sources:
Into the Wild, by John Krakauer
The Journal of Chris McCandless
The Wild Truth, by Carine McCandless
Tag: earth
Slavery in the name of progress | A Wake-Up Call by Martin Scorsese
Surviving Progress explores the dangerous paradox at the heart of modern civilization: what we call “progress” might actually be leading us toward collapse.
Based on Ronald Wright’s concept of the “progress trap,” this documentary journeys through history, economics, biology, and politics to reveal how technological advancement, debt, overconsumption, and ecological destruction are threatening the future of humanity.
Ronald Wright’s bestseller A Short History of Progress inspired this cinematic requiem to progress-as-usual. Throughout human history, what seemed like progress often backfired.
Some of the world’s foremost thinkers, activists, bankers, and scientists challenge us to overcome progress traps, which destroyed past civilizations and lie treacherously embedded in our own.
With powerful visuals, expert commentary, and haunting parallels to the fall of past empires, the film challenges viewers to rethink growth, power, and sustainability. Are we too smart for our own survival, or is there still time to change course?
A Climate Warning From the Fertile Crescent
As the Middle East braces for another year of extreme heat, climate change is turning the soil to dust in the landscape that has long been known as the fertile crescent — and water has become a new source of conflict.
Alissa J. Rubin, who covers the Middle East, tells the story of Iraq’s water crisis and what it means for the world.
Guest: Alissa J. Rubin, a senior Middle East correspondent for The New York Times.
Background reading:
From 2023: A climate warning from the cradle of civilization.
LISTEN: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/podcasts/the-daily/climate-change-iraq-middle-east.html
Dignity
I read this when it came out in 2011, while we were still thinking about Occupy and 2008. Here we are in 2025, and it is still relevant. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor.
A packet of hand-scrawled letters found in a stranger’s backpack tells of self-sufficient communities growing from the ruins of California’s housing collapse and the global recession. In unfinished Mojave Desert housing tracts and foreclosure ghost towns on the raw edges of the chaotic cities of the West, people have gathered to grow their own food, school their own children and learn how to live without the poisons of gossip, greed, television, mobile phones and the Internet. Encouraged by an enigmatic wanderer known only as “B,” the communities thrive as more families and workers are discarded by an indifferent system. But this quiet revolution and its simple rituals cannot stay unnoticed for long, because the teachings of “B” threaten an entire structure of power and wealth dependent upon people toiling their lives away to buy things they don’t need.
“But to understand the social mood as embodied by a group like Occupy, it may help to look at literature that captures its zeitgeist. One of the books that seems to have become a standard bearer for the Occupy movement is Ken Layne’s ‘Dignity.’ In a book that can only be described as a series of modern-day letters on the gospel of communal simplicity, you can see what kind of world some of the Occupiers might envision: communities occupying vacant suburban or exurban subdivisions, farming the land themselves, bartering with doctors and the like, and shunning modern technology.” — Minyanville.com
The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares
To understand the deepening divide between AI boosters and doomers, it’s necessary to unpack their common origins in a bundle of ideologies known as TESCREAL.
LINK: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/
Silicon Valley is run by people who genuinely think the world as we know it is going to end in the next few decades.
Silicon Valley is run by people who genuinely think the world as we know it is going to end in the next few decades. Many also WANT this to happen: they WANT the biological world to be replaced by a new digital world. They WANT "posthumans" to take the place of humans. A 🧵:
— Dr. Émile P. Torres (@xriskology.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T19:58:32.783Z
The Sunday Read: ‘The Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber’
Episode Description
Online, there is a name for the experience of finding sympathy with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber: Tedpilling. To be Tedpilled means to read Paragraph 1 of Kaczynski’s manifesto, its assertion that the mad dash of technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution has “made life unfulfilling,” “led to widespread psychological suffering” and “inflicted severe damage on the natural world,” and think, Well, sure.
Since Kaczynski’s death by suicide in a federal prison in North Carolina nearly two years ago, the taboo surrounding the figure has been weakening. This is especially true on the right, where pessimism and paranoia about technology — largely the province of the left not long ago — have spread on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to police speech on social media platforms.
Link: https://pca.st/07odumi7
2073
2073 is a 2024 British science fiction docudrama film directed by Asif Kapadia. Set in a dystopian future, the film is inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 featurette La Jetée, which follows a time traveller who risks his life to change the course of history and save the future of humanity.
Torrents: https://www.1377x.to/torrent/6305616/2073-2024-1080p-AMZN-WEB-DL-DDP5-1-H-264-FLUX/
‘All of his guns will do nothing for him’: lefty preppers are taking a different approach to doomsday
Liberals in the US make up about 15% of the prepping scene and their numbers are growing. Their fears differ from their better-known rightwing counterparts – as do their methods
One afternoon in February, hoping to survive the apocalypse or at least avoid finding myself among its earliest victims, I logged on to an online course entitled Ruggedize Your Life: The Basics.
Some of my classmates had activated their cameras. I scrolled through the little windows, noting the alarmed faces, downcast in cold laptop light. There were dozens of us on the call, including a geophysicist, an actor, a retired financial adviser and a civil engineer. We all looked worried, and rightly so. The issue formerly known as climate change was now a polycrisis called climate collapse. H1N1 was busily jumping from birds to cows to people. And with each passing day, as Donald Trump went about gleefully dismantling state capacity, the promise of a competent government response to the next hurricane, wildfire, flood, pandemic, drought, mudslide, heatwave, financial meltdown, hailstorm or other calamity receded further from view.
READ ARTICLE: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/17/preppers-liberals-climate-collapse
What I Found on the 365-Mile Trail of a Lost Folk Hero
The Old Leatherman, a sort of real-life Northeastern Sasquatch, gave me an excuse to step outside my own life.
Sometime in the 1850s or ’60s, at a terrible moment in U.S. history, a strange man seemed to sprout, out of nowhere, into the rocky landscape between New York City and Hartford. The word “strange” hardly captures his strangeness. He was rough and hairy, and he wandered around on back roads, sleeping in caves. Above all, he refused to explain himself. As one newspaper put it: “He is a mystery, and a very greasy and ill-odored one.” Other papers referred to him as “the animal” or (just throwing up their hands) “this uncouth and unkempt ‘What is it?’”
But the strangest thing about the stranger was his suit.
LINK: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/magazine/old-leatherman-walk-new-york-connecticut.html