Alexis Zeigler on Culture Change, Civil Liberty, Peak Oil February 24, 2009

We're delighted to announce an East Bay Cohousing potluck social for people interested in exploring community responses to climate change and peak oil, with special guest Alexis Zeigler, author of Culture Change, Civil Liberty, Peak Oil, and the End of Empire.

Deep-rooted communitarian Alexis is a former long-time member of Twin Oaks community in Louisa, VA; he now lives in a group household in Charlottesville, VA.

Draft Agenda
5-5:30 PM Arrivals, social time, serving
5:30-6:30 PM Alexis talk, eating
6:30-7:15 PM Q&A, discussion
7:15-7:30 PM Cleanup, optional small-group continued discussion (another group needs the big room by 7:30)

When you sign up, please indicate what kind of potluck dish you're bringing, if any, in your RSVP, so others can bring balanced dishes; please be sure to clearly label any non-obvious ingredients, and bring your own cup, silverware, plate, and napkin, so we can conserve resources.

This is a free event; Alexis will be selling his book, and we will pass the hat for donations for the clubhouse space.

The East Bay Cohousing clubhouse, generously sponsored by the Cohousing Coaches at Planning for Sustainable Communities, is between Addison and Center, 2 blocks downhill from downtown Berkeley BART. The AC Transit 15, 51, and 1/1R buses stop nearby (among others). The parking lot out front is reserved, please use onstreet parking (metered/restricted until 6 or 7 PM, check the signs!) or paid lots on Addison/Center between Shattuck and Milvia.

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From the back cover of Culture Change:

While we are daily witness to the powers of progress manifest in the extraordinary mechanical technologies we have developed in the industrial age, we remain woefully unaware of the most basic causes of social change in our society. Our lack of social awareness does not result from the difficulty of understanding social problems, it results from the active repression of such awareness.

The political resistance movements that developed in the twentieth century were adapted to conditions of economic growth. When an economy is growing, petitioning through political and legal means to assure increasing access to rights and wealth for traditionally disenfranchised groups met with a measure of success, and that success was the foundation for further movement building. Those movements cannot, as they are currently structured, guide us through the coming age.

Many of the problems that we see as having purely political roots are strongly influenced by economic and ecological factors. Social issues that may seem far apart, such as ecological stress and women's rights for instance, have common roots. In the modern context, much of the political unraveling that we are witnessing can be understood in terms of the limitations of growth of modern industrialism.

The growth of fundamentalism and militarism, the decline of civil liberty and the environment, all of these problems are going to get worse if we do not find a new means to address them.

There are real solutions to these problems, but they are going to involve a quantum leap, both in thought and in action, beyond our current methods of political engagement. The solutions themselves are not even terribly difficult, they are simply well outside of our current range of vision and will.

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Table of Contents

• Our Fate
  
• Civil Liberty: The Rise and Fall of Liberal Democracy
  
• Women's Rights: What the Heck is Going on in South Dakota?
  
• Peak Oil, Biofuel, and Genocide: Neoliberalism's End Game?
  
• Ecological Decline: 101 Painless and Ineffective Ways to Save the Whole Damn World Versus Real Solutions
  
• Witch Hunting: Terrorists, Communists, Drugs and Sorcerers: Wars that Were Never Meant to be Won
  
• Why Large Groups of Intelligent People do Foolish Things
  
• Real Solutions: The End of the Conservative/Liberal Piecemeal Crap
  

Official Website: http://www.ebcoho.org/