Evolution may be a controversial issue for many Christians, but it is primarily a theological and ontological one. Climate change, on the other hand, is visible, and is occurring in the moment. It is already affecting some people and will affect an increasing number of people as it progresses.

There is no time for theological debates; people’s lives are at stake. Christians of all stripes should be banding together to do whatever we can to help mitigate the causes, to “adopt more sober lifestyles,” as Pope Benedict put it, and to provide whatever ministry is necessary to those affected by it.

• The Choices We Do And Don’t Have
• Cleaner, Greener Lives in Oregon
• Simplicity and its Implications
• The Five-Carat Commute
• Suppleness And Going Beyond First Glance

Our conversation was like a brisk, invigorating mind-hike from one topic of mutual interest to another: public transit in rural areas; the Alice B. Toeclips Awards;  her organization’s board (”they’re brilliant”); how we each met our partners; bike camping (the answer to how she met her partner);  dragonboat racing (I learned that Portland has a team of blind paddlers); and politics. Stephanie dropped my jaw by informing me she’s a registered Republican. [If you know Portland's sustainability community very well, you'll understand the geography of my jaw.]  For a change of pace, she energetically explained to me, from being a Green. Plus, she’s fiscally conservative. A nimble and unconventional line of reasoning

Stephanie, the WPC and I all share the belief that streets are for people, and walking is good for people, planet and communities. If I’m lucky, Stephanie will be a speaker at the next event I’m holding. But I’m joining the Willamette Pedestrian Coalition regardless.

photo courtesy of BikePortland.org

• The Case For Hybrids and Sex
• The 99th Day Of A Greenish President
• Heat Wave: Slow Down II
• Civil Disobedience Against Coal Plant Today
• Responses To: How Does Change Happen?

“It’s true we’ve been house-hunting,” I replied, “but that’s not the reason I haven’t been posting. All my writing-time has been going into a fiction project that has me entranced. I should just let people know that.”  She nodded: good idea.

Similar to the last three weeks, I won’t be posting much at this stage. If my blog was paid work, we’d probably call this a sabbatical. I find that blogging for the public, much as it means to me, is different from being creative on one’s own terms. I feel joyfully mesmerized by the fiction I am writing, similar to the experience of falling in love with someone, or finally landing and starting a job you had wanted very much to land. And the fiction actually has nothing to do with sustainability per se, but is about a dancer with a tumultuous marriage and a vibrant faith community. I’m seeing that while I’m passionate about sustainability, it doesn’t define me. It doesn’t circumscribe my life.

And interestingly, going into my fictional world is making me even closer to my husband. Sometimes following the trail of soul opens our hearts wider like that.

So that’s what’s going on with me. Plus, I’m excited I’m taking the train to Seattle tomorrow for a two-day business trip. And speaking of work, this month I celebrate two years at my cool job in transportation options!

• Breeding Solutions, Not Enemies
• More Tips On Working For Rent
• Mid-Winter Haiku
• A Beautiful Marriage of Dance And Sport
• Optimists As Problem-Solvers

Sometimes, though, we do get what we want. Examples: Portland General Electric has announced it will shut down Boardman, the only coal-fired energy plant in Oregon, by 2020 (coal emissions are a prime source of global warming). And on the personal level, my desire to have more community in my life got advanced last night, when the group of friends attending our dinner party enthusiastically agreed to my proposal that we get together every month for dinner, rotating as hosts. I am elated! We actually opened our party with a toast to the eventual demise of Boardman. I pointed out that Thor’s successful program helped build the voluntary market for renewable energy that may have helped to turn the tide.

The topic last night that most fired our conversational imagination was this: how do we constructively deal with things we don’t like? How can we wield positive influence? On the micro level, a bar with an unpleasant vampire theme has recently opened in my friend Linda’s neighborhood. Let’s just say this vampire bar is called . . . . Lure. Linda is having a serious case of NIMBY concerning Lure — but doesn’t want to pursue the usual exhausting process of petitions and city council meetings. She’s devised instead a plan that’s both subversive and nonviolent (note that last Monday, my sodden and bedraggled day at Disneyland, was Martin Luther King Day).

“We simply all go to this vampire bar called Lure. And hang out there,” Linda explained energetically.”All the young people they’re trying to attract see us and are, pardon the term, horrified. Word gets out that Lure is for square middle-aged people. By the next weekend their reputation is ruined. They’re as popular as if they have garlic on their breath.”

“With our presence, we put our stake in the ground,” I said passionately.

“This strikes at the heart of the matter,” Leigh added feelingly.

“Nobody would want to be caught dead there,” Ken nodded soberly.

Thor noted that this plan could also be deployed at the sex club in downtown Portland. “We bring a few decks of cards, spread out over several tables, and make ourselves comfortable.”

“We play Go Fish and order 7-Up all night.”

“The swingers who stream through the door take one look at us and are convinced they’re in the wrong place.”

“They’d want no part of us.”

“They’d turn tail,” Sam said. “I mean, they’d run in the opposite direction.”

Sorry. All that may be more information about my dinner party than you wanted, so I’ll stop. To close the loop, all the joking around about vampire bars and sex clubs ended up tying back in to the eventual closing of the Boardman coal plant. The common thread was the power of social norms, i.e. people are heavily influenced by those around them, and are uncomfortable with sharp differences. Both people and companies would sometimes rather change their behavior or location than feel out of place.

To my point: as Oregon’s energy mix replaces coal with cleaner fuels, it will put subtle pressure on other states to reduce their use of coal, the cheapness of which has invited both heavy dependence on it, and denial of its central role in causing global warming. Which ties back in to my earlier mentioned passion: community. It’s a powerful thing, and makes each of us more powerful as we become steeped in it.

• Coal, Incandescents and Conservation
• Looking Ahead: Dancing & Singing On My 50th
• Revisiting Run 7 On 7
• The Best Entertainment I’ve Ever Had
• Join Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben

Like many others, Thor and I have given money for relief in Haiti. We chose Mercy Corps, who happen to be based here in Portland. But it’s their approach to service rather than their location that attracts us: they seek to turn crisis into opportunity by partnering with the survivors of disasters, often through social entrepreneurialism.  We donated online here, but we also could have mailed a check to  Haiti Earthquake Fund; Dept NR; PO Box 2669; Portland, OR 97208.  Another way to donate would be by calling 1-888-256-1900. (Sociable me, I like the idea of being able to talk with someone while giving. They might be able to tell me a story that makes helping more vivid and real to me.)

I’ve read reports of research that people who give and also who volunteer are happier than people who don’t. My personal experience is in harmony with that, i.e. giving and volunteering makes me a happier person (though they would also be the right things to do even if they didn’t benefit me). I picked up this quote from an article in Grist, though I couldn’t place the link: “But the amount of money people spent on themselves had no appreciable effect on how happy they were.”

It’s easy to tell ourselves that disasters like the Haitians are experiencing could never happen to us. Not true. Almost all of us on the West Coast of the United States, for example, live in earthquake country, with ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ being the operative phrase concerning a major earthquake of our own. Here are seven basic steps to earthquake safety and preparedness. We could choose to turn the eventual crisis of natural disaster into opportunity for ourselves here in the first part of the year, i.e. the opportunity to become prepared for it. Action is a good way of dealing with fear.

Note: this may be my last post for several days — I’m on a happy vacation, visiting family in Southern California as well as wonderful friends I’ve had since 1971.

• Seeking To Be Sustainable In An Earthquake
• Winner Of The Contest!
• Best Antidote to Terrorism: Emotional Fitness
• Top Five New Years Resolutions That Make A Difference
• Renewables Are Not Sugar-Daddies, But Equal-Opportunity Lovers

• Staying Safe During Snow Adventures
• Nature On Its Own Terms
• Enchanted With What I’ve Already Got, Part I
• How To Follow Through On New Year’s Resolutions
• Happy Birthday to the Unconquered Sun

Answer: the Nissan Leaf, an 100% electric vehicle (EV) coming out later this year. Thor and I went to a Nissan-sponsored event last month here in Portland at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, where we sat like tourists so they could conjure the photoshop creation to the right. (Silly, but then, sometimes I am silly). In reality, we saw the car, but couldn’t touch it.

Both the city of Portland and the state of Oregon are investing heavily in the electric fueling grid that will let a whole fleet of Leafs populate our region soon. They’re being pioneers in this arena, similar to Oregon’s history with the bottle bill and disciplined land use.

Does my household plan to replace our current hybrid, chosen after ever so much careful research, with a Nissan Leaf? Nah, we buy a car about once per decade, at most. In truth, no car draws my passion. Rather, the way my body feels when I walk and bike turns me on, and letting someone else drive, as with vanpooling and public transit, is much more relaxing to me than operating a car.

That said, I wish Nissan well with the Leaf. Within the context of our car-dependent culture, this innovation sharply reduces emissions, at least when the electricity mix fueling the EV’s has the relatively high proportion of hydropower to coal that Oregon has.

• Electric Vehicles: Truly Green, Or No?
• Doing The Unthinkable
• Bike. Walk. Joy.
• Soaring Above PZEV To Zero Emissions
• The Case For Hybrids and Sex

Take a brief trip with me back into my youth. When I was a child and then a teenager, I sometimes had nightmares in which evil creatures were out to kill me. I would freeze up with fear in my bed, even after awakening. Sometimes I went to school exhausted, still feeling intimidated. One night right after I turned 20, the nightmare climbed to a new level, taking the form of a man-eating tiger crouching on me. I could physically feel its claws on my back and its hot breath on my neck. I had recently completed a cross-country journey to start in at a new college, a trip that had been hard and challenging, with scary moments, but full of new friends, camping in wildish places, joy and adventure. I emerged from that summer exhilarated: yes, I could make my way in the world on my own, away from my parents, as a young adult.  Faced with this nightmare on steroids, for the first time it occurred to me to not cringe and cower, but to dare the evil visitor to kill me. “Do it!” I mentally yelled at it. “I’m not afraid to die!”

The menacing creature dissolved, and I found myself amazed and alone in a peaceful room. Evidently I could have routed the monsters in the nightmares long ago – if I had defied them by being unafraid to die. It didn’t matter that they weren’t objectively real, because they were real in their effect on me. Summoning the courage to face them down was in my sphere of influence, i.e. the realm of  my own power and impact, and plugging in to that courage set me free from fear and despair.

Fast forward to the present. As much as people don’t want to hear this (who would? I don’t) I do believe our civilization, at least in its current form, is headed for collapse. For just one example of why I believe that, our atmosphere, the one that keeps us (and all other creatures) alive in this surprisingly delicate world, can safely contain only 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide. We’re already at 390 and climbing faster than expected, with the Copenhagen summit last month failing to achieve agreements that will rein us in to the 350 threshold. The upshot: it’s not in my sphere of influence to prevent collapse, and I accept that. I don’t like it, but I accept it.

Let me clarify: I’m grateful that a lot of hard-working people, including but not limited to activists, writers, scientists, innovative businesses and even some politicians, are devoting themselves to sustainability, to preventing collapse. Of course I want all their work to succeed. They rarely use the term ‘collapse’, I imagine for the same reason I steered away from it for the first two years and three months I’ve been writing Diamond-Cut Life: the word ‘collapse’ doesn’t tend to win friends and influence people. The specter feels depressing, threatening.  Our instinct is to shudder and turn away, as if from the  image of our own gravestone.

The shuddering I still do at times , but the turning away I don’t.  Instead, I turn toward what is in my sphere of influence, i .e. keeping essential knowledge and practices and yes, joy, alive for the necessary rebuilding after our current fossil-fuel based culture collapses. Our human race evolved for more than 99% of our history without our current luxuries and conveniences, and it can continue without them, but it takes skills and knowledge that have become increasingly rare as most of us have devoted ourselves to consuming resources, often nonessential ones, rather than conserving or creating the resources essential to us. For instance, how many of us know how to grow food, repair clothes or repair our homes? Or get from place to place and entertain ourselves with little or no fossil fuels?

My sphere of influence includes practicing and helping others learn about the careful conservation of energy and heat, and gasoline, since the current abundance and relative cheapness of these things will not last. Food-wise, I’m a budding urban farmer who even as a dunce concerning carpentry projects manages to house and raise chickens that produce a plethora of eggs.  One of my most popular posts describes a very inexpensive but tasty meal that is also very low on the food chain. Similarly, I practice low-carbon cooking.

The world of the future will be water-constrained (already is in many places), hence I cultivate knowledge of xeroscaping. Transportation-wise, I practice and advocate  vanpooling and public transit, but even more, biking and walking.  More than anything and underpinning everything else is the practice of community, of  being interdependent and sharing moral support and resources, rather than isolating and trying to go it alone, in what Bill McKibben has termed hyperindividualism. For example, the skill of living with one or more other people — having a roommate — conserves a lot of resources and saves tens of thousands of dollars over the years as compared to living alone.

And because I am addicted to fun, I indulge in and write about the many pleasures, sports and forms of entertainment that are sustainable and don’t hinge on fossil fuels.  Don’t get me started on the many avenues. Well, OK, just a few. My favorites are singing and playing games;  reading good books and then discussing them; running and hiking and observing  nature; dancing, whether with old friends or friends we’ve just met. Most of these, and many other wonderful pastimes, are common to people of  all times and places. Keeping these juicy practices alive is something we can all do, rather than passively outsource our fun to movies, TV, the internet, spectator sports and the electronics industry. I’ve enjoyed all of these at various times, myself. Yet there’s no getting around how much these sedentary forms of entertainment have contributed to our culture’s high obesity rate. To be blunt, being sedentary make us physically weaker.

I don’t feel despair that I cannot help to prevent collapse. I believe that with many individual and sub-group exceptions, humanity in general isn’t mature enough yet to deal with something as hard as global warming. Maturity means being strong in hard moments, or hard centuries. The overall state of humanity I do not take on as my problem. I feel grounded hope, because  I am doing all I can, in my sphere of influence. I will never command armies or be a powerful person. But I am living in my power.

If you’re still with me and you had a hard time reading a piece about post-collapse, thank you for persevering here, to the end. I had a harder time writing this than anything else I’ve posted, and it’s the longest piece I’ve done as well, because it’s so complex. My final thought is that my spiritual faith, my belief in a compassionate God who has a greater plan than I am required to understand, is woven into my life like a quietly shimmering thread of gold.

As always, I welcome your comments. I’m especially interested in the paths other people have taken in facing down their fears and finding their sphere of influence.

• Embracing Change
• Nature On Its Own Terms
• Being Guided Across the Divide
• Top Ten Tips For Entrepeneurs, Part I
• Building The Web of Community

A lot of our intentions are to continue things we’ve been doing, but with more creativity and excellence, such as our jobs (Thor works in renewable energy and I work in transportation options). Another example of this is tutoring Mahamudi to become fluent in reading (Mahamudi is our 13 year old friend from Somalia).

The big new thing for Ali and Thor in 2010 is that after lots of discussion we plan to buy and move into a somewhat larger home, while staying in our  Mount Tabor neighborhood, and rent out our current home. I initially resisted this idea since I’m a big believer that small is beautiful, small is sustainable, I love simplicity, plus moving is a big pain and Americans do way too much of it, la la la la.

Here is why I’ve come around: a somewhat (not wildly larger) home will enable us to practice more community. While we’ve had a number of house guests since I moved in in 2003, they are seriously cramped in the room that holds both our desks plus all of Thor’s clothes. Two bathrooms instead of the current single bathroom will feel more hospitable to them, and the second bathroom will also facilitate our having an ongoing housemate. The housemate’s monthly rent (we’ll charge $500/month including utilities, a switch from our historic work-for-rent housemate situation) will mean our overall expenses will go up only slightly.

The other reason is that we think it’s good to invest in real estate, not just in stocks, for our eventual retirement, or financial independence, as we usually call it. Stocks are volatile, and I personally don’t see the capitalist system as it’s configured, that they are founded on, to be stable or sustainable. more soon.

• Top Ten Tips For Living With Others, Part II
• Dancing, Reading, Fully Alive
• Top Ten Tips For Living With Others, Part I
• More Tips On Working For Rent
• About Furloughs And Household Finances

Here is the comment I posted just now on Juliet’s site:

I admire your good attitude toward what sounds like record snow levels in Edinburgh. I confess I find cold, snowy winters difficult (growing up in sub-tropical Southern California was a bit formative, I’m afraid). Accepting the natural world on ITS terms instead of thinking the natural world ought to be accommodating and coddling us is one of the many things I like about your blog.

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Soon I’ll be posting the sequel to Alison Cassandra Barcelona. The working title is Joyful Vitality And Sphere Of Influence.

photo courtesy of Lisa

• Beyond Saving Money And Losing Weight
• Winter Storms: Slow Down, Snuggle In
• This And That, Approaching A Vacation
• Wishes Aren’t Horses
• The Happy Greed Of Summer