Time's Up!
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Keith Farnish has it right: time has practically run out, and the 'system' is the problem. Governments are under the thumb of fossil fuel special interests - they will not look after our and the planet's well-being until we force them to do so, and that is going to require enormous effort. --Professor James Hansen, Columbia University
I think we are beginning to see mounting awareness of the gravity and scope of the crisis afflicting life on earth. Keith's Time's Up! is a huge contribution to understanding the extremity of our situation and providing ideas for facing up to ending a fundamentally false and devouring technoculture. --John Zerzan, author of Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections and other books
I think we are beginning to see mounting awareness of the gravity and scope of the crisis afflicting life on earth. Keith's Time's Up! is a huge contribution to understanding the extremity of our situation and providing ideas for facing up to ending a fundamentally false and devouring technoculture. --John Zerzan, author of Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections and other books
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This is not an environmental book, even though it is concerned with the environment. It is not a book to save the world, even though the world is clearly in trouble. Ultimately, Time's Up is a book about survival; about ensuring that every individual human has the means to save herself or himself from the global crisis that is unfolding. People know that the climate is changing, that species are being removed from the Earth at a rapidly increasing rate, that entire ecosystems are becoming shadows of their former richness; they know, but they do not understand. The global environmental crisis is closing in on humanity from all directions, yet the crisis barely registers on this culture's list of problems.As we stand, humanity is doomed to a collapse that will leave only a few nomads, and a toxic, barely survivable Earth in its wake. So why is nothing being done beyond changing light bulbs, recycling and buying organic food? It's certainly not for a lack of good reasons. Humans have no motivation stronger than survival, yet the culture that dominates - the culture we call Industrial Civilization - has created a set of priorities that value financial wealth, the possession of superfluous goods and short, cheap thrills, above that most basic need.In short, we are prepared to die in order to live a life that is killing us. Time's Up is all about changing this. It describes what our actions are doing to the very things on Earth that we depend on for survival, at scales that we rarely contemplate. It arms us with the tools to free us from the culture that has blinded us for centuries, and which will allow us to live lives that will give the Earth, and ourselves, a future. Time's Up! proposes something radical, fundamental and frightening; something long-term, exhilarating and absolutely necessary; something totally uncivilized.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent and topical book, recommended!,
By
This review is from: Time's Up!: An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis (Paperback)
`time's up!' is an excellent book highlighting the destructiveness of the current civilisation in rampantly and suicidally destroying the biosphere and offering a better individual alternative. I was already pretty clued up on most of the issues already, but the book gave new details and connections and has an effect on my thinking and life. Recommended.
9 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The final solution for industrial civilisation,
By
This review is from: Time's Up!: An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis (Paperback)
Time's Up is an unusual book. It begins with a series of chapters that zoom out from the microscopic to whole ecosystems - an elaborate way of showing the sheer scope of our meddling in the earth's systems, from viruses to forests, and the extent to which we have left ourselves vulnerable. It could be the little things that get us, the changing disease patterns that climate change and industrial farming are creating, or it could be the big things, like deforestation. Either way, "nothing is so dependent on other forms of life as humans, the ultimate consumers."
So who are we to have put ourselves outside the rest of creation in this way? And does it matter? Having set out the parameters of the problem, Farnish spends the next section of the book examining humanity and our place in the world. Eventually he narrows our dilemma down to cultural factors: "much of humanity has become a commercial entity" he concludes, and "sustainability is not just about the use of natural resources; it is about the use of our lives." The solution is to reconnect to the earth, and the only way to do that is to unplug from civilisation. Industrial civilization is "fatally flawed and needs to be removed from the face of the earth, before the inevitable ecological collapse brings it down in far more horrible circumstances." It's an extreme and controversial solution, choosing a primitive wilderness rather than trying to fix or change what we have. This all-or-nothing approach is bound to alienate a lot of readers. If you're an environmentalist or campaigner, it basically tells you that you're wasting your time, and you should give up and go and live in the woods. That's a rather hopeless outlook, and in my opinion a needlessly final solution that Farnish hasn't even taken himself, but it will be music to the ears of those with survivalist ambitions. In summary, a real mix of the insightful and the impractical, but worth a read all the same.
3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Burn your money, don't buy this book!,
By Neil C. Taylor (Aberdeenshire, Scotland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Time's Up!: An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis (Paperback)
I like books that make me think or at least present a coherent argument. This is not one of them. The thrust behind this work is to provide the reader with capitalised catchphrases such as "The Culture Of Maximum Harm" and to build a wall with them behind which the "anti-science" eco-warriors can hide in self-satisfied, smug, self-righteousness. It reads very much like a Scientology handbook; redefining the rest of "us" as dysfunctional individuals and selling a solution to problems we never knew we had.
If modern culture is a badly leaking boat then the target audience of this book are trying to scuttle it instead of helping to bail it out or to make better boats. They want us to swim with the natural currents of life... and other such meaningless metaphors. The irony here is that I am already very familiar with self-suficiency arguments and ideas such as going "off-grid" and disconnecting yourself from being dependent on any sort of "society" or "civilisation" - I was introduced to them decades ago in the science-fiction novels of Robert A. Heinlein. In those, the libertarian and anarchic ideas of self-reliance and self-sufficiency were presented as the gateway to a technological sci-fi future where "science" was very much king. The complete opposite of Keith Farnish's Shangri-La. I've also come across this same idea of abandoning the herd-like masses to become self-reliant "producers" and not parasitic "consumers" in Ayn Rand's excellent "Atlas Shrugged" novel. Once again, there, the idea is presented as a way to achieve scientific progress and to advance humanity into a new age - as individuals and not sheep. The ideas in "Time's Up!" would not produce individuals just a new breed of sheep. I was continually struck by how similar Keith Farnish's proposed paradise would be to the medieval christian mono-culture in Europe - you know, before the renaissance and the rise of rational and scientific thought; where you had to follow the unknowable word of God unflinchingly in case you "upset the balance of nature". At the very end of the book he lists the "Key Skills For Going Beyond Civilisation" and the most important long term skills that he favours are "Sociology" and "Political Analysis" - Douglas Adams proposed a place for people with just those skills - the 'B' Ark: I have Mr Farnish's ticket right here.
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