It's been a bumpy ride and what's a little store to do against the noxious spread of corporations in to every corner. Well, we'll be what we're meant to be. Underground but tasty for those with a mind to take a little look.
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Saturday, 14 December 2013
Tuesday, 30 April 2013
Wednesday, 24 April 2013
Friday, 1 March 2013
Oil Shock
Surprised, the
beach met the slick,
Quickly it leached
and was sick
Agonized the ritual
became,
Blacker than the
slow spreading stain,
A tower tall, a
symbol,
Want meets want you
understand the angle
Soon all our
islands will be ocean
A unity to replace
isolation
Incision, the skin
of the woods,
A hemorrhage of
profitable blooms.
Those rivers run
with crude in their veins
Over run with a
fast flowing shame.
A fraying flag, a
symbol,
Need leads need you
understand the angle
The land gifted
from the ocean
You look for
patterns and only feel separation
The explosion, the
body is ripped,
A confusion calls
the core of the breach
Yet willingly the
torrents unfold
Answering fast to
the challenge imposed.
A might profit, a
symbol,
Like finds like and
will circle around to find you,
No blood promise stain to hold you
The rupture, the
gape of the mouth,
A grizzly jaw sucks
deep from the spout,
Machinery for the
mineral dance
A choreographed
breed and advance.
A highway long, a
symbol
Coast to coast the
greedy engines rumble
Encroaching web,
industrialization
Corrosion, the
bubbling of rocks,
A gaping yawn of
fracturing blocks
Cast aside, the
kingdom became
Toxified for a
paper exchange.
An exiled mother, a
symbol
A clearing in the
woods the fractured kingdom crumbles
Boom follows bust
as oily claws tears the dust
Consumer, the shock
of the mouth
A yawning hole
below an insatiable snout
Gulping quick from
the emptying trough
Picking clean from
the fields to the shops.
The latest trend, a
symbol
The fallacy of
wealth, the junk that gets you tangled.
The land uttered
slowly bound and strangled
Delusion and the
grandeur of growth
Oily spills paid
from the sea where they float,
Monetize for the
profit today
Swallowed whole
from the table we’ve laid
A company logo, a
sigil
Branded approval,
you understand the angle
It’s all about you
and the want that you’re tangled.
Dan O’Neill © 2013
Wednesday, 27 February 2013
Interview with John Michael Greer
John
Michael Greer is prolific author, independent scholar, historian of ideas,
cultural critic, Druid leader, environmentalist/conservationist, blogger, novelist,
and occultist/esotericist.
BB
recently discussed with him the issues surrounding his latest work:
BB Thanks
for taking the time to talk to Beetroot today; we're very enthusiastic about
your work - particularly the weekly Archdruid Report.
JMG Thank
you!
BB You've
written much on the apparent decline of industrial society and provided many examples
that illustrate the shocking point that this process is now underway. Could you
summarize one or two of the ones you deem undeniable?
JMG Well,
"undeniable" is hardly the right word, as denial is one of the few growth
industries the industrial world has left. The ongoing frenzy in the US media,
insisting that the trickle of petroleum coming out of shale deposits marks the
beginning of a new age of US energy independence, is a case in point. Still, it
bears remembering that ten years ago, predictions
that the price of
crude oil would rise about US$100 a barrel and stay there, landing most of the
world's industrial nations in permanent economic crisis, were widely disparaged
in the media as ridiculous.
BB In Not
The Future We Ordered: Peak Oil, Psychology, and The Myth of Progress, you
discuss our current paradigm as one underpinned by an unwavering belief in
progress. Could you talk a little about how we express that on a societal
scale?
JMG Literally
every plan for the future made in industrial societies, from the smallest to
the largest scale, presupposes growth. Pension funds assume that economic
growth will allow their assets to make money; local and national governments
plan for new housing, new roads, and increased population; business assumes
that a year-over-year increase in gross income and profits is normal -- well, I
could go on for pages. Nobody, anywhere, is making plans for a future of
long-term contraction, and yet as fossil fuels slide down their depletion
curves, long-term contraction is the future we're certain to get.
BB How
unaware do you think most people are of the predicament facing us? Certainly
it's not in general discussion in the media.
JMG "Unaware"
doesn't even begin to touch the depth of our collective blindness to the future
staring us in the face. The most basic assumptions we absorb from our culture
make it all but impossible for most people to think about the possibility of
decline, and I suspect that most people will continue to insist that prolonged
decline and contraction can't happen for decades after it's become an inescapable
fact.
BB Do you
think this notion of progress is disempowering, that perhaps we've been
deliberately encouraged to believe that someone else, some clever scientist or
whatever, will inevitably 'come up with something' to solve our myriad crises or might there be
something else behind our seeming inability to act?
JMG It's
certainly disempowering, but I think it's simplistic to assume that that comes
out of a deliberate decision by somebody or other. During the heyday of cheap
fossil fuel energy, it really did make sense to rely on technological progress
to solve collective problems, as a lot of collective problems did in fact get
solved that way. The difficulty is simply that we became dependent on that sort
of thinking, and remain dependent, even as the cheap energy that made such
thinking adaptive has begun to go away. As so often happens, overreliance on a
set of strategies that worked in the past has become the primary barrier to
finding new possibilities for a very different future.
BB Much of
your work has a spiritual element, and anyone who's familiar with it would also know that you've been
involved in many Western mystery traditions, do you believe that any possible
solution to these crises should recourse to spirituality in some form?
JMG I'm
going to take issue with the way this question is stated, because there are no
solutions to the present spiral of converging crises. Nothing, that is, can
make the crises go away, or keep our current lifestyles intact as we pass
through them. Adaptations, not solutions, are what's needed at this point --
that is, ways of adapting ourselves and our lives to the implacable changes
breaking over industrial civilization now and in the future. Spirituality can
play an important part in those adaptations, but it can't do the job alone; we
also have to change our lives on the most practical, nitty-gritty level. You
can meditate or pray to Gaia all you want, and if you still insist on driving
an SUV and living an SUV lifestyle, you're going to be on the wrong side of the
changes as they hit.
BB Finally,
are you personally optimistic or pessimistic about our immediate prospects - as
in do you see an easy transition as a possibility?
JMG We
tossed the prospect of an easy transition into history's dustbin at the time of
the Thatcher- Reagan counterrevolution, when all the hard work toward
sustainability that had been done in the 1970s was scrapped in the name of a
vacuous free-market ideology that put short term profit and political advantage
ahead of the long term survival of industrial civilization. As the Hirsch
Report pointed out in 2005, preparations for peak oil would have had to begin twenty
years before the peak of conventional petroleum production in order to prevent
massive discontinuities.
The peak of
conventional petroleum production, by an interesting irony, happened in 2005,
right as that report was being leaked to the press. Thus we're at least 27
years too late, and the massive discontinuities are already baked into the
cake. Individuals, families, and communities can still take constructive steps
to prepare for those discontinuities and get through them with as little
suffering as possible, but one way or another it's going to be a very rough
road down from the peak.
Thursday, 21 February 2013
Write and publish through Beetroot Books
If you're a writer who would like to share and distribute your work why not sell it as an e-book on Beetroot Books? We want to help more voices enter the debate about climate change, Peak Oil, pollution, species extinction and all the other challenges we face.
Your voice needs to be heard now.
Get in touch via our page on Project Dirt or email dan@beetrootbooks.com or @BeetrootBook on Twitter.
Wednesday, 2 January 2013
Creative block
Of late I have had a complete writers
block, a dry barrel for music composition and meager threads for writing verse –
not a very good period.
I’ve been wondering what’s responsible for
this particular malaise. Last year I finished my degree in French – a qualification
that kept me permanently at the creative pump as I had to turn out an essay a
month. I thought as soon as I didn’t have to do that anymore my creativity
would fly back into the room on easy wings of inspiration! Not quite!
Since then we’ve had the end of the Mayan
calendar (nothing), Christmas and many days when I thought I’d be able to get
started.
Oh, I could blame the permanent rain, the
dreadful commute to my current day job or some other lack but I have happily
written over these kind of blocks before.
I’ve always believed that you have to keep
creating to be creative. That is, rather than expect something to jump in to
your mind randomly you have to cultivate a habit, create space for the seed to
land and prepare yourself to recognize it when you get it. With that in mind I’m
going to attempt to stamp on my tiresome self censorship and just write any old
stuff to get the wheels turning. As Allen Ginsberg says: ‘we’re free to write anything
we want as long as we don’t show it to anyone…’.
Here I go….
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