The Great Dreary.

 

I've been listening to this book on CD since April. Glory hallelujah I'm done! It's an excellent book, especially for readers who have a high tolerance for wallowing in misery. I'm apparently drawn to depressing books, especially in nonfiction. I have a special love of disasters. Of this I am not proud. And I recognize that it's not good for my mental health but I can't stop myself.

This book needs no description: the subtitle says it all. Although I think I would insert the word "suffering" somewhere in that subtitle: I came away with a very, very full picture of just how awful the aftermath of that storm was for the residents. And the saddest part is that it will happen again.

And while I'm discussing my sick obsession with disasters, here are some observations from an oceanographer who was on the Diane Rehm radio show yesterday. The discussion was all that plastic that's out there in our oceans. (Diane is no slouch in the disaster area herself.)

According to Charles Moore:

You know, we're driven by an economic paradigm that requires us to be wasteful. We produce waste in order to drive the economic system. But there's a wide range of possible scenarios in which attractive economic, social and environmental outcomes are possible without relying on economic growth. We need a steady state economy. We need -- all these ideas about recycling, that's really about a steady state economy, where you take back as much as you produce. And in order to do that, we need a change in the economic paradigm. And the 11th commandment can't be thou shalt grow the economy, but that's the only way a politician can get elected.

I feel that we're being driven into a barbaric situation by this push to constantly grow the economy. We've got to reign in the productive monster. You can't have unlimited growth on finite resources. It just defies logic. And that is a radical change that would deal with the climate crisis as well as the plastic pollution crisis. But we need radicals. Radicals drive change, and that's why I'm an activist.

I'm not an activist or a radical. I'm just a doomsayer. But I do recycle and I no longer buy shampoo so that's something.

My environment versus THE environment. Sucked into the maw of the Dark Mountain Project.

My environment is good. Early crocuses, hellebores, and snowdrops are all abloom. (I included the picture at the bottom just to show the color of my dining room walls.)

For the last few years I've really wanted to understand a little bit of the science of global weirding, energy sources, and all that kind of thing. So I've been reading lots of books and articles. I still don't feel like I really understand anything yet, or that I can support any decisions about anything yet -- like the Keystone oil pipeline.

Last week I read this article -- "Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist" -- in a magazine, new to me, called Orion. I read all 200+ comments too, and they were almost as interesting as the article itself. For now, I'm totally smitten with what the author Paul Kingsnorth says, and maybe I'll also be smitten with his project called Dark Mountain. I've just started reading about it; it's a lot to take in. Here's a summary:

From this interview with Paul Kingsnorth:
Dark Mountain is not about ‘giving up’ or wallowing in doom or anything like that. Some people think it is, but they’re the ones who haven’t been paying attention. Dark Mountain is a process. First you give up on the unrealistic ambitions of both the mainstream growth narrative and the mainstream green narrative – creating a “sustainable” consumer democracy for nine billion people, stopping climate change, making capitalism nice and all the rest of the utopian stuff. You give up on that and then you can move on. You embrace what we might call radical honesty, and you look at what is possible and what’s not, and you see your true place in the world and in history…We call this the “hope beyond hope.” First you get real. Then you give up. Then you are re-inspired.’