· This came to mind at sunrise (in Auckland NZ) when looking out the window towards the as-yet-unlit west and noticing that the wilding peach tree just out the window was dead in its oldest half. All of us here are sensitive to living things and enjoy the great vitality of plant and animal life year-round here in New Zealand.

· So when a tree we’ve lived with most of our lives (in the case of our 30yo daughter) starts dying, we feel some sorrow.

· But this growing-season (September through to May) has held a broadening of experience for my wife and daughter: their two 2-metre-by-1-metre garden plots (6.6ft-by-3.3ft) have been wonderful (literally; we stand in awe and wonder), an eye-opener to them, showing how living things here produce, produce more, produce more still!

· So the death of the first half of our just-out-the-window peach tree, which never produced much until last year (after we cut down the old macrocarpa shading it and this house), has become a smaller sorrow, hardly a ripple in fact, because those two decided to take the risk of making a change they wanted: starting gardening, producing vegetables (and companion-planted flowers).

· IMO the biggest problem most people in the OECD face, the richer two thirds particularly, is that they have only experienced the artificially created life of the last forty-to-fifty years (one of the 90 percent Reduction list members described it well), so radical change, reduction, must affect almost all of what they know. 40-50 years is a small span really, in comparison with 90-year lifetimes; we older people see the apparently-”radical change” in its geographical and time context.

-So the young and middle-aged people I’ve just described need to take charge of their own lives and create the change they would like to see happen in their lives; then the forced-change will be only part of the picture, part of what they are involved in, so they should be more able to handle it; they’ll be more resilient.

David MacClement
– Re-Posts, in Germany: http://mitglied.lycos.de/davd/R/index.html#top
http://au.geocities.com/davdnz/ David’s location: http://snipurl.com/1m27a
earth our home: http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200710/r194556_737903.jpg

Then consumerism was created as a way of enabling the few rich (people and corporations) to produce and sell lots more, as a means of getting richer still. Greed was made acceptable (by the advertisers and showing the conspicuous consumption of the rich), whereas before it was widely frowned-upon.

This culture-change, an intentional creation, is the underlying cause of the unwillingness of most people in the OECD (the rich nations club) to seriously consider living modest lives with the sorts of expectations their grandparents in 1950 had.
— A corresponding intentionally-created culture-change is needed now, returning to the way the richer half of the world thought in the 1940s, if the catastrophe facing all living things is to be ameliorated and the transition to our future world is to be made smoothly (with only a few “natural disasters” and no more than two feet of sea-level rise).

I say: “the way the richer half of the world thought in the 1940s”, not: the way we lived in the late 1940s. We have made great progress since then, and will not need to discard the new developments and high efficiencies (e.g. in electricity use) we have now. In fact these efficiencies are the main reason our three-times-the-1950-population can have much hope of making a smooth transition to the post-carbon future world. Dropping the average consumption in the OECD by 80% to 90% is the much more urgent half of the whole Big Picture; the other is enabling people to get together and bring up half the number of children as the adults: for example, six people bringing up three children together (as an “extended family”, classic in much of the world) — two of these adults could decide to have no children, two more could have a single child, and the last couple could have two children, but all six adults act as parents-uncles-aunts to the three children.

To me this is eminently do-able; after all, I grew up with the kind of world-view I am advocating. I believe the 2.5 billion of us in the world in 1950 could have easily guided ourselves into a sustainable future from that point, if the greedy rich and TV had been kept under the sort of restraint (e.g. being partly-admired, partly sneered-at) they were under when I was born (in the Great Depression).

The hoped-for smooth transition to the post-carbon future world will only be smooth overall; the individual and family will likely find that it is three steps forward and two steps back, with _many_ mistakes. However, “our great and glorious leaders” are quite irrelevant since they are beholden to the rich and the world of the last 25-to-50 years. Why would humans pay more attention to dinosaurs beyond keeping out of their lumbering way?

Right now there are communities moving towards a near-sustainable future; these and the people in them are a good guide, together with people older than 60 who grew up in near-sustainable places like the British Commonwealth, the rural towns and century-old suburbs in bigger cities, in the USA. People need to live in small groups again; nuclear families in big single-houses in distant suburbs will not be sustainable into the future. So more-compact living (several families or small groups in one building), rather like 48th and 49th Streets in Manhattan with Turtle Bay Gardens in their “backs” (between those brownstones), will be much more likely in the future. In general, the more traditional parts of Europe right now give a fair guide to what we want to work towards, and the corresponding parts of Canada, New Zealand and Japan aren’t too far from sustainable, even now.
— My letters on Visualising the future, in year-2000 & 2002:
http://www.geocities.com/davdd.geo/visualising-2.html
{I’ve been living sustainably for over 15 years; see my main webpage:
http://www.geocities.com/davd.geo/index.html }.