Post-doom with Joanna Macy (Feb 2021) "To Collapse Well"https://youtu.be/4h1wdh3yEc4"To Collapse Well" - post-doom talk recorded February 2021. Time-coded list of topics below.
Dowd says, "This was originally intended to be just a catch-up conversation between long-time friends and colleagues. It quickly spiraled to profound and inspiring places and, thankfully, Joanna agreed that this this edited version could be published. This conversation is really the heart and soul of what I (Michael Dowd) mean by a POST-DOOM conversation!!"
My wife and mission partner, Connie Barlow, spent three days adding text and image overlays. She says, "Many of the post-doom conversations Michael recorded gave me a sense of equanimity about TEOTWAWKI ("The End Of The World As We Know It"). But this one with Joanna had me sense the possibility about actually feeling gratitude for the gift of being alive at such a time. I could see that gratitude in her face. It moved me, and gave me a fresh possibility for how I, too, might walk into this future. I wanted to share this gift with others."
00:02 - Introduction and two previews.
03:53 - MD (Dowd) and JM (Macy) - "We will be generative right to the end."
04:46 - Action needed: advocate for solar panels to be installed near nuclear power plants to ensure emergency electricity for pumped-water cooling of spent fuel rods.
07:00 - Foundational shift: "Admit the myth of perpetual progress is a false religion" and that that techno-fixes may not be a solution. Must avoid "geological-scale evil."
09:22 - Technological hubris becomes "irresponsible in the extreme." Spiritual leaders can play a role in using morally laden, relationally oriented language. JM: "We have crippled our moral imagination."
11:06 - Shifted meaning of "active hope." New edition of JM book, "World as Lover, Wolrld as Self." JM chapters in new book "A Wild Love for the World."
14:26 - JM: "The great turning will not precede but will come with or after the process of collapse." Terminology: a "life-sustaining" (not "sustainable") culture. Importance of "deep adaptation." Their previous post-doom conversation, "Children of the Passage." Great turning "becomes a vision, a compass, a guiding star." Anger over "still fracking."
18:10 - MD: Business-as-usual as a kind of "addiction" that is "totally understandable." The long history of "progress-regress, boom and bust cultures; how civilizations and empires predictably collapse." JM: "Morally we regress."
19:57 - Quoting text response that Catherine Ingram offered for this conversation.
22:42 - JM story: helped by Buddhist understanding of the self, plus her study of systems theory and Gaia theory toward growing "a planet sense of self" and "a vaster sense of experience through time." JM reflections on "Deep Ecology" with John Seed, and her own despair work, "The Work That Reconnects" and "Coming Back to Life."
25:35 - JM: amazed that when people "had the courage to go into anguish for the world ... and not numb in out ... there was sometimes a shift in identity ... almost coextensive with Earth." MD: "a sense of self that includes a continuity with time ... and the nested self ... is the key to facing extinction ... death of expectations and worldviews ... fearlessness around mortality." JM: "That is what I experience ... such a fulfillment." MD: "relative equanimity and passionate commitment."
29:46 - JM: "If this is the last generation, then I'm glad to be here.... so grateful ... a great harvesting." MD story of shifting out of fear for his daughter choosing to have a child. "A tsunami of trust just broke over top of me." JM: "Trust is at the core of life.... We're going to be humans living as humans till the last." MD: on being confronted by anti-natalists. JM: "We're a family till the end."
33:55 - MD: "What a sacred honor to be alive at this time ... at the end of the Age of Exuberance and the beginning of the Great Contraction." JM: saw a play showing the transcendance of people trapped in the Warsaw ghetto; life is "transforming and redemptive at every moment, right to the end." MD: "Serenity prayer for the 21st Century ... to collapse well ... post-doom and post-gloom." JM: "the hope that we can all die well." MD: Why young parents should not be reminded of this; focus on their daily parenting.
39:38 - JM: "Our making peace with this makes room for such fulfillment.... so happy to have a chance to be with this beautiful planet, after this long, long story ... right at this climax, ending.... to celebrate, to thank — instead of wallowing in self-pity and complaint." MD: importance of "celebrating our relationship to place, to evolution ... tears of gratitude." JM: "and remember, too, the great poets, the great musicians." Go to the great landforms in our own regions "and say, glory be!"