Micro-Skills

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

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

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

- my friend Bob from an email list

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rely on Nature, the carnival shell game is over.

Thom

P.S.

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