Hi John,

I am sure you intend to mean well but you probably do not realise the
amount of domination carried in your message mainly by your language
choices but not only.

Thank you for coming out as a person who has worked in the extractive
industry it is very useful to know we have those ressources around here,
it would be good to know the level of risks you are willing to take
nowadays as people are dying facing this industry.
However, when you say:  things are terrible we cannot do anything but be
spiritual this is really hard to take from someone in such a privilege
position. Please do remember that many people and mostly cuitures are
currently threatened and dying, and if the planet turns out to be not
sustainable anymore you will be among the ones surviving while many of
them won't.  I respect eachone's spirituality but this is really not the
topic of this conversation. And if spirituality implies preserving
existing privileges then it really does not interest me any more.
Neither am I interested by the stories of you facing Sendaro Luminoso,
it is only what happens when you enter in those realms
You have been doing portrait of local people.... Really? How about doing
portrait of local US people,

You might not realise it but your message is really mansplannig and I do
not feel you are in position to set morality particularly when you are
speaking to someone facing current threats in their community.

lots of love to you and I wish you a very wonderful time in your
beautiful and huge Colorado property-

Heart

natacha



On 11/17/24 18:07, John Hopkins wrote:
> Hi Vanessa -
>
> Some of my random opinions follow:
>
> You might be a bit shocked to learn that I was involved in early
> petroleum exploration just a couple hundred km northeast of
> Mocoa—around Yopal and Paz de Ariporo—when I worked for Union Oil of
> California, back in the early 1980s. I was an exploration geophysicist
> and worked on projects in Kenya, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, the South
> China Sea, Botswana, Alaska, and elsewhere. (I studied at the top US
> engineering school for extractives, the Colorado School of Mines, 50
> years ago.) I now call that period of my life as employed by the
> "Imperialist Vanguard". I worked under the protection of the Colombian
> military that was equipped by the US military. This because there were
> active attacks on our work there. That was the period when
> international extractives workers were under threat of kidnapping
> (i.e., the Sendaro Luminoso in Peru), so I traveled as a periodisto
> (journalist) when I was out and about. Although my Spanish wasn't very
> good, I did meet some really wonderful people. I made many portraits
> of the local people, and when I was giving a report to the senior
> executives of the oil company, I would show those images. This
> completely freaked the oil people out.
>
> Unfortunately, there can be no copper mining without oil, so they will
> both have to continue together. And without both those and thousands
> of other mining/extractive processes around the globe, we would not be
> typing messages to each other here. I think a 'clean transition' is a
> fabrication, based on what I have observed of collective human
> behavior over the past decades, essentially no one will give up what
> they have, and what they have is what got us to where we are now.
>
> What can we do about that except to admit that we are just part of a
> moment in the cosmos where a Life-form evolved on a single planet and
> existed for a short period of time, and then vanished.
>
> I've been silent on the list as I am busy preparing to sell an eight
> hectare property in far western Colorado where I started a project to
> re-wild the land that had been heavily abused with cattle/horse
> raising and cleared of most natural vegetation. I've been doing this
> for the past five years, since Covid, while working full-time remote
> for the Colorado Geological Survey as an editor, writer, media
> producer, and archivist. I am selling so that I can eventually leave
> the US next year and move back to Iceland. This, given the continuing
> destruction of the US system.
>
> There are no technological solutions to the problems facing the human
> species. With a global population over 8 billion people, the world
> cannot sustain 7 billion of those at all. It is my opinion that the
> extractives industry will continue to do whatever it can to get to
> any/all resources until there are no longer any left that can be
> gotten. Or, with a catastrophic environmental collapse that takes the
> human population down, there won't be the collective ability to
> operate the very complex systems of extraction and processing—that is
> a downward spiral of both technological and social system failure that
> further compromises human life.
>
> I realize that me being alive in this moment is a direct result of
> temporary technological control over the natural system. It is only
> temporary. Nature will always win, which certainly means that homo
> sapiens will join the other 99.9999% of life forms who have already
> gone extinct in the 4.5-billion-year history of the planet.
>
> As for environmental problems related to extractives, consider that
> there are more than 50,000 abandoned mining sites in the US state of
> Colorado alone. Some of these affect surface and/or groundwater
> supplies (which are otherwise dwindling from climate change).
>
> I think we need to manage our grief while being absolutely pragmatic
> about what governments can do about any of this (nothing??!?!).
> Working local, valuing what life we have in the moment, facilitating
> awareness of the issues among younger folks.
>
> The psycho-spiritual dimensions of this suffering Life are beyond all
> technologies to both help or damage.
>
> But what does it mean to even have a spiritual life these days? What
> does it mean to be alive in this moment?
>
> etc. Sry, this is a brief morning tirade. I've got to get out and
> continue to work on maintenance issues before winter really hits hard.
>
> cheers,
> John
>
> On 11/15/24 6:46 AM, Vanessa Gocksch wrote:
>> Hello Rob, thank you for considering my other perspective...When I
>> say a cry for help, it specifically refers to people in the south
>> (and or Mocoa where I am specifically) needing help with internet
>> security  and also more people / funding to support the environment
>> issues in the South (example; against this mega mine for "clean
>> transition") . Also having more living Europeans here serves to
>> protect the local activists, such as is the example of Zapatistas in
>> Chiapas where there is a constant flux of European activists that are
>> present only as "observers" (which avoids people getting killed).
>> Westerns working down here can also create more international
>> awareness (as they are connected to network in the north) and bridges
>> , bring PR / communication / promotion ideas and take a lot more
>> risks with what they do in the south because they don't actually live
>> here....
>> If you are envisioning post oil as a democratically orchestrated move
>> away from fossil fuels and into "the clean transition" with billions
>> of solar panels and wind turbines adorning our planet, this big
>> copper mine that is about to destroy a watershed of the amazon has
>> everything to do with this particular post oil scenario.....But
>> perhaps when you speak of  post oil you are referring to post
>> civilisational collapse? Or perhaps both post options...?
>>
>> Wishing you a fine day.
>> Vanessa
>