interview Archives - The Automatic Earth

TSHTF Podcast with Nicole Foss, Raúl Ilargi Meijer & RE

Aug 092015

August 9, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:11 pm Finance Tagged with: China, collapse, deflation, Doomstead, Ilargi, interview, Nicole Foss, RE 8 Responses »

Nicole and I did an interview with Reverse Engineer at the Doomstead Diner a few nights ago. I haven’t listened to it yet, but he seems to think it was, let’s say, entertaining yet insightful. Cheerful in the face of collapse.

Here’s what Reverse Engineer wrote about it on the DD site:

Reverse Engineer: Recently, Nicole Foss of The Automatic Earth returned to blogging after taking something of a hiatus over the last year. I caught one of her recent pieces on the situation in China, and her writing partner Raul Ilargi Meijer has been covering the situation in Greece extensively. Besides those two ongoing clusterfucks in China & Greece, there’s quite a bit of ongoing collapse related to climate, the recent publication by James Hansen on Sea Level Rise, and of course the Encyclical by the Vicar of Christ on Earth, His Holiness Pope Francis, Chief Spokesperson for some 1.2B members of the Holy Roman Catholic Church…. clearly no shortage of Collapse Topics to discuss! 🙂

It’s been about 2 years since I first got together with Nicole to talk about Energy & Inflation & Deflation. So this seemed like a good time to do an update, and I nailed her down for another chat this week. She happens to be visiting with Raul in the Netherlands, so as a bonus in this conversation we got his input as well. Now, for those of you expecting to get the normal “Just the Facts, Ma’am” type of presentation from Nicole in this Podcast, you may be slightly disappointed.

There definitely are a lot of facts jammed into this hour of KollapsnikTM chat. However, because Nicole was chatting with both me and Ilargi, we kind of went off the rails a few times, and hilarity ensued. I decided to leave some of it in there for a little entertainment value. 🙂 The stuff I cut out is even funnier, but sadly not for public consumption. LOL.

Additionally, Nicole currently has a DVD in post production, discussing parameters of where you want to live, what kind of choices you can make moving ahead and so forth. We currently have up a Doomstead Diner SurveyTM on places your DON’T want to live, still OPEN. We’ll have a new survey up next week on places you DO want to live. Anyhow, crack open a bottle of your favorite beverage and enjoy the latest in Collapse from the Collapse CafeTM on the Doomstead Diner and the folks from The Automatic Earth.

Snippets:

Nicole:

Just that the people need to understand that this is the model that we’ve been suggesting as to what’s going to happen is not a theory, it’s actually happening exactly the way we said it would. It’s just not happening everywhere at the same time because systems that are predatory pick off the little sick ones first. They work from the periphery towards the center as you said. But where we’re seeing things move more and more to the center now.

And China has been the the global engine of liquidity for the last while, and drives demand for absolutely everything. That’s now tipping over the edge and we are going to see those same consequences manifesting in countries in the center that do not see themselves as being in any way comparable to Greece, but they are, they’re just not there yet. The same dynamic ends up operating there. But when we tell people what’s happening people, they tend to think “oh well that’s just my theory”, but it’s not a theory, it’s actually happening and will in the future a lot more places…

RE:

Yeah it’s an ongoing phenomenon it’s definitely not something that you know is projected or you know happening in the future or something like that, collapse is ongoing now, it’s happening and you can watch. You can watch it progress, you can see all the different places where it manifests itself. Greece is one of course and Puerto Rico now as well…

Ilargi:

Civil War…That makes me think… People think the French are very good at protests right? But they haven’t seen the Chinese. The Chinese do protests like nobody else does. (RE: Yea…they get serious about it…) because it’s very bloody, very violent and I’ve been writing about this for years. I don’t see how China can not end up in that kind of thing…

Interview Nicole Foss for ‘A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity’

Jul 212015

July 21, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 5:09 pm Finance Tagged with: Automatic Earth, crisis, interview, Melbourne, Nicole Foss, opportunity, Samuel Alexander, simpler way 10 Responses »

This almost 2-hour long interview was recorded in Samuel Alexander‘s backyard in a Melbourne suburb in April 2015. Part of it is slated to be used in a documentary called “A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity”, written and produced by Jordan Osmond and Samuel Alexander. The documentary is set for release in April 2016. (Kudos for picture and sound quality, guys!)

The fimmakers about their project:

The purpose of the documentary is to unflinchingly describe the overlapping crises of industrial civilisation and explain why a ‘simpler way’ of life, based on material sufficiency not limitless growth, signifies the only coherent response to those crises. The dominant mode of development today seeks to universalise high-consumption consumer lifestyles, but this is environmentally catastrophic and it has produced perverse inequalities of wealth. Even the privileged few who have attained material affluence rarely find it satisfying or fulfilling, because consumerism just leaves people feeling empty and alone. Consequently, our forthcoming documentary seeks to show why genuine progress today means rejecting consumerism, transcending growth economics, and building new forms of life based on permaculture, simple living, renewable energy, and localised economies.

But what does that mean? And how should we go about building a new world? Mainstream environmentalism calls on us to take shorter showers, recycle, buy ‘green’ products, and turn the lights off when we leave the room, but these measures are grossly inadequate. We need more fundamental change – personally, culturally, and structurally. Most of all, we need to reimagine the good life beyond consumer culture and begin building a world that supports a simpler way of life. This does not mean hardship or deprivation. It means focusing on what is sufficient to live well. The premise of our documentary is that a simple life can be a good life.

One of the main concerns driving this documentary, and the Wurruk’an project more generally, is the uncomfortable realisation that even the world’s most successful ecovillages have ecological footprints that are too high to be universalised. In other words, even after many decades of the modern environmental movement, we still don’t have many or any examples of what a flourishing ‘one planet’ existence might look. This is highly problematic because if people do not have some understanding of what sustainability requires of us or what it might look like, it will be hard to mobilise individuals and communities to build such a world. A Simpler Way represents an attempt to envision and demonstrate what ‘one planet’ living might look like and provoke a broader social conversation about the radical implications of living in an age of limits.

We hope that this documentary will challenge and inspire people to explore a simpler way of life and to begin building sufficiency-based economies that thrive within planetary limits. If you feel this is a worthwhile film for social change, please support our project by donating here [link coming soon] and sharing the link with your networks.