If you’re still holding out hope that renewable energy is the future, you might want to read this.

Dougald Hine:

The fossil economy breaks the possibility of such a cycle [of human reciprocity with other living things]. How many million years of dying in the forests and seas of the ancient world go into one generation of living the way we have been doing around here lately? How could our lives ever be worthy of so much death? What could we possibly give back? And what would giving back even mean, when all that dying happened in the deep past of geological time? Committed to dependence on these vast underground reserves of death, the only response that remains is to silence such questions, to extinguish the ways of living which embody them, to make them unthinkable.

It’s as if we’ve discovered some powerful necromancy and we now we need a taboo on the practice. How is such a taboo established? How is it taught and enforced?

Goia says, “I’d pay more for trust.” What about those without discretionary income? Also, the trust crisis with regard to the tech companies means they have too much power. Nobody should have so much power that their ability to distort reality represents a crisis.

Following up on my previous post, it’s worth noting that he regards this as a counsel of perfection on the order of “love one another”, that is to say, ideals to be striven after even if never fully attained. Counsels of perfection, of course, bring monastic vows to mind. A lot to think about here.

The heart of Jeffers’ Inhumanist philosophy is the turn away from the human, toward the nonhuman. A shift in the locus of value and attention. From his preface to Double Axe:

Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit, to the vast life and inexhaustible beauty beyond humanity. This is not a slight matter, but an essential condition of freedom, and of moral and vital sanity.

“The Sun is Alive, and Why That Matters” by Charles Eisenstein. Interesting case for the aliveness of the sun, without making “aliveness” an extra-material property.

A fantastic essay from Paul Kingsnorth that captures so much of my own feeling. It even turns on a poem by blessed Robinson Jeffers. I’ll warn you: it’s a bit gloomy, so if you’re feeling pretty good about the state of the world then you might not want to read it.

The argument against conceptual clarity with regard to Ultimate Things:

The Tao that can be told is not the true Tao;

Names that can be named are not true names.

Keep asking yourself: What sort of person do I want to be? You may fail to reach your goal. No one may ever notice your efforts. What you must not do, however, is allow others to steer your life, thoughts, decisions in directions that are in their—not your—interests.

Ted Gioia’s eight techniques for evaluating someone’s character. A solid list. Perhaps the most interesting to me is his first: “Forget what they say—instead look at who they marry.” Also, his second and fifth are common enough ideas but I believe that’s because they are indeed revealing.