Here is this year’s Earth Day talk by Nate Hagens.
I used to preface Nate’s talks by saying he provides the best big picture view of our predicament available anywhere.
While still true, I think Nate may now be the only person discussing these issues in public forums.
Everyone else seems to have retired to their bunkers and gone quiet.
If you only have an hour this year to devote to understanding the human predicament and what needs to be done, this may be the best way to spend it.
He is one of the superheroes we need now.
Nate is a very impressive person. I think he believes other inherited behaviors are more significant than denial. I disagree. Nothing can or will change until we confront denial.
[…] Most citizens have no idea how fortunate they are to be alive at this point in history: Blindspots and Superheroes […]
I haven’t seen this one from Nate but I have seen 3-4 or more of his earlier talks including earth day ones.
Nate’s talks are great for starting out someone who is completly ignorant of overshoot. Nate’s presentations are a good way to ‘break it to them gently’. I’ve sent links of his talk to a couple of people I know from the real world who were getting curious about the changes they were seeing. People have instincts and not everyone is duped and dumbed down by the media and politicians. I am seeing more newbies around the doomOsphere than ever. Nate is for too hopey for me. Methinks we’re fucked and always were due to our inherent denial, insatiable reward seeking combined with the cognition to unlock fossil energy and split the atom. The humans technological evolution has outpaced their psychological evolution by orders of magnitude. That’s fatal.
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I suspect you are right but in fairness no outcomes are certain. Nate is a smart and good person and I imagine he would be unable to teach young people without being able to convey some genuine hope.
I base my opinions of the future on what history teaches and on what I see people doing (not saying). History is clear on how humans behave in times of scarcity. I see very few people changing their lifestyles and I see our leaders making decisions that are opposite from what should be done if our goal is a soft landing.
I watched this, as I’ve watched many other of Hagen’s presentations as well as his other “encompassing narrative” stuff from the days of The Oil Drum. As reasonable, rational and well-intentioned as he is, I have difficulty reconciling his message with what I see going on empirically all around me. He seems to have an unshakable “faith” in humanity. I know this is merely “anecdotal”, but most humans I know are oriented like magnetic particles toward some kind of “True North”, like spawning salmon with a sense of urgency. “True North”, ultimately, is oblivion. Most unfortunate, but there it is.