Coming to Substack
This is not your daddy's future any more. It could be something wonderful.
This is The Great Change, a newsletter to let people follow my thoughts as I explore life, leaving a trail of books and real world projects in my wake. Subscribers stovepipe the raw intel, look over my shoulder, and browse my field notes as we get down to the real nitty gritty of human prospects in the 21st Century on six continents.
I am an Emergency Planetary Technician. Earth is now in critical care, without a ventilator or drips, and when she needs rest to recover, this ICU is more like an MMA cage—she gets beaten mercilessly when she is down. My EPT jump kit contains rescue remedies—a suite of homeopathic solutions for plastics, nukes, biodiversity, population, cyberwar, climate change, and to repair our quantum entanglement with innumerable invisible ecosystems whose balance has been disrupted.
The Great Change began publication on Blogger in 2007 after I had completed The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for a Changing World for New Society. 635 posts and a dozen books later, I still put that out every week. I have 54 followers on the Blogger platform after 15 years. Last month there were 15083 reads of my posts, so they must be interesting, but Blogger doesn’t seem to do much for my bottom line.
In February 2017 I started posting the Blogger feed a few days early to Medium on a paid subscription basis and a few weeks later I added a Patreon site that gave donors a look at that Medium post the day it went up. I soon learned that the Medium paywall was wonky and an unsatisfying experience for most readers, although for creators, the writing platform is better than Blogger or Patreon. I am hopeful that Substack will have the ease of use of Medium, but with better yields for the creator.
My first post will be a repeat of “The Great Pause Week 90” that went up on Patreon, Medium and Blogger the first week of December, 2021. Week 90 refers to Wave Four of the Covid Pandemic, which should tell us the socio-economic pause that began in January 2020 is far from over. This post, “Sympathy for the Detail,” is about normalcy bias and the global civil unrest that was set in motion long before the pandemic but has been accelerating, as evidenced by the re-education camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China, the Yellow Vests in France, and the storming of the US Capitol last January.
I may not always get it right, but I promise to keep it interesting, and your feedback will help me clean up my raw musings enough to make them suitable for print. The blogs and the great comments they’ve provoked have birthed more than a dozen books, with several more now in various stages of ideation.
Join me as we consider the possibilities.
About this Newsletter
The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.
As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.
Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Substack and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.
#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity
“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”
— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.