Suburban Sustainable

Alchemy

2011-12-08T23:45:00.001-08:00

The Solstice is fast approaching and now is the perfect time to start thinking about the 2012 garden. In the not so dark days of winter here in Los Angeles, December is the perfect time to think about the foundation of all of our garden wealth. Before you review your portfolio at year end, take a moment to learn how to make gold in the Soil and Compost section. Investing in the Ponzi scheme of modern economics can't compare to applying a little alchemy to simple raw materials and creating some real wealth. No CDO's needed~!

Make Gold and Create Wealth!!

The alchemists devised all sorts of methods for creating gold but none are as simple as described here. No mysterious symbols, no hazardous ovens, there will be Earth, Water, Fire and Air however, and a certain amount of work, but the results, unlike the ancient alchemists, will be real. And it smells good too.

Let's have compost tea

Peak Oil WTF??

2011-11-29T23:27:00.001-08:00

If you have never heard the term, I have some new links and reading suggestions that might help to clear up the confusion. Peak Oil is old news - it's behind us, we can see it in the rear view mirror now (2005) - and that raises some serious questions about our way forward with this industrial society we have created.

Robert Hirsch explains in an interview:

The peak oil story is definitely a bad news story. There’s just no way to sugar-coat it, other than maybe to do what I’ve done on occasion and that is to say that by 2050 we’ll have it right and we will have come through the peak oil recession—quite probably a very deep recession. At some point we’ll come out of this because we’re human beings, and we just don’t give up. And I have faith in people ultimately. But it’s a bad news story and anybody’s who’s going to stand up and talk about the bad news story and is in a position of responsibility in the government needs to then follow immediately and say “here’s what we’re going to do about it,” and no one seems prepared to do that.

Peak oil is a bigger issue than health care, than federal budget deficits, and so forth. We’re talking about something that, to take a middle of the road position—not the Armageddon extreme and not the la-la optimism of some people—is going to be extremely damaging to the U.S. and world economies for a very long period of time. There are no quick fixes.

He further goes on to explain the ramifications.

"There are no quick fixes for something like this..."

His concern was that it would be sooner, rather than later as a soft landing would require 20 years to transition towards. Seems like we don't get that 20 years, so fasten your seat belts, put your tray in the upright position, and secure your oxygen mask before helping others. And plant a seed, or three.

Occupy your Garden

2011-11-22T00:39:00.001-08:00

The last few months have seen the emergence of the expected reaction to what has been created in our society over the last 150 years. The Occupy phenomenon has captured the attention of the world, and resonated across all sectors of our global society. The underlying plea seems to cry out "We want a different world!" and those with the most skin in the game, the young, are the first to raise the cry and rightly so.

As I look deeper, I can see the many threads that weave the tapestry of this emergent frustration, the economic justice thread being thematic, but also the threads of dignified work, food security, planetary stewardship and the realization that relying on a system based on trading digital chits which often represent a vicious plundering is no longer possible as we reach the limits to growth.

We have reached the limits of this current game and it is time to start a new one with new rules. "A world that works for everybody, a sacred world, a world of peace."

Starting the new game requires re-thinking the underlying premises of the current game and facing the realities of the future boldly, with no denial. There are a few points which can inform me as I move forward into the new game:

Limits to Economic Growth
Peak Oil
Need for a Suburban Transition
Climate Disruption

I can leave the big picture studies and projections to the professional academics. My concern here is how do I work this on a personal level, at the level of a suburban household outside of the large metropolis of Los Angeles. How do I teach my children and friends the reasons why we need to change, and the steps we can take toward a better, or at least survivable future? This blog will hopefully answer part of that question, my garden and life will answer the rest.

As just a single individual, a small man with my small suburban home, I can only work my own corner, I can only Occupy my own garden and be content with being a small cell in the vast body of ongoing change. But work here I can, and the new areas of this blog will hopefully teach as well as encourage. Compost, Soil, Gardens and Seed, Reusing, Reducing, and Recycling are my areas of interest. Reducing my reliance on the corporate system, living lightly on the planet, improving my mind and soul as I retreat from the consumer culture, making the effort in spite of the setbacks and my own ignorance, these are the steps I feel necessary to nudge along my society into a new form.

It is so overwhelming at times, facing the behemoth of modern industrial civilization, this global edifice that is eco-suicidal and even now beginning to tremble towards its' inevitable collapse.

But moving away from this is as simple as planting a seed. Planting a seed is the first step on this journey of a thousand miles.

I thank every one of the young and old who pitched a tent and Occupied a town, I thank you for overcoming the inertia and allowing Change to be seen now as not only possible, but inevitable.

Mountain Mandala

2011-09-20T10:43:00.001-07:00

Happiness Begins With Compost

2011-04-03T00:53:00.000-07:00

Fresh food. Healthy bodies. Smart minds. Well Being. Security. Warm in winter, cool in summer, and a nice hot shower. Computers, Gardens, and Music.   Abiding Happiness.

These are for me, the best of life, and the foundation required to realize my own potential as a sentient being in this wondrous universe.   No matter the endeavor - writing some wicked Android code, or spinning psytrance in a virtual world, or producing a tasty track of electronic eargasm, or writing, or working in my small shop battling a luthier’s dream, or trying to understand the latest issue of Science magazine, or planning a night out at the opera or a week at Burning Man, the beginning of all this happiness is my compost pile.

It is clear to me that the rest of my life will be spent surfing the huge energy gradient we will be sliding down as oil depletes and the world realizes we should have been planning for this 40 years ago.   8 years ago for me it was the warning being raised by the likes of Kunstler, Heinberg, Campbell, Greer, Orlov, and certainly being affirmed and validated by the 30 year update of Limits to Growth that drove my panic to seek the escape farm. Upon my return to my suburban home, I realized I had it all right here, and there really is no where to go other than where you are. It’s the space where you are that needs to change.

As mentioned earlier, I got the message, and began the transition. My ‘panic’ has been tempered a bit, and I see a Long Descent (Greer) and a Long Emergency (Kunstler) as being the way of it. But is IS underway. Look out your window, fill up your tank, buy some groceries, paying your heating bill, and you will feel it unfolding. The Brent Spot price for a barrel of oil is 118.86 as I write this. This is 3 years after the worst economy   since the Great Depression. In the current agricultural, food processing and distribution system, Oil=Food. Got Oil?

An appropriate solution for suburban dwellers is in becoming as self –reliant as possible. As local as possible.   I begin to produce food around my house, learn how to store it, begin to understand the energy requirements in my suburban household, begin to trust my skill and begin to make the changes. I make the transition from a mental map based on the realities of 1930 (40 years before U.S. peak oil production) to a mental map that is based on the realities of 2010 (40 years after U.S. peak oil production).   My expectations, my responsibilities, my priorities are now adjusting to a future with 70% less energy than I have known in my lifetime.

Oil and food are so tightly connected in this current social system, that the expense of feeding myself can be projected just by watching the gas stations change their prices.   I certainly don’t expect to be able to produce every morsel of my diet, but knocking 40-60% off my grocery bill by eating guaranteed organically grown, salmonella free, un-processed vegetables, soups and salads moves me a lot further along into my own sustainable future. My only cost is sweat of my brow, same as it ever was.

The true pillar of this abiding happiness is, believe it or not, Compost. The beginning of the journey to a more self reliant future, to a future based on wind and sun, to a future economy that maintains rather than grows, to a future with less toxins, less radiation, less anxiety, is one compost pile. In My yard (and yours).
Food not Lawn. Compost, not petrochemicals. Organics, not pesticides. Clean food for clean bodies and smart minds.

2010-07-23T15:16:00.000-07:00

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the train has left the station for the demise of Industrial civilization. Rather than being a set of chilling thought experiments or doomer fantasies, the Long Descent now underway will be an exciting time of innovation, action movie, and zombie technologies morphing into a new way of life.

Out of the Fog of Collapse there are a few voices of clarity that stand out due to their pragmatic, realistic, yet hopeful suggestions for a way to proceed. Some apply dark humour, some provide dry dusty data, and some provide integration of the data sets with the right harmonic of solutions to the oncoming transition times. Many of these voices can be heard here:

http://energybulletin.net

John Michael Greer is one of these chaps. I've been following his blog out on the Energy Bulletin for a few years, and just finished his book The Long Descent where he pulls together the problem and offers some possible solutions. He writes beautifully, is well versed in the Peak Oil data sets, and hails back to a time we are all familiar with, offering anew many of the solutions which might have made this a more leisurely journey if we had persisted in them back in the 70's.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

Appropriate technology, gardens, compost, bikes, and working with Nature instead of beating her to death. I want to build this world, and sweep up the current capitalist manifestation into the compost pile. From this seat, there are about 3 years left to continue to have access to relatively cheap fuel, which we can use to get some foundations in place for a lower tech, lower energy future. After that, the wheels look to come off this game, in not so slow motion, just like Saint Donella told us in Limits to Growth.

All the latest energy reports from DOD, , universities , and even the venerable Lloyd's seem to be circling the 2012-2015 time frame when the planet starts losing the ability to meet the demand for oil, DOD and others expecting a 10% shortfall. And then it is just down the slope of 4% depletion rate per year from there on out ad infinitum. Not a show stopper, not an immediate collapse, hell in 20 years we will still be producing as much oil as we were in 1970, but with China and India joining the fray of the last minutes of Industry, the depletion curve might move a bit quicker than expected.

In 1990 , two countries lost 10% of their oil imports - Cuba and N. Korea - when the Soviet Union collapsed. One country, Cuba, weathered it because they had local communities with a small garden ethic, and were willing to roll back to less energy intensive technologies. The other country, followed a path of the aristocracy protecting themselves, allowed 1 million of the 'small' people to starve to death. It seems to matter which choice you make.

Anyway, same old story. Look busy, Santa's coming.

Peace Love and composting toilets,

Thom

Throw Out My Wallet

2010-03-27T11:15:00.000-07:00

--more sparring with email friends--

"Besides, what do the liberals know about jobs? Jobs are created by business. You guys hate business. As soon as any business gets profitable you want to stomp it to death with taxes and anti-trust investigations! In order to create jobs you have to accept the notion of profitable businesses. You people think profit is evil."

==========================

Oh, for chrisakes..... jobs? from profitable business? When business sniffs profit by having jobs done in Mexico (1980's), China (1990's) and India (2000) they never hesitate to LOSE jobs here in the USA in favor of higher PROFITS by exploiting third world labor and calling it opportunity.

Profit, as the sole guiding principle and arbiter of business decision making, is one of the greater evils of capitalism. Evil being described as something against the common Good, such as mountain top removal, or dead zones from chemical fertilizers in our oceans, or marketing SUV's, or clear cutting boreal forests, or slash and burn clearing for raising beef or bio-fuels, or over-fishing to collapse the North Atlantic Cod populations, etc etc ... all being justified, by business, as the righteous pursuit of profits.

Profit is the fuel that drives the great engine of capitalism to seek continuous growth in a limited system, certainly an evil against plain common sense - expecting a limited, closed, material system to provide endless growth.

Profit, beyond the reasonable measure of recompense for effort, is the distorted lens, the fun house mirror in which we are all expected to view the world, and ourselves. Action without profit, in this mirror, is useless. Activity, effort, art, craftsmanship, music, compassion, altruism, simple kindness; any human endeavour seems now to be judged on the altar of profit, and if not tied to some remuneration of profit, is deemed foolish, trivial and useless.

Profit is the rapacious voice that says ALL and NOW, and considers nothing beyond its immediate satisfaction. No consciousness of connectedness, of ecology, of sustainability, no concern for a future, no looking out to seven generations, or even to our brothers, but NOW! and ALL! Cut ALL those trees, take ALL those fish, and do it NOW, this quarter, and the devil take the future.

Profit is, in many cases, the value derived from exploitation. The exploitation of labor, exploitation of free nature, exploitation of human weakness. Profit courses like a drug through the hearts of women and men, destroying lives, minds and ultimately destroying the natural foundations on which we all, all of The Creation, rely. Larger doses are required, requiring more theft, and leaving, as all drug addictions will, a dissatisfaction, a soul sickness, even in the midst of high profits and high times.

Business has become the sacred calf at which we worship, our temples and cathedrals now built in months to the gods of insurance, and consultancy, and finance. And oh! how we worship, sacrificing all; our breath, our sweat, our minds, and all the precious moments of our precious lives to feed the sacred calf of economic growth and higher profits. Business claims to provide the life we desire, to provide the products, the services, the "progress" that we all yearn for, all in exchange for just some small profit, some small payment for marginalizing, co-opting, and removing the resiliency and skill that existed in the world, before profit drove us all to become enslaved to an economic system driven by and grounded in this idea of profit which ultimately benefits only a few.

Businesses, large corporate enterprises, will not create jobs here, what are we thinking? We have been watching them take the jobs of our fathers and hand them gift wrapped to the Mexicans, Indians and Chinese for the last 40 years! And this was done, not for any other reason than to create Profit for a few million elites. They pacified us with low low prices, the consumer sheep that we are. We sold our economy for twenty dollar coffee makers and low priced hair dryers from Wal Mart.

So, yes, there are a number of valid reasons from this seat to consider Profit an evil that we could better avoid, a drug that once imbibed, becomes the monkey that eats the world, and leaves us in the end with nothing but copper pennies and abstract shit.

Capitalism is killing us,

Thom

Better to have the crime, the suicidal lovers,
or the incest between two brothers,
as between two mirrors
falling in love and loving their reflections,
better to venture and eat the poisoned bread,
better adultery on beds of ashes,
the ferocious passions,
and delirium, its venomous ivy,
and the sodomite who carries for his buttonhole carnation a gobbet of spit,
better be killed by stoning in the public square than tread the mill that grinds out into nothing the substance of our life,
changes eternity into hollow hours,
minutes into penitentiaries,
and time into some copper pennies
and abstract shit.

-- Ocatvio Paz

-- from Sun Stone

2010-03-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

-- response to an email list --

I don't disagree with your statement that 'Growth works.' It certainly does what it intends; creates jobs, increases output of the shiny things (and useful things as well) , and ameliorates age old problems of survival. Life grows, that is what it does. It has an arc: seed, seedling, shoot, plant, fruit, compost. Provided that the nutrients are there, and the water, this arc will play out in any garden. My contention is that we are at the cusp of the fruit/compost period for this civilization. Growth, as Saint Donella Meadows has shown us, has Limits. We are now hitting many of those limits in this unique moment of time in the planets history.

Growth as an economic strategy is fine when the resources are abundant. It works well when there is new lands to settle, new resources to discover, virgin forests to exploit, ores and oil to be had with a high EROEI etc.

It has worked quite well over the last 200 years, no doubt about that. I will set aside the intended consequences of income disparity, oppression, and environmental destruction for now and try to stick to the economics of it.

The question we face today is that Growth is no longer possible, so why are we continuing to focus on that as a viable economic paradigm? It is quite clear that Growth, in your terms, is impossible for most of the worlds people. In fact, growth now is a cancer, eating into our natural capital. Earth Overshoot Day is now....September 25 http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/earth_overshoot_day/ . How do you promise Growth to the Chinese and Indians and Brazilians in the face of that reality?

As much as we all want to keep our comfortable life, the fact is that the only demonstrably sustainable lifestyle is , sorry ... hunter/gatherer. And as we well know with 7 billion humans, huge megalopilis enclaves, and already exploited natural resources, this is no longer an option for most of the planet. Defining Sustainability is like nailing jelly to a tree ... or like rubbing a rabbits foot. It is hard to get it right, but makes us feel good by saying the word. Like you, I have not yet found an economics designed around sustainability. And actually, I don't expect to find one that will provide the same level of comfort as the current growth model.

Subsistence living, scraping out your food and materials from your own plot of land, is portrayed as a horrible thing by you, and yet, hasn't it always been thus for most of the humans? And is it such a horror? Is it horrible to dig the soil, plant the seeds, harvest the fruit, manage the productivity of the soil, preserve your food, make necessary items from your own materials? Hard work, yes, but a horrible life? I dont agree with that. My own experience in just dipping my toe into gardening and soil building has shown it to be a 'spiritual experience' if I may use the term (mutters some pedantic reference to James and Varieties of ...here...)

It is quite a difficult problem in the macro sense. Capitalism, growth, this current economy with all its wonders ....I would love this to continue!! (with many mods to the capitalism and social justice part) But the hard fact is...it can not. There is simply not enough stuff here. For me, I take a good programmers approach: divide and conquer. I take one aspect of the problem about sustainability such as : It is not sustainable to fly lettuce from Chile to Calfornia, and I grow my own lettuce. I take the next problem : It is not sustainable to clear cut trees to make packaging that gets throw in a landfill after ONE use. I reduce buying packaged goods, I buy in bulk, and the packages I do use, I save and use as sheet mulch, eventually returning them to the soil here. The ultimate goal would be that I no longer purchase any packaged goods, but this seems like a Herculean task here in this current economy.

Localization of human needs seems the most likely candidate for sustainability. Small communities providing the light manufacturing, food production, and specialties for the local population. The down side of this is that the large corporations that have taken over all aspects human production, will need to go away. And that sir, is the political problem, not that people are afraid of hard work. The rivers of money that pollute our politics will always be spent on preserving the status quo of Growth and corporate hegemony over the basics of life. Until we agree that sweat is revolutionary, that individual effort and skill are the weapons of the revolution, the status quo will prevail. Gandhi, India, spinning wheels, and British cotton being the poster child on this idea.

No easy answers, and certainly no macro answers from this seat. I just see the data, see the storm clouds out there, and realize that I can only walk my own talk, and hope it does not get too sporty on the social scene. Because, as Mr. Lallo points out, humans are violent, and hungry humans are randomly violent. I do expect that social unrest, meaning people killing each other for food, may be in our future. No, Rodney, unfortunately we can't all get along.

But we get along better on a full stomach which is why returning to an agrarian state of mind in the physical world, while maintaining a high level of mental endeavour in the virtual seems to me to be the proper course. 1860 with laptops. I hope the society decides to preserve our connectivity, preserve our computing prowess and ability to manufacture these systems and maintain these networks, and allow the sprawl and freeways to revert to small roads and smaller houses, with gardens surrounding each, and community power being generated from each rooftop. And then I woke up.

Peace, freeBSD , and Compost,

Thom

Micro-Skills

2009-06-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

Finally have a day off and thought to drop in for a moment and share an interesting article on Transition Towns. http://www.bohemian.com/bohemian/06.17.09/feature-0924.html

TV and air conditioners. Think of the energy requirements! If we shut them all off tomorrow, we could probably shut down a thousand coal fired power plants. And would we be that much worse off? Humans have existed for something like a million years without air conditioning until the last 50 or so. But now we think we can't live without it. And what would we do without American Idol and Dancing with the Stars? Would our lives would be so much poorer? Of course, that would mean on History Channel and no Discovery Channel too. Hmmmmmm..

And now technology steps in again with blogs, and IM, facebook and twitter-to build communities again. But these things all require more technology, more production, more energy. Our Ford would be very proud of us!

- my friend Bob from an email list

5 years after my bodhi moment relating to peak oil and climate change, the premises are further strengthened by the data and well...by just looking out my window. And although I am not deeply involved in the Transition movement as yet, this appears to be the emergence of the one realistic solution to the hmmmm, not looming, but now ongoing dilemma - Localization of all requirements.

Growing food is the entry point to Transition - well said in the article. And what is being discussed here, the air conditioning, the TV, the computers, the sheer waste of energy on comfort and entertainment with its unintended consequence of isolation and community shredding, will not be possible in the near future. Like globalization, it will just move into the strange period of history of our petroleum feeding frenzy. Localizing, community interactions, neighbors relying on neighbors, is poised to make a big comeback in the coming decade as we will either stand together, or fall alone.

So, I guess this is just another friendly reminder that we have about 5 years to get to a comfortable low energy zone for ourselves before the duct tape stimulus efforts fail and the wheels finally come off this capitalist nightmare. I won't bore you with the details of IEA, US Defense Dept, PostCarbon Institute data, but 2013-2015 looks to be when that oil starts getting might pricey. If you consider what $147/bl oil did to the economy last year, well ... $300 should be just grand.

Exponential growth cannot continue forever if the tokens are of a material nature. You soon require more tokens than there are atoms in the universe. Too bad for us, that realization only comes at the last few iterations. Economies based on perpetual growth will hit limits, as we are seeing right now. My future retirement scenarios, based on perpetual growth of a resource dependent system may be misguided as our economies use 1000 barrels a second of oil to function. I don't need computer models, or neural networks to calculate this...nothing more than simple artihmetic paints the likely outcome.

Corn in the fields.... micro farming (or as we would say in Los Ankgeleeees, micro-growing) . That's an entry point. Micro milling, micro-brewing, micro-metalsmithing, micro-lumbermills, micro-canneries....and working our ass off most days to get the harvest in, same as it ever was before up from the ground came the bubbling crude. I have rows of corn coming up in my yard, mulched by squash, with pole beans climbing up the cornstalks. The '3 sisters' which provided the sustenance for the indigenous peoples here for 10,000 years are a wonderful example of the perma-culture ethic. Everything doing more than one job, the squash mulching the corn, the beans fixing nitrogen for the corn, the corn acting as the trellis for the bean. What the hell I do with the corn come havest, I have no idea, but life is for learning. 5 years.

It doesn't have to be this way. That was the counter culture meme we all gave up on. This time, the nascent counter culture is about skill, about recovering some recently lost knowledge that allowed humans to live. About eschewing the baubles of industrial output which serve to enrich a few, and returning to the planting-growing-harvesting rhythms of the thousands of years of human civilization. Forget Ford, it is time for Dionysus and Demeter.

Rely on Nature, the carnival shell game is over.

Thom

P.S.

We have had cloud cover here in June for 3 weeks solid now, night time temperatures very very cool, and my native born Cali friend confirmed the weirdness of it all, for I sure don't remember this in 30 years. Used to be a regular Nov-March rainy season, and clear blue skies from April to October, with a rare shower in mid summer. This is what climate change looks like I suppose, step by step, incremental weather changes, barely worth mentioning in polite conversation.

5 Years

2009-06-26T13:15:00.000-07:00

Coffee Power

It is inspiring and fits in perfectly with my transition efforts. One of the experiments this year is making oil from the soy now growing in my yard (which was once a space buried under a concrete driveway). Granted, the amount of soy beans from the current planting will most likely provide me with a few meager quarts, but the benefits of soil nitrogen fixing and education are the important aspects of this at the moment. Coffee grounds! I've been composting them for years, but to be able to squeeze some liquid fuel AND still get the composting benefit is a new one for me. Will try this.

Although I live in the "failed state" of Sunny Southern California (LMAO), we still need a little heat in the winter. Standard fuel oil burning heaters will burn bio-diesel with no modifications. Replacing the natural gas heater with one of these, and a small bio-diesel processor provides another step on the road of unplugging from this collapsing large scale fragile system.

A few items of note that have shown up in the last few weeks for me:

This lecture is well worth the hour it takes to view it. Cal Tech chem professor Dr. Nate Lewis does the math on future energy, population and climate change out to 2050.

Ahhhhhh...The laws of nature, from which there is no escape.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures/feb08.cfm

Even the IEA thinks this current economic stimulus revival is a Head Fake:

A shortage of oil could trigger another global recession around 2013 – says the IEA. By 2010 the price will reach new highs.

The IEA in Paris is warning of a new, much more severe global economic crisis around 2013. The reason is that investments in oil from new projects are being cancelled by large oil companies. If demand starts increasing in 2010, the oil price could explode, fire up inflation and put global growth at risk.

"We are concerned, that oil companies are reducing their investment levels. When demand returns a supply shortage could appear. We are even predicting that this shortage could occur in 2013." Said Nobuo Tanaka, head of the IEA in an interview with Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

http://energybulletin.net/node/48582

AND one for my friend Robert Baron Bob. The Transition Towns idea is spreading rapidly and is a decent framework for self-organizing. Here is a story on the group in Boulder.

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2009/apr/10/transition-movement-boulder-sustainable-lives/

Plan C

I'm about halfway through PLAN C by Pat Murphy ISBN: 978-0-86571-607-0 which is inline with the sustainable town idea.

Plan A being business as usual which provides us with a 6 degree Centigrade global rise in temp by 2100. Game Over.

Plan B being techno solutions which allow us to be such warm fuzzy "Greens" and still have this ridiculous lifestyle.

Plan C which is based on curtailing fossil fuels and localizing our economy.

Plan D which is Die Off (interestingly the highest outcome of the scenario runs done by Limits to Growth models)

I find myself at Plan C.5 - somewhere between knowing that localization and curtailment, self reliance and small scale systems will be the path to provide a reasonably survivable future for my cute little grand-daughter, and realizing that humans are mostly too stupid to live and that G20 Plan A agreements are probably dooming us to a Permian extinction in the short term.

In parting, extrapolate Google. They create a hugely successful information processing infrastructure by utlizing small commodity PC's networked together. I am installing a similar system at work using the Apache Hadoop project. It works running on old PC's that were doomed for the child crawling electronic dumps in East Asia.

Take food, energy and transportation, localize them, use the already manufactured things (and coffee grounds) , and they scale up to a vibrant new economy based on recognizing Limits and reducing inequity. The fact that the robber baron corporatocracy will drown in a bathtub by doing this is a plus.

Note to self: Save the planet, stop buying corporate products.

Peace love and espresso powered heating,

Thom

Rollback

2009-04-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

I'm a programmer. I like computers, I like the mental space that writing software creates in me, and I like the benefits of ubiquitous computing and large databases. In writing applications that talk to these databases you quickly master the concept of the Transaction. A Transaction is a set of updates, inserts, deletes that must all succeed. If they do succeed, you can then Commit the transaction and the new data is allowed to exist. If they do not succeed, you can salvage the integrity of the data in the data tables by performing a Rollback. Rollback restores the system to it's previous state and assures the integrity of the overall system.

This serves as a simple metaphor for me as I continue on my way in an attempt to build a Future. It seems quite apparent to me that this Transaction of the last 30 years, this economic growth spurt which looks like nothing less than a money grab by a small segment of society inspired and abetted by the Reagan/Thatcher/Friedman schools of conceptual thinking, has failed. A number of tables are now corrupt: the economic table, the energy table, the climate table, the social equality and justice table.

In the database world, this realization would require a Rollback, but instead I read that the G20 is executing a Commit !! They are committing to business as usual, attempting to stimulate the economies to new growth, new plunder while fleecing the taxpaying masses of money to reward the very people who created this untenable transaction, which oftentimes is themselves.

Unfortunately, this Commit is doomed to achieve exactly what a Commit of corrupted data would achieve in any software system. The system will demostrate bugs, report bad data, and in worst cases, crash. The geological realities of energy make this path a fools party, and I expect it to create a Head Fake - the economy appearing to recover in preparation for a much sharper decline. The physics of available oil seems to indicate that this is what will transpire over the next 5-10 years:

http://energybulletin.net/node/48530

Rollback. It is time to Rollback the current transaction and return to the practices and lifestyles (the datasets) that worked so well for tens of thousands of years. Time for us to wake up to this ridiculous manner of living, one that was only possible in the last 100 years thanks to the oil bonus, and begin now to restore our lives, restore our communities, and restore our natural surroundings from the horrific damage created by the ethos of unbridled capitalist economics.

A Rollback looks like localization. It looks like self reliance. It looks like dynamic Freedom, like Attitude in the face of aristocratic arrogance, like dancing. It looks like baked pies, suburban gardens, community interactions, re-use of the already manufactured things, reducing the store bought, and learning how to actually DO something.

If I want destructive capitalism to disappear, it seems quite easy. Stop buying their stuff. Stop giving them my money, and rely more on my skill and knowledge, and abundant Nature, to provide the life I want. Rely more on my neighbors than the corporations, rely more on myself than on my government, and rely entirely on the natural laws from which there is no escape.

Rollback, and retain some integrity of Life. Rollback, and make more time for dancing, and less time for slavery to the greed of the elites. Rollback, and discover your Freedom.

Take down a parking lot, put up a paradise

2009-03-23T08:56:00.000-07:00

Now (soy)

Before

Arguments from an email exchange.

Maybe so, Thom, but there are efficiencies in specialization. To overlook this is to overlook the strength of civilization. Will you make your own cabinets, run your own pipes and plumbing? Cut your own trees? Mill your own lumber? Mine your own iron ore? Smelt it into plowshares? Growing enough food to live on is a lot of fricking work! Joyce should chime in here. They have a serious garden down there in West Virginia, and it consumes a lot of hours, but they still both have to work outside jobs.

Specialization-including in food production-is what gives us leisure, isn't it? What are you recommending-a future of subsistence farming like they have in, oh say, sub-Saharan Africa? That sounds attractive. No? Well, once you have specialization in food production, (because it's more efficient), then you have specialization in other areas. Sure, everybody should have some tomato plants in their yard, some potatoes, whatever, but I don't think it will replace the economies of scale-and there are simply economies of scale in specialization-of farms.

My thoughts:

The underlying reality is that current US food production is intensively fossil fuel dependent. Harvesters, tractors, food processing, food transportation, refrigeration all depend on our supply of fuel. In the last hundred years, by using this cheap fuel, we have been able to expand food production and allow the population to grow to its current level of 6.8 billion humans. This is what any organism will do, expand their population to the size of its available food supply. The UN projects population growth to achieve 9 billion by 2050, a mere 40 years from now. Got food?

Now, here is the problem. We both agree that current agri-biz food production is heavily reliant on diesel and other fossil fuels. Over the next 40 years that supply of cheap fuel will disappear as we are now beginning the slide down the back side of the depletion curve. Food will become much more expensive, at least the industrial food that makes Americans so fat and happy. And what of availability? Will the trucks continue to roll into all the towns and cities with the diminishing production from the heartland? One doesn't need to do the thought experiment too long to see the ramifications of $300 a barrel oil and its impact on industrial food.

Yes, gardening is hard work, let alone farming. But if we roll back 150 years, we see that most households maintained a set of domestic skills and knowledge that allowed them to provide a large % of their own needs, a time when "store bought" was the exception, not the rule. This is not sub-saharan Africa, but Altadena 1870, Denver 1850, etc. My contention is that the Suburban Ortho-promoted lawn culture, should be replaced by a more self reliant, organic, knowledgable ethic of Home as the basis of all food security. That food production should become localized, and the first and fundamental effort is to provide that security from the bottom up, on suburban homesteads. And keep in mind, this is 2009, we understand the chemistry and physics and systems behavior much better than the folks there in 1850. It's not a reversion to primitivism, or a collapse into sub-saharan subsistence, but a change to our ideological belief systems to accord more with ecological realities.

And of course, specialization comes into play! My associate Wil has his small machine shop in his garage. I work with wood. I grow soy, my neighbor grows lentils, up the street he grows cabbages. The horses here provide compost, the landscape guy specializes in drip systems, the local health food store distributes, and other local specializations come to mind: miller, sawyer, cannery, brewery, chemist, mill wright, etc...

This hardly looks like Sub-Saharan Africa, but more like a local self reliant community that consumes its natural bounty within the limits set by nature. A local community that establishes a nutrient cycle of (food - compost - food), rather than (salmonella laced crap wrapped in plastic - landfill). The food-compost-nutrient cycle replenishes the soil, and removes the organic toxins currently used to produce food from the eco-system. Over time, natural systems can cleanse and rejuvenate the soil, river and air systems on which our very life depends as opposed to our current system for food production which depletes the soil, relies on diminishing non-renewables, and creates dead zones in our oceans.

I am watching this process in my own garden right now, as I take dirt that was buried beneath a concrete driveway for 30 years, and transform it magically into Soil through adding compost, planting soil enriching legumes, and adding worms and more compost every chance I get. Within a few years, this area that was once just constuction dirt, will be a rich loam capable of providing me with some seriously luscious veggies. The coolest part is that Life shows up, the bugs, the bees, the birds, the bats, all appear over time. The fact that I get some delicious peas and edemame from it is almost secondary.

And of course this lifestyle, which I contend will be forced on our grandchildren, has less leisure than now. If by leisure you mean sitting on a couch watching American Idol, this is not a bad thing. The leisure time we will have will be more precious, and more deserved. Those parasites of society that excessive food production has allowed to exist: the stock brokers, derivative traders, bank executives, etc ... will most likely no longer be a luxury we can afford to feed.

As a student of history you can surely see that human life has been thus for hundred of thousands of years, and that this current manner of living was and is only made possible by our discovery of oil, and its attendant energy bonus. As we proceed down the depletion curve, rolling back to previous methods of living and more useful specializations will be either embraced pro-actively, or forced upon us by the geological realities now apparent.

And the climate wild card is just that, a very wild card. It may turn out that the only places able to grow food reliably are northen Canada and Siberia. Too bad for me, I can't eat cactus all year.

Clippety Clop

2009-03-22T11:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a whiff, a tiny sniff of a possible future state. Celebrating our Equinox I was out in the garden watering the peas and soy (my garden for the garden, the veggies come after this batch of soil enhancing legumes is done) when I heard a sound which was normal 100 years ago, but now is a rarity. The clip clop of horses hooves.

Coming down the street was a young man walking his horse. "I just thought I would stop by and let him eat some of (my neighbor) Joy's grass, its good for him and good for her. " And here, on this suburban corner, outside of one of the worlds megalopoli , was a magnificent creature, mowing my neighbors lawn. I asked Tim (the young horse owner) if his horse liked carrots, and proceeded to go and pull some of my remaining carrot crop to feed to his horse.

Tim was amazed that they were "home grown". I can only imagine that he expected me to go and pull a plastic bag out of the refrigerator, with perfectly shaped and topped off carrots, consumer perfect products of the industrial food chain. Instead he received some comparativley mishapened carrots with some brown leaves in the tops, and small roots porcupining off the tap root. His horse, being more sensible than most consumers, was delighted, and proceeded to relish each carrot that was fed him.

And so, a small collection of possibilities, random intersections of activity, and I felt the surreal nature of a future state interleaved with the modern petroleum based present - community interaction, neighbors interacting, through the vehicles of horse and garden, made more surreal by the cars going by and the sterile Ortho-Lawns along the suburban street.

Horses?? Gardens?? We don't have to go back to all that, do we?? I hear this reaction to 1860 with laptops quite a bit, the sneer barely hidden, and the idea immediately discounted out of hand. But as the consensus grows that global oil production has peaked and that we are now on the back side of the Hubbert curve, the depletion side, I would ask do you really expect your car to be a viable transportation mechanism when gasoline is $16usd a gallon? Is using for transportation a vehicle that produces little CO2, whose waste can replenish the soil , and who provides beauty and power, such a silly idea? When the fuel needed for it is a non-polluting energy store that can be grow, that requires no supertankers, no mining, no armies to defend it, and that when processed through the "engine" can be returned to the ecosystem as a benefit?

Gardens, now that is an easier transformation to grasp. Although at the moment "you must be the only one in the neighborhood growing their own vegetables" says Tim, this will change much sooner than horses showing up on our streets as a normal mode of transport. My president is putting in a garden ( how cool is that!) which may do more good for us than any policy decision. As people begin to realize that large percentages of countries production are coming from small household gardens (80% of Russian potatoes comes to mind) then the concept of the suburbs as the organic grow zone around the city may begin to make much more sense to the current Ortho-Lawn types. As diesel, the foundation of our industrial food chain, becomes increasingly more expensive over the coming decade, the budgetary impact of the household garden will do more than anything to make this a commonplace of future life.

The impetus for me, as I explained to my neighbor, is to learn how to garden. To begin NOW, while I have time for all the mistakes and fumbles, to establish the gardening skills and habits, to make this a part of my daily life BEFORE it becomes a necessity. It takes time to replenish soil, time to discover the micro-environments of your lawn, time to gain the knowledge of the growing things. Add the storage and preservation aspect of a personal food supply, and there is much to be done in participating in this great transition. Gardening is the easiest piece of the future to put into place.

The horses might take a while longer.

Our Cellular Song

2009-03-01T11:38:00.000-08:00

There are days when I think - wtf am I doing here, really? I zoom out from my little corner on Google Earth, and realize what a tiny mote this is, a meaningless parcel on a meaningless corner of Los Angeles County. Dust in the wind, in the long term we're all dead, the universe is functioning perfectly, sure sure, BUT I am alive now, right now, and have a vested interest in the near future! At times like these I will stumble across an essay that puts this in perspective, or at least affirms my efforts here. Slow change. Bottom up. Garden by garden.

The healing power of the small.

As the governor announces a water emergency, it now appears not only prescient, but mandatory that I continue my studies in water management and low water growing. Policy being dictated by ecological truth. The climate models point to drought for the SouthWest, so drought and water conservation will be our struggle here. Those living along the coast may deal with rising seas, and those up north may deal with flooding, but we all surely will deal with some manifestation of the ongoing climate change event. The oil depletion scenarios will just add more excitement to the mix over the coming decades. We must create 1860 with laptops willingly, or we surely will have some more repressive and chaotic society impressed on us by necessity.

Learn to grow food. Not because you will realistically be able to provide all of your sustenance, but so that you can connect again to Life, and the natural processes. This is my experience. That the simple act of turning soil, planting a seed - even if only in a small container on an apartment balcony- is a step forward to a surviveable future. It changes my awareness, pulls me back from the abyss of shrink wrapped poly carbon consumer slavery, and returns me to the deeper fundamentals of Life, to my place in the web of Life, and allows me the freedom and insight to question the current manifestation of our destruction based culture. It allows the signal of abundant Nature to get through the marketing noise, get through the talking head screaming pundits, get through the dominant culture noise, and see Life and Nature not as a resource base, not as a product, but as the only true foundation on which we all rest.

Your garden will not be televised.

My Seeds of Change are in my garden now. It is heartening to hear from other sources that they also perceive this path as being an appropriate response, a useful step towards a surviveable future. And that is why I post my little thoughts here, to support and encourage anyone else out there, anyone striving garden by garden to create the future we need. We are not alone, and we are not wasting our time, we are in fact the cellular engines of our much needed culture change.

Sing your cellular song!! See you in the garden!

From Alexis Zeigler - Silent Armageddon

We have become focused on “alternative” energy production, in spite of the fact that these technologies are not a real solution. The real solutions are actually fairly easy. They simply involve doing what we will be doing in the future -- using resources cooperatively -- a little sooner than we are compelled to do so. Unwinding the throughput economy cannot and will not be achieved by enlightened social policy. The throughput economy can only be changed by a bottom-up movement that seeks fundamental structural change in our society.

Phrases like “culture change” or “conscious culture” seem to evoke the image that we should all play nice -- liberal utopianism. A real understanding of culture leads us to the conclusion that the ecological and economic foundations of a society have a dominating influence over the social structure and belief system over time. A sustainable future does not mean we teach everyone to be tolerant. Though there is no harm in such lessons here and now, to achieve real “culture change” means rebuilding society from the bottom up, building a truly localized and sustainable society. You might imagine that is unlikely, but that is precisely what is going to happen, either by plan or by default. The latter would be much messier, and lead to a society that is neither equitable nor conscious. By getting ahead of the curve, we could arrive at the same point, but in a society that is conscious of its own process of social evolution. That society will not be a liberal utopia. It will be a sustainable society where power is devolved to the community level so people are empowered to defend themselves, and to create the future they want. It will not happen by policy, nor will it ever be announced on the evening news. It will happen as the minority movement of people who want to see it happen grows through the coming waves of change. See you in the street.

Bullets or Beans

2009-02-16T11:30:00.000-08:00

It seems that a typical reaction of most middle class men to the idea of societal collapse from peak oil and climate change is an immediate move to "survivalist" requirements. The thought that many bullets will ensure security, and that they will be one of the survivors thanks to their mighty arsenal, has come up a few times in my conversations with people. Also implied in their advice is that my efforts are pointless because the gangs will come and rip out my gardens and take my solar panels. Well, they might! Or maybe they just move in, and end up being a security force.

For example, here is a kind suggestion from a reader:

I would not want to bank on survival in the LA area without major fortifications at your urban kabbutz. So I'd increase your capital spend plan over next 2 years to include:

6 foot fencing with razor wire top and electrification option

Water purification system for long periods of isolation due to public unrest

Ditto for Electric generation -- large diesel generator and storage capacity -- careful diesel does not store well longer than 1 year.

Double Barrell shotgun

Hand Gun

Ammunition -- 1 year supply assuming all local sources depleted

Medical Supplies

Batteries for Cell Phones

Emergency Radio

A couple fierce dogs might also be good but they need to be feed so there are trade offs

All of this defensive posturing completely misses the point. The point is not to build a compound isolated from my surrounding community, as if the neighbors and gang members that live here are somehow Other, and not interested in living comfortably as well.

The point is building the Future. The point is discovering at this very low level of a suburban corner HOW to live in accord with our natural foundations here, HOW to live unplugged from the industrial food chain, HOW to create local food security as we move beyond the oil dependent concept of Suburb. It's not about "survival" at all, its about the Future.

We all can't move to Oregon. We all can't run to the hills. That illusion I abused back in 2005. We need to stay where we are, and put our efforts into transforming our communities back into the heaven they were before oil and coal created this suburban consumer nightmare. Localizing, permaculturing, and developing LOCAL light industry can create the thriving LOCAL economy that is true security.

Beans over bullets.

I can't eat bullets, you can't eat bullets, my neighbor can't eat bullets, and a gun makes for a very poor shovel. My choice is to learn the skills I need to provide my requirements here on a little corner of Los Angeles. If the imaginary raging hoardes of Angelinos suddenly appear on my doorstep to steal my solar panels, well, thats how it goes. Maybe I can recruit them to help with the compost, or maybe I become one of the billions of people that this planet will shed over the next hundred years. Either way, I am storing beans, not bullets.

Peace and compost,

Thom

Collapse -This is not a dress rehearsal

2009-02-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

A beautiful Sunday morning in my pre-collapse world. The only murmurings of our future state are in my head, breakfast is being served, and few interesting articles of note pop up on my morning screen. I am always looking for news or data that would refute my premise, but quite frankly, I rarely find any that are based on real metrics or experience. What I do run across this morning is confirmation of what I already suspected regarding our climate dilemma:

http://tinyurl.com/bd7u4b

One area of comfort for me has been the readings in paleoclimatology with its reassurance that the universe is functioning perfectly and the planet is just seeking balance. This balance will be achieved at the cost of the humans, but thats just the way it goes. Payback is a bitch.

So, okay, no shock here, just more confirmation. I then stumble across a wonderful speech by my new hero Dimitry Orlov, a man whose humour and insight I find to be a pragmatic light as we move forward in the gathering gloom. His experience and insight into the Collapse of the Soviet Empire, and most importantly his pragamtic advice on what to expect are a reality check for us all. He resonates and informs me on my project here, this attempt to take all the policy, science, energy broad strokes and turn them into realizable personal daily actions of preparation and change. He gives me a lens to focus this activity, and allows me to see the consequences that I should be preparing for. Granted, I delineated these for myself back in 2005: food, water, shelter, electricity. The task I have set for myself is HOW to provide these with minimal inputs from the failing industrial and political and financial systems around me. Thats the experiment here, to answer the question of how do you live with sustainable natural inputs in a suburban setting.

To date, my house is much more energy efficient in terms of heating and cooling, having been retrofitted with new windows, roof insulation etc etc. I acquire tools and material on a regular basis, and half of my yard is now garden. But in fact, I need a few more years, and in fact, that is probably all I have to secure the foundations of what I feel I need in place to surf the wave of the social and climate changes coming my way.

Here in Southern California, it becomes evident that drought will force us all to a more disciplined water management. This year, my focus is on water and gardens. I intend to learn and implement the skills necessary to provide and manage the water for gardens, and to continue the expansion of my food growing capacity here on this corner. Permaculture the surrounds, and learn, learn , learn about the low water techniques for gardening. Maybe even re-read Dune.

Dimitry Orlov's speech resonated with everything I am attempting here. When people speak from deep experience ( a la Matt "learn to grow food" Simmons) I tend to listen. Orlovs "Social Collapse Best Practices" is well worth the candle :

http://energybulletin.net/node/48082

Peace, drip, and compost

Thom

Emergency Sequence Started...you have 3 minutes...

2009-02-02T09:15:00.000-08:00

The more I watch this the more it feels like the closing sequence of Alien, as the planet and human economies keep repeating "you have 3 minutes to self destruct" and Sigourney is running around looking for her cat...her cat for gods sake.

Anyone ready to start the transition? I am hearing all kinds of business as usual solutions, even from the Mahdi Obama, but not much discussion on re-thinking this whole centralized industrial era game that is folding up.

Can we honestly look at the current manifestation of civilization, and say with confidence that it is working? Or is it time to tear it apart, and begin a new paradigm? Does centralized government, power, food, mfg and distribution make sense any more? Or do we need to re-localize and create a new distributed model, an InterTown model of civil endeavour? Towns of Towns make a country just as networks of networks make an Internet, a very effective way to distribute processing and facilitate communication while eliminating single points of failure within a system. (I love peanut butter. single points of failure for peanut butter is really serious shyte to me.)

When does the mainstream wake up and say The Emperor(s) have no clothes, and have been butt ass naked and stealing my stuff for quite some time? Will this Greatest Depression be that time? It starts to appear so as I look at Europe and Russia and the rumblings beginning there. Or, as a friend so lucidly points out, do we keep the game going with debt and stimulus, or do we just kick the can down the road to our grandchildren, and wring our hands about our lack of economic growth?

I find it hopeful that David Meadows was honored by the Japanese last week - Limits To Growth now appears to make a lot of sense :) I find it disturbing that we are in our 3rd consecutive year of drought here, with a big decline in Sierra snowpack. (oh, just like those pesky computer climate models predicted).

It's a finite planet , with finite resources. All energy ultimately comes from the sun. This game can not sustain, so overshoot and collapse are the usual outcome of our type of behavior, whether it is Easter island, the Mayans, or a petri dish of yeast. Are we ready for those consequences?

For me, these are all rhetorical questions of course, I am still convinced we are watching the accelerating train wreck of human civilization from economic greed and planetary abuse. The klaxons are sounding on starship Earth, and ooooops.....there is no escape pod. Too bad for us, this ain't hollywood...but have your people call my people and we'll do lunch.

Peace Love and hope that the Navajo (or Amish) will adopt me,

Thom

Overshoot

2009-02-01T12:48:00.000-08:00

So, it's the 23rd of the month, payday is the 30th, and I am out of cash. That's overshoot on a personal basis. I use my credit card to make it through, thus stealing cash from next month, and hope to tighten up next month and have money left by the 30th, maybe enough to pay back the credit card. Or maybe I just spread that borrowing over time, and let my kids pay it all back when I am dead.

Scale that up, and thats how we live now on a macro level.

The Limits to Growth, recently recognized by Japan (finally...see previous post) lays out this scenario, several of them, and demonstrate the effects of Overshoot. In most cases, the effect is Collapse.

Dana Visalli has provided a wonderful essay on this. (thank you Dana!!):

http://www.methownaturalist.com/page16.html

The most salient line to me is what she writes here:

In the end mind-based belief structures overwhelmed ecological reality, and the culture collapsed.

But wait!!! WE are different, right? WE have technology!! WE are much more sophisticated than these silly Easter Islanders, or the Mayans, or the Anassi...or yeast. All cultures that overconsumed beyond their carrying capacity pursuing mind based belief systems (except the yeast)... and...uh...collapsed.

It can't happen here, right?

Earth Overshoot Day 2008

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=overshoot

One useful definition of insanity is persisting in the same behaviors and expecting different results.

Time to start moving our "mind-based belief structures" back to an accord with ecological reality. Feed your mind.

And with that, it's time for me to turn my compost.

Question Progress

2009-01-31T11:30:00.000-08:00

Complexity hides chicanery.

There are times as I wander around in this civilization where I feel like a townie at a carnival shell game. Just another mark to be suckered out of his dollar, which of course, is what I am. The few commercial human interactions I engage in are between myself and some poor clerk making minimum wage, slaving for some corporation that has appropriated the skill based economies of previous eras.

"We work hard, so you don't have to". This on a can of cleaner, this, the epitaph of our age. In the name of "progress" we have surrendered the idea of work and skill as quality traits, for the idea of convenience and leisure. What we did not realize is that with that, we also surrendered our freedom and self respect. Our progress, as we can see now from the failing institutions around us, those institutions that assured us they could provide that wonderful life (failing to mention that they needed to destroy the planet in the process) is enslavement wrapped in the complexity of corporate legalese and government complicity.

This isn't working. I look around at the freeways, the high rises, the power lines, the carbon spewing vehicles, the tainted food, the collapsing economies, the destruction of ecosystems required, absolutely required to maintain a material economy, the economic oppression of billions of people and I think ... "we couldn't have meant this, we could not have meant it to be like this." Probably not, but someone did, and still does.

This civilization is not working.

The struggle for me, the fight for freedom, is not finding them and overthrowing them, or making them wear silly hats and signs and marching them through the streets. The real struggle is in unplugging as an individual. It is a struggle to re-discover the common skills that households contained just a short time ago, before we all lost our balls and became slaves to corporate convenience.

It's flashing in bright neon now: This civilization can not sustain. The oil that fuels it will dry up very soon, the climate is already seeking balance from our emmissions and waste, and our economies based on plunder are falling apart as I write this.

Sure, sure it's a pipe dream, a fantasy, but it's time to shut off the machines. Time to turn them off, melt them for new materials, and put everyone to work at a much slower pace. Retrain for a slower, less energetic world, where my commercial interaction will be between the artisan, or a small shop keeper who knows the artisan, and my purchase of a fine tool, or a finely woven shirt. One or two degress of separation between maker and user, rather than this tangled web of credit card purchased, ocean borne, sweat shop produced fabric that serves to only enrich a few hands, but equally serves to impoverish us all.

This rant was prompted by this wonderful list of Victorian skills found here. I would imagine that all of those brokers (borkers?) : P might start here for finding a new skill that enriches us all.

http://transitionculture.org/2009/01/22/the-200-artisan-skills-required-to-make-a-victorian-town-functional/

Peace and bone carving, yeah.

Limits

2009-01-22T22:30:00.000-08:00

Some interesting articles on Limits :)

Chris Clugston on America's Predicament

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/46892

...and reality always eventually gets recognized.

Dr. Dennis Meadows, lead scientist and co-author of The Limits to Growth (1972) and its subsequent updates, is the winner of this year’s Japan Prize from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan for “Transformation towards a sustainable society in harmony with nature.”

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/47800

Tone up, Turn soil, Drop out.

A Genocide in Progress

2009-01-22T21:31:00.000-08:00

While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2, of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

In my random musings, I have thought that what we are about here, in 2009, with our Globalized Industrial economy, is a Genocide against the national and ethnical groups of humans who will be living in 2150. Our weapons of choice will be climate change and the greed that now consumes ALL of the possible fossil fuel on the planet, leaving them nothing, basically bringing about physical destruction in whole or in part of the poor people born towards the end of this century.

And we go about it with zeal! Our biggest concern is how to "save" our economy, how to achieve "growth" in this already rapacious commercial orgy we are all trapped in. If I look at the market, look at the economic news, I see a world population suffering the greed of the elites, and worried about what this means for their job, their few pieces of copper shyte that gets taxed away from them anyway.

When I tilt my head a bit, and look at what all this economic activity means to the natural foundations of this planet, what it bodes for the very near future and the upcoming generations, I see a genocide in progress. I imagine how they will despise us, curse us, for our blindness and selfishness. I imagine memorials erected in the Northern reaches, to all those who failed to escape the drought ridden hot zones of the planet, victims of the Boomers right to an American Way of Life that is, and never was, a sustainable enterprise. I imagine the sadness they will feel of watching a planet in ruin, a climate system run amock, an environment of violent changes that their own flesh and blood created just for them.

I think about how 250 years ago, some clever people tried to create a new country, after executing another genocide on the native population, and how that history of America does not seem so distant. The ideas are still approachable, I can visit the homes of some of these people, see the Liberty Bell, walk the streets where the Declaration was signed, all of it still there in Philadelphia.

The results of the future genocide are much closer in time, a mere 90 years away. Now, instead of good Germans, we are good Americans, I suppose. Either way, genocide is genocide, and we are commiting that NOW against the next generation of humans on this planet. The sickness and evil of National Socialism inflicted a genocide of millions on the European population. The sickness and evil of Capitalism will make that look like a minor turf war, as we inflict a genocide of billions on the next generation.

End the Genocide!!

I live the future by reducing, reusing, and backing away from the great commercial machines of genocide. I try to keep my meager pay, and learn to make what I need, grow what I need, and discover my local place. It is a struggle of change, as I am a sheep, lulled into thinking that the commercial markets provide all, that the corporations own all, and that government has my best interests at heart. No surprise at that, as commerce spends billions just to create that message for me.

I wake up and crawl towards the exit of this commercial insanity. Come on, lets find some squirrels.

It's not Plastics anymore

2007-02-07T22:08:00.000-08:00

How many of us here will live to be 102?
How many of our kids will live to be 82?
How many of their kids will live to be 52?

Will we be the first generation that fails to provide survival information to our progeny? As we begin to experience the planetary climate adjustment, the likes of which we have not seen for 20,000 years (the Last Glacial Maximum) it seems possible that whatever info we can provide our children will be relatively useless. Our climb into civilization, if it can be called such, has been possible because of the relative stability of our planets climate. As it becomes evident that this period of stability has ended, what useful information can we give them? Plastics? Get an MBA? Be a lawyer? Get an aerospace engineering degree? Be a rock star?

Or does, learn how to do with less, learn how to manage your food supply, learn how electricity works, learn how to make things yourself, make more sense? And if it does, how can we impart that when most of us don't have that knowledge to begin with? When we live in a faith based society - I believe the electric company will continuously supply me power, I believe the food will be on the A&P shelf, I believe I will be able to drive my car tomorrow - when we deal with this kind of low level faith every day, what do we do when the gods go away?

Taking the position of the reality of our looming bottleneck of problems: population, oil and energy, water, climate change; the next 50 years will determine how we embrace our future, or more accurately, the future we leave the coming generations, our kids and theirs. What I don't see in the media, or governmental debates, is the sense of urgency that a reading of the data relating to all of this should produce. We have talked about voting with our wallets, writing our reps, debating the benefits of wood burning pellet stoves, and even wasted bandwidth on debating the scientific basis for anthropogenic climate change. All of it has been interesting discussion, but little of it helps us to build the future in a concrete sense. And seeing how it is quite evident that we will not see any leadership at the federal level on this, we are left to our own resources.

This is happening now. Today, 3/26/2006. Peak oil is here, climate change is here. The manner of living we have known for our entire lifetime, and our parent's lifetime, is over. O-V-E-R.

Building the future will require a different set of premises, and a different set of skills. If we remain sanguine in the face of millions of refugees within the US, if we remain sanguine in the face of an economy relying on a diminishing resource, if we remain sanguine in the face of drought and famine, we can only do so by knowing we are acting Now, and not cooking our generations books by off loading the environmental consequences onto our children.

No matter the cause, anthropogenic or sunspots, the thought of dealing in 2080 with millions of refugees, New Yorkers and Floridians, roaming the country essentially homeless, should give all of us pause. The rise in sea level will force these millions out into the country, and at a time when oil, our foundation energy source, has depleted to a few small remaining pools. The ability of us to deal with a small disaster like Katrina should abide as our abject lesson in the scale of the coming displacements. The latest report of millions in refugee camps and political disruption may very well be coming from the US in a very near future.

The meme of urgency needs to spread. The realization of this epochal shift, forget the blame of how and why, raises serious concerns about the viability of our institutions and their continuance. The premise of catastrophic climate change coupled with the depletion curve of our business as usual energy base makes everything else pale in comparison. It should galvanize our greatest efforts as individuals and as a nation to prepare for a time we know little about, a new era that will be evident within our lifetimes.

Sustainable living in the suburbs seems like an impossible task. It is only easy when compared to living in a collapsing society of refugees, where the infrastructures and institutions are incapable of providing enough assistance, where the economy is crippled, and where the effects of destroying the natural fundaments on which we depend are being manifested all around us. It can't happen here, right?

It's All About Me!!

2007-02-07T22:00:00.000-08:00

I need a restructuring of how I live. I need a reduction in energy consumption, a commitment to a zero carbon lifestyle, and a learning of new skills and techniques that replace the global industrialized set of assumptions that passed as "knowledge" in the Age of Oil.

Not Them, not We, not You. Them-We-You will never do it.

I. Me.

I can't waste time railing at anyone else, or waiting for anyone else to do this, or merely enjoy writing and reading the position papers on oil peak and global warming. I can't read another book about peak oil that would tell me anything new, or learn more about global warming. The U.N. and the Fourth Assesment Report defines our dilemma quite clearly. I can't live in the problem any longer.

What I can do is discover and connect with the people who are in my community who see the twenty year timeline of disruptive changes, people who understand that the storm clouds on the horizon, the storm of Peak Oil and the hellfire of global warming, are not going to dissipate but are getting darker and headed right this way. These people are not on a web site in Australia, not on Stephen Gaskin's Farm, but right here in Altadena. Surprisingly, there are a number of us, and even more in the greater Los Angeles area. People who are finished with the discussion and are now quietly going about the business of building the future.

This industrial economy with its waste, over-consumption, and non-sustainable development took 100+ years to put together, using the best minds of the time, and a lot of really cheap energy. It is going to take some time to tear it apart, to back it off, to retreat and rethink. It is quite possible that we don't have that time, but a beginning must be made nevertheless.

A beginning, for me, is made by shopping locally, supporting carbon trading, CFL's, gardening, building community, learning new skills, reducing my own consumption of everything, reusing whatever I can, and working the inner game of adjusting to a low energy life by questioning most of the premises I was taught and by not accepting this insane destruction as normal life.

For those of us unable at the moment to install a PV array or buy a hybrid, either economic or logistic, there are carbon offsets which can be purchased until you can get there yourself. I am buying 10,000kwh from Native Energy for my household use, and some TerraPass offsets for my vehicles. These credits go towards purchasing audited wind and solar electrons that are put on the grid, offsetting my electrons I get now from natural gas.

It's not a get out of jail free card - I still need to get the bio-diesel vehicle, or pluggable hybrid, and my solar PV, 400 sq ft of it. I still need to achieve the goal of an elegant lifestyle with zero carbon, but until I can get those components in place, I can offset and support and promote carbon reduction schemes. And I can continue on a daily basis to commit to changing my habits and thinking, commit to my project plan, and thus build the future.

Humans created this consumer/industrial nightmare day by day since 1860, put it on steroids since 1970, and now are at warp speed it seems in 2006. The last great crescendo. Humans can tear it apart day by day just as well and build it anew on our new found premises of sun and wind and the very certain knowledge that that which destroys Life, destroys us.

Healing Power of the Small

2007-02-07T21:38:00.000-08:00

Thoughts to an email list:
The guy in the Winnebago, or Hummer, or 5000 sq ft home, buying stuff he doesn’t need by the truckload from some Big Box store, is the engine. The aristocracy, advertising media, and politicos are the fuel, it would seem. The problem is not that we are using some energy to stay warm, or take a hot shower, or even flying to China or Brazil to experience foreign cultures. The problem is greed wrapped in the flag of efficiency, of pillaging wrapped in the banner of growth, and of dishonesty wrapped in the shroud of accounting.

The problem is you and me, and 6.5 Billion people all wanting to live like you or me, or any other struggling American middle class denizen. If the population of China were to consume (and waste) paper like we do here, which economically they are projected to be able to achieve by 2030, it will take 2 planet Earths to allow them to do that. Let the Indians play too and now we need 3 Earths. That is just wood, it is like that with everything else.

The problem is that our Western economic models are based on growth at any cost, and are not able to sustain a population of 6.5 billion, soon to be 7 billion. This economic model relies on advertising and media to create a culture of consumption, disposables, and planned obsolescence; which seemed to work just fine in 1955, but is killing us surely in 2006. Moving that model to China is just not possible, there just isn’t enough stuff.

The problem is that being “green” is still “alternative”, when it needs to become the way we live. People expect electricity in their homes, like magic, without a thought of the acid rain or CO2 produced when it is generated. People want hard wood floors, without a thought of clear cutting and flooding. People want, why we demand, cheap gasoline, without a thought to the geological realities of a limited resource which is frankly too precious to burn. When I turn on a light now, I think “burning coal” . That simple mantra has translated into a habit of turning off lights when I leave a room. It didn’t take long to turn that into a normal habit of every day life. Buying wood from a sustainable forest, putting in a cleaner furnace, putting up solar arrays, recycling, composting….none of these things should even be worth mentioning, none of these should be commendable, but just part of daily life.

Back again to the old phrase of the 19th century, a phrase that displays the consciousness of cost when using energy. “I read his poetry, but it wasn’t worth the candle”. At least then, they had an awareness in the language of the effort and cost of making the resource, that there was a tangible cost associated with generating the light. Today, I stand up on the trail at twilight and look out over the San Gabriel Valley, into the Oz like spires of downtown Los Angeles, all brightly lit, the glow apparent even from space. I connect the dots to the generator, then to the coal (or natural gas), then to the strip mined mountain, then back to the air I must breathe, to the high tension towers marring my mountains, to the vehicles spewing along the freeway, to the gas pump that fuels them, the refineries that offload the crude from the Middle East where we have pissed away billions and lives to protect that flow…. Yeah, it is all of a piece, and it is all of us, and all of them, the great planetary consumption machine. And most people don’t have any idea how it works, it's all magic.

Which is why when Marcus buys a wood stove, or Richard intalls a solar array, or you switch to natural gas… It Matters. It moves us another step toward the future we need to create, the future of electricity from the sun, the future of wind turbines on the prairie, the future of silent electric vehicles floating down the freeway, the future of clean local food and water, of renewable energy and sustainable forests. Not some green pipe dream, but a real vibrant economic reality based on sustainable practice, telling the ecological truth, and living as if nature mattered. And yes, spending the money to get there, demanding that respect for all life is applied in all circumstances, and demanding accountability. I wouldn’t smoke at your dinner table, why is it okay to allow these manufacturers and vehicles to smoke in my air ?

I can begin and put in CFL or LED lights all over my house, and turn my thermostat down 5 degrees. I can drop the 25 large and put in the solar array and switch my vehicles to bio diesel. I can learn how to grow a garden, tear out the front lawn and permaculture my surrounds. We can all start looking at the ways we can move our suburban homes to a sustainable life style. Death to Suburbia, its day is over. Elegant living with a small footprint and stop blaming and feeling guilty. Individual actions like this are our only hope - the individual rejection of the hyper consumption based society and the acceptance of the additional work and effort it will now take to create a world that can continue as a foundation for the finer efforts of the human spirit. Mozart and Bach both composed by candlelight.

The only hope I see for the humans, and other life forms, is to start building that future step by step. Right Now. A future that provides the requirements of life for all people, a future whose economy doesn't rely on poisoning the planet, a future where people live as if Nature mattered. My small actions, and others small actions, will accumulate and allow us to heal our natural foundations. Small steps, small improvements, over time.

The healing power of the small.