A Blindness to Systems

"I feel my fate in what I cannot fear," poet Theodore Roethke wrote in his most famous poem, "The Waking." He could have been speaking for any of us; as individuals, communities, or societies, it's not the problems we dread but the ones we're unable to take seriously, or fail to recognize as problems at all, that end up dragging us down.

Some of the responses to last week's Archdruid Report post brought that point forcefully home to me. The theme of that post, as regular readers will remember,...