Why is Our Lack of Agency Difficult to Accept?
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore
Posts
A Plea to Scientists, Teachers, Influencers, and Politicians Everywhere
Clover Hollow Covered Bridge, Virginia
Exploring Acceptance
Seeing the forest through the trees can be difficult; this is the Section Eight Woods in the Cache River Wetlands in Southern Illinois
What's a Hyperobject and Why Can't We Control Them?
Playhouse (for the landowners' grandchildren) in Jonesboro, Illinois Four of my articles over the past couple of years are part of a four-part series titled, " So, What Should We Do? " The first three articles were written, one after the other, back in 2021 after I discovered our lack of free will which condemns us to make choices based upon our biological (see the Maximum Power Principle ) and cultural conditioning (see this article ). This led me to realize that we truly lack agency to be able to control hyperobjects such as nature, climate change, ecological overshoot , the biosphere, etc. Not only is the predicament of overshoot too difficult for most people to grasp, many people unfortunately place it in the category of problems (with answers or solutions) rather than predicaments (with outcomes). Attempting to reduce issues seen as problems tends to turn those issues into bigger problems and/or predicaments. Often this is due to those working on these issues
Conservation, Saving Species, Fighting Climate Change, and Rebelling Against Extinction
Gazebo in Jonesboro, Illinois
Rationalizing, Storytelling, and Narrative-Generating Apes
Falling Spring Falls, Falling Spring, Virginia
What Are Self-Sufficient Communities and Why Are They More Hype Than Substance?
Some selected images from Pike Lake State Park
The Climate Crisis, Localization, and Collapse
Louisville, Kentucky skyline as seen from the Big Four Bridge at Waterfront Park
Seriously Thorny Issues
Kure Beach Pier, North Carolina How often do you develop a theory about something or hear about one and then try to prove that theory wrong? I keep trying to prove my theories wrong but instead keep finding proof that they are actually correct (highly disappointingly, I might add). I'm constantly asking WHY we haven't come to realize and accept the facts and then actually ACT upon those facts collectively. For instance, why aren't we working on reducing technology use? The Degrowth Movement recognizes that energy and resource throughput must be reduced either by design or by disaster, and that as such, this necessarily dictates a reduction of technology use. One cannot keep introducing new technologies which require the infrastructural platforms which already exist and magically expect the energy and resources to build, power, and maintain these devices to appear out of nowhere. Furthermore, the energy to power and maintain the infrastructural platforms we ALREADY have