Derrick Jensen & The Collapse of Civilization

[valuesystem]

Last week, I watched an online video talk in Google by Derrick Jensen. Jensen has written several books about civilization which sound quite interesting. They seem to extend themes discussed by Jared Diamond, Daniel Quinn and others

Comments

[rednikki]

Let's consider the Amazon rain forest. Right now, our culture is destroying it. Will protests, petitions, sit-ins, articles, and conferences end this destruction and start the restoration? If not, what is to be done to protect it?

Buy it.

Dead serious. Buy it, hire some people to steward it.

People "buy" stars in the sky; why not make buying a square foot of the rainforest a trend?

[valuesystem]

I wonder how much that would cost for 1.7 billion acres. At $1,000 per acre, and less than $2 trillion, it actually sounds like a deal. I wonder how much it would cost per acre.

I imagine that Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana would all be interested in a chunk of $2 trillion.

[rednikki]

Maybe mixing that up with the ideas in this:
http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2008/09/the-tom-sawyer.html
could lead to something.

$1000 to have your name on a plaque on an acre of land? People paid more than that to get their names on a brick at Disneyland, I think. There is a way to make it work. It would take strategizing, but it's not impossible.

[valuesystem]

Thanks for sharing that blog; that is a very good point; lead by example, and that tends to be how I think about it as well.

For the conference Local Future is hosting in November, we're trying to find people who are actually doing this, breaking away from the economic system, and living a more sustainable life. These folks are the ones that we need to hear and see more about, so that we feel inspired to move our lives in that direction. It needs to be fun. It needs to be appealing. It needs to be challenging, but not unachievable, just the right level of difficultly.

Or, to sum up, I agree. The Tom Sawyer model is well worth keeping in mind.