Personal, Family, & Community Sustainability

Understanding the Challenge and the Options for an Effective Response

Although "green" tips for living sustainability abound, there are few resources that provide a deep, comprehensive, integrative, and transformational understanding of the challenge and the options for an effective response--resiliency and Plan B. Chris Martenson, Lester Brown, Daniel Lerch, and Richard Heighberg are four people who have produced some of the seminal resources.

Chris Martenson and the Crash Course

In 2003, Chris Martenson took the sustainability challenge to heart. He embraced sustainability personally, quit his fortune 300 company job in finance and strategy and created an outstanding resource for understanding the challenge and smart ways to respond.

His "primary goal is to position you for a positive tomorrow by taking appropriate action today. I built this site to help you stay informed, protect wealth, build resilience into your life and community, and connect with other concerned citizens. Hope to see you back here often."

Based on extensive research, he produced The Crash Course in a few different mediums, and dedicated his life to the mission of preparing himself and others.  He says, "The Crash Course is the world's most concise video seminar on how our economy, energy systems, and environment interact, and how they will impact the future."

This is not about dropping out but dropping in, understanding the risks of our/your current life in a post-peak-everything world and the actions you can take to expand the resiliency of your life and that of your family and your community.

Time is of the essence because many of these risks will begin to become more evident soon, within our lifetimes and that of our children. As Chris says, "the next 20 years will look very different from the last 20 years.

Although many take comfort in the invisibility of the risks intrinsic to modern society, that is part of the problem. "The (rude) awakening [of our day] is that the very fabric of modern ife is woven from illusion. The one master illusion is the notion that somehow what we see around us today is normal. . . . " By definition it is, and why should it not continue?" The answer lies in peak oil, both literally and metaphorically. The foundation of modern life is cheap oil. Rising oil costs undermine the prosperity of  the modern economy. The heart of modern life is an economy dependent on free natural resources and ecosystem services that are not replenished and being used up. Thus, the nonreplacable inputs to our modern life and prosperity are being drawn down and the natural capital infrastructure is being liquidated with every increase in GNP. There is no future in this and the next 20+ years will see accelerating changes.

Chris Martenson's crash course and web site are a rich resource to use in beginning a response. http://www.chrismartenson.com/

A Peak Oil, Peak Everything, and Post-Carbon World -- the Driver of Fundamental Pattern Change?

Richard Heinberg does a great job of illuminating the illusion in his book, Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines.

The environmental primer for the 21st century is a new book, The Post-Carbon Reader--Managing the 21st Century's Sustainability Crises, edited by Richard Heighberg and Daniel Lerch (Post Carbon Institute).

Plan B for a World on the Edge!

Finally, Lester Brown's primer's from his Earth Policy Institute are two other essential resources for understanding the challenge and the options for an effective response:

Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. Brown argues that food may be the issue that convinces the world of the need to cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020. Every major environmental trend from climate change to deforestation and water scarcity affect food supplies. In this completely revised edition, Brown focuses on details of the plan and how it is already emerging in the energy economy.

World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse.  We are facing issues of near-overwhelming complexity and unprecedented urgency. Our challenge is to think globally and develop policies to counteract environmental decline and economic collapse. The question is: Can we change direction before we go over the edge? The answer of course is YES, if we act now, together, and the cost will be about $160B per year, or 15 percent of the world's $1T per year defense expenditures.