Collapse -This is not a dress rehearsal

A beautiful Sunday morning in my pre-collapse world.  The only murmurings of our future state are in my head, breakfast is being served, and few interesting articles of note pop up on my morning screen.   I am always looking for news or data that would refute my premise, but quite frankly, I rarely find any that are based on real metrics or experience.  What I do run across this morning is confirmation of what I already suspected regarding our climate dilemma: 

http://tinyurl.com/bd7u4b

One area of comfort for me has been the readings in paleoclimatology with its reassurance that the universe is functioning perfectly and the planet is just seeking balance.  This balance will be achieved at the cost of the humans, but thats just the way it goes.  Payback is a bitch. 

So, okay, no shock here, just more confirmation.  I then stumble across a wonderful speech by my new hero Dimitry Orlov, a man whose humour and insight I find to be a pragmatic light as we move forward in the gathering gloom.  His experience and insight into the Collapse of the Soviet Empire, and most importantly his pragamtic advice on what to expect are a reality check for us all.  He resonates and informs me on my project here, this attempt to take all the policy, science, energy broad strokes and turn them into realizable personal daily actions of preparation and change.  He gives me a lens to focus this activity, and allows me to see the consequences that I should be preparing for.   Granted, I delineated these for myself back in 2005:  food, water, shelter, electricity.   The task I have set for myself is HOW to provide these with minimal inputs from the failing industrial and political and financial systems around me. Thats the experiment here, to answer the question of how do you live with sustainable natural inputs in a suburban setting.  

To date, my house is much more energy efficient in terms of heating and cooling, having been retrofitted with new windows, roof insulation etc etc.   I acquire tools and material on a regular basis, and half of my yard is now garden.   But in fact, I need a few more years, and in fact, that is probably all I have to secure the foundations of what I feel I need in place to surf the wave of the social and climate changes coming my way.

Here in Southern California, it becomes evident that drought will force us all to a more disciplined water management. This year, my focus is on water and gardens.  I intend to learn and implement the skills necessary to provide and manage the water for gardens, and to  continue the expansion of my food growing capacity here on this corner. Permaculture the surrounds, and learn, learn , learn about the low water techniques for gardening.  Maybe even re-read Dune.

Dimitry Orlov's speech resonated with everything I am attempting here.   When people speak from deep experience ( a la Matt "learn to grow food" Simmons)  I tend to listen.   Orlovs "Social Collapse Best Practices" is well worth the candle :

http://energybulletin.net/node/48082

Peace, drip,  and compost

Thom

 

Emergency Sequence Started...you have 3 minutes...

The more I watch this the more it feels like the closing sequence of Alien, as the planet and human economies keep repeating "you have 3 minutes to self destruct"  and Sigourney is running around looking for her cat...her cat for gods sake.  

Anyone ready to start the transition?  I am hearing all kinds of business as usual solutions, even from the Mahdi Obama, but not much discussion on re-thinking this whole centralized industrial era game that is folding up.  

Can we honestly look at the current manifestation of civilization, and say with confidence that it is working?  Or is it time to tear it apart, and begin a new paradigm?  Does centralized government, power, food, mfg and distribution make sense any more?  Or do we need to re-localize and create a new distributed model, an InterTown model of civil endeavour?   Towns of Towns make a country just as networks of networks make an Internet, a very effective way to distribute processing and facilitate communication while eliminating single points of failure within a system.  (I love peanut butter. single points of failure for peanut butter is really serious shyte to me.) 

When does the mainstream wake up and say The Emperor(s)  have no clothes, and have been butt ass naked and stealing my stuff for quite some time? Will this Greatest Depression be that time? It starts to appear so as I look at Europe and Russia and the rumblings beginning there.  Or, as a friend so lucidly points out, do we keep the game going with debt and stimulus, or do we just kick the can down the road to our grandchildren, and wring our hands about our lack of economic growth?   

I find it hopeful that David Meadows was honored by the Japanese last week - Limits To Growth now appears to make a lot of sense :)  I find it disturbing that we are in our 3rd consecutive year of drought here, with a big decline in Sierra snowpack.  (oh, just like those pesky computer climate models predicted).  

It's a finite planet , with finite resources. All energy ultimately comes from the sun.  This game can not sustain, so overshoot and collapse are the usual outcome of our type of behavior, whether it is Easter island, the Mayans, or a petri dish of yeast.  Are we ready for those consequences?     

For me, these are all rhetorical questions of course, I am still convinced we are watching the accelerating  train wreck of human civilization from economic greed and planetary abuse.  The klaxons are sounding on starship Earth, and ooooops.....there is no escape pod.  Too bad for us, this ain't hollywood...but have your people call my people and we'll do lunch.  

Peace Love and hope that the Navajo (or Amish) will adopt me, 

Thom

Overshoot

So, it's the 23rd of the month, payday is the 30th, and I am out of cash.  That's overshoot on a personal basis.  I use my credit card to make it through, thus stealing cash from next month, and hope to tighten up next month and have money left by the 30th, maybe enough to pay back the credit card.  Or maybe I just spread that borrowing over time, and let my kids pay it all back when I am dead.     

Scale that up, and thats how we live now on a macro level.  

The Limits to Growth, recently recognized by Japan (finally...see previous post)  lays out this scenario, several of them,  and demonstrate the effects of Overshoot.  In most cases, the effect is Collapse.  

Dana Visalli has provided a wonderful essay on this. (thank you Dana!!):  

http://www.methownaturalist.com/page16.html

The most salient line to me is what she writes here: 

 

In the end mind-based belief structures overwhelmed ecological reality, and the culture collapsed.

But wait!!!   WE are different,  right? WE have technology!!    WE are much more sophisticated than these silly Easter Islanders, or the Mayans, or the Anassi...or yeast.   All cultures that overconsumed beyond their carrying capacity pursuing mind based belief systems (except the yeast)... and...uh...collapsed.    

It can't happen here, right?  

Earth Overshoot Day 2008

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=overshoot

One useful definition of insanity is persisting in the same behaviors and expecting different results.   

Time to start moving our "mind-based belief structures" back to an accord with ecological reality.   Feed your mind.  

And with that, it's time for me to turn my compost.  

Question Progress

Complexity hides chicanery.  

There are times as I wander around in this civilization where I feel like a townie at a carnival shell game.   Just another mark to be suckered out of his dollar, which of course,  is what I am.  The few commercial human interactions I engage in are between myself and some poor clerk making minimum wage, slaving for some corporation that has appropriated the skill based economies of previous eras.  

"We work hard, so you don't have to".  This on a can of cleaner, this, the epitaph of our age.   In the name of "progress" we have surrendered the idea of work and skill as quality traits, for the idea of convenience and leisure.  What we did not realize is that with that, we also surrendered our freedom and self respect.  Our progress, as we can see now from the failing institutions around us, those institutions that assured us they could provide that wonderful life (failing to mention that they needed to destroy the planet in the process) is enslavement wrapped in the complexity of corporate legalese and government complicity.  

This isn't working.  I look around at the freeways, the high rises, the power lines, the carbon spewing vehicles, the tainted food, the collapsing economies,  the destruction of ecosystems required, absolutely required to maintain a material economy, the economic oppression of billions of people and I think ... "we couldn't have meant this, we could not have meant it to be like this."  Probably not, but someone did, and still does.  

This civilization is not working. 

The struggle for me, the fight for freedom, is not finding them and overthrowing them, or making them wear silly hats and signs and marching them through the streets.   The real struggle is in unplugging as an individual.   It is a struggle to re-discover the common skills that households contained just a short time ago, before we all lost our balls and became slaves to corporate convenience.

It's flashing in bright neon now:  This civilization can not sustain.   The oil that fuels it will dry up very soon, the climate is already seeking balance from our emmissions and waste, and our economies based on plunder are falling apart as I write this.   

Sure, sure it's a pipe dream, a fantasy, but it's time to shut off the machines.  Time to turn them off, melt them for new materials, and put everyone to work at a much slower pace.  Retrain for a slower, less energetic world, where my commercial interaction will be between the artisan, or a small shop keeper who knows the artisan, and my purchase of a fine tool, or a finely woven shirt.  One or two degress of separation between maker and user, rather than this tangled web of credit card purchased, ocean borne, sweat shop produced fabric that serves to only enrich a few hands, but equally serves to impoverish us all.    

This rant was prompted by this wonderful list of Victorian skills found here.  I would imagine that all of those brokers (borkers?) : P  might start here for finding a new skill that enriches us all. 

http://transitionculture.org/2009/01/22/the-200-artisan-skills-required-to-make-a-victorian-town-functional/  

Peace and bone carving, yeah.  

Limits

Some interesting articles on Limits :)  

Chris Clugston on America's Predicament

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/46892

...and reality always eventually gets recognized.  

Dr. Dennis Meadows, lead scientist and co-author of The Limits to Growth (1972) and its subsequent updates, is the winner of this year’s Japan Prize from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan for “Transformation towards a sustainable society in harmony with nature.”

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/47800

Tone up, Turn soil, Drop out. 

A Genocide in Progress

While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2, of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

In my random musings, I have thought that what we are about here, in 2009, with our Globalized Industrial economy, is a Genocide against the national and ethnical groups of humans who will be living in 2150.  Our weapons of choice will be climate change and the greed that now consumes ALL of the possible fossil fuel on the planet, leaving them nothing, basically bringing about physical destruction in whole or in part  of the poor people born towards the end of this century.  

And we go about it with zeal!  Our biggest concern is how to "save"  our economy, how to achieve "growth"  in this already rapacious commercial  orgy we are all trapped in.   If I look at the market, look at the economic news, I see a world population suffering the greed of the elites, and worried about what this means for their job, their few pieces of copper shyte that gets taxed away from them anyway.   

When I tilt my head a bit,  and look at what all this economic activity means to the natural foundations of this planet, what it bodes for the very near future and the upcoming generations, I see a genocide in progress.  I imagine how they will despise us, curse us, for our blindness and selfishness.   I imagine memorials erected in the Northern reaches, to all those who failed to escape the drought ridden hot zones of the planet, victims of the Boomers right to an American Way of Life  that is, and never was, a sustainable enterprise.  I imagine the sadness they will feel of watching a planet in ruin, a climate system run amock, an environment of violent changes that their own flesh and blood created just for them.  

I think about how 250 years ago, some clever people tried to create a new country,  after executing another genocide on the native population, and how that history of America does not seem so distant.  The ideas are still approachable, I can visit the homes of some of these people, see the Liberty Bell, walk the streets where the Declaration was signed, all of it still there in Philadelphia.  

 The results of the future genocide are much closer in time, a mere 90 years away.  Now, instead of good Germans, we are good Americans, I suppose.   Either way,  genocide is genocide, and we are commiting that NOW against the next generation of humans on this planet.  The sickness and evil of National Socialism inflicted a genocide of millions on the European population.   The sickness and evil of Capitalism will make that look like a minor turf war, as we inflict a genocide of billions on the next generation.  

End the Genocide!!  

I live the future by reducing, reusing, and backing away from the great commercial machines of genocide. I try to keep my meager pay, and learn to make what I need, grow what I need,  and discover my local place.  It is a struggle of change, as I am a sheep, lulled into thinking that the commercial markets provide all, that the corporations own all, and that government has my best interests at heart.  No surprise at that, as commerce spends billions just to create that message for me.     

I wake up and crawl towards the exit of this commercial insanity.  Come on, lets find some squirrels.