How Science Is Telling Us All To Revolt by Naomi Klein

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).

What scientists and experts are saying, says Klein, is "that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules."

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less."

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.  >>>more<<<

also from Naomi Klein:

December 1962 

Section of Psychiatry 

President E W Anderson MD

Meeting June 19 1962
at the University Department of Psychiatry,
The Royal Infirmary, Manchester
Effects of Sensory Deprivation

sen′sory depriva′tion , 
n.

extreme reduction of environmental stimuli, often leading to cognitive, perceptual, or behavioral disorientation or, in infants, developmental damage.

'I'd say the easy form of that would be introducing computers and the vast unlimited amounts of information that can be changed/erased at the click of a key, wikipedia, text books, classic pieces of literature, gotta make it PC, entertainment, but it also connects people world wide with the same views in ways which is an awesome thing, that never would have happened prior to computer/internet;  but it also keeps a lot of people from publicy socializing in their own communities and when they do  it seems like they can't talk one on one while even in the same room at a 'party'  they have to do it in text form and that is HORRIBLE!'  jlh