A new kind of blues

Check out this site which has an interesting focus on ecopsychology - the experience of learning about peak oil, and what kinds of reactions it prompts in people. Interesting discusison on how it might affect people depending on life stage, and actual stories of people's responses. What was yours? (Or have you known for so long about peak oil that you can't remember?) Was something else your aha moment in sustainability thinking? (Or do you now know what I'm talking about and wish I'd stop rabbiting on?). Mine was growing up in a suburb that had a plastics factory in eyesight on the horizon and watching the plumes of white smoke, learning about acid rain at school, and hearing about the greenhouse effect. First bad poem therefore written at 7 about acid rain ('dripping down my window pane' - but actually it wasn't, we have a verandah so really it couldn't reach my window, even if there was some acid rain there in down town suburban Aelaide - which there wasn't). Or maybe it was just always feeling like things were connected and that people could be unjust. That child's righteous indignation that never really went away. That sadness for little things and bright things and precious things squashed and fallen out of nests. The thought of deforestation horrified me, I wrote the start of my first bad novel at age 10 - about a cheetah whose forest was being burnt by hunters trying to flush him out. That careful pencil manuscript on lined cream paper was my treasured work, my horded and peered over slowly scrawled 41/2 page wonder. I pumped out a story about a ceterpillar in class that day to hand in, to buy me time to keep working on my cheetah story. Which I subsequently lost (probably lost interest in), but it has stayed a significant moment for me, a chrystallisation of all that care and indignation and feeling of custodianship for other creatures that welled up in my little girl heart (along with my exacting love of Michael Jackson's 'Bad' and Tears for Fears 'The Big Chair'). Aaaah, the naiivety of youth.

Anyway, I diverge, the first website I mentioned reminds me quite a bit of the premise of Joanna Macy's/John Seed's Despair and Empowerment work,but interesting to that peak oil could be the nuclear threat of the 2000's. I do like Joanna's stuff, gentle hearted but strong in conviction, worth a look also if you haven't seen before (and ever so relevant these days as more people get switched on to sustainability thinking?)