How many of us here will live to be 102?
How many of our kids will live to be 82?
How many of their kids will live to be 52?
Will we be the first generation that fails to provide survival information to our progeny? As we begin to experience the planetary climate adjustment, the likes of which we have not seen for 20,000 years (the Last Glacial Maximum) it seems possible that whatever info we can provide our children will be relatively useless. Our climb into civilization, if it can be called such, has been possible because of the relative stability of our planets climate. As it becomes evident that this period of stability has ended, what useful information can we give them? Plastics? Get an MBA? Be a lawyer? Get an aerospace engineering degree? Be a rock star?
Or does, learn how to do with less, learn how to manage your food supply, learn how electricity works, learn how to make things yourself, make more sense? And if it does, how can we impart that when most of us don't have that knowledge to begin with? When we live in a faith based society - I believe the electric company will continuously supply me power, I believe the food will be on the A&P shelf, I believe I will be able to drive my car tomorrow - when we deal with this kind of low level faith every day, what do we do when the gods go away?
Taking the position of the reality of our looming bottleneck of problems: population, oil and energy, water, climate change; the next 50 years will determine how we embrace our future, or more accurately, the future we leave the coming generations, our kids and theirs. What I don't see in the media, or governmental debates, is the sense of urgency that a reading of the data relating to all of this should produce. We have talked about voting with our wallets, writing our reps, debating the benefits of wood burning pellet stoves, and even wasted bandwidth on debating the scientific basis for anthropogenic climate change. All of it has been interesting discussion, but little of it helps us to build the future in a concrete sense. And seeing how it is quite evident that we will not see any leadership at the federal level on this, we are left to our own resources.
This is happening now. Today, 3/26/2006. Peak oil is here, climate change is here. The manner of living we have known for our entire lifetime, and our parent's lifetime, is over. O-V-E-R.
Building the future will require a different set of premises, and a different set of skills. If we remain sanguine in the face of millions of refugees within the US, if we remain sanguine in the face of an economy relying on a diminishing resource, if we remain sanguine in the face of drought and famine, we can only do so by knowing we are acting Now, and not cooking our generations books by off loading the environmental consequences onto our children.
No matter the cause, anthropogenic or sunspots, the thought of dealing in 2080 with millions of refugees, New Yorkers and Floridians, roaming the country essentially homeless, should give all of us pause. The rise in sea level will force these millions out into the country, and at a time when oil, our foundation energy source, has depleted to a few small remaining pools. The ability of us to deal with a small disaster like Katrina should abide as our abject lesson in the scale of the coming displacements. The latest report of millions in refugee camps and political disruption may very well be coming from the US in a very near future.
The meme of urgency needs to spread. The realization of this epochal shift, forget the blame of how and why, raises serious concerns about the viability of our institutions and their continuance. The premise of catastrophic climate change coupled with the depletion curve of our business as usual energy base makes everything else pale in comparison. It should galvanize our greatest efforts as individuals and as a nation to prepare for a time we know little about, a new era that will be evident within our lifetimes.
Sustainable living in the suburbs seems like an impossible task. It is only easy when compared to living in a collapsing society of refugees, where the infrastructures and institutions are incapable of providing enough assistance, where the economy is crippled, and where the effects of destroying the natural fundaments on which we depend are being manifested all around us. It can't happen here, right?
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
It's All About Me!!
I need a restructuring of how I live. I need a reduction in energy consumption, a commitment to a zero carbon lifestyle, and a learning of new skills and techniques that replace the global industrialized set of assumptions that passed as "knowledge" in the Age of Oil.
Not Them, not We, not You. Them-We-You will never do it.
I. Me.
I can't waste time railing at anyone else, or waiting for anyone else to do this, or merely enjoy writing and reading the position papers on oil peak and global warming. I can't read another book about peak oil that would tell me anything new, or learn more about global warming. The U.N. and the Fourth Assesment Report defines our dilemma quite clearly. I can't live in the problem any longer.
What I can do is discover and connect with the people who are in my community who see the twenty year timeline of disruptive changes, people who understand that the storm clouds on the horizon, the storm of Peak Oil and the hellfire of global warming, are not going to dissipate but are getting darker and headed right this way. These people are not on a web site in Australia, not on Stephen Gaskin's Farm, but right here in Altadena. Surprisingly, there are a number of us, and even more in the greater Los Angeles area. People who are finished with the discussion and are now quietly going about the business of building the future.
This industrial economy with its waste, over-consumption, and non-sustainable development took 100+ years to put together, using the best minds of the time, and a lot of really cheap energy. It is going to take some time to tear it apart, to back it off, to retreat and rethink. It is quite possible that we don't have that time, but a beginning must be made nevertheless.
A beginning, for me, is made by shopping locally, supporting carbon trading, CFL's, gardening, building community, learning new skills, reducing my own consumption of everything, reusing whatever I can, and working the inner game of adjusting to a low energy life by questioning most of the premises I was taught and by not accepting this insane destruction as normal life.
For those of us unable at the moment to install a PV array or buy a hybrid, either economic or logistic, there are carbon offsets which can be purchased until you can get there yourself. I am buying 10,000kwh from Native Energy for my household use, and some TerraPass offsets for my vehicles. These credits go towards purchasing audited wind and solar electrons that are put on the grid, offsetting my electrons I get now from natural gas.
It's not a get out of jail free card - I still need to get the bio-diesel vehicle, or pluggable hybrid, and my solar PV, 400 sq ft of it. I still need to achieve the goal of an elegant lifestyle with zero carbon, but until I can get those components in place, I can offset and support and promote carbon reduction schemes. And I can continue on a daily basis to commit to changing my habits and thinking, commit to my project plan, and thus build the future.
Humans created this consumer/industrial nightmare day by day since 1860, put it on steroids since 1970, and now are at warp speed it seems in 2006. The last great crescendo. Humans can tear it apart day by day just as well and build it anew on our new found premises of sun and wind and the very certain knowledge that that which destroys Life, destroys us.
Not Them, not We, not You. Them-We-You will never do it.
I. Me.
I can't waste time railing at anyone else, or waiting for anyone else to do this, or merely enjoy writing and reading the position papers on oil peak and global warming. I can't read another book about peak oil that would tell me anything new, or learn more about global warming. The U.N. and the Fourth Assesment Report defines our dilemma quite clearly. I can't live in the problem any longer.
What I can do is discover and connect with the people who are in my community who see the twenty year timeline of disruptive changes, people who understand that the storm clouds on the horizon, the storm of Peak Oil and the hellfire of global warming, are not going to dissipate but are getting darker and headed right this way. These people are not on a web site in Australia, not on Stephen Gaskin's Farm, but right here in Altadena. Surprisingly, there are a number of us, and even more in the greater Los Angeles area. People who are finished with the discussion and are now quietly going about the business of building the future.
This industrial economy with its waste, over-consumption, and non-sustainable development took 100+ years to put together, using the best minds of the time, and a lot of really cheap energy. It is going to take some time to tear it apart, to back it off, to retreat and rethink. It is quite possible that we don't have that time, but a beginning must be made nevertheless.
A beginning, for me, is made by shopping locally, supporting carbon trading, CFL's, gardening, building community, learning new skills, reducing my own consumption of everything, reusing whatever I can, and working the inner game of adjusting to a low energy life by questioning most of the premises I was taught and by not accepting this insane destruction as normal life.
For those of us unable at the moment to install a PV array or buy a hybrid, either economic or logistic, there are carbon offsets which can be purchased until you can get there yourself. I am buying 10,000kwh from Native Energy for my household use, and some TerraPass offsets for my vehicles. These credits go towards purchasing audited wind and solar electrons that are put on the grid, offsetting my electrons I get now from natural gas.
It's not a get out of jail free card - I still need to get the bio-diesel vehicle, or pluggable hybrid, and my solar PV, 400 sq ft of it. I still need to achieve the goal of an elegant lifestyle with zero carbon, but until I can get those components in place, I can offset and support and promote carbon reduction schemes. And I can continue on a daily basis to commit to changing my habits and thinking, commit to my project plan, and thus build the future.
Humans created this consumer/industrial nightmare day by day since 1860, put it on steroids since 1970, and now are at warp speed it seems in 2006. The last great crescendo. Humans can tear it apart day by day just as well and build it anew on our new found premises of sun and wind and the very certain knowledge that that which destroys Life, destroys us.
Healing Power of the Small
Thoughts to an email list:
The guy in the Winnebago, or Hummer, or 5000 sq ft home, buying stuff he doesn’t need by the truckload from some Big Box store, is the engine. The aristocracy, advertising media, and politicos are the fuel, it would seem. The problem is not that we are using some energy to stay warm, or take a hot shower, or even flying to China or Brazil to experience foreign cultures. The problem is greed wrapped in the flag of efficiency, of pillaging wrapped in the banner of growth, and of dishonesty wrapped in the shroud of accounting.
The problem is you and me, and 6.5 Billion people all wanting to live like you or me, or any other struggling American middle class denizen. If the population of China were to consume (and waste) paper like we do here, which economically they are projected to be able to achieve by 2030, it will take 2 planet Earths to allow them to do that. Let the Indians play too and now we need 3 Earths. That is just wood, it is like that with everything else.
The problem is that our Western economic models are based on growth at any cost, and are not able to sustain a population of 6.5 billion, soon to be 7 billion. This economic model relies on advertising and media to create a culture of consumption, disposables, and planned obsolescence; which seemed to work just fine in 1955, but is killing us surely in 2006. Moving that model to China is just not possible, there just isn’t enough stuff.
The problem is that being “green” is still “alternative”, when it needs to become the way we live. People expect electricity in their homes, like magic, without a thought of the acid rain or CO2 produced when it is generated. People want hard wood floors, without a thought of clear cutting and flooding. People want, why we demand, cheap gasoline, without a thought to the geological realities of a limited resource which is frankly too precious to burn. When I turn on a light now, I think “burning coal” . That simple mantra has translated into a habit of turning off lights when I leave a room. It didn’t take long to turn that into a normal habit of every day life. Buying wood from a sustainable forest, putting in a cleaner furnace, putting up solar arrays, recycling, composting….none of these things should even be worth mentioning, none of these should be commendable, but just part of daily life.
Back again to the old phrase of the 19th century, a phrase that displays the consciousness of cost when using energy. “I read his poetry, but it wasn’t worth the candle”. At least then, they had an awareness in the language of the effort and cost of making the resource, that there was a tangible cost associated with generating the light. Today, I stand up on the trail at twilight and look out over the San Gabriel Valley, into the Oz like spires of downtown Los Angeles, all brightly lit, the glow apparent even from space. I connect the dots to the generator, then to the coal (or natural gas), then to the strip mined mountain, then back to the air I must breathe, to the high tension towers marring my mountains, to the vehicles spewing along the freeway, to the gas pump that fuels them, the refineries that offload the crude from the Middle East where we have pissed away billions and lives to protect that flow…. Yeah, it is all of a piece, and it is all of us, and all of them, the great planetary consumption machine. And most people don’t have any idea how it works, it's all magic.
Which is why when Marcus buys a wood stove, or Richard intalls a solar array, or you switch to natural gas… It Matters. It moves us another step toward the future we need to create, the future of electricity from the sun, the future of wind turbines on the prairie, the future of silent electric vehicles floating down the freeway, the future of clean local food and water, of renewable energy and sustainable forests. Not some green pipe dream, but a real vibrant economic reality based on sustainable practice, telling the ecological truth, and living as if nature mattered. And yes, spending the money to get there, demanding that respect for all life is applied in all circumstances, and demanding accountability. I wouldn’t smoke at your dinner table, why is it okay to allow these manufacturers and vehicles to smoke in my air ?
I can begin and put in CFL or LED lights all over my house, and turn my thermostat down 5 degrees. I can drop the 25 large and put in the solar array and switch my vehicles to bio diesel. I can learn how to grow a garden, tear out the front lawn and permaculture my surrounds. We can all start looking at the ways we can move our suburban homes to a sustainable life style. Death to Suburbia, its day is over. Elegant living with a small footprint and stop blaming and feeling guilty. Individual actions like this are our only hope - the individual rejection of the hyper consumption based society and the acceptance of the additional work and effort it will now take to create a world that can continue as a foundation for the finer efforts of the human spirit. Mozart and Bach both composed by candlelight.
The only hope I see for the humans, and other life forms, is to start building that future step by step. Right Now. A future that provides the requirements of life for all people, a future whose economy doesn't rely on poisoning the planet, a future where people live as if Nature mattered. My small actions, and others small actions, will accumulate and allow us to heal our natural foundations. Small steps, small improvements, over time.
The healing power of the small.
The guy in the Winnebago, or Hummer, or 5000 sq ft home, buying stuff he doesn’t need by the truckload from some Big Box store, is the engine. The aristocracy, advertising media, and politicos are the fuel, it would seem. The problem is not that we are using some energy to stay warm, or take a hot shower, or even flying to China or Brazil to experience foreign cultures. The problem is greed wrapped in the flag of efficiency, of pillaging wrapped in the banner of growth, and of dishonesty wrapped in the shroud of accounting.
The problem is you and me, and 6.5 Billion people all wanting to live like you or me, or any other struggling American middle class denizen. If the population of China were to consume (and waste) paper like we do here, which economically they are projected to be able to achieve by 2030, it will take 2 planet Earths to allow them to do that. Let the Indians play too and now we need 3 Earths. That is just wood, it is like that with everything else.
The problem is that our Western economic models are based on growth at any cost, and are not able to sustain a population of 6.5 billion, soon to be 7 billion. This economic model relies on advertising and media to create a culture of consumption, disposables, and planned obsolescence; which seemed to work just fine in 1955, but is killing us surely in 2006. Moving that model to China is just not possible, there just isn’t enough stuff.
The problem is that being “green” is still “alternative”, when it needs to become the way we live. People expect electricity in their homes, like magic, without a thought of the acid rain or CO2 produced when it is generated. People want hard wood floors, without a thought of clear cutting and flooding. People want, why we demand, cheap gasoline, without a thought to the geological realities of a limited resource which is frankly too precious to burn. When I turn on a light now, I think “burning coal” . That simple mantra has translated into a habit of turning off lights when I leave a room. It didn’t take long to turn that into a normal habit of every day life. Buying wood from a sustainable forest, putting in a cleaner furnace, putting up solar arrays, recycling, composting….none of these things should even be worth mentioning, none of these should be commendable, but just part of daily life.
Back again to the old phrase of the 19th century, a phrase that displays the consciousness of cost when using energy. “I read his poetry, but it wasn’t worth the candle”. At least then, they had an awareness in the language of the effort and cost of making the resource, that there was a tangible cost associated with generating the light. Today, I stand up on the trail at twilight and look out over the San Gabriel Valley, into the Oz like spires of downtown Los Angeles, all brightly lit, the glow apparent even from space. I connect the dots to the generator, then to the coal (or natural gas), then to the strip mined mountain, then back to the air I must breathe, to the high tension towers marring my mountains, to the vehicles spewing along the freeway, to the gas pump that fuels them, the refineries that offload the crude from the Middle East where we have pissed away billions and lives to protect that flow…. Yeah, it is all of a piece, and it is all of us, and all of them, the great planetary consumption machine. And most people don’t have any idea how it works, it's all magic.
Which is why when Marcus buys a wood stove, or Richard intalls a solar array, or you switch to natural gas… It Matters. It moves us another step toward the future we need to create, the future of electricity from the sun, the future of wind turbines on the prairie, the future of silent electric vehicles floating down the freeway, the future of clean local food and water, of renewable energy and sustainable forests. Not some green pipe dream, but a real vibrant economic reality based on sustainable practice, telling the ecological truth, and living as if nature mattered. And yes, spending the money to get there, demanding that respect for all life is applied in all circumstances, and demanding accountability. I wouldn’t smoke at your dinner table, why is it okay to allow these manufacturers and vehicles to smoke in my air ?
I can begin and put in CFL or LED lights all over my house, and turn my thermostat down 5 degrees. I can drop the 25 large and put in the solar array and switch my vehicles to bio diesel. I can learn how to grow a garden, tear out the front lawn and permaculture my surrounds. We can all start looking at the ways we can move our suburban homes to a sustainable life style. Death to Suburbia, its day is over. Elegant living with a small footprint and stop blaming and feeling guilty. Individual actions like this are our only hope - the individual rejection of the hyper consumption based society and the acceptance of the additional work and effort it will now take to create a world that can continue as a foundation for the finer efforts of the human spirit. Mozart and Bach both composed by candlelight.
The only hope I see for the humans, and other life forms, is to start building that future step by step. Right Now. A future that provides the requirements of life for all people, a future whose economy doesn't rely on poisoning the planet, a future where people live as if Nature mattered. My small actions, and others small actions, will accumulate and allow us to heal our natural foundations. Small steps, small improvements, over time.
The healing power of the small.
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