The Inflection/Disruption Consumption
One thing I don't like about the time change is getting up while night is still with us.
One thing I do like, however, is watching the Sun emerge behind a stand of trees at this moment.
Contradiction? You bet.
Wanna watch me turn this into a metaphor?
It will either be really lame or totally awesome...take your pick. No middle ground.
When crisis appears to be looming in the future, "waking up" to it early, before others do, means that one will feel surrounded by utter darkness. It's coming - there's no hope. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
But this awakening also gives one the privilege of seeing the opportunity hidden behind the crisis, of perceiving how a new dawn could be possible.
Commence the rolling of the eyes!
I wouldn't be so bold to claim any real prescience. Environmentalists, climate scientists, Catholic economists and social thinkers, and neo-agrarians have sounded alarm bells for years. Nature and economy are interconnected and we manhandle both in consequential, unsustainable malpractice. I think I'm only "early" in the sense that the large majority of Americans still believe we can get back to "business as usual" in a year or so, climate change is a relatively low priority that we can push to the back burner for now, and we can go on living pretty much the way we supposedly "always" have. And I'm "early" because of a steady stream of braver and more thoughtful voices than my timid, wavering self.
The Australian environmental business adviser Paul Gilding calls it The Great Disruption. Thomas Friedman has just written an op-ed in the New York Times calling it The (near?) Inflection. Physicist Joe Romm at climateprogress.org calls it a global Ponzi scheme. Maybe we could go back to the old use of the word "consumption" for tuberculosis, because our situation looks something TB did - the body eating itself up.
All three express what I would say is my own guarded optimism. I think our future will be better, although our scales of measurement may look different. And there will probably be plenty of rough turns on the road in the near future.
One thing I do like, however, is watching the Sun emerge behind a stand of trees at this moment.
Contradiction? You bet.
Wanna watch me turn this into a metaphor?
It will either be really lame or totally awesome...take your pick. No middle ground.
When crisis appears to be looming in the future, "waking up" to it early, before others do, means that one will feel surrounded by utter darkness. It's coming - there's no hope. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
But this awakening also gives one the privilege of seeing the opportunity hidden behind the crisis, of perceiving how a new dawn could be possible.
Commence the rolling of the eyes!
I wouldn't be so bold to claim any real prescience. Environmentalists, climate scientists, Catholic economists and social thinkers, and neo-agrarians have sounded alarm bells for years. Nature and economy are interconnected and we manhandle both in consequential, unsustainable malpractice. I think I'm only "early" in the sense that the large majority of Americans still believe we can get back to "business as usual" in a year or so, climate change is a relatively low priority that we can push to the back burner for now, and we can go on living pretty much the way we supposedly "always" have. And I'm "early" because of a steady stream of braver and more thoughtful voices than my timid, wavering self.
The Australian environmental business adviser Paul Gilding calls it The Great Disruption. Thomas Friedman has just written an op-ed in the New York Times calling it The (near?) Inflection. Physicist Joe Romm at climateprogress.org calls it a global Ponzi scheme. Maybe we could go back to the old use of the word "consumption" for tuberculosis, because our situation looks something TB did - the body eating itself up.
All three express what I would say is my own guarded optimism. I think our future will be better, although our scales of measurement may look different. And there will probably be plenty of rough turns on the road in the near future.
Labels: Agrariana, Discipleship
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