The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises

The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises

How do issues related to people, water, power, nutrition and environment impact each other? What can we do without making the others worse to tackle one problem?

The Post Carbon Reader presents reflections on the key issues defining our new century from renewable energy and urban agriculture to social justice and collective resilience by some of the world's most influential thinkers. Here is a chapter out of the book Post Carbon Reader that talks about ways to be resilience:

RESILIENCE: Personal Preparation by Chris Martenson

How to make sense of the challenges that society is facing now. What are the systemic underlying forces at stake? What brought us here? It is like placing a band-aid on a life-threatening injury to act without this understanding.

How to establish resilience in the family. While we also need to behave as national and global citizens in our individual lives, building our societies ' resilience is an integral response to the numerous sustainability crises of the 21st century.

Resilience: Personal Preparation by Chris Martenson is meant for anyone, everywhere, who is worried about the unstable course that society is on and who wants to understand better why we are here and what we can do about it. Participants included entirely new people and people who have been studying these issues for decades.

To start with, a sustainability project is about creating and maintaining a change you can be inspired and excited about in your life.   Climate change conferences have encouraged the international community to take action over the past few years. 

To keep it simple, a green lifestyle is about choosing and taking eco acts and can be classified in different areas of our lives.

• Natural resource protection: begin by rethinking energy and water consumption patterns and finding ways to curb excessive consumption.

• Reduce waste: start with the elimination of food waste.  Preplanning your meals, ordering in bulk, and storing what you need.  Compost and make healthy soil for your old food.

• Purchase products with an eco-conscious mind.  Buy products with minimal packaging or sustainable packaging.

• More environmental value is offered by products that can be reused before recycling. 

• Buy local produce, purchase fair trade and buy items from green companies. 

• Inspire others: take a green stance.

How can you go from information to personal action to the next step?  Here is where the tried and true adage applies: "What is calculated is handled." While more commonly articulated in a business setting, it also refers to our personal lives.  For example, you need to know how much you weigh to benchmark your success if you want to lose weight. Similarly, you first need to learn the areas of your environmental impacts in order to measure your progress in living a sustainable lifestyle.