Shifting the Focus Away from Oil

Here’s the latest installment of the C+C News. There’s an article in the Wall Street Journal called If $4 Gas Is Bad, Just Wait. The gist of it is that, in the US, gas has gone up and over $4.00 a gallon. Prices in Japan are averaging over $5.00 a gallon and as the graphic from the article suggests, prices are going to continue to rise with Goldman Sachs predicting an upper limit of somewhere around $200 a barrel.

I don’t think we should “just wait.” Wait for what? For things to get so bad that travel becomes simply untenable? C’mon we are smarter and more capable than that. These rising oil prices are a glimpse of a future (and the reality of our present) in which petroleum powered travel and petrochemical manufacturing become non-sustainable. There’s nothing evil or malicious at work here. Oil and oil production are not inherently bad. I’m not suggesting some Luddite shunning of technology either. We are simply entering into a period of transition away from a century of fossil fuel dominated industry and development. Let’s acknowledge it, get over and get on with it.

Just waiting, now, would be about the worst thing we could do. We are being presented with an opportunity to expand our individual and collective capacities to engage the world. We, now, have the opportunity to radically re-imagine and re-create commerce, communities and lifestyles in ways that support our mutual, inextricably inter-related short and long term futures. Forget oil, forget the new “war” on global warming. Let’s stop trying to fix what’s irretrievably broken and shift our attention awareness, intention and attention to a more eco-systemically coherent, resonant and sustainable way of living, working and playing together. Imagine a future where oil dependency and carbon emissions are no longer a concern. Let’s plan and design that. 

Let’s recognize “now” for what it is. It is a gift, the opportunity to change change and respond with a proactive vision of a future we want versus the future we will get if we “just wait.”
 

Tags: climate change, gas prices, global warming, peak oil, sustainability

What this is about

Some say we are special people living in a special time. A number of powerful, seemingly uncontrollable dynamics like peak oil and global climate change seem poised to wreak havoc on a grand scale. Ecologically, geopolitically, at work, at home many of us have never felt so at risk, so exposed to the potential for chaos and complexity to overwhelm our lives. 

What can we do? We can open ourselves to the change at hand, to that which is emerging. We can strive to engage our selves, others and the eco-systems into which we interwoven as fully as possible. In that engagement there is opportunity, in opportunity hope and potential to influence the chaotic and complex, to change change. 

That which is emerging is, in a sense, that which has always been there. It is change. Change wrought by the beauty and infinity of open, living systems at play. The world is not in danger–we are. The silk cocoons of security we have woven for ourselves individually, communally, globally are fraying. The order we have dreamt into existence is deteriorating. Things change. Earth will continue to spin, life will go on–with or without us.

Yet here we are. Things are changing. Things are complex. Chaos is doing her dance of destruction and birth. What do we need to face this change? We need the capacity to engage and face all that we are as open living human systems intertwined with and contained by other open living systems in the dance of life. We need the capacity to pace, we need the capacity to lead and, maybe, change from a waltz to a rhumba. We need the capacity to be flexible, agile and centered, grounded, compassionate, firm and aware as that which we are emerging, does its thing.

That’s what this is about. Any questions?

Tags: capacity, climate change, peak oil