I think it’s about time i repurposed this blog, from mainly theoretical to something more practical.
The question on my mind now is how we humans can make the transition to a more ecologically sound civilization, one that values all the inhabitants of Planet Earth and not just our species. The transition needs to happen at every level, from local to global, and it needs to happen fast. According to the IPCC, we have only about a decade to avert runaway global heating which will make life difficult, if not impossible, for most of us. Humans will have to radically transform the dominant culture of consumptive capitalism, or else the present climate emergency will become an irreversible catastrophe. The situation is already dire for many millions of humans and other earthlings, and will get worse before it gets better – how do we cope with that?
None of us really knows much about the answers to these questions. We have a general idea of what needs to be done and have the technology to do it, but the entrenched resistance to such radical changes is still a major obstacle. Maybe an ongoing conversation about the transition will allow for us to learn from each other’s experiments and experiences, and i hope this blog can contribute something to that. I’d like to turn the blog into something more like a forum that will make it easier for others to contribute, so please let me know if you’re interested in doing that! I’m looking into the WordPress options to open it up to more discussion.
Now for the local news. Yesterday my wife Pam and i took a carload of friends from Manitoulin to Sudbury, the first time we’ve done that with the Chevrolet Bolt EV we bought a few months ago. And another first: we used fast DC chargers in both Sudbury and Espanola to power the trip back to Manitoulin. These were recently installed at Petro-Canada stations, and more of them are going in across the country, according to Petro-Canada. It’s good to see that at least one oil company is actually helping out with the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources and electric vehicles – especially considering how much oil money is going into desperate atttempts to delay the transition.
Our Bolt EV is an experiment in managing our energy consumption, which has been a priority for Pam and me (and gnusystems) for many years. Our home is off the electrical grid and mostly solar-powered now (though we are still partly reliant on propane). I’ll be reporting and commenting on this as we head into our first winter of relying on an EV for transportation. But there’s much more to report on, so i hope you readers will “stay tuned” and share some of your own transitional thoughts.
Sounds like a timely idea. Count me in. I’d also like to invite some colleagues and friends to join the dialogue. What’s the best/simplest way to do that, esp. so they’ll know exactly what the proposed forum is intending to concern itself with.
Aloha Gary!
I’ve been looking into the “forum” options and decided that, for now at least, i’ll just tweak the “comment” system a little so that anyone who posts a comment (including a reply to another comment) has the option to subscribe to be receive new posts by email. But they will still have to go to the blog online to see any comments to the posts. Anyway the simplest way to invite others to join the conversation is to send them the link to this post (“Transition time”), and they can subscribe from there if they want to.