Human activity is no longer directly shaped by the global ecosystem, although it must ultimately harmonize with it, and our abilities to anticipate and manipulate have grown to the point where the evolutionary mandate of adaptive fit is far less evident than our spectacular ability to adapt the environment to fit our purposes. It is indeed this state of affairs that generates our sense that the name of the game is who is the fittest. The fittest humans are often understood be those who best manipulate their contexts to suit their purposes, and we have extrapolated this perception to declare that evolution is all about such dynamics of power.

This disconnect between our perception of how things work and how things actually work is generating countless planetary and existential crises. We have specialized and elaborated our rapid temporal framework and achieved unprecedented mastery over our immediate circumstances, in the process detaching our responses from groundings in the slower processes of nature. We have become the fastest-living creature on earth, producing more than the earth can absorb or sustain, changing entire ecosystems and environments faster than lifeforms can adjust, and straining our own capacity to deal with our ever more dense, eventful, experience-packed lives in which the dominant feeling is that we never have enough time.

What do we value the most? That which is scarce. Time is surely scarce. When I inhabited the corporate world I had time for no one.

One terrible evening, Robin told me how unhappy she was. My response was that I was so busy working to provide all these things. I asked her what more did she and the children want. She replied "You".

It took years to rearrange my life. We live on a fraction of the money we used to have. But we have time - lots of it.

Living in the country helps as did moving to PEI.

All is surely not lost?

U.S. car sales are a shadow of what they once were, and in a world of triple-digit oil prices, they will become even fainter. There were four million fewer cars on American roads last year than there were the year before. As oil prices (CL-FT79.71-1.08-1.34%)climb ever higher, some 50 million more vehicles will be heading for the exit lane over the next decade.

Is that the kind of market outlook the taxpayer should be investing in?

But invest they have. American taxpayers ponied up some $40-billion last year. The federal government in Canada, along with the provincial government of Ontario, anted up $14.5-billion in direct taxpayers’ assistance to GM and Chrysler—a bailout equal to half those jurisdictions’ entire annual corporate tax collection.

Just think of the public outrage that would follow if the government gave the money directly to the oil industry instead. Yet the auto and oil industries are two sides of the same coin—over half of all the oil used in North America is burned in our cars.

During World War II, Detroit went from manufacturing cars to making tanks and bombers literally overnight. Today, couldn’t all those unemployed auto workers be re-employed to make what their economy really needs—more public transit vehicles—so that when those 50 million Americans get off the road, there’s a bus or mass rapid transit vehicle for them to get on?

That way, if we’re going to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, we’ll be investing in our future, not in our past.

What if there was a massive Rail project - now that would be interesting!

Michigan, which has the highest unemployment rate of any state, has been aggressive in offering support for start-up companies, particularly in Detroit. The Michigan Small Business and Technology Development Center, which offers support and counseling, counts 20 small businesses, and 400 new jobs, created last year in the three-county area around Detroit, and the center expects that tally to grow as it completes its accounting in the coming weeks. That was down from 41 new businesses in 2008, but on par with the 23 such start-ups in 2007 and 24 in 2006.

At Wayne State University’s business incubator, TechTown, housed in a former auto plant, 150 companies jostle for space — up from one when the building opened five years ago.

“I find it inspiring,” Peter Bregman, the chief executive of Bregman Partners, a New York management consulting firm, said of what is happening in Detroit. “There’s something about that feeling — ‘Maybe America abandoned us, but we’re not going to abandon us.’ ”

Detroit is at ground zero - it may be where much of the US economy will go as the traditional jobs disappear forever. What is so hopeful is to see how at rock bottom, people get out there and create their own future.

No more looking for someone else - looking to ourselves!

I don’t think many people grasp just how much job creation we need to climb out of the hole we’re in. You can’t just look at the eight million jobs that America has lost since the recession began, because the nation needs to keep adding jobs — more than 100,000 a month — to keep up with a growing population. And that means that we need really big job gains, month after month, if we want to see America return to anything that feels like full employment.

How big? My back of the envelope calculation says that we need to add around 18 million jobs over the next five years, or 300,000 jobs a month. This puts last week’s employment report, which showed job losses of “only” 11,000 in November, in perspective. It was basically a terrible report, which was reported as good news only because we’ve been down so long that it looks like up to the financial press.

So if we’re going to have any real good news, someone has to take responsibility for creating a lot of additional jobs.

Paul Krugman puts the important job numbers on the table and then says that the Fed has to make this a priority. I agree but I think that the nature of "jobs" needs a revisit as well. If we don't understand "job" we may not get what we need.

Between 1941, America' entry into WWII, and about 1980 it was well paying manufacturing jobs that built the American economy. But since the mid 1980's these jobs have gone. To China or replaced by machines. They have been replaced by minimum wage service jobs if at all. Today the number of manufacturing jobs is the same as in 1942!

While this has gone on White collar jobs are also disappearing - this is driven by the web revolution. Journalists are the most obvious but this trend is thinning out many very well paying jobs and entire industries of blue collar jobs - the paper industry, printing etc.

This is not your usual recession. It is a work revolution. It is like the industrial revolution itself. What happened then was "Enclosure". All the work attached to the land and the rural communities was destroyed by the revolution in agriculture where machines and new practices did away with a system that depended on lots of people. Where did they go? In England 3 million went to London by 1860. Millions went to Manchester etc and formed the basis of the Industrial revolution.

There are NO JOBS TO GO BACK TO. Just as there was no village and rural work in 1840.

We have to re-invent our economy just as the Victorians re-invented theirs.

A start will be local food, local energy and web infrastructure.

Simply throwing money at "Jobs" will be to waste it and millions of lives.

Between the fall of 1973 and the spring of 1974 world oil prices quadrupled.

The effects of this sudden increase were dramatic everywhere, but particulary so here in Prince Edward Island, Canada. With 100% of electricity coming from fossil fuel generators, gasoline and home heating oil prices that were already higher than elsewhere, and a lower per-capita income than most of Canada, the so-called "energy crisis" hit the Island hard, and spawned interest in looking at sustainable alternatives to meeting the Island's energy needs.

Politically Prince Edward Island was well-poised to take steps in this direction: in the midst of a bold 15-year "Comprehensive Development Plan," the Island's provincial government was already on a drive to modernize the economy and infrastructure. Premier Alex Campbell, spurred on by his executive secretary Andy Wells, who had become interested in the work of the Club of Rome, of E.F. Schumacher and of Louis Mumford, redirected some of this drive for modernization into an exploration of energy alternatives, taking an uncommonly broad, ecological view of the challenges.  At a 1976 speech in Montreal, Campbell laid out the broad view of his administration:

What I am presenting to you then, is a suggestion, not for a new society, but for a new direction to our society. One that emphasizes self-reliance and involvement of our citizens rather than encouraging them to be passive consumers. It accentuates decentralization of capital and decision making, rather than intensive control. I envision a highly diversified society. I believe this is in keeping not only with our traditional values but also with our modern aspirations for a pluralistic society.

This would be a bold statement for a leader to make today; in 1976 it was doubly so coming from Campbell, leader of a small, remote, conservative province averse to dramatic change.

Peter has done a wonderful job here - This is a compelling story - Told with passion by David - "I came for a weekend and stayed 35 years..."

Surely we can take Premier Campbell's words then and apply them today - Work to shift our society to "one that emphasizes self reliance and involvement of our citizens ..."

As a 60 year old with a grand daughter, I feel that I can no longer simply talk and exhort. I have tried to do a few things at home but it is not enough.

Sophia is one year old - what will life be like when she is 60? Will I die knowing that I have done my bit?

The Beltway crowd and the Einsteins of high finance who never saw this economic collapse coming are now telling us with their usual breezy arrogance that the Great Recession is probably over. Their focus, of course, is on data, abstractions like the gross domestic product, not the continued suffering of living, breathing human beings struggling with the nightmare of joblessness.

Even Mr. Obama, in an interview with The Times, gave short shrift to the idea of an additional economic stimulus package, telling John Harwood a few weeks ago that the economy had likely turned a corner. “As you know,” the president said, “jobs tend to be a lagging indicator; they come last.”

The view of most American families is somewhat less blasé. Faced with the relentless monthly costs of housing, transportation, food, clothing, education and so forth, they have precious little time to wait for this lagging indicator to come creeping across the finish line.

Americans need jobs now, and if the economy on its own is incapable of putting people back to work — which appears to be the case — then the government needs to step in with aggressive job-creation efforts.

Nearly one in four American families has suffered a job loss over the past year, according to a survey released by the Economic Policy Institute. Nearly 1 in 10 Americans is officially unemployed, and the real-world jobless rate is worse.

We’re running on a treadmill that is carrying us backward. Something approaching 10 million new jobs would have to be created just to get back to where we were when the recession began in December 2007. There is nothing currently in the works to jump-start job creation on that scale.

A massive long-term campaign to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure — which would put large numbers of people to work establishing the essential industrial platform for a truly 21st-century American economy — has not seriously been considered. Large-scale public-works programs that would reach deep into the inner cities and out to hard-pressed suburban and rural areas have been dismissed as the residue of an ancient, unsophisticated era.

We seem to be waiting for some mythical rebound to come rolling in, magically equipped with robust job creation, a long-term bull market and paradise regained for consumers.

It ain’t happening.

This disconnect reminds me of the Vietnam War where the Generals fought a war based on statistics and the grunts fought the real war.

If unemployment lasts at this level, society will be gutted. It is not good enough to say that employment is a "lagging indicator". For in this recession the jobs are not going to return.

I see no evidence that the administration is looking at what is behind the numbers - that good jobs have been in decline since 1983 - that the number of manufacturing jobs is now at the level of 1940! - that the wait for a new job is longer than at any time recorded - that without a job people will have to lose their home.

I see evidence that the policy reaction is all about "we know how to do this" lets incent employment etc.

In reality what is required is a reinvention of the economy - re-localize work and control.

It's so frustrating to see how much a prisoner the White House is of the system.