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?
Showing posts with label global warming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label global warming. Show all posts
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.
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