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.

by PS Pirro

One of the best pieces of advice I ever read came from Kentucky farmer
and author Wendell Berry, who wrote in numerous essays of the
importance of living in a place we love. Unfortunately for me – and
for all those places I've lived -- I interpreted that advice to mean I
needed to search for my ideal home, my one best place in the world. I
needed to find it and go there. Then and only then would I be able to
live fully, deeply, and intimately connected – which is what I craved.


Until I found that place, everywhere I lived was a waystation: large
cities, small cities, rural enclaves, suburban bedroom communities.
None of them was my ideal place. When there were things to like, I
enjoyed them, but not too much, because I knew I would be leaving.
When there were things I didn't like, I ignored them, because there
was little point in working for change in a place I didn't intend to
stay, a place that just didn't feel right.


Do you see the problem? After many years and many moves, I saw it,
too. I was a lazy seeker. I didn't want to do the work of developing a
relationship to a place, learning its nature and giving myself to it
with real affection. I valued reciprocity – or thought I did -- but I
wanted the place to give to me first. I wanted an off-the-rack
experience of home, but love – true affection – doesn't come
ready-made. It's a tailored response. It's always specific. It comes
with a definitive article: not a home, but this home, beside this
road, along this river, on this patch of Earth. I've come to
understand – belatedly, but finally -- that loving where you are has
less to do with finding a place than with staying put long enough to
allow a place to know you're there, to let it grow comfortable with
your presence and begin – slowly, and with great patience -- to love
you back.

I think it was the character of Phineas, in John Knowles' novel A
Separate Peace, who said, "When you love something, it loves you back,
in whatever way it has to love." You care for it, and it cares for
you, usually in ways you never anticipated.


That's true reciprocity.


Loving where you are means relinquishing all those comforting
contingency plans that spare you the work of local affection – those
plans that allow you to leave half your life packed in boxes in the
garage or the attic, half your heart tucked away, and half your
imagination wandering the map in search of a better place. Loving
where you are means calling your imagination home and putting it to
work right where you are: learning the names of the people and trees
and plants and birds and creeks and flowers, and letting them speak to
your heart – your whole heart -- and show you what needs to be done,
right here, right now.

http://crooked5280.blogspot.com/2008/07/work-of-local-affection.html

by Clay Shirky

(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech I gave at the Web
2.0 conference, April 23, 2008.)


I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in
the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical
technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are
amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the
streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that
we actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public
libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children,
elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having
all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started
seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic
surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we
started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.


If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit
of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the
whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second
World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita,
rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically,
a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For
the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens
the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage
before--free time.


And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it
watching TV.


We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's
Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives.
Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive
heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and
caused society to overheat.


And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender,
that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather
than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage
of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a
TV in everybody's basement.


This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said
in the introduction, I've finished a book called Here Comes Everybody,
which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a
conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV
producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me,
"What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may
remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of
years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on
Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article
like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we
characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a
time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from,
"Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an
odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."


So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have
a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever."
That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head
and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And
I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to
ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from
the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."


So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of
unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit,
every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia
exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100
million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin
Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's
the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.


And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone,
every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000
Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still
another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend,
just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking,
"Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like
Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a
carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim
calls an architecture of participation.


Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society
doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the
sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with
reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a
surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to
deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in
order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that
integration can transform society.


The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the
phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of
participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like
the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make
these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over
here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people
are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the
inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much
complexity.


The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots
and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails
informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff
near where you're going. That's the phase we're in now.


Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A
couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project
started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado.
It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's
a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can
go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the
assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.


Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a
town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street corner is
dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after
dark." But it's something society knows without society really knowing
it, which is to say there's no public source where you can take
advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're
certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in
starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may not
exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to try to
rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities
who might have it now."


Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of
social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan
out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this
one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the
point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap
tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive
surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective
goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have
imagined existing even five years ago.


So that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?"
Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was
another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this
same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of
Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she
was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending
to be elves."


At least they're doing something.


Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost
get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I
saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every
half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at
my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I
had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of
those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the
way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's
the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and
pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's
worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann
is cuter.


And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to
do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of
kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out
an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the
things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on
your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can
do that, too--is a big change.


This is something that people in the media world don't understand.
Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How
much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and
you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally
been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different
events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and
they like to share.


And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of
the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do
something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer
people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on
that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly
watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.


And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus
we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have
huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the
same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to,
but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The
Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a
year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption.
One per cent of that  is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of
participation.


I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?


Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal;
she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me
was essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the
flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out
and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to
eventually realize, "This isn't as good as doing what I was doing
before," and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this
wasn't the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more
analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.


I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of.
It's the sort of thing that society grows into. But I'm not sure she
believed me, in part because she didn't want to believe me, but also
in part because I didn't have the right story yet. And now I do.


I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one
of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter
watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she
jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems
like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is
really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She
started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you
doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said,
"Looking for the mouse."


Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a
mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's
targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still
for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way
change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply
in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma
that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent
watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes
consuming, producing and sharing.


It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and
when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to
deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the
people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at
figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to
tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every
place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been
locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned
experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the
cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing
happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

by Charles Hugh Smith
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjun08/survival6-08.html

I'm not trying to be difficult, but I can't help cutting against the
grain on topics like surviving the coming bad times when my experience
runs counter to the standard received wisdom.

A common thread within most discussions of surviving bad
times--especially really bad times--runs more or less like this:
stockpile a bunch of canned/dried food and other valuable
accoutrements of civilized life (generators, tools, canned goods,
firearms, etc.) in a remote area far from urban centers, and then wait
out the bad times, all the while protecting your stash with an array
of weaponry and technology (night vision binocs, etc.)

Now while I respect and admire the goal, I must respectfully disagree
with just about every assumption behind this strategy. Once again,
this isn't because I enjoy being ornery (please don't check on that
with my wife) but because everything in this strategy runs counter to
my own experience in rural, remote settings.

You see, when I was a young teen my family lived in the mountains. To
the urban sophisticates who came up as tourists, we were "hicks" (or
worse), and to us they were "flatlanders" (derisive snort).

Now the first thing you have to realize is that we know the
flatlanders, but they don't know us. They come up to their cabin, and
since we live here year round, we soon recognize their vehicles and
know about how often they come up, what they look like, if they own a
boat, how many in their family, and just about everything else which
can be learned by simple observation.

The second thing you have to consider is that after school and chores
(remember there are lots of kids who are too young to have a legal
job, and many older teens with no jobs, which are scarce), boys and
girls have a lot of time on their hands. We're not taking piano
lessons and all that urban busywork. And while there are plenty of
pudgy kids spending all afternoon or summer in front of the TV or
videogame console, not every kid is like that.

So we're out riding around. On a scooter or motorcycle if we have one,
(and if there's gasoline, of course), but if not then on bicycles, or
we're hoofing it. Since we have time, and we're wandering all over
this valley or mountain or plain, one way or another, then somebody
will spot that trail of dust rising behind your pickup when you go to
your remote hideaway. Or we'll run across the new road or driveway you
cut, and wander up to see what's going on. Not when you're around, of
course, but after you've gone back down to wherever you live. There's
plenty of time; since you picked a remote spot, nobody's around.

Your hideaway isn't remote to us; this is our valley, mountain,
desert, etc., all 20 miles of it, or what have you. We've hiked around
all the peaks, because there's no reason not to and we have a lot of
energy. Fences and gates are no big deal, (if you triple-padlock your
gate, then we'll just climb over it) and any dirt road, no matter how
rough, is just an open invitation to see what's up there. Remember, if
you can drive to your hideaway, so can we. Even a small pickup truck
can easily drive right through most gates (don't ask how, but I can
assure you this is true). If nobody's around, we have all the time in
the world to lift up or snip your barbed wire and sneak into your
haven. Its remoteness makes it easy for us to poke around and explore
without fear of being seen.

What flatlanders think of as remote, we think of as home. If you
packed in everything on your back, and there was no road, then you'd
have a very small hideaway--more a tent than a cabin. You'd think it
was safely hidden, but we'd eventually find it anyway, because we
wander all over this area, maybe hunting rabbits, or climbing rocks,
or doing a little fishing if there are any creeks or lakes in the
area. Or we'd spot the wisp of smoke rising from your fire one crisp
morning, or hear your generator, and wonder who's up there. We don't
need much of a reason to walk miles over rough country, or ride miles
on our bikes.

When we were 13, my buddy J.E. and I tied sleeping bags and a few
provisions on our bikes--mine was a crappy old 3-speed, his a Schwinn
10-speed--and rode off into the next valley over bone-jarring dirt
roads. We didn't have fancy bikes with shocks, and we certainly didn't
have camp chairs, radios, big ice chests and all the other stuff
people think is necessary to go camping; we had some matches, cans of
beans and apple sauce and some smashed bread. (It didn't start out
smashed, but the roads were rough. Note: if you ever suffer from
constipation, I recommend beans and apple sauce.)

We camped where others had camped before us, not in a campground but
just off the road in a pretty little meadow with a ring of
fire-blackened rocks and a flat spot among the pine needles. We didn't
have a tent, or air mattress, or any of those luxuries; but we had the
smashed bread and the beans, and we made a little fire and ate and
then went to sleep under the stars glittering in the dark sky.

There were a few bears in the area, but we weren't afraid; we didn't
need a gun to feel safe. We weren't dumb enough to sleep with our
food; if some bear wandered by and wanted the smashed bread, he could
take it without bothering us. The only animal which could bother us
was the human kind, and since few people walk 10 or more miles over
rough ground in the heat and dust, then we'd hear their truck or
motorbike approaching long before they ever spotted us.

We explored old mines and anything else we spotted, and then we rode
home, a long loop over rutted, dusty roads. In summer, we took
countless hikes over the mountainous wilderness behind his family cabin.

All of which is to say that the locals will know where your hideaway
is because they have lots of time to poke around. Any road, no matter
how rough, might as well be lit with neon lights which read, "Come on
up and check this out!" If a teen doesn't spot your road, then
somebody will: a county or utility employee out doing his/her job, a
hunter, somebody. As I said, the only slim chance you have of being
undetected is if you hump every item in your stash on your pack
through trailess, roadless wilderness. But if you ever start a fire,
or make much noise, then you're sending a beacon somebody will
eventually notice.

The Taoists developed their philosophy during an extended era of
turmoil known as the Warring States period of Chinese history. One of
their main principles runs something like this: if you're tall and
stout and strong, then you'll call attention to yourself. And because
you're rigid--that is, what looks like strength at first glance--then
when the wind rises, it snaps you right in half.

If you're thin and ordinary and flexible, like a willow reed, then
you'll bend in the wind, and nobody will notice you. You'll survive
while the "strong" will be broken, either by unwanted attention or by
being brittle.

Another thing to ponder is that the human animal is a much better
predator than it is an elusive prey. Goats and wild turkeys and other
animals have very keen senses of smell and hearing, and it's tough to
get close without them smelling you or hearing you. They're well
camoulflaged, and since human sight is selected to detect movement and
color, if they stay quite still we have a hard time spotting them.

In comparison, the human is a clumsy prey. It can't smell or hear very
well, and it's large and not well camouflaged. Plus it's usually
distracted and unaware of its surroundings. It doesn't take much to
kill a human, either; a single-shot rifle and a single round of
.22-long is plenty enough.

If the chips are down, and push comes to shove, then what we're
discussing is a sort of war, isn't it? And if we're talking about war,
then we should think about the principles laid down in The Art Of War
by Sun Tzu quite some time ago.

The flatlander protecting his valuable depot is on the defensive, and
anyone seeking to take it away (by negotiation, threat or force) is on
the offensive. The defense can select the site for proximity to water,
clear fields of fire, or what have you, but one or two defenders have
numerous disadvantages. Perhaps most importantly, they need to sleep.
Secondly, just about anyone who's plinked cans with a rifle and who's
done a little hunting can sneak up and put away an unwary human.
Unless you remain in an underground bunker 24/7, at some point you'll
be vulnerable. And that's really not much of a life--especially when
your food supplies finally run out, which they eventually will. Or you
run out of water, or your sewage system overflows, or some other
situation requires you to emerge.

So let's line it all up. Isn't a flatlander who piles up a high-value
stash in a remote area with no neighbors within earshort or line of
sight kind of like a big, tall brittle tree? All those chains and
locks and barbed-wire fencing and bolted doors just shout out that the
flatlander has something valuable inside that cabin/bunker/RV etc.

Now if he doesn't know any better, then the flatlander reckons his
stash is safe. But what he's not realizing if that we know about his
stash and his vehicle and whatever else can be observed. If some
locals want that stash, then they'll wait for the flatlander to leave
and then they'll tow the RV off or break into the cabin, or if it's
small enough, disassemble it and haul it clean off. There's plenty of
time, and nobody's around. That's pretty much the ideal setting for
leisurely thieving: a high-value stash of goodies in a remote area
accessible by road is just about perfect.

Let's say things have gotten bad, and the flatlander is burrowed into
his cabin. Eventually some locals will come up to visit; in a truck if
there's gas, on foot if there isn't. We won't be armed; we're not
interested in taking the flatlander's life or goodies. We just want to
know what kind of person he is. So maybe we'll ask to borrow his
generator for a town dance, or tell him about the church food drive,
or maybe ask if he's seen so-and-so around.

Now what's the flatlander going to do when several unarmed men
approach? Gun them down? Once he's faced with regular unarmed guys, he
can't very well conclude they're a threat and warn them off. But if he
does, then we'll know he's just another selfish flatlander. He won't
get any help later when he needs it; or it will be minimal and
grudging. He just counted himself out.

Suppose some bad guys hear about the flatlander's hideway and stash.
All it takes to stalk any prey is patience and observation; and no
matter how heavily armed the flatlander is, he'll become vulnerable at
some point to a long-range shot. (Even body armor can't stop a
headshot or a hit to the femoral artery in the thigh.) Maybe he stays
indoors for 6 days, or even 60. But at some point the windmill breaks
or the dog needs walking or what have you, and he emerges--and then
he's vulnerable. The more visible and stringent the security, the more
he's advertising the high value of his depot.

And of course guarding a high-value stash alone is problematic for the
simple reason that humans need to sleep.

So creating a high-value horde in a remote setting is looking like
just about the worst possible strategy in the sense that the
flatlander has provided a huge incentive to theft/robbery and also
provided a setting advantageous to the thief or hunter.

If someone were to ask this "hick" for a less risky survival strategy,
I would suggest moving into town and start showing a little generosity
rather than a lot of hoarding. If not in town, then on the edge of
town, where you can be seen and heard.

I'd suggest attending church, if you've a mind to, even if your faith
isn't as strong as others. Or join the Lions Club, Kiwanis or Rotary
International, if you can get an invitation. I'd volunteer to help
with the pancake breakfast fundraiser, and buy a couple tickets to
other fundraisers in town. I'd mow the old lady's lawn next door for
free, and pony up a dollar if the elderly gentleman in line ahead of
me at the grocery store finds himself a dollar light on his purchase.

If I had a parcel outside town that was suitable for an orchard or
other crop, I'd plant it, and spend plenty of time in the local
hardware store and farm supply, asking questions and spreading a
little money around the local merchants. I'd invite my neighbors into
my little plain house so they could see I don't own diddly-squat
except some second-hand furniture and a crappy old TV. And I'd leave
my door open so anyone could see for themselves I've got very little
worth taking.

I'd have my tools, of course; but they're scattered around and old and
battered by use; they're not shiny and new and expensive-looking, and
they're not stored all nice and clean in a box some thief could lift.
They're hung on old nails, or in the closet, and in the shed; a thief
would have to spend a lot of time searching the entire place, and with
my neighbors looking out for me, the thief is short of the most
important advantage he has, which is time.

If somebody's desperate enough or dumb enough to steal my old handsaw,
I'll buy another old one at a local swap meet. (Since I own three
anyway, it's unlikely anyone would steal all three because they're not
kept together.)

My valuable things, like the water filter, are kept hidden amidst all
the low-value junk I keep around to send the message there's nothing
worth looking at. The safest things to own are those which are visibly
low-value, surrounded by lots of other mostly worthless stuff.

I'd claim a spot in the community garden, or hire a neighbor to till
up my back yard, and I'd plant chard and beans and whatever else my
neighbors suggested grew well locally. I'd give away most of what I
grew, or barter it, or maybe sell some at the farmer's market. It
wouldn't matter how little I had to sell, or how much I sold; what
mattered was meeting other like-minded souls and swapping tips and
edibles.

If I didn't have a practical skill, I'd devote myself to learning one.
If anyone asked me, I'd suggest saw sharpening and beer-making. You're
legally entitled to make quite a bit of beer for yourself, and a
decent homebrew is always welcome by those who drink beer. It's
tricky, and your first batches may blow up or go flat, but when you
finally get a good batch you'll be very popular and well-appreciated
if you're of the mind to share.

Saw-sharpening just takes patience and a simple jig; you don't need to
learn a lot, like a craftsman, but you'll have a skill you can swap
with craftsmen/women. As a carpenter, I need sharp saws, and while I
can do it myself, I find it tedious and would rather rebuild your
front porch handrail or a chicken coop in exchange for the saw-sharpening.

Pickles are always welcome in winter, or when rations get boring; the
Germans and Japanese of old lived on black bread or brown rice and
pickled vegetables, with an occasional piece of dried meat or fish.
Learning how to pickle is a useful and easy-to-learn craft. There are
many others. If you're a techie, then volunteer to keep the network up
at the local school; do it for free, and do a good job. Show you care.

Because the best protection isn't owning 30 guns; it's having 30
people who care about you. Since those 30 have other people who care
about them, you actually have 300 people who are looking out for each
other, including you. The second best protection isn't a big stash of
stuff others want to steal; it's sharing what you have and owning
little of value. That's being flexible, and common, the very opposite
of creating a big fat highly visible, high-value target and trying to
defend it yourself in a remote setting.

I know this runs counter to just about everything that's being
recommended by others, but if you're a "hick" like me, then you know
it rings true. The flatlanders are scared because they're alone and
isolated; we're not scared. We've endured bad times before, and we
don't need much to get by. We're not saints, but we will reciprocate
to those who extend their good spirit and generosity to the community
in which they live and in which they produce something of value.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHRvwNJRNag
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGCj7NA0OIs

by Alex Steffen
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008208.html

The other night Cory Doctorow and I were talking over coffee, and we
got going on an idea that's been rattling around in my head ever since.

We were talking about the slow-motion collapse here in America, the
looming climate crisis,the futility of survivalism; and we began to
play with the thought, what kinds of heroes would actually do some
good for the communities that get hit hard?

Because if the ruins of the unsustainable are the new frontier, and
if, as is already happening, the various economic and environmental
transitions we face will leave many people unmoored from their
familiar assumptions at the very least and, at the worst, cut loose
from their jobs or driven from their homes, a huge number of people
are going to need help forging new ways of life.

Even if we do a pretty decent job of hugging the curve, and bright
green innovation brings prosperity and security to a lot of people in
many regions, some others will still suffer from ecological shifts,
political abandonment, economic collapse or some combination of all
three. Unless things change dramatically, we have not seen our last
Dust Bowl, our last New Orleans, our last Detroit. What do the people
who are left trapped in degrading places, who don't get the green
collar jobs, do?

And we got on this riff about heroes who got the paradox of the
moment: that abandoned people and places are sometimes the ones who
most need radical innovation; that, these days, new tools and models
are practically scattered all over the ground, just waiting for people
to pick them up; but that those who most need them are those who least
know how to find them.

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and
innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead
mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm
communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed.
We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something
like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a
crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.

Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running
holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management
systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and
complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate
foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality
housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or
an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down
suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart
grids, communication systems, water treatment systems -- and getting
really good atadaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other
words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.

This would not be lone stragglers wandering through a post-apocalyptic
landscape (ala A Canticle for Liebowitz). As we've said again and
again, worldending is a fool's game, and what comes after will not be
an adventure. Nor would it be the fantasy of a localist retreat to
19th Century farming communities that folks like Jim Kunstler hold so
dear (I mean, for Christsakes, no one really wants that life -- our
ancestors all had that life and they fled it as soon as they could in
great teeming masses)

Rather, it'd be a network of places where people were engaged in
ingenious development of elegant solutions to the problems of life
where living is hard and money is short might well be a vital
necessity for a certain portion of the population. It's really not
hard for me to imagine a certain kind of person eagerly embracing the
role of being facilitators of that network, sort of like barefoot
solar engineers for the forgotten parts of the developed world.

It sounds implausibly weird, but then much of the world we're moving
into is likely to sound that way at first. Our ideas of what's normal,
or even what's possible, will not outlast the next decade, and it'll
be the people who think in (what are by today's standards) abnormal,
impossible ways who may just do the most good.

From a new blog.

7 Fat and 7 Lean Years
by Yeoman Gardener
http://www.feastandfamine.blogspot.com/

There is no cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or
anything else left [in US government reserve] ... The only thing left
in the entire CCC inventory will be 5.73 million bushels of wheat
which is about enough wheat to make one half loaf of bread, for each
of the 300 million people in America...  [According to the May 1,
2008, CCC inventory report, USDA's Commodity Credit Corporation].
--Larry Matlack, President of the American Agricultural Movement

Long time ago Pharaoh asked Joseph to interpret a dream about seven
fat and seven scrawny cattle, and--double trouble--seven fat and seven
skimpy heads of grain. Joseph described the dream as a warning to make
preparations for seven years of hardship, to act pre-emptively, during
seven years of plenty. He ordered the granaries filled so that people
would not starve when crops failed and famine hit.

If such ancient foresight and investment have not yet been implemented
by the "bread basket of the world," America, in the 21st century,
where does that leave us? What are the precedents and the
possibilities? How do we the people implement economics, as if people
mattered?

Boom and bust cycles are natural and recurring events, chronicled back
to the Middle Ages by a Soviet economist, Kondratieff. Stalin gave him
the task of finding a way to destroy the West economically.
Kondratieff reported back to Stalin that the destruction was cyclical,
self-induced, and inevitable. Boom years of great crop yields and
prosperity were also times of credit excess, borrowing, and
mal-investment. Bank failures, crop failures, drought, flash floods,
locusts, and blights followed boom years. Debts were called in,
properties foreclosed upon, in a great and grinding transfer of wealth
to the banks.

In 1930's America, for example, the Plains states all but blew away in
severe drought. Terrible winds blasted topsoil to perdition in a
farmers' nightmare called the Dustbowl. When farmers planted crops,
seed failed to sprout, or grew a pitiful few inches, shriveled and
died. Many banks had gone belly-up, having invested depositors'
savings in the stock market, which crashed in 1929; FDR had
confiscated citizens' gold in `33. There was no money, nor credit to
buy more seed, nor to pay on mortgages or share cropper rents.
Families were thrown off the land by the banks into a long season
known as the "Bitter Years."

The author's mother remembered walking to school with a damp bandana
across nose and mouth to block out the wildly whipping grit. Eyes
stung with it, land turned to dust and whirlwind. Windows were shut
tight, with rolled towels at their base, in 100 degree heat. Not all
homes had electricity; kerosene lamps lit most farms. Nobody had air
conditioning.

Men roaming the country looking for work to feed their families,
stopped at Grandmother's back door, hat in hand, eyes to the ground,
"You got any work needs doin', Ma'am?" Grandmother never offered a
handout from their garden. So as not to shame the man, she would think
of some small chore. Chore done, she'd bring him a plate of food to
the back stoop. "Thank ye, Ma'am," touching his hat brim, he'd fall on
the food. Those were lean and hungry times, and we have lost most of
the generation who lived through it, and could warn us.

In our present time frame and its crop failure cycle, there is another
story old as time. Alan Greenspan, as a young man, is said to have
wished to be Fed Head during the inevitable Kondratieff downturn.
Greenspan held the belief that flooding the banks and Wall Street with
easy credit could fend off "Kondratieff Winter." As Chairman of the
Federal Reserve, he implemented PPT (Plunge Protection Team)
intervention, allegedly to maintain market stability, but to the
benefit of insiders. The PPT, also known as Working Group on Finacial
Markets was mandated by Executive Order, following the 1987 market
crash. Intervention recently morphed into bailing out JPMorgan, the
monster derivatives holder by gutting Bear Stearns, to save the
system, save it from the consequences of shoddy practices. Relief for
bankers and hedgies only. We will live the results of hubris and
preferential interventions.

Here's another old, old concept: Debt-forgiveness, utterly and across
the board, every 50 years, in a "Jubilee Year." It's an Old Testament
idea: families, widows, orphans could begin anew. There is a "global
Jubilee movement" in our day to forgive unpayable debts, loans made to
deposed dictators, whose poor people now go hungry in that catch-22.
(Given credit card company usury, sub-prime mortgage profiteering, and
diminishing ability of the indebted to pay, families may refuse to be
destroyed at some point.)

The hubris of central bankers—of "Maestro" Greenspan's sleight of
hand—had seemed to have everything under control. Whereas in fact, we
face adverse growing conditions—catastrophic destruction of rice crops
by the Myanmar typhoon, destruction of the US corn (maize) crop by
Mississippi floods, and wheat rust blight spreading at an alarming
rate from Turkey. This all too painfully vindicates Kondratieff's
discovery that bad grain harvest years are correlated with economic
downturns.

In the interim, the system is unraveling. CEO's were once touted as
mythic in reach, greed-is-good as Zeitgest, the Enron-phenom. We are
huddled in a surround-sound theater with few exits, beneath a Ponzi
scheme collapse. Many are frightened. Yet heroes of a different sort
are stepping free of the smoke and mirrors—inventors at work on
alternative energy solutions, whistleblowers of corporate and
government malfeasance such as Rep. Ron Paul, repair folk who keep
things running, sustainable farmers, bridge-builders, skilled
crafters, teachers, and home-schooled young. We will remain rich in
solution-driven people, if not in paper debt instruments.

Theory will not now avert food crisis, only sensible action will. As
an instance of theory, "our" government gave financial incentives to
so-called agricultural corporations to convert food-producing land to
the planting of corn, much of it genetically modified, for ethanol,
which requires more energy input than it produces.


.....You mean to tell me that seed there is gonna save the world?
Well, I'll be. And that same seed company will be our climate change
savior? Hm! That's the company that tainted my neighbor's corn, I do
believe… Well, Sir… Come to find out, pollen from their pricey-as-sin
"modified" corn blew onto my neighbor's land. They contaminated his
whole crop; couldn't be sold for human food. Nope. Ruined him, or so
he thought, till the company up and sued him for stealing their
patent! A real knee-slapper.....


Profit trumped common sense, and even common decency. The mid-term
election hopes for sensible priorities sank into the Potomac swamp,
where borrowed funding, out of actual U.S. "insufficient funds," holds
sway.

The world has looked on as we apparently lay back and resigned
ourselves to belligerent government dysfunction, in order to "feel safe."

Yet despite a perception of Americans as couch potatoes, the "natives
are getting restless" and represent a very interesting gene pool--of
iconoclasts. Over many generations, waves of peoples fled to America
from tyrannies in their countries of origin. We include immigrant
entrepreneurs from all over the world. Out of that heritage, we can
come to life locally with solutions, as our national focus shifts from
flamboyant empire to hearth and home.

As an example, in a variation on the Horatio Alger success story, a
few late 20th century pathfinders voluntarily chose frugality as a
road to success. In The Millionaire Next Door, which lobbed a shot
across the bow of dot-bomb era glitz, the authors interviewed
self-made millionaires, who actually lived within their means—they
bought second-hand cars, maintained and drove them for years; they
shopped at thrift stores and flea markets; their kids went to public
schools, had to earn their weekly allowances, and many worked
newspaper routes. The parents lived in middle class neighborhoods;
they did not build McMansions. These folks were pioneers, aware of the
lessons of the down cycle of the Great Depression, making do, making
things last, living in community.

During the two world wars, food was rationed. Only farmers and black
marketeers were likely to eat well. In each of the two wars the
government promoted nationwide planting of Liberty and Victory
Gardens, respectively. People planted food -- potatoes, corn, beans,
carrots, not lawns or cacti. This may be a concept whose time has come
again. Barbara Kingsolver's, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle shows us how
to produce what we eat, support local growers, and celebrate the
seasons of availability. If nothing else does, rising oil prices will
force us to concentrate on community food production.

Cheaply transported food has been a short-lived phenomenon,
historically speaking. Can we count on planes and trucks to deliver
lettuce from California, grapes from Chile, or any food at all, if
fuel costs exceed what people can pay, for food delivered? In living
memory, cities were fed from surrounding farms. We have strip-malled
and asphalted fertile land with beige suburbia. Can we undo it, and
return rich farmland to cultivation?

We may want to give that a hard look. Jim Kunstler, author of The Long
Emergency and a weekly commentary "Clusterfuck Nation," views suburban
commutes as a fantasy, a wrong-turn, soon to meet the grim reaper of
Peak Oil, in an avalanche of abandoned press board and vinyl-sided
McMansions.

If we need to develop local gardening and farming to alleviate the
downslide of our economy and lean years to come, and we can't buy fuel
for tractors and tillers, will spades and shovels still fit our hands?
Some of our solutions may be Amish or Native American, which remain a
living wisdom of stewardship. Will they teach us; will we learn?


.....Come on over, son, and have a look-see here. Pickax will bust up
that cement slab. Yeah. No-money down, huh? Teaser mortgage rate they
gave the family to dream on; broke now… There's good earth there
still, and it'll be there when we're gone. Go to it, boy. Come find me
when you're done, and we'll plant us a garden.....


Can we muster the oomph to recreate the infrastructure for horse and
mule farming, (and our rail system for that matter?) You bet we can.
Cuba is a hot button in Washington, but those folks went cold turkey
off cheap fuel and farm subsidies into ox-powered organic farming,
when the Soviet Union collapsed.

We face a similar challenge. Our government is bankrupt, hiding it,
and will soon not be able to dole out farm subsidies. Fuel may not
reach farmers or truckers; it may not even be available. Cuba, a small
country, has shown what can be done, at need. The US, a vast land on
the brink of crisis, demonstrated its federal-level response
capabilities in New Orleans, and compounded incompetence by refusing
local and international relief. Remember Katrina.

Our capacity for local decision-making and intervention will
resurge—in Town Meetings, in charity work, in Depression Era soup
kitchens, if it comes to that. Food Banks are way ahead of us—already
asking gardeners to "Grow-a-Row" in their gardens specifically for
Food Bank distribution, as there is little food available for the
laid-off, the foreclosed upon, the homeless Vets.

What do we need? How about hand tools and backyard gardens with the
children helping out and learning. If we don't know how, let's find
those who do. Gardeners tend to be optimists; some will be willing
teachers. How about community gardens, prison gardens, school gardens,
farmers' markets in a no-car zone, where people can stroll and chat.

Have we forgotten how to can/freeze/store food? Are families scattered
and skills lost? Well, let's seek out those with can-do knowledge—they
may be in nursing homes; they may live on small family farms; they may
not have English as their first language. Let's learn from those who
know how to tend land and grow food. Let's dig root cellars to store
potatoes, winter squash, pumpkins, apples, at the ambient temperature
of deep earth, without electricity.

At the local level, zoning can be re-considered--especially if food is
not being trucked in to the supermarket shelves. We could raise
backyard chickens or a milk goat, just for instance. In Cuba people
went hungry when the subsidies stopped. Townspeople dug up lawns,
planted gardens, built chicken coops, set up sidewalk stands. That
"urban farming" has brought entrepreneurial good fortune to families,
and represents a large chunk of Cuba's agricultural output!

Many Americans have grown sweet corn for Fourth of July picnics. It's
just as easy to grow field corn, to feed the chickens, with corn which
produces seed we can save for next season -- this means heirloom,
non-hybrid, non-genetically engineered. The field corn cobs are left
to dry on the stalk, then shucked of husk and stored in backyard
granaries, also known as corncribs, which can be built in a day.
Chickens will peck the dry kernels off the whole cob. Easy!

Eggs and dairy are becoming prohibitively expensive, due to feed and
fuel costs. While fuel and chemical fertilizer were cheap, and feed
was cheap, and farmers made serious money selling off land to
developers, many farmers stopped growing their own feed. Now animal
husbandry folk have to pay exorbitant prices for grain and hay, prices
which are passed on to the consumer.


.....Now, is manure cheaper than chemical fertilizer? Yup. Is it
produced on the farm? Um. But you do have to shovel it.....


Self-sufficient farms and communities are a size which work. Small
organic farms are full of variety, not gazillion acres of
Roundup-ready one-crop far as the eye can see. Small farms are full of
fragrance, fruits, butterflies, birds and ladybugs; they produce food,
sustain families, and empower communities.

Small is bountiful.

Pharaoh asked Joseph what to do. Prepare, he said, for hard times.
Grow food, store food, to feed your people. Joseph got specific; he
said to set aside twenty percent of each of the seven years of bounty.
When famine struck, not just Egypt, but the entire Middle East,
Pharaoh's people were well fed from the granaries. Egypt had saved
enough grain to sell to neighboring kingdoms. They prospered in a time
of famine by Joseph's foresight and preparations.

So, given US preparation thus far, and wealth-hemorrhage abroad,
what'll it be? Katrina?


.....Step right up, folks! Get your half a loaf of bread, to tide each
and every one of you over.....


Until what?… The Rapture?

Or will we go for community, and local can-do? What will we create,
returning to the common sense of township and state governance? Fuel
costs may stop shipments of gulag-goods across the Pacific. Large
"oops" there, in the building of BigBox mega-emporums. If they stand
empty, what's the opportunity? Well, we might spare some diesel for
bulldozers, and return to mom & pop businesses in walk-able
neighborhoods! How about bike lanes as a plan, cluster housing, parks
and community gardens?

Communities know that "we all live downstream;" bureaucracies fund
studies and porkbarrel projects, as levees and bridges and school
buildings crumble. There's work needs doing, and that means
employment. Let's give Americans a task with heart in it, while the
Potomac Titanic plays on… glub glub. We built bombs; let's repair our
bridges, across rivers, and across chasms of policies of destruction.

American immigrants dared everything, to choose freedom.

Hi Lotus and welcome to the list, there's lots of good people in that
area http://www.permaculture.biz/
There's been several new members here in the last month all looking
for community, feel free to chat amongst yourselves and see what comes up
Cheers
Rob



--- In intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com, "hypmumma"
<hypnoharmony@...> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> just a quick intoduction. My family are due to relocate from rural
> Bungendore to rural Victoria in October. We are looking at Heathcote at
> this point and we are wanting to strt an intentional community there. I
> am sure I will learn a lot from others here to aid our journey!
>
> Cheers,
>
> Lotus
>

Hi all,

just a quick intoduction. My family are due to relocate from rural
Bungendore to rural Victoria in October. We are looking at Heathcote at
this point and we are wanting to strt an intentional community there. I
am sure I will learn a lot from others here to aid our journey!

Cheers,

Lotus

--- In intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com, "Rob Windt"
<meridian_power@...> wrote:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCPEBM5ol0Q&eurl

Oh wow, that was so inspiring! Thankyou for the link!

Lotus
>

http://www.comradesimba.com/blog/?p=4
by Comrade Simba

So if I'm standing and line at a bank or some store and I want to
bitch about the price of a 50 pound sack of corn chops to feed the
chickens with, where am I if all I can expect to get is a blank stare?
Must be an urban area, right? Rats and pigeons, yappy dogs and a stray
cat or two staring as the local fauna. And it must be rural if the guy
you're talking to hooks his thumbs in the overall straps and says
"ayup, seven twenty a bushel". What do you call a place where you get
the stare and the county population is smaller than the nearest "city"
in the next county?

I'm going to call it a welfare backwater. Middle of nowhere, no
factories or manufacturing to speak of, and nobody is running a shovel
except one out of 642 on the road crew. The video stores do alright,
quickie marts abound, the walmart is full of shoppers and the dog
groomer is open for business. I also am beginning to believe this is
the real America. Get on any two lane state highway and spend an
afternoon traveling in a random direction and that's what you'll see -
town after town of a whole bunch of nothing but village centers empty
of anything but gas stations, banks and video stores. On the way out
of town the glitz of the new walmart/lowes complex arises like the
Emerald City - surely I'm not the only one who wonders what powers and
feeds this behemoth.

Must be a lawyer or something in town who pays fifty grand in taxes.
Our magical financial system can leverage and default swap that shit
into a good million or so to fill up food stamp cards and propane
tanks for the households that operate on income "derived" from gov't
grants like matching highway funds, social work, education, emergency
room medicaid, and the bad back disability check. It sure as hell
isn't from the joebobs selling cheeseburgers to each other - the only
yield on that "swap" is a couple more inches around the middle. It's
just a wonder, that's all - how some burg as a whole spends a dollar
while creating a nickel's worth of wealth and the population doesn't
even know that's happening. I think that 95 cents may be coming due.

Same blank stare when the sheriff comes to evict. Unpayable mechanic's
lein on the car. Unfathomable balances on the last chance threat
letter from finance company. Food stamp card running out by the 17th
of the month. Do you know horror? Ever watched the burner go off -
stare out the window at an empty propane tank through swirling
snowflakes. It won't take much to make the the real America a really
uncomfortable place to be.

I have the luxury of waltzing out past the courtyard into my woods
with my chainsaw and 50 cents worth of gasoline later I have a week's
wood all cut up ready to haul to the woodpile. It's just sheer luck of
the draw that there is a big ass Amish Pioneer Maid wood cookstove for
that firewood to go into, right? Sheer dumb luck… Kinda the same
mechanics in action that leaves me unbeholden to a mortgage company.
Or GMAC, Citibank, Chase and the rest of the gang. Perhaps it's
because i never had to play gladiator in the child support forum.
Yeah, that's got to be it.

I'm verging on being, shall we say, uncompassionate so's I'd better
wrap this up. Suffice to say that "it's" coming down the pike, and not
that I'm unconcerned about what's coming, I won't be caught with my
pants down.

by Kurt Cobb
http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2008/06/tinkering-our-way-to-sustainability\
.html

When we think about the scope of the ecological challenges we
face--peak oil, climate change, soil degradation, water depletion and
species loss--we often think of responses big enough to match them. We
might ponder large, national or international crash programs for the
deployment of alternative energy; for the conservation of energy,
water and habitat; and for the spread of organic agriculture and
gardening. We might also think of a global agreement to slash
greenhouse gas emissions deeply and quickly. But, the larger the
responses one imagines, the more improbable their implementation
seems. Governments are moving only slowly or sometimes not at all in
the direction of sustainability though some corporate efforts are
moving much faster.

In an age of gigantic government and corporate research projects, it
is easy to lose sight of the fact that the majority of human technical
and even social progress has been made through trial and error, in
other words, through tinkering. Unfortunately, tinkering has been
given a bad name by the dictionary. "To tinker" is variously defined
as 1) "to busy oneself with a thing without useful results," 2) "to
work unskillfully or clumsily at anything," and 3) "to repair in an
unskillful, clumsy, or makeshift way." But there is a more neutral
definition as well: "To make unskilled or experimental efforts at repair."

It is tinkering of the last sort, some of it highly skilled actually,
that was much on display at the International Conference on Peak Oil
and Climate Change held recently in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A few
examples will serve to illustrate:

     * An Internet-based system called Bright Neighbor designed by
Portland, Oregon resident Randy White allows people living in a
neighborhood, village or town to coordinate simple things such as
ridesharing or tool lending and more complex tasks such as planting a
community or individual garden.

     * A system of public transportation referred to as JPods seems to
take its inspiration from both the gondola and the monorail and could
create a cheap alternative to building light rail lines. In addition,
JPods can be designed to run on solar power generated by panels
mounted above the overhead track. JPods founder Bill James says he is
close to lining up the financing for the first JPod system at the Mall
of America in Bloomington, Minnesota.

     * Permaculture and urban gardening are already well-established
practices. But the idea of turning every large suburban lawn into a
permaculture garden and many of the empty spaces and backyards in
cities into urban gardens is a task that has barely begun. It has the
potential, however, to provide a huge increase in the world's food
supply in ways that are healthy for people and soil and also easy on
the climate since transportation needs are minimized.

     * Community currencies, which only circulate locally, offer an
opportunity to keep money flowing within the community where it is
earned. That benefits all who live there. Such a currency also offers
a method of exchange the value of which is not determined by
international currency traders, but by the hard work and ingenuity of
community residents.

None of these ideas by themselves will create a sustainable society.
But each can be tested and adapted to the locale where the testing
takes place. Allowing everyone who wants to to become an experiment
station speeds greatly the adoption of new practices and technologies.
In this way, such tinkering may work better and faster than any grand
government plan to spread sustainable practices and technology. The
secret weapon, of course, is modern communications, especially the
Internet. The success or failure of promising sustainability projects
can be transmitted almost instantly across the world, and the details
for implementing new practices can move just as fast.

It's likely the scale for most successful sustainability ideas will be
no larger than that of the town or region. This explains why tinkering
could be a more successful sustainability strategy than any
centralized research. If thousands of minds toiling under a variety of
conditions in many places are working on a problem, it just might get
solved faster and more satisfactorily than if several hundred or
thousand are working on it at a research institute or corporate
research department away from where it will be implemented.

Still, it is hard to see how a problem such as global warming might be
tackled without broad international efforts and regulation. The
tinkerer might be able to come up with ways for making deep reductions
in carbon emissions affordably. But, he or she won't have any market
for those methods without government regulations forcing the
curtailment of greenhouse gas emissions. Who is going to put up wind
generators and solar panels at the rate necessary to displace fossil
fuel plants unless the government makes it profitable and perhaps even
mandatory to do so?

While we struggle to create a political climate more friendly to
sustainability practices in the face of lethargic and often
unresponsive political systems, it is the tinkerers who have stolen
the march and are rapidly creating the needed platforms for social,
economic, technical and even political progress. Let a thousand
flowers bloom. On second thought, why not millions.

http://theorstrahyun.blogspot.com/2008/06/ridiculously-satisfying-go-ahead-laugh\
.html

Go ahead, laugh at those wonky carrots. Couldn't care less, they
tasted wonderful last night. So did the snow peas and beans. There
would have been more in the mini-harvest, but I kept eating them raw
as I picked them. Raw vegetables, straight from the plants, absolutely
delicious.

For someone who thought, as a kid, that fresh food was a Chiko Roll
that had only spent two days in the local takeaway's warming trays,
the supply of greens, herbs, tomatoes and carrots spilling out of tubs
and pots on the balcony has been a revelation, blasted through with
unexpected nostalgia.

It's stunning just how much food you can grow, in six to ten weeks, on
a small balcony and still have room for tables and chairs. As I mulch
and dig and plant and pluck, the question keeps returning, why didn't
I do this sooner? Because the local veggie shop was always so cheap,
it was always easier and quicker to duck in, load up on their produce
and head home. Not anymore.

Growing enough carrots, tomatoes, basil, french beans, snow peas,
chives, mint, broccoli to reduce veggie shop visits from three times a
week to once every two weeks has been remarkably easy. More easy than
the gardening shows on TV ever made it seem. Downstairs, a couple of
mushroom boxes are turning out more fungus than this household can eat.

The entire venture, so far, has cost about $110, for plants, pots,
tubs, fertiliser, soil, seeds. About the same as easily can be spent
in one night at the movies, followed by a few hours at the pub. Based
on the prices of organic veggies at Coles and Woolworth's, the balcony
garden has already turned out about $400 worth of eatables. With Coles
charging about $4 for a handful of 'fresh' basil, the basil plants are
probably worth $200 alone.

I find myself trying to find things that need to be done in this
mini-food garden, but the maintenance is minimal. For the volume of
food the tubs and pots turn out, I don't feel like I'm putting in
enough time. How can it be this easy? How can it possibly be this
satisfying? It just is. Incredibly so.

I hadn't thought of my long dead grandfather in ages until a few days
ago, when I was stringing bean vines and delicately replanting
half-grown carrots into looser, sandier soil so they wouldn't be so
squat and stunted. I realised I was now doing what he used to do, what
so many of his generation did, what he tried to get me to do, too,
when I was a kid. What I refused. Back then.

I remembered his house near Moorebank, the whole backyard filled with
pumpkin patches and bee hives and chicken coups and vegetable gardens
that fed him and god knows how many of his poor neighbours. I saw him
on that ultra-vivid mind movie screen, plucking fresh beans and
holding them out, towering over me, demanding I try them, me refusing.
Eat a raw bean? Is he crazy?

He tried to get the grandchildren interested in the veggie garden, but
we couldn't have cared less. Gardening? Yeah, right! That's what the
shops were for. He saw entire Sydney suburbs feeding themselves from
their backyards through the Great Depression and he wanted his
grandchildren to understand.

Now I get it, now I understand. He was right.

"This is real food," he used to say, brushing dirt off unearthed
potatoes, "not that old garbage in the supermarkets. This will make
you strong. This is life."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCPEBM5ol0Q&eurl

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by Dimitri Orlov
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2008/04/keeping-fed.html

The inability to feed their people stands as the Soviet Union's most
striking failure. In just a couple of generations, a country that was
the breadbasket of Europe had been turned into Europe's agricultural
basket case, so that by the time the Soviet Union collapsed it was
financially and politically hamstrung by its need to obtain grain
import credits from countries that were hostile to its interests. In
the 1970s, an oil boom made it complacent, but when the boom ended and
oil prices collapsed it was left with no room to maneuver. Its oil
provinces reached their all-time peak of production in the mid-80s;
consequently, it was unable to further ramp up production and boost
exports.

How does a country with more arable land than just about any other, an
ancient and successful agricultural tradition complete with
all-you-can-eat food festivals and a history of grain surpluses,
produce such a dismal result? A short excursion into Russian history
might be instructive here: small mishaps can be produced accidentally,
but disasters on this scale take serious effort. Speaking of
agricultural disasters as a class, it is worth noting at the outset
that agriculture is seriously dull work, best done by decidedly simple
people who do not mind bending down to touch the ground all day until
they look like hunchbacks. Almost genetically predisposed to growing
food, these hunchbacks are to be found in all traditional farming
societies the world over. As they toil, they wear out the soil very
slowly or, if they are not too stressed, and just a bit clever, not at
all. In return for their humble servitude, they stay in daily and
direct contact with nature in all of its fickle bounty, remaining part
of it. As long as they do not resort to shortcuts, such as relying on
just one plant, be it maize or potato, their numbers fluctuate
naturally along with the climate. But try replacing the humble
hunchback with a university-trained agronomist, her hoe with a
tractor, her bag of heirloom seeds with some mass-produced hybrid and
rainfall with an irrigation pump, and you soon find yourself on the
road to environmental oblivion. While Russian agriculture presents us
with a particularly frightening example, let us not discount American
efforts in the same direction: with enough effort at subjugating
nature, through chemical farming, genetic manipulation, pumping down
non-replenishing aquifers, ethanol production and other weapons of
mass desertification, anything is achievable, even starvation, right
here in the US.

Up to the middle of the 19th century, the Russian empire operated
something vaguely analogous to the plantation system in the old South,
with an ever more distant, French-speaking nobility presiding over a
multitude of illiterate, Russian-speaking serfs. Based on a more
humane serfdom rather than outright slavery, it bound peasants to the
land, giving the landowner control over its use and nominal
responsibility for their welfare. As the 19th century wore on, the
imperial throne found the perpetuation of serfdom increasingly
embarrassing to its international prestige as a leading European
power, and so, in 1861, less than a month before the outbreak of the
American Civil War, serfdom was abolished by imperial decree, without
any bloodshed and without any serious detriment to agricultural
production. Some peasants were gradually able to acquire their own
land, and by the early 20th century the more fertile parts of Russia
and the Ukraine had many prosperous farming families.
Pre-Revolutionary Russia was, by all accounts, a well-fed place.

Then came the man-made disaster, known as collectivization, the
results of which can be plainly visible to this day to anyone who
travels through rural Russia and the surrounding lands. The epicenter
of this disaster is central Russia, and the further out one travels —
to the Baltic states or to Western Ukraine — the less one sees of its
enduring devastation. It is as if a series of plagues had swept
through the land, leaving poverty and desolation in its wake. Under
the revolutionary slogan "All land to the people!" the prosperous
farming families were labelled as the class enemy and persecuted.
Grain, including seed grain, was confiscated to feed the starving
cities. The result was starvation in the countryside and a collapsing
rural population. In place of the prosperous family farms, collective
farms were organized, once again binding peasants to the land, but
without the benefit of the old church-bound feudal traditions. The
introduction of mechanized farm machinery, chemical fertilizers,
pesticides and "scientific" farming methods did little to forestall
the disaster: the best farmers were either dead or had escaped to the
cities. Despite much government effort and some wildly creative
solutions, such as attempts at broadcasting seeds using rockets,
agricultural production never fully recovered, because fixing the
problem involved undoing collectivization and this was not politically
advisable.

Another thing not politically advisable was neglecting to feed the
people. In particular, all areas at all times had to be supplied with
bread, which, more than any other staple, was symbolic of the covenant
between the Communist government and the subservient masses. Bread
riots, which could not be repressed and could only be quelled by a
serendipitous delivery of bread, struck fear into the heart of every
local Communist functionary. To make such a scenario unlikely, there
were local food stockpiles in every city, stocked according to a
government allocation scheme, and staples such as bread were almost
always available. And while the quality of other government-supplied
food was sometimes questionable, the bread was always excellent — a
reflection of its symbolic importance. But the right to be fed did not
necessarily extend beyond the basic carbohydrates, especially in the
outlying areas. Moscow was always the best-supplied city, with
Leningrad a distant second, while in many provincial towns the store
shelves were mostly bare except for bread, vodka and a few varieties
of canned foods, and whenever some scarce item, such as sausage,
suddenly appeared, lines would instantly form until it was sold out.
Shopping was rather labor intensive, and involved carrying heavy
loads. Sometimes it resembled hunting — stalking that elusive piece of
meat lurking behind some
store counter.

Shortly before the Soviet Union's collapse, it became known informally
that the ten percent of farmland allocated to kitchen gardens (in
meager tenth of a hectare plots) accounted for some 90 percent of
domestic food production. During and after the economic collapse, with
the government stores quite uncontaminated by food, and often closed
altogether, these plots became lifesavers for many families. The
summer of 1990 particularly stands out in my mind: it was the summer
when we ate nothing but rice (imported), zucchini (grown by us) and
fish (from a local lake, caught by some neighbors).

The dismal state of Soviet agriculture turned out to be paradoxically
beneficial in fostering a kitchen garden economy, which helped
Russians to survive the collapse. Russians always grew some of their
own food, and scarcity of high-quality produce in the government
stores kept the kitchen garden tradition going during even the more
prosperous times of the 60s and the 70s. After the collapse, these
kitchen gardens turned out to be lifesavers. What many Russians
practiced, either through tradition or by trial and error, or sheer
laziness, was in some ways akin to the new organic farming and
permaculture techniques. Many productive plots in Russia look like a
riot of herbs, vegetables, and flowers growing in wild profusion. In
the waning years of the Soviet era, the kitchen garden economy
continued to gain in importance. Beyond underscoring the gross
inadequacies of Soviet-style command and control industrial
agriculture, the success of the private kitchen gardens is indicative
of a general fact: agriculture is far more efficient when it is
carried out on a small scale, using manual labor.

While most families cooked and ate at home, institutional fare was
also considered important. With salaries regulated and with nothing
interesting to spend them on, how well fed one was at work took on
added significance. Institutional food varied in quality: officers in
the nuclear navy ate remarkably well, while privates in the infantry
were fed unremarkable porridge and soup. Jobs at many government
organizations, factories and institutes were valued for the quality of
their commissaries. These sometimes stayed open even as the economy
crumbled, production lines stood still, and salaries went unpaid for
months, providing an important lifeline. Some factory cafeterias even
went beyond providing a hot meal; there, workers could buy a whole
uncooked chicken or scarce canned goods, all very reasonably priced.

Restaurants did exist, but were generally outside the budgetary
constraints of most families. They always struck me as rather odd,
because their menus were by and large works of fiction. Whatever it
was you tried to order, the waitress would invariably respond with a
laconic "Nyetu! " ("We don't have that"). After a few attempts at
ordering something you might actually want, you would break down and
ask: "What do you have? " The answer to this mystery would be
something like "Borscht. It's good today." Surprisingly enough, it
often was quite good. Although restaurants were something of a rarity,
there were always plenty of snack bars, ice cream parlors and
refreshment stands.

In addition to small-scale farming, forests in Russia have always been
used as an important additional source of food. Russians recognize and
eat just about every edible mushroom variety and all of the edible
berries. During the peak mushroom season, which is generally in the
fall, forests are overrun with mushroom pickers. The mushrooms are
either pickled or dried and stored, and often last throughout the winter.

In spite of the monumental failures of Soviet agriculture, the overall
structure of Soviet-style food delivery proved to be paradoxically
resilient in the face of economic collapse and disruption. The
combination of local food stockpiles administered by politicians
conditioned to treat bread riots as career-ending calamities, the
prevalence of government institutions that attended to the sustenance
of their employees and plenty of kitchen gardens, meant that there was
no starvation and very little malnutrition. But will fate be as kind
to the United States?

In the United States, most people get their food from a supermarket,
which is supplied from far away using refrigerated diesel trucks,
making them entirely dependent on the widespread availability of
transportation fuels and the continued maintenance of the interstate
highway system. In an energy-scarce world, neither of these is a
given. Most supermarket chains have just a few days' worth of food in
their inventory, relying on advanced logistical planning and
just-in-time delivery to meet demand. Thus, in many places, food
supply problems are almost guaranteed to develop. When they do, no
local authority is in a position to exercise control over the
situation and the problem is handed over to federal emergency
management authorities. Based on their performance after Hurricane
Katrina, these authorities are not only manifestly incompetent, but
also appear to be ruled by the ethos that it is better for the
government to deny services than provide them, to avoid creating a
population that is dependent on government help.

Many people in the United States don't even bother to shop and just
eat fast food. The drive to maximize profit while minimizing costs has
resulted in a product that manipulates the senses into accepting as
edible something that is mainly a waste product. Under strict process
control procedures, agro-industrial wastes, sugar, fat and salt are
combined into an appealing presentation, packaged, and reinforced by
vigorous advertising. Once accepted, it beguiles the senses by its
reliable consistency, creating a lifelong addiction to bad food. The
chemical industry obliges with an array of deodorants to mask the
sickly body odor such a diet produces. Immersed for a lifetime in a
field of artificial sensory perceptions, dominated by chemical,
man-made tastes and smells, people recoil in shock when confronted
with something natural, be it a simple piece of boiled chicken liver
or the smell of a healthy human body. Perversely, they do not mind car
exhaust and actually like the carcinogenic "new car smell" of vinyl
upholstery.

When people do cook, they rarely cook from scratch, but simply re-heat
prepackaged factory-produced meals. When they do cook from scratch,
the supposedly fresh ingredients come from thousands of miles away and
are selected for ease of shipping rather than any actually desirable
qualities, making them woody or pulpy and only barely edible. Since
good taste is no longer on the menu, the focus shifts to quantity,
resulting in appallingly sized portions of undifferentiated protein
and starch drowned in fat, administered in national festivals of
pathetic gorging, of which Thanksgiving seems to be the main one. But
this is all good for business and keeps the cancer, diabetes and heart
disease industries humming. This is all very unhealthy, and the effect
on the nation's girth is visible clear across the parking lot. A lot
of the people, who just waddle to and from their cars, seem unprepared
for what is coming next. If they suddenly had to start living like
Russians they would blow out their knees. Most of them would not even
try, but simply wait, patiently or impatiently, for someone to come
and feed them. And if that food arrives and consists of a styrofoam
box containing a puck of pseudo-meat between two pucks of pseudo-bread
and a plastic bottle of water laced with pseudo-syrup, they would be
satisfied.

But the food may never arrive. There is already a fair amount of
hunger in the United States and many families are forced to choose
between food and gasoline. Gasoline is the greater of the two
necessities, because it is necessary for them to drive to buy food:
their car always gets to eat first. In the future, the choice will be
made for them: they will be priced out of the market, their food used
to produce ethanol, so that the more fortunate can keep driving their
cars a tiny bit longer. The process of starving them out might go by
one of the euphemistic terms economists seem to favor, such as the
somewhat sinister "demand destruction," or the more bland "load
shedding." This process is already underway in Mexico, where corn masa
producers who provide a staple purchased by the poor are squeezed out
by the ethanol producers. The United States is next. Who is that
skeleton driving a pickup truck? Let us hope it is not you, but
someone else — someone less fortunate than you, with whom you are not
acquainted.

by Jeff Vail
http://www.jeffvail.net/2008/03/implementing-rhizome-at-personal-level.html

This fourth essay in a five-part series, The Problem of Growth,
examines practical steps to implement rhizome at the personal level.
In the last installment, I argued for the theoretical requirements of
rhizome. Rhizome begins at the personal level, with a conscious
attempt to understand anthropological processes, to build minimal
self-sufficiency, and to engage in "small-worlds" networks. This
installment will outline my ideas for implementing this theory at the
personal level in an incremental and practicable way. This is by no
means intended to be an exhaustive list of ideas, but rather a
starting point for discussion:

Water

In the 21st Century, I think it will become clear that water is our
most critical resource. We'll move past our reliance on oil and fossil
fuels—more by the necessity of resorting to dramatically lower
consumption of localized energy—but we can't move beyond our need for
water. There is no substitute, so efficiency of use and efficacy of
collection are our only options. In parts of the world, water is not a
pressing concern. However, due to the fundamental and
non-substitutable need for water everywhere, creating a consistent and
resilient water supply should be a top priority everywhere. Climate
change, or even just periodic extreme drought such as has recently hit
the Atlanta area, may suddenly endanger water supplies that today may
be considered a "sure thing." How does the individual do this? I think
that four elements are crucial: efficient use, resilient collection
systems, purification, and sufficient storage.

Efficient use is the best way to maximize any available water supply,
and the means to achieve this are varied: composting (no-flush)
toilets, low-flow shower heads, mulching in the garden, etc. Greywater
systems (also spelled "graywater," various spellings seem popular, so
search on both) that reuse domestic water use in the garden are
another critical way to improve efficiency.

Resilient collection systems are also critical. Rainwater harvesting
is the best way to meet individual minimal self-sufficiency—dependence
on a shared aquifer, on a municipal supply system, or on a riparian
source makes your water supply dependent on the actions of others.
Rainwater falling on your property is not (at least arguably not)
dependent on others, and it can provide enough water to meet minimal
needs of a house and garden in even the most parched regions with
sufficient planning and storage. There are many excellent resources on
rainwater harvesting, but I think Brad Lancaster's series is the
best—buy it, read it, and implement his ideas.

While dirty water may be fine for gardens, water purification may be
necessary for drinking. Even if an existing water supply doesn't
require purification, the knowledge and ability to purify enough water
for personal use with a solar still or via some other method enhances
resiliency in the face of unforeseen events.

Storage is also critical. Rain, fortunately, does not fall
continuously—it comes in very erratic and unpredictable doses.
Conventional wisdom would have said that long-term storage wasn't
necessary in the Atlanta area because rain falls so regularly all year
round that storage of only a few months supply would suffice. Recent
events proved this wrong. Other areas depend on short, annual monsoon
seasons for the vast majority of their rain (such as Arizona). Here,
storage of at least one year's water supply is a threshold for
self-sufficiency, and more is desirable. Significant droughts and
erratic rainfall mean the more storage the better—if you don't have
enough storage to deal with a drought that halves rainfall for two
straight years, then you are forced back to dependency in such an
event at exactly the worst time, when everyone else is also facing
scarcity. Where to store water? The options here are also
varied—cisterns are an obvious source for drinking water, as are ponds
where it is a realistic option, but storage in the ground via swales
and mulch is a key part of ensuring the water supply to a garden.

Food

If you have enough water and land, it should be possible to grow
enough food to provide for minimal self-sufficiency. While many people
consider this both unrealistic and extreme, I think it is neither.
Even staunchly "establishment" thinkers such as the former chief of
Global Strategy for Morgan Stanley advise exactly this path in light
of the uncertainty facing humanity. There are several excellent
approaches to creating individual food self-sufficiency: Permaculture
(see Bill Mollison's "Permaculture: A Designer's Manual"), Masanobu
Fukuoka's "Natural Way of Farming" (see book of the same name), Hart's
"Food Forests," and John Jeavons' "Biointensive Method" (see "How to
Grow More Vegetables"). Some combination and modification of these
ideas will work in your circumstances. It is possible to grow enough
calories to meet an individual's requirements in only a few thousand
square feet of raised beds—a possibility on even smaller suburban
lots, and I have written about the ability to provide a culinarily
satisfying diet on as little as 1/3 acre per person.

An additional consideration here is the need to make food supplies
resilient in the face of unknown events. I have written about exactly
this topic in "Creating Resiliency in Horticulture", which basically
advises to hedge failure of one type of food production with others
that are unlikely to fail simultaneously—e.g. balance vegetable
gardens with tree-crop production, mix animal production with the
availability of reserve rangeland, or include a reserve of land for
gathering wild foods. In Crete, after World War II, while massive
starvation was wreaking Greece, the locals reverted to harvesting
nutritious greens from surrounding forests to survive. The right mix
to achieve food resiliency will vary everywhere—the key is to
consciously consider and address the issue for your situation.

Shelter, Heating, & Cooling

Shelter should be designed to reduce or eliminate outside energy
inputs for heating and cooling. This is possible even in the most
extreme climates. Shelter should also be designed to eliminate
reliance on building or maintenance materials that can't be provided
in a local and sustainable fashion. I realize that this is a
challenge—but our architectural choices speak just as loudly about our
real lifestyle as our food choices. Often, studying the architectural
choices of pre-industrial people living in your region, or in a
climatically similar region, provides great insight into locally
appropriate architectural approaches. Passive solar heating and
cooling is possible, with the right design, in virtually any
climate—something that I have written about elsewhere.

Defense

I'm not going to advocate that individuals set up their own private,
defensible bunker stocked with long rifles, claymore mines, and cases
of ammunition. If that's your thing, great. I do think that owning one
or more guns may be a good idea for several reasons—defense being only
one (hunting, good store of value, etc.). Let's face facts: if you get
to the point that you need to use, or threaten to use a lethal weapon
to defend yourself, you're A) already in serious trouble, and B) have
probably made some avoidable mistakes along the way. The single best
form of defense that is available to the individual is to ensure that
your community is largely self-sufficient, and is composed of
individuals who are largely self-sufficient. The entirety of part five
of this series will address exactly that topic. Hopefully, America
will never get to the point where lethal force must be used to protect
your garden, but let's face it, large parts of the world are already
there. In either case, the single best defense is a community composed
of connected but individually self-reliant individuals—this is
rhizome. If your neighbors don't need to raid your garden or "borrow"
your possessions, then any outside threat to the community is a
galvanizing force. More on this next time.

For now, aside from building a resilient community, there are a few
things that individuals can do to defend their resiliency. First,
don't stand out. Hakim Bey's notion of the permanent autonomous zone
depends largely on staying "off the map." How this manifests in
individual circumstances will vary wildly. Second, ensure that your
base of self-sufficiency is broad and minimally portable. At the risk
of seeming like some wild-eyed "Mad Max" doom-monger, brigands can
much more easily cart off wealth in the form of sheep or bags of
cracked corn than they can in the form of almond trees, bee hives, or
a well-stocked pond. Just think through how you achieve your
self-sufficiency, and how vulnerable the entire system is to a single
shock, a single thief, etc. You don't have to believe that there will
ever be roaming bands of brigands to consider this strategy—it applies
equally well to floods, fire, drought, pestilence, climate change,
hyperinflation, etc. My article "Creating Resiliency in Horticulture"
also addresses this point.

Medicine, Entertainment, & Education

You don't need to know how to remove your own appendix or perform open
heart surgery. You don't need to become a Tony-award caliber actor to
perform for your neighbors. You don't need to get a doctorate in every
conceivable field for the education of your children. But if you
understand basic first aid, if you can hold a conversation or tell a
story, if you have a small but broad library of non-fiction and
reference books, you're a step ahead. Can you cook a good meal and
entertain your friends? Look, human quality of life depends on more
than just the ability to meet basic caloric and temperature
requirements. The idea of rhizome is not to create a bunch of people
scraping by with the bare necessities. Having enough food is great—you
could probably buy enough beans right now to last you the next 10
years, but I don't want to live that way. Most Americans depend on our
economy to provide us a notion of quality of life—eating out, watching
movies, buying cheap consumables. Minimal self-sufficiency means that
we need the ability to provide these quality of life elements on our
own. This probably sounds ridiculous to people in the third world who
already do this—or to the lucky few in the "West" who have regular
family meals, who enjoy quality home cooking, who can carry on
enlightening and entertaining conversations for hours, who can just
relax and enjoy the simplicity of sitting in the garden. It may sound
silly to some, but for others this will be the single, most
challenging dependency to eliminate. Again—dependency is the key. I'm
not saying that you can never watch E! or go out to Applebee's. What I
am saying is that if you are so dependent on this method of achieving
"quality of life" that you will enter the hierarchal system on its
terms to access it, you have not achieved minimal self-sufficiency.

Production for Exchange

Finally, beyond minimal self sufficiency, the individual node should
have the capability to produce some surplus for exchange because this
allows access to additional quality-of-life creating products and
services beyond what a single node can realistically provide entirely
for itself. This is the point where minimal self-sufficiency doesn't
require isolationism. It is neither possible nor desirable for an
individual or family node to provide absolutely everything desired for
an optimal quality of life. While minimal self-sufficiency is
essential, it is not essential to produce independently every food
product, every tool, every type of entertainment, every service that
you will want. Once minimal self-sufficiency is achieved, the ability
to exchange a surplus product on a discretionary basis allows the
individual node to access the myriad of wants—but not needs—that
improve quality of life. This surplus product may be a food item—maybe
you have 30 chickens and exchange the extra dozen or two eggs that you
don't consumer on a daily basis. Maybe you make wine, olive oil, baked
bread, or canned vegetables. Maybe you provide a service—medicine,
childcare & education, massage, who knows? The possibilities are
endless, but the concept is important.

Practical Considerations in Implementing Rhizome at the Personal Level

Rhizome isn't an all or nothing proposition—it is possible, and
probably both necessary and desirable, to take incremental, consistent
steps toward rhizome. Learn how to do more with less. Work to
consciously integrate the principles of rhizome into every aspect of
your daily life—think about your choices in consumption, then make
medium and long-term plans to take bigger steps towards the full
realization of rhizome.

And, perhaps most of all, rhizome does not demand, or even endorse, a
"bunker mentality." The single greatest step that an individual can
take toward rhizome is to become an active participant in the creation
of rhizome in the immediate, local community. That, of course, is the
subject of the next, and final, installment in this series.

Vernacular Zen: Glimpses of "The Original Affluent Society"
  by Jeff Vail
  http://www.jeffvail.net/2004/10/vernacular-zen_11.html

I am an advocate of localization, simplification, self-sufficiency and
fulfilled ontogeny. Slow food. Tribalism. A thousand other
catch-phrases that, above all else, raise a singular objection from
friends and critics alike: isn't your idealized vision starkly
juxtaposed to your professed enjoyment of the finer things in life?

My response: on the contrary, my good friend...these worlds are in
fact one in the same, only separated by the disinformation of the
consumer economy.

  I have spent, to be perfectly honest, more than my fair share of
mornings slowly enjoying an espresso as the fog burns off the slopes
of Mount Etna in the distance, the scent of blood orange blossoms
mingling with the sharp aroma of coffee. This is the kind of perfect
moment that embodies our cultural ethos: sacrifice enough of what you
love now, and you'll make enough money that some day you'll be able to
buy back those priceless experiences in the form of a luxury cruise, a
meal at that new bistro or a beach house in Florida. The irony is that
this perfect moment cost about 65 cents--that's less than 8 minutes
wage for a cashier at McDonald's, and yet it's enough to make highly
paid executives and professionals alike salivate. This should tell us
something...

The finer things in life can generally be divided into two categories:
material and experiential. Despite the relentless psychological
barrage of advertising, most of us can readily admit that it is the
experiential that is truly rewarding and fulfilling. Many even
recognize their own predilection to fulfill their desire for the
experiential by compensating with an excess of the material.
Commercialism tells us that the experiential--that which requires
time--is too costly, out of our reach. Our time, we are led to
believe, must be sacrificed to meet the demands of the economy. But
time is free for all of us. It is the great equalizer, something to
which we all have equally random access. But in the modern economy,
where average individuals cannot directly provide for themselves, they
are duped into trading time for the basic necessities of
life--necessities that are directly available to the poorest of the
Earth. As this economic hierarchy has intensified over time, we
continue to be duped into trading our time for material
possessions--far beyond those required to survive. The memes of our
economic culture have convinced us that the material is a fine
substitute for the experiential. A nagging doubt, dissatisfaction with
our own suburbanization, some unknown, unfulfilled yearning tells us
that, despire the overtures of mass-media, even the materially rich
among us still long for the experiential.

The sun on your face, playing with your children, staring at a fire
until late into the night, sitting still in the forest listening to
the wind rush through aspen leaves, talking with friends, laying on
your back in a meadow and watching the clouds pass above you. All of
these things are free--they require only time. Hunter-gatherers around
the world spend, on average, less than 20 hours a week "working". The
rest of their time was available for the experiential, the "finer
things" in life. Perhaps this is why anthropologist Marshal Sahlins
calls them "The Original Affluent Society", or why Paul Shepard says
that humanity's time in the "hamlet economy" was the best it ever had.

The finer things in life are nothing more than a connection and a
oneness with those things that modern culture insists remain separate
or "sacred". This connection is available to all of us. Reconnecting
to the finer things in life is not dependent on success within the
modern commercial economy...on the contrary, my good friend, this
reconnection requires that we take a new--or is it old?--approach to
life. This is vernacular zen.


3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

     One of my favorite experiences is cooking a meal. It combines
creativity with cooking skill and produces an enjoyable result, along
with a sense of accomplishment. But I wonder how this experience would
translate into a more local/subsistence type of lifestyle. Certainly
the growing/finding/purchasing food and cooking it will still carry
all the benefits of a good experience, but will the experience be
limited? While there is something to be said for making a meal out of
foodstuffs you have personally grown or acquired locally, the variety
of foodstuffs is necessarily much more limited. And to me, part of the
satisfaction of cooking is the skillful combining of a variety of
ingredients. Would this experience be lost? Was "cooking" as I think
of it even a concept in more localized cultures?


Jeff Vail said...

     I think that "local" cultures have produced--and continue to
exemplify--the kind of cooking that I most admire: fresh, seasonally
varying, largely locally produced and unique to the climate and
lifestyle of a particular area. Take Italian food, for example. The
cuisines of Tuscany or the Veneto or Puglia are each unique, are based
on what grows best in the local area, and have existed for ages. Or
the food of Provence, or Bavaria, or Japan, Thailand, Indonesia,
Lebanon, etc. By far my favorite foods are these local cuisines--even
if I must normally enjoy them out of their natural environment (and
they aren't as good that way...). Look at the "Slow Food" movement
that is growing out of Italy into the rest of the world: traditional,
locally grown, peasant meals are appreciated for their true value. In
my opinion, the post-modern art-food of a pretentious few can't hold a
candle to a bowl of penne carbonara and a glass of simple red wine
enjoyed in a tuscan hill-town.

     This isn't a prohibition to creativity or innovation. In America,
many areas have strong local culinary traditions. Combine that with a
broader theme of localization, and the possibilities for American
local-food and slow-food are very exciting.

     Also, read Marshall Sahlins' "Stone Age Economics". The wide
variety of ingredients available to modern chefs is certainly not a
new development... if anything, we've reduced the variety in our food
over the last 10,000 years. The San tribes of Africa regularly use
over 50 different ingredients in their cooking--including over a dozen
used just as spices. And that's in a very harsh natural environment...


mjaroneski said...

     I am currently reading a summary history on england before,
during, and after Cromwell. Before Cromwell, there were 100 feast days
a year when the poor did not work. I think I could handle working 2
days on and 1 off. Less profit was made then.

by Jeff Vail
http://www.jeffvail.net/2008/01/will-peak-oil-drive-relocalization.html


Over the past week, Stuart Staniford and Sharon Astyk have written
thought-provoking essays at The Oil Drum on the nexus of Peak Oil and
relocalization, with Staniford suggesting that peak oil will not
result in relocalization of agriculture because the industrialization
of agriculture is a more efficient use of energy and is not
practicably reversible, and Astyk rebutting that idea. I think that
both essays make important points, but I would like to offer a third
perspective: that we have insufficient information to reach a
conclusion about when energy scarcity will result in relocalization of
agriculture, but that we will likely cross this threshold in the
not-too-distant future and should prepare accordingly.
Astyk's main critique of Staniford's essay is, while important,
focused primarily on the somewhat dismissive and partisan language of
"reversalism." I agree with this critique, and will not rehash it
here. This critique does not, however, address the core of Staniford's
argument that centralization and hierarchal organization in
agriculture will stabilize or intensify in the face of rising energy
prices.

In my view, the primary weakness of Staniford's analysis is the hidden
substitution of causation for correlation in the body of his argument.
My own writings have often been criticized as lacking in scientific
analysis of hard data, and I accept that as the price of trying to
approach causation directly. Graphs of data points, such as those
dominating Staniford's analysis, can clearly convey correlation with
some causal mechanism—say an increasing linear function—but do nothing
to establish that causal relationship itself. These graphs do nothing
to establish a causal relationship between, to use Staniford's
examples, labor per acre or profit margin per acre and oil price. It
could be pure coincidence that they appear positively correlated, much
like the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast. As importantly, such
correlations provide no insight as to whether the current correlative
relationship will continue as oil prices increase—a small segment of a
linear function, an exponential function, or a parabolic function may
all fit this correlation, yet diverge wildly at later points. Here's
an example: a graph showing the driving fatalities by age for 13 to 17
year olds will show a remarkable positive correlation between higher
deaths at higher ages. The implied causality in such a graph is that
aging causes driving fatalities. Of course, with the benefit of a much
broader perspective, additional data showing that driving fatalities
begin to decline significantly after roughly the age of 25, and the
knowledge that (in the U.S.) one can get a license to drive at age 16,
an alternate likely causality arises. This is, essentially, my
critique of Standiford's argument--that while correlation may suggest
causation on the very limited data set available to us, we really
don't gain any insight into what will happen--or what form of
agriculture will be most efficient--at oil prices equivalent to $200,
$300, or more dollars per barrel. At risk of pushing too far into the
philosophical, Staniford's analysis places us in the equivalent of
Plato's cave where all we can see is the 13-17 year segment of the
driving fatality graph. I won't belabor this point any
further—Scottish philosopher David Hume said this far better than I
could if anyone cares to delve deeper into this line of thought.

Suffice it to say that, if we reject this substitution of causation
for correlation, we're left with Staniford's rather bald conclusion
that "industrial farmers are extremely efficient, and there is no way
to compete with them except by becoming one" based solely on the
presumptive correlation between various agricultural data in very
recent history with historical oil prices. I don't find that
convincing, but Staniford must be given his due—he presents a
plausible case, and certainly one that doesn't disprove itself.

I think that the best way to approach this problem is to try to locate
actual causal relationships that either A) make centralization and
hierarchy more efficient means of organizing agriculture in the face
of rising energy prices, or B) make decentralization a more efficient
means of organizing agriculture in the face of rising energy prices:

A. Why would centralization of agriculture increase efficiency?

1. Economy of place: It is more efficient to grow oranges in Florida
than in a heated greenhouse in upstate New York (or, to use the
classic example, wine in Portugal than in England).
2. Economy of scale: It is more efficient for one man to grow ten
orange trees than ten men to each grow one for a variety of reasons.
3. Specialization of knowledge processes: A contributor to #2 above,
but particularly important in the era of increasingly scientific and
knowledge intensive farming—farmers can afford to specialize in
farming, whereas people who are only part-time farmers cannot to the
same degree.
4. Justification for intensive capital expenditure: An industrial
farmer can justify the expense of a complex combine harvester that
automates processes, whereas a small holder may not be able to.

B. Why would decentralization of agriculture increase efficiency?

1. Transportation & operation cost: decentralized farming has the
potential to require transportation over shorter distances to market
than centralized farming, and therefore less embodied energy cost.
Likewise, tractors and combines use oil, whereas hoeing and hand
weeding do not.
2. Superior suitability for sustainable operation: for now,
decentralized agriculture seems more capable of maintaining topsoil
and is more adaptable to varying water regimes.
3. Greater resiliency to black swan & gray sway events: decentralized
agriculture is less susceptible to terrorism, is more likely to
incorporate the biodiversity necessary to overcome disease, and may be
more adaptable in the face of global warming.
4. Less exposure to capital cost creep: decentralized agriculture is
less dependent on expensive machinery that is subject to increasing
cost as the cost of manufacture and raw materials increase.

There are undoubtedly many more reasons on both sides—the intent here
is to set up the following balancing problem, not to present an
exhaustive list.

It becomes apparent that resolving the centralization vs.
decentralization of agriculture dispute requires balancing these
factors—more specifically, balancing these factors at a given cost of
energy. I don't think that it can be reasonably disputed that, at some
cost of energy, it is more efficient to centralize agriculture.* As a
hypothetical, if energy is free, there is no substantive barrier to
total centralization of all agriculture. Likewise, I don't think it
can be reasonably disputed that, at some cost of energy, it is more
efficient to decentralize agricultural production. As a hypothetical,
if energy is so expensive as to be totally use-prohibitive to all
parties (e.g. nothing but human labor is available), then
centralization that requires food transportation of a greater distance
than a human can walk before the food spoils, or that requires more
calories for a human to transport to market than the cargo contains,
is infeasible. Obviously, we are faced with the challenge of balancing
centralization vs. decentralization for some real cost of energy
between free and use-prohibitive.

This analysis also confronts some significant knowledge gaps.
Centralized agriculture is currently engaged in practices that are
widely considered non-sustainable. Industrial farming practices are
rapidly depleting topsoil and rely on non-renewable chemical inputs.
Conversely, methods of decentralized agriculture exist that are widely
considered fully sustainable—permaculture, Fukuoka method, and John
Jeavon's biointensive method, just to name a few. It may well be
possible to adopt industrial-scale methods that are equally
sustainable, but the efficiency loss in doing so is unknown. It seems
unfair to compare an unsustainable method with a sustainable one, but
no data currently exists sufficient to bridge this gap. Another factor
to be addressed is the opportunity cost of time spent in decentralized
agriculture/horticulture. If there are abundant opportunities to earn
high wages relative to food costs—something true in today's Western
economies, but uncertain at best in a future scenario of $300/barrel
oil—then the opportunity cost of spending personal time laboring in a
garden weighs heavily against decentralized agriculture. However, if
there is massive unemployment and it isn't possible for most to earn
enough to buy necessary food due to the embodied cost of energy
inputs, then it is more rational to spend time gardening no matter how
efficient centralized agriculture is.

Furthermore, it is necessary to consider the sunk cost and subsidies
supporting centralized agriculture. Just two examples:

- The trillion dollar infrastructure of highways necessary to support
our centralized system has already been paid for (well, is still being
paid for in many respects) whereas decentralized agriculture has no
trillion dollar head start. This infrastructure is supported by
ongoing maintenance paid for via distributed taxes, not by tax
attached to the price of food or collected from individual farmers. At
some cost of energy, maintaining such a system is no longer
practicable, erasing this current advantage for centralized agriculture.

- The existing urbanization of America (just to cite one example)
makes gardening impracticable for many, and is a relic of cheap food
and the inexpensive transportation network capable of supporting
urbanization. There is a great reluctance to relocate for the purpose
of making gardening affordable now, but at some theoretical cost of
food there is a tipping point where people would stream to small
holdings, dramatically erasing this current advantage for centralized
agriculture.

Hopefully I have highlighted the methodological difficulties in
determining whether centralized or decentralized agriculture is more
efficient at a given price of oil we have not yet reached—and
therefore whether this historical process is likely to be "reversible"
at some price. I'd love to tell you that, at $254/barrel, society will
tip from centralized to decentralized agriculture. Clearly I can't do
that, and I submit that there is insufficient data for anyone to do so
at this time (or, to demonstrate that the same won't happen). What I
will suggest is that it seems clear to me that, at some price of oil,
decentralized agriculture will be more efficient. Price may actually
be misleading on this point—if one accepts a general energy descent
future (which I realize is a big *IF* for many), then demand
destruction may prevent prices of energy from continuing forever
upward. In such a scenario it will actually be "at some availability
of surplus energy" where decentralization becomes more efficient. If
one extrapolates any of the various gloomier future scenarios for
world energy production often presented it seems very possible that
this threshold may be crossed within a generation or two. And, when we
reach this threshold, those who have prepared or transitioned early
will be better situated. There are, without doubt, vast uncertainties
here, but the precautionary principle suggests that we prepare for the
possibility that this point comes sooner rather than later. Finally, I
would suggest that there are benefits of decentralized agriculture
that reach beyond mere calculations of price, profit, and meeting
minimal nutrition requirements (see notes below). There are, after
all, reasons why people go on vacation to Tuscany instead of Kansas.**

* What are our goals—is it merely to meet our minimal nutritional
requirements, or to amass the most material possessions? Who benefits
from centralized processes vs. decentralized, and what political
structures to they tend to support and accrete? Are we seeking to
maximize the mean or median fulfillment of human ontogeny? These are
ultimately moral and philosophical questions, and ones that I will not
attempt to answer here. I do, however, wish to draw the reader's
attention to the complexities raised by trying to address this dilemma
while simultaneously balancing the benefits of centralization and
decentralization. For more on centralization vs. decentralization,
consider my essay "A Theory of Power."
http://www.jeffvail.net/atheoryofpower.pdf

** For a discussion of Tuscan hill towns as a mode of decentralized
coordination, consider my essay "The Hamlet Economy."
http://www.jeffvail.net/2006/04/envisioning-hamlet-economy-topology-of.html

----- Original Message -----

From: Rob Windt

To: intentionalcommunityvictoria@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, January 11, 2008 4:52 PM

Subject: [intentionalcommunityvictoria] Wood is more precious than gold

by Gene Logsdon
http://energybulletin.net/39047.html

The price of gold is going crazy as investors look for a shelter from
a dipsy-doodling stock market.

It reminds me of one of my grandfather's stories. During the bad
financial times of the early 1920s in Germany, the peasants (ancestors
of ours) traded their potatoes for gems that the rich people were
forced to pay to get something to eat.

That story is one reason why in 1974, I took my family out of
Philadelphia where I had a good job, bought a little piece of land in
my home country, built a house on it, and prepared for a severe
economic depression, which fortunately did not come. Yet.

The only requirement I insisted on in looking for land was that it
have several acres of woodland on it. I knew I could have a garden
producing food in a hurry, but it takes time to grow the wood to keep
a house warm and to cook with, if it came to that. I did not want to
depend entirely on faraway oil to stay alive, and in a pinch I wanted
to get by without electricity if I had to.

Whether I am just paranoid or prophetical I don't know yet, but as I
sit in my woods, resting from the work of splitting firewood, that
decision has continued to make sense to me even in times of stable
economics. (Is our economic system ever stable?) What I have gained in
enjoyment alone makes my investment in two mature woodlots at least as
"profitable" as investing an equivalent amount of money in gold.

You can't eat gold like you can the bounty of trees in fruits, nuts,
maple syrup, and various edible mushrooms and herbal treasures of the
woodland. You can't warm yourself with gold. You can't bask in the
shade of gold. You can't make fence posts out of gold. A gold house
would be mighty expensive. You can't make a windbreak out of gold. You
can't make furniture, violins, guitars, wall paneling, picture frames,
gun stocks, tomato stakes, flooring, barns, chicken coops, and hog
houses out of gold. You can't mulch a garden with gold leaf. Gold does
not take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen to preserve an
environment we can live in. Gold does not provide habitat for millions
of wild animals and zillions of insects necessary for a sustainable
environment. And in fact, you can make methane out of wood much more
efficiently than ethanol out of corn. All gold can do is go up and
down in price and invariably it turns out to be a poor investment, as
many panic buyers learn the hard way.

I've known my two woodlots intimately for over 70 years.. The one of
ten acres was my playground as I grew up. The other, of about four
acres two miles away, I also tramped as a child and have lived in,
literally, for the last 34 years. There are so many ways to figure the
value of woodland, so many intangibles that don't show up on ledgers,
that I doubt anyone can make an accurate estimate. But I want to try,
using only my own rather uncomplicated experiences, leaving out
intangibles like how the tranquility and exercise I've gained from
caring for my woodland may have affected my health beneficially.

I paid $700 an acre for the four acre woodlot in 1974 and $2000 an
acre for a ten acre woodlot in 1979. The four acre plot was really the
lot for our house, so to speak, and so it is hard to try to calculate
its value as woodland alone. So I will focus on the ten acres although
what is true for one is true for the other.

Twenty thousand dollars for ten acres of woods was extravagant by
local standards in 1979 but that's what I had to pay to keep a corn
farmer from bulldozing it away. I presume that if I had invested that
money in the stock market, it would have doubled or tripled by now,
but then again, after the recession in the 1980s when the market took
a beating, and again in 2002, and now in 2008, maybe not.

A few years after we bought the ten acres, a timber buyer offered us
$20,000 if we would let him clear-cut it, which of course I had no
intention of doing. But I did sell five white oaks as veneer for
$5000. A few years after that I sold another $2000 worth of logs.
About 1995, my son, who was getting in the home construction business,
hired a sawyer with a bandsaw mill to saw about 10,000 board feet of
lumber which my son and I have used in various ways. The slab wood
"waste" made several loads of firewood too. The sawyer charged thirty
cents a board foot as I recall. We figured the wood was worth, above
that cost, about a dollar a board foot, possibly twice that. If you
have purchased wood from a lumberyard lately you know that you can
carry $150 worth out to your truck in one trip. My son used some of
the red oak as trim throughout his new home. It is breathtakingly
beautiful. What is that worth? I sold another $2000 worth of trees in
2007.

Every year I harvest about four cords of fuel wood from the 14 acres
of both woodlots. My son and other family members have been harvesting
firewood from the ten acres too. Experience teaches us that an acre of
mature woodland will produce indefinitely at least a cord of wood
annually just in deadfalls, blowdowns, and thinnings, without
lessening the over all yearly production of wood, and in fact
increasing it. One mature tree containing two sawlogs to sell or make
lumber from, also has enough branches to make a cord of wood.

The price of cord wood, needless to say, is going up as fast as the
price of oil. I've always figured that a cord of oak replaced about
$100 worth of other fuel but now the replacement value is higher. In
general the wood I've used to keep the house warm over the last 25
years saved us an average of $400 a year even after deducting the cost
of five chainsaws I have worn out in the process. My son figures that
today his wood replaces about $300 of other fuel per winter month. He
heats almost entirely with wood. I let our woodstove go out at night
in favor of backup electric heat unless the weather is very cold.

Actually I rarely count wood by the cord but by the amount I need to
heat the house for a day. Experience has shown me that I can cut from
the log and split a day's supply of heat in about an hour if the wood
is straight-grained. Could do better when I was young. So to work up
enough wood to last a hundred winter days, which is what I do, takes
about a hundred hours. Since I like to work in the woods, and since I
am not paying money out of pocket to someone else, I consider that
labor as part of the profit.

Obviously the original $20,000 was an excellent investment. The
woodlot will go on producing fuel and lumber and satisfaction forever
with proper management. Even discounting that, the land is still
there, going up in value whether it has trees on it or not. And if I
were to sell the land, it is worth far more for homesites if it has
mature trees on it than if it were bare land.

When I was a boy, farmers followed a code of ethics that proscribed a
ten acre woodlot be kept for every hundred acres of farm land. That of
course was forgotten when coal, fuel oil, bulldozers and subsidized
corn became easily available. Would we not have much better homeland
security today if that practice had remained as part of our cultural
heritage?

~~

Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot
County, Ohio.

Current Books:
All Flesh Is Grass: Pleasures & Promises of Pasture Farming
The Lords of Folly (novel)
The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture
of the Land)

"We can't grow our way out of this grain-shortage hole," said Jim
Gerlach, president of A/C Trading Inc. in Fowler, Indiana. "We'll have
to price our way out. I'm bullish until further notice. We'll see ups
and downs, but the trend will remain higher."
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aAg_Yh1ifzWs&refer=home


"Pakistani paramilitary troops have begun escorting trucks carrying
wheat to stop supplies being stolen amid shortages of flour that have
inflamed anger against the government before an election, an official
said on Sunday.
Pakistanis are complaining bitterly about a shortage of wheat flour
and rising prices of the staple food which the government has blamed
on hoarding and smuggling to neighboring countries."
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsMaps/idUSISL32876220080113


"Some guerrilla gardeners carry out their actions at night, in
relative secrecy, to sow and tend a new vegetable patch or flower
garden. Others work more openly, seeking to engage with members of the
local community"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_gardening


I've been mulling over the issue of food security and figure that new
members can add to an old discussion that has many tangents.

A small vegetable plot helped my grandparents raise a family through
the depression and the following Nazi occupation of Holland, and most
of us realise the importance of Victory Gardens in other countries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden

Growing our own fruit, veg and medicinal plants is the most important
preparation we can make and yet... hungry neighbours, displaced
relatives, opportunistic folks and stray animals could leave us in the
lurch.

Before the gun nuts chime in I would like to add that a 24/7 armed
guard would be a labour and energy intensive business that cannot be
kept up indefinitely, and the same thing applies to the landcare
movement that "weeds" our parks, forests and waterways, you can't stop
birds from shitting seeds where they may.

The guerrilla gardening movement has always had an anarchistic appeal
for me but maybe it's time to step things up, most folks won't
recognise onions and potatoes etc and they're not that hard to grow.
Plant stuff in small depressions that can hold rainwater and turn
roadside verges, corners of parks and golf courses into a stealth food
forest. Any place within striking distance of your home is fair game
but please use common sense, Vietnamese mint is a rampant weed outside
the leafier suburbs of Melbourne

Our own mortality and aging bodies rules out the remote homestead
(unless it includes several families, and who are we to deny their
children access to the world while civilisation sorta functions) so do
what you can wherever you are, it only takes a handful of root
vegetables to make a nourishing soup for your community kitchen.

Rob

by Gene Logsdon
http://energybulletin.net/39047.html

The price of gold is going crazy as investors look for a shelter from
a dipsy-doodling stock market.

It reminds me of one of my grandfather's stories. During the bad
financial times of the early 1920s in Germany, the peasants (ancestors
of ours) traded their potatoes for gems that the rich people were
forced to pay to get something to eat.

That story is one reason why in 1974, I took my family out of
Philadelphia where I had a good job, bought a little piece of land in
my home country, built a house on it, and prepared for a severe
economic depression, which fortunately did not come. Yet.

The only requirement I insisted on in looking for land was that it
have several acres of woodland on it. I knew I could have a garden
producing food in a hurry, but it takes time to grow the wood to keep
a house warm and to cook with, if it came to that. I did not want to
depend entirely on faraway oil to stay alive, and in a pinch I wanted
to get by without electricity if I had to.

Whether I am just paranoid or prophetical I don't know yet, but as I
sit in my woods, resting from the work of splitting firewood, that
decision has continued to make sense to me even in times of stable
economics. (Is our economic system ever stable?) What I have gained in
enjoyment alone makes my investment in two mature woodlots at least as
"profitable" as investing an equivalent amount of money in gold.

You can't eat gold like you can the bounty of trees in fruits, nuts,
maple syrup, and various edible mushrooms and herbal treasures of the
woodland. You can't warm yourself with gold. You can't bask in the
shade of gold. You can't make fence posts out of gold. A gold house
would be mighty expensive. You can't make a windbreak out of gold. You
can't make furniture, violins, guitars, wall paneling, picture frames,
gun stocks, tomato stakes, flooring, barns, chicken coops, and hog
houses out of gold. You can't mulch a garden with gold leaf. Gold does
not take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen to preserve an
environment we can live in. Gold does not provide habitat for millions
of wild animals and zillions of insects necessary for a sustainable
environment. And in fact, you can make methane out of wood much more
efficiently than ethanol out of corn. All gold can do is go up and
down in price and invariably it turns out to be a poor investment, as
many panic buyers learn the hard way.

I've known my two woodlots intimately for over 70 years.. The one of
ten acres was my playground as I grew up. The other, of about four
acres two miles away, I also tramped as a child and have lived in,
literally, for the last 34 years. There are so many ways to figure the
value of woodland, so many intangibles that don't show up on ledgers,
that I doubt anyone can make an accurate estimate. But I want to try,
using only my own rather uncomplicated experiences, leaving out
intangibles like how the tranquility and exercise I've gained from
caring for my woodland may have affected my health beneficially.

I paid $700 an acre for the four acre woodlot in 1974 and $2000 an
acre for a ten acre woodlot in 1979. The four acre plot was really the
lot for our house, so to speak, and so it is hard to try to calculate
its value as woodland alone. So I will focus on the ten acres although
what is true for one is true for the other.

Twenty thousand dollars for ten acres of woods was extravagant by
local standards in 1979 but that's what I had to pay to keep a corn
farmer from bulldozing it away. I presume that if I had invested that
money in the stock market, it would have doubled or tripled by now,
but then again, after the recession in the 1980s when the market took
a beating, and again in 2002, and now in 2008, maybe not.

A few years after we bought the ten acres, a timber buyer offered us
$20,000 if we would let him clear-cut it, which of course I had no
intention of doing. But I did sell five white oaks as veneer for
$5000. A few years after that I sold another $2000 worth of logs.
About 1995, my son, who was getting in the home construction business,
hired a sawyer with a bandsaw mill to saw about 10,000 board feet of
lumber which my son and I have used in various ways. The slab wood
"waste" made several loads of firewood too. The sawyer charged thirty
cents a board foot as I recall. We figured the wood was worth, above
that cost, about a dollar a board foot, possibly twice that. If you
have purchased wood from a lumberyard lately you know that you can
carry $150 worth out to your truck in one trip. My son used some of
the red oak as trim throughout his new home. It is breathtakingly
beautiful. What is that worth? I sold another $2000 worth of trees in
2007.

Every year I harvest about four cords of fuel wood from the 14 acres
of both woodlots. My son and other family members have been harvesting
firewood from the ten acres too. Experience teaches us that an acre of
mature woodland will produce indefinitely at least a cord of wood
annually just in deadfalls, blowdowns, and thinnings, without
lessening the over all yearly production of wood, and in fact
increasing it. One mature tree containing two sawlogs to sell or make
lumber from, also has enough branches to make a cord of wood.

The price of cord wood, needless to say, is going up as fast as the
price of oil. I've always figured that a cord of oak replaced about
$100 worth of other fuel but now the replacement value is higher. In
general the wood I've used to keep the house warm over the last 25
years saved us an average of $400 a year even after deducting the cost
of five chainsaws I have worn out in the process. My son figures that
today his wood replaces about $300 of other fuel per winter month. He
heats almost entirely with wood. I let our woodstove go out at night
in favor of backup electric heat unless the weather is very cold.

Actually I rarely count wood by the cord but by the amount I need to
heat the house for a day. Experience has shown me that I can cut from
the log and split a day's supply of heat in about an hour if the wood
is straight-grained. Could do better when I was young. So to work up
enough wood to last a hundred winter days, which is what I do, takes
about a hundred hours. Since I like to work in the woods, and since I
am not paying money out of pocket to someone else, I consider that
labor as part of the profit.

Obviously the original $20,000 was an excellent investment. The
woodlot will go on producing fuel and lumber and satisfaction forever
with proper management. Even discounting that, the land is still
there, going up in value whether it has trees on it or not. And if I
were to sell the land, it is worth far more for homesites if it has
mature trees on it than if it were bare land.

When I was a boy, farmers followed a code of ethics that proscribed a
ten acre woodlot be kept for every hundred acres of farm land. That of
course was forgotten when coal, fuel oil, bulldozers and subsidized
corn became easily available. Would we not have much better homeland
security today if that practice had remained as part of our cultural
heritage?

~~

Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot
County, Ohio.

Current Books:
All Flesh Is Grass: Pleasures & Promises of Pasture Farming
The Lords of Folly (novel)
The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture
of the Land)

[new] unplanner on December 22, 2007 - 8:37pm | Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

First the vote: Currently raising zero % of my own food. Maybe this spring I will add a veggie garden,,,or maybe not.

Now my more substantive comments. Having read or skimmed this and the previous post on farmers and farming and the over 200+ comments I feel the need to add a perspective I have on this debate, one which Jason has heard from me personally and I have railed against professionally.

Any discussion by Heinberg and others on transitioning to a low energy system of food production dependent on many more farmers is premature unless the very contentious issue of LAND USE / LAND REFORM is discussed. As some of you know, I am a land use planner with a strong background in this subject area. In many, if not all jurisdictions in the US (as well as a number of other countries) what you do with your land and how it is arranged and configured is governed by a basket of rights commonly called zoning. Currently, most locations that maintain an agricultural designation, restrict the minimum parcel size and the number of units permissible on the property. For large scale ag, this isnt a problem as most commercially profitable operators operate well in excess of the typical minimums. But for those new small scale farmers that many of us envision, there simply are no properties available that are correctly sized and larger ones are unable to be collectively purchased and split down to a more useable size since the designation prohibits this anyway.

At the same time a compromise solution that would preserve parcel size minimums but allow collective ownership and residency--one I floated right here in Jason's backyard--was shot down by the local planning commission in a fairly contentious and well attended hearing by small scale farmers back in April. THis set of proposed allowances (which you can read if you click here: http://www.co.mendocino.ca.us/planningteam/pdf/GPU_070419_SR.pdf and scroll down to Item K on page 12) to encourage small scale farming were modest and entirely voluntary.

Oddly enough (or maybe not) allowances for farmworker housing continue to remain on the books. So while 10 small scale farmers are not able to band together and jointly farm a large holding in an equitable manner, a single farm owner can oversee a 10 subservient resident employees (or "independent contractors" as many farmers have taken to referring to their help as legally).

And speaking of ownership in general, land ownership in the US has gotten increasingly consolidated in rural areas due in no small part to cheap energy which makes farming thousand acre farms an afterthought. Well as cheap and abundant energy dries up but the land ownership patterns remain the same we have another problem that we do have historical references for: what will happen to the "landless" poor. We already know our zoning codes frown on collectivism but approve of (neo)feudalism. We know that landowners historically do not give up land willingly. We also know large mobs of landless poor are hugely destabilizing and have given rise to both the Lord-vassal relationships as well as the forced (often violently) removal of the land owner and redistribution of their holdings.

If we are indeed forced down Jason's curve, how are we going to get all our required farmers onto their lands--and under what ownership structure? It is great to talk about the nuts and bolts of farming but failing to address the legal, political and historical challenges to increasing farming in this country renders this discussion premature in my mind. I know we can sustainably farm small properties and provide a decent respectable standard of living for those farmers. The real question is will we be allowed to?

by Edward C. Wolf
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/492

Suppose you consider it anathema that your next bite of food should
journey fifteen hundred miles from its source to your plate. If you
live in metropolitan Portland, Oregon—a city, like most, not exactly
famous for row crops—you can beat that lamentable average by calling
Donna Smith and Robyn Streeter and hiring them to farm your land. All
that's required of your city lot is at least one hundred square feet
of growing space, six hours or more of direct sunlight, and an outdoor
spigot. You can then join a pioneering cousin of community supported
agriculture (CSA) and dial a significant share of your household's
food miles down to zero.

Typically, CSA customers buy shares of produce from a local farm and
receive a weekly carton packed with whatever's ripe for picking. Your
Backyard Farmer, Donna and Robyn's two-year-old business, takes the
idea in a new direction. In effect, customers purchase shares of Donna
and Robyn's horticultural smarts.

Households hire the two women to prepare raised beds and rows for
planting right in the backyard. They sow organic seeds and transplant
seedlings selected by their customers from a list of more than four
dozen vegetable crops. They tend, weed, and water each farm through
the growing season. They deliver a harvest basket to the back porch
once a week.

I visited two backyard farms on a cool June morning when the leaf
lettuces were flourishing and sweet pea pods offered crunchy
temptation from string trellises. The first farm was located beside
the home of a young couple in one of Portland's densest neighborhoods,
a short bus ride from City Hall. Two raised beds and a patch of rows
mulched with straw produced salad greens and vegetables sufficient to
feed the couple and their three children plus two neighboring
households. The second farm, by contrast, was a 150-square-foot oasis
next to a modest cottage near strip malls and a freeway interchange.
The owner, a single woman, shares the surplus from her postage-stamp
plot with neighbors and colleagues at work.

All told, Donna and Robyn farm about forty such parcels, plus a
quarter-acre property where they grow organic vegetables for the local
Pastaworks grocery and the Arleta Library Café. Three dozen backyard
farms may merit nary a footnote in state agricultural statistics, but
if considered as a whole, the land cultivated by the two women would
likely rank near the top of Oregon's farm sector in output and gross
value per acre.

If you suspect that this arrangement is tailored to the foodie elite,
think again. These backyard farmers work with food-stamp recipients as
well as lawyers, with lifelong gardeners short on time and neophyte
locavores eager to learn. The common thread is a desire for healthy
food raised in topsoil one can crumble between one's fingers at the
end of the day.

Through a Glass Darkly
by the Contrary Goddess
http://contrarygoddess.blogspot.com/2007/12/through-glass-darkly.html

I stopped by the local food store to pick up a pack of bologna. Ok,
some beer too. Beer and bologna.

I was standing there in front of the selection of bolognas trying to
discern the best buy, having waited for another working man to make
his selection (I later met him again in the beer isle), when a old,
scruffy man missing one foot (I couldn't tell how much of his leg was
gone with it) rolled up to me in a wheelchair.

"A body can't afford to eat anymore, can they?" he said by way of
introduction.

"Every time the dollar goes down, prices go up," I reply.

"It's gettin' bad, prices goin' up every day," he said.

"Yep," I said, "people are going to have to grow a garden if they want
to eat. Like they used to."

"Lawd, people are too sorry to do that. I have children that are too
sorry to pick a piece of bread up off the floor," he said.

"Well, your children and those other people are going to be hungry
then, aren't they?"

"Huh, I guess they are. You've been working," he says as he eye's my
muddy boots, my dirty jeans, "working in the mud. What do you do?"

"I've been working with a barn full of horses all day today," and I
went on to explain my situation a bit -- a boarding barn, a mother,
working part-time, milking a cow, growing most of our food.

"Your husband helps you, don't he?" he asked.

"We couldn't do any of what we do without all of us working at it," I
answered. "But when I talk about people needing to grow some food, I
know what that means. Corn and 'taters and meat and milk and hard
work. And the occasional pack of bologna!"

"Ha, it's gettin' to where a body can't afford it," he says again.

"It sure is," I say, moving away after touching him on his shoulder
first, a gesture of almost kinship, "so tell those kids of yours they
better put in a garden!"

I'd been thinking about how energy intensive the horse business as I'm
working in it is. It *could be all recycled and renewable and
fertilizer, but as it is, the sawdust for the bedding is hauled from a
couple hours away, and to get good sawdust is a four hour haul bill.
Then the manure hauling away is more gas, although that is at least
more local. We have a load of hay coming in from New York, but that is
only because of the crop failure due to drought this year. A lot of
our hay, even in this year, is local. But again, there's gas and oil
in it, from tractors to hauling to the hay elevator (a device to put
hay up into the loft with).

And yet, it wouldn't have to be. I guess recreationally it would have
to be, but if we were talking practical horses, it would have to find
its practical outlet. I think a lot about what transitions might look
like. I think the people with the money to pay so much to keep a horse
recreationally will continue to do it for a relatively long time -- to
burn that oil until it is all gone. And then those horses will become
draft horses again, or pack horses, or something. They could be put to
hauling their own sawdust.

I would love to gallop a cross country course again. I would love to
ride a dressage test. But today, I'm going out and walking my own big
guy up a hill just to begin starting to put some muscle back on him
because I've let him get way too out of shape. And doing that will put
my own riding muscles to use so perhaps they won't be totally
atrophied away.

I love my job. I love going there, I love taking care of the horses,
talking to the people. I love my farm, milking my cow, doing the home
economics of maintaining everything, finding the baby goats to cuddle.
I have a lot of plans, I always do. A lot of hopes and dreams and
schemes and readiness to see what might work. I am excited to look
toward finding my way, and helping the others in our family find their
way, in the post-oil world.

Because the answer is not to find alternative sources of energy, other
ways to be industrial capitalistic consumers. It is to embrace the
change. Because life will be different. Soon.

Life will be different. Is it climate change? Is it peak oil? To me,
and I can get pretty passionate about this, it is neither. They are
both convenient shorthands for talking about getting "right" with
"livelihood".

Western civilization, industrialization, and probably right back to
the agricultural revolution, has produced a way of living, a way of
life, a way of death, that is exploitive. It is dependendent on
exploitation of the earth and her people. Great works of art, great
music, great achievements are not those that are dependent on patrons,
on exploitation. Just like history isn't really the history of wars
and conquests.

Really great works of art are those that have gone unremarked. Like
history is really the story of hearths but no one has thought it
remarkable enough to write much about it, or to call it history.

The way I read current events, life will be changing, in this
direction, whether you make right livelihood changes or not. It is a
time when having gone to the right schools won't matter. Growing a
garden will matter.

And perhaps you understand that growing a garden is, for me, a
shorthand. It also means being able to take what you get from the
garden and make delicious meals from it. And it means being able to
entertain yourself and not depend on your cellphone and ipod to do it
for you. Play an instrument, tell a story, whatever. It is so much of
everything. Grow a garden. Be independent in a real way. It is not
only a non-exploitive way of life, it is not only salvation for
yourself and your fellows and the world, it is fun. Sure it is hard,
but it is rewarding too.

Oh, gawd, I feel like John the Baptist or one of the OT prophets.
"LOOK PEOPLE. You can see it at the grocery store, yeah, in the
bologna bin, repent of your evil exploitive ways, repent and sin no
more. Grow a garden. Salvation does not lie in spending your money, in
saving your standard of living, in making the world trade oil in
dollars. Salvation depends on how you get your money, and not getting
much of it to begin with because much money means much exploitation
and this you cannot do. This is how you kill your fellow man and the
world and call it giving back. As the prophet Eleutheros says, you
break their legs and give them crutches and call that virtue. You must
not break legs to begin with. You must not kill to begin with. You
must repent and take a step back, one step at a time, step back to a
real life, consuming only what you yourself produce. Consider a pack
of bologna to be opulent, and consider ostentatiousness to be the
worst of vulgarities."

And you know what I really like the most about this vision? That it
doesn't matter if a person has both his feet or not, he can grow a
garden. An old woman descending into Alzheimer's can be useful
shelling the beans. There is a place for everyone, a real place, not a
PC manufactured sheltered job sort of place. Not a "we'll send you a
check every month so we really don't have to deal with you barking
obscenities" sort of place. A real place. Useful. A retarded boy or
girl can keep chickens, or raise goats, or get the kale through the
winter. A teenage boy can find his balance chopping the wood and he
won't need to shoot up a shopping mall because he won't be a burden
and won't see himself that way. No matter what you can think of, that
person can be productive, with the exception of the very few first
years of a kid's life, and perhaps the very last few days or months of
a person's life. What a joy that is!

It seems to me that this is love. We can love each other but only if
we are not stockpiling stores.

But that is only possible outside of an industrial oil intensive
consumerist paradigm. I think that paradigm is ending but you can step
out of it anyway.

If you are strong and brave enough. To love.

And make no mistake, love will mean allowing someone who is too sorry
to pick a piece of bread up off the floor to starve to death.

By Aaron at Village Blog
http://villageblog.wordpress.com/2007/12/07/dont-panic/

It's funny, I was about to write a post saying that I have cut back on
how much time I spend reading Cryptogon and I've just discovered that
Kevin has put Villageblog on his list of links. Of course I'm pleased
when people add me to their list but I'd better offer some background
for any new readers who've linked from there.

As regular readers will know I have gained a lot from Kevin's analysis
- in particular his explanation of how dropping out of mainstream
society is the most effective method of undermining the powers that
be. That said I have found, since spending three weeks away from my
computer that I'm better off if I spend less time at Cryptogon. I
still like the site and what it has to offer but the regular diet of
scary news that daily visits were giving me was starting to paralyse me.

Whilst visiting less I'm not actually reading less, I'm just making
sure I don't spend so much time in a paralysing headspace. I will
continue to keep away from Life After the Oil Crash though - on the
face of it LATOC really seems to have scaring the living daylights out
of us as it's primary mission.

It's pretty odd because I usually don't have trouble making decisions
but I really was getting a bit incapacitated.  At the same time I was
thinking this Ran wrote a comment based on the recent Archdruid post,
Solvitur Ambulando - we'll figure it out as we go.

     "It occurs to me that now that the crash has begun, my own writing
about the crash is suddenly irrelevant. I was able to be helpful by
studying and thinking about the crash more than other people, but now
that we're in it, experience trumps speculation, and I don't have any
more experience than you do."

If you've already been to Ran's site you will have seen him refer to a
comment I made that he still has a lot to offer in the way of helping
to prevent panic.

In the email to him I also  said that there have been times where I
have found a kind of calming reassurance from visiting his site and
that I had occaisionally referred readers to some of his texts for the
express purpose of giving them a calmer perspective.

Apart from Dmitry Orlov on occasion there really isn't anyone else
writing in the smash-crash-blogosphere who can write about the future
and still impart a sense of hope.

I'm also starting to see the blissful benefits of ignorance. It's all
very well being clued up  but if I'm to spend the rest of my days
paralysed by a paranoid expectance of doom I might as well end it all
now. I don't imagine for a minute that a lot of people will agree with
me but I also don't imagine that everyone is as bothered by what they
read as I am - although Kevin does make regular reference to the
volume of panicky emails he receives. Really I'm trying to avoid the
survivalist mentality because I don't just want to survive, I want to
properly enjoy being alive.

The other benefit, which people will appreciate, is that I'm back to
making sensible decisions and avoiding the trap of thinking that I
have to both predict the future, which is impossible, and devise a
detailed plan to deal with it, which will quickly become outdated as
real life takes over my predictions.

Ultimately I want to live my life in an enjoyable state of mind
irrespective of what is going on around me. That's not to say I will
be ignoring what is happening around me - only that I will endeavour
to follow the excellent advice given on the front of the Hitch-Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy: Don't Panic.

by John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/12/agriculture-price-of-transition.h\
tml

One of the great gifts of crisis is supposed to be the way it helps
sort out the difference between what's essential and what's not. As we
move deeper into the crisis of industrial civilization, that
particular gift is likely to arrive in horse doctor's doses. Those who
insist that the first priority in an age of declining petroleum
production is finding some other way to fuel a suburban SUV lifestyle,
or who hope to see some favorite technology – the internet, say, or
space travel – privileged in the same way, risk finding out the hard
way that other things come first.

At the top of the list of those other things are the immediate
necessities of human life: breathable air, drinkable water, edible
food. Lacking those, nothing else matters much. The first two are
provided by natural cycles that industrial civilization is doing its
best to mess up, but so far the damage has been localized. There are
still crucial issues to consider and work to be done, but the raw
resilience of a billion-year-old biosphere that has shrugged off ice
ages and asteroid impacts is a powerful ally.

Food is another matter. Unlike air and water, the vast majority of the
food we eat comes from human activity rather than the free operation
of natural cycles, and the human population has gone so far beyond the
limits of what surviving natural ecosystems can support that
attempting to fall back on wild foods at this point would be a recipe
for dieoff and ecological catastrophe. At the same time, most of the
world's population today survives on food produced using fossil fuels
and other nonrenewable resources such as mineral phosphate and ice age
aquifers. As the end of the fossil fuel age approaches, other
arrangements have to be made.

This poses a challenge, because nearly every resource currently used
in industrial agriculture, from the petroleum that powers tractors and
provides raw materials for pesticides, through the natural gas and
phosphate rock that go into fertilizer, to the topsoil that underlies
the whole process, is being depleted at radically unsustainable rates.
Some peak oil theorists, noting this, have worried publicly that the
consequences of declining petroleum production will include the
collapse of industrial agriculture and worldwide starvation.

Still, this is one of those places where one of the central themes of
recent Archdruid Report posts – the theme of adaptation – is
particularly useful. If today's industrial agriculture were to keep
chugging away along its present course into the future, the results
could be disastrous. One of the few things that can be said for
certain, though, is that this sort of straight-line extrapolation is
the least likely trajectory for the agriculture of the future.

The certainty here comes from two sources. First, the industrial
agriculture we have today did not pop fully formed out of a John Deere
plant like Athena from the head of Zeus. It evolved as farmers and
agricultural corporations took advantage of the abundant energy
supplies made available by the exploitation of oil reserves in the
20th century. At that time, increasing energy inputs into agriculture
was adaptive; it made use of an abundant resource – cheap fossil fuel
energy – to make up for other resources that were more expensive or
less available. That same equation, though, works equally well the
other way. As energy and other fossil fuel products become more
expensive, farmers have a strong incentive to use less of them, and to
replace them with other resources.

The second source of certainty comes from the simple fact that
adaptations in the other direction are already taking place. The
organic farming revolution, the most important of these, may be the
most promising and least often discussed of the factors shaping the
future of industrial society. It's not a small factor, either. In
2005, the most recent year for which I have been able to get data,
some four million acres of land completed the transition from chemical
to organic agriculture, about a million acres over the previous year's
figure.

Because it uses no chemical fertilizers and no pesticides, organic
agriculture is significantly less dependent on fossil fuels than
standard agriculture, and yet it produces roughly comparable yields.
It has huge ecological benefits – properly done, organic agriculture
reverses topsoil loss and steadily improves the fertility of the soil
rather than depleting it – but it also translates into a simple
economic equation: a farmer can get comparable yields for less cost by
growing crops organically, and get higher prices for the results. As
the prices of petroleum, natural gas, phosphate rock, and other
feedstocks for the agrichemical industry continue to climb, that
equation will become even harder to ignore – and in the meantime the
infrastructure and knowledge base necessary to manage organic farming
on a commercial scale is already solidly in place and continues to expand.

As fuel prices continue to climb, tractor fuel and transportation
costs are likely to become the next major bottlenecks. The adaptive
responses here are already taking shape, though they're back further
in the development curve – more or less where organic agriculture was
in the 1970s.

The renaissance of horsedrawn agriculture is one adaptive response
moving steadily toward the takeoff point. After a long period when
diesel was so much cheaper than feed that horses no longer made
economic sense, the balance is swinging the other way, and farmers are
waking up to the advantages of "tractors" that run on grain and hay,
rather than expensive diesel fuel, and can be manufactured in a horse
barn by the simple expedient of letting a stallion in among the mares.
The percentage of North American acreage farmed by horsedrawn
equipment is still very small, but it's many times larger than it was
even a decade ago, and the infrastructure and knowledge base needed to
expand further are coming into being.

Transportation, at least in North America, is a thornier problem. The
railroad system that once connected North American farmland to the
rest of the planet, and enabled it to become the world's breadbasket,
was effectively abandoned decades ago, and it's an open question
whether enough of it can be rebuilt in the teeth of catabolic collapse
to make any kind of difference. In the meantime, though, another set
of adaptive responses is taking shape. All over the US, though it's
especially common on the west coast, local farmers markets have sprung
up over the last decade, and much of the produce sold in them comes
from small local farms.

In cities where the farmers market movement has set down strong roots
– I'm thinking particularly of Seattle, where five weekly farmers
markets and the seven-days-a-week Pike Place Market supply local
shoppers with produce of every kind – the economics of modern farming
have been turned on their heads, and truck farms from 10 to 100 acres
located close to the city have become profitable for the first time in
many decades. Once again, the infrastructure and knowledge base needed
for further expansion is taking shape.

All these transformations and the others that will come after them,
though, have their price tag. The central reason why modern industrial
agriculture elbowed its competitors out of the way was that, during
the heyday of fossil fuel consumption, a farmer could produce more
food for less money than ever before in history. The results combined
with the transportation revolution of the 20th century to redefine the
human food chain from top to bottom. For the first time in history, it
became economical to centralize agriculture so drastically that only a
very small fraction of food was grown within a thousand miles of the
place where it was eaten, and to turn most foodstuffs into processed
and packaged commercial products in place of the bulk commodities and
garden truck of an earlier era. All of this required immense energy
inputs, but at the time nobody worried about those.

As we move further into the twenty-first century, though, the
industrial food chain of the late twentieth has become a costly
anachronism full of feedback loops that amplify increases in energy
costs manyfold. As a result, food prices have soared – up more than
20% on average in the United States over the last year – and will very
likely continue to climb in the years to come. As industrial
agriculture prices itself out of the market, other ways of farming are
moving up to take its place, but each of these exacts its price.
Replace diesel oil with biodiesel, and part of your cropland has to go
into oilseeds; replace tractors altogether with horses, and part of
your cropland has to go into feed; convert more farmland into small
farms serving local communities, and economies of scale go away,
leading to rising costs. The recent push to pour our food supply into
our gas tanks by way of expanded ethanol production doesn't help
either, of course.

All this will make life more challenging. Changes in the agricultural
system will ripple upwards through the rest of society, forcing
unexpected adjustments in economic sectors and cultural patterns that
have nothing obvious to do with agriculture at all. Rising prices and
shrinking supplies will pinch budgets, damage public health, and make
malnutrition a significant issue all through the developed world;
actual famines are possible, and may be unavoidable, as shifting
climate interacts with an agricultural economy in the throes of
change. All this is part of the price of adaptation, the unavoidable
cost of changing from a food system suited to the age of fossil fuels
to one that can still function in the deindustrial transition.

The same process can serve as a model for other changes that will be
demanded of us as the industrial system moves deeper into
obsolescence. Adaptation is always possible, but it's going to come
with a price tag, and the results will likely not be as convenient,
abundant, or welcome as the equivalents were in the days when every
American had the energy equivalent of 260 slaves working night and day
for his or her comfort. That can't be helped. Today's industrial
agriculture and the food chain depending on it, after all, were simply
the temporary result of an equally temporary abundance of fossil fuel
energy, and as that goes away, so will they. The same is true of any
number of other familiar and comfortable things; still, the more
willing we are to pay the price of transition, the better able we will
be to move forward into the possibilities of a new and unfamiliar world.

by Rob Hopkins of Transition Culture
http://transitionculture.org/

Ted Trainer is author of the essential Renewable Energy Cannot Power a
Consumer Society, which is one of the best arguments for the
inevitability of energy descent yet to appear. He has spent many years
arguing for localisation, reduced consumption and the end of
affluence. He recently received the Transition Primer, and was highly
enthused by the whole concept. He sent me a list of 17 questions about
it all, which my crap typing has thus far prevented me from launching
into. Given the assumption (which I have observed repeatedly as a
teacher) that if one person has a question, it is usually the case
that it is also a question that lots of other people would like to ask
too, and given also that they are great questions, I am going to work
my way through them, 2 a day, here at Transition Culture. It is also
an opportunity for readers who are involved in Transition Initiatives
elsewhere to chip in their thoughts, and perhaps how they might have
answered the questions, thereby offering a snapshot of the Transition
movement in relation to these questions. So, here we go, Question One…

1. How many in the most energetic towns are involved; is it a fringe
thing or is the whole town more or less working with the cause?

In a recent piece on a local Sussex radio station, an incredibly inane
reporter visited Lewes, and went around asking people if they had
heard of Transition Town Lewes. Out of the 4 people he asked, only one
had. When he later interviewed Adrienne Campbell of TTL he said
something like "in my straw poll, only 25% of people have heard of
your group!" Struck me that 25% is really rather good after such a
short time!

In Totnes, which is the one I am most familiar with, it is hard to
ascertain how many people are involved. It also depends what one means
by `involved'. In terms of those who are actively involved in groups,
that figure is less than those who are enthusiastic and supportive but
have less time to dedicate. At the moment, in a town of about 8,000
people, our email bulletin goes out to about 800 people, although
admittedly not all of those are in Totnes, although the large majority
are.

The various working groups have memberships of anything between 10 and
up to 70 or 80. In Totnes we are certainly not a fringe thing, we have
the full endorsement of Totnes Town Council, Totnes Chamber of
Commerce and the local Strategy Group. We are designing our work so
that we increasingly reach out into areas we haven't worked in before,
so in April we are working with all of Year 7 at the local school with
our Transition Tales initiative, we are planning a street makeover,
events for young people, all the time we are designing the programme
so it reaches out into new demographics in the town that we haven't
touched up to that point.

At the end of the day, I think the idea that we can get everyone on
board before we can start work is a dangerous one. I see the
Transition model as being based on an ethic of service. It is about
working around peoples' lives, putting in place the infrastructure
that will be needed post-peak in such a way that it is fun, engaging
and non-threatening. This has been the beauty of things like the
Totnes Pound and the nut tree plantings. What they are doing is
important, putting in place essential resilient infrastructure, but
they are universally seen as positive and good for the town. If 10% of
people are actively engaged, and the majority of everyone else are
supportive, then that seems to me to be an excellent basis for action,
with any increases on that being an added bonus.

2. How did the consciousness get where it is; did this take a lot of
work, or was it more or less spontaneous? (Either way it is very
encouraging that it has got up such momentum so quickly.)

I have no idea, I guess this is a big question and is one that is more
appropriate for other people to answer, I guess I am too close to it
to wonder how it grew so fast. My sense, for what it's worth, is that
it emerged into a vacuum. Peak oil is starting to be seen as a big
issue, and the Transition approach is the possibly the best thought
through response to it. As such, when people find out about it and
wonder what to do, unless they plan to head for the hills with their
baked beans and their shotgun, then Transition tend to be where they turn.

The answer to "did this take a lot of work, or was it more of less
spontanteous?" is both. It has developed an extraordinary viral
momentum, but at the same time it has required a lot of work to
support and enable that. That is really where the Transition Network
comes in and why we have been so fortunate to secure some core funding
for that, which is what has enabled the Network to form and support
this viral growth.

What I find amazing is how the concept and the inspiration is reaching
further afield, in terms of what is happening elsewhere in the world.
Without our going on extensive international lecture tours, people
seem to be hearing about it and being inspired by it, which I think
will be facilitated enormously when the book comes out in February. It
feels to me that one of the reasons it has grown so fast is that it is
positive in a time where it is hard to find positivity,
solutions-based in a time when the problems are so glaringly obvious,
and fun, in a time where we're not supposed to have time for that any
more. I'd be interested to hear other peoples' thoughts on this one…

3. Are people in Transition Initiatives forming "public" institutions
like town banks, business incubators, workshops, working bees,
getting-rid-of-homelessness etc committees?

In Transition Town Totnes at the moment, some of these are being
addressed. Forming new banks is very very difficult in the UK given
the regulations, but the town already has a Credit Union, and we are
looking into the creation of new investment models that can allow
people to invest their money in such a way as to support the
relocalisation process. The Totnes Pound is, I suppose, a kind of
`public institution', and is currently setting up as a Community
Interest Company (CIC). One of the most exciting developments is that
TTT, together with the Town Council, the Chamber of Commerce and
various other local groups, have formed the Sustainable Business Park
group who are putting together a proposal for the Dairy Crest site in
Totnes, an 8 acre site, formerly home to a large milk processing plant
which closed a few months ago. The idea is to create, as you might
imagine, a sustainable business park, featuring a number of green
businesses, business incubator units, urban agriculture and training
facilities, powered by the nearby river and right next to the railway
station.

Also, recently launched in Totnes was TRESOC (the Totnes Renewable
Energy Society), which has emerged as a sister company to TTT, and
which is a Industrial and Provident Society which offers a mechanism
whereby people can invest money which is then used to install
renewable capacity. This is a very exciting development, and their
prospectus is due soon. We are hoping that our next programme of
events (January to April `08) will also trigger the establishment of a
Community Supported Agriculture scheme in the community.

4. Are there committees thinking about the needs of youth, aged,
disadvantaged in the locality…providing for them more satisfactorily,
and harnessing their labour skills and energy?

One of the things that is challenging about Transition work is that we
are starting to implement strategies that will be needed beyond the
peak when the economy is still booming. This is particularly the case
when it comes to complementary currencies like the Totnes Pound, but
is also the case with some of the things you are talking about. I
think that communities reorganising so as to take care of their own
elderly populations is something that we probably won't see on any
significant scale until the reality of peak oil and/or a major
recession really starts to bite.

We are trying to encourage as much volunteering as possible, and
increasingly to design big events that allow people to get involved.
We are also planning a short film competition for young people on the
theme of "Totnes in 2030″, an extension of the Transition Tales work
we have been doing in local schools. I think some of the other
Transition initiatives are also exploring interesting ways to draw in
as diverse a range of people as possible to the various aspects of
their work. I think that given that we are still at the top of the
economic curve, part of what Transition Initiatives are doing is
seeding the groups and reweaving the networks so as to make
appropriate responses possible when the severity of our situation
becomes more clear to more people once we pass the peak.

> Your right, definitely an article close to my heart! So how
> have things been going out your way, is everything going to plan?
>
Hmmm, things are slowly going to plan, I probably mentioned that I'm
getting back into LPG conversions and, long story short, I had to do
the TAFE course to get re licensed and graduated just last week.
Still have much work to do as the workshop also needs to be inspected,
insured and registered but I'm on the home stretch and should be open
by January (insurance is around $500 per month so it may be pointless
opening just as the suppliers are going on holiday) After several
years as a sole parent/student/pensioner it's a bit of a shock to be
budgeting in thousands instead of pennies but it's all coming together.

The woodgas producer has been on hold till the business comes together
but will feature prominently in the near future, there is a renewable
energy cooperative forming here and a grid tied generator that can run
on tree loppings and /or methane from dairy effluent would have a
ready market, I'm more excited by this prospect than any other but LPG
conversions are the bread and butter that make the woodgas development
possible; it all feels like "right livelihood" to me as a successful
business would allow constant training of apprentices and a
reinvigorated local LETS.

On the local level we have approval for a community garden here in
Wonthaggi (the soil tests passed, yay) with one of my wood fired pizza
ovens, there will also be a mens shed built adjacent to it. This will
be an exciting precinct as they adjoin Mitchell community house (the
auspicing body) the Apex park that hosts a community market, the
historical society in the railway station and the arts co-op at the
old goods shed, all on one block near the town centre (and across the
road from a pub)
My youngest is 18 and has just about left the nest and I'm 50 next
year, feels like a brand new day.

THE CENTURY OF ROOTS
by A.M Samsam Bakhtiari
http://www.sfu.ca/~asamsamb/sb.htm

The 21st century is still young as there are another ninety-three
years to go. So it might sound over-ambitious to claim that 'The Event
of the Century' is already behind us. But I'll gladly take the risk;
for I seriously believe that the peaking of the global production of
crude oil --- commonly know as 'Peak Oil' --- has occurred in 2006 [1]
and will be 'The Event' bound to dominate the history of the 21st
century: one of those 'Historical Inflection Points' [2] which
abruptly change "fundamentals" in the course of World History. I
cannot foresee any other 'Event' coming to eclipse 'Peak Oil', not
even the World Wars which might be unleashed in the Peak's aftermath
and further fueled by widespread resources' scarcity. Unless, of
course, humanity decides upon collective suicide with the massive use
of weapons of mass destruction; but such an annihilating 'Event' would
spell the word 'End' for most, if not all, of Mankind…

After some 147 years of almost uninterrupted supply growth to a record
output of some 81-82 million barrels/day [mb/d] in the summer of 2006,
crude oil production has since entered its irreversible decline. This
exceptional reversal alters the energy supply equation upon which life
on our planet is based. It will come to place pressure upon the use of
all other sources of energy --- be it natural gas, coal, nuclear
power, and all types of sundry renewables especially biofuels. It will
eventually come to affect everything else under the sun…

Take, for example, population. In the 'Post Peak' era, population
growth will gradually decrease before becoming stagnant (following
crude oil) and passing a Peak of its own --- my early projections show
a 'Population Peak' occurring some time around 2025 (a twenty-year lag
respective to oil) at a global level of around 7.5 to 8.0 billion
people. There is little doubt that crude oil is our world's 'Master
Domino': when it thrives all other dominoes flourish, and when it
tumbles it does topple all of the others too. Thus, interestingly,
'Peak Oil' will not usher in a revolution, but rather an evolution 'en
sense contraire' ('in reverse gear').

'Peak Oil', however, is now in the past and we are presently left
facing the 'Post Peak' era. There is little doubt that in this
brand-new period, massive changes are bound to occur. The usage of
relatively cheap crude oil has invaded every nook and cranny of our
modern world economy --- sometimes without the wasteful invasion being
fully realized. Moreover, the ubiquitous oil products have created
addictions (especially in the transport sector) which will be
extremely difficult to uproot. And, not only is the addiction to motor
cars common throughout the developed world, but it has also begun
making deep inroads in China, Russia and even India: a very dangerous
development indeed because as American physician and poet Oliver
Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) judiciously remarked:

"Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea,
never regains its original dimensions" [3]

It is not only addictions that the decline of crude oil is threatening
but ultimately what Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the genius turned
historian, called 'The System of Habits' --- the whole fabric
underpinning Society:

"Without such a System of Habits… in a word, fixed ways
of acting and of believing… Society would not exist at all.
With such it exists, better or worse. Herein too, in this its
System of Habits … lies the true Law-Code and
Constitution of a Society" [4]

In 'Post Peak', all of our Systems of Habits are in mortal danger. Due
to the relative cheapness of crude oil (in relation to other, more
expensive daily needs), people don't exactly realize the pivotal role
played by its products in their daily routines --- as these products
has invaded every nook and cranny of our modern life. It is only when
the brakes will be pulled (as they inevitably will have to be), that
the general public will come to gradually realize the critical
importance of 'Black Gold' --- which currently provides no less than
two-fifths of world energy --- and of 'Energy' in general, in their
living habits.

Thus, at present, the global masses seem totally unprepared for the
two shocks which will inevitably occur in 'Post Peak'. On the one
hand, no major institution or medium is willing to inform them
seriously on the not-so-palatable consequences of 'Post Peak'; and, on
other hand, specialized institutions (such as the 'International
Energy Agency' [IEA], the 'Energy Information Administration' [EIA]
and OPEC) as well as some major energy consultancies (e.g., the
'Cambridge Energy Research Associates' and the Edinburgh-based 'Wood
Mackenzie' research outfit) will go on denying 'Peak Oil' by issuing
rosy future oil output predictions.

So that the twin shocks are now inevitable on a global scale, as there
is no time left to prepare public opinion for 'Post Peak' sequels. The
shocks will first surprise, then jilt and finally entangle swaths of
people worldwide. Those better prepared will be less inclined to react
in a disorderly way and panic when the shocking truth will be unveiled...

For example, according to my personal research, the country best
prepared to cope with the 'Post Peak' shocks seems to be Australia
because three major institutions have led the way to boost public
awareness:

     A. The 'Australian Broadcasting Corporation' [ABC] --- on both its
TV and Radio networks --- has exposed its audiences to the 'Peak Oil'
phenomenon (always trying to remain impartial by presenting both the
pro and con views). A remarkable decision by ABC's top management
which will soon prove to have been very wise indeed.
     B. The Australian Senate has issued a 'White Paper' on the
subject, and also a plethora of enlightened regional ministers,
politicians and experts (sometimes acting together in ad hoc
committees) have endeavored to encourage the diffusion of the 'Peak
Oil' paradigm into the general public (with the Gold Medal clearly
going to the 'Western Australia' Cabinet of Ministers).
     C. The local NGO groups which have been active since 2003-2004 as
they became aware of the impending 'Peak', and have since taken giant
strides in preparing their constituents for the coming shocks.

But, in the large majority of countries, no one has prepared (or
wanted to prepare) the general public to the Historical 'Peak Oil'
Event and to its momentous consequence in their daily lives. Thus,
most probably, the popular masses will be directly exposed to two main
types of shock:

1. A Material Shock;
2. A Psychological Shock.

Due to the benign decline gradient in crude oil production during the
early 'Post Peak' period --- only 3 mb/d over the first transition
period spanning 2007 to 2010 --- the Material Shock will not pose
insoluble problems and accommodation will prove possible with minimal
gradual pain. Moreover, sizeable amounts of wastage in most developed
societies will provide a welcome cushion for the initial cuts to be made.

Not so for the Psychological Shock. This shock, in stark contrast,
will be electric and abrupt. Stress, fear, depression, despairs and
nightmares will be the order of the day --- as people come to face the
not-so-palatable facets of 'Post Peak'. When confronted with this
series of unknowns, with the trauma of Change, people will try to
protect themselves by automatically reverting to their past, to the
known, to what they believe to be "real and true" --- in a word, to
their reassuring 'Roots'…

I define the overall concept of 'Roots' as a mixture of traditions,
language, art, festivals, monuments, academies, museums, institutions,
religion, creeds, legends and myths --- and God knows that myths are
always infinitely more attractive than reality. Or still, 'Roots'
could be said to be

"Past Excellences that have withstood the Test of Time"

Every living society on Earth --- be it a community, a city, a region,
a country or a continent --- has its very own set of pell-mell
'Roots'. Some rather primitive, some extremely developed.
Interestingly, there is little correlation between a society's 'Roots'
and the present status of the 'Tree' it supports and nourishes --- the
former being in the Past, and the latter in the Present. But,
interestingly, the Future will come to depend more on the Past than
the Present…

Soon, the attraction of 'Roots' will prove irresistible, and woe to
those societies who have little or none, and to those who had some but
have cut them off (for example, by changing their language or
alphabet), and also to those who have failed to properly tend their
valuable 'Roots' over time.

Some, like the Belgians, have already begun their historical 'Return
to Roots' by trying to live in the Middle Ages (a glorious period for
their small country as its trading centers of Bruges and Antwerp were
then dominating the world). In Belgium, this return to the past

"has become a national passion… with groups of medieval
enthusiasts such as the 'Order of the Hagelanders' and
the 'Gentsche Ghesellen' [Ghent's Companions] having
sprouted up over the past two years" [5]

Across the country, a growing number of Belgians "are trading in their
jeans for suits of armor... they are rubbing stones together to make
fire, eating their dinners out of cauldrons, re-enacting heroic
battles… and, in their medieval life, appreciate the value of
everything they do".

In Europe, Belgium is only the top of the iceberg. Soon many others
will follow suit --- countries such as France, Germany, Spain, and
Italy. Especially Italy which is definitely 'Number One' in the world
(by miles) for her magnificent 'Roots' --- which reach deep in all
times and in almost every possible domain, with the Churches of St.
Peter (The Vatican) and that of St. Francis (The 'Porziuncola' at the
Basilica Santa Maria degli Angeli near Assisi) as two of her Unique
and Universal Beacons.

As usual, it will be the masterminds who will be showing the way
leading to their nations' collective 'Roots'. It makes sense that Men
of Excellence will be those pointing back to past Excellence. How they
will manage to do so (through the major institutions at their
fingertips) might prove of utmost importance for the future wellbeing
of their own society.

And, let us end with the verdict passed by one of the great
masterminds of the 20th century, French thinker Andre Malraux
(1901-1976), who paid the greatest possible homage to 'Roots' by
advancing that:

"Le seul monde qui vaille la peine d'etre sauve est le monde des statues"
["The only world worth saving is the world of statues"]

REFERENCES

[1] See paper 'Peak Oil: The End of The Modeling Phase' (March 2007)
on the website www.samsambakhtiari.com

[2] Taking the basic idea from the expression 'Strategic Inflection Point'
coined by Andrew Grove, the former 'Intel' CEO (1987-1998) --- in
his book entitled "Only the Paranoid Survive" (Doubleday, 1996).
Quoting:

"A Strategic Inflection Point is defined as: a time in the
life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change"

[3] 'Wikipedia' at http://en.wikipedia.org --- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

[4] Thomas Carlyle, "The French Revolution", (New York, The Modern
Library, 2002) p.33.

[5] Dan Bilefsky, "Pining for power, modern Belgians return to the
Middle Ages", in the 'International Herald Tribune', April 3, 2007.