Brockville Climate Action Group

Speaking Truth to Power / Carolyn Baker / 31 July 2008

It's the same with everyone I speak to who's been watching the downward spiral of empire for any length of time: "I can't believe how fast things are unraveling", we all say to each other. The incessant mantra these days from people who haven't been paying attention is that "things are going to get better", but almost no one is denying that we are in uncharted waters beyond anything we've experienced since the Great Depression. The uninformed are traumatized, and traumatized people almost always revert to "it's going to get better" thinking in order to cope with their current plight.

Vermont Commons / Annie Dunn Watson / 29 May 2008

“Supposing a tree fell down Pooh, when we were standing underneath it?”

- A.A.Milne

There is an old Jewish saying that goes something like this: “It isn’t required of you to complete the work, but it is not permitted not to try.”

In Al Gore's brand-new slideshow, he presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of "generational mission" -- the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement -- to set it right. Gore's stirring presentation is followed by a brief Q&A in which he is asked for his verdict on the current political candidates' climate policies and on what role he himself might play in future.

[ VIEW VIDEO HERE ] [High-speed internet recommended]

New York Times / Michael Pollan / 20 April 2008

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

Energy Bulletin / Richard Heinberg / 2 March 2008

Awareness of Peak Oil, Climate Change, impending global economic implosion, topsoil depletion, biodiversity collapse, and the thousand other dire threats crashing down upon us at the dawn of the new millennium constitutes an enormous psychological burden, one so onerous that most people (and institutions) respond with a battery of psychological defenses -- mostly versions of denial and distraction -- in an effort to keep conscious awareness comfortably distanced from stark reality.