert in Crossing The Rubicon, and Kevin Phillips in Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism. Your failed love affair with Obama is now your teaching moment-a critical opportunity to research these four books above and buy out of the putrid, perfidious American political system and buy into making your local community resilient and self-sufficient.

I have long since rejected the American political system and have not voted in any national election since 2000, nor will I again in my lifetime. To do so is to buy into a system that has created what for years I have termed the Toxic Triangle of energy depletion, economic meltdown, and environmental devastation. Every drop of human energy I invest in that system is energy divested from working with my community, my neighborhood, and my loved ones to respond to the current and coming horrors that have been wrought by the three "E's": catastrophic climate chaos, multitudes of environmental refugees, impending global food shortages, the depletion of safe and clean drinking water worldwide, widespread droughts and environmental disasters, unprecedented energy depletion, environmental illnesses and pandemics, and global economic cataclysm.

Visionaries such as Buckminster Fuller, E.F. Schumacher, and Herman Daly have demonstrated that global challenges are most effectively addressed on the local level, where pragmatic responses and options can be created as an alternative to investment in the fantasy of global solutions. That is to say that in the 21^st century, "global" is synonymous with "corporate" and therefore guaranteed to exacerbate rather than grapple with the daunting issues confronting the earth community.

Some individuals argue that focusing on re-localization forces us to ignore the global corporatism of an international ruling elite. My response is to ask why we must do one or the other. It is crucial in my opinion to be aware of the powers that be and their machinations, but I must also ask, what realistically, any of us can do to alter or avert their agenda? The answer is nothing; however, there is much we can do to protect ourselves and our communities from it by becoming self-sufficient and resilient.

On Inauguration Day, 2009, I was intrigued as I watched the swearing in of Obama, by the presence of one man standing behind and to the right of Obama--none other than Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. I doubt that the positioning was intentional, but for me, it was symbolic. It forces me to ask, which interests, which ruling elite families are "standing behind and to the right" of Obama? To what extent is he their creation and theirs alone? For that reason, I chose a photo of that symbolic moment to accompany this article. Take a closer look and think about it deeply. On Inauguration Day, I scoured the internet to find a photo of Rockefeller standing behind Obama during the Oath of Office because I knew its symbolism would later be appreciated by many more Americans than just me. This moment is the moment I had in mind.

Some enablers are capable of changing their behavior and making saner choices. For example, those that have a magnetic attraction to prisoners might find themselves losing interest because they have discovered the deeper meaning of freedom-the ability to create with the support of others, authentic, meaningful responses that do not seduce one into the prison system itself.

This particular affair is over. The "hopium" has worn off. It's time to choose whether you will pursue another affair with another prisoner or walk away from all forms of incarceration, theirs and yours. This is your teaching moment.

Create pressure on governments to keep the assistance flowing? Perhaps, but there is no shortage of assistance being sent to Haiti. There is however a huge problem in Haiti's limited ability to absorb the assistance.

Whether it's small and inefficient sea ports, one small and inefficient airport, a lack of decent roads, and a lack of government direction - all aspects of any place as poor as Haiti - it takes time for outsiders to come in, unload their cargoes, and organize a distribution network from scratch.

Certainly the disturbing reports and pictures are useless from the point of view of prevention. It was a natural disaster, not to be predicted, not to be prevented. One could argue that post-disaster investments could ameliorate events the next time there is an earthquake. But the kinds of images and reports being broadcast will be long forgotten if and when the world's governments get around to re-building.

So the question for me remains, what are we to do with such information?

I am reminded of another disaster, one that happened in the last few years. It was not a "natural" disaster but the deliberate work of the immensely powerful.

In this other disaster, roughly a million people died, about five times the current estimate of death in Haiti. I don't know how many were crippled, but it must have been a great number. This other disaster created more than two million refugees fleeing for their lives. Most of them fled to poor but generous countries, not being welcome by the rich and powerful, and especially not by the country responsible for the mayhem.

As far as pictures and reports, most of them seen in North America were sanitized. Many if not most of the reports were dishonest, clearly not informing people of the magnitude of the horror as it happened. There was a brave group of reporters who produced images every bit as terrible as those we see from Haiti, including scores of hideously mangled children.

But those pictures were not broadcast in North America, were not published in The New York Times or other newspapers "of record." Indeed, the reporters taking these images and writing tough reports actually became targets of the forces causing all the horror.

I'm referring, of course, to the invasion of Iraq, an event whose toll of killing and damage easily compared to the dropping of a thermonuclear bomb on a good-size city.

Of course, the great and bitter irony is that that disaster was both preventable and could even have been stopped once it had started. One could almost guarantee that publication and broadcast of pictures and reports comparable to what's now coming from Haiti would have stopped that demonic brutality. Here indeed gruesome, truthful press coverage could have made a difference, but not in Haiti.

And there was another, smaller disaster recently, smaller but still terrible, and it was completely preventable. In this one about 1,400 people died, including 400 children, and a great deal of the infrastructure of a relatively poor people was destroyed. The damage cannot even be repaired because those responsible for the horror maintain a siege on the victims, allowing no material assistance to be delivered.

Here too you likely will not have seen the kind of pictures or read the kind of stories coming out of Haiti. Some were available - I recall one of poor people trying to avoid stepping in a stream of blood flowing down a narrow street - again the work of amazingly brave reporters, but their work could only be found at not-widely known sites on the Internet. None were published or broadcast by the establishment press in North America. These events occurred in a place called Gaza.

If you think the press is objective, if you think the press does not slavishly serve the interests of the powerful, you just might want to think again.

I used to ponder at that admonition every morning back in 1962, and its message did sink in, as I think it did in the minds of every student in the class who wasn't just falling asleep in the back of the room, or idly daydreaming. Students in that class went on to become brain surgeons, genetic engineers, writers, computer scientists, horticulturalists and lawyers. I don't think too many of us are conspiracy theorists.

Malone encouraged me and my classmates to pursue a science track. He selected a fellow student and me for an experiment, shifting us midway through the fall term to an 11th grade advanced physics class, where we learned to calculate vectors, understand wave behavior and the peculiar nature of light, and where we experimented with electricity (I learned its power when, during a boring lecture, I absent-mindedly stuck two straight pins into the electric outlet on my science desk and crossed them, causing a flash and pop, burning the outlet cover and my fingers, and casting the whole classroom into darkness). Sometimes I was lost, but most of the time, I was simply captivated, learning about the inner workings of the atom and the universe.

The public school I attended was excellent, featuring a number of iconoclastic teachers, who taught us to question, not just to memorize.

Sadly, I have learned that this is not the norm in American education, which many explain why the country is so prone to conspiracy theories.

What can we expect when polls show that only 39% of Americans believe in evolution (no surprise since fewer than 33% even know about DNA and its role in heredity)? What can we expect when one in five Americans, or about 20% of us, think that the sun revolves around the earth, or that 55% believe that they are protected by a "guardian angel"?

Conspiracy theories abound where people are fearful and ignorant. There is the conspiracy theory that Americans never really landed on the moon, the conspiracy theory that Jews run the world, the contradictory conspiracy theory that the Freemasons or Opus Dei run the world, the conspiracy theory that President Obama is a secret Muslim born in Kenya. The list goes on and on.

I'm not saying there are not good reasons for considering 1some conspiracy theories. Certainly the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 was more complicated than the work of one man, Lee Harvey Oswald. Too many things had to work perfectly, and there are too many conflicting pieces of evidence, from the poorly adjusted sight on his gun to the Zapruder film and the alleged trajectory of one incredibly destructive "magic" bullet, for the official story to work. Ditto the assassination several years later of Martin Luther King.

Nor, or course, is the official story of the 9-11 attacks credible, and indeed even the participants in the 9-11 Commission are now refusing to stand by the commission's conclusions about what happened. There are too many gaping holes, from how planes hitting the tops of buildings and creating fires that were far below the melting point of steel could have caused those buildings to dissolve into dust from the bottom up to why another building, not hit by any plane, would collapse in exactly the same fashion for no reason.

But not accepting an official explanation is different from adhering to a full-blown conspiracy theory, and Americans seem amazingly inclined to do the latter.

The most stunning example of this is the popularity of the global warming conspiracy theory.

Despite all the terrifying evidence before our eyes-the rapid disappearance of the North Polar ice cap, the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the shrinking back of mountain glaciers all over the world, the frightening acidification of the upper layer of the global oceans, the measurable and accelerating rise in sea levels, and the thousands of years of data on carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere that can clearly be linked to temperature changes around the world, only half of Americans even believe that global climate is changing, and even fewer, just 36%, believe that the rising global temperature is caused even in part by human activity. Even more astounding is the fact that the number of Americans who believe the earth is heating up has fallen over the last few years from 77% to 51%.

Parallel to this is a growing support for an elaborate conspiracy theory that postulates that governments around the world, in collusion with virtually the entire scientific community, are working collectively to make up and promote a bogus story about global warming.

With other conspiracy theories, from the swine flu vaccination conspiracy to the lunar landing hoax, there is little need for concern. People have their belief system and go about their lives harmlessly. But with the climate change conspiracy, there is a terrible danger that it is leading to government inaction that could ultimately doom the human race, and indeed many of the earth's myriad life forms, to extinction.

Let's look at what the climate change conspiracy advocates are saying. They argue that the governments of Europe, of the US, of Canada, of China and India, and indeed of much of the rest of the world--governments that rarely agree on anything, I might point out--are acting in concert to promote a bogus claim that the earth is heating up because of man-made release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They claim that this conspiracy is being supported by the almost universal connivance of the world's scientists, who are collectively falsifying data and hiding countervailing data. And all this is happeningthey assert, despite the almost universal opposition of the world's corporations, most of which, we know, are resisting having governments take any serious action to combat climate change, and in many cases (look at the US Chamber of Commerce), are actively challenging the whole notion of climate change.

To believe in such a far-reaching conspiracy theory, one would have to first deny all the evidence before our eyes. But then one would also have to believe that the US, China, and Europe, as well as other countries, are in league. You would also have to assume that thousands of tenured scientists--a group with a disproportionate number of large egos and people with a penchant for disputation and controversy, I might add--are all working in concert to bury information and create a false theory. Finally, you would have to believe that all this effort is being made in order to pursue an economy-crippling strategy of making fossil fuels more expensive that is directly in opposition to the wishes of virtually the entire capitalist system.

When, I have to ask, has the US government ever acted deliberately against the interests of the major capitalist enterprises? When, except during revolutionary moments, have any nations acted against the wishes of the assembled commercial interests within their borders? The short answer is: never.

Unless you think the Jews, or alternatively the Freemasons or Opus Dei or the Federalist Society, or maybe all these disparate groups together, are behind this vast conspiracy, and have successfully terrorized and bribed the tens of thousands of scientists and government officials into complicity, the idea of a conspiracy so huge and far-reaching is simply laughable.

And yet with almost half of Americans ready to believe it, the corporate media, eager for ratings, are playing along, giving equal billing to the global warming deniers. Just last night, ABC News anchor Charlie Gibson offered a story on climate change that featured competitor Fox TV's ardent climate change denier and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck as a suppsedly credible advocate for the argument that global warming is an elaborate hoax.

We might as well be watching news stories about how we've all been duped into believing that the earth revolves around the sun, or that, god help us, the damned thing is round.

The truth is, if there is a conspiracy regarding climate change, it is a conspiracy by our government to minimize the threat (we saw that concretely with the attempt by the Bush administration to muzzle climate scientists like NASA's James Hansen), avoid taking serious action, and pretend that the actions being proposed, like "cap and trade," will solve the problem.

As I sit here in southeastern Pennsylvania on December 10, looking out at the green grass on my lawn, which has yet to feel a hard frost just two weeks before Christmas, I'm reminded of Mr. Malone's old banner: "If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist." The corollary is clearly: "If you can measure it, it does exist."

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

As institutions crumble and the global economic meltdown worsens and morphs into irreversible collapse, many people feel lost and disoriented, especially if they have lost jobs, health care, experienced foreclosure or bankruptcy, and of course, if they have lost the funds which they may have spent decades assuming would be there for them in retirement. The seemingly endless losses of collapse can be terrifying and paralyzing, and it is always easier to complain about the culture than to take action to empower oneself and serve the rest of the community of life on this planet. It may also be tempting to assume that since collapse is inevitable and now moving along unstoppably with a life of its own, there isn't any point in exerting any effort to alleviate the misery it is manifesting everywhere by compassionately serving others, even those who may know or care little about collapse. On one level, it is easier to just sit than to act.

One woman who does not embrace that perspective and who beautifully exemplifies empowerment and service is Kathleen Byrne, R.N., who works essentially two full-time jobs as a hospice nurse and as the proprietor of a cheery boarding house and hostel in rural Vermont. Despite numerous challenges in the past year, Kathleen has been able to thrive by working in two industries which not only pay the bills but feed her soul, namely, hospice care and hospitality. A former restaurant owner and gourmet chef, she offers housing but also serves up a sumptuous cuisine which enhances the feeling of home her guests already experience.

I can't help notice that the words hospitality and hospice come from the same root word having to do with kindness toward guests. For this reason, Kathleen's two jobs complement each other, and she is the perfect person to perform and embellish both tasks.

CB: Thank you Kathleen for your willingness to do this interview. Please tell our readers your thoughts on the current and worsening collapse of industrial civilization. How have you seen it playing out in the past two years, and where do you think it's going to go, particularly in terms of its effects on healthcare and housing?

KB: I saw "The End of Suburbia" and experienced the catastrophe of Katrina within weeks of each other in 2005 and knew then that the dark times were upon us. I have not watched tell-a-vision in over 15 years and so have been able to detox from the nightly news and American culture. Like a character in an apocalyptic novel, I gauge the level of collapse we are experiencing by the news that people bring me from away-such as Truth to Power's Daily News Digest.

This summer, two different sets of environmental refugees came to the Inn. Two Alabamans came to Vermont looking for property because "the summers are too hot in Alabama now." A couple with a two year-old child stayed with me for a few days while looking for property here, fearful over the water supply in Boulder, Colorado.

This week, I received a call from a mental health counselor who wanted help for his 56 year-old client. The man had long been cared for by his father who was now a resident in a nursing home. The placement the counselor had found for the man was no longer suitable, and the only other option was a hotel or homeless shelter.

I have patients who are faced with the option of buying food or medications. I don't need to tell you how this will all play out. We have all read Grapes of Wrath. Eventually, I will be inundated with the homeless and hungry.

CB: As you know, I live in Boulder, and what we know for sure is that there is plenty of water here-for now, but what is alarming is the misuse of it and the possibility of millions more people moving to Colorado. Nevertheless, there will be many communities across the nation and the world in which collapse will produce environmental refugees.

So my next question is: Why do you think it's important to take action in the world, even as everything around us seems to be collapsing?

KB: The answer to this question lies in my Catholic upbringing and the kindness of my mother. The dictates of those early years were to give back to those less fortunate since we had been given so much. I am grateful to my father who emphasized the importance of education, my mother who taught me to read before I started kindergarten and showed me by example to be kind and loving, and the many others I have met in countless books who have reinforced the values of hard work and purpose. My favorites are Howard Zinn, Pema Chodron, and Joseph Campbell. How could I not absorb all this and be grateful and lovingly give back?

A miracle occurred on December 17th, my 64th birthday to underscore this. I celebrated by listening to the Beatles famous song "When I'm 64" and was flooded with emotions as I remembered what life was like in the 60's in our country and for me as a young woman. Life seemed simple then, but I was unformed and unfulfilled and had not yet traveled the path to adulthood. Later in the dark of my birthday night, a former boarder came in out of the Vermont cold, a homeless 68 year-old with a limp and emotional problems. I asked no questions and welcomed him into the warmth of the inn, making sure he had eaten recently. Robert Frost said, "Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in." By trusting me and returning, this man gave me the birthday present that clarified my life's purpose. I am reminded of the stories of countless hobos on the byways during the (other) Great Depression who drew the smiling cat logo in chalk on the sidewalk of the house of the kind-hearted woman. I aspire to be her.

CB: Tell us about your work as a hospice care nurse. What makes it so enlivening and enriching for you personally? How do you feel you are making a difference in a collapsing world?

KB: In 1971, I was a VISTA Volunteer assigned to a Community Action Agency in Anadarko, Oklahoma . It was there that I saw an Indian child with fetal alcohol syndrome, a result of the rampant alcohol abuse among the Indian population. That one shocking moment directed my rather drifting 60's life to nursing school to "make a contribution to the world."

I had felt that this promise would never really come to fruition, but now, after 33 years in the profession, I have the job that allows me to fulfill this promise. I am a nurse for a home care-hospice agency in Vermont. I am privileged to care for people in their own homes with the mission of keeping them there safely. My life's purpose of being of service is fulfilled by every person I am privileged to care for: the Viet Nam Vet with PTSD and a recent amputation; the 75 year-old Vermont farm woman with ovarian cancer; the oxygen dependent woman in a trailer park that lost power after a high wind storm. One morning at 4 AM I drove over a daunting Vermont mountain to help an elderly man living alone in the house in which he was born. He was in pain and had no one to call for help but the home health nurses. The essence of nursing is to care for such an older man who is alone and in pain in the middle of the night. These older Vermonters are stoics who are used to adversity-- to the cold and snowy climate, rural isolation and the 40-mile trip for supplies. These people are my teachers, my sisters, my brothers, my mothers. And so, let me not sit lifeless and unfulfilled when there is so much work to do. Let me contribute to my community of patients bravely soldering on, teaching all of us so much.

CB: Now please tell us about your management of the hostel/boarding house you own. Has it been a profitable enterprise for you in the past year? How do you feel this work makes a difference? What has made it rewarding for you?

KB: The inn ! Oh, my! A huge blessing, great fun and a financial disaster all rolled into one! I think of Loreena McKennitt, the Canadian vocalist and composer, who said in a commencement address at Laurier College in 2002 , "No matter how much you think you know what you want, life sometimes takes you by the scruff of the neck and offers you surprises and changes, other possibilities and opportunities even in the heart of disappointments, and your talents and potential, your capacity to effect change may lie in completely different areas from where you thought they were and sometimes you need to go with this."

And so, the inn that I bought in 2008 with the hopes of it becoming an intentional community has become a boarding house and hostel where travelers and adventurers can find a good meal and a comfortable bed. The boarders get a furnished room and use of the kitchen and dining and living rooms. There have been 12 of them since March, some staying for two days and one for five months. There was a woman who left her husband and needed short-term, temporary shelter; a talented musician/botanist who works for the Forest Service; a writer/editor, and a student on his way to the Art Institute of Chicago. Sometimes there are even guests--like the two sisters cycling from California.

This 2.5 acres of permacultured land at the edge of the Green Mountains and populated by my 16 chickens, 8 cats and Rabbit is not Earth Haven. It is, however, community to the 10 of us who live here, and we have become a family who cares for each other. A baby will be born in March, and there is a beautiful, sweet 15 year-old who is home schooled. At a time in the history of the planet when we have peak oil, climate change, great unemployment and war, we have each other and gardens and the White River in our backyard and the beauty of the Green Mountain National Forest, the wilderness that is the "undiluted work of the Creator". These people and this place have pushed me far beyond my boundaries and are keeping me young....And I have found my community.

CB: You could be living a nice, quiet, isolated life in retirement, but you're obviously not. Tell us why.

KB: I always say with a smile that Goddess looks out for stupid women like me, and She has surely saved me from my father's retirement. My father retired financially secure to his bedroom where he sat for 25 years essentially going crazy from self-absorption. There I was, living in a house I had paid for with money in the bank collecting "social insecurity." The next thing I knew, my loneliness and fear over collapse had propelled me to Vermont. Who knew that I would find the light and the dark you talk about Carolyn - fun, tears, fulfillment , frustration - in other words, a great life.

As Pema Chodron says, "It's not about getting to a place that's really swell." So I have been saved from myself, the self that wanted safety and security where things were really swell. My path now is very different from any darn thing I could have imagined! Let my life continue to make a difference to others. Let me fulfill my purpose on this dark and scary planet. Thank you Carolyn for inviting me to talk with you.

Kathleen may be contacted at: kthlnbyrne@gmail.com

This winter solstice is particularly dark. I watch the blood drain from the faces of my progressive friends, disillusioned by their "yeswecan" poster boy who has accomplished little in his first term but the escalation of a despicable war for oil and drugs, and with the stroke of a pen, opened the floodgates for troops and military contractors to rape and pillage yet another piece of the planet. "Welcome to the Golden Arches of Kabul. May I take your order?" The "Hopium" wears off, and we're reminded that it's still winter, and it's still very, very dark.

I contemplate the word "apocalypse" which originates from the Greek word that means "the unveiling". The poster child wins the peace prize, but just hours beforehand, he unleashes hell on earth. Did you see that? The veil was lifted for a few moments and we saw who really owns him.

Humanity is committing suicide in a thousand ways. This week, they all shook hands in Copenhagen and agreed to throw a bone to the climate change militants while genuflecting before corporate capitalism as the supreme deity on earth. The gods have been appeased, but the veil was lifted briefly. Oh my, did you see that? Corruption, scandal, and one climate scientist, Jim Hansen, not only boycotts the entire spectacle, but hopes it will fail because he was able to see through the chicanery even as it was being orchestrated.

A Congress of solidly owned legislators shakes hands and agrees that healthcare has nothing to do with health but only profit for big pharma and the insurance industry. It's all there if you just look. You don't even have to read about it on an alternative news website. Open your eyes because the veil has been torn off, and if you ever wanted to see naked people who can't even find their clothes-who aren't even trying, this is it. But beware because you are a walking pre-existing condition simply because you breathe air.

Over two decades ago as a psychotherapist in training, I worked in the back ward. I have the scars to prove it. I'm fortunate not to have been more severely injured, but more fortunate not to be living the hell I witnessed in the eyes of the patients inhabiting the so-called "mental health unit." Yet unlike the inmates who run the current asylum that is empire, those folks, in that ward, really knew they were crazy. They wanted so badly to die, and they told you that, straight up. They didn't make delusional statements like "this is a necessary war" or "this climate deal was a meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough" or "hold your nose and vote for it." What's really crazier than the insanity these statements blatantly reveal is the attempt to keep the veil in place. Let's all pretend that industrial civilization is temporarily limping along in some "rough patch" that will invariably, inevitably (because this is America) turn around and re-establish itself in the land of "normal." I'll take a flagrantly violent and suicidal psychotic any day of the week who is excruciatingly aware of their anguish and begs to be allowed to end their misery. Please, I implore you, give me the certifiable schizophrenic who "knows" he is Jesus and that killer ants are crawling all over his body.

No darkness is as dark as that perpetuated by people who insist they are living in the light.

So what's the real deal with the species that sits, as Tim Bennett suggests, like Thelma and Louise, at the edge of the cliff, about to punch the gas of the '66 T Bird into oblivion while taking everything and everyone else in sight with it? Is it really all about hating the culture and its vacuousness that much?

I keep coming back to the dark-and the light. I can't forget how they need each other-like the North and South poles-like every opposite we can possibly imagine that is only truly defined and appreciated by what it isn't. After all I've written here, how dare I talk about the light? Isn't that all just theory? Where's the experience?

Every once in awhile, one of those patients in that back ward would receive the kind of treatment that allowed him or her to walk out the front door with fear and trepidation, but nevertheless committed to staying alive and finding many reasons to contribute to the lives of others. And even more frequently these days, I find individuals and communities that are discovering a deeper meaning and purpose in their lives that they are holding alongside the horrors created by an inexorably suicidal human species. I encounter in the most unexpected places people who are not just sitting and waiting, but working-working hard to contribute to the well being of the community of life. They wish to minimize the suffering that the collapse of empire will entail, but even more importantly, they are doing their work just because-because it makes a difference to others, because it empowers themselves and all the lives they touch, because they can't not do the work, because in doing whatever work they feel called to do, they are finding and fulfilling their purpose in being on this dark and scary planet.

You see it isn't just about jumping off a cliff to end the anguish. It's about finding meaning, and even if we build communities that look like permaculture design on steroids, even if we return to steady-state economics and create burgeoning economies of scale based on cooperation, compassion, creativity-even if we fashion intentional communities that approximate heaven on earth, even if we were to forge a culture of nirvana, it is only by immersing ourselves in the inner transition process that brings emotional and spiritual transformation far beyond anything traditional psychotherapy has to offer-it is only there that we find the meaning and purpose that will move us through the evolutionary threshold on which we stand and make the current cultural nightmare a bit more bearable.

A new kind of human is possible, but it will be experienced only as the old paradigm definition of humanity breathes its last breath. The veils keep falling off the things they have been concealing for more than 5,000 years. Let's keep assisting the unveiling and call what's underneath exactly what it is.

One way to do this is to find and do the work we came here to do and which massive unemployment and underemployment, vs. greasing the wheels of empire, now gives us an excellent opportunity to discover.

Our second job is to become in the indigenous sense of the word, elders of the community. The elder is not necessarily the older. His or her job always was and will be not only the preparation of youth for initiation, but speaking truth and creating beauty. These may seem like contradictory tasks, but they are profoundly complementary. In indigenous cultures, elders are truth-tellers who are often disliked for their directness and candor. Yet they know that this is the job of the elder, and that to do anything less is to betray succeeding generations. At the same time, the elder knows that the horrible truths unveiled must be balanced by the creation of beauty-poems, songs, stories, works of art, and music. In earlier definitions of the word "prophet", it meant not someone who tells what will happen, but what is happening and what is about to happen. Thus the elder must be both a prophet and an artist, for one needs the other and cannot exist without it.

I'm reminded of scenes from the recent movie and novel "The Road" in which "the man" teaches "the boy" that some individuals "carry the fire", and others don't. As the ending reveals, this instruction, as much as the incessant heinous experiences they encountered, made a permanent impression on the boy, and we are led to believe, would be the litmus test on which he relied in a world which many found impossible to endure.

Another poet who was roughly a contemporary of T.S. Eliot was William Butler Yeats. Both lived the transition from the 19th to the 20th centuries, and both witnessed the global cataclysm of World War I. Yeats in particular was deeply troubled about where industrial civilization was taking the planet, yet he never relinquished his conviction that its horrors would ultimately bring forth that new kind of human.

At this solstice/nativity moment, Yeats speaks to us of the light that attends the darkness and cannot be extinguished:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And so I ask, on this longest night and shortest day: What beauty did you create today?

And in this very dark moment, are you carrying the fire?

I was a psychotherapist in private practice for 17 years, and 12 years ago, I felt compelled to leave the profession. At the time, I wasn't clearly aware of why, but today, I realize that some part of me knew that not only was the profession about to disintegrate, but that my talents and skills could be more effectively engaged elsewhere.

I currently live in Boulder, Colorado where I am developing a Transition Counseling and Spiritual Direction practice to reach out to individuals who may be experiencing unemployment, foreclosure, bankruptcy, loss of benefits, loss of retirement, and other crises resulting from the collapse of industrial civilization. I'm also exploring options for working with people by phone as well as in person. As I interact with people hurting from a variety of economic, emotional, physical, and spiritual devastations, I notice that few of them have to be reminded that something is horribly wrong with the culture in which they live. They feel unspeakably betrayed and shattered as a result of the faith they invested in the American dream, and they are now experiencing the nightmare it has become in their personal lives.

Up until perhaps 2008, it might have been useful to bemoan the culture in which we live in an effort to teach our fellow humans that it is killing them and all other earthlings. Today, I find that even if people maintain a persona that we're simply passing through a "rough patch" and that things will get back to normal because after all, this is America, and we will bounce back - just beneath the surface of that particular mask is a profoundly disturbing awareness that we are in dire and unprecedented territory and that a "return to normal" is a tragic chimera.

Because few people are solidly convinced of what this pathetic culture can actually deliver, I'm finding it unnecessary and even counterproductive to keep whining about that reality. What people want and need is a sense that they're not alone, that they're not crazy, that there are many things they can do to enhance their personal empowerment in the context of an unraveling civilization, and very importantly, that there is work for them to do in their neighborhood and community - that they can invest their life force energy there and work with others to prepare for a deepening collapse. Curiously, I'm finding that the latter option is perhaps the most important of all.

I am currently working with Transition Colorado and networking with other Transition groups around the nation and world, but Transition is only one of many venues for involvement with one's community in preparation for the Long Emergency. The opportunities for doing preparatory work with others locally are infinite.

While I believe it is crucial to understand how we have all incorporated the toxicity of the culture on myriad levels, and while it is equally important to buy out of the dominant system, it is extremely important to engage with other awake individuals in preparing for collapse by doing that work together. The time of focusing exclusively on individual childhood wounding, individualistic self-empowerment, coping skills, and personal self-esteem is over. I'm not dismissing these as irrelevant, but humanity has now reached an evolutionary threshold in which we must grow up and evolve together or become extinct.

Evolving together means working together. Incessant navel contemplation and "woundology" enhanced by sitting in groups and attempting to create intimacy is not only narcissistic, but is in some sense, a crime against the earth community because it compartmentalizes humans from their inherent membership in the human and more-than-human families. It fosters a sense of "us and them" and propagates an odious arrogance that "our little group" is better than, wiser than, more evolved than, and more likely to survive than those others hoodwinked by the dominant culture. I'm not sure that at this point in the collapse process that we can engage in this kind of work without inadvertently perpetuating the culture of empire that we proclaim to abhor.

Perhaps even more counterproductive is isolation and an abdication of our human responsibility to serve the earth community. While it may be useful to sit in conversation groups with likeminded folks, it is, in my opinion, our moral obligation to serve the world in which we live, and as stated above, the opportunities for doing so are endless. This is tricky because it means we must create and maintain good boundaries. It means serving but also keeping some distance from the prevailing paradigm. Engaging in service does not mean wallowing in the system, but it does mean affirming that we are part of the earth community, not better than - that we are equally vulnerable, equally fallible, and that by serving, we are joining with our fellow earth inhabitants to carry the vision of a new paradigm, whether that paradigm ever prevails or not.

In her recent blog post, "Lessons From The Edge", Sharon Astyk reminds us of why it's important to carry the vision:

...at the end of the night the sense is this - that though the odds are increasingly small and the abyss below us increasingly vast, what matters most is that we live our lives as though we can succeed, because every bit of harm we prevent and every blow softened matters, and in the end, how you lived matters as much as the winning. Most of what we do may not work, in the sense of preserving it all, but ought to preserve some -and some is a great deal when measured in human lives and happiness.

You see, it isn't about "preventing" collapse or the triumph of a new paradigm, but rather about minimizing the suffering.

Some individuals believe that the ideal model for transcending the culture of empire is the ecovillage or intentional community. There may be a time, in my opinion, when this option is truly viable, but at this stage of collapse, I think not. People who do live in intentional communities usually report that because of the emotional baggage people bring to the community, it is necessary to spend hours daily "processing" these issues in order to resolve conflicts. Generally, if this processing is not done, the community falls apart. That, from my perspective, is because for the most part, non-tribal people are not yet in a situation where they need to create tribes. When they need to do so, they probably will. Until then, we will have isolated ecovillages held together by incessant psychological processing, and how, I ask, is this different from living in a gated community in suburbia?

As Kathy McMahon notes:

Rather than learning to speak more honestly, (a skill I value, highly, by the way), I think that the true therapist encourages people to do more listening and do more real honest work with other people they live around. Meaningful work means local work that will heal and repair the world around you.

I believe that in addition to service, we must also address our own personal shadow. The shadow is a Jungian term that simply means all within us that we have disowned and said, "That's not me." It can be the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, and everything in between. It is more than just taking responsibility for "my part" in an event or an interaction. It is the willingness to explore how something we despise or loathe may actually be a part of us which we project outward onto other individuals and on the culture itself. In other words, how do I act out empire on a daily basis? How do I abuse, exploit, plunder, pillage, manipulate, and use power and control to get what I think I need? How do I subtly or blatantly perpetuate Western civilization's curse of entitlement and "specialness"? Of course, I wouldn't do any of this consciously, because I'm too "enlightened", right? Wrong. That's why rigorous exploration of the shadow is so crucial.

Doing shadow work is very humbling and radically diminishes arrogance because it reveals our sameness and what we have in common with our fellow humans, as opposed to how we believe we are superior. And in fact, in the same way that within the dark recesses of the earth we sometimes find gold, within the most despised parts of ourselves, we find treasures that if "mined" and worked with, provide the compassion, creativity, patience, and humility that allow us to transform the "emperor within."

One piece I found implicit but not explicit in both Erickson's and McMahon's articles is the importance of connecting with something greater than ourselves and other humans. I have attempted in Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse, to offer not only tools for emotional preparation for collapse, but options for enhancing our relationship with something greater. Some people abhor the word "spiritual", yet some of the most "spiritual" individuals I have ever met call themselves atheists and agnostics. Here again, the contamination of words with the semantics of empire challenges our definitions, but in my experience, I have met few people who aren't "spiritual" in the sense that they are able to stand in awe of forces greater than the personal ego, such as nature, love, beauty, joy, and sorrow - to name only a few. For me, "spiritual" means little more than having a heart and a gut, and where emotion ends and "spiritual" begins, who can say?

Here in Boulder, and in several places around the country, people have started Sacred Demise study groups which simply means they are using the book as a springboard for exploring many other topics. What I know of these groups is that they are not intended to be venues for ongoing inner work or the creation of intimacy, yet in the process of coming together to work with the book's contents, both seem to occur quite naturally. What I also notice is that folks in these groups are not isolated, but extensively involved in service in their neighborhoods and communities.

Much of the emotional work we may "think" we need to do at this stage of the transition - work that is still primarily optional, will pale by comparison to work that will need to be done as collapse accelerates. Some of the work we are doing now may seem almost irrelevant in the light of intensifying challenges down the road. But all of the work we do now or later will be informed and interpreted by the conditions around us and will only make sense in the light of them.

A very important question for those currently practicing psychotherapy is raised by McMahon:

When our neighborhoods are defined by the five-to-ten miles around our homes, we'll be forced to learn new skills, and being diplomatic will count a whole lot more than honesty all by itself. As therapists, we'd do well to encourage our clients to appreciate the qualities of human connections and interactions by doing thoughtful, tangible and useful things for others in our neighborhood, without an expectation of an immediate payoff. When we learn to be helpful and constructive to others, our oddness or emotional damage will become less important than the way we go about salvaging our humanity. We may well find ourselves in a time when it will be a rare person who has escaped true hardship. Right now, one of every six workers in the U.S. are unemployed or underemployed.

What will our job as psychotherapists be when that number grows to one in five or even one in three?

In the title of this article I have put the word "ends" in quotation marks because I do not believe that the world will end, but certainly the world as we have known it is ending. That includes the institution of psychotherapy which in its traditional form is collapsing as rapidly and as profoundly as every other institution of civilization. Two decades from now, it will bear little resemblance to its present form. One reality of that transition will be that if therapists expect to get paid for their work, they should plan to accept payment in vegetables or chickens because money as we know it, eventually won't exist. Regardless of what happens, however, it is only the work we do in the external world - in our particular places with real human beings, that gives meaning to the work we do in the inner world. If we can spend as much time in the community garden as we do on the couch, then perhaps it will serve us to have a shrink as the world ends. Or perhaps as awake individuals strive to maintain this balance, less therapy will be needed and our roles as therapists as we know them will become obsolete. We will then discover other gifts to offer our communities.

I have written much about initiation, more recently an article entitled "Humanity's Rite of Passage: A World Tended By Adults." The initiated woman or man knows that the world is not a perfect place and that if it were, he or she would probably not be here because his/her gifts would not be needed here. Contempt for the culture serves no one, nor does insistence that our roles in relation to a collapsing empire must function in traditional ways. Collapse will show us where we are most needed and how we can best serve, yes the operative word is serve, our fellow creatures.

Carolyn may be contacted at Carolyn@carolynbaker.net This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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If incessant adrenalin rushes enhanced by stupefying special effects are what you desire, seeing "Collapse" should be postponed until you are ready to hear, see, and feel how Director Chris Smith's uncanny discernment is brilliantly conveyed in one of the most poignant, but inspiring movies of this decade.

When was the last time you saw a movie that opened with a plea for revolution-no, not the kind with bullets and bombs, but the kind Thomas Jefferson said should happen every twenty years-a revolution in our thinking? In fact, the kind of revolution Mike Ruppert calls for in the opening scenes is one that takes place inside us. In fact, that kind of revolution is one he's lived since he was a political science major at UCLA in the seventies. Whether you like him or not, whether you agree with him or not, you cannot argue that every word that comes out of his mouth in "Collapse", issues from bone-marrow experience-the kind none of us would ever welcome, the kind some of us would have long since committed suicide over, the kind most of us would gladly walk away from. Yet, Mike Ruppert is still alive, still speaking his truth, and amazingly, still able to laugh and play music.

From this point forward in this review, I will refer to Mike Ruppert as simply "Mike." That's because despite the fact that we've had our disagreements in the past and not a few "come to Jesus" moments, this guy named Mike--"Ruppert", "MCR", the LAPD narc, the investigative journalist, and "batshit insane conspiracy theorist" as he has been derisively labeled, is still my friend, and has been for almost a decade.

So what kind of movie opens with the main character coming in, sitting down, lighting a cigarette, and being asked, "So who are you?" Shortly, the viewer may be thinking, "Wish they hadn't asked that question because I really don't want to know." That means that by the time you've heard three minutes of Mike's personal story, you are already appalled and prepared to plug your ears and do anything but hear more. Your first response may be, "That can't be true", yet his story is fully documented in writing and by verified numerous eyewitnesses. In summary, his was no ordinary childhood and certainly no ordinary law enforcement career. All roads led to that career as a highly decorated Los Angeles Police Department detective, and everything after has been impacted by it. For as Mike very clearly states in the movie, that clean, dedicated, twenty-seven year-old cop is still alive in him and has always wanted some answers-and yes, some justice.

But to the same extent the conscientious cop lives within him, so does the cartographer, the map maker, whose life depended on finding out how the world really works as opposed to how we've been told it works. I would say that at least 80% of his work has evolved out of an attempt to save his own life. That brings it down from ivory tower speculation to a cellular, soul level.

PEAK OIL

So if you're still hanging out with doubts about the validity of Peak Oil, you won't be after you watch this movie's second segment. I've heard and read volumes on Peak Oil, but Mike's explanation always rings in my ears more loudly than that of any other because of its clarity and simplicity. However, he admittedly stands on the shoulders of numerous Peak Oil researching giants such as Dale Allen Pfeiffer and what he calls "The Three Wise Men": Colin Campbell, Matt Simmons, and Richard Heinberg.

Mike explains that it requires the mind of a cop to understand how Peak Oil fits into the rest of the map of events in terms of motive, means, and opportunity. It is now the fundamental underpinning of foreign policy-not only that of the United States, but of all industrial nations. Institutionalized denial of Peak Oil or the refusal by our government to tell the truth about it is nothing less than criminal, according to Mike, because it means that we are building our future as if Peak Oil doesn't exist-sacrificing the lives of future generations so that we can live comfortable lives based on a lie. As for "alternative energy options", I've yet to hear anyone surpass Mike's explanations of how futile and farcical this notion is in terms of sparing us from a global energy crisis. On a small, local scale, renewable energy is necessary and useful, but it is an untenable solution for the long-term, big picture reality of the end of the age of oil.

THE DEADLY ACCURATE MAP

About the same time that Mike's newsletter, From The Wilderness began publishing stories about Peak Oil, he started connecting the dots between a number of other issues, and several articles published on the website at that time by Catherine Austin Fitts and by Mike, revealed the likelihood of a massive housing and debt bubble that would inevitably burst and result in a global economic meltdown. In his numerous articles and lectures, Mike began admonishing people to get out of debt, buy gold, pay off credit cards, and learn to grow their own food. It is illumining to return to the From The Wilderness website from time to time and revisit the economic forecasts made there which predicted the current crisis superbly. Some aspects of timing and minor details may have fallen short of accuracy, but for the most part, the forecasts were spot-on in terms of the larger picture.

Others, including myself, read, wrote for, and published aspects of the From The Wilderness map which at the time resulted in being scorned and called crazy. Those years from 2001 to the beginning of the economic crash in September, 2008 were especially tough for many of us in terms of being labeled inveterate doom and gloomers. Some of my close friends who got it were calling me "Cassandra Baker" and with good reason.

But neither Mike nor I have broken out the champagne to celebrate how right on target we were during those years because the collapse of civilization and all of its attendant horrors is not something to celebrate. However, we are both buoyed by the number of people who paid attention and acted accordingly and are still doing so today. Likewise, we are inspired and encouraged by the people who have awakened more recently and all those who are just now connecting the dots and experiencing in their bones, the same revolution to which Mike refers in the opening moments of "Collapse."

Fiat Currency, Fractional Reserve Banking, and Compound Interest-these are the only three things you need to know, says Mike, about money. These three inherently comprise a pyramid scheme; in fact, the entire global economy is a pyramid scheme. It is based on the infinite growth paradigm which has now collided with something much more powerful. Our economy is collapsing, but many other countries in the world are collapsing much more rapidly. In summary, the people who have been running the planet are now losing control.

POPULATION

Anyone who has been researching the collapse of industrial civilization understands, as Mike clearly reminds us, that a global population explosion occurred almost simultaneously with the discovery of oil as the 19th century moved into the 20th . Population has steadily increased as the availability of oil has increased, and it is axiomatic that as access to oil decreases, so must the population.

A question that naturally arises from these disturbing realities is whether or not the human race can understand them and change its behavior in time to avert catastrophe. At this point, Mike reminds us of three types of responses to a Titanic-like situation. One is the deer-in-the-headlights response in which one is frozen with fear and surprise and begins to ask, "What does this mean? What do I do?" Another kind of response is, "We know this is happening, we know we're all going to die unless we build lifeboats, so let's get busy doing it." Another group says, "This is the Titanic; it's unsinkable."

Everything is going to break down differently in different places, according to Mike. Currently, we are seeing the bumpy plateau of energy prices which fluctuate wildly. The critical, lethal point of the plateau for the human race is when oil prices spike again, and no one can afford to buy the oil, at which point, everything will shut down.

THE TRANSITION PHASE

What is critical now is for us to begin to put new structures in place before the old infrastructure completely crumbles. That phase could last between 20 years (which would be incredibly fast) to 50 or 100 years. What is crucial is that we don't panic but rather analyze our own local situation to see what structures must be put in place there. Shortages will occur, but most likely, gradually as opposed to abruptly. Specific shortages will happen in specific places for a specific period. Thus, what is important is not to prepare for the end result of collapse, but to prepare for the transition.

When asked if a collapse be "prevented" by human ingenuity, Mike pensively responds with, "No amount of technology, no amount of human ingenuity can overturn the laws of physics and the laws of the universe." Humankind's greatest peril, he asserts, is to believe that it can overturn the law of the universe and "become God."

He very directly admonishes us to: Buy gold, insulate your house, restore the soil around you and grow food in the restored soil; get organic seeds and store them; get a land line and realize that your cell phone will not be available as the system's collapse exacerbates. Local food production is the most fundamental key to human survival in the collapse of industrial civilization.

For example, when the Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea and Cuba were desperately dependent on Soviet oil. The two nations adapted to the loss differently. North Korea maintained its rigid communist system, and millions starved. The Cuban government, however, adapted by growing organic food almost everywhere, abandoning the agribusiness model. The idea was to grow food where people were going to eat food, and the result was remarkable resilience-and survival. The phenomenon to which Mike is referring in this section of "Collapse" is extremely well documented in the 2006 film, "The Power of Community". In summary, in the new human paradigm, everything will be local, and as all animals species know, survival must occur in community, not in isolation.

Director Chris Smith has succeeded in capturing the essence of Mike Ruppert, and one aspect of that essence is the monumental load of grief he carries regarding having spent three decades crying "from the wilderness" to humanity to awaken and embrace the new paradigm. Yet even as the grief is poignantly revealed to us through Mike's tears, so is the balance he maintains through savoring love, fun, play, and making people smile-all of which are very instructive to those of us who are consciously preparing for collapse.

Mike reminds us of Kubler-Ross's Five Stages of Grief and comments that currently, our society appears to be caught in the Anger stage. Ironically, the day I began this review was the same day in which the Ft. Hood massacre occurred, followed by another terrifying shooting rampage in Orlando, Florida. The protracted debate on healthcare over the course of 2009 has been punctuated with numerous violent outbursts at town meetings and insane rages against "socialism" by thousands of hurting middle class Americans. Caustic vitriol pervades our crumbling culture, and that chilling reality is exacerbated by mainstream media's massive lies, distortions, and omissions. How we get through this phase, according to Mike, is critical, and unfortunately, we have little in the culture to assist us in moving through it. However, once we do, and once we begin experiencing acceptance, we are then able to discover like-minded "passengers" on the Titanic with whom we can ally to build lifeboats.

I was recently asked if I thought it was possible that I could be "wrong" about Peak Oil and climate change. My response is that it's possible to be wrong about anything. But as Mike so powerfully comments in "Collapse", there is no longer anything to debate. Engaging in debate on these issues is very much like debating whether the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Peak Oil and climate change are happening; what's to debate?

For those who expend energy with political solutions, Mike points out that capitalism, socialism, and communism are terms "that need to be put in the trash can immediately." The only thing the human race will be concerned with in the future is survival, and ideologies and political parties are showing us less than nothing about how to do this. Engaging in large-scale political processes is not only futile, but deprives us of the energy we need to be investing in survival. All these ideologies were created on the premise of infinite resources, and none offer a balance with the planet's resources and other species.

Yes, we have a sincere, likeable guy in the White House, but, says Mike: He's a prisoner-a prisoner of the government, of politics, of the Federal Reserve, of a system that's archaic. Don't make success or failure rest on his shoulders. The only thing any of us can possible change is our minds.

Stop running from your fear, Mike admonishes us, and starting moving toward embracing your fear because therein lies our ability to survive. This will be, he optimistically reminds us, the greatest evolution in human thinking our species has ever known. Do not run away from your fear, your love, or any emotion because that is the life experience. In those emotions we find the richness of art, music, poetry, and all human creations. Our greater work, he says, is to pull that richness out of the rubbish of civilization's paradigm--a comment which bears uncanny resemblance to what I have written in Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse.

Asked if he would ever "walk away" from three decades of work, Mike asks: If there was a German in 1932-33 who had the foresight to look ahead and see what the end result of the Third Reich would be, could they have in good conscience turned around and walked away? We are collectively as a species responsible for what may be the greatest holocaust in human history-our own suicide.

While I have no negative comments regarding "Collapse", I do have concerns about two issues which could be interpreted as contradictions. One is Mike's statement in the movie that during the Bush administration, he believes Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were paying very close attention to his work. The viewer is left to wonder about his rationale for this bold statement, especially as he concludes the comment with, "that's all I care to say." Three decades of persecution by the powers that be does not, in itself, indicate that any two members of those powers were intensely interested in Mike and his work. So I'm left wondering what he knows that we don't.

Those of us who have been close associates of Mike in the past witnessed his dramatic exodus from Los Angeles to Ashland, Oregon in 2006, based as he said at the time on what a horrible place he believed L.A. would turn out to be in collapse. Yet it is precisely to that city that he returned in 2008. One may be tempted to accuse him of hypocrisy, but only if one does not understand that Mike spent most of his life in L.A., and it is for him "home" in every sense of the word. Some people preparing for collapse choose to relocate to exotic locations; some choose what is familiar and comforting.

The movie draws to a close with Mike's recounting in detail the Hundredth Monkey story. For all its poignancy and sad moments, "Collapse" leaves us with great optimism, joy, possibility, and inspiration. While the logistical focus of the movie is on Mike Ruppert, the ultimate focus is on each of us-on that part of us that knows in every cell of our bodies that we are now in the throes of collapse and that our survival and the meaning of our very existence lies in embracing and to some extent living the Michael C. Ruppert that abides in all of us.