Assino (e recomendo!) o The Ecologist. É uma das minhas formas de me lembrar que há coisas bem mais importantes do que as urgências entre as quais saltito de dia para dia.
No número de Fevereiro li uma revisão do livro de Richard Heinberg, "Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Decline in Earth's Resources" e fui à Amazon comprá-lo.
Sim, eu sei, tenho que arranjar uma livraria mais verde! Mas esta tem coisas boas, e uma delas são as sugestões que fazem de outros livros nos quais nós podemos estar interessados. E acertam muita vez.
Como agora: sugeriram-me "World Made by Hand", de James H. Kunstler. Não o comprei (ainda?), mas desde a minha descoberta de Robert A. Heinlein que sei a importância dos ficcionistas com uma mensagem: iluminam-nos o labirinto das possibilidades. E a mensagem do que o petróleo significa no nosso modelo de sociedade, junta com a reflexão sobre o que acontecerá quando ele acabar é, literalmente, de importância vital.
Deixo aqui um excerto de um discurso de Kunstler, na Petrocollapse Conference de 2005:
"We face a series of ramifying, self-reinforcing, terrifying breaks from business-as-usual, and we are not prepared. We are not talking about it in the traditional forums - only in the wilderness of the internet.
Mostly we face a crisis of clear thinking which will lead to further crises of authority and legitimacy - of who can be trusted to hold this project of civilization together.
Americans were once a brave and forward-looking people, willing to face the facts, willing to work hard, to acknowledge the common good and contribute to it, willing to make difficult choices. We've become a nation of overfed clowns and crybabies, afraid of the truth, indifferent to the common good, hardly even a common culture, selfish, belligerent, narcissistic whiners seeking every means possible to live outside a reality-based community.
These are the consequences of a value system that puts comfort, convenience, and leisure above all other considerations. These are not enough to hold a civilization together. We've signed off on all other values since the end of World War Two. Our great victory over manifest evil half a century ago was such a triumph that we have effectively - and incrementally - excused ourselves from all other duties, obligations and responsibilities.
Which is exactly why we have come to refer to ourselves as consumers. That's what we call ourselves on TV, in the newspapers, in the legislatures. Consumers. What a degrading label for people who used to be citizens.
Consumers have no duties, obligations, or responsibilities to anything besides their own desire to eat more Cheez Doodles and drink more beer. (...)
At the bottom of the Peak Oil issue is the fear that we're not going to make it.
The Long Emergency looming before us is going to produce a lot of losers. Economic losers. People who will lose jobs, vocations, incomes, possessions, assets - and never get them back. Social losers. People who will lose position, power, advantage. And just plain losers, people who will lose their health and their lives.
There are no magic remedies for what we face, but there are intelligent responses that we can marshal individually and collectively. We will have to do what circumstances require of us.
We are faced with the necessity to downscale, re-scale, right-size, and reorganize all the fundamental activities of daily life: the way we grow food; the way we conduct everyday commerce and the manufacture of things that we need; the way we school our children; the size, shape, and scale of our towns and cities."
