[Peakoil] Meetup agenda - the vision thing

[Alex P]

Hi folks,

This email focusses on the vision thing, ie what are we about.

In the last email I basically came to the conclusion that what we are 
ultimately dealing with is The Limits to Growth.

So what do the authors of the series of books of this name suggest 
activists do?
At the end of the 30 year update to the original Limits To Growth they 
suggest we aim for The Sustainable Society. the Sustainability Economy ( 
ie Societey )is sumarised neatly as:

* Its rates of use of renewable resources do not exceed their rates of 
regeneration.

* Its rates of use of nonrenewable resources do not exceed the rate at 
which sustainable renewable substitutes are developed.

* Its rates of pollution emission do not exceed the assimilative capacity 
of the environment.

These are known as Herman Daly's three conditions. You will notice that 
Peak Oil shows violation of condition 2, and climate change a violation of 
condition 3. 

The authors then say there are a number of ways of achieving this:

Visioning
Decide what society you *really* want. Similarly, we need to decide what 
organisation we want, to achieve this society.

Networking
This is what we are already doing, we just need to do much more of it.

Truth-telling
This is hard, and I think its where a lot of activist organisations really 
fail. Unpopular messages like Growth is Limited ( but development per se 
is not limited ) are almost heresy these days, but there's no getting 
around it.

Learning
This means be open to learning so we can find the best way through. We may 
go down blind alleys and we can't hope to have all the answers.

Loving
The authors acknowledge this is the squishy bit, but the best way through 
is to love your fellow human beings and not act with antipathy toward them.


So while the group doesn't need to explicitly rename itself as the "Limits 
to Growth ACT group", I think Peak Oil is just part of this bigger 
picture. The good news is Peak Oil is a Learning Opporunity in pre-empting 
The Limits to Growth.

If everything we hoped for out of this group happened, would we just be 
transfering the problem into the realm of climate change, or soil erosion 
etc? Would we solve problems, or just shift them around?

So at the next meetup, we try to decide what we envision the society we 
want, what the organisation is in 5 to 10 years, and then the 
implementation in broad terms, using visioning, networking etc...



Alex

Canberra Oil Awareness Meetup
http://oilawareness.meetup.com/12/

ACT Peak Oil discussion list
http://www.act-peakoil.org