It's not just about practical things. We do discuss practicalities on this board, but it is primarily a place where we debate the complex issues surrounding peak oil and associated topics, from a British perspective. In other words we are having difficult discussions about the future of northwest Europe, and especially our little corner of it. What should you actually do? I think you need to shift your thinking in some important ways, and as a result you should be responding differently when faced with certain difficult moral and political questions.biffvernon wrote: What I am not clear about, UE, is what you would like me to do. Saying "it is time to grow up, stop the fluffybunny thinking, and face reality as it actually is", doesn't help much. What, in practical terms, should I actually do?
There is a pattern both within transition town movements and within the green movement. That pattern is of internal divisions causing the movement as a whole to be impotent as an intellectual fighting force, and in many cases to fall apart and cease to exist. There are always going to be serious differences of opinion, especially on moral questions. This cannot be avoided. What can be avoided are serious differences of opinion that are the result of one or more of the participants simply refusing to accept reality, whether that is physical/scientific reality or the human realities like global politics and human psychology. I think that you actually know, deep down, that you are clinging on to an impossible dream - that you are peddling "false hope" and basing your politics on this. What you do not understand is that there are serious real-world negative consequences to this peddling of false hope. In short, it is NOT possible for people like myself or Steve Cook to fix the intellectual divisions in this community, because our position result from the acceptance of grim realities. It IS possible for you to fix them, because your position results from the peddling of what you know, deep down, to be false hopes and impossible dreams.
What I want you to do is stop being the cause of serious intellectual disputes within this community and the wider environmental movement. There is no justification for you to continue being the cause of these disputes, because your false hopes and impossible dreams are not actually helping anybody or anything. The only purpose they actually serve is to make you feel like you are morally superior to us, when in reality you are nothing of the sort. Paul Kingsnorth sums it up in one sentence: False hope is worse than no hope.
the tribal paradigm has its original base in evolution good luck with bucking that long term 
