If we do nothing, we still get to a post-carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people and ecosystems with millions of other species.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of proactive planning in the transition to a sustainable future.
In this quote, Richard Heinberg points out that while the world will inevitably move towards a post-carbon future, failing to take action will result in a bleak outcome. He advocates for strategic planning and proactive measures to ensure a future where communities thrive and ecosystems flourish, highlighting the interconnectedness of human well-being and environmental health.
In practice
In a speech about environmental policy, one might quote this to emphasize the need for strategic planning.
The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century.
Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems.
Spring, which germinated in the earth, moved also with a strange restlessness, in the hearts of... women. As the weeks passed, inextinguishable hope, which mounts with the rising sap, looked from their faces.
A change of work is the best rest.
a revolutionary in every bedroom cannot fail to shake up the status quo. And if it is your wife that is revolting, you can't just split to the suburbs. Feminism, when it truly achieves it's goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society.
Women can drive progress towards the central goals of mine action, which aims to increase security, rebuild communities, reclaim land and end the looming fear caused by explosive remnants of war.
Culture does not make people - people make culture. So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, we must make it our culture. [...] A feminist is a man or a woman who says, 'yes there is a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it. We must do better.'
No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there.
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