Member-only story
The World Is On Fire
Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed toward material, scientific, and technical subjects and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at math; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage. — Alain de Botton
*
“The world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.” — Sandra Cisneros
If we aren’t helping to put the fire out, what the hell are we doing that is more important?
*
I believe, while we may see many natural and social catastrophes over the next decades, that we can avoid worst outcomes and grow as socially just, nature cherishing people, communities and societies:
The Alternative: Caring about the Earth
Another way to avert collapse, the authors contend, is fundamental civilizational transformation….
In the absence of rapidly building a Dyson Sphere, the physicists suggest that to escape our collapse trajectory “we may have to redefine a different model of society……