Re: Fw: Energy article from BBC news

I am reminded of the character in a novel by James Michener who in the
1930s anticipated a coming war in the Northern Hemisphere and who chose
to emigrate to a safe place well away from urban civilization. The place
that he chose was Guadalcanal.
Don

Innovatia wrote:

> TO: ASA Listserver What amazes me is the strong tendency in human
> nature to remain in danger despite knowing the consequences. Ingrained
> habit is a powerful influence on human will. The many Jews in Western
> and Central Europe could not have failed to note the danger that
> Corporal Schickelgruber (Hitler) posed to them, yet millions ended in
> the death camps when they could have emmigrated (as did the German
> Jewish physicists such as Einstein). They were not like the simple,
> info-limited peasants who were exterminated by Stalin or Mao. Major
> cities are rather vulnerable to disruptions in the infrastructure,
> including the financial system. A dozen or more credit links are
> involved in getting food from the farmer to the urban consumer. In the
> past, famine and physical suffering have not uncommonly been due to
> financial instability instead of physical limitations. On a larger
> scale, the developed world has become an urban-style time-bomb. While
> the Establishment media conditions the mases in a false view of
> geopolitical and economic reality, some fraction of Americans -
> perhaps 1 to 3 % - have bothered to actually look behind the scenes at
> what's going on. A significant fraction of these people have gotten
> out of the developed world. I would be one of them. As it becomes
> obvious to fools that something has gone very wrong, a superlinear
> trend in emmigration will occur, but much of it will not be possible,
> I suspect, because the walls put in place will hold most would-be
> escapees in. The time to get out is while your neighbors are still
> convinced of the foolishness of your ark-building efforts. Unless one
> is resigned to a nihilistic view (which is characteristic of some
> eschatology in the organized AmXn church nowadays), then it seems to
> me that a high priority for AmXns - especially talented Xns such as
> ASAers, perhaps - should be to start projects for the preservation of
> civilization in view of the coming darkness. My approach is to
> encourage and participate in the formation of "colonies", intentional
> communities of Christians who have left the System, and to encourage
> and support the existing ones. Here in Cayo, Belize are several
> Mennonite colonies and a colony of non-Xn Germans. As networks of
> like-minded colonies form and grow, they could become the nucleus for
> civilization in the future, especially some with higher education
> levels than the Kleinegemeinde Mennonites who live here. Some
> countries in Central America, such as Belize and Panama, have a low
> population density yet are quite liveable. It is possible to emmigrate
> to these countries without liquidating the Taj Mahal. They politically
> avoid entanglement in the emerging World Order, yet not in the manner
> of the Mideastern world. Some sacrifices have to be made to leave
> North America or Western Europe, most for the better, physically and
> spiritually. Due to the lack of means here, governments cannot, even
> if they wanted, micromanage society, replacing community based on
> personal relations with enumeration, databases, law-enforced "trust"
> among strangers, and impersonal procedures. The Mayans in Belize are
> the survivors of a past, decayed civilization in which most Mayans
> perished. The few who remain carry with them strong survival instincts
> and practices. They too are colonists of sorts. A technology-oriented
> network of colonies could be places where alternative living in its
> fullness, and not only alternative energy development, might thrive.
> They would be dominated by an extreme statistical tail of the overall
> population - people driven by a larger vision and willing to pursue it
> at personal cost. That more or less sums up what this ASAer is doing
> nowadays in Central America. I am not alone. Former ASAer Mark Ludwig,
> a particle physicist by background, shares a similar vision, as do a
> large fraction of N. American expatriates here. Our calling as
> Christians is not to save the world per se but to pursue what we can
> realistically address given the parameters God has handed us in our
> setting. I can live with the fact that a large fraction of the global
> population will die off in the coming destruction because I am working
> on the seeds of a new society for after this destruction has run its
> course. The people of Christ have always functioned in this way,
> living in the wilderness, on the margins, and building something
> better. When societies permeated by wordly evil crumble, the seeds of
> renewed civilization emerge from these colonies, communities promoting
> the principles of life. Anybody else doing or thinking along these
> lines out there? Dennis Feucht
> -
>
Received on Wed Aug 4 18:22:57 2004