5 Years

Coffee Power

It is inspiring and fits in perfectly with my transition efforts. One of the experiments this year is making oil from the soy now growing in my yard (which was once a space buried under a concrete driveway). Granted, the amount of soy beans from the current planting will most likely provide me with a few meager quarts, but the benefits of soil nitrogen fixing and education are the important aspects of this at the moment. Coffee grounds! I've been composting them for years, but to be able to squeeze some liquid fuel AND still get the composting benefit is a new one for me. Will try this.

Although I live in the "failed state" of Sunny Southern California (LMAO), we still need a little heat in the winter. Standard fuel oil burning heaters will burn bio-diesel with no modifications. Replacing the natural gas heater with one of these, and a small bio-diesel processor provides another step on the road of unplugging from this collapsing large scale fragile system.

A few items of note that have shown up in the last few weeks for me:

This lecture is well worth the hour it takes to view it. Cal Tech chem professor Dr. Nate Lewis does the math on future energy, population and climate change out to 2050.

Ahhhhhh...The laws of nature, from which there is no escape.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures/feb08.cfm

Even the IEA thinks this current economic stimulus revival is a Head Fake:

A shortage of oil could trigger another global recession around 2013 – says the IEA. By 2010 the price will reach new highs.

The IEA in Paris is warning of a new, much more severe global economic crisis around 2013. The reason is that investments in oil from new projects are being cancelled by large oil companies. If demand starts increasing in 2010, the oil price could explode, fire up inflation and put global growth at risk.

"We are concerned, that oil companies are reducing their investment levels. When demand returns a supply shortage could appear. We are even predicting that this shortage could occur in 2013." Said Nobuo Tanaka, head of the IEA in an interview with Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

http://energybulletin.net/node/48582

AND one for my friend Robert Baron Bob. The Transition Towns idea is spreading rapidly and is a decent framework for self-organizing. Here is a story on the group in Boulder.

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2009/apr/10/transition-movement-boulder-sustainable-lives/

Plan C

I'm about halfway through PLAN C by Pat Murphy ISBN: 978-0-86571-607-0 which is inline with the sustainable town idea.

Plan A being business as usual which provides us with a 6 degree Centigrade global rise in temp by 2100. Game Over.

Plan B being techno solutions which allow us to be such warm fuzzy "Greens" and still have this ridiculous lifestyle.

Plan C which is based on curtailing fossil fuels and localizing our economy.

Plan D which is Die Off (interestingly the highest outcome of the scenario runs done by Limits to Growth models)

I find myself at Plan C.5 - somewhere between knowing that localization and curtailment, self reliance and small scale systems will be the path to provide a reasonably survivable future for my cute little grand-daughter, and realizing that humans are mostly too stupid to live and that G20 Plan A agreements are probably dooming us to a Permian extinction in the short term.

In parting, extrapolate Google. They create a hugely successful information processing infrastructure by utlizing small commodity PC's networked together. I am installing a similar system at work using the Apache Hadoop project. It works running on old PC's that were doomed for the child crawling electronic dumps in East Asia.

Take food, energy and transportation, localize them, use the already manufactured things (and coffee grounds) , and they scale up to a vibrant new economy based on recognizing Limits and reducing inequity. The fact that the robber baron corporatocracy will drown in a bathtub by doing this is a plus.

Note to self: Save the planet, stop buying corporate products.

Peace love and espresso powered heating,

Thom

Rollback

I'm a programmer.  I like computers, I like the mental space that writing software creates in me, and I like the benefits of ubiquitous computing and large databases.  In writing applications that talk to these databases you quickly master the concept of the Transaction.   A Transaction is a set of updates, inserts, deletes that must all succeed.  If they do succeed, you can then Commit the transaction and the new data is allowed to exist.   If they do not succeed, you can salvage the integrity of the data in the data tables by performing a Rollback.  Rollback restores the system to it's previous state and assures the integrity of the overall system.  

This serves as a simple metaphor for me as I continue on my way in an attempt to build a Future.  It seems quite apparent to me that this Transaction of the last 30 years, this economic growth spurt which looks like nothing less than a money grab by a small segment of society inspired and abetted by the Reagan/Thatcher/Friedman schools of conceptual thinking,  has failed.   A number of tables are now corrupt: the economic table, the energy table, the climate table, the social equality and justice table.   

In the database world, this realization would require a Rollback, but instead I read that the G20 is executing a Commit !!  They are committing to business as usual, attempting to stimulate the economies to new growth, new plunder while fleecing the taxpaying masses of money to reward the very people who created this untenable transaction, which oftentimes is themselves.  

Unfortunately,  this Commit is doomed to achieve exactly what a Commit of corrupted data would achieve in any software system.  The system will demostrate bugs, report bad data, and in worst cases, crash.   The geological realities of energy make this path a fools party, and I expect it to create a Head Fake - the economy appearing to recover in preparation for a much sharper decline.   The physics of available oil seems to indicate that this is what will transpire over the next 5-10 years: 

http://energybulletin.net/node/48530

Rollback.   It is time to Rollback the current transaction and return to the practices and lifestyles (the datasets)  that worked so well for tens of thousands of years.  Time for us to wake up to this ridiculous manner of living, one that was only possible in the last 100 years thanks to the oil bonus, and begin now to restore our lives, restore our communities, and restore our natural surroundings from the horrific damage created by the ethos of unbridled capitalist economics.  

A Rollback looks like localization.   It looks like self reliance.  It looks like dynamic Freedom, like Attitude in the face of aristocratic arrogance, like dancing.   It looks like baked pies,  suburban gardens, community interactions, re-use of the already manufactured things,  reducing the store bought, and learning how to actually DO something.   

If  I want destructive capitalism to disappear, it seems quite easy.  Stop buying their stuff.  Stop giving them my money, and rely more on my skill and knowledge, and abundant Nature, to provide the life I want.  Rely more on my neighbors than the corporations, rely more on myself than on my government, and rely entirely on the natural laws from which there is no escape.  

Rollback, and retain some integrity of Life.  Rollback, and make more time for dancing, and less time for slavery to the greed of the elites.  Rollback, and discover your Freedom.    

Take down a parking lot, put up a paradise

Now (soy)

Before

Arguments from an email exchange.  

Maybe so, Thom, but there are efficiencies in specialization. To overlook this is to overlook the strength of civilization. Will you make your own cabinets, run your own pipes and plumbing? Cut your own trees? Mill your own lumber? Mine your own iron ore? Smelt it into plowshares? Growing enough food to live on is a lot of fricking work! Joyce should chime in here. They have a serious garden down there in West Virginia, and it consumes a lot of hours, but they still both have to work outside jobs.

 

Specialization-including in food production-is what gives us leisure, isn't it? What are you recommending-a future of subsistence farming like they have in, oh say, sub-Saharan Africa? That sounds attractive. No? Well, once you have specialization in food production, (because it's more efficient), then you have specialization in other areas. Sure, everybody should have some tomato plants in their yard, some potatoes, whatever, but I don't think it will replace the economies of scale-and there are simply economies of scale in specialization-of farms.

My thoughts: 

The underlying reality is that current US food production is intensively fossil fuel dependent.   Harvesters, tractors, food processing, food transportation, refrigeration all depend on our supply of fuel.  In the last hundred years, by using this cheap fuel, we have been able to expand food production and allow the population to grow to its current level of 6.8 billion humans. This is what any organism will do, expand their population to the size of its available food supply.  The UN projects population growth to achieve 9 billion by 2050, a mere 40 years from now.  Got food?  

Now, here is the problem.  We both agree that current agri-biz food production is heavily reliant on diesel and other fossil fuels.  Over the next 40 years that supply of cheap fuel will disappear as we are now beginning the slide down the back side of the depletion curve.  Food will become much more expensive,  at least the industrial food that makes Americans so fat and happy.  And what of availability?  Will the trucks continue to roll into all the towns and cities with the diminishing production from the heartland?  One doesn't need to do the thought experiment too long to see the ramifications of  $300 a barrel oil and its impact on industrial food.  

Yes, gardening is hard work, let alone farming.  But if we roll back 150 years, we see that most households maintained a set of domestic skills and knowledge that allowed them to provide a large % of their own needs, a time when "store bought"  was the exception, not the rule.   This is not sub-saharan Africa, but Altadena 1870, Denver 1850, etc.  My contention is that  the Suburban Ortho-promoted lawn culture, should be replaced by a more self reliant, organic, knowledgable ethic of Home as the basis of all food security. That food production should become localized, and the first and fundamental effort is to provide that security from the bottom up, on suburban homesteads.  And keep in mind, this is 2009, we understand the chemistry and physics and systems behavior much better than the folks there in 1850.  It's not a reversion to primitivism, or a collapse into sub-saharan subsistence, but a change to our ideological belief systems to accord more with ecological realities.  

And of course, specialization comes into play!  My associate Wil has his small machine shop in his garage.  I work with wood. I grow soy, my neighbor grows lentils, up the street he grows cabbages.  The horses here provide compost, the landscape guy specializes in drip systems, the local health food store distributes, and other local specializations come to mind:  miller, sawyer, cannery, brewery, chemist, mill wright,   etc... 

This hardly looks like Sub-Saharan Africa, but more like a local self reliant community that consumes its natural bounty within the limits set by nature.  A local community that establishes a nutrient cycle of (food - compost - food), rather than (salmonella laced crap wrapped in plastic - landfill).  The food-compost-nutrient cycle replenishes the soil, and removes the organic toxins currently used to produce food from the eco-system.  Over time, natural systems can cleanse and rejuvenate the soil, river and air systems on which our very life depends as opposed to our current system for food production which depletes the soil, relies on diminishing non-renewables, and creates dead zones in our oceans. 

I am watching this process in my own garden right now, as I take dirt that was buried beneath a concrete driveway for 30 years, and transform it magically into Soil through adding compost, planting soil enriching legumes, and adding worms and more compost every chance I get.  Within a few years, this area that was once just constuction dirt, will be a rich loam capable of providing me with some seriously luscious veggies. The coolest part is that Life shows up, the bugs, the bees, the birds, the bats, all appear over time.  The fact that I get some delicious peas and edemame from it is almost secondary.  

And of course this lifestyle, which I contend will be forced on our grandchildren, has less leisure than now.  If by leisure you mean sitting on a couch watching American Idol, this is not a bad thing.  The leisure time we will have will be more precious, and more deserved.  Those parasites of society that excessive food production has allowed to exist: the stock brokers, derivative traders, bank executives, etc ...  will most likely no longer be a luxury we can afford to feed.    

As a student of history you can surely see that human life has been thus for hundred of thousands of years, and that this current manner of living was and is only made possible by our discovery of oil, and its attendant energy bonus.  As we proceed down the depletion curve, rolling back to previous methods of living and more useful specializations will be either embraced pro-actively, or forced upon us by the geological realities now apparent.  

And the climate wild card is just that, a very wild card.  It may turn out that the only places able to grow food reliably are northen Canada and Siberia. Too bad for me, I can't eat cactus all year.   

Clippety Clop

Yesterday was a whiff, a tiny sniff of a possible future state.  Celebrating our Equinox I was out in the garden watering the peas and soy (my garden for the garden, the veggies come after this batch of soil enhancing legumes is done) when I heard a sound which was normal 100 years ago, but now  is a rarity. The clip clop of horses hooves.  

Coming down the street was a young man walking his horse.  "I just thought I would stop by and let him eat some of (my neighbor) Joy's grass, its good for him and good for her. "   And here, on this suburban corner, outside of one of the worlds megalopoli , was a magnificent creature,  mowing my neighbors lawn.   I asked Tim (the young horse owner)  if his horse liked carrots, and proceeded to go and pull some of my remaining carrot crop to feed to his horse.   

Tim was amazed that they were "home grown".   I can only imagine that he expected me to go and pull a plastic bag out of the refrigerator, with perfectly shaped and topped off carrots,  consumer perfect products of the industrial food chain.   Instead he received some comparativley mishapened carrots with some brown leaves in the tops, and small roots porcupining off the tap root.  His horse, being more sensible than most consumers, was delighted, and proceeded to relish each carrot that was fed him.  

And so, a small collection of possibilities, random intersections of activity, and I felt the surreal nature of a future state interleaved with the modern petroleum based present - community interaction, neighbors interacting, through the vehicles of horse and garden, made more surreal by the cars going by and the sterile Ortho-Lawns along the suburban street.   

Horses??  Gardens??  We don't have to go back to all that, do we??   I hear this reaction to 1860 with laptops quite a bit,  the sneer barely hidden, and the idea immediately discounted out of hand.   But as the consensus grows that global oil production has peaked and that we are now on the back side of the Hubbert curve, the depletion side,  I would ask do you really expect your car to be a viable transportation mechanism when gasoline is $16usd a gallon?   Is using for transportation a vehicle that produces little CO2, whose waste can replenish the soil , and who provides beauty and power, such a silly idea?   When the fuel needed for it is a non-polluting energy store that can be grow, that requires no supertankers,  no mining,  no armies to defend it, and that when processed through the "engine" can be returned to the ecosystem as a benefit?  

Gardens, now that is an easier transformation to grasp.  Although at the moment  "you must be the only one in the neighborhood growing their own vegetables" says Tim,  this will change much sooner than horses showing up on our streets as a normal mode of transport.   My president is putting in a garden ( how cool is that!) which may do more good for us than any policy decision.   As people begin to realize that large percentages of countries production are coming from small household gardens (80% of Russian potatoes comes to mind) then the concept of the suburbs as the organic grow zone around the city may begin to make much more sense to the current Ortho-Lawn types.   As diesel, the foundation of our industrial food chain, becomes increasingly more expensive over the coming decade, the budgetary impact of the household garden will do more than anything to make this a commonplace of future life.    

The impetus for me, as I explained to my neighbor, is to learn how to garden.   To begin NOW, while I have time for all the mistakes and fumbles, to establish the gardening skills and habits, to make this a part of my daily life BEFORE it becomes a necessity.   It takes time to replenish soil, time to discover the micro-environments of your lawn, time to gain the knowledge of the growing things.  Add the storage and preservation aspect of a personal food supply, and there is much to be done in participating in this great transition.  Gardening is the easiest piece of the future  to put into place. 

 

The horses might take a while longer.  

 

  

Our Cellular Song

There are days when I think - wtf am I doing here, really?  I zoom out from my little corner on Google Earth, and realize what a tiny mote this is,  a meaningless parcel on a meaningless corner of Los Angeles County.   Dust in the wind, in the long term we're all dead, the universe is functioning perfectly, sure sure,  BUT I am alive now, right now, and have a vested interest in the near future!   At times like these I will stumble across an essay that puts this in perspective, or at least affirms my efforts here.  Slow change.  Bottom up.   Garden by garden.  

The healing power of the small. 

As the governor announces a water emergency,  it now appears not only prescient, but mandatory that I continue my studies in water management and  low water growing.  Policy being dictated by ecological truth.   The climate models point to drought for the SouthWest, so drought and water conservation will be our struggle here.  Those living along the coast may deal with rising seas, and those up north may deal with flooding, but we all surely will deal with some manifestation of the ongoing climate change event.  The oil depletion scenarios will just add more excitement to the mix over the coming decades.   We must create 1860 with laptops willingly, or we surely will have some more repressive and chaotic society impressed on us by necessity.     

Learn to grow food.  Not because you will realistically be able to provide all of your sustenance, but so that you can connect again to Life, and the natural processes.  This is my experience.  That the simple act of turning soil, planting a seed - even if only in a small container on an apartment balcony- is a step forward to a surviveable future.  It changes my  awareness, pulls me back from the abyss of shrink wrapped poly carbon consumer slavery, and returns me to the deeper fundamentals of Life, to my place in the web of Life, and allows me the freedom and insight to question the current manifestation of our destruction based culture.   It allows the signal of abundant Nature to get through the marketing noise, get through the talking head screaming pundits, get through the dominant culture noise, and see Life and Nature not as a resource base, not as a product, but as the only true foundation on which we all rest.  

Your garden will not be televised. 

My Seeds of Change are in my garden now.  It is heartening to hear from other sources that they also perceive this path as being an appropriate response, a useful step towards a surviveable future.   And that is why I post my little thoughts here, to support and encourage anyone else out there, anyone striving garden by garden to create the future we need. We are not alone, and we are not wasting our time, we are in fact the cellular engines of our much needed culture change.  

Sing your cellular song!!  See you in the garden!  

From Alexis Zeigler - Silent Armageddon 

We have become focused on “alternative” energy production, in spite of the fact that these technologies are not a real solution. The real solutions are actually fairly easy. They simply involve doing what we will be doing in the future -- using resources cooperatively -- a little sooner than we are compelled to do so. Unwinding the throughput economy cannot and will not be achieved by enlightened social policy. The throughput economy can only be changed by a bottom-up movement that seeks fundamental structural change in our society.

Phrases like “culture change” or “conscious culture” seem to evoke the image that we should all play nice -- liberal utopianism. A real understanding of culture leads us to the conclusion that the ecological and economic foundations of a society have a dominating influence over the social structure and belief system over time. A sustainable future does not mean we teach everyone to be tolerant. Though there is no harm in such lessons here and now, to achieve real “culture change” means rebuilding society from the bottom up, building a truly localized and sustainable society. You might imagine that is unlikely, but that is precisely what is going to happen, either by plan or by default. The latter would be much messier, and lead to a society that is neither equitable nor conscious. By getting ahead of the curve, we could arrive at the same point, but in a society that is conscious of its own process of social evolution. That society will not be a liberal utopia. It will be a sustainable society where power is devolved to the community level so people are empowered to defend themselves, and to create the future they want. It will not happen by policy, nor will it ever be announced on the evening news. It will happen as the minority movement of people who want to see it happen grows through the coming waves of change. See you in the street.

Bullets or Beans

It seems that a typical reaction of most middle class men to the idea of societal collapse from peak oil and climate change is an immediate move to "survivalist" requirements.   The thought that many bullets will ensure security, and that they will be one of the survivors thanks to their mighty arsenal, has come up a few times in my conversations with people.  Also implied in their advice is  that my efforts are pointless because the gangs will come and rip out my gardens and take my solar panels.  Well, they might!  Or maybe they just move in, and end up being a security force.   

For example, here is a kind suggestion from a reader:

I would not want to bank on survival in the LA area without major fortifications at your urban kabbutz. So I'd increase your capital spend plan over next 2 years to include:

 

6 foot fencing with razor wire top and electrification option

Water purification system for long periods of isolation due to public unrest

Ditto for Electric generation -- large diesel generator and storage capacity -- careful diesel does not store well longer than 1 year.

Double Barrell shotgun

Hand Gun

Ammunition -- 1 year supply assuming all local sources depleted

Medical Supplies

Batteries for Cell Phones

Emergency Radio

A couple fierce dogs might also be good but they need to be feed so there are trade offs

All of this defensive posturing completely misses the point.  The point is not to build a compound isolated from my surrounding community, as if the neighbors and gang members that live here are somehow Other, and not interested in living comfortably as well.   

The point is building the Future.   The point is discovering at this very low level of a suburban corner HOW to live in accord with our natural foundations here, HOW to live unplugged from the industrial food chain, HOW to create local food security as we move beyond the oil dependent concept of Suburb.  It's not about "survival" at all, its about the Future.  

We all can't move to Oregon.   We all can't run to the hills.  That illusion I abused back in 2005. We need to stay where we are, and put our efforts into transforming our communities back into the heaven they were before oil and coal created this suburban consumer nightmare.   Localizing, permaculturing, and developing LOCAL light industry can create the thriving LOCAL economy that is true security.  

Beans over bullets. 

I can't eat bullets, you can't eat bullets, my neighbor can't eat bullets, and a gun makes for a very poor shovel.  My choice is to learn the skills I need to provide my requirements here on a little corner of Los Angeles.   If the imaginary raging hoardes of Angelinos suddenly appear on my doorstep to steal my solar panels, well, thats how it goes.   Maybe I can recruit them to help with the compost, or maybe I become one of the billions of people that this planet will shed over the next hundred years.  Either way, I am storing beans, not bullets.   

Peace and compost,

Thom