Transition Voice is running the piece below by Nicole Foss to promote her upcoming speaking tour of the eastern United States with green entrepreneur Laurence Boomert on topics that we believe are urgent and important. — Ed.
We are approaching many limits to growth over the next several decades, and are consequently facing many challenges in our immediate future.
Finance, energy, environment, resources and climate will all impact on the single-minded, one-dimensional trajectory human society has been taking in our era of growth imperative. Our current path is unsustainable. It cannot and will not continue, so we must adapt our societies in order to build a new future.
The first challenge is being presented by the ongoing global financial crisis, which is far closer to its beginning than it end. Recent events in Europe, particularly in Cyprus, represent a major wake up call that financial crisis is about to resume in earnest. We must therefore anticipate and navigate a period of rapid contraction, while also planning to restructure our societies from the bottom up, so that our recovery can rest on a solid foundation.
That foundation requires the resurgence of resilient communities and the development of true human capacity.
I will paint an comprehensive picture of where we stand today globally, how our human operating system functions, how and why it is acutely vulnerable, and what we must do about the predicament in which we find ourselves. The focus will be primarily financial and social, reflecting the priority of impacts likely to be felt in the relatively short term.
I will conduct a world tour, using different countries as illustrations of different points in a cycle of economic and societal expansion and contraction. I will highlight the critical factors for change and outline the possibilities that exist within the scope of the emerging reality.
Laurence will explain how our current crisis reflects an unprecedented opportunity to create a better future. We are presented with the most expansive cultural possibilities in human history, and the power to deliver positive change rests with an increasingly empowered global grass roots. Laurence will present a wide range of working examples of how neighborhoods and wider communities have woken up to their power to create a smarter, kinder world, using a myriad of both sophisticated and simple social innovations, along with super networked, yet decentralized, systems for meeting human need.
Humanity stands on the edge of a precipice, and where we go from here is in our own hands. Laurence and I believe that there is both considerable danger and tremendous potential to address a challenging situation constructively. We are the first generation with the ability to learn and apply the lessons of history. This is an unprecedented opportunity we simply cannot afford to waste.
About Nicole Foss
Nicole Foss is Senior Editor of The Automatic Earth, where she also used to write under the name Stoneleigh. She and co-author and Editor-in-Chief Raúl Ilargi Meijer have been chronicling and interpreting the on-going credit crunch as the most pressing aspect of our current multifaceted predicament. The site integrates finance, energy, environment, psychology, population and Realpolitik in order to explain why we find ourselves in a state of crisis and what we can do about it.
Nicole is also an international speaker on energy and global finance. She has lectured in hundreds of locations across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and has made numerous media appearances in a variety of countries.
About Laurence Boomert
Laurence Boomert has a long history in contingency planning, green business development and community up solutions. In the 1990s he founded the 500 member Environmental Business Network, He currently runs the Bank of Real Solutions, an online database of community can-do success stories. He was a co publisher and writer for the book Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse published in 2011 by Living Economies with whom he is a board member. Along the way he has done everything from being an organic farmer to a television presenter (on Maggie’s Garden Show) to founding a new political party. He serves on a variety of national and local trusts dedicated to sustainable living.
Nicole and Laurence are now finalizing their plans for their tour of the eastern U.S. Anyone who’s interested in hosting them can email stoneleightravels@gmail.com.
— Nicole Foss, Transition Voice
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