Call for Submissions to Briarpatch

I like this magazine and it seems they are looking for submissions for their upcoming edition "How I learned to stop destroying the planet and love the global recession"

What if the economic recession we're presently experiencing
is not just a regrettable temporary setback in the never-ending
march of growth-fuelled prosperity, but the beginning of a
painful but ecologically necessary process of scaling back
our footprint to a more sustainable level?

How would we manage the decline so as to ensure the burdens
are shared out equitably? How would we go about reorganizing
our society and economy around conservation and community
well-being rather than economic growth and short-term profit?

The revolution envisioned above would require a fundamental
transformation in every aspect of our lives -- our jobs, our
homes, our food system, our arts and entertainment, etc.
It's certainly beyond the scope of a single issue of Briarpatch
to describe, but in our July/August 2009 issue, we hope to
sketch out some of the broad contours and specific
opportunities so our readers can get to work on the rest.

What principles should guide our efforts to reorganize our
lives and communities on a human scale? What initiatives
already underway deserve to be profiled, celebrated, and
imitated? What can we learn from what other people are doing
in other parts of the world? What books and films shed light
on the key issues and should be reviewed? How can our
efforts to cope with the global recession pave the way to
a more stable and sustainable future?

If you've got something to contribute to this discussion,
then we want to hear from you. We are looking for articles,
essays, investigative reportage, news briefs, project profiles,
interviews with luminary thinkers, reviews, poetry, humour,
artwork & photography that explore how we can unplug
from the growth machine and cope with the global recession.

We seek to cast a broad net in our approach, profiling
initiatives in energy alternatives, housing and urban
planning, transportation, job (re)training, ecological
economics and much more -- this is not an exhaustive list!

Queries are due by March 23, 2009. If your query is
accepted, first drafts are due by May 1, 2009. Your query
should outline what ground your contribution will cover and
include an estimated word count and a short writing sample.

Please review our submission guidelines before submitting
your query. Send your queries to:
editor AT briarpatchmagazine DOT com.

We reserve the right to edit your work (with your active
involvement) and cannot guarantee publication. Briarpatch
pays $0.05/word. http://www.briarpatchmagazine.com

Some of my blogging friends (and the non-bloggy ones too) have certainly been opining on exactly this topic - perhaps one of you wants to submit something. If I can get my act together, I just might as well.

Children of Men and the Dystopian Present

The Pentagon views the foreign slum city of tomorrow as a dystopian nightmare and the bloody battlespace to be feared and controlled in the coming decades. (More)

This weekend I saw the movie Children of Men. Any time I see films set in a dystopian future, I am struck by how much they reflect the past and even the present.

The scene in Children of Men that occurs in the refugee camp displays the type of urban warfare that has been a fixture of countless recent conflicts, such as in Iraq. It is very much the same as the urban warfare scenes in Blood Diamond, another recent film. Based on real events, and set in the past, (Sierra Leone's Civil War of the 90's) what we see happening is far worse than anything the most imaginative speculative fiction writer could conceive of.

Obviously the creators of dystopian future worlds such as in Children of Men get their inspiration from history and even the evening news, so the similarities shouldn't be surprising. Perhaps these movies allow us privileged folk who live in relative peace and prosperity to begin to visualize how terrible war and related atrocities actually are. These films succeed in communicating with wide audiences, and reach us a gut level in a way that newspaper articles often don't.

Urban warfare is inevitable in our increasingly unequal world, as evidenced by what happens in vast third-world slums around the world. As quoted in this excellent article, Mike Davis wrote in Planet of Slums:

...the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World --especially their slum outskirts -- will be the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century." Pentagon war-fighting doctrine, he notes, "is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor."

True safety cannot be created by armoured cars, gated communities, and private security guards.

Landfill Mining

I wonder if, in the not too distant future, we'll be in such short supply of petroleum products that we won't start mining our own landfills. I could see big companies buying up landfills because of the vast resources they contain. All those plastic bags, pop bottles, and other plastic products we throw away today will be a potential source of wealth for our sick future society that has run out of petroleum resources.

Unless we get our act together, it is certainly a possibility.

A Chilling Postapocalyptic Vision

"Imagine you're a member of whatever species replaces Homo sapiens in 10,000 years. There's no more oil, at least not enough to build your economy around, and the planet's climate is still feeling the aftereffects of what your biological, bipedal predecessors did to it... No species on earth lasts forever, but we are hastening our own demise with such rapidity, that those who follow us will not know whether to curse us or thank us. "
This Commentary By Eric Patton and others is available to Sustainer Donors of ZNet.