Summary: SUMMARY: From The Farm in Tennessee, alternative guru Albert Bates rates responses to predictions of doom. Film-maker Anne Macksoud on new movie "The Wisdom to Survive" Plus musical activist Rachelle Van Zanten. List your alternative speakers and writers - Albert Bates probably knows them all. As a travelling speaker and permaculture teacher at The Farm in Tennessee, Bates brought out a new chart showing responses from "we will find a way with local community" to "why prolong the agony, we are all doomed". We talk about the players in the end game. Anne Macksoud and film-maker partner John Ankele interviewed many of the same people - plus a lot of young women activists, aboriginal and third world people about the developing climate crisis. The result is their new film "The Wisdom to Survive, Climate Change, Capitalism & Community". We talk through our options. From Canada's West Coast, Rachelle Van Zanten went from a world tour (with "Painted Daisies") to her 400 square foot off-grid cabin. Her songs have become anthems for those opposing pipelines, tankers, fracking, and tar sands. It's also damn fine music. We chat, and then spin two tunes. Listen to/Download this Radio Ecoshock Show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB) (CD Quality recommended for the music!) ALBERT BATES The economy seems to teeter on the edge of break-down, week to week. Fukushima rolls on. Climate scientists are pretty sure we're on our way to catastrophe. That, and a whole lot more, is always lurking in the back our our minds. So...in the great scheme of things, what kind of doomer are you? Albert Bates has a chart to sort out some of the leading alternative thinkers. Albert is the former lawyer, long-time resident of The Farm in Tennessee, and a well-known speaker and writer about everything from alternative energy to permaculture. We begin with a ground-breaking article by Permaculture founder David Holmgren in Australia. It's called "Crash on Demand". (I'll be talking with David next week). Homlgren describes four possible futures, or perhaps responses to the future. One is "Brown Tech" - the path we are on now, substituting high energy sources like Tar Sands and fracking to keep our growth-oriented economy going. If the Brown Tech succeeds in supplanting the another possibility, namely "'Green Tech" - then our world is doomed to climate disaster. We can't let that happen says Holmgren. Perhaps if enough people withdraw from the system, taking out their money and their efforts, we could stimulate an economic crash that was bound to happen. The only example we have of any society drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions was the Soviet Union in the 1990's. Their crash of industry reduced their emissions greatly. That's the kind of cut we need to survive, Holmgren reasons. If none of that works, then we have the "Lifeboat" society, where each of us tries to survive even in an unstable system, perhaps with permaculture, localized food and local currencies. Or in a worst case, the survivor-prepper idea of isolated fortresses ("beans and bullets"). Albert Bates evaluates these scenarios, and the best known alternative thinkers, into four camps on a chart. Here is the article you need to look at. Albert doesn't claim he is photographing reality. It's a map pointing to something happening in our culture, with some of our spokespeople. Dmitri Orlov tried to calculate how many people like him, bloggers with hi influence, would it take to bring about the required change to crash the system. He found it would be about 100,000 activists with the same reach, even if a sky-high figure of half his readers actually took action. Rob Hopkins doesn't want the Crash on Demand. he wants to work with existing structures, including local governments. In Albert's blog, at peaksurfer.blogspot.ca, he reproduces a super chart by David Pollard. I love some of the slogans that typify each position. We have everything from "preparation in community might save us" to "smash o
