Keynote Speakers [at Green Life Eco Fest] Include:Here is Ruppert's flyer for the event.
Michael Ruppert authored "Confronting Collapse" and "Crossing the Rubicon". Michael spoke in Grass Valley a few years ago to a sold out crowd at the Vets Hall.
Dmitry Orlov authored "Reinventing Collapse" and "Hold Your Applause"
They are speaking on Sunday May 22nd at 11:00 AM
...
[Judith Kildow will be speaking at 10am Sat.]
Tickets are available at the gate and at the APPLE Center. Adults are $8 and children are free.
Orlov says:
"I'll be at the Eco-Fest this Saturday and Sunday. ... I'll be speaking on making the best of your Energy Elves (they are like the old fossil-fueled Energy Slaves except much smaller; I seem to have made my peace with them) on Saturday at 11:15."
6 comments:
Will Judith Kildow speak Sunday as well?
Sorry, never mind. I used the link you provided to look it up myself (no, she's not).
I caught Orlov's talk on Sunday, and then just a couple minutes of Ruppert's.
Orlov gave his capsule view of economics; and didn't think much of the field as practiced, and gave me the impression that he thought we needed to return to small-social-group transactional dynamics, that they made us better people. I don't think his (IMO) romanticized view of such past systems would pass muster with Brad DeLong (DeLong: "even [Adam] Smith's self-interested and calculating market agents are sociable ones: they exchange, and perhaps they cheat--they don't kill, rape, burn, and steal. Which is odd, given that fifty years before Smith was born not far from his house there were lots of people who saw others not as potential partners in acts of mutually-beneficial commerce but instead as either (i) clan allies, (ii) clan enemies to be killed, or (iii) strangers to be robbed."); and there'd be violent disagreement with Jason Scorse's thesis that ceding economics to the RW charlatan set is wrongheaded.
However, it felt inappropriate to speak up and critique; we ain't in the U. of Kansas anymore...
(not that we ever were, literally speaking)
(Ruppert was reading his speech, & if I'm going to absorb text, I'd rather be the one doing the reading.)
I also caught Bryan Welch's talk, Welch being publisher of Mother Earth News, Utne Reader, Natural Home & Gardening, etc; he had a publisher's perspective on save-the-world communication.
He's an excellent speaker & the talk was interesting, he made a good case for an approach I don't agree with.
He advocated taking a "wave the carrot, don't mention the stick" approach, pointing out that it works like gangbusters for magazine subscriptions (& M.E. website traffic)
But (IMO) there's an effectiveness fault and a misunderstanding fault, to this - the latter, in that it's somewhat like saying "we should be Good Cop not Bad Cop" - overlooking the fact that it was Bad Cop's communication that's driven the customer to seek solace in the arms of Good Cop.
Plus, it's like selling indulgences; like suggesting you can expiate your anxiety by doing fun stuff, stuff that appeals to the earth person in all of us; not doing the stuff that really makes a difference.
(It'd be like telling me I can save the world by making minor edits on SourceWatch...which is more the equivalent of knitting)
The "act as citizen/act as consumer" distinction wasn't mentioned, at least not that I recall.
and again, no I didn't bring any of this up. in the Q&A session - partly because I'm slow, partly because I'm inarticulate, partly because, once again, in this culture it seems rude.
(damn I miss science sometimes...)
(3 days later)
Not sure what got into me Wed. night (besides Elaine's TPP popcorn, which was delicious, and the first half of their "creating the Constitution" movie, which (IMO) was paralytic) - I am not normally anywhere near this voluble, and there's a touch of crankery, to my comments above. (Yo, speech centers: submit to thy executive-function master.)
Sorry.
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