The inevitable Great Dieoff has begun, and it will not be pretty. It was foreordained from the moment we adopted the insane idea, predicated on the money system, that more is always better; that infinite growth of production, consumption, and population was ever possible, much less the unquestioned mandate of every economy on the planet. Infinite growth on a finite planet is the very definition of terminal cancer.

Our personal challenge is this: how can we best prepare ourselves and especially our youth for a traumatic future that will only grow more traumatic as time goes on? My own short answer is this: grow gardens, grow community, grow awareness--by learning, teaching, healing, and creating...as long as we can. Let us incrementally emancipate ourselves, our neighbors, and those we love from dependence on the source of the cancer--fossil fuels and the money system, by cultivating a gift economy among those we know based on positive-sum forms of capital--that is, biological, experiential, intellectual, social, and cultural capital. (Money, conversely, is Zero Sum capital--the rich always get richer while the poor get poorer...)