Author and resilience barnstormer Carolyn Baker takes us into the American shadow – and tools to cope with our own dark side. Then scientist and author Naomi Oreskes on the future if Trump wins and we all do nothing about climate change. Her book is “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future”.
Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
CAROLYN BAKER – THE AMERICAN SHADOW
Are you worried our complicated society could break down? What can we do, and how much can we allow ourselves to feel about the terrible news?
Carolyn Baker is a one-woman whirlwind of communication. She’s up-to-date on the news of the world, as she publishes her Daily News Digest. Carolyn is author or co-author of 11 books, has provided life-coaching for many, and leads workshops. Her motto is “Speaking Truth to Power”. From Boulder Colorado, it’s a treat to welcome Carolyn Baker back to Radio Ecoshock.
Download or listen to this 30 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Carolyn Baker in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
It’s hard to know where to start with Carolyn’s many ways of communicating and helping people.
* The Daily News Digest Every day, for ten years, Carolyn spends hours combing through the Internet and other sources to find news and stories for her Daily News Digest. It’s a low-cost subscription service. I’ve found stories for Radio Ecoshock from that daily burst in my in box. It saves me hours of work and keeps me informed from the viewpoints I’m looking for.
* The New Lifeboat Hour radio/podcast. When collapse guru Mike Ruppert took his own life, he left notes asking his regular guest and occasional fill-in host to take over his weekly radio show on PRN, the Progressive Radio Network. Carolyn has since taken the show into a twice a month podcast with guests from the alternative and resilience community.
* Books, books, books. Carolyn has written or co-authored at least 11 books that I know of. Among my favorites: “Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times”. Her book “Dark Gold: The Human Shadow and the Global Crisis” comes up again and again in our interview, as we delve into the group shadow that America has developed and casts on the rest of the world. Carolyn’s most recent book with Andrew Harvey is “Return to Joy”. They explore ways to experience joy even as other systems suffer and collapse. Her upcoming book (not available quite yet) is “Living Resiliently In The Dark Night Of The Globe” co-authored with Andrew Harvey. The title is perfect for our times.
Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times
* Online courses and workshops. Carolyn’s newest is “Resilience Bridge: A new course with Carolyn Baker and Dean Walker”. Get that info here.
Resilience Bridge: A new course with Carolyn Baker and Dean Walker
* Online group chats/meetings. Carolyn is currently offering a FREE safe space for people who realize the trouble we are in, as a society. Dean Walker from Ashland Oregon co-hosts that. Contact Carolyn for details.
* Life-coaching. For over 15 years Carolyn was a registered psychotherapist. She left that world to teach psychology and history to college students. Now she offers personal life-coaching sessions for people who want her one-on-one experience. Details here.
THE CHRISTIAN COUP?
In our Radio Ecoshock interview, Carolyn and I talk a little about the new impact fundamentalist Christians are imposing on the American and international scene.
A whole lot of people around the world are anxiously awaiting Donald Trump’s downfall. But looking at Mike Pence inheriting that throne in the White House, maybe we should be hoping the Donald survives?
I just read an article by Glen Greenwald in the Intercept, laying out the fundamentalist Christianity represented by Mike Pence. Pence has been funded by the mercenary Erik Prince and the Devos family, inheritors of the Amway fortune. These billionaire uber-Christians pay out millions for anti-gay campaigns, and anti-abortion laws, throughout the country. Pence America would be pretty harsh – or do you think he will also be caught up in the scandals?
Extreme Christians will accept almost any horror as part of the End Times, and the hoped for return of Jesus. Global warming will wipe out the species? No problem. Are we on the edge of nuclear Armageddon, that’s all prophesied in the Bible. It’s so heartless and irresponsible. Isn’t it like accepting the death of our families as part of so-called religion?
THE SHADOW KNOWS
But that’s just a side-trip. Really we are exploring how the shadow works to empower darkness at the top. The Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung first realized that we all have a second unconscious part of our personality. We are not aware of the urges and thoughts that we suppress – even though they can drive us to do things that are hard to accept. He called it “the shadow”. I’m not a professional, so you should listen to the interview to hear Carolyn describe the shadow and how it works.
My impression is that we try to project the darker sides of ourselves on others. When that flows into a big society, like the United States or any country, the projection can be huge. For example, we say others are terrorist killers, while we bomb civilians in their homes. We tell ourselves we are good, and “they” are bad. By the way, Carolyn as a historian has written an alternative history of the United States. It explores some of the dark things citizens do not want to accept, or rationalize away. The genocide of the original Americans, slavery, and dropping the Atomic bomb are just some of the larger examples. We pack these away into our shadow selves, but they continue to operate.
All this applies very well to what is happening on the climate change front. Trump and his associates think they can just deny climate change and pretend the seas are not rising, the weather is not weird, and temperatures are not rising. All that gets shoved into the darkness of the shadow self. Unfortunately, that just makes climate change worse.
But Carolyn also finds ways to give us hope, and ways to not just cope, but develop resilience. She tells us about a new free online resilience workshop offered by Michael Brownlee from Colorado. They’ve been doing some exciting things there. It’s called the “Local Food Summit”. Check that out.
Go ahead, dive into this interview.
NAOMI ORESKES PAINTS THE DARK PICTURE IF WE IGNORE CLIMATE CHANGE
In our second interview, scientist and author Naomi Oreskes takes us into the future when Trump wins and we all do nothing about climate change. She calls it the track to extinction.
Oreskes is a leading American earth scientist in her own right. She’s also a historian of science. Currently Naomi is Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, at Harvard University.
You can learn more about Naomi here in her Wikipedia entry. One of her most cited papers is the 2004 “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” published in the journal Science.
Oreskes is the author of the seminal book “Merchants of Doubt” shows how industry hires scientists to create doubt in the public mind about well-understood dangers. This strategy was crafted for the tobacco industry (and worked for almost 40 years) – but then applied by the chemical industry for many toxins, including DDT. It was further adapted by energy and electricity companies to throw doubt on global warming science.
In 2010, I interviewed Dr. Oreskes. You can download the interview here or listen to it, below.
In 2014, Oreskes brought out her new book “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future”. The book description is:
“The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and—finally—the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second People’s Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse, a senior scholar presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment—the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies—failed to act, and so brought about the collapse of Western civilization.”
It’s all science-based fiction. Climate change is shown as it ramps up, while humans continue in denial, as we do now. A top scientist makes it real.
Listening to this interview by Francesca Rheannon, Oreskes seemed to perfectly capture our present, just as Donald Trump announced the United States would pull out of the Paris climate agreement. I couldn’t say it better.
TRUMP’S PULL-OUT FROM THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT
The authors of the Paris agreement cleverly realized that democracies can change course with any election. So the agreement contains a clause that allows a country to exit, but only four years after filing to leave. That means the United States will technically be part of the agreement, right up to the 2020 general election.
It’s still possible a new President could repair the damage. Or is it? We don’t know if other countries will want to bail out of the Paris accord, following Trump’s lead. So far, the opposite is happening. Nicaragua, which didn’t sign because they didn’t think the agreement went far enough, is now saying they will join. And as you know, almost a hundred America Mayors and Governors have announced they will continue to act to help America reach it’s emission reduction goals. Will Trump’s action stimulate faster reductions? We’ll see.
THE WRITER’S VOICE
On the Pacifica Radio Network, Francesca Rheannon produces the series “Writer’s voice”. On Pacifica, I found this about Francesca:
“Francesca Rheannon is an independent radio producer and show host. She is producer and co-host of Writer’s Voice, a talk show about writing, writers and their works, that has been on the air since 2004. She also is a freelance broadcast news reporter, who has produced features for public radio stations, Sprouts on Pacifica, and The Homelessness Marathon. She lives in South Hadley, MA.”
Find all her great programs at writersvoice.net.
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I’m Alex Smith. Thank you for listening to Radio Ecoshock.
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Seems the play off for who has the right of exclusive control of society’s spoils.