Culturopoiesis, or Culture-Making: Bluevolution

One of the the echoes (it would be too much to refer to it as a consensus which involves conscious agreement) between psychologists and ecologists (scientists and artists in both camps) at the Nature and Human Nature conference in April is that we are past the point of a previous way of being meeting its demise. There is not a "tipping point", ecologically speaking, that is Coming. It has passed. The species dead, energy reserves tapped, and leeway to pollute less and avoid global warming that raises the level of the worlds oceans, are lost.

So Hope, one of them even stated directly, might be the problem keeping us from the hard choices about what will survive the end of Peak Oil (electricity, synthetic clothing, transportation, ...), easy access to water for the middle class world (already sold out from under the poor), readily breathable air and truly clean (non-poisonous) food. The previous kind of hero could have been hoped for to arrive with the better technology, the faster plan to accelerate Progress, the winning gambit to define and defeat The Enemy. But that kind of heroism is what got us in this mess in the first place and what is killing us today, never mind our kids.

The edge of my current discoveries, beyond which I have very little to say because I don't really know what I'm talking about yet, involves a specific mystery - grief. It would seem that, rather than denying our situation and "looking on the bright side", the way through to making some very difficult survival choices is not more Green (progressive, revolutionary, growth-oriented, sustained, evolutionary) boosterism, though the changes in our infrastructures to reuse and cut-back consumption are certainly essential.

If there is a color to characterize the shift required to truly expect sustainability of some part of our civilization it will be Blue, like the azure sky and the deep sea both fade into the unknown black of mystery. Feeling and singing The Blues, the cultural pandemic of "Depression", the underneath and underside of most things we would prefer to repress and deny are the places we might grope for some kind of understanding and, finally, hope - after the circling down into darkness work has been seen through.

So, Bluevolution. Not a revolutionary return to an imagined utopia. Not a coming evolutionary step which is inevitable because it is either ordained by Nature or not. A spiral turning (volution) that feels like washing in and out with water when a thing needs burial. Simply grieving what is past until it truly has passed. Then humanity may live in a new way that understands and incorporates an understanding of what has died. Otherwise we keep making literal and living the old way until we are all literally no more.