Refusing to face the need for radical change and adaptation only makes the eventual adjustment more traumatic and less likely to succeed.

As an initial reaction to unwelcome crises, denial serves a psychological purpose. Closing our eyes and hoping the Monster will go away is the first stage of eventual acceptance and engagement with unwelcome reality.

Clinging to denial sets up pathology, anger and collapse. If we continue to keep our eyes closed, and demand the Monster go away because we don’t want to deal with change and challenge, then we either detach ourselves from reality altogether (a pathological psychosis perfectly depicted in the classic film Sunset Boulevard) or we rage in fear and dread at the challenge/Monster, as if it is somehow unfair that change has occurred without our express permission.

The longer we close our eyes and hope the Monster will magically go away when we finally open them, the more likely our eventual collapse.

As a nation, two years after the demise of the status quo, we are still closing our eyes hoping the Monster goes away. Frequent contributor U. Doran recently sent me Hiding a Depression: How the Government Does It by Daniel Amerman, a blow-by-blow description of how Federal and state spending has expanded to replace the private-sector GDP which has vanished.

The article notes how this massive replacement of the private sector by Federal (borrowed) spending has gone largely unremarked.

In other words: if we close our eyes and borrow 10% of the nation’s GDP ($1.4 trillion) every year (or perhaps more accurately, $2 trillion a year) from now on, then when we finally open our eyes the Monster of change and challenge will have magically vanished and everything will be as it was before the Monster’s terrible appearance.

Yes, this is childlike. We have turned to the Central State as our Mommy and Daddy who will save us from the Monster.

Unfortunately, our own desires and derangements are feeding the Monster that is threatening us with change–a dynamic illustrated by the classic sci-fi film Forbidden Planet.

The more we cling to our deranged dependence on systemic fraud, exponential expansion of credit, corporate cartels/political Plutocracy, Central State largesse, corporate-media propaganda and a financial system that breathes misrepresentation of risk, the stronger the Monster becomes.

A close friend has been consulting for a long-successful private enterprise. Like many if not most businesses which started small and grew into a successful niche, the company’s very success is the wellspring of its limitations: the owners cling to haphazard, anachronistic ways of doing business cobbled together in the distant past rather than risk change (and losing control over anything, even if serving customers demands new systems and some delegation).

As a result, the limitations of the inefficient, failing parts of the company will doom the entire enteprise as soon as a competitor enters their niche. And since the entry of a competitor in a profitable niche is inevitable, then the willful blindness of the company’s founders/managers to the need for adaptation is dooming the company to a desperate make-or-break convulsion at a later point, when competition will force a rapid adaptation which may be too frantic to be successful.

This is an excellent analogy for the U.S. economy and society. We fear adaptation, even as we sense it is necessary and inevitable. We want to cling to the past for as long as we can, even as this dooms us to a convulsive, forced adaptation in the future that is likely to fail for the very reason that it has been put off until the last frantic minute.

The Titanic offers us a timeless analogy for denial and a frantic, too-late acceptance of grim reality. Had the doomed ship’s leadership actively accepted the challenge to save as many lives as possible, then lifeboats would not have been sent off half-full. The sea was calm; boats could have been safely loaded beyond their designed capacity, and crude life-rafts might have been lashed together. As poor a solution as a lashed-together assemblage of buoyant materials would have been welcomed as a better alternative than certain death.

But instead, the “plan” was to maintain a veneer of normalcy: the band played on, even as the bow sank lower into the unforgiving icy water.

Fed chairman Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Geitner, President Obama and Congress are all ordering the band to play spritely tunes of rising holiday spending, endless borrowing, and the carefully crafted propaganda of Fed manipulation, statistical legerdemain and happy-talk about how the Monster will be gone when we open our eyes.

Since we are feeding the Monster with our very denial and derangements, then that is impossible. The longer we keep our eyes closed, hoping we can avoid any meaningful change, any meaningful adaptation and any meaningful sacrifice, the more fearsome and powerful the Monster becomes.

If we insist–childlike, petulant, resentful of reality–on keeping our eyes closed in 2011, then we are dooming ourselves to facing a much fiercer and more powerful Monster in 2012. We can’t escape the confrontation, and the longer we put it off, hiding under our bed, wishing it all away, the more likely our panicky collapse when reality forces our eyes open.

The crush of long workdays and events has caused me to fall behind my email once again, so please allow me to thank everyone who sent their holiday greetings and best wishes to me: thank you for your kind thoughts.

New recipes on What’s for Dinner at Your House?–Elsewhere Cafe Muffins, and Louisa’s Vegetarian Baked Beans

If you would like to post a comment where others can read it, please go to DailyJava.net, (registering only takes a moment), select Of Two Minds-Charles Smith, and then go to The daily topic. To see other readers recent comments, go to New Posts.

Despite my deep respect for Rob and the enormous legacy to which he and Transition in the UK have given birth, I cannot be silent about his concerns. The first seems to be Michael’s assertion that Transition initiatives in the U.S. must “declare independence,” from Transition in the U.K. Here I recall one of the things that first drew me to Transition, namely its focus on local solutions based on the needs of a particular place. Having been an activist for decades, I was beyond disillusioned by groups that claimed to depart from the hierarchical, corporate functioning of most organizations of industrial civilization but in fact, mimicked them. I was thrilled to discover that the Transition model as outlined in the Transition Handbook, was at long last, a genuine exception to this. In more recent months, however, I have started to feel as if a kind of creeping corporatism is beginning to emerge which as Michael notes, we need to declare independence from. Specifically, what I have noticed is an implicit assumption that however Transition is implemented in a particular place, it must defer to the leadership of Transition in the U.K. and in the U.S. So on the one hand, “declaring independence” from a tendency to become monolithic in thinking and action may well be necessary, but in no way is this synonymous with renouncing a “spirit of collaboration.” Throughout Michael’s article, I hear a deep desire for collaboration, but also for resilience in our approach to implementing Transition in the U.S.

As for economics, Rob’s argument against putting all his eggs in the basket of any one economic theory, misses the point. The point is not to choose a particular theory and defend it, but to put all the theories he mentioned on the table and engage in deep, protracted dialog about all of them. The U.K. is presently enduring a horrible winter in which people are freezing to death, losing jobs, police and fire personnel are being laid off by the hundreds, and at the same time, the nation is facing the same severity of economic meltdown now occurring throughout many other industrialized nations. All of this is happening in the vicinity of Rob’s local place, and one does not need to be an economist to understand that conditions are becoming increasingly dire all across Europe. Transition initiatives in all parts of the world will ultimately find themselves confronted by these grim economic realities, and they should be talking about them with as much focus as they are directing toward Peak Oil and climate change. As frightening as the consequences of Peak Oil will be, the consequences of a global economic collapse are beginning to bring similar or worse realities to our doors with dizzying speed. In fact, currency wars, gargantuan amounts of debt, and a worldwide crisis in food production and food prices—all of which are happening now, may ultimately make the consequences of Peak Oil seem anticlimactic.

All of this leads up to a statement by Rob that I find appalling: “I get a sense from how Michael builds his case in his article that he has drawn together all the very worst forecasts of everything and used that to underpin his case for ‘Deep Transition’.” Yet in just a few sentences below, Rob admits that he finds the facts regarding climate change “terrifying.” He then states: “I don’t think that one needs to exaggerate threats and try and terrify people into a sense of urgency. The facts are motivating enough on their own. Indeed there is lots of research showing that bombarding people with terrifying information is far more likely to lead to a Flight/Fight/Freeze response than to constructive engagement. It is rarely an effective approach to engaging people in my experience.”

This reveals a reality that for me is profoundly disturbing among some members of Transition initiatives, namely, an unwillingness to deeply analyze the meaning of the word “transition.” It comes from a sixteenth-century Latin word which means “to cross over.” If one is crossing over something, it is important to understand what one is crossing from and what one is crossing to. Therefore, I personally find the word “transition” by itself an inadequate description of our current planetary predicament . That is why in my work, I incessantly use the words, collapse, transition, and Great Turning, the latter term used by Joanna Macy and David Korten. The historian in me finds it necessary to look at where we have been, where we are in this moment, and not just where we would like to be in the future. The entire process, which I choose to call an evolutionary leap for the human species, occurs in stages, and let’s not delude ourselves: At the moment there is much more collapse going on than transition even though it is difficult to know exactly where on ends and the other begins.

At the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we are experiencing the collapse of industrial civilization. No matter how much we may want to call it “transition”, we are profoundly fooling ourselves if we are unwilling to use the “C” word, as I have found many members of Transition are. One of the hallmarks of industrial civilization is its enculturation into idealism, denial, and frantic addiction to progress. We love the rebirth, but we absolutely refuse to talk about the death that makes it possible. Oh isn’t this lovely—we’re “transitioning.” Never mind that our entire way of life is dying. Never mind how we actually feel about that in our guts and in our hearts. Whistle a happy tune because we’re “transitioning.”

I am an enthusiastic supporter of holding a positive vision for the future, but not unless I am also willing to stare down the reality of the collapse of civilization and all of the adversity that will entail. Here in the U.S. we are shamefully addicted to positive thinking as the author and social critic, Barbara Ehrenreich notes in her 2010 book Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In it she argues that positive thinking in American culture is believing that the world is shaped by our wants and desires and that by focusing on the good, the bad ceases to exist. Ehrenreich believes this notion has permeated our society and that the refusal to acknowledge that bad things could happen is in some way responsible for the current financial crisis. She, of course, attributes that crisis to many other causative factors as well but notes that positive thinking has become an integral aspect of corporate and popular culture. American culture is deeply afflicted with the delusion that we are exceptional and entitled and will always prevail in the face of hardship, and this delusion, I believe, fuels the sense of urgency conveyed by Michael in his article.
Thus I adamantly disagree with Rob when he states that “the facts are motivating enough on their own” to cause us to incisively grasp the severity of our predicament. This is an unequivocally false assumption borne out by the level of denial that still dominates the psyches of humanity both in and out of the Transition movement—a reality that lies at the heart of industrial civilization. Because he doesn’t seem to understand this, Rob defends some aspects of industrial civilization as advantageous:

Also, there are some elements of Michael’s analysis that don’t seem to stand up to historical analysis. For example, he writes that “industrial civilisation destroys communities”. While on the one level this could be argued to be the case from a Robert Puttnam/Happiness Index analysis, it is also important to note that at present, industrial civilisation is, for much of the world, the only thing that feeds, clothes, employs and heats and cools billions of people. Yes it is deeply flawed, yes it is highly oil vulnerable, yes it is pushing the biosphere to the edge of collapse, yes it is grossly unequally distributed, but is Transition, at this point, in any position to take over and run an alternative infrastructure? To argue that ‘industrial civilisation destroys communities’ is hugely over-simplistic.

First of all, a clarification. It was David Orr, a Post-Carbon Institute Fellow, who first stated that industrial civilization destroys communities. While it is true that industrial civilization provides those things mentioned in the above paragraph, what Rob is not addressing and what Michael seems to be attuned to is the paradigm of industrial civilization—the assumptions, demands, roles, and fundamental tenets thereof. Few would counter the reality that industrial civilization has provided mindboggling advantages for the human species. Because of it, people walk on the moon, penicillin has saved millions of lives, and you are reading these words on the internet. But if we do not thoroughly, deeply, assiduously explore the price that each of us has paid for these benefits, we will lack the capacity to appreciate the extent of our predicament and the urgency inherent in it. For this reason Michael states:

We will need to tell and retell the story of how we got into this predicament. It would be the story of the rise of the Industrial Growth Society, and how it has deeply wounded every single human living today, and how it has devastated the entire biosphere. It would be the story of how we’re learning that the Industrial Growth Society—in the form of economic globalization—is the culprit that has been pushing us to the brink of The Long Emergency, the brink of economic collapse, even the brink of civilization’s collapse.

On Page 79 of the Transition Handbook, at the beginning of the chapter “The Heart,” one reads:

I think alongside an understanding of the issues, it is important not to pretend that we can keep our awareness of these issues on a purely intellectual “head” level, but that we need to address the “heart” too, acknowledging that this is disturbing information, that it affects us, and that how it affects us in turn shapes how we respond—or don’t.

Later on the same page, we read, “Ultimately, at the heart of this section is the understanding that the scale of this transition requires particular inner resources, not just an abstract intellectual understanding.”

Yet throughout this entire section “the heart” is not defined. What is it? Obviously, in this context, it means much more than the physical organ. Thus I must reflect on the irony that when Rob states in the second paragraph of his article that Michael’s use of the word “sacred” is never defined, the Transition Handbook has never really defined “heart” except intuitively. We have clues in that particular section of the Handbook, but no explicit definition. So I suspect that if Rob wants to fully comprehend what is meant by “sacred,” he would do well to deeply contemplate the ambiguous term “heart.”

At its inception, the Transition movement went to great lengths to avoid a reference to the sacred or spirituality. At that time, this circumvention was probably appropriate. The point Michael is trying to make, it seems, is that because Transition and the world are evolving, such avoidance is no longer congruent with humanity’s dire predicament which now necessitates digging deeper into the core of the human species.

I began researching Peak Oil, climate change, and economic collapse in 2002, and in 2007, well in advance of the unleashing of an official Transition movement, I came to understand that the ramifications of these were so enormous that they were literally challenging our species to look more incisively than ever before in human history not only at its place in relation to the earth community, but into its very essence. In fact, I realized that these daunting challenges would ultimately confront humans with the fundamental question of what it means to be a human being inhabiting planet earth. It became increasingly clear to me that these challenges were no longer simply challenges of energy, climate, economics, or politics, but that in fact, they were profoundly existential. I came to understand that if we follow the reverberations of them into the farthest reaches of the human psyche we will confront something greater than the human ego and the rational, linear mind. In fact, we will confront the mystery at our core and at the core of the human community at large. Thus, I began viewing the collapse of industrial civilization not as a calamity befalling the human species, but rather as an opportunity for humanity to become a uniquely new species—that as a result of navigating the loss of the way of life as it had known, it would become a species that could never again permit the kind of existence on this planet that industrial civilization has created.

Consequently, in 2009 I published Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse. I actually felt reluctant to publish the book because I assumed it would be ignored at best and reviled at worst. Too depressing, too truthful, too demanding? Much to my surprise, Sacred Demise has been widely read around the world and touted as a book that offers tremendous inspiration and motivation at the same time that it clearly elucidates collapse, transition, and the Great Turning.

So now you may ask, what do I mean by “sacred”? For me, the word simply means “something greater” that is at the core of humanity and the earth community. The mathematical cosmologist, Brian Swimme speaks of conscious self-awareness, that is to say, the universe being conscious of itself through the human species. To grasp the implications of this notion, we need only ask a few simple questions: What would our world be like if human beings understood and lived as if they are the universe being conscious of itself? What would be the implications in energy, environment, economics, health, law, education, human relationships, and relationships between humans and non-humans?

The dictionary offers many definitions of sacred; one of them is set apart. We speak of “sacred time,” “sacred places,” and sometimes ask, “Is nothing sacred?” Perhaps some part of us knows that completely irrespective of religious dogma, there is something in each of us that is “set apart”—-that cannot be touched by and is in fact greater than any of the challenges we face. And therefore, I must disagree with Rob when he states:

For me, if Transition has done one thing well over the past 4 years, it has been the designing of an approach that comes uncluttered by much of the baggage that has encumbered environmental responses over the past 30 years. These responses have often been perceived as being smug, judgmental and against lots of stuff without a very clear idea of what it is for. The Transition idea has spread into businesses, organisations, Councils, the media and so on, as an idea that is simple to understand and accessible to people from all manner of mindsets. Making a central and explicit connection with the ‘Sacred’ would be a sure-fire way to consign Transition back to the left-field, far away from businesses and communities everywhere.

Peter Senge, an American scientist and director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management, one of the world’s noted masters of organizational development utilizes “the sacred” in much of his work with businesses worldwide. Like Rob, he speaks of the “head, heart, and hands” approach to our humanity. In Kosmos Journal Senge writes:

…head, heart, and hands. People have said it in many different ways. Chinese culture has three different traditions: Taoism, which is physically based; Confucianism, which is relational or the social philosophy of the heart; and Buddhism, which is more mentally centered.

We have a tremendous imbalance in our schools with so much emphasis on the pure development of the intellect. Rationalism is the dominant worldview today. The primary example of this is the economic worldview that basically says no person does anything unless self-interest is involved and the benefits exceed the costs. It’s not very enlightened or thrilling, but that’s rational-economic man.

Also we are aware that we are part of nature. We are physical. We live in a body, and that is in a process of continual construction, so we are tied to the unfolding of the universe. Every seven years every cell in the body is replaced. We have a very deep sense of connection to nature. I don’t know of anyone who hasn’t had a profound experience in nature. So that kind of naturalism or physicalism is a critical part of our nature. I also think that learning is nature. The best definition of learning I know is Tom Johnson’s: “Learning is a process of discovering and embodying nature’s patterns.” What is walking? It is discovering and embodying a pattern of mobility that nature makes possible for this particular physiology. Humanism, the third worldview, points to our life as a journey of becoming a human being, which includes but goes beyond the physical and the mental aspects of existence.

I quote Senge as an example of an increasing number of high profile individuals in businesses and organizations who view the sacred as an integral aspect of optimum functioning in their endeavors. Yet another example is the Holacracy model, the motto of which is “liberating the soul of organizations.” Thus to assume that “Making a central and explicit connection with the ‘Sacred’ would be a sure-fire way to consign Transition back to the left-field, far away from businesses and communities everywhere” is probably a very inaccurate assumption. Increasingly, American businesses and organizations are incorporating aspects of “the sacred” in their leadership training models.

Rob tells us that the word “sacred” would be divisive among Christian and Muslim groups and that atheists and agnostics would be alienated. On the contrary, that has not been my experience. In fact, in workshops I have conducted on my book Sacred Demise and in coaching sessions and conversations I have had with individuals who identify as Christian, agnostic, or atheist, I have witnessed in them a profound interest in exploring and experiencing the sacred in nature. Often, this interest leads to a more profound exploration of inner transition—yes, “deep transition.”

Moreover, what I notice in my work with Transition and Transition-related functions is that there is an insatiable hunger at the core of most of the people I encounter for the sacred in relation to the Transition model. They consistently report that their connection with the sacred buoys and inspires them, enhances their resilience, and helps them navigate the losses that seem ubiquitous in the current declining milieu. Most importantly, people report that they have grown weary of charts, graphs, and scientific articles on Peak Oil, climate change, and global economic collapse and while they are looking at these issues head-on and working hard in their Transition initiatives to make their communities resilient, they now crave a deeper sense of meaning and purpose and a rich relationship with the sacred and the entire earth community.

As Rob notes, we are well into the end of the age of oil, and climate change realities are “terrifying.” Converging with these two crises is a global financial catastrophe that shows every indication of worsening. As humans confront the severe consequences of these concurrent crises, which are likely to play out differently in different places, what preparation is the Transition model offering us to navigate the unprecedented emotional and spiritual trauma that is already manifesting in many parts of the world? Suicide and depression rates are dramatically elevated in all parts of the industrialized world. Energy descent action plans, awareness raising, and reskilling—all of the superb logistical strategies that the Transition model provides are necessary for enhancing our physical survival, but they are woefully inadequate for addressing what is likely to be a planetary crisis in meaning among our species. The Transition model has provided a skeleton for this preparation with its heart and soul aspect. Going forward from here, we must now focus on the sacred by adding flesh to these bones, and each initiative will do this differently. In the process, we “reskill” the human interior for the daunting journey of collapse, transition, and Great Turning.

I feel blessed to be part of a heart and soul group that has met regularly here in Boulder, Colorado for over a year. We have evolved and continue to evolve by experimenting with new practices in addition to utilizing a book study as a springboard for our discussions. Among the members of our group, most of whom are deeply involved in other aspects of Transition, the hunger for a safe place to share feelings about collapse and transition is palpable, and in the process of discussion, we are building nurturing, supportive relationships.

According to Rob, Michael asserts that “it is our belief if you’re not spiritually connected to the Earth and understand the spiritual reality of how to live on Earth, it’s likely you will not make it.” He argues that this approach would permanently alienate a massive proportion of the people we’re trying to reach. What must be noted, however, is that it is not Michael who makes this assertion but rather the Native American elder, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, quoted in Michael’s article. In this statement, Westerman succinctly captures the fundamental wisdom of indigenous traditions whose “transition” model kept them thriving for thousands of years. Although indigenous cultures are not utopias and have their own issues to deal with, their lived experience throughout the world has been that disconnection from the sacred in nature has mitigated against survival and has facilitated the creation of the paradigm of industrial civilization.

There can be no Great Turning without the collapse of the endless growth model and a transition from that model to a new paradigm and a new culture. As much as we all wish for a seamless transition, reality dictates that we will not “tiptoe through the tulips” of a Transition movement into resilience and self-sufficiency without great suffering and painful loss. Anyone who pretends otherwise or inserts earplugs upon hearing this statement is greatly deluding him/herself.

Yet this demise of an earth-murdering, soul-murdering paradigm is nothing if not sacred—set apart, unique, and resonant with the core of our humanity and the wisdom of all other species whose human-caused misery may be alleviated as the structures and systems of industrial civilization disintegrate.

Unfortunately, what I hear in Rob’s critical response is a great deal of fear of that which can only be partially defined because it is inherent in a great mystery which demands that we recover from our addiction to Western, Cartesian, rational, linear thinking. While I do not advocate disowning our phenomenal left-brain capacities, they are insufficient and woefully inadequate in the face of the species-transforming upheaval that is profoundly shifting the tectonic plates of the human soul and perhaps the earth itself.

And so it is that another way of putting those letters S-A-C-R-E-D together comes in the form of the word S-C-A-R-E-D. To open ourselves to something greater and something beyond the rational, scientific mind—something that cannot be contained within the bounds of our “civilized” paradigm, is indeed scary. We must have compassion for ourselves when we are afraid to go there, yet we must find the courage to do so. Feeding our addiction to the rational and the optimistic is understandable because of our enculturation. As a result of it, we may fear that if we entertain the deeper meaning of words like “sacred” or “spiritual,” we will become irrational, dogmatic ideologues. Many of us have witnessed the irreparable damage done by organized religions throughout history, and such words may remind us of it.

Additionally, I sense from Rob’s comments a distinct fear of how Transition is going to appear to the rest of the world. While on the one hand this concern is legitimate, it presents a very tricky edge which if not skillfully navigated could lead or perhaps has already led to a kind of old paradigm corporatism. In other words, one can fret so much about how one is perceived that one soon finds oneself in a black hole of constant image management. A personal story may be appropriate.

As stated above, I have been researching what have come to be known as “Transition issues” since 2002. When I first began writing and speaking about them, I was perceived as nothing less than certifiably psychotic. Today, at least 80% of what I forecasted is now our current reality, and I frequently hear from people who want to apologize to me for their derision of the information I shared. Hundreds of other researchers were also addressing these issues at that time and long before—people like Colin Campbell, Mike Ruppert, Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Megan Quinn Bachman, Richard Heinberg, Vicki Robin, to name only a few, and now standing on the threshold of 2011, we have all been transformed from prophets of “doom and gloom” to very accurate historians. We could have chosen instead to obsess about our images and become silent. Certainly some people did choose to do just that because it was too risky to do otherwise, and that was and is everyone’s right. However, I believe that the Transition network should concern itself much less with image and political correctness and emphasize the kind of reskilling and preparation for which people in one’s local place are crying out. If that includes a hunger for “deep Transition,” then so be it. Subsequently, as the consequences of economic collapse, Peak Oil, and climate change intensify, the naysaying masses are likely to be approaching Transition in droves for assistance. This is not to say that image is totally irrelevant, but under the influence of a paradigm which is mostly about image, with very little substance, we must be extremely cautious when establishing our priorities.

Thus, it may be that humanity now finds itself on the edge of a precipice—pushed to that edge by the collapse of the old paradigm, but terrified to either leap or scale the sides of the cliff for fear of losing our intellectual footing. Neither move will be easy because another word comprised of these letters S-A-C-R-E-D, with the addition of one more letter is S-C-A-R-R-E-D—a word that describes all of us who have managed to navigate the wounding of the endless growth, slash, burn, pillage, and plunder paradigm. Yet we must not allow our fear and wounding to preclude a deeper exploration of the sacred.

One aspect of the scarring is either/or thinking which may for example conclude that if people are hungering for “deep Transition” what they were experiencing before was “shallow Transition.” Fully grasping the concept of evolution precludes making such binary judgments. Whether we name it “deep” or “shallow” is irrelevant. What matters is that the course of events in the past three years is now dictating a fresh, new approach that does indeed place inner transition at the core. Is the Transition model sufficiently expansive for this endeavor? Are its creators, caretakers, and collaborators willing to confront their scare and their scars sufficiently so that a discerning exploration of the sacred will enable an evolutionary leap for Transition and the human species?

[Carolyn’s forthcoming book is Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Handbook For Inner Transition, available in January, 2011. Please stay tuned to her website for a specific release date: www.carolynbaker.net.]

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird – equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren,
to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over,
how it is that we live forever.

~ Mary Oliver ~

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?

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?

I disagree and feel adamant about using the term for a number of reasons. In the first place, I am an historian, and as I endeavor to make sense of human history, I notice that monumental changes do not occur in one fell swoop, but over time through a variety of stages. Personally, I am deeply involved in the Transition movement, and I am also strongly aligned philosophically with individuals such as Joanna Macy and David Korten who frequently use the words Great Turning. I could not agree more that in the larger scheme of the unprecedented changes we are navigating, a Great Turning is indeed occurring. However, I believe that it is crucial to hold both the larger picture and the current predicament in our consciousness simultaneously in order to remain effectively present in this moment, as well as in a state of preparation and anticipation for a more redemptive future.

What is more, the Great Turning/Transition is a process, and like all processes, each stage is important. While it is tempting to minimize the stages in favor of our natural human longing for the desirable end result, we may actually jeopardize our appreciation of the destination by refusing to be present with each segment of the journey. The stage in which we happen to find ourselves at this present moment is the collapse of every institution within industrial civilization. I challenge anyone reading these words to give an example of one institution that is not in a state of obvious, irrevocable decline. While in the larger scheme of things, we are in Transition and also experiencing a Great Turning, we are profoundly in the early stages of a shattering unraveling such as our planet has never experienced in human history. That must not be minimized.

In addition, inhabitants of industrial civilization who have not yet understood its consequences seem particularly averse to the word “collapse”. Unlike millions of indigenous and dispossessed peoples throughout the world who have been unconscionably devastated by it, their identities remain invested in the false security that it promises and the hope that the next two or three decades will somehow deliver an extension of what life in present time is like. Therefore, I believe that coming to terms with the reality of myriad, ubiquitous forms of collapse in the first decade of this century is imperative. Long term, a great turning is occurring, and we are in transition, yet we have only to observe the breathtaking changes that have transpired in the past three years to notice an undeniable unraveling of this civilization. A collapse by any other name is nevertheless a collapse.

Within the human psyche reside many themes, including death and rebirth. The two always travel together without exception because both are integral aspects of the human story. Attempt to minimize or eliminate one, and you invariably minimize or distort the other. We all wish to be “in” the later stages of the Great Turning, but we aren’t, period. We are where we are, and where we are is painful, sad, frightening, enraging, uncertain, and yes, dark. Who would not wish to be basking in the light of the journey’s end or near-end? Who would not prefer to look in the rear view mirror (oops, I use an expression from pre-Peak Oil days) and see clearly that we have come through the ordeal, and we are now on the other side of it–free to live out the new paradigm in all of its promise? We can hardly contain our elation as we contemplate that possibility, right?

But we are not in that stage of the journey yet; we have just begun. Our work now is to be present with what is, even as we hold the larger vision in our hearts. To be present means to be willing to look, and the beautiful thing about being present in this moment is that we can utilize all of the qualities of our deliciously imagined future to buoy us in the here and now. In fact, as I emphasize repeatedly in Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse, without savoring and practicing those attributes moment to moment, we cannot endure the future emotionally or spiritually.

Notice I said cannot. I am profoundly frightened for the numbers of people I meet who are highly collapse-aware, but who are doing nothing to prepare emotionally and spiritually. Without that preparation, they are extremely vulnerable to breaking down; with it, they are more likely to break through.

The proper response to death is respect and ritual. Respect literally means “to look again.” When people die, we review their lives and renew our appreciation for their contributions and accomplishments. We create rituals to honor those and to express our gratitude for their presence in our lives. Ritual simply means “to fit together” which is to say, we reconnect the broken, separated pieces and in doing so attempt to find meaning in the experience. Given the Great American Death Phobia, this culture is particularly challenged in its capacity to respect death as a part of life and find meaning in it. I believe this may be the principal reason for resistance to words like collapse or unraveling.

What is most challenging for us to hold in the throes of the magnitude of the current oil spill, in the face of being daily deluged with increasingly frightening information about climate change, witnessing around us the beginning of the obliteration of world financial markets and possibly the end of money as we have known it, witnessing the extinction of species at previously unimaginable rates, finding ourselves surrounded with unrelenting natural disasters-this, all of this IS the Great Turning. And at the same time, in this moment, it also IS the collapse of industrial civilization.

Who would not want to be reveling in rebirth? Yet rebirth does not, cannot occur, without death. In present time we may feel marinated in death as its ubiquitous presence threatens to overwhelm us. It is as if we are being asked to walk through a war zone, witnessing around us the fallen everywhere and not knowing if we ourselves will survive. And we my wonder, why can’t we just get to the other side and as Thomas Paine said, “begin the world all over again”?

It may be that our species, tortured and toxified by industrial civilization as it has been, is incapable of beginning the world all over again without having lived through the ghastly consequences of what unprecedented growth and disconnection from the earth invariably produce. Perhaps we need this death in order to mould, shape, treasure, and protect the new life we ache to create.

In present time, what we can do with the unraveling is honor and respect what everything that is dying has given us. We can creatively construct rituals that erupt out of our hearts and out of the earth, acknowledging what the oceans, the land, the animals, and all other treasures of this beautiful planet have provided. We can thank and bless them, and we can invite our loved ones to join and co-create rituals with us.

Above all, it appears that we are being asked to allow our old way of life to die. Something in us is dying as we walk through the war zone. Something in us is dying with maybe as much as 100,000 gallons of oil being released daily into the Gulf of Mexico, now slithering into the loop current of the Atlantic Ocean. Something in us is dying with all the life that this cataclysm is extinguishing. Perhaps we need that death in us in order to unequivocally grasp in every cell of our bodies that disconnection, endless growth, competition, and entitlement kill everything in the universe. Perhaps humanity requires devastation of this magnitude in order to become a new kind of species-the kind of species that will never again allow such madness to prevail on this planet.

A very old myth written in myriad versions in ancient texts may be instructive in this collapse/transition/Great Turning journey, namely, the story of our old friend Noah who was instructed to build a lifeboat. Storyteller and author Michael Meade, in his latest book The World Behind The World, offers a timely, poetic appreciation of Noah’s mission and ours:

The problem wasn’t that the end of the world had come; rather the issue was how to act when it seemed that way. Secretly, each of us is a Noah sent on a distinct and seemingly foolish errand that can help the world as well as fulfill us….Noah stands for the timeless dreamer in the human soul who knows what to do when the floods of change gather and the sense of dissolution grows. (102, 120)

I do not wish to imply that we cannot experience joy or celebration until the Great Turning is complete. Even in the face of horror, we can have moments of humor, play, and elation. Our vision of a “greatly turned” humanity can sustain and inspire us, producing periods of unprecedented community and conviviality in the here and now. The turning is happening, and the collapsing of a way of life that does not work is a pivotal piece in the process. In fact, accepting the natural process of collapse as the first step in the Great Turning is profoundly liberating and empowering.

As always, the poets say it better than prose, especially the mystical poets who catapult our minds to the depths then propel us back up into clear-eyed, laser awareness. So often when they speak of love, they are not referring to human love or romance, but to the soul and the unbounded freedom our intimacy with it generously offers us. Within the cacophony of civilization’s demise, Rumi whispers:

Inside this new love, die
Your way begins on the other side
Become the sky
Take an axe to the prison wall
Escape
Walk out like someone suddenly
born into colour
Do it now
You’re covered with thick cloud
Slide out the side.
Die, and be quiet
Quietness is the surest sign
that you have died
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence
The speechless full moon comes out now.

Transition, Great Turning, Collapse? The words matter and don’t matter at the same time. It’s all about being fully present where we are while holding the vision of being somewhere incomparably different.

“Surrender” feels like a part of the answer. It invites us beyond the preeminence of the individual ego, as does another of Carolyn’s themes, “service.”

In his engagingly titled essay “Out of Our Ego Houses and into Collective Intelligence,” Andrew MacDonald points us towards a related alternative as we face collapse — one in which the individual re-joins group life in a way that is different from our long-distant tribal origins.

MacDonald notes that we evolved in groups for our survival and benefit:

“Communal life — our tribal past — valued the group over the individual. We left our communal past to put the individual’s benefit (and especially material benefit) before the common good, in the process losing much of our memory of community.”

“In this time of rapidly approaching limits we need the gifts of both community and individuality to deal with what we’re facing…. Both the threat and the solution present themselves to the collective, not just to individuals.”

MacDonald believes there’s a taboo against reacquainting ourselves with the “groupness” in our nature. We defend against losing our individuality. “But when individuated individuals move back consciously into a group they can become aware of a group mind, a collective intelligence.”

He gives us a flavor for what it’s like returning to a tribal mind while retaining our individual awareness: “There’s an impression that ideas or impressions are coming more rapidly and coming out of the group, not just from this or that individual. Things emerge within the one and the many of the group.”

I’m fortunate to have tasted the experience of groupness. For eight years in the late 1970s I lived in a household-sized heart community we called “Journey Inn” (pun intended). Our “group mind” emerged over time in our weekly meetings. Inspired by Findhorn and using communication tools from est and group work, we learned to atune to that group presence/mind in this experiment in shared living, as well the groups, celebrations and vision quest projects we undertook.

We’d sit in our meetings, stopping at times to silently listen and “feel into” a question or idea or stuck feeling. I learned to trust that whatever thing showed up for anyone might contribute to the shared creation — which often didn’t coalesce until everybody showed up with their part (especially the weird or seemingly off-the-wall sentiments).

That “group mind” took on its own identity. What I experienced wasn’t just a collection of our individual egos, but some kind of integration into a shared mind or beingness.

(Side note: It’s so hard to talk about this because our language of inner landscapes is impoverished. Not surprising in an outer-oriented heroic culture).

(Side note: I imagine this development of group mind is happening in many intentional communities around us.)

I’ve also experienced “group mind” in a corporate work setting. For months, three of us brainstormed and designed computer software concepts. We got so engaged in the creative process that the ideas arose fast and furiously. Looking back, no one was quite sure who came up with some particular brilliant insight: it arose from the collective process. It didn’t matter. The process engaging us mattered more than individual egos getting much attention. It was incredibly enlivening, satisfying, and at times astonishing. Nothing new-ageish about it.

(Side note: this process was also in distinct contrast to the prevailing culture around us, where I watched a lot of bright minded egos laying out their pet ideas and defending their turf while analyzing and criticizing others, in the classic competition fostered by our civilization.)

While at Journey Inn I was privileged to live with a dyad who called themselves Paramilana. (When required by the outer world, he was called Param and she Milana.) Their shared single name reflected their functioning as one being. Sure, they disagreed at times, their egos getting honed down as always happens in committed relationships. But sensing how they worked, I felt their dyad was a newly-emerging mode of human “beingness.”

I’m privileged to experience this dyadic unit with my partner Robyn. As a scientist, she is not particularly interested in “woo-woo” stuff she can’t directly experience. But early in our relationship she named those moments when, as a dyad, we experienced a “something”, a presence or knowing that went beyond we two as individuals.

Sometimes we talked of it as a third partner in our relationship. Robyn dubbed it “The Two.” Over the years synchronicities and validations and goose-bump moments affirm to us that “The Two” is still alive and well. It’s often shows up, for example, in our service through Peak Moment TV.

What qualities or aspects do these experiences have in common? They might provide clues for how to cultivate or encourage the “group mind” more broadly.

• None of these groups were constellated around a leader. They go beyond the heroic myth by being expressions of a “We.”
• Purposefulness. Egos in the service of a larger purpose, but not subsumed. (Side note: personal awareness, emotional healing, confidence-building, were actually accelerated and quickened in these group-minds.)
• Commitment. It takes persistence and trust to keep working at it when the personality differences and bumps inevitably hit. At Journey Inn especially, we learned to keep showing up with vulnerability and honesty, even when the ego’s preference was to close off in defense or stage an offense. Over time our trust in each other allowed us to let our ego’s warts be exposed by others, and thus for healing and transformation.
• Valuing feelings and intuitions, not just thoughts. It’s a different approach to quietly listen to “what is emerging among us” and to trust that this weird thought that I pick up on might be an essential element whose value wouldn’t emerge until it was shared with the group. It’s like picking up sensations in the shared group “body.” With my co-journers I learned to feel when there’s aliveness and vitality energizing a group, and when the energy is sluggish or everybody wants to go unconscious — because something has gotten stuck.
• Gender differences. The groups I experienced were predominantly women. The few men involved were able to soften their egos and become equals in the group-being or creative process. Perhaps our difference in subordinating the ego to the group is linked to the different gender expressions under stress: men tend to strike out alone (the hero), while women tend to bond (build cooperative relationships). So far in my experience, it’s somewhat rare to find such men in a culture that promotes male ego dominance. (Side note: there’s that “surrender” Carolyn Baker speaks of.)

(Side note: the dynamics of gender in engendering “group mind” and the contributions of women at this time could fill a whole other essay).

As Carolyn Baker points out in Sacred Demise, civilization is a manifestation of heroic consciousness. I wonder whether its origins might be in a partial disconnection from nature needed for the successful hunter to kill his prey. Also — and more importantly — competition for a mate favors those who are most aggressive in both the human and animal worlds. Over the millennia this disconnected ego-consciousness has expanded to conquering, dominating, exploiting and now destroying the very life force and environment on which all life depends.

Following Einstein’s maxim that “a problem cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created it,” it would appear that the problems of civilization’s destruction of the planet cannot be solved by heroic consciousness — our problem-solving methods are born of disconnection. Like putting huge contraptions in the sky to reflect back the sunlight to cool the planet! No, we can’t get to a post-civilization world using the heroic mind.

In Sacred Demise, Carolyn Baker roots around in heroic culture’s cellar, bringing to light those qualities devalued by civilization, elements we may need to meet collapse. Andrew MacDonald digs just as deeply. Call it surrender, service, group mind, collective intelligence, cooperation. They all point us in another direction, these qualities of rough Shared-Being shuffling towards Bethlehem to be born.

For most individuals who are aware of and preparing for the collapse of industrial civilization, the notion of a convergence of crises in the current milieu—Peak Oil, climate change, economic meltdown, species extinction, and overpopulation, is not new information. They know that never before in recorded history has the human race been confronted with the web of crises it is now facing. What they didn’t anticipate, however, is that when sharing their bursts of enlightenment with spouses, friends, children, or parents they would increasingly be perceived by their loved ones as something akin to psychotic alien life forms. What they had hoped for instead is that their dear ones would be willing to investigate the same topics they had so carefully researched and would join them in preparing to navigate a daunting future.

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
Has struck, down there in the depths,
Against a great thing.

And nothing happens!
Nothing, silence, waves
Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
And are we 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.]

The latest headline, for example, suggests that the Gulf Coast oil spill has appeared to lessen the administration’s enthusiasm for future offshore oil drilling. What was previously deemed as “safe” by the oil industry is now in question. Is it really safe? If it was an accident of nature, then it’s unpredictable and not safe. If it was sabotage, then the very idea this sort of event can be manufactured to make a political statement makes deep water drilling unsafe. The only way it can be made safe is to put in redundant and over-the-top safeguards that can prevent any sort of foreseen and unforeseen incidents in the future, or eliminate off-shore oil drilling completely (yeah, that’s not going to happen anytime soon).

In an interview with a survivor of the oil rig explosion, it is apparent that this was an act of nature. The rig employees were conducting routine testing of the well, and everything was checking out o.k. when suddenly there was a blowback of natural gas that came up so fast and forcefully up the pipe from the well, it blew out the valve and spilled heavier-than-oxygen natural gas all over the platform in a matter of minutes. Something—perhaps even static electricity—ignited the dense gas (odorless and colorless) and set off the first of a series of explosions. Simply put, they hit a pocket of extremely high-pressure gas that their equipment couldn’t safely contain.

The survivor said that the balance of pressure from the rig and well at those depths are tenuous and a very delicate balance. It seems that the balance tipped, and now the entire Gulf region is facing an ecological disaster of unprecedented proportions.

As Mike Ruppert wrote on his blog, “…maybe Mother Earth will have poisoned us with the substance we have so greedily raped her — and killed each other — for… “You want oil?… I’ll give you oil.”

The Blame Game

It’s difficult to fathom such a destructive situation and not want to blame somebody. It’s human nature and it’s a way to direct the anger and despair away from ourselves. Some are blaming the government for not having enough regulation of the oil industry. Some are blaming BP for not putting enough safeguards in place and spending the extra money for additional back-up systems. Some are already blaming the Obama administration for not acting quickly enough, even though the containment of the well has been likened to an Apollo 13 mission a mile underwater. Translation: a near impossible task, given the depth and the fact that the tangled metallic mess of the destroyed rig is laying on top of the well.

There are even those who are forming conspiracy theories. The North Koreans sent a secret torpedo from Cuba. Environmentalists rigged this disaster so that no new oil drilling platforms would be allowed. The government planned this so that they could control us better through more regulation and a nationalization of the oil industry. This sort of thinking is just one more way to deflect the anger and despair we’re feeling inside, but it isn’t productive or helpful.

Why do we want to deflect our anger? Because blaming someone and feeling angry feels much better than feeling despair and bone-deep sadness deep in our heart and soul. Anger is invigorating and allows us to not have to feel responsible or face the truth.

So what is the truth? The truth is that we are all a party to this mess, because we live in a world that is utterly and completely dependent on oil for survival. The oil companies keep drilling wherever they viably can because the public demands cheap energy to run the economy. Unless we face that simple fact, we are doomed to keep repeating these sorts of ecological and economic disasters in the future.

Go Ahead, Feel Your Despair

Unfortunately, blaming others, corporations and political parties for this disaster won’t solve anything or keep this from destroying the lives and livelihoods of millions of animals and humans dependent on the Gulf of Mexico. Unless we all realize our own culpability in this, we won’t make any lasting or significant changes that will prevent this from ever happening again.

We have to embrace the fact that each time we get into a car or gas-powered public transportation, we are contributing to the oil industry. Each time we type on a keyboard, put on a piece of polyester or nylon clothing, eat non-local food, use plastic or any product that was transported by planes, trains, trucks or boats, we are using oil. As long as we continue to subsidize the oil industry with our oil-rich way of life, our environment will always take a back seat to Our Way of Life.

As helpless as you may feel about stopping the oil from infiltrating the ecology of the Gulf and possibly the Atlantic, you probably feel just as helpless about staying away from the very thing that is poisoning our environment. Our very survival is so intricately tied to oil. The helplessness I feel is so deep and profound. When I calm the anger and fear and resentment long enough and listen to what’s really in my heart, what I hear is utter despair for the world and all its inhabitants.

Therefore go ahead, feel your despair. It’s not easy to see something that’s so devastating unfold and know that in your small way, you too had a part in this drama. Denying your feelings or trying to stuff them down or deflect them away through blame and shame isn’t going to solve anything. It’ll just create more fodder for the mainstream media, more bickering and debate and then endless gridlock over details that are meaningless and counter-productive in the long run.

Now Do Something

Once you can admit to all your feelings and actually feel them, there is something you can do to actually make a difference for the future.

Besides directly participating in the efforts of the clean up through such organizations as the Nature Conservancy, or donating money to similar organizations, there are things you can do to lessen how much oil you use in your life:

• Bike or walk instead of driving if at all possible, to work, the grocery, to visit friends, to run errands.
• Buy local, organic produce instead of produce shipped from another state or country.
• Join a CSA or participate in a community garden to grow some of your own food. Locally grown, organic food takes a fraction of the oil to produce and transport conventionally-grown, imported food.
• Grow your own garden.
• Choose natural fibers like cotton, linen and wool instead of polyester or nylon, or better yet, buy your clothing from a thrift store whenever possible.
• Consider used before new, consider if you really need something before you buy it, especially if it’s not local and made from plastic.
• Be an advocate for more public transportation, especially the kind that runs more on an electricity grid fueled by renewable resources like wind.
• Write a letter to your government officials demanding more creative ideas, funding and projects related to renewable, safer energy sources.
• Invest in your local community by banking local, supporting your local community garden, shopping at independently-owned stores instead of big box retailers, and, if it’s in your means, be a venture capitalist to companies that have innovative solutions for sustainability.

The public sentiment I’ve observed online in the last few days tells me that people want to be less dependent on oil for energy, but they realize that it’s not an easy transition to make. Making small changes, combined with a mindful awareness of the paradigm that’s contributing to the pollution of our planet is the minimum we should all be doing. It all starts with examining our hearts and allowing ourselves to feel whatever we’re feeling, so that we can make thoughtful, intelligent choices about the future of our planet.

“I think everybody knows deep down in their bones that changes are ahead, and that we are at the end of the world as we have known it,” said Carolyn Baker, Ph.D. “There’s going to be tremendous emotional turbulence as things unravel. People are going to have to cope with their feelings and be anchored to some kind of sense of principle or meaningfulness.”

Starting April 24, Baker will lead a four-week distance-learning course titled “Navigating the Coming Chaos of Unprecedented Transitions.”  The Boulder, Colo.-based psychotherapist is the author of “Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse” (2009), which is the textbook for this course offered by PostPeakLiving.com.

The premise of Baker’s book and online course is that a global energy crisis is very near. The world’s oil supply is already at peak production now. As we pass the “peak oil” point, soaring energy costs will disrupt everything from the economy to the food supply, and will make paying down the world’s debt impossible.

“We need to prepare for the daunting changes ahead in our future,” Baker said. “This course and my book are about preparing for the inner transition for life after the peak.”

Books like James Howard Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency” (2005) and television shows like National Geographic’s “Aftermath: World Without Oil” (airing March 8 & 11)  are introducing the concept of peak oil to large audiences.  The new Transition Town social movement is supporting communities throughout the country to re-make their local economies as they prepare for a world of expensive and likely scarce oil.

The most emphatic among the peak oil proponents are often called “doomers” by their critics and fans alike.

But getting ready for a post-peak oil world isn’t all doom-and-gloom, said André Angelantoni, founder of PostPeakLiving.com.  Baker’s upcoming course is just one of many offered by the California-based online, distance-learning school. Other courses include: “Sustainable Post-Peak Livelihoods,” “Introduction to Sustainable Gardening,” “Chickens 101″ and the “UnCrash Course,” the company’s six-week intensive preparation course.

“Our course instructors dedicate a lot of time to showing people the opportunities they have to redesign their lives after oil,” Angelantoni said. “The sooner we acknowledge that the days of cheap oil are numbered, the sooner we can start making realistic plans for the next phase in human history.”

All PostPeakLiving.com courses are available to anyone with access to the Internet. Baker’s course will begin on April 24 and consists of four three-hour sessions on consecutive Saturdays.  Students call into a central phone line where they can hear the instructor and each other. They follow along with an online PowerPoint presentation and complete homework between sessions.

“When most people first learn about peak oil, they get depressed,” Baker said.  “But it’s worse when they are so terrified of this impending change that they don’t even want to hear about it. But there are ways to stay out of paralysis and in action when we are rooted in a larger meaning for our life.”

For information, visit Post Peak Living.

Summary: The latest climate research suggests that we are much closer to global ecological (and perhaps biological) collapse than previously thought. These alarming findings, coupled with the inevitable (and likely imminent) resource-depletion-based economic collapse, suggest that a much greater urgency is needed in transitioning to post-carbon living arrangements. So let’s do it. With a smile.