By John Médaille
http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=3298

Science, Normative and Positive
Some wag somewhere has remarked that economists suffer from "physics envy." One
could certainly make that charge against W. S. Jevons (1835-1882), one of the
founders of marginal economics, when he wrote that a "perfect system of
statistics … is the only … obstacle in the way of making economics an exact
science"; once the statistics have been gathered, the generalization of laws
from them "will render economics a science as exact as many of the physical
sciences."1

More than a century has passed since Jevons wrote these words, and in that time
there has been a growth of vast bureaucracies, both public and private, devoted
to establishing this "perfect system" of statistics. Yet today economics seems
no closer to being an exact science than it was in Jevons's day. Despite this
failure, economic orthodoxy clings to the notion of itself as a positive
science. As Milton Friedman puts it, "Positive economics is in principle
independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgments.  As [J.
N.] Keynes says, it deals with `what is,' not with `what ought to be.'"2

Underlying Friedman's view are two distinctions: a distinction between facts and
values (the "is" and the "ought to be" of things), and a corresponding
distinction between a "normative" science and a "positive" one, with the former
reflecting the world of values and the latter the world of facts. So which kind
of science is economics, normative or positive?

Let me suggest that the question is meaningless. Every science, insofar as it
really is a science, is both positive and normative. Every science, insofar as
it is a science, must be "normalized" to some criteria of truth. These truths
will arise from two sources: an internal and an external source. The internal
criteria involve a science's proper subject matter and methodology. But these
criteria are insufficient to found any science as a science. In addition, there
must be external criteria of truth, and these truths can only come from one or
more higher sciences. In the absence of such an external check, the science will
merely be circular, dependent on nothing but itself and disconnected from the
hierarchy of truth. Thus, for example, biology is responsible to chemistry,
chemistry to physics, physics to metaphysics. No biologist can violate the laws
of chemistry, and no chemist can reach a conclusion contrary to physics. Thus
every science is responsible to its own methodology (and therefore "positive")
and to the higher sciences (and therefore "normative"). Every science has,
therefore, both its own proper autonomy, based on its subject matter and
methodology and its own proper connection to the near sciences, based on the
hierarchy of truth. In speaking of the autonomy of a science, we should note
that it is only a relative autonomy, not an absolute one. A scientist's
obligation to be faithful to his proper method does not relieve him of the
obligation to higher truths. No science can provide its own criteria of truth
without being merely circular. When a science attempts to do so, one of two
things happens. The first possibility is that the science breaks up into
mutually warring camps whose disputes can never be resolved because there are no
accepted criteria of truth by which to resolve them. The second possibility is
that the science becomes merely dogmatic, and no rational examination of its
premises is permitted. In economics, both things have happened: the science is
divided into warring factions with no arbiter of truth among them; the
principles of the various factions have become dogmatic statements with little
connection to reality.

The Physical and Humane Sciences
The hierarchy of science allows us to define what science is, because science is
not a mere random collection of "facts," nor just a free-floating knowledge.
Rather, it is knowledge integrated into a hierarchy of truth. To know a thing,
anything, it is not sufficient to know the thing in itself, but also how it
"fits" with everything else, what its relationships are with the rest of the
world. Science then is not just knowledge, but organized knowledge. It is
precisely this organization that makes it science. We have many other kinds of
knowledge, such as tacit or intuitive knowledge, but these are not scientific
until they can be integrated into the hierarchy of knowledge, and thereby submit
themselves to the tests of truth that come from the higher sciences. Until we
know the thing in the fullness of its relationships, we don't really know it at
all. Therefore science is not just about describing things in themselves, but
about describing things in their full relationships with everything else. Now,
everything that is, is related to everything else that is, in one way or
another. Nevertheless, we can identify two general hierarchies of knowledge, two
great branches of science, the physical and the humane sciences. So the first
thing to determine about any science is not whether it is normative or positive,
but whether it is a physical or a humane science.

The distinction between these two branches of science concerns how the objects
of the science are moved to their ends. Physical objects are moved to their ends
by "laws" outside of themselves, such as the law of gravity. They do not exhibit
any degrees of freedom; that is to say, the planets are kept in their orbits by
the law of gravity and no planet can suddenly decide to reverse its course and
visit a new region of the heavens. In other words, the motions of physical
objects are completely deterministic; they are bound by the laws of nature and
cannot deviate from them. We can examine nature and discover its laws, laws that
exist independently of will and intention. This examination of nature we may
call "naturalism," and these sciences all terminate in physics, the
master-science for the study of physical objects.

Man, of course, is another physical object in the universe of objects, and is
bound by the law of gravity no less than the planets. However, he is also
something more, because while a planet cannot determine its own course, we must
determine ours. That is, we are not moved to our ends by a law like gravity, but
by the choices we make. Man is that being that can choose his own ends and make
judgments about the best means to achieve those ends. This freedom towards ends
and means is the essence of what it means to be human. The humane sciences,
therefore, have a completely different aim than the physical sciences. The
latter aim at discovering the physical laws that must be followed and are always
in fact followed; the former aim at discovering laws that ought to be followed
if we are to achieve the ends we set for ourselves, and of detailing the
consequences of not following those laws. Humane sciences have the human person
for their object, and specifically the human person in relationship, whether
that is the relationship a person has with himself, his family, his community,
the natural environment, or God. Now, political economy deals with economic
relationships, those relationships necessary for the material provisioning of
society. It is therefore a humane science and not a physical science. Like all
humane sciences, it is about right relationships.

Facts without Values?
At this point, the positivist is likely to object that no one can tell us what
kinds of relationships are "right" or "wrong." We can only note the facts and
predict the consequences. Therefore science, economic or otherwise, should
simply stick to the "facts" and let the "moral" chips fall where they may. This
view is based on a distinction between facts and values. As D. Stephen Long has
noted, "The fact-value distinction has become so determinative in the modern
world that we seldom even recognize the many ways our politics, economics, even
our theology assume and perpetuate this distinction."3

Can there be a "value-free" law for humans? The answer to this question depends
on one's theology. The older view of natural law situated it within a
discernment of the meanings of things, that is, within their proper acts and
ends. Thus, natural law would always involve a teleology, a perception of final
meaning, but such perceptions involve philosophical, theological, and cultural
questions. The Enlightenment view of nature sought to divorce natural law from
any moral or theological authority. Is this actually possible?

Let us take a simple deduction from "nature": "Lions eat lambs; therefore the
strong prey on the weak." The conclusion would seem to be an unavoidable
deduction from the indubitably factual premise, a pure instance of a "natural
law," blissfully free of any moral or theological foundation. But in fact it
contains a hidden assumption: the premise concerns animals, but the conclusion
is applied to men. Is this valid? Yes, if man is no more than an animal; no, if
man transcends the animals. If the latter is true, then natural law can never be
just a "reading" of nature, but must be guided by a consideration of the end and
nature of man. Can the issue be resolved one way or another by an appeal to pure
reason? No, because both views rest on a purely theological foundation. Man may
or may not be just an advanced animal and nothing more. Certainly, he is an
advanced animal, but the status of the "something more" cannot be proved—or
disproved. Certainly, both men and lions enjoy a leg of lamb for lunch; quite
possibly, speech is no more than an advanced form of roaring or baying. There is
simply no "proof" that men transcend, or do not transcend, the animals; it is a
matter of faith and faith alone. Therefore, the question of whether the
proposition is a valid deduction from nature depends not on the raw facts (which
cannot be disputed) but on the theology by which one reads those facts. And this
will be true for every statement which purports to be a "value-free" conclusion
from the natural world. The only question is whether the values are explicit or
hidden; if the latter, men will delude themselves into thinking that their
thinking is "value-free," when in fact it is a mere attempt to impose their
values on others. The solution is never to proclaim a "value-free" conclusion,
but to make the values that underlie the conclusion explicit, thereby exposing
them to critique and evaluation.

It would seem, therefore, that the world of human beings cannot be neatly
divided into a realm of "facts" and a realm of "values." While there may be, at
certain times and in certain cases, a methodological advantage in making such a
distinction, it is merely a way of speaking of things for limited purposes and
involves no real ontological distinction. Therefore, Chafuen's case for a
division in the natural law would seem to have failed. A realm of pure
"facticity" in human affairs is doubtful. All human observation requires some
theoretical framework to make sense of the mere sense impressions. The
theoretical framework always involves some value judgments.4 For example, in
measuring unemployment, the economist must first start by,

making the decision that it needs theoretical explanation and second [he] must
define what unemployment is, both of which are blatantly value-laden (and
political) activities. Furthermore, the choice of what methods to use to
investigate this phenomenon also involves value judgments, as does selection of
the critical criteria about what will be accepted as the "final term" in the
analysis, the bases of what arguments will or will not be accepted. However,
values and value judgments enter into theory construction on the ground floor by
giving the theorist the "vision" of the reality s(he) is attempting to explain.
This "vision" is pre-analytical in the sense that it exists before theoretical
activity takes place.5

We are, of course, bombarded each day by a reams of economic "facts" and
statistics. Each and every one of them is surrounded by the same constellation
of political and value-laden decisions as is the statistic called
"unemployment." This does not make them invalid or useless, but we must
understand the value-laden decisions that went into making each of these
numbers. The numbers are not like the numbers we get from looking at a telescope
or a oscilloscope or some instrument used in the physical sciences. Rather, each
number reflects a judgment about what the purpose and meaning of economics is.

Humane Science and Teleology
The major division of the sciences, then, is not the normative-positive duality,
but a division based on the object of the sciences, whether they be merely
physical or fully human. For the physical sciences, we need only examine the
physical world to note the relationships and regularities, and we have, in most
cases, ample room for discovering laws and testing them empirically. But when we
deal with the humane sciences, the task becomes more complex, for a simple
examination of persons cannot be undertaken without first determining what a
"right" state of affairs ought to be. For example, if we practice medicine, we
must have some idea of what good health is; we must have some "normative" state
the departure from which constitutes disease. This seems a straightforward
process in physical medicine (although it is actually fraught with many
difficulties and conundrums), but can become somewhat complex when we look at,
say, psychology. For example, if we take two psychologists, one of whom believes
that mental health means giving expression to every sexual impulse, and another
who believes that sexuality should mainly be expressed in marriage and family,
it is obvious that they will give very different kinds of advice. I have no
intention of trying to sort out those issues here; I merely point out that the
advice given will depend on each psychologist's perception of what it means to
be a human being, on what the end and purpose of our humanity is.

This is the case with every humane science. Its first task is to understand the
end and purpose of the human person, in all of his or her relationships, and
that particular science's role in contributing to those ends and purposes. This
search for ends and purposes is called teleology, from the Greek telos, a word
which connotes "that which completes or perfects a thing." Each humane science
begins, as it were, backwards, with the ends of man, whether those be the ends
of his physical or mental health, his social order, his political peace, his
need to pursue truth and knowledge, etc. Underneath all of these ends there lies
the necessity of a certain material sufficiency. Without having some security of
food, clothing, and shelter, it is difficult to pursue any of the other ends of
man. Now, all of these other ends may be higher than these bare necessities, but
every other end presumes the necessities, for no man can long pursue anything
else if he cannot get enough to eat. Hence, the pursuit of these ends is basic
to the pursuit of every other end, and the more easily they can be obtained, the
more time and energy can be devoted to the pursuit of other goals. Now, the
political economy is the science which deals with the pursuit of man's material
needs, and so it is foundational to every other humane science; even the priest,
the philosopher, and the artist need to eat. Therefore, in order to understand
the science of political economy, we must ask in greater detail just what the
purpose of this science is, which is the topic of our next chapter.

1 Quoted in James E. Alvey, "A Short History of Economics as a Moral Science,"
Journal of Markets and Morality 2, no. 1 (Spring, 1999): 62.

2 Milton Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1953), 4.

3 D. Stephen Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market, ed. Catherine
Pickstock John Milbank, Graham Ward, Radical Orthodoxy (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000), 3.

4 Charles M.A. Clark, "Catholic Social Thought and the Economic Problem,"
Oikonomia, no. 1 (2005), http://www.pust.edu/oikonomia/pages/febb2000/Clark.htm.

5 Charles M.A. Clark, "Economic Insights from the Catholic Social Thought
Tradition: Towards a More Just Economy," (2005).

Property in the hands of labor is freedom.
Labor in the hands of property is slavery.
–Dmitri Kleiner

By John Médaille
http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=3149

From the earliest days of Distributism, distributists have exhibited a certain
disinterest in economics. This is a rather odd stance for the adherents of an
economic theory. Distributism was defended generally on moral and social
grounds, and only occasionally on economic grounds. Both Chesterton and Belloc
were aware of this problem, but neither was willing to tackle the job in any
formal way. Belloc did produce a brief volume, Economics for Helen, but even the
title indicates his disdain for the subject; "Helen" was taken to be an
inquisitive high-school student, and all that she needed to know could be
expressed in a brief treatment. And while Belloc's volume was correct as far as
it went, it did not go far enough to establish Distributism as an economic
theory, and did less to establish a program for advancing the proprietary state.
Hence, Distributism remained "a creed without a dogma, evoking sympathy but
lacking support."1 The distributists never really established a school of
economics nor proposed a program of economic research, despite the work or some
fine economists such as John Ryan, E. F. Schumacher, Heinrich Pesch, and others.

This was particularly unfortunate because the distributists' main antagonists,
the Fabian Socialists, insisted on first-class economic research. Among those
who recognized the need for the reform of the Capitalist system, the Fabians had
a great advantage because they could put their case convincingly in economic
terms. Distributists were able to produce first-class critiques of both
Capitalism and Socialism, but they tended to be somewhat vague about their own
economics. The Fabians had no such problems, and without a "working"
alternative," the tended to carry the day against the distributists. They won a
battle we refused to fight.

Further, there is a certain amount of resignation among distributists, the
feeling that they are facing a system that "works," and that our major task is
to add a moral dimension to an already fully functioning system. For example,
Daniel M. Bell writes, "The empirical question put to capitalism cannot be `does
it work?' The obvious answer is "yes." 2 At first glance, Prof. Bell's statement
would appear to be true: we do see a working system around us, however
imperfectly. However, the working system we see is not capitalism, but
Keynesianism. The best one can say from the empirical evidence is that Keynesian
Capitalism works. But to say this is to already destroy the argument of the
capitalists, or at least of the pure capitalists. If capitalism is a system that
requires massive government intervention to balance supply and demand, then it's
purely economic claims must be called into question.

Yet the fact that capitalism fails and Keynesianism works is itself somewhat
perplexing. We would expect the reverse to be true. And here we come to the real
tragedy of the Distributist failure to confront the economic questions in
economic terms, because Distributist analysis provides us with the economic and
intellectual tools to understand the manifest failure of the one and the
apparent success of the other. Further, Distributism provides the tools to
understand the current crises in Keynesian economies and to point the way
forward. Nor do Distributists need to confine their remarks to the merely
speculative realm; on the contrary, we can demonstrate our beliefs with systems
that are on the ground and working successfully, and have been doing so for at
least 50 years. And finally, we can note that nearly all of modern economics,
whether neoclassical, Keynesian, Socialist or Austrian, is built on a mistake
about science; in the attempt to make their discipline "scientific" in the mold
of physics, they abandoned the only thing that can make a humane science
"scientific," namely the principle of justice and particularly distributive
justice. Thus, distributism can provide what the world now lacks: both a
theoretical framework and practical examples. Capitalism can provide neither and
Keynesianism is in crises. My thesis in this article is that if one wishes to be
an economic scientist, one will have to be a Distributist, or something very
like it.

Does Capitalism Work?
The people who argue that "capitalism works" are the same people who argue that
we should have less government interference in the market. Now, I am all for
less government; however, the plain fact of the matter is that capitalism cannot
function without this interference; capitalism relies on an expanded state to
balance aggregate supply and demand. Consider this fact: in the period from 1853
to 1953, the economy was in recession or depression fully 40% of the time. Since
1953, that is, since the economy became fully Keynesian, the economy has been in
recession only 15% of the time.3 Moreover, the pre-war recessions were, on
average, twice as deep and twice as long as the post-war ones.

There has been an on-going attempt for the last 30 years to return the economy
to its pre-Keynesian status. Since the rise of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and
Ronald Reagan in 1980, the political rhetoric has been about "free markets,"
"lower taxes," "less government interference," etc. Both Reagan and Thatcher
took Fredrick von Hayek as their economic mentor. But the more "Hayekian" the
economic rhetoric became, the more Keynesian the economy has actually become;
the unintended consequence of Hayek's policies have been the opposite of what
Hayek wanted: larger governments, greater debts, more centralized economic
power, and so forth. Keynes's policies are certainly, as Hayek claimed, a "road
to serfdom," but Hayek's policies have turned out to be a super-highway to that
same dismal destination. Nor is this true just for the United States and
Britain. Since the Reagan administration, the World Bank has forced Hayek's
economic policies on all the developing economies, and the results have been
uniformly dismal. Indeed, the theories of Hayek have been tested just as much as
have the theories of Karl Marx, and with about the same results: more government
power, less economic freedom; under neither did the state whither away, but
became an all-encompassing behemoth.

Under the free market rhetoric of "conservative" regimes, the government has not
shrunk, but expanded, so much so that we now have a government of nearly
imperial power and privilege, headed by an imperial presidency that ignores not
only the laws of congress and the Constitution, but even basic human "laws" such
as the law against torture as an instrument of state policy. Government
expenditures as a share of GDP are about the same as they were before the
conservative ascendancy, but the cost of government has far exceeded its tax
base. The result has been an increased dependence on borrowing. At the start of
the Reagan administration, the federal debt was about $700 Billion; at the close
of the Reagan-Bush era, it had tripled to $2.1 Trillion. It doubled again and
then doubled again, and then grew some more and now stands at about $11 Trillion
and rising rapidly. This increased debt represents an effective tax increase,
since borrowing is taxing too, but a tax shifted on to the next generations.

This leads us to an unavoidable conclusion: capitalism and the free market are
incompatible. History shows, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the growth of
capitalism and the growth in government go hand-in-hand. Big capitalism and big
government are not, as in the popular imagination and the economic treatises,
things opposed; rather, the one grows on the back of the other, and the more you
get of one, the more you will need of the other.

Distributists will not be surprised at this result, since it exactly matches the
predictions that Belloc made in The Servile State. The capitalist state, Belloc
believed, would grow increasingly unstable, and could only stabilize itself by
enlisting the power of government.4 Belloc wrote before the rise of Keynes, but
Keynes' methods were no surprise to readers of Belloc. Keynes indeed found a
"solution," but Belloc had already predicted the solution, and the solution is
servility. In Keynesian states, people cease to be citizens and become mere
clients of the state, where even their most ordinary needs are the subject of
one or more governmental bureaucracies, and where even ordinary local problems
are pushed up to be the responsibility of the most distant levels of government.

But as successful as Keynesianism has been at rescuing capitalism from itself,
one wonders if this cycle can continue. Each new business cycle seems to require
greater intervention than the last, and this latest crises requires gargantuan
efforts. Can this exercise in gigantism continue forever? Most likely not, at
least not in a finite world; sooner or later we come to a point where the system
can no longer sustain itself. We may now be at that point. Certainly a $11
trillion debt at the Federal level alone is daunting enough by itself, and that
debt shows no sign of abating. But even more problematic is the increasingly
servile nature of the population, a population easily manipulated by commercial
advertising and political "spin." The servility which Belloc predicted, which
Keynes institutionalized, and which Hayek feared on the theoretical level but
did so much to advance on the practical level, is now upon us. Thus our problem
transcends the merely economic; we must deal with a cultural problem as well. We
have saddled our children with crushing debts, just as we have deprived them of
the independent spirit which leads a man to pay his debts.

But if Capitalism, Keynes, and Hayek have all failed, then we must search for
the roots of their failure. If capitalist rhetoric no longer describes economic
reality (and hasn't described it for the last 60 years), then we must discover a
rhetoric more aligned with reality. In order to do this, we will have to
re-examine economic theory from the ground up to discover the flaws and find the
cure. And the cure, I am convinced, is to re-establish economic science on its
traditional base, a base that disappeared in the late 19th century. And the base
of economics, as with any humane science (science that examines relationships
between human beings) is justice.

1R. Matthews, Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stakeholder Society (Sydney, Australia
and West Wickham, UK: Comerford and Miller, 1999), 119

2 Daniel M. Bell Jr., "What Is Wrong with Capitalism? The Problem with the
Problem with Capitalism," The Other Journal.Com, no. 5 (2005).

3 NBER Website, Business Cycle Expansions and Contractions (National Bureau of
Economic Research, 2006 [cited May 17 2006]); available from
http://www.nber.org/cycles.html.

4 Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Classics,
1977; reprint, 1913), 107-21.

A long essay from Reality Sandwich that is worth reposting in full - enjoy
http://www.realitysandwich.com/money_and_crisis_civilization


Suppose you give me a million dollars with the instructions, "Invest this
profitably, and I'll pay you well." I'm a sharp dresser -- why not? So I go out
onto the street and hand out stacks of bills to random passers-by. Ten thousand
dollars each. In return, each scribbles out an IOU for $20,000, payable in five
years. I come back to you and say, "Look at these IOUs! I have generated a 20%
annual return on your investment." You are very pleased, and pay me an enormous
commission.
Now I've got a big stack of IOUs, so I use these "assets" as collateral to
borrow even more money, which I lend out to even more people, or sell them to
others like myself who do the same. I also buy insurance to cover me in case the
borrowers default -- and I pay for it with those self-same IOUs! Round and round
it goes, each new loan becoming somebody's asset on which to borrow yet more
money. We all rake in huge commissions and bonuses, as the total face value of
all the assets we've created from that initial million dollars is now fifty
times that.

Then one day, the first batch of IOUs comes due. But guess what? The person who
scribbled his name on the IOU can't pay me back right now. In fact, lots of the
borrowers can't. I try to hush up this embarrassing fact as long as possible,
but pretty soon you get suspicious. You want your million-plus dollars back --
in cash. I try to sell the IOUs and their derivatives that I hold, but everyone
else is suspicious too, and no one buys them. The insurance company tries to
cover my losses, but it can only do so by selling the IOUs I gave it!

So finally, the government steps in and buys the IOUs, bails out the insurance
company and everyone else holding the IOUs and the derivatives stacked on them.
Their total value is way more than a million dollars now. I and my fellow
entrepreneurs retire with our lucre. Everyone else pays for it.

This is the first level of what has happened in the financial industry over the
past decade. It is a huge transfer of wealth to the financial elite, to be
funded by US taxpayers, foreign corporations and governments, and ultimately the
foreign workers who subsidize US debt indirectly via the lower purchasing power
of their wages. However, to see the current crisis as merely the result of a big
con is to miss its true significance.

I think we all sense that we are nearing the end of an era. On the most
superficial level, it is the era of unregulated casino-style financial
manipulation that is ending. But the current efforts of the political elites to
fix the crisis at this level will only reveal its deeper dimensions. In fact,
the crisis goes "all the way to the bottom." It arises from the very nature of
money and property in the world today, and it will persist and continue to
intensify until money itself is transformed. A process centuries in the making
is in its final stages of unfoldment.

Money as we know it today has crisis and collapse built into its basic design.
That is because money seeks interest, bears interest, and indeed is born of
interest. To see how this works, lets go back to some finance basics. Money is
created when somebody takes out a loan from a bank (or more recently, a
disguised loan from some other kind of institution). A debt is a promise to pay
money in the future in order to buy something today; in other words, borrowing
money is a form of delayed trading. I receive something now (bought with the
money I borrowed) and agree to give something in the future (a good or service
which I will sell for the money to pay back the debt). A bank or any other
lender will ordinarily only agree to lend you money if there is a reasonable
expectation you will pay it back; in other words, if there is a reasonable
expectation you will produce goods or services of equivalent value. This
"reasonable expectation" can be guaranteed in the form of collateral, or it can
be encoded in one's credit rating.

Any time you use money, you are essentially guaranteeing "I have performed a
service or provided a good of equivalent value to the one I am buying." If the
money is borrowed money, you are saying that you will provide an equivalent
good/service in the future.

Now enter interest. What motivates a bank to lend anyone money in the first
place? It is interest. Interest drives the creation of money today. Any time
money is created through debt, a need to create even more money in the future is
also created. The amount of money must grow over time, which means that the
volume of goods and services must grow over time as well.

If the volume of money grows faster than the volume of goods and services, the
result is inflation. If it grows more slowly -- for example through a slowdown
in lending -- the result is bankruptcies, recession, or deflation. The
government can increase or decrease the supply of money in several ways. First,
it can create money by borrowing it from the central bank, or in America, from
the Federal Reserve. This money ends up as bank deposits, which in turn give
banks more margin reserves on which to extend loans. You see, a bank's capacity
to create money is limited by margin reserve requirements. Typically, a bank
must hold cash (or central bank deposits) equal to about 10% of its total
customer deposits. The other 90%, it can loan out, thus creating new money. This
money ends up back in a bank as deposits, allowing another 81% of it (90% of
90%) to be lent out again. In this way, each dollar of initial deposits ends up
as $9 of new money. Government spending of money borrowed from the central bank
acts a seed for new money creation. (Of course, this depends on banks'
willingness to lend! In a credit freeze, banks hoard excess reserves and the
repeated injections of government money have little effect.)

Another way to increase the money supply is to lower margin reserve
requirements. In practice this is rarely done, at least directly. However, in
the last decade, various kinds of non-bank lending have skirted the margin
reserve requirement, through the alphabet soup of financial instruments you've
been hearing about in the news. The result is that each dollar of original
equity has been leveraged not to nine times it original value, as in traditional
banking, but to 70 times or even more. This has allowed returns on investment
far beyond the 5% or so available from traditional banking, along with
"compensation" packages beyond the dreams of avarice.

Each new dollar that is created comes with a new dollar of debt -- more than a
dollar of debt, because of interest. The debt is eventually redeemed either with
goods and services, or with more borrowed money, which in turn can be redeemed
with yet more borrowed money... but eventually it will be used to buy goods and
services. The interest has to come from somewhere. Borrowing more money to make
the interest payments on an existing loan merely postpones the day of reckoning
by deferring the need to create new goods and services.

The whole system of interest-bearing money works fine as long as the volume of
goods and services exchanged for money keeps growing. The crisis we are seeing
today is in part because new money has been created much faster than goods and
services have, and much faster than has been historically sustainable. There are
only two ways out of such a situation: inflation and defaults. Each involve the
destruction of money. The current convulsions of the financial and political
elites basically come down to a futile attempt to prevent both. Their first
concern is to prevent the evaporation of money through massive bankruptcies,
because it is, after all, their money.

There is a much deeper crisis at work as well, a crisis in the creation of goods
and services that underlies money to begin with, and it is this crisis that gave
birth to the real estate bubble everyone blames for the current situation. To
understand it, let's get clear on what constitutes a "good" or a "service". In
economics, these terms refer to something that is exchanged for money. If I
babysit your children for free, economists don't count it as a service. It
cannot be used to pay a financial debt: I cannot go to the supermarket and say,
"I watched my neighbors kids this morning, so please give me food." But if I
open a day care center and charge you money, I have created a "service". GDP
rises and, according to economists, society has become wealthier.

The same is true if I cut down a forest and sell the timber. While it is still
standing and inaccessible, it is not a good. It only becomes "good" when I build
a logging road, hire labor, cut it down, and transport it to a buyer. I convert
a forest to timber, a commodity, and GDP goes up. Similarly, if I create a new
song and share it for free, GDP does not go up and society is not considered
wealthier, but if I copyright it and sell it, it becomes a good. Or I can find a
traditional society that uses herbs and shamanic techniques for healing, destroy
their culture and make them dependent on pharmaceutical medicine which they must
purchase, evict them from their land so they cannot be subsistence farmers and
must buy food, clear the land and hire them on a banana plantation -- and I have
made the world richer. I have brought various functions, relationships, and
natural resources into the realm of money. In The Ascent of Humanity I describe
this process in depth: the conversion of social capital, natural capital,
cultural capital, and spiritual capital into money.

Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based)
money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship
must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at
home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket
delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a "service". And we are the
richer for it. Right?

Another major engine of economic growth over the last three decades, child care,
has also made us richer. We are now relieved of the burden of caring for our own
children. We pay experts instead, who can do it much more efficiently.

In ancient times entertainment was also a free, participatory function. Everyone
played an instrument, sang, participated in drama. Even 75 years ago in America,
every small town had its own marching band and baseball team. Now we pay for
those services. The economy has grown. Hooray.

The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact there there is almost no
more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into
money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so
destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond
repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the
rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural
treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and
copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan.
Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold
back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for
things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing,
entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item.
Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the
biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is
culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the
"developed" world. In the developing world there still remain people who live
substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the
subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these
assets, to feed the money machine's insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet
this stripmining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both
because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of
effective resistance.

The result is that the supply of money -- and the corresponding volume of debt
-- has for several decades outstripped the production of goods and services that
it promises. It is deeply related to the classic problem of oversupply in
capitalist economics. The Marxian crisis of capital can be deferred into the
future as long as new, high-profit industries and markets can be developed to
compensate for the vicious circle of falling profits, falling wages, depressed
consumption, and overproduction in mature industries. The continuation of
capitalism as we know it depends on an infinite supply of these new industries,
which essentially must convert infinite new realms of social, natural, cultural,
and spiritual capital into money. The problem is, these resources are finite,
and the closer they come to exhaustion, the more painful their extraction
becomes. Therefore, contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an
ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We
cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health
into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.

Faced with the exhaustion of the non-monetized commonwealth that it consumes,
financial capital has tried to delay the inevitable by cannibalizing itself. The
dot-com bubble of the late 90s showed that the productive economy could not
longer keep up with the growth of money. Lots of excess money was running around
frantically, searching for a place where the promise of deferred goods and
services could be redeemed. So, to postpone the inevitable crash, the Fed
slashed interest rates and loosened monetary policy to allow old debts to be
repaid with new debts (rather than real goods and services). The new financial
goods and services that arose were phony, artifacts of deceptive accounting on a
vast, systemic scale.

Various pundits have observed that the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme was not so
different from the financial industry's pyramid of mortgaged-based derivatives
and other instruments, which themselves formed a bubble that, like Madoff's,
could only sustain itself through an unceasing, indeed exponentially-growing,
influx of new money. As such, it is a symbol of our times -- and even more than
people suppose. It is not only the Wall Street casino economy that is an
unsustainable pyramid scheme. The larger economic system, based as it is on the
eternal conversion of a finite commonwealth into money, is unsustainable as
well. It is like a bonfire that must burn higher and higher, to the exhaustion
of all available fuel. Just as fire breaks existing chemical bonds and frees
heat, so does our economy break the bonds of community, nature, and culture,
liberating free energy -- called money -- in the process. Only a fool would
think that a fire can burn ever-higher when the supply of fuel is finite. To
extend the metaphor, the recent deindustrialization and financialization of the
economy amounts to using the heat to create more fuel. According to the Second
Law of Thermodynamics, the amount created is always less than the amount
expended to create it. Obviously, the practice of borrowing new money to pay the
principal and interest of old debts cannot last very long, but that is what the
economy as a whole has done for ten years now.

Yet even abandoning this folly, we still must face the depletion of fuel
(remember, I mean not literal energy sources, but any bond of nature or culture
that can be turned into a commodity). Most of the proposals for addressing the
present economic crisis amount to finding more fuel. Whether it is drilling more
oil wells, paving over more green space, or spurring consumer spending, the goal
is to reignite economic growth; that is to expand the realm of goods and
services. It means finding new things for which we can pay. Today, unimaginably
to our forebears, we pay even for our water and our songs. What else is left to
convert into money?

A collapse is coming, unavoidably; indeed, we are in the midst of it. The first
government response, the bailout, was an attempt to uphold a tower of money that
is far beyond the total value of real goods and services it promises to redeem.
Predictably, the bailout was a miserable failure. The next response, Obama's
massive stimulus package, will fail for a different and much deeper reason. It
will fail because we are "maxed out": maxed out on nature's capacity to receive
our wastes without destroying the ecological basis of civilization; maxed out on
society's ability to withstand any more loss of community and connection; maxed
out on our forests' ability to withstand more clearcuts; maxed out on the human
body's capacity to stay viable in a depleted, toxic world. That we are also
maxed out on our credit only reflects that we have nothing left to convert into
money. Do we really need more roads and bridges? Can we sustain more of them,
and more of the industrial economy that goes along? Government stimulus programs
will at best prolong the current economic system for two or three years, with
perhaps a brief period of growth as we complete the pillage of nature, spirit,
body, and culture. When these vestiges of the commonwealth are gone, then
nothing will be able to stop a massive inflationary surge and currency collapse
on a global scale.

The present crisis is actually the final stage of what began in the 1930s.
Successive solutions to the fundamental problem of keeping pace with money that
expands with the rate of interest have been applied, and exhausted. The first
effective solution was war, a state which has been permanent since 1940.
Unfortunatly, or rather fortunately, nuclear weapons and a shift in human
consciousness have limited the solution of endless military escalation. Other
solutions -- globalization, technology-enabled development of new goods and
services to replace human functions never before commoditized, and
technology-enabled plunder of natural resources once off limits, and finally
financial auto-cannibalism -- have similarly run their course. Unless there are
realms of wealth I have not considered, and new depths of poverty, misery, and
alienation to which we might plunge, the inevitable cannot be delayed much
longer.

In the face of the impending crisis, people often ask what they can do to
protect themselves. "Buy gold? Stockpile canned goods? Build a fortified
compound in a remote area? What should I do?" I would like to suggest a
different kind of question: "What is the most beautiful thing I can do?" You
see, the gathering crisis presents a tremendous opportunity. Deflation, the
destruction of money, is only a categorical evil if the creation of money is a
categorical good. However, you can see from the examples I have given that the
creation of money has in many ways impoverished us all. Conversely, the
destruction of money has the potential to enrich us. It offers the opportunity
to reclaim parts of the lost commonwealth from the realm of money and property.

We actually see this happening every time there is an economic recession. People
can no longer pay for various goods and services, and so have to rely on friends
and neighbors instead. Where there is no money to facilitate transactions, gift
economies reemerge and new kinds of money are created. Ordinarily, though,
people and institutions fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening. The
habitual first response to economic crisis is to make and keep more money -- to
accelerate the conversion of anything you can into money. On a systemic level,
the debt surge is generating enormous pressure to extend the commodification of
the commonwealth. We can see this happening with the calls to drill for oil in
Alaska, commence deep-sea drilling, and so on. The time is here, though, for the
reverse process to begin in earnest -- to remove things from the realm of goods
and services, and return them to the realm of gifts, reciprocity,
self-sufficiency, and community sharing. Note well: this is going to happen
anyway in the wake of a currency collapse, as people lose their jobs or become
too poor to buy things. People will help each other and real communities will
reemerge.

In the meantime, anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from
conversion into money will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity.
Any forest you save from development, any road you stop, any cooperative
playgroup you establish; anyone you teach to heal themselves, or to build their
own house, cook their own food, make their own clothes; any wealth you create or
add to the public domain; anything you render off-limits to the world-devouring
Machine, will help shorten the Machine's lifespan. Think of it this way: if you
already do not depend on money for some portion of life's necessities and
pleasures, then the collapse of money will pose much less of a harsh transition
for you. The same applies to the social level. Any network or community or
social institution that is not a vehicle for the conversion of life into money
will sustain and enrich life after money.

Elsewhere I have described alternative money systems, based on mutual credit and
demurrage, that do not drive the conversion of all that is good, true, and
beautiful into money. These enact a fundamentally different human identity, a
fundamentally different sense of self, from what dominates today. No more will
it be true that more for me is less for you. On a personal level, the deepest
possible revolution we can enact is a revolution in our sense of self, in our
identity. The discrete and separate self of Descartes and Adam Smith has run its
course and is becoming obsolete. We are realizing our own inseparateness, from
each other and from the totality of all life. Interest belies this union, for it
seeks growth of the separate self at the expense of something external,
something other. Probably everyone reading this essay agrees with the principles
of interconnectedness, whether from a Buddhistic or an ecological perspective.
The time has come to live it. It is time to enter the spirit of the gift, which
embodies the felt understanding of non-separation. It is becoming abundantly
obvious that less for you (in all its dimensions) is also less for me. The
ideology of perpetual gain has brought us to a state of poverty so destitute
that we are gasping for air. That ideology, and the civilization built upon it,
is what is collapsing today.

Individually and collectively, anything we do to resist or postpone the collapse
will only make it worse. Let us stop resisting the revolution in human
beingness. If we want to survive the multiple crises unfolding today, let us not
seek to survive them. That is the mindset of separation; that is resistance, a
clinging to a dying past. Instead, let us shift our perspective toward reunion,
and think in terms of what we can give. What can we each contribute to a more
beautiful world? That is our only responsibility and our only security.

More concretely, let us engage in conscious, purposeful money destruction in
place of the unconscious destruction of money that happens in a collapsing
economy. If you still have money to invest, invest it in enterprises that
explicitly seek to build community, protect nature, and preserve the cultural
commonwealth. Expect a zero or negative financial return on your investment --
that is a good sign that you are not unintentionally converting even more of the
world to money. Whether or not you have money to invest, you can also reclaim
what was sold away by taking steps out the money economy. Anything you learn to
do for yourself or for other people, without paying for it; any utilization of
recycled or discarded materials; anything you make instead of buy, give instead
of sell; any new skill or new song or new art you teach yourself or another,
will reduce the dominion of money and grow a gift economy to sustain us through
the coming transition. The world of the Gift, echoing primitive gift societies,
the web of ecology, and the spiritual teachings of the ages, is nigh upon us. It
tugs on our heartstrings and and awakens our generosity. Shall we heed its call,
before the remainder of earth's beauty is consumed?

Added a couple of youtube videos to my blog
http://nakedmechanic.blogspot.com/2009/02/blog-post.html

I thank you for your reply and will ask no more - unless it's over a
shared drink
cheers
rob


--- In intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Stretton
<andrewpstretton@...> wrote:
>
> Hi Rob,
>
> Thank you for asking, most people don't. Why don't they ask?
Perhaps the great philosopher Herman Hesse put it best:
>
> "He who travels far will often see things far removed from what he
thought was the truth. When he talks about it in the fields at home,
he is often accused of lying, for the obdurate people will not
believe. Ignorance, I believe, will give little credence to my song."
>
> It wasn't just Ballarat. It was the board rooms of Japan, of
Australia, of the USA. It was the hallowed halls of Canberra, the
dining room of the NSW Parliament and the whistleblower meeting rooms
of the ACCC. It was the needless loss of 800 Australian manufacturing
jobs and the stacking of two Local Council elections and it was the
shafting of  numerous 'small town' folk.
>
> It was a common denominator that kept rearing its ugly head,
equally prevalent in those 'hallowed' places as it was in the
Local 'Progress / Community' committees of small townships like
Talbot, (200 people), Clunes (1400 people) and Maryborough (8000
people), small towns in 'the middle of nowhere'.
>
> It led to an understanding far removed from what I believed was the
truth.
>
> Which is why I don't talk about it in the fields at home.
>
> Kindest Regards
>
> Andrew
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Rob Windt <meridian_power@...>
> To: intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Tuesday, 3 February, 2009 3:21:38 PM
> Subject: [intentionalcommunityvictoria] Re: Choice, the Best Sauce
>
>
> I seem to be missing the (obvious to you) link here.
>
> Does membership of a chamber of commerce infer evil intentions,
> besides the usual pro-growth nonsense?
>
> Does your experience at one of our largest inland cities translate
to
> similar doings in a small town in the middle of nowhere?
>
> What the &^@# happened in Ballarat to provoke this reaction?
>
> Yours in curiousity
> Rob
>
> --- In intentionalcommunit yvictoria@ yahoogroups. com, Andrew
Stretton
> <andrewpstretton@ ...> wrote:
> >
> > "I think you misjudge Lloyd as he was, in part, skewering the
> unreal
> > expectations of the sea/tree changers that are flooding this area"
> >
> > Hmmm, no I don't Rob, between 2000 and 2002 I was the CEO of the
> Ballarat Chamber of Commerce!
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > Andrew
> >
> > ____________ _________ _________ __
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >       Make Yahoo!7 your homepage and win a trip to the Quiksilver
> Pro. Find out more
> >
>
>
>
>
>       Make Yahoo!7 your homepage and win a trip to the Quiksilver
Pro. Find out more
>

I seem to be missing the (obvious to you) link here.

Does membership of a chamber of commerce infer evil intentions,
besides the usual pro-growth nonsense?

Does your experience at one of our largest inland cities translate to
similar doings in a small town in the middle of nowhere?

What the &^@# happened in Ballarat to provoke this reaction?

Yours in curiousity
Rob



--- In intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Stretton
<andrewpstretton@...> wrote:
>
> "I think you misjudge Lloyd as he was, in part, skewering the
unreal
> expectations of the sea/tree changers that are flooding this area"
>
> Hmmm, no I don't Rob, between 2000 and 2002 I was the CEO of the
Ballarat Chamber of Commerce!
>
> Regards
>
> Andrew
>
> ________________________________
>
>
>
>
>
>
>       Make Yahoo!7 your homepage and win a trip to the Quiksilver
Pro. Find out more
>

G'day Andrew, I thought that post would strike a chord - and I must
confess that I just blew a whole day reading every post on "How Many
Miles From Babylon" - time well spent I reckon.

I think you misjudge Lloyd as he was, in part, skewering the unreal
expectations of the sea/tree changers that are flooding this area,
that post was written a few days after I inquired off-line about his
opinion on Foster and surrounding towns post crash (for the record,
we both feel that Foster and Meeniyan have better
prospects/demographics than Wonthaggi where I currently reside)

"I am torn, as we all are, between pointing out the realities of
surviving in this world and standing up for what we truly believe in"

Aye, there's the rub, I'm tied to the machine via my business but see
that as a means to an end.
At 50 years of age with no land or assetts beyond what is in this
shed I'll play Babylons game and build in what resilience I can, if
it gets me my own piece of dirt I'll be a happy man as my needs are
small and I have a strong social network across this district

By the way, here's a brilliant dissertation on things of value
http://milesfrombabylon.blogspot.com/2005/07/beginning-of-wisdom.html

Cheers
Rob

--- In intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Stretton
<andrewpstretton@...> wrote:
>
> Rob,
>
> Sensational post!
>
> It has taken a couple of days of pondering and the post, 'miles
from Babylon' to bring about greater clarity over just why it was
that Lloyd Morcomb's post rattled my cage. There is no doubt great
irony in that fact, and it hasn't been lost on me. Visiting Lloyd's
blog, I noticed that you have an ad for your business on his page,
and so I am torn, as we all are, between pointing out the realities
of surviving in this world and standing up for what we truly believe
in. The 'Babylon' post below clarifies the importance to our future
survival, that of congruently making the choice for the latter,
regardless of the fact that there will not be any guarantees if we do
so. This is something that Kris (my partner) and I struggle with
hourly. Just how do we survive in a world that is doing its best to
keep us within its destructive fold?
>
> Perhaps the only lucid point of Lloyd's post was his last sentence
where he outlined the 'camaraderie' that Humans posses in times of
great difficulty. Hardship and shared responsibility of that hardship
hold within them immense 'potential' for widespread equality. The
converse is also true, and as such there are a great many people who
presently live in the city, and many in the country, who want to, or
have made their move to the regions because they are seeking a safe
haven from what is to come. We met many in regional Oz during our
pushbike tour up the East Coast. They have followed much of what
Lloyd talks about in order to 'secure their future's', incidentally,
a divisive phrase that our politicians use in sickening repetition in
order to create fear and an atmosphere of 'us agin them' (including
Nature), no doubt because it engenders a belief in 'us' about
our 'need' for their (dubious) 'leadership'.
>
> Whilst on the surface, our move may appear to be 'like minded', in
reality, if we base 'our move' on what is really a shallow premise,
we simply end up with self centered communities that do little more
than fight over what is left, either amongst themselves or with other
communities. This then ultimately becomes the classic 'Darwinian
Struggle', a concept that Darwin himself warned against, one that
Peter Kropotkin succinctly argued against in his classic
treatise 'Mutual Aid', and at best, a means that Capitalism
successfully hijacks for its own ends.
>
> This then is the Capitalist 'upside down' world of 'caring'. Why?
Because,
>
> When we are more concerned about being eaten by: 'the mosquitoes,
the leeches', than we are about the importance of their bio-
diversity, we have upside down caring.
>
> When we are more concerned about getting cold and wet because
we : 'Run out of firewood in the middle of a week of solid rain',
than we do about the importance of the Forests and the Rain, we have
upside down caring.
>
> When we are more concerned about being: 'Run off the road by a
logging truck and becoming too traumatised to drive anywhere', than
we are about protesting and stopping the logging of our critically
endangered Forests, we have upside down caring.
>
> When we are more concerned about our inability to: 'dodge wallabies
and wombats in mid-winter on our way to and from work, than we are
about stopping and observing their beauty in wonderment, we have
upside down caring.
>
> When we are more concerned that we only have: 'Two crappy TV
Stations', that limit our knowledge of what's on offer during
the 'Christmas' and every other wasteful 'consumption day' binge,
than we are the damage that those profligate binge's burden the
environment with, then we have upside down caring.
>
> When we are more concerned about making sure that we: 'Don't live
in a place surrounded by tall trees because (we might) spend every
summer terrified by the smell of smoke', instead of celebrating the
importance of those tall trees, their bio-diversity, their organic
matter production and their shade, then we have nothing more than
self-centered upside down caring!
>
> Unfortunately, it takes all of these points to demonstrate what
Neil Douglas said so beautifully:
> 'We deliberately hate the bush, even when we're in the act of
playing tribute to it'.
>
> We 'play' tribute to it through poems and legends and we move to it
because of the romance and the future potential security, but we
actually hate it. So our first priority is to change it, get rid of
all the 'nasties' and create our own little secure and guaranteed
world.
>
> The post below shows us another way if we care to open our eyes to
it. It is perhaps a shame that they don't outline the hardship
connected with that life. That life takes considerable commitment and
persistence, Nature after all is the greatest teacher, but the
rewards do as they suggest, exist in the freedom of choice. After
all, all humans are free to choose, but only if they know enough to
compare.
>
> Regards
>
> Andrew
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Rob Windt <meridian_power@...>
> To: intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Monday, 2 February, 2009 8:37:11 AM
> Subject: [intentionalcommunityvictoria] Choice, the Best Sauce
>
>
> by Eleutheros of http://milesfrombab ylon.blogspot. com/
>
> This is from the comments of the previous post: Question: what
advice
> could/would you give someone who truly has the desire and the will
to
> walk away from Babylon?
>
> I don't know. I don't know your circumstances, proclivity,
resources,
> history, etc. It would be all too easy to suggest something or
begin
> a diatribe that would be completely moot. So I must reduce the
answer
> to the most basic tenet of the freeman's way of things.
>
> The above photo is a view down the cathedral-like corridor formed
by
> the 14' high stalks in one of the patches of corn. On the left side
> and about midway from top to bottom you will see one ear of corn
> still upright and several others behind it drooping over. When the
> corn is completely finished for the season, the stalk begins to
turn
> brown and the ears droop over so that the husks form a raincoat to
> allow the corn to dry in the October sun. Very soon we will begin
> harvesting the corn, allow to to finish drying, then shell it from
> the cobs and put it way for kitchen use.
>
> We actually have enough of this kitchen corn left over from last
year
> to do us for the current year. You never know when there is going
to
> be as bad year, so we will put most of this aside against the
> possibility. During the year the corn will be ground into meal as
> needed to make our staple food, cornbread. A variation of that is
to
> soak the corn in lime water to make masa for tortillas and tamales.
> But the natural food staple of our culture is Appalachian style
> cornbread which along with the dried beans we also grow gives a
> balance of starch, protein, and fat.
>
> These corn patches, this year one for white corn and one for red
> corn, are tucked away on a rather narrow shoulder, maybe 70' wide,
on
> the hillside above the mountain hollow in a place few would deem as
a
> place for agriculture in these modern times. The seed has been
saved
> from crop to crop for many years now. The ground is prepared with a
> horse and a 100 year old plow. The ground is kept fertile by
> application of stable manure and leaf mold. In other words, if we
> padlocked the gate to this farmstead and never had any trafficking
> with Babylon ever again, we could still grow corn and beans in
> perpetuity, worlds without end, amen.
>
> Now many of the people who read this blog, or other writings like
it,
> turn away in horror and disgust and what they perceive as a call to
> recluse oneself in some remote niche of the world and subsist on a
> mirthless bowl of corn meal gruel all of one's days. Said people
miss
> the point entirely.
>
> What is this low tech, low input, subsistence economy all about,
what
> does it mean to us? It is much like Jack Sparrow's remark to
> Elizabeth Swann when they were marooned on the island and he told
her
> what the Black Pearl really was, it was freedom. Like that to us
our
> centuries old agriculture represents for us a choice. And having a
> choice is the very essence and foundation of our escape from
Babylon.
>
> So this is my answer to the anonymous commenter, To walk away from
> Babylon, you must have choices. Alas, it is likely you don't even
if
> you most certainly think you do. Babylon, as with any exploitative
> and controlling system, can only exist by limiting and eliminating
> your choices. After all, if you actually have choices, you may in
> fact choose the things that benefit and enhance you and your family
> rather than things that benefit Babylon.
>
> Babylon must eliminate your ability to choose. It does so with the
> help of two effective ploys. First it will offer you false choices
in
> order to distract you from the fact that you have no real choices
at
> all. A desperate maneuver of failed parenting is when a child is
> adamant that he does not want to go somewhere, you say, "We need to
> get ready to go now, do you want to wear the blue shirt or the red
> one?" The hope being that the child will become absorbed in
choosing
> which color shirt to choose and forget for the moment all his
> objections about going in the first place. The Nazis used this
tactic
> to control the Jews they intended to exterminate and it is hardly
> less dishonorable when anyone uses it. Yet this is part and parcel
> the essential operations of Babylon.
>
> For example, people are always asking us what sort of alternate
> electrical energy we are using, because, after all, if you are
going
> to escape from Babylon, you surely don't want to be connected to
the
> grid! It's a false choice to choose, say, solar electric or grid
> electric. If you "escape" being tied down to a monthly electric
bill,
> you are saddled with the expense of a depreciating and
deteriorating
> electric system you own. What is more, the amount of electricity
you
> can feasibly realize with a home solar set up is so small that you
> must curtail your electric use severely if that's all you use. You
> will not, for example be running an electric range, electric hot
> water heater, electric clothes dryer, and electric furnace or heat
> pump on a home solar electric system. So if you are willing to live
> within the limits of the amount of electricity you can generate
with
> such a system, it is such a tiny bit that it is not much expense or
> dependence to get it from the grid to begin with. It's a false
> choice. Our household is set up so that it is not dependent on
> electricity at all. Make no mistake, we enjoy our electricity. We
> like watching DVD's, using the computer, listening to the radio,
> running the electric dehydrator, and the convenience of early
morning
> and late evening activities because of the electric lights. But we
> also are equipped to live without it. Which we have done. Ours is a
> true choice, it is to use electricity or not as is prudent by the
> circumstances. Switching from being dependent on the grid to being
> dependent on the makers of batteries and solar panels is not a true
> choice since either way you are dependent.
>
> The second way in which Babylon enforces its no-choice policy is
when
> there really is a choice you might make, Babylon convinces you that
> you really don't have that choice at all. To be able to raise any
of
> our own food we have to borrow money for land, right! You have to
go
> to college, right? Gotta have wheels, gotta have a credit card,
> right?
>
> Wrong. Those, and many more, are all things Babylon chants over and
> over until the idea that you could do without them entirely is just
> beyond belief.
>
> So I bring up my corn field in way of illustration of what a real
> choice looks like. We produce (and even prepare, grind and bake)
our
> staple bread with no input at all from Babylon. So we always have
the
> choice to eat that instead of what Babylon offers. We also buy
wheat
> in bulk and make wheat bread sometimes, but if (when, as it
happened
> this year) the transportation cost or scarcity of wheat makes the
> price beyond the pale, we can look at it and say, "No, not going
> there, we will just go home and have our cornbread and beans."
> Likewise we sometimes buy food from stands and stores, and on a few
> occasions we eat out. But we always have the choice, and if we need
> to, we can enforce that choice for months on end. We've heard many
a
> Babylonian say, "A person has to eat, so no matter what we've got
to
> get money to buy food, or else use the credit card!" No choice.
>
> Your escape from Babylon begins when you can say, "No, I have a
> choice. Oh, I can dine around Babylon's table if I choose, but if
the
> Babyonian terms and conditions are odious, then I don't have to."
>
> That's what my cornfield means.
>
> It's just an example. Your choices may vary. So let's go back to
the
> beginning. What can you do? Examine the verities and realities of
> your existence and ask yourself plainly and honestly where you are
> devoid of choices. This and this alone tells you exactly where you
> stand. Is it the gas pump and car payment or else you are destitute
> with no way of earning your livelihood? Is it the Mart and
> agribusiness or you starve? Is it the mortgage company and real
> estate agent or you'd have to live under a bridge? Is it the
> University and its degree else no one has the least bit of
> credibility in you? Etc. etc.. Then you are devoid of choices and
this
> defines your thralldom to Babylon. Its policy of eliminating your
> choices has been most effective.
>
> There is another curious aspect of this matter of choice. To the
> untutored it might appear as if it is a continuum, a matter of
> degrees, and so it is all a matter of balance. But it most
certainly
> is not. There is a trigger point, a breaking point, where you are
> free of the stranglehold of Babylon.
>
> I recall a conversation some years ago that was the inspiration for
a
> post on this blog. Like so many who employ the "matter of degrees"
> argument, my disputant insisted that we both alike were dependent
on
> trafficking in Babylon's coin, that ultimately I could not escape
it
> any more than he could. The difference, which he never understood,
> was that the need for it controlled what he did the next morning.
He
> had no choice. He had to put gas in the car on the morrow and go to
> the job or else the disaster of his personal world loomed. I on the
> other hand had a choice of whether I attended to the matter of
> Babylon's money that day, or that week, or even that year for that
> matter. Babylon's hold was broken. Just as I could decide to go
home
> and eat cornbread and beans or else buy something at Babylon's
> markets, I could choose to bestir myself to do Babylon's dance for
a
> few of its coins ... or not. Oh, eventually I would have to pay the
> property tax and and buy some kerosene. But I had weeks or years to
> decide how I'd like to do it. In that time many things change, many
> opportunities arise, and many circumstances come and go. I don't
have
> to do it right now, you can't rush me, you can't dictate to me, you
> can't write the rules for me to follow. It is not a continuum or
> matter of degrees, it is a matter of having to do it right now
under
> someone else's conditions and to someone else's advantage, or
rather
> to do it in my own time, under my conditions, and to my advantage.
> That's what it means to live in a world of real choices. It is what
> it means to live free.
>
> So, my anonymous friend, the thing you must do is provide yourself
> with choices. Look at your situation cold in the eye and tell where
> you have been backed into a choiceless corner. Then see beyond
> Babylon's false choices and blather that you have no choice and
step
> to a place in each instance where you an say to Babylon, "No, not
> this time, I don't have to."
>
> And most of all, don't look at the lives of the really free and see
> us as hulking down on a dark mountainside swilling down a bowl of
> mirthless gruel. No indeed. When we choose to have it, our humble
> fare is a feast unrivaled. It is partaken with a fine and savory
> sauce far beyond anything offered in Babylon's finest. That sauce
is
> choice.
>
> http://milesfrombab ylon.blogspot. com/2008/ 10/choice- best-sauce.
html
>
>
>
>
>       Make Yahoo!7 your homepage and win a trip to the Quiksilver
Pro. Find out more
>

by Eleutheros of http://milesfrombabylon.blogspot.com/

This is from the comments of the previous post: Question: what advice
could/would you give someone who truly has the desire and the will to
walk away from Babylon?

I don't know. I don't know your circumstances, proclivity, resources,
history, etc. It would be all too easy to suggest something or begin
a diatribe that would be completely moot. So I must reduce the answer
to the most basic tenet of the freeman's way of things.

The above photo is a view down the cathedral-like corridor formed by
the 14' high stalks in one of the patches of corn. On the left side
and about midway from top to bottom you will see one ear of corn
still upright and several others behind it drooping over. When the
corn is completely finished for the season, the stalk begins to turn
brown and the ears droop over so that the husks form a raincoat to
allow the corn to dry in the October sun. Very soon we will begin
harvesting the corn, allow to to finish drying, then shell it from
the cobs and put it way for kitchen use.

We actually have enough of this kitchen corn left over from last year
to do us for the current year. You never know when there is going to
be as bad year, so we will put most of this aside against the
possibility. During the year the corn will be ground into meal as
needed to make our staple food, cornbread. A variation of that is to
soak the corn in lime water to make masa for tortillas and tamales.
But the natural food staple of our culture is Appalachian style
cornbread which along with the dried beans we also grow gives a
balance of starch, protein, and fat.

These corn patches, this year one for white corn and one for red
corn, are tucked away on a rather narrow shoulder, maybe 70' wide, on
the hillside above the mountain hollow in a place few would deem as a
place for agriculture in these modern times. The seed has been saved
from crop to crop for many years now. The ground is prepared with a
horse and a 100 year old plow. The ground is kept fertile by
application of stable manure and leaf mold. In other words, if we
padlocked the gate to this farmstead and never had any trafficking
with Babylon ever again, we could still grow corn and beans in
perpetuity, worlds without end, amen.

Now many of the people who read this blog, or other writings like it,
turn away in horror and disgust and what they perceive as a call to
recluse oneself in some remote niche of the world and subsist on a
mirthless bowl of corn meal gruel all of one's days. Said people miss
the point entirely.

What is this low tech, low input, subsistence economy all about, what
does it mean to us? It is much like Jack Sparrow's remark to
Elizabeth Swann when they were marooned on the island and he told her
what the Black Pearl really was, it was freedom. Like that to us our
centuries old agriculture represents for us a choice. And having a
choice is the very essence and foundation of our escape from Babylon.

So this is my answer to the anonymous commenter, To walk away from
Babylon, you must have choices. Alas, it is likely you don't even if
you most certainly think you do. Babylon, as with any exploitative
and controlling system, can only exist by limiting and eliminating
your choices. After all, if you actually have choices, you may in
fact choose the things that benefit and enhance you and your family
rather than things that benefit Babylon.

Babylon must eliminate your ability to choose. It does so with the
help of two effective ploys. First it will offer you false choices in
order to distract you from the fact that you have no real choices at
all. A desperate maneuver of failed parenting is when a child is
adamant that he does not want to go somewhere, you say, "We need to
get ready to go now, do you want to wear the blue shirt or the red
one?" The hope being that the child will become absorbed in choosing
which color shirt to choose and forget for the moment all his
objections about going in the first place. The Nazis used this tactic
to control the Jews they intended to exterminate and it is hardly
less dishonorable when anyone uses it. Yet this is part and parcel
the essential operations of Babylon.

For example, people are always asking us what sort of alternate
electrical energy we are using, because, after all, if you are going
to escape from Babylon, you surely don't want to be connected to the
grid! It's a false choice to choose, say, solar electric or grid
electric. If you "escape" being tied down to a monthly electric bill,
you are saddled with the expense of a depreciating and deteriorating
electric system you own. What is more, the amount of electricity you
can feasibly realize with a home solar set up is so small that you
must curtail your electric use severely if that's all you use. You
will not, for example be running an electric range, electric hot
water heater, electric clothes dryer, and electric furnace or heat
pump on a home solar electric system. So if you are willing to live
within the limits of the amount of electricity you can generate with
such a system, it is such a tiny bit that it is not much expense or
dependence to get it from the grid to begin with. It's a false
choice. Our household is set up so that it is not dependent on
electricity at all. Make no mistake, we enjoy our electricity. We
like watching DVD's, using the computer, listening to the radio,
running the electric dehydrator, and the convenience of early morning
and late evening activities because of the electric lights. But we
also are equipped to live without it. Which we have done. Ours is a
true choice, it is to use electricity or not as is prudent by the
circumstances. Switching from being dependent on the grid to being
dependent on the makers of batteries and solar panels is not a true
choice since either way you are dependent.

The second way in which Babylon enforces its no-choice policy is when
there really is a choice you might make, Babylon convinces you that
you really don't have that choice at all. To be able to raise any of
our own food we have to borrow money for land, right! You have to go
to college, right? Gotta have wheels, gotta have a credit card,
right?

Wrong. Those, and many more, are all things Babylon chants over and
over until the idea that you could do without them entirely is just
beyond belief.

So I bring up my corn field in way of illustration of what a real
choice looks like. We produce (and even prepare, grind and bake) our
staple bread with no input at all from Babylon. So we always have the
choice to eat that instead of what Babylon offers. We also buy wheat
in bulk and make wheat bread sometimes, but if (when, as it happened
this year) the transportation cost or scarcity of wheat makes the
price beyond the pale, we can look at it and say, "No, not going
there, we will just go home and have our cornbread and beans."
Likewise we sometimes buy food from stands and stores, and on a few
occasions we eat out. But we always have the choice, and if we need
to, we can enforce that choice for months on end. We've heard many a
Babylonian say, "A person has to eat, so no matter what we've got to
get money to buy food, or else use the credit card!" No choice.

Your escape from Babylon begins when you can say, "No, I have a
choice. Oh, I can dine around Babylon's table if I choose, but if the
Babyonian terms and conditions are odious, then I don't have to."

That's what my cornfield means.

It's just an example. Your choices may vary. So let's go back to the
beginning. What can you do? Examine the verities and realities of
your existence and ask yourself plainly and honestly where you are
devoid of choices. This and this alone tells you exactly where you
stand. Is it the gas pump and car payment or else you are destitute
with no way of earning your livelihood? Is it the Mart and
agribusiness or you starve? Is it the mortgage company and real
estate agent or you'd have to live under a bridge? Is it the
University and its degree else no one has the least bit of
credibility in you? Etc. etc. Then you are devoid of choices and this
defines your thralldom to Babylon. Its policy of eliminating your
choices has been most effective.

There is another curious aspect of this matter of choice. To the
untutored it might appear as if it is a continuum, a matter of
degrees, and so it is all a matter of balance. But it most certainly
is not. There is a trigger point, a breaking point, where you are
free of the stranglehold of Babylon.

I recall a conversation some years ago that was the inspiration for a
post on this blog. Like so many who employ the "matter of degrees"
argument, my disputant insisted that we both alike were dependent on
trafficking in Babylon's coin, that ultimately I could not escape it
any more than he could. The difference, which he never understood,
was that the need for it controlled what he did the next morning. He
had no choice. He had to put gas in the car on the morrow and go to
the job or else the disaster of his personal world loomed. I on the
other hand had a choice of whether I attended to the matter of
Babylon's money that day, or that week, or even that year for that
matter. Babylon's hold was broken. Just as I could decide to go home
and eat cornbread and beans or else buy something at Babylon's
markets, I could choose to bestir myself to do Babylon's dance for a
few of its coins ... or not. Oh, eventually I would have to pay the
property tax and and buy some kerosene. But I had weeks or years to
decide how I'd like to do it. In that time many things change, many
opportunities arise, and many circumstances come and go. I don't have
to do it right now, you can't rush me, you can't dictate to me, you
can't write the rules for me to follow. It is not a continuum or
matter of degrees, it is a matter of having to do it right now under
someone else's conditions and to someone else's advantage, or rather
to do it in my own time, under my conditions, and to my advantage.
That's what it means to live in a world of real choices. It is what
it means to live free.

So, my anonymous friend, the thing you must do is provide yourself
with choices. Look at your situation cold in the eye and tell where
you have been backed into a choiceless corner. Then see beyond
Babylon's false choices and blather that you have no choice and step
to a place in each instance where you an say to Babylon, "No, not
this time, I don't have to."

And most of all, don't look at the lives of the really free and see
us as hulking down on a dark mountainside swilling down a bowl of
mirthless gruel. No indeed. When we choose to have it, our humble
fare is a feast unrivaled. It is partaken with a fine and savory
sauce far beyond anything offered in Babylon's finest. That sauce is
choice.

http://milesfrombabylon.blogspot.com/2008/10/choice-best-sauce.html

That's a fair comment Andrew, I suppose it comes down to preparing
for a crash or a contraction, and you're right that there are no
guarantees or "hand holding" on the former
Cheers
Rob


--- In intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Stretton
<andrewpstretton@...> wrote:
>
> Hi Rob,
>
> The article doesn't get my goat, if anything, it simply reinforces
my belief that when it comes to the future and to what is unfolding,
there is a distinct lack of 'depth' in the thinking of many people.
This article is a 'populist' sales pitch by the South Gippsland
Shire's contact for the Foster Chamber of Commerce, a checklist that
most people from the cities who are considering a tree change would
agree with and as such, it fails dismally. Many of the truly critical
topics are simply not covered, it is therefore an article written
primarily for people who are looking for 'guarantees'.
>
> What are the critical topics? Will I be covering them? No. The
realities we will have to face in the future cannot be taught. Most
Humans seeking guarantees shy away from adversity and hostility, the
rich experiences that in truth could provide them with considerable
personal growth and critically important survival skills and
resilience.
>
> We have observed an interesting phenomena on our property North of
the Divide. We grow wild rocket, giant red mustard (a lettuce like
green) and kale, simply because they are very hardy and the insects
and pests hate the taste of the leaves and won't go near the plants.
>
> So it is with the Human visitors to the property, all of whom spit
out these highly nutritious raw leaves after only two chews, because
the 'taste is too strong'.
>
> A decision to move to any area requires thinking way beyond that of
the insects.
>
> Regards
>
> Andrew
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Rob Windt <meridian_power@...>
> To: intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Friday, 30 January, 2009 5:23:29 PM
> Subject: [intentionalcommunityvictoria] Why Foster? Why South
Gippsland?
>
>
> Lloyd Morecom lives in the Sth Gippsland town of Foster and writes
a
> fine blog http://southgippsla ndfutures. blogspot. com/ this is one
of
> his latest entries
>
> The fundamental choice I made about how my life was to be ordered
was
> my decision to make attachment to place a priority over following a
> career. By making such a choice a very different set of values then
> follow from the ones dictated by climbing the slippery pole of
career
> ambition. This is not to say that I haven't had any sort of career.
I
> have, but it's been bounded and limited by a higher loyalty. I do
> what I need to do to live in this place, although sometimes that
has
> involved working in other places for a while, such as in Indonesia
> and Thailand in order to set myself up financially, or Melbourne in
> the eighties when I needed more social stimulus.
>
> By making such a fundamental choice, one's life is greatly
> simplified. It's easy to work out what your subsidiary values are.
> Because you will spend a long period of time in a local community,
> the kinds of artificial aids one needs to bolster one's prestige in
a
> larger and more abstract social milieu aren't needed. What's the
> point of a prestige car when for better or worse, everyone knows
what
> kind of person you are anyway? And in any case, the flash car
doesn't
> look flash for long once your wife starts carting her goats around
in
> the back.
>
> Office and career politics can be a thorny issue in any job, but if
> everything doesn't hinge on it and you were only in it for the
money
> and a bit of fun in the first place, if you fall off the slippery
> pole, it's no longer a shattering tragedy.
>
> Of course communities can be toxic too, or just plain unlucky. It
> pays to back winners in this life. It may be admirable to devote
your
> life to helping lepers in Burma, but it's not likely to be a great
> place to bring up the kids and you can forget the notion of
> participation as a full citizen in national life. Even in this wide
> brown land, there are places I personally would give a wide berth
to.
> What's the point of being president of the Wittenoom Progress
> Association? In the same way and with the broadest and crudest
brush-
> strokes, I would not consider any where inland of the Great
Dividing
> Range. Too dry, too vulnerable to climate change and almost always
> too vulnerable to changes in single economic variables (export
> agricultural products for starters are exposed to market
> fluctuations, climate variations and land degradation through
> irrigation and dry land salinity).
>
> I've got nothing against city or suburban living per se. There are
> vibrant and sustainable communities in cities and big towns, and
the
> larger and more diverse a place is, the more reslient it is likely
to
> be in the face of the changes which are now upon us. So small
> communities like Foster are liable to be less viable and more
> vulnerable than bigger ones.
>
> But I'm used to living here, I've lived in a diversity of other
> places and looking at it with a cold objective eye it's got a lot
> going for it. And that's what you need: a cold clear look at the
> frying pan you're leaping from into which fire? What follows is
> Lloydy's rough guide to thinking about this sort of decision.
>
> Sea or Tree Change? Nothing wrong with that, but think carefully
> about where you're moving to. No low lying coastal properties! And
if
> you're thinking about a move to the tropics, consider how you'd go
> without air-conditioning, and the likelihood of extreme weather
> events such as cyclones.
>
> Again, consider location before all else! What are you really
after?
> Is what you're seeking a realistic vision which you know will work,
> or is it just a remnant of a fantasy you had while trapped in the
> cube farm? You remember that weekend you and your wife had in the
> cabin tucked away in a rain forest a couple of years ago â€" that's
> what you want! Whoa buddy! No it isn't! In the end, there is a
common
> human pattern which governs the good life. We need food, shelter,
> love and companionship, meaningful work and community. You move
into
> your cabin in the woods and what happens? You'd forgotten about the
> mosquitoes, the leeches. You run out of firewood in the middle of a
> week of solid rain. Your wife gets run off the road by a logging
> truck and becomes too traumatised to drive herself anywhere. You
find
> in winter you're driving into town in the dark and home in the
dark,
> dodging wallabies and wombats, not very successfully, and in
eighteen
> months, the gravel roads hammer your gorgeous little European car
to
> death. There are only two crappy TV stations. After your house
> warming party, you don't see anyone for months at time, until
> Christmas, when all your old friends turn up with their surly
> teenagers and have a holiday for free. You discover your close
> neighbours, who you made a big effort to befriend when you first
> arrived, are barking mad. They borrow your tools and never return
> them, and you find yourself having vague and troubling
conversations
> with them at the mailbox involving long running feuds, guns and
dark
> marital secrets. And all this is assuming the price of fuel still
> makes driving hundreds of kilometres a month, in and out of town,
> affordable!
>
> Live in or very close to a town. Assume at some stage that you will
> need to do without a car at all. Chose your town with care. It
should
> have a diverse population, with reasonable medical services and
other
> professionals, and not be overly dependant on one crop or industry.
> Is it dependant on irrigation which may fail? Don't live in a place
> surrounded by tall trees unless you want to spend every summer
> terrified by the smell of smoke. Don't be sucked in by charming old
> buildings. And don't buy low lying properties on the coast.
Remember?
> Global Warming? Sea level rise? Long before the waves wash over
your
> mansion on the beach at Mollymook, its value will have collapsed
> through sheer fear of sea level rise. You won't be able to get
> insurance on it either. Be sensible!
>
> Look at the people. Try and gauge their feelings about the place.
Is
> it ruled on Saturday nights by gangs of drunken louts in noisy
cars,
> looking for someone to fight? Get the local paper and look at the
> police reports. What sorts of crime get reported weekly? If it's
just
> lost wallets and speeding fines, with the odd break in of sheds on
> remote properties, it should be OK. Is the shopping centre full of
a
> lot of empty shops? Look at the demeanour of the people you see in
> the street.. Do you see lots of people in conversation on busy days
> with smiles on their faces? Are the young people friendly or surly?
> Remember everywhere has its oddballs, so don't focus too much on
them.
>
> Talk to school teachers if you have children who'll be going to
local
> schools. You may be lovely cultured people, but the wrong crowd in
a
> small town can destroy your kid's lives, or force you to send them
to
> boarding school. On the other hand, the right crowd will give them
a
> confidence, straightforwardness , lack of cynicism and ability to
mix
> with all types which they would never get in the City. They will be
> big fish in a small pond, and get the kind of attention to their
> education which you'd need to pay serious money for anywhere else.
I
> know some remarkable groups of people who've grown up together in
> country towns and who've gone on to adult life staying in close
touch
> with each other and doing great things, in particular a bunch of
> people from Mallacoota in East Gippsland who I've worked with on
many
> diverse projects over twenty years, and who've become musicians,
> builders, writers and film industry professionals, and with whom
you
> could trust your life.
>
> So you decide to make your move. You find the ideal house, you have
> work lined up. Good. Now you need to get some tradesmen in to do
some
> work and you've struck your first problem. It takes forever to get
> the builder/plumber/ electrician. And beware of someone who's too
> available. The good tradies are always booked well ahead.
>
> Now you will be starting to measure your dreams against the
reality.
> Just don't forget the locals will be doing the same to you.
Everyone
> is very friendly, but it all comes down to one thing. Are you a
good
> payer? If you want to discover whether it's possible for something
to
> travel faster than the speed of light, mess a local tradesman
around
> over money. Every other local tradie will know instantly and
they'll
> never return any of your calls. Oh, they'll nod politely to you in
> the street and make vague noises about coming over sometime, but
> you'd better call someone from out of town if you want the job done
> in this lifetime.
>
> This is the reality of life in a small community. Every act outside
> your front door is public act, and there are no private
> conversations. The small acts of kindness and patience will be
> noticed, and so will every insult and act of deviousness. Don't run
> the person you bought the business from down in conversation with
> your customers. Let them do that, after all, it was their
> brother/uncle/ daughter in law. Treat everyone with equal respect
and
> decency and you'll gain a reputation as a good person and it wont
do
> you any harm.
>
> Everyone knows who the local dope dealer is, and who made a move on
> the teenage baby-sitter. In the town I grew up in people still
spoke
> of a scandalous pregnancy resulting in a broken engagement which
had
> taken place sixty years before.
>
> The upside is that when disaster strikes, like a serious illness,
or
> your house burning down, the community will get behind to help in a
> way that will astonish you..
>
> http://southgippsla ndfutures. blogspot. com/2009/ 01/why-foster-
why-
> south-gippsland. html
>
>
>
>
>       Make Yahoo!7 your homepage and win a trip to the Quiksilver
Pro.. Find out more
>

I have a soft spot for Mirboo North as my sister lives in the centre
of town and my mother is on the edge of it, they were all evacuated
yesterday and the town was covered in cinders - the smell of smoke
can be scary there indeed
Rob

--- In intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com, Ilan G
<ilgo_au@...> wrote:
>
> Thanks for drawing my attention to this article Rob.
>
> My reaction is the opposite to Andrew's. Its a well thought out
article
> that covers a lot of ground. Lloyd has actually mentioned many
things in
> my check-list!
> But have to say it did pander to my personal prejudices.
>
> I am not looking at living in Foster, actually in Mirboo North (in
a
> part of it that is not surrounded by bushland!)
>
> ilan.
>
> Rob Windt wrote:
> >
> > Lloyd Morecom lives in the Sth Gippsland town of Foster and
writes a
> > fine blog http://southgippslandfutures.blogspot.com/
> > <http://southgippslandfutures.blogspot.com/> this is one of
> > his latest entries
> >
> > The fundamental choice I made about how my life was to be ordered
was
> > my decision to make attachment to place a priority over following
a
> > career. By making such a choice a very different set of values
then
> > follow from the ones dictated by climbing the slippery pole of
career
> > ambition. This is not to say that I haven't had any sort of
career. I
> > have, but it's been bounded and limited by a higher loyalty. I do
> > what I need to do to live in this place, although sometimes that
has
> > involved working in other places for a while, such as in Indonesia
> > and Thailand in order to set myself up financially, or Melbourne
in
> > the eighties when I needed more social stimulus.
> >
> > By making such a fundamental choice, one's life is greatly
> > simplified. It's easy to work out what your subsidiary values are.
> > Because you will spend a long period of time in a local community,
> > the kinds of artificial aids one needs to bolster one's prestige
in a
> > larger and more abstract social milieu aren't needed. What's the
> > point of a prestige car when for better or worse, everyone knows
what
> > kind of person you are anyway? And in any case, the flash car
doesn't
> > look flash for long once your wife starts carting her goats
around in
> > the back.
> >
> > Office and career politics can be a thorny issue in any job, but
if
> > everything doesn't hinge on it and you were only in it for the
money
> > and a bit of fun in the first place, if you fall off the slippery
> > pole, it's no longer a shattering tragedy.
> >
> > Of course communities can be toxic too, or just plain unlucky. It
> > pays to back winners in this life. It may be admirable to devote
your
> > life to helping lepers in Burma, but it's not likely to be a great
> > place to bring up the kids and you can forget the notion of
> > participation as a full citizen in national life. Even in this
wide
> > brown land, there are places I personally would give a wide berth
to.
> > What's the point of being president of the Wittenoom Progress
> > Association? In the same way and with the broadest and crudest
brush-
> > strokes, I would not consider any where inland of the Great
Dividing
> > Range. Too dry, too vulnerable to climate change and almost always
> > too vulnerable to changes in single economic variables (export
> > agricultural products for starters are exposed to market
> > fluctuations, climate variations and land degradation through
> > irrigation and dry land salinity).
> >
> > I've got nothing against city or suburban living per se. There are
> > vibrant and sustainable communities in cities and big towns, and
the
> > larger and more diverse a place is, the more reslient it is
likely to
> > be in the face of the changes which are now upon us. So small
> > communities like Foster are liable to be less viable and more
> > vulnerable than bigger ones.
> >
> > But I'm used to living here, I've lived in a diversity of other
> > places and looking at it with a cold objective eye it's got a lot
> > going for it. And that's what you need: a cold clear look at the
> > frying pan you're leaping from into which fire? What follows is
> > Lloydy's rough guide to thinking about this sort of decision.
> >
> > Sea or Tree Change? Nothing wrong with that, but think carefully
> > about where you're moving to. No low lying coastal properties!
And if
> > you're thinking about a move to the tropics, consider how you'd go
> > without air-conditioning, and the likelihood of extreme weather
> > events such as cyclones.
> >
> > Again, consider location before all else! What are you really
after?
> > Is what you're seeking a realistic vision which you know will
work,
> > or is it just a remnant of a fantasy you had while trapped in the
> > cube farm? You remember that weekend you and your wife had in the
> > cabin tucked away in a rain forest a couple of years ago -- that's
> > what you want! Whoa buddy! No it isn't! In the end, there is a
common
> > human pattern which governs the good life. We need food, shelter,
> > love and companionship, meaningful work and community. You move
into
> > your cabin in the woods and what happens? You'd forgotten about
the
> > mosquitoes, the leeches. You run out of firewood in the middle of
a
> > week of solid rain. Your wife gets run off the road by a logging
> > truck and becomes too traumatised to drive herself anywhere. You
find
> > in winter you're driving into town in the dark and home in the
dark,
> > dodging wallabies and wombats, not very successfully, and in
eighteen
> > months, the gravel roads hammer your gorgeous little European car
to
> > death. There are only two crappy TV stations. After your house
> > warming party, you don't see anyone for months at time, until
> > Christmas, when all your old friends turn up with their surly
> > teenagers and have a holiday for free. You discover your close
> > neighbours, who you made a big effort to befriend when you first
> > arrived, are barking mad. They borrow your tools and never return
> > them, and you find yourself having vague and troubling
conversations
> > with them at the mailbox involving long running feuds, guns and
dark
> > marital secrets. And all this is assuming the price of fuel still
> > makes driving hundreds of kilometres a month, in and out of town,
> > affordable!
> >
> > Live in or very close to a town. Assume at some stage that you
will
> > need to do without a car at all. Chose your town with care. It
should
> > have a diverse population, with reasonable medical services and
other
> > professionals, and not be overly dependant on one crop or
industry.
> > Is it dependant on irrigation which may fail? Don't live in a
place
> > surrounded by tall trees unless you want to spend every summer
> > terrified by the smell of smoke. Don't be sucked in by charming
old
> > buildings. And don't buy low lying properties on the coast.
Remember?
> > Global Warming? Sea level rise? Long before the waves wash over
your
> > mansion on the beach at Mollymook, its value will have collapsed
> > through sheer fear of sea level rise. You won't be able to get
> > insurance on it either. Be sensible!
> >
> > Look at the people. Try and gauge their feelings about the place.
Is
> > it ruled on Saturday nights by gangs of drunken louts in noisy
cars,
> > looking for someone to fight? Get the local paper and look at the
> > police reports. What sorts of crime get reported weekly? If it's
just
> > lost wallets and speeding fines, with the odd break in of sheds on
> > remote properties, it should be OK. Is the shopping centre full
of a
> > lot of empty shops? Look at the demeanour of the people you see in
> > the street. Do you see lots of people in conversation on busy days
> > with smiles on their faces? Are the young people friendly or
surly?
> > Remember everywhere has its oddballs, so don't focus too much on
them.
> >
> > Talk to school teachers if you have children who'll be going to
local
> > schools. You may be lovely cultured people, but the wrong crowd
in a
> > small town can destroy your kid's lives, or force you to send
them to
> > boarding school. On the other hand, the right crowd will give
them a
> > confidence, straightforwardness, lack of cynicism and ability to
mix
> > with all types which they would never get in the City. They will
be
> > big fish in a small pond, and get the kind of attention to their
> > education which you'd need to pay serious money for anywhere
else. I
> > know some remarkable groups of people who've grown up together in
> > country towns and who've gone on to adult life staying in close
touch
> > with each other and doing great things, in particular a bunch of
> > people from Mallacoota in East Gippsland who I've worked with on
many
> > diverse projects over twenty years, and who've become musicians,
> > builders, writers and film industry professionals, and with whom
you
> > could trust your life.
> >
> > So you decide to make your move. You find the ideal house, you
have
> > work lined up. Good. Now you need to get some tradesmen in to do
some
> > work and you've struck your first problem. It takes forever to get
> > the builder/plumber/electrician. And beware of someone who's too
> > available. The good tradies are always booked well ahead.
> >
> > Now you will be starting to measure your dreams against the
reality.
> > Just don't forget the locals will be doing the same to you.
Everyone
> > is very friendly, but it all comes down to one thing. Are you a
good
> > payer? If you want to discover whether it's possible for
something to
> > travel faster than the speed of light, mess a local tradesman
around
> > over money. Every other local tradie will know instantly and
they'll
> > never return any of your calls. Oh, they'll nod politely to you in
> > the street and make vague noises about coming over sometime, but
> > you'd better call someone from out of town if you want the job
done
> > in this lifetime.
> >
> > This is the reality of life in a small community. Every act
outside
> > your front door is public act, and there are no private
> > conversations. The small acts of kindness and patience will be
> > noticed, and so will every insult and act of deviousness. Don't
run
> > the person you bought the business from down in conversation with
> > your customers. Let them do that, after all, it was their
> > brother/uncle/ daughter in law. Treat everyone with equal respect
and
> > decency and you'll gain a reputation as a good person and it wont
do
> > you any harm.
> >
> > Everyone knows who the local dope dealer is, and who made a move
on
> > the teenage baby-sitter. In the town I grew up in people still
spoke
> > of a scandalous pregnancy resulting in a broken engagement which
had
> > taken place sixty years before.
> >
> > The upside is that when disaster strikes, like a serious illness,
or
> > your house burning down, the community will get behind to help in
a
> > way that will astonish you.
> >
> > http://southgippslandfutures.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-foster-why-
> > <http://southgippslandfutures.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-foster-why-
>
> > south-gippsland.html
> >
> >
>

Lloyd Morecom lives in the Sth Gippsland town of Foster and writes a
fine blog http://southgippslandfutures.blogspot.com/ this is one of
his latest entries

The fundamental choice I made about how my life was to be ordered was
my decision to make attachment to place a priority over following a
career. By making such a choice a very different set of values then
follow from the ones dictated by climbing the slippery pole of career
ambition. This is not to say that I haven't had any sort of career. I
have, but it's been bounded and limited by a higher loyalty. I do
what I need to do to live in this place, although sometimes that has
involved working in other places for a while, such as in Indonesia
and Thailand in order to set myself up financially, or Melbourne in
the eighties when I needed more social stimulus.

By making such a fundamental choice, one's life is greatly
simplified. It's easy to work out what your subsidiary values are.
Because you will spend a long period of time in a local community,
the kinds of artificial aids one needs to bolster one's prestige in a
larger and more abstract social milieu aren't needed. What's the
point of a prestige car when for better or worse, everyone knows what
kind of person you are anyway? And in any case, the flash car doesn't
look flash for long once your wife starts carting her goats around in
the back.

Office and career politics can be a thorny issue in any job, but if
everything doesn't hinge on it and you were only in it for the money
and a bit of fun in the first place, if you fall off the slippery
pole, it's no longer a shattering tragedy.

Of course communities can be toxic too, or just plain unlucky. It
pays to back winners in this life. It may be admirable to devote your
life to helping lepers in Burma, but it's not likely to be a great
place to bring up the kids and you can forget the notion of
participation as a full citizen in national life. Even in this wide
brown land, there are places I personally would give a wide berth to.
What's the point of being president of the Wittenoom Progress
Association? In the same way and with the broadest and crudest brush-
strokes, I would not consider any where inland of the Great Dividing
Range. Too dry, too vulnerable to climate change and almost always
too vulnerable to changes in single economic variables (export
agricultural products for starters are exposed to market
fluctuations, climate variations and land degradation through
irrigation and dry land salinity).

I've got nothing against city or suburban living per se. There are
vibrant and sustainable communities in cities and big towns, and the
larger and more diverse a place is, the more reslient it is likely to
be in the face of the changes which are now upon us. So small
communities like Foster are liable to be less viable and more
vulnerable than bigger ones.

But I'm used to living here, I've lived in a diversity of other
places and looking at it with a cold objective eye it's got a lot
going for it. And that's what you need: a cold clear look at the
frying pan you're leaping from into which fire? What follows is
Lloydy's rough guide to thinking about this sort of decision.

Sea or Tree Change? Nothing wrong with that, but think carefully
about where you're moving to. No low lying coastal properties! And if
you're thinking about a move to the tropics, consider how you'd go
without air-conditioning, and the likelihood of extreme weather
events such as cyclones.

Again, consider location before all else! What are you really after?
Is what you're seeking a realistic vision which you know will work,
or is it just a remnant of a fantasy you had while trapped in the
cube farm? You remember that weekend you and your wife had in the
cabin tucked away in a rain forest a couple of years ago – that's
what you want! Whoa buddy! No it isn't! In the end, there is a common
human pattern which governs the good life. We need food, shelter,
love and companionship, meaningful work and community. You move into
your cabin in the woods and what happens? You'd forgotten about the
mosquitoes, the leeches. You run out of firewood in the middle of a
week of solid rain. Your wife gets run off the road by a logging
truck and becomes too traumatised to drive herself anywhere. You find
in winter you're driving into town in the dark and home in the dark,
dodging wallabies and wombats, not very successfully, and in eighteen
months, the gravel roads hammer your gorgeous little European car to
death. There are only two crappy TV stations. After your house
warming party, you don't see anyone for months at time, until
Christmas, when all your old friends turn up with their surly
teenagers and have a holiday for free. You discover your close
neighbours, who you made a big effort to befriend when you first
arrived, are barking mad. They borrow your tools and never return
them, and you find yourself having vague and troubling conversations
with them at the mailbox involving long running feuds, guns and dark
marital secrets. And all this is assuming the price of fuel still
makes driving hundreds of kilometres a month, in and out of town,
affordable!

Live in or very close to a town. Assume at some stage that you will
need to do without a car at all. Chose your town with care. It should
have a diverse population, with reasonable medical services and other
professionals, and not be overly dependant on one crop or industry.
Is it dependant on irrigation which may fail? Don't live in a place
surrounded by tall trees unless you want to spend every summer
terrified by the smell of smoke. Don't be sucked in by charming old
buildings. And don't buy low lying properties on the coast. Remember?
Global Warming? Sea level rise? Long before the waves wash over your
mansion on the beach at Mollymook, its value will have collapsed
through sheer fear of sea level rise. You won't be able to get
insurance on it either. Be sensible!

Look at the people. Try and gauge their feelings about the place. Is
it ruled on Saturday nights by gangs of drunken louts in noisy cars,
looking for someone to fight? Get the local paper and look at the
police reports. What sorts of crime get reported weekly? If it's just
lost wallets and speeding fines, with the odd break in of sheds on
remote properties, it should be OK. Is the shopping centre full of a
lot of empty shops? Look at the demeanour of the people you see in
the street. Do you see lots of people in conversation on busy days
with smiles on their faces? Are the young people friendly or surly?
Remember everywhere has its oddballs, so don't focus too much on them.

Talk to school teachers if you have children who'll be going to local
schools. You may be lovely cultured people, but the wrong crowd in a
small town can destroy your kid's lives, or force you to send them to
boarding school. On the other hand, the right crowd will give them a
confidence, straightforwardness, lack of cynicism and ability to mix
with all types which they would never get in the City. They will be
big fish in a small pond, and get the kind of attention to their
education which you'd need to pay serious money for anywhere else. I
know some remarkable groups of people who've grown up together in
country towns and who've gone on to adult life staying in close touch
with each other and doing great things, in particular a bunch of
people from Mallacoota in East Gippsland who I've worked with on many
diverse projects over twenty years, and who've become musicians,
builders, writers and film industry professionals, and with whom you
could trust your life.

So you decide to make your move. You find the ideal house, you have
work lined up. Good. Now you need to get some tradesmen in to do some
work and you've struck your first problem. It takes forever to get
the builder/plumber/electrician. And beware of someone who's too
available. The good tradies are always booked well ahead.

Now you will be starting to measure your dreams against the reality.
Just don't forget the locals will be doing the same to you. Everyone
is very friendly, but it all comes down to one thing. Are you a good
payer? If you want to discover whether it's possible for something to
travel faster than the speed of light, mess a local tradesman around
over money. Every other local tradie will know instantly and they'll
never return any of your calls. Oh, they'll nod politely to you in
the street and make vague noises about coming over sometime, but
you'd better call someone from out of town if you want the job done
in this lifetime.

This is the reality of life in a small community. Every act outside
your front door is public act, and there are no private
conversations. The small acts of kindness and patience will be
noticed, and so will every insult and act of deviousness. Don't run
the person you bought the business from down in conversation with
your customers. Let them do that, after all, it was their
brother/uncle/ daughter in law. Treat everyone with equal respect and
decency and you'll gain a reputation as a good person and it wont do
you any harm.

Everyone knows who the local dope dealer is, and who made a move on
the teenage baby-sitter. In the town I grew up in people still spoke
of a scandalous pregnancy resulting in a broken engagement which had
taken place sixty years before.

The upside is that when disaster strikes, like a serious illness, or
your house burning down, the community will get behind to help in a
way that will astonish you.

http://southgippslandfutures.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-foster-why-
south-gippsland.html

That's an interesting reaction Andrew, is there any part in
particular that "got your goat", or is it the tone in general?

I don't think that he's selling any land and he seemed genuine when I
met him last month - perhaps he's hoping to entice more like minded
people - just curious here
Rob


--- In intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com, "Andrew"
<andrewpstretton@...> wrote:
>
> Sorry Rob,
>
> You post some of the most interesting commentary on the web through
Intentional
> Community Vic, but this one from this guy is a crock of you know
what!
>
> Pure emotional drivel with little in the way of proof to
substantiate his claims.
>
> Perhaps he owns land in Foster that he is seeking to sell off?
>
> Good job I go by the maxim of doing the exact opposite of what
everybody else is doing,
> otherwise I'd be joining the masses who will clearly be flocking to
Foster after following
> Lloyd's advice!
>
> Regards
>
> Andrew
>
> --- In intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com, "Rob Windt"
> <meridian_power@> wrote:
> >
> > Lloyd Morecom lives in the Sth Gippsland town of Foster and
writes a
> > fine blog http://southgippslandfutures.blogspot.com/ this is one
of
> > his latest entries
>

Sorry Rob,

You post some of the most interesting commentary on the web through Intentional
Community Vic, but this one from this guy is a crock of you know what!

Pure emotional drivel with little in the way of proof to substantiate his
claims.

Perhaps he owns land in Foster that he is seeking to sell off?

Good job I go by the maxim of doing the exact opposite of what everybody else is
doing,
otherwise I'd be joining the masses who will clearly be flocking to Foster after
following
Lloyd's advice!

Regards

Andrew

--- In intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com, "Rob Windt"
<meridian_power@...> wrote:
>
> Lloyd Morecom lives in the Sth Gippsland town of Foster and writes a
> fine blog http://southgippslandfutures.blogspot.com/ this is one of
> his latest entries

Lloyd Morecom lives in the Sth Gippsland town of Foster and writes a
fine blog http://southgippslandfutures.blogspot.com/ this is one of
his latest entries

The fundamental choice I made about how my life was to be ordered was
my decision to make attachment to place a priority over following a
career. By making such a choice a very different set of values then
follow from the ones dictated by climbing the slippery pole of career
ambition. This is not to say that I haven't had any sort of career. I
have, but it's been bounded and limited by a higher loyalty. I do
what I need to do to live in this place, although sometimes that has
involved working in other places for a while, such as in Indonesia
and Thailand in order to set myself up financially, or Melbourne in
the eighties when I needed more social stimulus.

By making such a fundamental choice, one's life is greatly
simplified. It's easy to work out what your subsidiary values are.
Because you will spend a long period of time in a local community,
the kinds of artificial aids one needs to bolster one's prestige in a
larger and more abstract social milieu aren't needed. What's the
point of a prestige car when for better or worse, everyone knows what
kind of person you are anyway? And in any case, the flash car doesn't
look flash for long once your wife starts carting her goats around in
the back.

Office and career politics can be a thorny issue in any job, but if
everything doesn't hinge on it and you were only in it for the money
and a bit of fun in the first place, if you fall off the slippery
pole, it's no longer a shattering tragedy.

Of course communities can be toxic too, or just plain unlucky. It
pays to back winners in this life. It may be admirable to devote your
life to helping lepers in Burma, but it's not likely to be a great
place to bring up the kids and you can forget the notion of
participation as a full citizen in national life. Even in this wide
brown land, there are places I personally would give a wide berth to.
What's the point of being president of the Wittenoom Progress
Association? In the same way and with the broadest and crudest brush-
strokes, I would not consider any where inland of the Great Dividing
Range. Too dry, too vulnerable to climate change and almost always
too vulnerable to changes in single economic variables (export
agricultural products for starters are exposed to market
fluctuations, climate variations and land degradation through
irrigation and dry land salinity).

I've got nothing against city or suburban living per se. There are
vibrant and sustainable communities in cities and big towns, and the
larger and more diverse a place is, the more reslient it is likely to
be in the face of the changes which are now upon us. So small
communities like Foster are liable to be less viable and more
vulnerable than bigger ones.

But I'm used to living here, I've lived in a diversity of other
places and looking at it with a cold objective eye it's got a lot
going for it. And that's what you need: a cold clear look at the
frying pan you're leaping from into which fire? What follows is
Lloydy's rough guide to thinking about this sort of decision.

Sea or Tree Change? Nothing wrong with that, but think carefully
about where you're moving to. No low lying coastal properties! And if
you're thinking about a move to the tropics, consider how you'd go
without air-conditioning, and the likelihood of extreme weather
events such as cyclones.

Again, consider location before all else! What are you really after?
Is what you're seeking a realistic vision which you know will work,
or is it just a remnant of a fantasy you had while trapped in the
cube farm? You remember that weekend you and your wife had in the
cabin tucked away in a rain forest a couple of years ago – that's
what you want! Whoa buddy! No it isn't! In the end, there is a common
human pattern which governs the good life. We need food, shelter,
love and companionship, meaningful work and community. You move into
your cabin in the woods and what happens? You'd forgotten about the
mosquitoes, the leeches. You run out of firewood in the middle of a
week of solid rain. Your wife gets run off the road by a logging
truck and becomes too traumatised to drive herself anywhere. You find
in winter you're driving into town in the dark and home in the dark,
dodging wallabies and wombats, not very successfully, and in eighteen
months, the gravel roads hammer your gorgeous little European car to
death. There are only two crappy TV stations. After your house
warming party, you don't see anyone for months at time, until
Christmas, when all your old friends turn up with their surly
teenagers and have a holiday for free. You discover your close
neighbours, who you made a big effort to befriend when you first
arrived, are barking mad. They borrow your tools and never return
them, and you find yourself having vague and troubling conversations
with them at the mailbox involving long running feuds, guns and dark
marital secrets. And all this is assuming the price of fuel still
makes driving hundreds of kilometres a month, in and out of town,
affordable!

Live in or very close to a town. Assume at some stage that you will
need to do without a car at all. Chose your town with care. It should
have a diverse population, with reasonable medical services and other
professionals, and not be overly dependant on one crop or industry.
Is it dependant on irrigation which may fail? Don't live in a place
surrounded by tall trees unless you want to spend every summer
terrified by the smell of smoke. Don't be sucked in by charming old
buildings. And don't buy low lying properties on the coast. Remember?
Global Warming? Sea level rise? Long before the waves wash over your
mansion on the beach at Mollymook, its value will have collapsed
through sheer fear of sea level rise. You won't be able to get
insurance on it either. Be sensible!

Look at the people. Try and gauge their feelings about the place. Is
it ruled on Saturday nights by gangs of drunken louts in noisy cars,
looking for someone to fight? Get the local paper and look at the
police reports. What sorts of crime get reported weekly? If it's just
lost wallets and speeding fines, with the odd break in of sheds on
remote properties, it should be OK. Is the shopping centre full of a
lot of empty shops? Look at the demeanour of the people you see in
the street. Do you see lots of people in conversation on busy days
with smiles on their faces? Are the young people friendly or surly?
Remember everywhere has its oddballs, so don't focus too much on them.

Talk to school teachers if you have children who'll be going to local
schools. You may be lovely cultured people, but the wrong crowd in a
small town can destroy your kid's lives, or force you to send them to
boarding school. On the other hand, the right crowd will give them a
confidence, straightforwardness, lack of cynicism and ability to mix
with all types which they would never get in the City. They will be
big fish in a small pond, and get the kind of attention to their
education which you'd need to pay serious money for anywhere else. I
know some remarkable groups of people who've grown up together in
country towns and who've gone on to adult life staying in close touch
with each other and doing great things, in particular a bunch of
people from Mallacoota in East Gippsland who I've worked with on many
diverse projects over twenty years, and who've become musicians,
builders, writers and film industry professionals, and with whom you
could trust your life.

So you decide to make your move. You find the ideal house, you have
work lined up. Good. Now you need to get some tradesmen in to do some
work and you've struck your first problem. It takes forever to get
the builder/plumber/electrician. And beware of someone who's too
available. The good tradies are always booked well ahead.

Now you will be starting to measure your dreams against the reality.
Just don't forget the locals will be doing the same to you. Everyone
is very friendly, but it all comes down to one thing. Are you a good
payer? If you want to discover whether it's possible for something to
travel faster than the speed of light, mess a local tradesman around
over money. Every other local tradie will know instantly and they'll
never return any of your calls. Oh, they'll nod politely to you in
the street and make vague noises about coming over sometime, but
you'd better call someone from out of town if you want the job done
in this lifetime.

This is the reality of life in a small community. Every act outside
your front door is public act, and there are no private
conversations. The small acts of kindness and patience will be
noticed, and so will every insult and act of deviousness. Don't run
the person you bought the business from down in conversation with
your customers. Let them do that, after all, it was their
brother/uncle/ daughter in law. Treat everyone with equal respect and
decency and you'll gain a reputation as a good person and it wont do
you any harm.

Everyone knows who the local dope dealer is, and who made a move on
the teenage baby-sitter. In the town I grew up in people still spoke
of a scandalous pregnancy resulting in a broken engagement which had
taken place sixty years before.

The upside is that when disaster strikes, like a serious illness, or
your house burning down, the community will get behind to help in a
way that will astonish you.

http://southgippslandfutures.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-foster-why-
south-gippsland.html

by Chris Turner

My wife and daughter and I decided to include in our itinerary a few
days' stay at Crystal Waters, one of the oldest and most renowned
ecovillages on the planet. Crystal Waters serves as a sort of living
lab for the "permaculture" design philosophy of Max Lindegger.
Founded on a broad patch of denuded hillside about 90 kilometers
northwest of Brisbane in the mid-1980s, Crystal Waters today is a
lush, semi-agrarian township of about 200 souls that sprawls across
640 acres of thick forest and deep valley. The populace delightedly
shares the land with grazing wallabies and kangaroos, deadly venomous
snakes and an increasing abundance of indigenous plants, trees and
birds.

Crystal Waters was, on the surface, a stellar example of classic
conservation in action – a human settlement so finely tuned to its
natural setting that it verged on William McDonough's lofty design
goal of becoming a restorative enterprise. The ecovillage was
actually improving the biodiversity of the valley in which it was
situated. What's more, Crystal Waters was a charming place, achingly
beautiful like a series of postcards of Edenic perfection and
populated by bright, friendly and engaged citizens. The sky filled
each night with a billion stars, and in the first light of dawn the
wallabies came out onto the green lawn next to the little guest cabin
where we were staying to graze on the wet grass. It made you kind of
wish you lived in a place like this, a place so pretty and pristine,
so committed to the earth's health that dogs had been banned to keep
them from chasing away the valley's rightful inhabitants.

I couldn't help but feeling, though, that whatever future Crystal
Waters pointed to was already all but lost. It was geared to a
conservation model that still hasn't been fully recalibrated for the
realities of the Anthropocene Era, and it was difficult to see many
core lessons it might offer to The Outquisition.

There was, for example, the tricky fact that the place was all but
unreachable except by private automobile, and that the nearest
purveyor of even rudimentary supplies was half an hour away at
highway speeds. (Crystal Waters has a small café at its community
center, but it keeps sporadic hours and is in any case no kind of
general store.) We were there for the 20th anniversary party, and we
were a little surprised to find that even the pizza dough being fed
into the community center's nifty handmade cob oven was store-bought
prefab stuff, as was every topping piled upon it. And of course there
was the omnipresent 800-lb. Anthropocene gorilla of the earth's
population, seven billion strong and ratcheting steadily upward and
already long past a number the earth could hope to carry if we all
lived in semi-agrarian townships.

Not long after arriving, my wife and I met a young couple with a
daughter about the same age as ours, and they invited us to their
Crystal Waters homestead for dinner. They'd just bought the place,
selling a dream home in suburban Brisbane close enough to the ocean
they could hear the waves. He was a media rep for a national organic
agriculture organization, and they worked together on an organic food
delivery service. They were still half in love with their Brisbane
lives, and you could feel the ache of their decision even as they
delighted in the details of their new abode –the verdant vegetable
garden, the little pond down the hill, the passive solar design.

To hear them tell it, the harsh realities of the global climate and
energy crises had finally left them with no choice – wherever
sustainability was, they reckoned it was emphatically not in
Brisbane's sprawling suburbs. They were after something closer to
self-sufficiency. They'd kept chickens even in Brisbane, and they'd
brought their brood of roosters and hens out to Crystal Waters. They
had one too many roosters now, though, and they'd been agonizing over
the inevitable necessity of its demise. Neither of them had yet found
the stomach for the ax and chopping block.

It struck me that neither needed to. Their goal, shrouded as it was
in practicality and undeniable virtue, was misaligned on some
fundamental level. The village butcher is an institution that
predates not just the curvilinear suburban avenue but the internal
combustion engine. It exists in part because not all of us are cut
out for killing our own dinners. Self-sufficiency of the sort my new
Crystal Waters friends were chasing in fact predates agriculture, and
it might well predate what we regard as humanity. We have always
lived together – there is no precedent in human history for the self-
sufficient nuclear family – and we have always divvied up the
community's tasks to some degree. I wonder if even among our hunter-
gatherer ancestors there were some who'd preferred to just fire the
initial shot and others who excelled at seizing the fallen beast and
delivering the fatal blow, others who found skinning and carving and
cooking more to their liking.

A few days later, we were guests in another home – a classic postwar
bungalow in suburban Brisbane. Australia is nearly a decade into its
worst drought in at least a century, and water conservation has
become routine in much of the country. In this Brisbane bungalow, the
showers stalls had little hourglasses the size of AAA batteries
suctioned to the tile. As I recall, they were freebies – I never
learned from which level of government – and the idea was that you
flipped the hourglass as you started your shower. It gave you a
visual cue when you'd reached your recommended four-minute limit.

The shower hourglass was one tiny but ubiquitous example of how
Brisbane was slowly learning to adapt to the new realities of the
Anthropocene. I have to wonder whether it isn't a more valuable tool
for The Outquisition than keeping a chicken coop, than anything
devised in a rural ecovillage. I mean no disrespect to our Crystal
Waters hosts, nor to the idea of permaculture. I just wonder whether
the truly sustainable ecovillages that fuel The Outquisition won't
look more like suburban Brisbane than like a pre-industrial Eden.

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009045.html

Via Chris at Club Orlov

I have recently moved from Australia, where Peak Oil issues are just
beginning to gain traction belatedly in the mainstream press, to the
Philippines, where seemingly nobody has even heard of peak oil -- yet.

I have read that the USA is leveraged up to a debt ration approaching
15/1 (1 real dollar for each dollar borrowed). I believe Australia's
ratio is about 3/4 of that. The Philippines has a debt ratio of
approximately 1/1. Hence when the wolf is finally at the door the
Philippines may be in a better fiscal position than countries
currently far richer.

However, this is all semantics. The real issue is preparedness.

I believe Australia is in a similar position to the USA and Europe in
many regards, beyond financial issues.
The looming disaster in these countries is mostly to do with the
feckless assumption that the status quo will somehow continue:
private car ownership and food being transported over vast distances
being prime among many key vulnerabilities in these societies. Other
factors include simple laziness, poor health generally, and
addictions to substances both legal and illegal.

Very few people in these countries under the age of about 80 remember
anything about what it means to have to survive somehow in the
environment, from that environment. Look to the evidence online; how
many sites are telling people to stock up on guns and ammo or to
stockpile massive amounts of food? The guns will attract violence,
the ammo will make those using it targets for those who have less
ammo; the food will perish, attract rodents and thieves. In
comparison, how many are teaching how to build suburban gardens,
recycle small power and methane generators, and other practical
adaptations?

The Philippines, like a number of other countries, is living in a
paradox of different proportions. Outside of the biggest cities here,
food is growing everywhere, in the villages themselves, as well as
the agricultural lands around them. Most people here can tell you how
to grow a list of useful plants and to raise chickens.
They are also very much used to sharing. There is virtually no
government safety net here. To become eligible for social welfare
payments, one must have held the same job for ten years; this almost
never happens. Yet even in the moderate-sized cities, nobody starves.
Interdependence is local and regional rather than national and
international. Of course, there is a degree of modernization
contributing to the welfare of people. Some people work in the cities
or overseas and send money home to support the extended family. But
even without this money life would go on.

Most people here are very fit compared to developed nation's. I have
seen hardly any overweight people, let alone obese. Washing is done
by hand in water pumped by hand from the ground. "Sounds horrible," I
hear the average reader murmur: but it works and it means the people
are physically fit. The main diet is locally grown rice with
similarly grown meats and vegetables. Fruit can be expensive because
a lot of it is exported, yet whatever is in season is abundant. The
fishing trade here is mostly very small boats with small crews using
small nets and lines; there are very few industrial scale fishing
boats. I live near a fishing village where 95% of the income is
derived from fishing in these small boats; the population of over
2,000 people is the healthiest, happiest bunch I have ever met.

Transport here is a world away from that in developed nations, yet
there is no problem getting anywhere. Locally, there are tricycles
and jitneys going past all the time in all directions; these and the
buses are very affordable for most people. Only about 2% of
households have a car, and maybe half have a private 125cc motorcycle
or tricycle. These vehicles get about 100 miles to a gallon of fuel.

The paradox is this: the Philippines greatest asset in the future may
be its lack of assets now. Less debt, less dependence on expensive
gadgets, less laziness and complacency. More communalism, more
integration.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2008/11/poverty-asset-assets-burden.html

by Michael Lewis  Nov 11 2008

The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael
Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar's Poker, returns to his old
haunt to figure out what went wrong.

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay
me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to
grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no
experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and
bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall
Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who
should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn't the first clue.

I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never
even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at
Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years
later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole
thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons
the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was
unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to
identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a
fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning
when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young
people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other
people's money, would be expelled from finance.

When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989—Liar's
Poker, it was called—it was in the spirit of a young man who thought
he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely
scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle
for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant
future.

Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no
future human would believe that it happened.

I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America.
Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last
two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall
Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I
expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the
C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I
expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our
traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250
million; I assumed they'd be shocked to learn that a Wall Street
C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were
running. What I didn't expect was that any future reader would look
on my experience and say, "How quaint."

I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a
remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked
what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have
said something like, "I hope that college students trying to figure
out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it's
silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become
financiers." I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State
University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my
book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar's
Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio
State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about
Wall Street. They'd read my book as a how-to manual.

In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall
Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders,
the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the
crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over
and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in
some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along
with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform
tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth
against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your
parents' world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and
sell off the pieces?

  At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There was no scandal
or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system.

Then came Meredith Whitney with news. Whitney was an obscure analyst
of financial firms for Oppenheimer Securities who, on October 31,
2007, ceased to be obscure. On that day, she predicted that Citigroup
had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its
dividend or go bust. It's never entirely clear on any given day what
causes what in the stock market, but it was pretty obvious that on
October 31, Meredith Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to
crash. By the end of the trading day, a woman whom basically no one
had ever heard of had shaved $369 billion off the value of financial
firms in the market. Four days later, Citigroup's C.E.O., Chuck
Prince, resigned. In January, Citigroup slashed its dividend.

From that moment, Whitney became E.F. Hutton: When she spoke, people
listened. Her message was clear. If you want to know what these Wall
Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets
they bought with huge sums of ­borrowed money, and imagine what they'd
fetch in a fire sale. The vast assemblages of highly paid people
inside the firms were essentially worth nothing. For better than a
year now, Whitney has responded to the claims by bankers and brokers
that they had put their problems behind them with this write-down or
that capital raise with a claim of her own: You're wrong. You're
still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business.

Rivals accused Whitney of being overrated; bloggers accused her of
being lucky. What she was, mainly, was right. But it's true that she
was, in part, guessing. There was no way she could have known what
was going to happen to these Wall Street firms. The C.E.O.'s
themselves didn't know.

Now, obviously, Meredith Whitney didn't sink Wall Street. She just
expressed most clearly and loudly a view that was, in retrospect, far
more seditious to the financial order than, say, Eliot Spitzer's
campaign against Wall Street corruption. If mere scandal could have
destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they'd have vanished
long ago. This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were
corrupt. She was saying they were stupid. These people whose job it
was to allocate capital apparently didn't even know how to manage
their own.

At some point, I could no longer contain myself: I called Whitney.
This was back in March, when Wall Street's fate still hung in the
balance. I thought, If she's right, then this really could be the end
of Wall Street as we've known it. I was curious to see if she made
sense but also to know where this young woman who was crashing the
stock market with her every utterance had come from.

It turned out that she made a great deal of sense and that she'd
arrived on Wall Street in 1993, from the Brown University history
department. "I got to New York, and I didn't even know research
existed," she says. She'd wound up at Oppenheimer and had the most
incredible piece of luck: to be trained by a man who helped her
establish not merely a career but a worldview. His name, she says,
was Steve Eisman.

Eisman had moved on, but they kept in touch. "After I made the Citi
call," she says, "one of the best things that happened was when Steve
called and told me how proud he was of me."

Having never heard of Eisman, I didn't think anything of this. But a
few months later, I called Whitney again and asked her, as I was
asking others, whom she knew who had anticipated the cataclysm and
set themselves up to make a fortune from it. There's a long list of
people who now say they saw it coming all along but a far shorter one
of people who actually did. Of those, even fewer had the nerve to bet
on their vision. It's not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to
believe that most of what's in the financial news is wrong or
distorted, to believe that most important financial people are either
lying or deluded—without actually being insane. A handful of people
had been inside the black box, understood how it worked, and bet on
it blowing up. Whitney rattled off a list with a half-dozen names on
it. At the top was Steve Eisman.

Steve Eisman entered finance about the time I exited it. He'd grown
up in New York City and gone to a Jewish day school, the University
of Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School. In 1991, he was a 30-year-
old corporate lawyer. "I hated it," he says. "I hated being a lawyer.
My parents worked as brokers at Oppenheimer. They managed to finagle
me a job. It's not pretty, but that's what happened."

He was hired as a junior equity analyst, a helpmate who didn't
actually offer his opinions. That changed in December 1991, less than
a year into his new job, when a subprime mortgage lender called Ames
Financial went public and no one at Oppenheimer particularly cared to
express an opinion about it. One of Oppenheimer's investment bankers
stomped around the research department looking for anyone who knew
anything about the mortgage business. Recalls Eisman: "I'm a junior
analyst and just trying to figure out which end is up, but I told him
that as a lawyer I'd worked on a deal for the Money Store." He was
promptly appointed the lead analyst for Ames Financial. "What I
didn't tell him was that my job had been to proofread the ­documents
and that I hadn't understood a word of the fucking things."

Ames Financial belonged to a category of firms known as nonbank
financial institutions. The category didn't include J.P. Morgan, but
it did encompass many little-known companies that one way or another
were involved in the early-1990s boom in subprime mortgage lending—
the lower class of American finance.

The second company for which Eisman was given sole responsibility was
Lomas Financial, which had just emerged from bankruptcy. "I put a
sell rating on the thing because it was a piece of shit," Eisman
says. "I didn't know that you weren't supposed to put a sell rating
on companies. I thought there were three boxes—buy, hold, sell—and
you could pick the one you thought you should." He was pressured
generally to be a bit more upbeat, but upbeat wasn't Steve Eisman's
style. Upbeat and Eisman didn't occupy the same planet. A hedge fund
manager who counts Eisman as a friend set out to explain him to me
but quit a minute into it. After describing how Eisman exposed
various important people as either liars or idiots, the hedge fund
manager started to laugh. "He's sort of a prick in a way, but he's
smart and honest and fearless."

  "A lot of people don't get Steve," Whitney says. "But the people who
get him love him." Eisman stuck to his sell rating on Lomas
Financial, even after the company announced that investors needn't
worry about its financial condition, as it had hedged its market
risk. "The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst," says
Eisman, "was after Lomas said they were hedged." He recited the line
from memory: " `The Lomas Financial Corp. is a perfectly hedged
financial institution: It loses money in every conceivable interest-
rate environment.' I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any
sentence I ever wrote." A few months after he'd delivered that line
in his report, Lomas Financial returned to bankruptcy.

Then came Meredith Whitney with news. Whitney was an obscure analyst
of financial firms for Oppenheimer Securities who, on October 31,
2007, ceased to be obscure. On that day, she predicted that Citigroup
had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its
dividend or go bust. It's never entirely clear on any given day what
causes what in the stock market, but it was pretty obvious that on
October 31, Meredith Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to
crash. By the end of the trading day, a woman whom basically no one
had ever heard of had shaved $369 billion off the value of financial
firms in the market. Four days later, Citigroup's C.E.O., Chuck
Prince, resigned. In January, Citigroup slashed its dividend.

From that moment, Whitney became E.F. Hutton: When she spoke, people
listened. Her message was clear. If you want to know what these Wall
Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets
they bought with huge sums of ­borrowed money, and imagine what they'd
fetch in a fire sale. The vast assemblages of highly paid people
inside the firms were essentially worth nothing. For better than a
year now, Whitney has responded to the claims by bankers and brokers
that they had put their problems behind them with this write-down or
that capital raise with a claim of her own: You're wrong. You're
still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business.

Rivals accused Whitney of being overrated; bloggers accused her of
being lucky. What she was, mainly, was right. But it's true that she
was, in part, guessing. There was no way she could have known what
was going to happen to these Wall Street firms. The C.E.O.'s
themselves didn't know.

Now, obviously, Meredith Whitney didn't sink Wall Street. She just
expressed most clearly and loudly a view that was, in retrospect, far
more seditious to the financial order than, say, Eliot Spitzer's
campaign against Wall Street corruption. If mere scandal could have
destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they'd have vanished
long ago. This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were
corrupt. She was saying they were stupid. These people whose job it
was to allocate capital apparently didn't even know how to manage
their own.

At some point, I could no longer contain myself: I called Whitney.
This was back in March, when Wall Street's fate still hung in the
balance. I thought, If she's right, then this really could be the end
of Wall Street as we've known it. I was curious to see if she made
sense but also to know where this young woman who was crashing the
stock market with her every utterance had come from.

It turned out that she made a great deal of sense and that she'd
arrived on Wall Street in 1993, from the Brown University history
department. "I got to New York, and I didn't even know research
existed," she says. She'd wound up at Oppenheimer and had the most
incredible piece of luck: to be trained by a man who helped her
establish not merely a career but a worldview. His name, she says,
was Steve Eisman.

Eisman had moved on, but they kept in touch. "After I made the Citi
call," she says, "one of the best things that happened was when Steve
called and told me how proud he was of me."

Having never heard of Eisman, I didn't think anything of this. But a
few months later, I called Whitney again and asked her, as I was
asking others, whom she knew who had anticipated the cataclysm and
set themselves up to make a fortune from it. There's a long list of
people who now say they saw it coming all along but a far shorter one
of people who actually did. Of those, even fewer had the nerve to bet
on their vision. It's not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to
believe that most of what's in the financial news is wrong or
distorted, to believe that most important financial people are either
lying or deluded—without actually being insane. A handful of people
had been inside the black box, understood how it worked, and bet on
it blowing up. Whitney rattled off a list with a half-dozen names on
it. At the top was Steve Eisman.

Steve Eisman entered finance about the time I exited it. He'd grown
up in New York City and gone to a Jewish day school, the University
of Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School. In 1991, he was a 30-year-
old corporate lawyer. "I hated it," he says. "I hated being a lawyer.
My parents worked as brokers at Oppenheimer. They managed to finagle
me a job. It's not pretty, but that's what happened."

He was hired as a junior equity analyst, a helpmate who didn't
actually offer his opinions. That changed in December 1991, less than
a year into his new job, when a subprime mortgage lender called Ames
Financial went public and no one at Oppenheimer particularly cared to
express an opinion about it. One of Oppenheimer's investment bankers
stomped around the research department looking for anyone who knew
anything about the mortgage business. Recalls Eisman: "I'm a junior
analyst and just trying to figure out which end is up, but I told him
that as a lawyer I'd worked on a deal for the Money Store." He was
promptly appointed the lead analyst for Ames Financial. "What I
didn't tell him was that my job had been to proofread the ­documents
and that I hadn't understood a word of the fucking things."

Ames Financial belonged to a category of firms known as nonbank
financial institutions. The category didn't include J.P. Morgan, but
it did encompass many little-known companies that one way or another
were involved in the early-1990s boom in subprime mortgage lending—
the lower class of American finance.

The second company for which Eisman was given sole responsibility was
Lomas Financial, which had just emerged from bankruptcy. "I put a
sell rating on the thing because it was a piece of shit," Eisman
says. "I didn't know that you weren't supposed to put a sell rating
on companies. I thought there were three boxes—buy, hold, sell—and
you could pick the one you thought you should." He was pressured
generally to be a bit more upbeat, but upbeat wasn't Steve Eisman's
style. Upbeat and Eisman didn't occupy the same planet. A hedge fund
manager who counts Eisman as a friend set out to explain him to me
but quit a minute into it. After describing how Eisman exposed
various important people as either liars or idiots, the hedge fund
manager started to laugh. "He's sort of a prick in a way, but he's
smart and honest and fearless."

  "A lot of people don't get Steve," Whitney says. "But the people who
get him love him." Eisman stuck to his sell rating on Lomas
Financial, even after the company announced that investors needn't
worry about its financial condition, as it had hedged its market
risk. "The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst," says
Eisman, "was after Lomas said they were hedged." He recited the line
from memory: " `The Lomas Financial Corp. is a perfectly hedged
financial institution: It loses money in every conceivable interest-
rate environment.' I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any
sentence I ever wrote." A few months after he'd delivered that line
in his report, Lomas Financial returned to bankruptcy.

Eisman wasn't, in short, an analyst with a sunny disposition who
expected the best of his fellow financial man and the companies he
created. "You have to understand," Eisman says in his defense, "I did
subprime first. I lived with the worst first. These guys lied to
infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street
didn't give a shit what it sold."

Harboring suspicions about ­people's morals and telling investors that
companies don't deserve their capital wasn't, in the 1990s or at any
other time, the fast track to success on Wall Street. Eisman quit
Oppenheimer in 2001 to work as an analyst at a hedge fund, but what
he really wanted to do was run money. FrontPoint Partners, another
hedge fund, hired him in 2004 to invest in financial stocks. Eisman's
brief was to evaluate Wall Street banks, homebuilders, mortgage
originators, and any company (General Electric or General Motors, for
instance) with a big financial-services division—anyone who touched
American finance. An insurance company backed him with $50 million, a
paltry sum. "Basically, we tried to raise money and didn't really do
it," Eisman says.

Instead of money, he attracted people whose worldviews were as shaded
as his own—Vincent Daniel, for instance, who became a partner and an
analyst in charge of the mortgage sector. Now 36, Daniel grew up a
lower-middle-class kid in Queens. One of his first jobs, as a junior
accountant at Arthur Andersen, was to audit Salomon Brothers'
books. "It was shocking," he says. "No one could explain to me what
they were doing." He left accounting in the middle of the internet
boom to become a research analyst, looking at companies that made
subprime loans. "I was the only guy I knew covering companies that
were all going to go bust," he says. "I saw how the sausage was made
in the economy, and it was really freaky."

Danny Moses, who became Eisman's head trader, was another who shared
his perspective. Raised in Georgia, Moses, the son of a finance
professor, was a bit less fatalistic than Daniel or Eisman, but he
nevertheless shared a general sense that bad things can and do
happen. When a Wall Street firm helped him get into a trade that
seemed perfect in every way, he said to the salesman, "I appreciate
this, but I just want to know one thing: How are you going to screw
me?"

Heh heh heh, c'mon. We'd never do that, the trader started to say,
but Moses was politely insistent: We both know that unadulterated
good things like this trade don't just happen between little hedge
funds and big Wall Street firms. I'll do it, but only after you
explain to me how you are going to screw me. And the salesman
explained how he was going to screw him. And Moses did the trade.

Both Daniel and Moses enjoyed, immensely, working with Steve Eisman.
He put a fine point on the absurdity they saw everywhere around
them. "Steve's fun to take to any Wall Street meeting," Daniel
says. "Because he'll say `Explain that to me' 30 different times.
Or `Could you explain that more, in English?' Because once you do
that, there's a few things you learn. For a start, you figure out if
they even know what they're talking about. And a lot of times, they
don't!"

At the end of 2004, Eisman, Moses, and Daniel shared a sense that
unhealthy things were going on in the U.S. housing market: Lots of
firms were lending money to people who shouldn't have been borrowing
it. They thought Alan Greenspan's decision after the internet bust to
lower interest rates to 1 percent was a travesty that would lead to
some terrible day of reckoning. Neither of these insights was
entirely original. Ivy Zelman, at the time the housing-market analyst
at Credit Suisse, had seen the bubble forming very early on. There's
a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median
home price to income. Historically, it runs around 3 to 1; by late
2004, it had risen nationally to 4 to 1. "All these people were
saying it was nearly as high in some other countries," Zelman
says. "But the problem wasn't just that it was 4 to 1. In Los
Angeles, it was 10 to 1, and in Miami, 8.5 to 1. And then you coupled
that with the buyers. They weren't real buyers. They were
speculators." Zelman alienated clients with her pessimism, but she
couldn't pretend everything was good. "It wasn't that hard in
hindsight to see it," she says. "It was very hard to know when it
would stop." Zelman spoke occasionally with Eisman and always left
these conversations feeling better about her views and worse about
the world. "You needed the occasional assurance that you weren't
nuts," she says. She wasn't nuts. The world was.

By the spring of 2005, FrontPoint was fairly convinced that something
was very screwed up not merely in a handful of companies but in the
financial underpinnings of the entire U.S. mortgage market. In 2000,
there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55
billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was
$625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found
its way into mortgage bonds. Eisman couldn't understand who was
making all these loans or why. He had a from-the-ground-up
understanding of both the U.S. housing market and Wall Street. But
he'd spent his life in the stock market, and it was clear that the
stock market was, in this story, largely irrelevant. "What most
people don't realize is that the fixed-income world dwarfs the equity
world," he says. "The equity world is like a fucking zit compared
with the bond market." He shorted companies that originated subprime
loans, like New Century and Indy Mac, and companies that built the
houses bought with the loans, such as Toll Brothers. Smart as these
trades proved to be, they weren't entirely satisfying. These
companies paid high dividends, and their shares were often expensive
to borrow; selling them short was a costly proposition.

  Enter Greg Lippman, a mortgage-bond trader at Deutsche Bank. He
arrived at FrontPoint bearing a 66-page presentation that described a
better way for the fund to put its view of both Wall Street and the
U.S. housing market into action. The smart trade, Lippman argued, was
to sell short not New Century's stock but its bonds that were backed
by the subprime loans it had made. Eisman hadn't known this was even
possible—because until recently, it hadn't been. But Lippman, along
with traders at other Wall Street investment banks, had created a way
to short the subprime bond market with precision.

Here's where financial technology became suddenly, urgently relevant.
The typical mortgage bond was still structured in much the same way
it had been when I worked at Salomon Brothers. The loans went into a
trust that was designed to pay off its investors not all at once but
according to their rankings. The investors in the top tranche, rated
AAA, received the first payment from the trust and, because their
investment was the least risky, received the lowest interest rate on
their money. The investors who held the trusts' BBB tranche got the
last payments—and bore the brunt of the first defaults. Because they
were taking the most risk, they received the highest return. Eisman
wanted to bet that some subprime borrowers would default, causing the
trust to suffer losses. The way to express this view was to short the
BBB tranche. The trouble was that the BBB tranche was only a tiny
slice of the deal.



But the scarcity of truly crappy subprime-mortgage bonds no longer
mattered. The big Wall Street firms had just made it possible to
short even the tiniest and most obscure subprime-mortgage-backed bond
by creating, in effect, a market of side bets. Instead of shorting
the actual BBB bond, you could now enter into an agreement for a
credit-default swap with Deutsche Bank or Goldman Sachs. It cost
money to make this side bet, but nothing like what it cost to short
the stocks, and the upside was far greater.

The arrangement bore the same relation to actual finance as fantasy
football bears to the N.F.L. Eisman was perplexed in particular about
why Wall Street firms would be coming to him and asking him to sell
short. "What Lippman did, to his credit, was he came around several
times to me and said, `Short this market,' " Eisman says. "In my
entire life, I never saw a sell-side guy come in and say, `Short my
market.' "

And short Eisman did—then he tried to get his mind around what he'd
just done so he could do it better. He'd call over to a big firm and
ask for a list of mortgage bonds from all over the country. The
juiciest shorts—the bonds ultimately backed by the mortgages most
likely to default—had several characteristics. They'd be in what Wall
Street people were now calling the sand states: Arizona, California,
Florida, Nevada. The loans would have been made by one of the more
dubious mortgage lenders; Long Beach Financial, wholly owned by
Washington Mutual, was a great example. Long Beach Financial was
moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked,
in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking home­owners
with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer
interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield,
California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and
no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for
$720,000.

More generally, the subprime market tapped a tranche of the American
public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street.
Lenders were making loans to people who, based on their credit
ratings, were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population.
Eisman knew some of these people. One day, his housekeeper, a South
American woman, told him that she was planning to buy a townhouse in
Queens. "The price was absurd, and they were giving her a low-down-
payment option-ARM," says Eisman, who talked her into taking out a
conventional fixed-rate mortgage. Next, the baby nurse he'd hired
back in 1997 to take care of his newborn twin daughters phoned
him. "She was this lovely woman from Jamaica," he says. "One day she
calls me and says she and her sister own five townhouses in Queens. I
said, `How did that happen?' " It happened because after they bought
the first one and its value rose, the lenders came and suggested they
refinance and take out $250,000, which they used to buy another one.
Then the price of that one rose too, and they repeated the
experiment. "By the time they were done," Eisman says, "they owned
five of them, the market was falling, and they couldn't make any of
the payments."

  In retrospect, pretty much all of the riskiest subprime-backed bonds
were worth betting against; they would all one day be worth zero. But
at the time Eisman began to do it, in the fall of 2006, that wasn't
clear. He and his team set out to find the smelliest pile of loans
they could so that they could make side bets against them with
Goldman Sachs or Deutsche Bank. What they were doing, oddly enough,
was the analysis of subprime lending that should have been done
before the loans were made: Which poor Americans were likely to jump
which way with their finances? How much did home prices need to fall
for these loans to blow up? (It turned out they didn't have to fall;
they merely needed to stay flat.) The default rate in Georgia was
five times higher than that in Florida even though the two states had
the same unemployment rate. Why? Indiana had a 25 percent default
rate; California's was only 5 percent. Why?

Moses actually flew down to Miami and wandered around neighborhoods
built with subprime loans to see how bad things were. "He'd call me
and say, `Oh my God, this is a calamity here,' " recalls Eisman. All
that was required for the BBB bonds to go to zero was for the default
rate on the underlying loans to reach 14 percent. Eisman thought
that, in certain sections of the country, it would go far, far higher.

The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even
someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They
were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then
trying to figure out what they had done. Eisman knew subprime lenders
could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed
complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance,
he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of
loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a
trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent
of the new total being rated AAA.

But he couldn't figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified
turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. "I didn't understand how they
were turning all this garbage into gold," he says. He brought some of
the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for
a visit. "We always asked the same question," says Eisman. "Where are
the rating agencies in all of this? And I'd always get the same
reaction. It was a smirk." He called Standard & Poor's and asked what
would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at
S&P couldn't say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept
a negative number. "They were just assuming home prices would keep
going up," Eisman says.

As an investor, Eisman was allowed on the quarterly conference calls
held by Moody's but not allowed to ask questions. The people at
Moody's were polite about their brush-off, however. The C.E.O. even
invited Eisman and his team to his office for a visit in June 2007.
By then, Eisman was so certain that the world had been turned upside
down that he just assumed this guy must know it too. "But we're
sitting there," Daniel recalls, "and he says to us, like he actually
means it, `I truly believe that our rating will prove accurate.' And
Steve shoots up in his chair and asks, `What did you just say?' as if
the guy had just uttered the most preposterous statement in the
history of finance. He repeated it. And Eisman just laughed at him."

"With all due respect, sir," Daniel told the C.E.O. deferentially as
they left the meeting, "you're delusional."
This wasn't Fitch or even S&P. This was Moody's, the aristocrats of
the rating business, 20 percent owned by Warren Buffett. And the
company's C.E.O. was being told he was either a fool or a crook by
one Vincent Daniel, from Queens.

A full nine months earlier, Daniel and ­Moses had flown to Orlando for
an industry conference. It had a grand title—the American
Securitization Forum—but it was essentially a trade show for the ­
subprime-mortgage business: the people who originated subprime
mortgages, the Wall Street firms that packaged and sold subprime
mortgages, the fund managers who invested in nothing but subprime-
mortgage-backed bonds, the agencies that rated subprime-­mortgage
bonds, the lawyers who did whatever the lawyers did. Daniel and Moses
thought they were paying a courtesy call on a cottage industry, but
the cottage had become a castle. "There were like 6,000 people
there," Daniel says. "There were so many people being fed by this
industry. The entire fixed-income department of each brokerage firm
is built on this. Everyone there was the long side of the trade. The
wrong side of the trade. And then there was us. That's when the
picture really started to become clearer, and we started to get more
cynical, if that was possible. We went back home and said to
Steve, `You gotta see this.' "

Eisman, Daniel, and Moses then flew out to Las Vegas for an even
bigger subprime conference. By now, Eisman knew everything he needed
to know about the quality of the loans being made. He still didn't
fully understand how the apparatus worked, but he knew that Wall
Street had built a doomsday machine. He was at once opportunistic and
outraged.

Their first stop was a speech given by the C.E.O. of Option One, the
mortgage originator owned by H&R Block. When the guy got to the part
of his speech about Option One's subprime-loan portfolio, he claimed
to be expecting a modest default rate of 5 percent. Eisman raised his
hand. Moses and Daniel sank into their chairs. "It wasn't a Q&A,"
says Moses. "The guy was giving a speech. He sees Steve's hand and
says, `Yes?'"

   "Would you say that 5 percent is a probability or a possibility?"
Eisman asked.

A probability, said the C.E.O., and he continued his speech.

Eisman had his hand up in the air again, waving it around. Oh, no,
Moses thought. "The one thing Steve always says," Daniel
explains, "is you must assume they are lying to you. They will always
lie to you." Moses and Daniel both knew what Eisman thought of these
subprime lenders but didn't see the need for him to express it here
in this manner. For Eisman wasn't raising his hand to ask a question.
He had his thumb and index finger in a big circle. He was using his
fingers to speak on his behalf. Zero! they said.

  "Yes?" the C.E.O. said, obviously irritated. "Is that another
question?"

"No," said Eisman. "It's a zero. There is zero probability that your
default rate will be 5 percent." The losses on subprime loans would
be much, much greater. Before the guy could reply, Eisman's cell
phone rang. Instead of shutting it off, Eisman reached into his
pocket and answered it. "Excuse me," he said, standing up. "But I
need to take this call." And with that, he walked out.

Eisman's willingness to be abrasive in order to get to the heart of
the matter was obvious to all; what was harder to see was his
credulity: He actually wanted to believe in the system. As quick as
he was to cry bullshit when he saw it, he was still shocked by bad
behavior. That night in Vegas, he was seated at dinner beside a
really nice guy who invested in mortgage C.D.O.'s—collateralized debt
obligations. By then, Eisman thought he knew what he needed to know
about C.D.O.'s. He didn't, it turned out.

Later, when I sit down with Eisman, the very first thing he wants to
explain is the importance of the mezzanine C.D.O. What you notice
first about Eisman is his lips. He holds them pursed, waiting to
speak. The second thing you notice is his short, light hair, cropped
in a manner that suggests he cut it himself while thinking about
something else. "You have to understand this," he says. "This was the
engine of doom." Then he draws a picture of several towers of debt.
The first tower is made of the original subprime loans that had been
piled together. At the top of this tower is the AAA tranche, just
below it the AA tranche, and so on down to the riskiest, the BBB
tranche—the bonds Eisman had shorted. But Wall Street had used these
BBB tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of
bonds: a "particularly egregious" C.D.O. The reason they did this was
that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by
dubious loans, would pronounce most of them AAA. These bonds could
then be sold to investors—pension funds, insurance companies—who were
allowed to invest only in highly rated securities. "I cannot fucking
believe this is allowed—I must have said that a thousand times in the
past two years," Eisman says.

His dinner companion in Las Vegas ran a fund of about $15 billion and
managed C.D.O.'s backed by the BBB tranche of a mortgage bond, or as
Eisman puts it, "the equivalent of three levels of dog shit lower
than the original bonds."

FrontPoint had spent a lot of time digging around in the dog shit and
knew that the default rates were already sufficient to wipe out this
guy's entire portfolio. "God, you must be having a hard time," Eisman
told his dinner companion.

"No," the guy said, "I've sold everything out."

After taking a fee, he passed them on to other investors. His job was
to be the C.D.O. "expert," but he actually didn't spend any time at
all thinking about what was in the C.D.O.'s. "He managed the
C.D.O.'s," says Eisman, "but managed what? I was just appalled.
People would pay up to have someone manage their C.D.O.'s—as if this
moron was helping you. I thought, You prick, you don't give a fuck
about the investors in this thing."

  Whatever rising anger Eisman felt was offset by the man's genial
disposition. Not only did he not mind that Eisman took a dim view of
his C.D.O.'s; he saw it as a basis for friendship. "Then he said
something that blew my mind," Eisman tells me. "He says, `I love guys
like you who short my market. Without you, I don't have anything to
buy.' "

That's when Eisman finally got it. Here he'd been making these side
bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB
tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to
make the bets. Now he saw. There weren't enough Americans with shitty
credit taking out loans to satisfy investors' appetite for the end
product. The firms used Eisman's bet to synthesize more of them.
Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy
football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn't
create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league's stats. But
when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to
create another bond identical in every respect but one to the
original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer
or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets
Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in
effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In
fact, there was no mortgage at all. "They weren't satisfied getting
lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they
couldn't afford," Eisman says. "They were creating them out of whole
cloth. One hundred times over! That's why the losses are so much
greater than the loans. But that's when I realized they needed us to
keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?"

This particular dinner was hosted by Deutsche Bank, whose head
trader, Greg Lippman, was the fellow who had introduced Eisman to the
subprime bond market. Eisman went and found Lippman, pointed back to
his own dinner companion, and said, "I want to short him." Lippman
thought he was joking; he wasn't. "Greg, I want to short his paper,"
Eisman repeated. "Sight unseen."

Eisman started out running a $60 million equity fund but was now
short around $600 million of various ­subprime-related securities. In
the spring of 2007, the market strengthened. But, says
Eisman, "credit quality always gets better in March and April. And
the reason it always gets better in March and April is that people
get their tax refunds. You would think people in the securitization
world would know this. We just thought that was moronic."

He was already short the stocks of mortgage originators and the
homebuilders. Now he took short positions in the rating agencies—
"they were making 10 times more rating C.D.O.'s than they were rating
G.M. bonds, and it was all going to end"—and, finally, the biggest
Wall Street firms because of their exposure to C.D.O.'s. He wasn't
allowed to short Morgan Stanley because it owned a stake in his fund.
But he shorted UBS, Lehman Brothers, and a few others. Not long after
that, FrontPoint had a visit from Sanford C. Bernstein's Brad Hintz,
a prominent analyst who covered Wall Street firms. Hintz wanted to
know what Eisman was up to. "We just shorted Merrill Lynch," Eisman
told him.

"Why?" asked Hintz.

"We have a simple thesis," Eisman explained. "There is going to be a
calamity, and whenever there is a calamity, Merrill is there." When
it came time to bankrupt Orange County with bad advice, Merrill was
there. When the internet went bust, Merrill was there. Way back in
the 1980s, when the first bond trader was let off his leash and lost
hundreds of millions of dollars, Merrill was there to take the hit.
That was Eisman's logic—the logic of Wall Street's pecking order.
Goldman Sachs was the big kid who ran the games in this neighborhood.
Merrill Lynch was the little fat kid assigned the least pleasant
roles, just happy to be a part of things. The game, as Eisman saw it,
was Crack the Whip. He assumed Merrill Lynch had taken its assigned
place at the end of the chain.

There was only one thing that bothered Eisman, and it continued to
trouble him as late as May 2007. "The thing we couldn't figure out
is: It's so obvious. Why hasn't everyone else figured out that the
machine is done?" Eisman had long subscribed to Grant's Interest Rate
Observer, a newsletter famous in Wall Street circles and obscure
outside them. Jim Grant, its editor, had been prophesying doom ever
since the great debt cycle began, in the mid-1980s. In late 2006, he
decided to investigate these things called C.D.O.'s. Or rather, he
had asked his young assistant, Dan Gertner, a chemical engineer with
an M.B.A., to see if he could understand them. Gertner went off with
the documents that purported to explain C.D.O.'s to potential
investors and for several days sweated and groaned and heaved and
suffered. "Then he came back," says Grant, "and said, `I can't figure
this thing out.' And I said, `I think we have our story.' "

  Eisman read Grant's piece as independent confirmation of what he
knew in his bones about the C.D.O.'s he had shorted. "When I read it,
I thought, Oh my God. This is like owning a gold mine. When I read
that, I was the only guy in the equity world who almost had an
orgasm."

On July 19, 2007, the same day that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben
Bernanke told the U.S. Senate that he anticipated as much as $100
billion in losses in the subprime-mortgage market, FrontPoint did
something unusual: It hosted its own conference call. It had had
calls with its tiny population of investors, but this time FrontPoint
opened it up. Steve Eisman had become a poorly kept secret. Five
hundred people called in to hear what he had to say, and another 500
logged on afterward to listen to a recording of it. He explained the
strange alchemy of the C.D.O. and said that he expected losses of up
to $300 billion from this sliver of the market alone. To evaluate the
situation, he urged his audience to "just throw your model in the
garbage can. The models are all backward-looking.

The models don't have any idea of what this world has become…. For
the first time in their lives, people in the asset-backed-
securitization world are actually having to think." He explained that
the rating agencies were morally bankrupt and living in fear of
becoming actually bankrupt. "The rating agencies are scared to
death," he said. "They're scared to death about doing nothing because
they'll look like fools if they do nothing."

On September 18, 2008, Danny Moses came to work as usual at 6:30 a.m.
Earlier that week, Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy. The day
before, the Dow had fallen 449 points to its lowest level in four
years. Overnight, European governments announced a ban on short-
selling, but that served as faint warning for what happened next.

At the market opening in the U.S., everything—every financial asset—
went into free fall. "All hell was breaking loose in a way I had
never seen in my career," Moses says. FrontPoint was net short the
market, so this total collapse should have given Moses pleasure. He
might have been forgiven if he stood up and cheered. After all, he'd
been betting for two years that this sort of thing could happen, and
now it was, more dramatically than he had ever imagined. Instead, he
felt this terrifying shudder run through him. He had maybe 100 trades
on, and he worked hard to keep a handle on them all. "I spent my
morning trying to control all this energy and all this information,"
he says, "and I lost control. I looked at the screens. I was staring
into the abyss. The end. I felt this shooting pain in my head. I
don't get headaches. At first, I thought I was having an aneurysm."

Moses stood up, wobbled, then turned to Daniel and said, "I gotta
leave. Get out of here. Now." Daniel thought about calling an
ambulance but instead took Moses out for a walk.

Outside it was gorgeous, the blue sky reaching down through the tall
buildings and warming the soul. Eisman was at a Goldman Sachs
conference for hedge fund managers, raising capital. Moses and Daniel
got him on the phone, and he left the conference and met them on the
steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral. "We just sat there," Moses
says. "Watching the people pass."

This was what they had been waiting for: total collapse. "The
investment-banking industry is fucked," Eisman had told me a few
weeks earlier. "These guys are only beginning to understand how
fucked they are. It's like being a Scholastic, prior to Newton.
Newton comes along, and one morning you wake up: `Holy shit, I'm
wrong!' " Now Lehman Brothers had vanished, Merrill had surrendered,
and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were just a week away from
ceasing to be investment banks. The investment banks were not just
fucked; they were extinct.

Not so for hedge fund managers who had seen it coming. "As we sat
there, we were weirdly calm," Moses says. "We felt insulated from the
whole market reality. It was an out-of-body experience. We just sat
and watched the people pass and talked about what might happen next.
How many of these people were going to lose their jobs. Who was going
to rent these buildings after all the Wall Street firms collapsed."
Eisman was appalled. "Look," he said. "I'm short. I don't want the
country to go into a depression. I just want it to fucking
deleverage." He had tried a thousand times in a thousand ways to
explain how screwed up the business was, and no one wanted to hear
it. "That Wall Street has gone down because of this is justice," he
says. "They fucked people. They built a castle to rip people off. Not
once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall
Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience."

Truth to tell, there wasn't a whole lot of hand-wringing inside
FrontPoint either. The only one among them who wrestled a bit with
his conscience was Daniel. "Vinny, being from Queens, needs to see
the dark side of everything," Eisman says. To which Daniel
replies, "The way we thought about it was, `By shorting this market
we're creating the liquidity to keep the market going.' "

"It was like feeding the monster," Eisman says of the market for
subprime bonds. "We fed the monster until it blew up."

About the time they were sitting on the steps of the midtown
cathedral, I sat in a booth in a restaurant on the East Side, waiting
for John Gutfreund to arrive for lunch, and wondered, among other
things, why any restaurant would seat side by side two men without
the slightest interest in touching each other.

There was an umbilical cord running from the belly of the exploded
beast back to the financial 1980s. A friend of mine created the first
mortgage derivative in 1986, a year after we left the Salomon
Brothers trading program. ("The problem isn't the tools," he likes to
say. "It's who is using the tools. Derivatives are like guns.")

When I published my book, the 1980s were supposed to be ending. I
received a lot of undeserved credit for my timing. The social
disruption caused by the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry
and the rise of hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts had given way
to a brief period of recriminations. Just as most students at Ohio
State read Liar's Poker as a manual, most TV and radio interviewers
regarded me as a whistleblower. (The big exception was Geraldo
Rivera. He put me on a show called "People Who Succeed Too Early in
Life" along with some child actors who'd gone on to become drug
addicts.) Anti-Wall Street feeling ran high—high enough for Rudy
Giuliani to float a political career on it—but the result felt more
like a witch hunt than an honest reappraisal of the financial order.
The public lynchings of Gutfreund and junk-bond king Michael Milken
were excuses not to deal with the disturbing forces underpinning
their rise. Ditto the cleaning up of Wall Street's trading culture.
The surface rippled, but down below, in the depths, the bonus pool
remained undisturbed. Wall Street firms would soon be frowning upon
profanity, firing traders for so much as glancing at a stripper, and
forcing male employees to treat women almost as equals. Lehman
Brothers circa 2008 more closely resembled a normal corporation with
solid American values than did any Wall Street firm circa 1985.

  The changes were camouflage. They helped distract outsiders from the
truly profane event: the growing misalignment of interests between
the people who trafficked in financial risk and the wider culture.

I'd not seen Gutfreund since I quit Wall Street. I'd met him,
nervously, a couple of times on the trading floor. A few months
before I left, my bosses asked me to explain to Gutfreund what at the
time seemed like exotic trades in derivatives I'd done with a
European hedge fund. I tried. He claimed not to be smart enough to
understand any of it, and I assumed that was how a Wall Street C.E.O.
showed he was the boss, by rising above the details. There was no
reason for him to remember any of these encounters, and he didn't:
When my book came out and became a public-relations nuisance to him,
he told reporters we'd never met.

Over the years, I'd heard bits and pieces about Gutfreund. I knew
that after he'd been forced to resign from Salomon Brothers he'd
fallen on harder times. I heard later that a few years ago he'd sat
on a panel about Wall Street at Columbia Business School. When his
turn came to speak, he advised students to find something more
meaningful to do with their lives. As he began to describe his
career, he broke down and wept.

When I emailed him to invite him to lunch, he could not have been
more polite or more gracious. That attitude persisted as he was
escorted to the table, made chitchat with the owner, and ordered his
food. He'd lost a half-step and was more deliberate in his movements,
but otherwise he was completely recognizable. The same veneer of
denatured courtliness masked the same animal need to see the world as
it was, rather than as it should be.

We spent 20 minutes or so determining that our presence at the same
lunch table was not going to cause the earth to explode. We
discovered we had a mutual acquaintance in New Orleans. We agreed
that the Wall Street C.E.O. had no real ability to keep track of the
frantic innovation occurring inside his firm. ("I didn't understand
all the product lines, and they don't either," he said.) We agreed,
further, that the chief of the Wall Street investment bank had little
control over his subordinates. ("They're buttering you up and then
doing whatever the fuck they want to do.") He thought the cause of
the financial crisis was "simple. Greed on both sides—greed of
investors and the greed of the bankers." I thought it was more
complicated. Greed on Wall Street was a given—almost an obligation.
The problem was the system of incentives that channeled the greed.

But I didn't argue with him. For just as you revert to being about
nine years old when you visit your parents, you revert to total
subordination when you are in the presence of your former C.E.O. John
Gutfreund was still the King of Wall Street, and I was still a geek.
He spoke in declarative statements; I spoke in questions.

But as he spoke, my eyes kept drifting to his hands. His alarmingly
thick and meaty hands. They weren't the hands of a soft Wall Street
banker but of a boxer. I looked up. The boxer was smiling—though it
was less a smile than a placeholder expression. And he was saying,
very deliberately, "Your…fucking…book."

I smiled back, though it wasn't quite a smile.

"Your fucking book destroyed my career, and it made yours," he said.

I didn't think of it that way and said so, sort of.

"Why did you ask me to lunch?" he asked, though pleasantly. He was
genuinely curious.

You can't really tell someone that you asked him to lunch to let him
know that you don't think of him as evil. Nor can you tell him that
you asked him to lunch because you thought that you could trace the
biggest financial crisis in the history of the world back to a
decision he had made. John Gutfreund did violence to the Wall Street
social order—and got himself dubbed the King of Wall Street—when he
turned Salomon Brothers from a private partnership into Wall Street's
first public corporation. He ignored the outrage of Salomon's retired
partners. ("I was disgusted by his materialism," William Salomon, the
son of the firm's founder, who had made Gutfreund C.E.O. only after
he'd promised never to sell the firm, had told me.) He lifted a giant
middle finger at the moral disapproval of his fellow Wall Street
C.E.O.'s. And he seized the day. He and the other partners not only
made a quick killing; they transferred the ultimate financial risk
from themselves to their shareholders. It didn't, in the end, make a
great deal of sense for the shareholders. (A share of Salomon
Brothers purchased when I arrived on the trading floor, in 1986, at a
then market price of $42, would be worth 2.26 shares of Citigroup
today—market value: $27.) But it made fantastic sense for the
investment bankers.

From that moment, though, the Wall Street firm became a black box.
The shareholders who financed the risks had no real understanding of
what the risk takers were doing, and as the risk-taking grew ever
more complex, their understanding diminished. The moment Salomon
Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had by the investment
bank as public corporation, the psychological foundations of Wall
Street shifted from trust to blind faith.

No investment bank owned by its employees would have levered itself
35 to 1 or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine C.D.O.'s. I doubt
any partnership would have sought to game the rating agencies or leap
into bed with loan sharks or even allow mezzanine C.D.O.'s to be sold
to its customers. The hoped-for short-term gain would not have
justified the long-term hit.

No partnership, for that matter, would have hired me or anyone
remotely like me. Was there ever any correlation between the ability
to get in and out of Princeton and a talent for taking financial
risk?

Now I asked Gutfreund about his biggest decision. "Yes," he
said. "They—the heads of the other Wall Street firms—all said what an
awful thing it was to go public and how could you do such a thing.
But when the temptation arose, they all gave in to it." He agreed
that the main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was
to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders. "When things go
wrong, it's their problem," he said—and obviously not theirs alone.
When a Wall Street investment bank screwed up badly enough, its risks
became the problem of the U.S. government. "It's laissez-faire until
you get in deep shit," he said, with a half chuckle. He was out of
the game.

It was now all someone else's fault.

He watched me curiously as I scribbled down his words. "What's this
for?" he asked.

I told him I thought it might be worth revisiting the world I'd
described in Liar's Poker, now that it was finally dying. Maybe bring
out a 20th-anniversary edition.

"That's nauseating," he said.

Hard as it was for him to enjoy my company, it was harder for me not
to enjoy his. He was still tough, as straight and blunt as a butcher.
He'd helped create a monster, but he still had in him a lot of the
old Wall Street, where people said things like "A man's word is his
bond." On that Wall Street, people didn't walk out of their firms and
cause trouble for their former bosses by writing books about
them. "No," he said, "I think we can agree about this: Your fucking
book destroyed my career, and it made yours." With that, the former
king of a former Wall Street lifted the plate that held his appetizer
and asked sweetly, "Would you like a deviled egg?"

Until that moment, I hadn't paid much attention to what he'd been
eating. Now I saw he'd ordered the best thing in the house, this
gorgeous frothy confection of an earlier age. Who ever dreamed up the
deviled egg? Who knew that a simple egg could be made so complicated
and yet so appealing? I reached over and took one. Something for
nothing. It never loses its charm.


http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-
news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom/?
refer=email&print=true

by Aaron at http://villageblog.wordpress.com/

You know I will probably never visit the LATOC discussion board when
looking for advice on how to handle the coming upheavel in our way of
life and while guns-and-gold are doubtless getting a big look in at
the moment, Ran is still dispensing his much calmer advice and
generally soothing the troubled waters of those who are prepared to
listen. I want to take this direction one step further though and
talk about how we're going to do more than just surivive and for that
kind of thinking we need Bill Mollison. Old interviews of Bill are
all over the internet and I recommend reading lots of them to pick up
on his vibe of ingenuity.

One of the worst paths we can follow at this point is to try to
preserve our existing way of life even as it becomes increasingly
untenable. Maybe out of habit, but more likely because we don't know
the alternatives, we'll just struggle on with an ever harder daily
grind. I'm pretty sure now however that permaculture has the vision
we need to chart a new course - and it doesn't just come with a new
plan for the future but also a new way of thinking that will be
especially valuable for a culture that has grown dependant on
authority figures to do it's thinking for it.

One of Bill's interviews compared permaculture thinking to the
marital arts philosophy of Aikido in that it seeks to turn adversity
into strength. I have to admit I don't know much about Aikido that
here's Bill Mollison with just one of a million tales of ingenious
inventiveness.

..."We grow a lot of prawns in Hawaii, [Bill is actually from
Australia] and you could grow them in your glass house up in Maine,
freshwater prawns, and they eat single-celled algae, so we don't know
how to cultivate those, so we just simply float about 20 ducks to a
quarter acre and they do the job of growing the algae. The duck
manure is almost immediately colonized by algae and that's what the
prawns eat, the algae. So 25 ducks per quarter acre,100 per acre, and
you can produce $60,000 worth of prawns per quarter acre twice a
year. Think of that. And that's just duck shit. Duck's shit is the
basic fuel for that system. Now, what are you going to feed your
ducks. Very few ducks enjoy eating much grass. They love Tradescantia
and sweet potato but they love snails too, so you can put in lots of
water lilies in clumps here and there and in between them you put a
lot of horseradish. Snails love living in water lilies but they come
out and eat horseradish. And also, if you put a lot of nasturtium in,
you get a lot of snails, so if you're going to grow ducks you gotta
grow horseradish, nasturtium, Tradescantia, water lilies and
Agapanthus (African lily). You'll get plenty of ducks which means
you'll have plenty of algae in the water and you can grow prawns, and
the prawns haven't cost you a penny. They're just a second offshoot
of your ducks feeding and enjoying themselves. So the system fuels
itself..."

That's from a very long and inspiring interview at Seeds of Change.
This next example is from another long interview at Mother Earth News

..."Here's an example I like to use: I call it my chicken model. Take
four separate elements: a hen coop, a greenhouse, a pond, and a small
forest. Now you can have these on your farm . . . and place them
wherever you like, in no particular relationship to each other. In
that situation each one functions individually, and they all consume
energy. But if you make the forest a forage range for the chickens by
putting the coop in or near that forest . . . if you attach the
greenhouse to the front of the chickens' shelter . . . and if you set
the pond in front of the greenhouse — as illustrated in Permaculture
Two — well, then you've got a nice system of interrelating functions,
the familiar checks and balances.

Just look at all the ways you produce energy in this system: the
chickens' body heat, the direct sunlight that reflects off the pond
and hits the greenhouse, the radiation of the trees at the rear, the
decomposition of chicken manure, and on and on. If you sit down and
sketch this system out, you'll find that it's fantastically complex —
with thousands of functional interactions — and will run itself .
Operating on its own energy, the system automatically switches on and
off. As the sun gets high in the sky, the greenhouse absorbs more
heat . . . so the chickens get hot and go out, thus removing the
source of animal heat. While they're outside, the birds forage in the
forest and leave their manure to enrich the soil. After dark, of
course, they'll go back inside to keep warm . . . taking their body
heat with them.

Look at each chicken by itself and the variety of functions it's
performing in this one simple model: In the coop the hen operates as
a radiator, an egg producer, and a manurial system. In the forest the
bird acts as a self-forager, a tree-disease controller, a
fireproofer, a fertilizer producer, and a rake. One can use chickens
to do quantities of useful work . . . in fact, I don't know what you
can't do with chickens, once you get started!..."

I tend to have the view that there's no problem that's insurmountable
if I think about the solution for long enough, but Bill Mollison
seems to operate on the belief that there's no problem that can't be
turned into an advantage if you think about it just right - and it's
that kind of attitude that we're all going to need as we go about
recreating our culture (and saving our butts) over the next few
years. I think we'll also need some of Bill's attitude just to keep
our energy levels high in the dispiriting face of the diet of doom
most of us follow.

by John Michael Greer

The mismatch between the narratives of sudden apocalypse that shape
so much of today's debate about the future, on the one hand, and the
sluggish pace at which the predicament of industrial society unfolds
in the real world, on the other, found a poster child of sorts last
weekend. During the days of uncertainty before Hurricane Gustav's
arrival on the Louisiana coast, some enthusiastic soul posted claims
to the peak oil newsblog The Oil Drum that the hurricane would bring
industrial civilization itself crashing down in ruins.

I was pleased to note that this announcement seems to have fallen on
unsympathetic ears. The Oil Drum's forte is shrewd technical
analysis, and its staff – if I may so describe the loose association
of regular posters and commenters who give that excellent site its
tone and direction – set aside such speculations and did their usual
exemplary job, mapping out the oil platforms and refineries likely to
be affected by Gustav and posting damage estimates that turned out to
be fairly close to the picture now emerging on the ground. Gustav was
a moderately strong storm; it forced the evacuation of nearly every
offshore and coastal petroleum facility in the Gulf of Mexico,
causing substantial short-term production losses; the long-term
effects of the storm will not be clear for weeks, but all by itself,
$30 billion or so in estimated damage piled atop an already faltering
economy will certainly have an impact.

The difference between the fantasy of sudden collapse and the reality
of one more localized jolt piling additional burdens on a stumbling
society is well worth keeping in mind. Like the proverbial frog in
the saucepan, those who think of apocalyptic collapse as the only way
industrial civilization can break down are far less likely to notice
the gradual changes in their environment that are leading in the same
direction, just more slowly. It's as though, to shift stories, the
boy who cried wolf was convinced that immense armies of wolves would
suddenly swoop down and eat up all the sheep in the world at once,
and mistook every whistle of wind in the trees for the distant
howling of the wolf pack to end all wolf packs; meanwhile,
practically under his nose, real wolves – scruffy, undersized, and
quite depressingly few in number compared to the massed uber-wolves
of the fantasy – were picking off a sheep or two each day from the
fringes of the flock.

As both these metaphors suggest, the fixation on sudden collapse has
practical disadvantages. If you're a frog in a saucepan, and the only
idea of heat you're willing to consider involves all the water in the
saucepan suddenly flashing into steam, you probably won't jump while
your legs are still uncooked enough to do so; if you're guarding
sheep from wolves, and groups of wolves numbering fewer than fifty
are beneath your notice, your sheep are going to be eaten. In the
same way, there are plenty of practical steps that can be taken here
and now by individuals, that will likely make the slow unraveling of
industrial society much less horrific than it might otherwise be.
Most of those steps would be, or at least appear to be, irrelevant in
the face of sudden global catastrophe, and in fact it's not uncommon
to find believers in some such catastrophe dismissing these practical
steps in exactly those terms.

Mind you, there are other reasons why those steps are easy to
dismiss. Every one of them has a price tag of some sort, denominated
in money, labor, comfort, convenience, or unimpeded access to the
smorgasbord of distractions today's industrial civilization offers
its inmates. By contrast, our culture's two dominant narratives about
the future – the narrative of apocalypse and its twin and shadow, the
narrative of inevitable progress – are popular at least in part
because they push the necessity and the costs of change onto somebody
else: the "they" who are expected to think of something just in time
to keep progress on track, for example, or the supposedly faceless
billions who are expected to hurry up and die en masse so that the
flag of some future utopia can be pitched atop their graves.

I've talked about some of the steps in question already on this blog,
but today I'd like to turn to something a bit different from those
previous discussions: the question of how people will make a living
during the long unraveling of the industrial age.

That's a question that has received surprisingly little attention in
recent years, and a good deal of that neglect, I think, can be laid
at the door of the apocalyptic narrative. According to that
narrative, after all, nothing much changes until everything does; you
keep on punching the timeclock at your present job until the day that
civilization falls apart, and then, if you happen to be among the
survivors, you step into whatever new role the apocalypse has
ordained for you – subsistence farmer, tribal hunter-gatherer,
protein source for the local cannibal population, or what have you.
At the same time, the absence of a 9-to-5 routine on the far side of
apocalypse is likely to be an important source of the narrative's
popularity; I'm far from the only person who noticed, during the
runup to the Y2K noncrisis, how many people predicting imminent doom
seemed exhilarated by the notion that they would not have to go to
work on January 2, 2000.

If I'm right and the descent into the deindustrial future unfolds
over generations, though, that enticing prospect is not in the cards.
Rather, the vast majority of us will need to earn our livings in a
world that, while it will be changing around us, is extremely
unlikely to change in ways that will make that process any easier
than it is now. During the period I've described in other posts as
the age of scarcity industrialism, something like today's money
economy will likely remain firmly in place, though the household
economy and other forms of production and exchange outside the money
economy will likely play a steadily growing role. During the age of
salvage economies that I expect to follow the twilight of the
industrial system, money of some sort will likely remain in use on a
small scale, as it does in most dark ages, but most day-to-day
transactions will take place via barter or other systems of exchange
outside the money economy; again, that's standard practice in dark
ages. In both periods, though, people will work for their livings –
and will likely work a good deal harder than many Americans do today.

Nor will their jobs be the same as the ones that employ most
Americans nowadays. The flood of cheap abundant energy that surged
through the industrial world during the twentieth century reshaped
every dimension of the economy in its image, and nearly all the
things we have grown up considering normal and natural are artifacts
of that highly abnormal and unnatural state of affairs. Very few
people in the industrial world today spend their workdays producing
goods or providing necessary services; instead, pushing paper has
become the standard employment, and preparation for a paper-pushing
career the standard form of education. The once-mighty archipelago of
trade schools that undergirded the rise of America as an industrial
power sank with barely a trace in the second half of the twentieth
century. I once lived three blocks away from the shell of one such
school; it had been engulfed by a community college, and classrooms
that once hummed with the busy noises of machine-shop equipment and
the hiss of hot solder were being used to train a new generation of
receptionists, brokers, and medical billing clerks

The postindustrial economy proclaimed by Daniel Bell many years ago,
and accepted as an accurate description of economic reality since
then, was never much more than a shell game. The societies of the
industrial world were every bit as dependent on industry as they had
ever been; they simply exported the industries to Third World
countries where labor was cheap and environmental regulation
nonexistent, and continued to reap the benefits back home. Those
arrangements only worked, however, because cheap abundant energy made
transport costs negligible, and systematic distortions in patterns of
exchange pumped wealth from the Third World to a handful of
industrial nations, providing the latter with the wherewithal to pay
a very large fraction of their populations to do jobs that don't
actually need to be done. As energy becomes scarce and expensive
again, and the imperial systems that concentrated the world's wealth
in a minority of nations are shredded by the rise of new centers of
power, those arrangements will break down. As that happens, a great
many goods and necessary services now done offshore will need to be
done at home once again, and a great many professions that produce no
goods and provide no necessary services will likely drop off the
economic map.

Prophecy is a risky business at the best of times, but it's worth
hazarding some guesses about the jobs that will fill the post-
petroleum job ads here in America over the next generation or so,
through the years of the Great Recession and the disintegration of
America's overseas empire. Farmers are among the most likely
candidates for the top of the list. By this I don't mean subsistence
farmers in rural ecovillages – their time is much further in the
future, if it ever comes at all. Rather, market farmers tilling what
is now suburban acreage to feed the dwindling cities, and rural
farmers producing grains and other bulk crops for foreign exchange,
will likely be in high demand, along with support professions such as
agronomists.

Engineers form another set of trades likely to do well in the
generation to come, especially those who know their way around energy
production and distribution and the design, building, and maintenance
of low-tech transportation networks. In the not too distant future,
rail and canal transport will have to take over much of the work now
done by trucks, and energy networks will have to cope with a
fractious mix of alternative resources, dwindling fossil fuels, and
massive conservation programs. The people who actually put the plans
of engineers into effect, from skilled machinists all the way down to
the gandy dancers who lay the rails, will also be able to count on
steady paychecks.

Another suite of professions likely to do well barely exists today,
though demolitions experts, junkyard workers, and people who run
recycling and composting operations represent tentative forays into
the territory. A huge fraction of America's potential wealth in the
postpeak years consists of manufactured objects that can either be
refurbished and put back into circulation, or stripped of raw
materials for reuse. When the electricity needed to power elevators
and run heating and cooling systems is dizzyingly expensive when it
can be had at all, for example, skyscrapers will be worth more as
sources of refined metal than as buildings, and most of them will
come down. On the other end of the spectrum, a great many consumer
products that are now consigned to landfills when they break will be
worth salvaging, repairing, and reselling once the cost of the
necessary labor is cheaper than the cost of the energy and raw
materials for a new model – a state of affairs that existed in
America until the 1960s and will likely exist again within a decade
or two. The salvage industries, as we may as well call them, may well
turn out to be one of the major growth industries of the twenty-first
century.

Other professions have their own possibilities. It's a useful
exercise to locate a city directory from the first half of the
twentieth century and flip through the pages, noting the businesses
that existed then but are nowhere to be found today. Those that meet
actual needs, however unpopular they are as career tracks today, are
likely to be more viable and more lucrative in a deindustrializing
future than many professions fashionable today. The pundits and
publicists of our economic system never seem to tire of explaining
that tomorrow's jobs will not be the same as today's, and I suspect
they may just be right; what they don't expect, and I do, is that
many of tomorrow's hottest jobs will have more than a little
resemblance to the careers of yesterday.

Those people who make preparations now to move into such jobs as they
come open will be doing themselves and their communities alike a
favor of no small worth. These preparations need to begin soon –
while the time, resources, and knowledge base for many necessary
skills are still readily accessible – and this requires, once again,
some sense of the way civilizations actually fall, and a willingness
to apply that slow, stumbling, unromantic but realistic model to the
events going on around us right now.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/09/post-petroleum-job-
ads.html

By Ian Angus

August 24, 2008 -- Will shared resources always be misused and
overused? Is community ownership of land, forests and fisheries a
guaranteed road to ecological disaster? Is privatisation the only way
to protect the environment and end Third World poverty? Most
economists and development planners will answer "yes" — and for proof
they will point to the most influential article ever written on those
important questions.

Since its publication in Science in December 1968, "The Tragedy of
the Commons" has been anthologised in at least 111 books, making it
one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific
journal. It is also one of the most quoted: a recent Google search
found "about 302,000" results for the phrase "tragedy of the commons".

For 40 years it has been, in the words of a World Bank discussion
paper, "the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess
natural resource issues" (Bromley and Cernea 1989: 6). It has been
used time and again to justify stealing indigenous peoples' lands,
privatising health care and other social services, giving
corporations ``tradable permits'' to pollute the air and water, and
much more.

Noted anthropologist Dr G.N. Appell (1995) writes that the
article "has been embraced as a sacred text by scholars and
professionals in the practice of designing futures for others and
imposing their own economic and environmental rationality on other
social systems of which they have incomplete understanding and
knowledge".

Like most sacred texts, "The Tragedy of the Commons" is more often
cited than read. As we will see, although its title sounds
authoritative and scientific, it fell far short of science.

Garrett Hardin hatches a myth

The author of "The Tragedy of the Commons" was Garrett Hardin, a
University of California professor who until then was best known as
the author of a biology textbook that argued for "control of
breeding" of "genetically defective" people (Hardin 1966: 707). In
his 1968 essay he argued that communities that share resources
inevitably pave the way for their own destruction; instead of wealth
for all, there is wealth for none.

He based his argument on a story about the commons in rural England.

(The term "commons" was used in England to refer to the shared
pastures, fields, forests, irrigation systems and other resources
that were found in many rural areas until well into the 1800s.
Similar communal farming arrangements existed in most of Europe, and
they still exist today in various forms around the world,
particularly in indigenous communities.)

"Picture a pasture open to all", Hardin wrote. Herders who want to
expand their personal herd will calculate that the cost of additional
grazing (reduced food for all animals, rapid soil depletion) will be
divided among all, but they alone will get the benefit of having more
cattle to sell.

Inevitably, "the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible
course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd". But
every "rational herdsman" will do the same thing, so the commons is
soon overstocked and overgrazed to the point where it supports no
animals at all.

Hardin used the word "tragedy" as Aristotle did, to refer to a
dramatic outcome that is the inevitable but unplanned result of a
character's actions. He called the destruction of the commons through
overuse a tragedy not because it is sad, but because it is the
inevitable result of shared use of the pasture. "Freedom in a commons
brings ruin to all."

Where's the evidence?

Given the subsequent influence of Hardin's essay, it's shocking to
realise that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping
conclusions. He claimed that the "tragedy" was inevitable — but he
didn't show that it had happened even once.

Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self-
regulation by the communities involved. One such process was
described years earlier in Friedrich Engels' account of the "mark",
the form taken by commons-based communities in parts of pre-
capitalist Germany:

"[T]he use of arable and meadowlands was under the supervision and
direction of the community …

"Just as the share of each member in so much of the mark as was
distributed was of equal size, so was his share also in the use of
the `common mark'. The nature of this use was determined by the
members of the community as a whole. …

"At fixed times and, if necessary, more frequently, they met in the
open air to discuss the affairs of the mark and to sit in judgment
upon breaches of regulations and disputes concerning the mark."
(Engels 1892)

Historians and other scholars have broadly confirmed Engels'
description of communal management of shared resources. A summary of
recent research concludes:

"[W]hat existed in fact was not a `tragedy of the commons' but rather
a triumph: that for hundreds of years — and perhaps thousands,
although written records do not exist to prove the longer era — land
was managed successfully by communities." (Cox 1985: 60)

Part of that self-regulation process was known in England
as "stinting" — establishing limits for the number of cows, pigs,
sheep and other livestock that each commoner could graze on the
common pasture. Such "stints" protected the land from overuse (a
concept that experienced farmers understood long before Hardin
arrived) and allowed the community to allocate resources according to
its own concepts of fairness.

The only significant cases of overstocking found by the leading
modern expert on the English commons involved wealthy landowners who
deliberately put too many animals onto the pasture in order to weaken
their much poorer neighbours' position in disputes over the enclosure
(privatisation) of common lands (Neeson 1993: 156).

Hardin assumed that peasant farmers are unable to change their
behaviour in the face of certain disaster. But in the real world,
small farmers, fishers and others have created their own institutions
and rules for preserving resources and ensuring that the commons
community survived through good years and bad.

Why does the herder want more?

Hardin's argument started with the unproven assertion that herders
always want to expand their herds: "It is to be expected that each
herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons…
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain."

In short, Hardin's conclusion was predetermined by his
assumptions. "It is to be expected" that each herder will try to
maximise the size of their herd — and each one does exactly that.
It's a circular argument that proves nothing.

Hardin assumed that human nature is selfish and unchanging, and that
society is just an assemblage of self-interested individuals who
don't care about the impact of their actions on the community. The
same idea, explicitly or implicitly, is a fundamental component of
mainstream (i.e. pro-capitalist) economic theory.

All the evidence (not to mention commonsense) shows that this is
absurd: people are social beings, and society is much more than the
arithmetic sum of its members. Even capitalist society, which rewards
the most anti-social behaviour, has not crushed human cooperation and
solidarity. The very fact that for centuries "rational herdsmen" did
not overgraze the commons disproves Hardin's most fundamental
assumptions — but that hasn't stopped him or his disciples from
erecting policy castles on foundations of sand.

Even if the herder wanted to behave as Hardin described, they
couldn't do so unless certain conditions existed.

There would have to be a market for the cattle, and herders would
have to be focused on producing for that market, not for local
consumption. The herder would have to have enough capital to buy the
additional cattle and the fodder they would need in winter. The
herder would have to be able to hire workers to care for the larger
herd, build bigger barns, etc. And the herder's desire for profit
would have to outweigh their interest in the long-term survival of
their community.

In short, Hardin didn't describe the behaviour of herders in pre-
capitalist farming communities — he described the behaviour of
capitalists operating in a capitalist economy. The universal human
nature that he claimed would always destroy common resources is
actually the profit-driven "grow or die" behaviour of corporations.

Will private ownership do better?

That leads us to another fatal flaw in Hardin's argument: in addition
to providing no evidence that maintaining the commons will inevitably
destroy the environment, he offered no justification for his opinion
that privatisation would save it. Once again he simply presented his
own prejudices as fact:

"We must admit that our legal system of private property plus
inheritance is unjust — but we put up with it because we are not
convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system.
The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate.
Injustice is preferable to total ruin."

The implication is that private owners will do a better job of caring
for the environment because they want to preserve the value of their
assets. In reality, scholars and activists have documented scores of
cases in which the division and privatisation of communally managed
lands had disastrous results. Privatising the commons has repeatedly
led to deforestation, soil erosion and depletion, overuse of
fertilisers and pesticides, and the ruin of ecosystems.

As Karl Marx wrote, nature requires long cycles of birth, development
and regeneration, but capitalism requires short-term returns.

"[T]he entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented
towards the most immediate monetary profits, stands in contradiction
to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of
permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human
generations. A striking illustration of this is furnished by the
forests, which are only rarely managed in a way more or less
corresponding to the interests of society as a whole …" (Marx 1998:
611n)

Contrary to Hardin's claims, a community that shares fields and
forests has a strong incentive to protect them to the best of its
ability, even if that means not maximising current production,
because those resources will be essential to the community's survival
for centuries to come. Capitalist owners have the opposite incentive,
because they will not survive in business if they don't maximise
short-term profit. If ethanol promises bigger and faster profits than
centuries-old rain forests, the trees will fall.

This focus on short-term gain has reached a point of appalling
absurdity in recent best-selling books by Bjorn Lomborg, William
Nordhaus and others, who argue that it is irrational to spend money
to stop greenhouse gas emissions today, because the payoff is too far
in the future. Other investments, they say, will produce much better
returns, more quickly.

Community management isn't an infallible way of protecting shared
resources: some communities have mismanaged common resources, and
some commons may have been overused to extinction. But no commons-
based community has capitalism's built-in drive to put current
profits ahead of the wellbeing of future generations.

A politically useful myth

The truly appalling thing about "The Tragedy of the Commons" is not
its lack of evidence or logic — badly researched and argued articles
are not unknown in academic journals. What's shocking is the fact
that this piece of reactionary nonsense has been hailed as a
brilliant analysis of the causes of human suffering and environmental
destruction, and adopted as a basis for social policy by supposed
experts ranging from economists and environmentalists to governments
and United Nations agencies.

Despite being refuted again and again, it is still used today to
support private ownership and uncontrolled markets as sure-fire roads
to economic growth.

The success of Hardin's argument reflects its usefulness as a pseudo-
scientific explanation of global poverty and inequality, an
explanation that doesn't question the dominant social and political
order. It confirms the prejudices of those in power: logical and
factual errors are nothing compared to the very attractive (to the
rich) claim that the poor are responsible for their own poverty. The
fact that Hardin's argument also blames the poor for ecological
destruction is a bonus.

Hardin's essay has been widely used as an ideological response to
anti-imperialist movements in the Third World and discontent among
indigenous and other oppressed peoples everywhere in the world.

"Hardin's fable was taken up by the gathering forces of neo-liberal
reaction in the 1970s, and his essay became the `scientific'
foundation of World Bank and IMF policies, viz. enclosure of commons
and privatisation of public property. … The message is clear: we must
never treat the earth as a `common treasury.' We must be ruthless and
greedy or else we will perish." (Boal 2007)

In Canada, conservative lobbyists use arguments derived from Hardin's
political tract to explain away poverty on First Nations' [Indigenous
Canadians'] reserves, and to argue for further dismantling of
Indigenous communities. A study published by the influential Fraser
Institute urges privatisation of reserve land:

"[T]hese large amounts of land, with their attendant natural
resources, will never yield their maximum benefit to Canada's native
people as long as they are held as collective property subject to
political management. … collective property is the path of poverty,
and private property is the path of prosperity." (Fraser 2002: 16-17)

This isn't just right-wing posturing. Canada's federal government,
which has refused to sign the United Nations Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples, announced in 2007 that it will "develop
approaches to support the development of individual property
ownership on reserves", and created a C$300 million fund to do just
that.

In Hardin's world, poverty has nothing to do with centuries of
racism, colonialism and exploitation: poverty is inevitable and
natural in all times and places, the product of immutable human
nature. The poor bring it on themselves by having too many babies and
clinging to self-destructive collectivism.

The tragedy of the commons is a useful political myth — a scientific-
sounding way of saying that there is no alternative to the dominant
world order.

Stripped of excess verbiage, Hardin's essay asserted, without proof,
that human beings are helpless prisoners of biology and the market.
Unless restrained, we will inevitably destroy our communities and
environment for a few extra pennies of profit. There is nothing we
can do to make the world better or more just.

In 1844 Friedrich Engels described a similar argument as a "repulsive
blasphemy against man and nature". Those words apply with full force
to the myth of the tragedy of the commons.

http://links.org.au/node/595

by Dimitri Orlov
This piece started out as a solicited submission to Harvard Business
Review for their "List of Breakthrough Ideas." After careful review,
it was decided that the senior executives that are the target
audience of this publication would find my breakthrough
idea "counterintuitive," and I was asked to look for evidence of my
breakthrough idea's effectiveness. So, if you are a senior executive
and would like to try a novel approach to running your business,
please give this a try, and let me know how you make out.

The combination of skyrocketing food and energy costs, rising medical
costs, falling real estate values and stagnant wages is putting
increasing numbers of workers in financial distress. A distressed
workforce can hardly be a productive workforce, and companies must do
whatever it takes to make it physically possible for their employees
to function. What can companies do to remedy this situation? The
obvious step of increasing wages not only puts additional pressure on
the bottom line, but can also fuel wage inflation. Also, It may not
be the most effective approach.

A better approach is to treat the company and its employees as an
economic unit: a single household, with a common set of costs. These
costs can be cut very effectively by trading off slightly higher
company costs against significantly lower employee costs. Each
additional dollar paid out in wages is taxed as income, trimming it
by about a third. It is then spent in the retail chain, generating
profits for retailers and service providers, trimming it by another
half or more. This same dollar can be stretched much further if the
company uses it to buy products wholesale and makes them available to
its employees either free of charge or for a nominal fee.

Many families are struggling with rising food costs. To help them,
the company commissary can provide not just breakfast and lunch, but
take-home dinners for the entire family. Periodically, it can provide
other take-home items such as frozen chickens purchased in bulk,
fresh organic vegetables from local CSA (Community-Supported
Agriculture) farms, or a basket of popular foodstuffs purchased
wholesale and assembled in-house.

Many employees are finding that their daily commute is eating ever
deeper into their budgets because of the increasing price of fuel. In
many cases, their ability to relocate closer to work is complicated
by the stagnant real estate market and the higher price of housing
closer to population centers. Telecommuting can help, but is only
feasible for certain types of work. Here, the company can help by
providing dormitories close by, which would allow employees to
commute every other day, or even just once a week. For the younger,
single employees, this may allow them to avoid spending money on
housing altogether.

There are numerous other ways that a company can use its vastly
greater negotiating power to effect significant savings for its
employees while incurring a comparatively small additional cost.
Examples run from directly providing family medical care through a
company clinic to providing vacation packages at cost by renting out
an entire vacation resort at a lower, negotiated group rate.

But perhaps the greatest opportunities for cost reduction lie in
areas where employees' own efforts can replace services or products
they would otherwise be forced to purchase, be it taking care of
their elderly relatives instead of putting them in assisted living,
or spending time with their children instead of paying for day care,
or growing their own food in a community garden instead of shopping
at a supermarket. Here, the company has to be willing to accommodate
shorter working hours, trading off the slightly lower efficiency of
having more part-time employees against the resulting vastly greater
efficiency of the company community when it is viewed as a single
household.

There is no need to couch such initiatives in purely negative terms
of cost containment. Here is how Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, sees
it: "The goal is to strip away everything that gets in our employees'
way. We provide a standard package of fringe benefits, but on top of
that are first-class dining facilities, gyms, laundry rooms, massage
rooms, haircuts, car washes, dry cleaning, commuting buses - just
about anything a hardworking employee engineer might want."

If you feel that such special treatment may be required for the
pampered software artists at prosperous Google, but not for your own
employees, then take a look at the long list of benefits enjoyed by
the enlisted men and women of the US Air Force, which includes 30
days a year of paid vacation and unlimited free air travel. This is a
fine example of making the best use of what you have to make a
difference for your employees: if what you have is plenty of jets,
then why not let your employees travel as much as they want?

Although the results of such efforts may at first be difficult to
quantify, should they succeed, the resulting competitive advantage is
likely to become obvious. Let your hard-nosed competitors try to run
their businesses with distressed, disgruntled, overworked employees,
while you reap the benefits of loyalty, solidarity and ésprit de
corps. In due course, this should make your competitors attractive as
acquisition targets.

One ready objection that this proposal normally encounters runs along
the lines of "If everybody did this, the economy would collapse." If
it were implemented across the board, this would cut retailers and
the government out of their share of your earnings, reduce both
corporate profits and government expenditures, shrink the overall
size of the economy, making it unable to sustain a large and growing
national debt, and hasten economic collapse and national bankruptcy.

But it is clearly a mistake to consider it likely that this proposal
would be implemented by more than a handful of companies.
Overwhelming numbers of corporate executives would regard it as
professional suicide, because financial markets punish companies that
put the interests of their employees ahead of those of their
investors. And it seems equally outlandish to think that the actions
of a few mavericks could significantly hasten economic collapse and
national bankruptcy. In short, the macroeconomic effects of this
proposal are not interesting. It is far more interesting to consider
the notion that it is possible to safeguard a company and its
employees against a continuously worsening economic environment, even
onto complete economic and political collapse. The steps proposed in
this article can be regarded as baby steps in that direction. The
remaining steps are varied and far more difficult, and are beyond the
scope of this article.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2008/08/when-all-your-best-employees-
are-going.html

by John Michael Greer

One of the lessons of history is that change, no matter how drastic it
appears on the pages of history books, is rarely anything like so
sudden for those who live through it. Read an account of the French
Revolution, for example, and events seem to follow one another like
explosions from a string of firecrackers, from the final crisis of the
Ancien Régime straight through to the fall of Napoleon. For the man or
woman in the French street, though, these happenings were scattered
threads in a fabric of months and years woven from the plainer cordage
of ordinary life.

Partly this is a function of the way historical narrative compresses
time. It bears remembering that a teenage Parisienne who sat
daydreaming of her upcoming wedding on the day that Louis XVI summoned
the États-General in 1788 would most likely have been a grandmother on
the day the Allied armies marched into Paris after the battle of
Waterloo in 1815. Equally, though, it's rare for historical events to
have the same apparent importance at the time that they are assigned
in the historian's hindsight, not least because the everyday process
of making a living and moving through the stages of human existence
plays a larger role in most lives than the occasional tumults that
make the history books.

This lesson needs to be kept in mind as we try to make sense of the
implications of the crisis of industrial society, not least because it
offers some protection against the common bad habit of projecting
daydreams onto the inkblot patterns of the future. That habit of
thinking is more than usually at issue in exploring the theme of this
week's post, the nature of daily life in the decades ahead of us.

The role of wishful thinking in driving the apocalyptic expectations
so common in contemporary culture rarely shows itself so clearly as
here. In the weeks leading up to the Y2K noncrisis, I knew quite a
respectable number of people whose conviction that industrial
civilization was about to undergo total collapse was all too clearly
motivated by the belief that this meant that come January 1, 2000,
they would no longer have to continue living the lives they had made
for themselves. You'd think that the prospect of mass death would be a
good deal more daunting than even the most humdrum modern existence,
but it's always part of the narrative of imminent apocalypse that
dieoff only happens to other people; no matter how poorly suited the
people in question were to the strenuous task of surviving the
overnight collapse of a civilization, each one of them believed that
they'd be among the lucky few.

The same sort of logic pervades certain corners of the peak oil scene.
I've met far too many people who don't know enough about plant care to
keep a potted petunia healthy, and have very likely never put in an
eight-hour day of hard physical labor in their lives – most middle
class Americans haven't, after all – and yet who nonetheless talk
enthusiastically about the life they expect to lead in a
self-sufficient rural lifeboat ecovillage as industrial civilization
crashes into ruin a comfortable distance away. It's all very
reminiscent of the aftermath of the Sixties, when a great many people
headed back to the land with equally high hopes; the vast majority of
them straggled back to the cities a few months or years later with
their hopes in shreds, having discovered that fantasies of the good
life in nature's lap make poor preparation for the hard work,
unremitting discipline, and relative poverty of life as a subsistence
farmer.

The would-be communards of the Sixties had an advantage not shared by
their counterparts in the peak oil movement. Rural land was relatively
cheap, and money was fairly easy to come by, not least because the
counterculture scene always had a sprinkling of members with large
trust funds who functioned as the sugar daddies of the movement. As
the Summer of Love gave way to the summer of Altamont and the urban
neighborhoods that nurtured hippie culture went to seed, communes in
the countryside were a significant option, and a great many of them –
I don't know that a census was ever done, but there were certainly
thousands – sprouted as a result.

That has not happened in the wake of peak oil. Partly, of course, it's
one thing to leave the city behind for a rural commune when you're
nineteen years old and can put all your worldly goods into a knapsack,
with plenty of room left over for dreams; it's quite another thing to
do that when you're forty and comfortably middle-class, with a family
to support, a career to think of, and the prospect of retirement
sufficiently visible on the horizon of your future that the impact of
your choices on your pension is always somewhere in your thoughts.
Today's peak oil activists very often resemble the second of these
categories a good deal more than the first, which goes a long way to
explain the gaping difference between the number of lifeboat
ecovillages that have gotten onto the drawing boards and the number of
them that have actually been built.

Still, this is only one reflection of a much broader problem, which is
that lifeboat ecovillages do not make economic sense in today's world.
However self-sufficient they may turn out to be in the deindustrial
future their planners envision, they are anything but self-sufficient
here and now, when they have to be built and paid for. Nor is it at
all clear how soon they will become self-sufficient if the future
turns out to be a gradual descent into the deindustrial age, rather
than the sudden plunge so often imagined these days.

This is where the perspective I brought up at the beginning of this
essay – the difference between history as read in retrospect, and
history as lived at the time – becomes crucial. Seen in retrospect,
the changes that will follow the decline of world petroleum production
are likely to be sweeping and global. From the perspective of those
who live through them, however, those changes are much more likely to
take gradual and local forms. This will make them harder to notice,
but paradoxically easier to meet.

Imagine, for example, a scenario in which worldwide production of
conventional crude oil drops by an average of 5% a year, and other
fossil fuels follow gradual depletion curves of their own. Especially
at first, the gap can be offset with biofuels, tar sands, and other
unconventional sources; yearly production totals for liquid fueld may
even increase, though this won't include an accounting of the fuel
burnt to extract oil from tar sands or the petroleum products used to
grow biofuel crops, and thus will hide the fact that there's less
energy available for other uses. The need to funnel an ever-increasing
fraction of fuel into producing more fuel, coupled with expanding
global population and the ongoing transfer of economic and political
power from an aging American empire to its successors, will tend to
drive fuel prices up; economic contraction driven by the twilight of
cheap energy will tend to decrease demand, and drive them back down;
factor in speculation, and you get wild gyrations in energy costs,
coupled to cycles of economic boom and bust of an intensity not seen
in the Western world since the nineteenth century.

All of this spells trouble, without a doubt. To rising energy prices
and contracting economies, add the public health consequences of
increasing poverty and the likelihood that the end of the American
empire will result in wars as bloody and protracted as those that
followed the decline of every other major commercial empire in recent
history, and you get a recipe for massive change. I've argued in
previous posts that these changes mark the first stage of the decline
and fall of Western industrial civilization – the change from
affluence industrialism to scarcity industrialism – and that it will
be followed by further stages of contraction and social
transformation, leading into a dark age several centuries long from
which our successor societies will eventually emerge.

From the perspective of some future Edward Gibbon of the year 3650 or
so, outlining The Decline and Fall of the American Empire as he
strolls past sheep grazing on the mossy ruins of ancient Washington
DC, all this will doubtless seem traumatic enough. For those who
experience that transformation first hand, though, it will likely have
a much different appearance. The young Parisienne whose image I
invoked at the beginning of this essay, after all, did not go to sleep
one night in the agrarian, half-feudal France of the Ancien Régime and
wake up the next morning as a grandmother in the nascent industrial
nation that France became in Napoleon's wake. Even those changes in
the interval that brought her grief – any sons she had, for example,
would have faced high odds of dying a soldier's death – would have
been spread out over the years, part of a fabric of many other
experiences.

Similarly, the unraveling of today's industrial society can be
expected to follow a similar tempo of change. If the scenario I've
outlined above is anything close to the shape the future holds for us,
we can expect to witness economic, social, and political turmoil
beyond anything the industrial world has experienced in living memory.
We will all be attending more funerals than we do nowadays, and our
appearance as the guest of honor at one of them will likely come
noticeably sooner than it otherwise would. Most of us will learn what
it means to go hungry, to work at many different jobs, to have paper
wealth become meaningless, and to watch established institutions go to
pieces around us. A quarter century or so from now, the world may be a
very different place, but on the way there each of us will have had to
deal with the same unoriginal challenges of everyday life we face today.

The continuity of history as a lived experience imposes requirements
on planning for the post-peak future that haven't always been noticed.
Like the imaginary lifeboat ecovillages that would make perfect
economic sense in an imagined world, but can't even scrape together
the funding to get built in this one, a good many of the plans and
projects that have been discussed as a response to peak oil make no
provision for the fact that people will still have to live their lives
and make a living while they wait for those projects to justify
themselves. Those projects that make good practical sense here and
now, or at least place no great burden on the people who choose to
pursue them, will be a good deal more viable than those that can only
support themselves in a radically different world than the one we
inhabit. In the weeks to come I plan on sketching out some outlines of
how such an approach to the future might be crafted.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/08/tempo-of-change.html

by Comrade Simba
http://www.comradesimba.com/blog/?p=87

It Can Be Done

This is our fifth growing season out here. The first two years was
mainly hacking out scrub and mending fences from 20 years of neglect
on the "Old Bartley Rental House" as it is known by the locals. Goofed
up a few times trying to work with somebody else's lack of vision just
because it was there and seemed easier at the time. Back in the early
50's electricity and propane was all the rage so retrofitting this
place to accommodate all things peak oil hasn't been very easy, and
some of it is just going to have to be put up with. Like the garden
area being uphill from where the gray water line runs out of the
house, shade trees being on the southeast, and the long axis of the
house being oriented to taking full advantage of that summer afternoon
sun blast. But five years of planting stuff in all kinds of
experimental ways has shown me what works well and gives indications
that this self sufficiency thing is doable.

Right now we have enough raw calories in storage, canned up, and in
the ground to make it through to next spring even if an EMP turned all
things fucko bazzoo.

The key was to finally wrap my head around the idea that ultimately,
everything has to go to the garden. How and when to put what where is
like a puzzle - and I spent a lot of time trying to fill in large
hunks of similar background colors instead of finding the corners and
edge pieces first. Here is the first installment of the mechanics of
what worked…

Raking up the fall leaves and dumping them into in four foot wide
windrows covered with a two inch layer of manure is the place to plant
the early squash. No matter how much rain you get the squash roots
don't rot and there is a super rich humus zone where the dead leaves
come into contact with the manure. The best part is the pile stays
moist with very little water in dry spells since it's basically mulch
pile. So the yard gets raked making the wife happy, the barn gets
cleaned out for good critter housekeeping, abundant squash to eat and
lots left over to feed the pig and chickens. Once the plants are
exhausted in late summer, fork or till the whole row into the ground
(noting about 5 billion earthworms) and its a cowpea patch. And if you
don't know about cowpeas - learn up. Ultimate doomer crop. Grows
anywhere under any conditions. Inoculate them the first year to make
sure nitrogen fixing bacteria are in the ground, pick the pods when
they dry up brown and stuff `em into feed sacks for shelling during
the long winter nights by the fire (family bonding and all that shit).
Once the cowpeas get done with their thing sow winter wheat or rye or
some other cover crop in the bed. There's your corn bed for mid spring
planting.

Spring is nice to see after spending all winter in battle with the
woodstove but it quickly becomes a nightmare of too much to do all at
once. So far, every year I have fucked up and tilled up the whole
garden plot with grand visions of thousands of square feet of lush
kitchen vegetables only to wind up with a giant weed patch from all
the disturbed earth not getting planted in time `cuz the damn lawn
needs mowed or some shit. No more of that insanity - winter wheat over
everything besides the squash/melon leaf windrows. Chop it into the
ground when something is ready to plant, and if it has headed up it's
chicken feed and straw for nest boxes and corn mulch. Where I planted
winter wheat last year I did not have a weed problem this year. Repeat
- no weed problem, just a nice loose earthworm laden bed suitable for
the early spinach and peas or whatever. But I wanna talk corn… and
that's a post all by itself.

by Graham at Zone 5
http://zone5.org/2008/08/10/book-review-climate-code-red-the-case-for-emergency-\
action/


Climate Code Red

The Case for Emergency Action

David Spratt and Philip Sutton

Scribe Publications 2008

Spratt and Sutton have written an important book that looks at the
current state of climate science, compares the projections for likely
catastrophic and irreversible climate change to the policy measures
and government reactions so far, and finds the latter seriously
lacking. If we carry on with our current targets for cutting
greenhouse gas emissions, we will effectively guarantee climate disaster.

They are too little, too late and seem designed more to allow
"business as usual" commerce and industry to continue with minimal
pain rather than responding sufficiently to the extreme gravity of our
situation; and as the authors continually stress, we have only one
shot at solving the problem. The decisions we make now will determine
the future of life on earth, and so far, there is little evidence that
we are taking the threats to civilisation seriously enough.

It's time, they argue, to face the reality that we are confronting a
global climate emergency, and we had better start reacting with an
appropriate sense of urgency.

The problem with the book I found is that despite the language of
"emergency" -and we should know by now this is certainly what we
should be talking about- the book doesnt go nearly far enough, confing
itself to largely technological and economic methods of reducing
carbon emissions and cooling the planet while ignoring the call from
other authors- Ted Trainer for example- to change our lifestyle and
revolutionize the ideology that underpins the growth economy.

Throughout the book the authors survey a wide range and reports
concerning the three variables of:

-how much warming before we pass the tipping point that will take us
into "dangerous runaway climate change"?

-what is the levels of greenhouse gases which are likely to lead to
this level of warming?

-what % cuts will we need to keep atmospheric levels of GHG below the
dangerous threshold?

I found myself getting slightly confused as to who was saying what
exactly and how these three variables actually relate to each other,
and a couple of graphs would have been really useful here to provide a
ready reference point.

But the long and the short of it seems to be, the conventional view of
keeping warming to below 2 degrees of pre-industrial levels (we are
currently at about o.8 degrees) is probably too high, but in any case-
and this is the crucial point- at current rates we are already
committed to exceeding this and are likely to propel the world into a
radically different climate regime.

To avoid this we will need to a)reduce emissions to zero by 2050;
b)actively remove GHGs from the atmosphere by carbon sequestration and
other technological cooling mechanisms.

The planet is already too hot and there is little evidence that the
world is even slowing its rate of increase in emissions- the task of
reducing emissions to zero seems indeed daunting.

The science of climate change is covered thoroughly, and the authors
also add to the discussion by asking why there has been such a gap
between the science, public understanding, and policy.    On the
subject of whether the changes in the Arctic are a result of man-made
climate change or not, James Hanson of NASA is quoted as saying:

     The scientific response was, if we might paraphrase, `We are not
sure, we are not sure, we are not sure…Yup, there is climate change
due to humans, and it is too late to prevent loss of all.' If this is
the best we can do as a scientific community perhaps we should be
farming or doing something else.

The professional caution of scientists not to over-state the case for
fear of being accused of scare-mongering has lead to them understating
the case-   the worst-case scenarios of the recent IPCC reports taken
by events in the Arctic even as they were being published.

In addition, policy makers seem to be trying to walk a path between
what is indicated as necessary by the science while trying to find a
policy that is politically acceptable and will not harm the economy.
The 2006 Stern review for example called for a 60% reduction on
emissions by 2050 to achieve a 50% chance of keeping warming below 3
degrees- even though 3 degrees has been assessed by Hanson and others
as being highly likely to be beyond the tipping point to runaway
warming because of feedbacks in the system.

Spratt and Sutton ask: why have policy makers been willing to accept
such watered-down responses when these will not solve the problem?
Using the analogy of the calamitous Apollo 13 mission, "failure is not
an option"- and yet it seems we are currently headed on a course that
will lead to disaster because we are not willing to allow planetary
survival to take precedence over the economy.

Part of the reason for this they argue is a vicious cycle that every
stakeholder has bought into: the environmental lobby knows it can only
ask for so much at a time; the scientists are sensitive to being
called scaremongers; the policy makers cannot be seen to call for more
reductions than the most extreme environmentalists.

he authors make some interesting points about psychological denial,
arguing that

     The complexity and seriousness of climate and sustainability
problems makes our current political world of trade-offs, compromises,
and decision-making obsolete, along with most of our experience about
how to act effectively. this is an extraordinary challenge, because
our acculmulated skills in the art of compromise become less useful.
Perhaps the best way through is to adopt, whatever one's age, a
youthful willingness to live with uncertainty and to view the
prevention of climate catastrophe as an invigorating process of
innovation, learning and imagination.

A compelling case is made that we need to adjust to an emergency
situation, but the repeated reference to how quickly the economies of
the west were transformed wholesale to fight the second world war as
an historical precedent I find unconvincing: this was at a time of
rising energy availability, and the war itself was arguably fought
partly for access to new markets and energy sources, and the shift to
weapons manufacture itself being hugely profitable. It is not clear
that the same can be said for carbon sequestration and renewable
energy, and although the authors certainly acknowledge peak oil and
the need to address the two issues together, they fail in my view to
get to grips with what this will entail.

Unlike Pat Murphy's Plan C (review coming soon) there is no analysis
of how energy availability and use is the main driver of the economy
as well as pollution and population growth; and little consideration
of how a powerdown approach will be necessary to re-localise economies
during energy descent. Increasing efficiency, and switching to
renewables are discussed but if these responses take place within the
current growth paradigm, they seem to me destined only to keep the
system going a little longer, and do nothing to really tackle the
emergency.

Participatory democracy is mentioned as one key to achieving emergency
action, but this is not fleshed out into how a sustainable culture
will emerge beyond the emergency.

There is no real attempt to tackle the growth economy and show how it
needs to be replaced, and population trends are assumed to just
continue, rather than being shown to being part of the problem. In
short, the book does a fine job of making the case for emergency
action, and the need to go for a "safe climate" scenario rather than
just the bare minimum to avoid climate catastrophe, but fails to get
to grips with community solutions and localisation, which are aspects
coming more from the peak oil community.

To finish, I want to brainstorm what society might do if it really did
think we were facing an emergency:

-place an immediate halt to all new road and airport developments, and
institute a 5-10 year plan to reduce these modes of transport;

-place a huge tax on all recreational and non-essential electrical
products;

-provide incentives for people to stay at home more and gorw some of
their own food, develop community gardens and local food plans;

-require all new planning permissions to include requirements to
demonstrate how the householder will produce some of their own food by
providing an integrated permaculture design for the property;

-provide rolling information on tackling peak oil and climate change
on all major news outlets, including up to date assessments of the
latest science and avioding the trap of giving equal time to climate
change deniers;

-create  Ministry's for Transition whose job it is to provide
resources for Community Powerdown;

-make gardening and permaculture part of the curriculum for all
schools, colleges and universities; and use part of the school green
spaces for community gardens;

-provide funding for Energy descent Plans, with resource and skillls
directories to be created for all communities;

-underpin all this with discussions on and plans for  long-term
population reduction.

Many of these things are of course the backbone of Transition Towns
and similar movements; we need to  replace the myth of "Growth" with a
  culture of Community self-reliance.