Mountain Mandala

Happiness Begins With Compost

Fresh food.  Healthy bodies.  Smart minds.  Well Being.  Security.  Warm in winter, cool in summer, and a nice hot shower. Computers, Gardens, and Music.   Abiding Happiness.
 
These are for me, the best of life, and the foundation required to realize  my own potential as a sentient being in this wondrous universe.   No matter the endeavor - writing some wicked Android code, or spinning psytrance in a virtual world, or producing a tasty track of electronic eargasm, or writing,  or working in my small shop battling a luthier’s dream, or trying to understand the latest issue of Science magazine, or planning a night out at the opera or a week at Burning Man, the beginning of all this happiness is  my compost pile. 

It is clear to me that the rest of my life will be spent surfing the huge energy gradient we will be sliding down as oil depletes and the world realizes we should have been planning for this 40 years ago.   8 years ago for me  it was the warning being raised by the likes  of Kunstler, Heinberg, Campbell, Greer, Orlov, and certainly being affirmed and validated by the 30 year update of Limits to Growth that drove my panic to seek the escape farm.  Upon my return to my suburban home, I realized I had it all right here, and there really is no where to go other than where you are.  It’s the space where you are that needs to change. 

As mentioned earlier, I got the message, and began the transition.  My ‘panic’  has been tempered a bit, and I see a Long Descent (Greer) and a Long Emergency (Kunstler) as being the way of it.  But is IS underway.  Look out your window, fill up your tank, buy some groceries, paying your heating bill, and you will feel it unfolding.  The Brent Spot price for a barrel of oil is 118.86 as I write this.  This is 3 years after the worst economy   since the Great Depression.  In the current agricultural, food processing and distribution system,  Oil=Food.  Got Oil? 

An appropriate solution for suburban dwellers  is in becoming as self –reliant as possible.  As local as possible.   I begin to produce food around my house, learn how to store it,  begin to understand the energy requirements in my suburban household,  begin to trust my skill and begin to make the changes.  I make the transition from a mental  map based on the realities of 1930 (40 years before U.S. peak oil production)  to a mental map that is based on the realities of 2010 (40 years after U.S. peak oil production).   My expectations, my responsibilities, my priorities are now adjusting to a future with 70% less energy than I have known in my lifetime.

Oil and food are so tightly connected in this current social system, that the expense of feeding myself can be projected just by watching the gas stations change their prices.   I certainly don’t expect to be able to produce every morsel of my diet,  but knocking 40-60% off my grocery bill by eating  guaranteed  organically grown, salmonella free, un-processed vegetables, soups and salads moves me a lot further along into my own  sustainable future.  My only cost is sweat of my brow, same as it ever was.

The true pillar of this abiding happiness is, believe it or not,  Compost.  The beginning of the journey to a more self reliant future, to a future based on wind and sun, to a future economy that maintains rather than grows, to a future with less toxins, less radiation, less anxiety,  is one compost pile.  In My yard (and yours). 
Food not Lawn.  Compost, not petrochemicals.  Organics, not pesticides.  Clean food for clean bodies and smart minds. 

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the train has left the station for the demise of Industrial civilization. Rather than being a set of chilling thought experiments or doomer fantasies, the Long Descent now underway will be an exciting time of innovation, action movie, and zombie technologies morphing into a new way of life.

Out of the Fog of Collapse there are a few voices of clarity that stand out due to their pragmatic, realistic, yet hopeful suggestions for a way to proceed. Some apply dark humour, some provide dry dusty data, and some provide integration of the data sets with the right harmonic of solutions to the oncoming transition times. Many of these voices can be heard here:

http://energybulletin.net

John Michael Greer is one of these chaps. I've been following his blog out on the Energy Bulletin for a few years, and just finished his book The Long Descent where he pulls together the problem and offers some possible solutions. He writes beautifully, is well versed in the Peak Oil data sets, and hails back to a time we are all familiar with, offering anew many of the solutions which might have made this a more leisurely journey if we had persisted in them back in the 70's.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

Appropriate technology, gardens, compost, bikes, and working with Nature instead of beating her to death. I want to build this world, and sweep up the current capitalist manifestation into the compost pile. From this seat, there are about 3 years left to continue to have access to relatively cheap fuel, which we can use to get some foundations in place for a lower tech, lower energy future. After that, the wheels look to come off this game, in not so slow motion, just like Saint Donella told us in Limits to Growth.

All the latest energy reports from DOD, , universities , and even the venerable Lloyd's seem to be circling the 2012-2015 time frame when the planet starts losing the ability to meet the demand for oil, DOD and others expecting a 10% shortfall. And then it is just down the slope of 4% depletion rate per year from there on out ad infinitum. Not a show stopper, not an immediate collapse, hell in 20 years we will still be producing as much oil as we were in 1970, but with China and India joining the fray of the last minutes of Industry, the depletion curve might move a bit quicker than expected.

In 1990 , two countries lost 10% of their oil imports - Cuba and N. Korea - when the Soviet Union collapsed. One country, Cuba, weathered it because they had local communities with a small garden ethic, and were willing to roll back to less energy intensive technologies. The other country, followed a path of the aristocracy protecting themselves, allowed 1 million of the 'small' people to starve to death. It seems to matter which choice you make.

Anyway, same old story. Look busy, Santa's coming.

Peace Love and composting toilets,

Thom

Throw Out My Wallet

--more sparring with email friends--

"Besides, what do the liberals know about jobs? Jobs are created by business. You guys hate business. As soon as any business gets profitable you want to stomp it to death with taxes and anti-trust investigations! In order to create jobs you have to accept the notion of profitable businesses. You people think profit is evil."

==========================

Oh, for chrisakes..... jobs? from profitable business? When business sniffs profit by having jobs done in Mexico (1980's), China (1990's) and India (2000) they never hesitate to LOSE jobs here in the USA in favor of higher PROFITS by exploiting third world labor and calling it opportunity.

Profit, as the sole guiding principle and arbiter of business decision making, is one of the greater evils of capitalism. Evil being described as something against the common Good, such as mountain top removal, or dead zones from chemical fertilizers in our oceans, or marketing SUV's, or clear cutting boreal forests, or slash and burn clearing for raising beef or bio-fuels, or over-fishing to collapse the North Atlantic Cod populations, etc etc ... all being justified, by business, as the righteous pursuit of profits.

Profit is the fuel that drives the great engine of capitalism to seek continuous growth in a limited system, certainly an evil against plain common sense - expecting a limited, closed, material system to provide endless growth.

Profit, beyond the reasonable measure of recompense for effort, is the distorted lens, the fun house mirror in which we are all expected to view the world, and ourselves. Action without profit, in this mirror, is useless. Activity, effort, art, craftsmanship, music, compassion, altruism, simple kindness; any human endeavour seems now to be judged on the altar of profit, and if not tied to some remuneration of profit, is deemed foolish, trivial and useless.

Profit is the rapacious voice that says ALL and NOW, and considers nothing beyond its immediate satisfaction. No consciousness of connectedness, of ecology, of sustainability, no concern for a future, no looking out to seven generations, or even to our brothers, but NOW! and ALL! Cut ALL those trees, take ALL those fish, and do it NOW, this quarter, and the devil take the future.

Profit is, in many cases, the value derived from exploitation. The exploitation of labor, exploitation of free nature, exploitation of human weakness. Profit courses like a drug through the hearts of women and men, destroying lives, minds and ultimately destroying the natural foundations on which we all, all of The Creation, rely. Larger doses are required, requiring more theft, and leaving, as all drug addictions will, a dissatisfaction, a soul sickness, even in the midst of high profits and high times.

Business has become the sacred calf at which we worship, our temples and cathedrals now built in months to the gods of insurance, and consultancy, and finance. And oh! how we worship, sacrificing all; our breath, our sweat, our minds, and all the precious moments of our precious lives to feed the sacred calf of economic growth and higher profits. Business claims to provide the life we desire, to provide the products, the services, the "progress" that we all yearn for, all in exchange for just some small profit, some small payment for marginalizing, co-opting, and removing the resiliency and skill that existed in the world, before profit drove us all to become enslaved to an economic system driven by and grounded in this idea of profit which ultimately benefits only a few.

Businesses, large corporate enterprises, will not create jobs here, what are we thinking? We have been watching them take the jobs of our fathers and hand them gift wrapped to the Mexicans, Indians and Chinese for the last 40 years! And this was done, not for any other reason than to create Profit for a few million elites. They pacified us with low low prices, the consumer sheep that we are. We sold our economy for twenty dollar coffee makers and low priced hair dryers from Wal Mart.

So, yes, there are a number of valid reasons from this seat to consider Profit an evil that we could better avoid, a drug that once imbibed, becomes the monkey that eats the world, and leaves us in the end with nothing but copper pennies and abstract shit.

Capitalism is killing us,

Thom

Better to have the crime, the suicidal lovers,
or the incest between two brothers,
as between two mirrors
falling in love and loving their reflections,
better to venture and eat the poisoned bread,
better adultery on beds of ashes,
the ferocious passions,
and delirium, its venomous ivy,
and the sodomite who carries for his buttonhole carnation a gobbet of spit,
better be killed by stoning in the public square than tread the mill that grinds out into nothing the substance of our life,
changes eternity into hollow hours,
minutes into penitentiaries,
and time into some copper pennies
and abstract shit.

-- Ocatvio Paz

-- from Sun Stone

-- response to an email list --

I don't disagree with your statement that 'Growth works.' It certainly does what it intends; creates jobs, increases output of the shiny things (and useful things as well) , and ameliorates age old problems of survival. Life grows, that is what it does. It has an arc: seed, seedling, shoot, plant, fruit, compost. Provided that the nutrients are there, and the water, this arc will play out in any garden. My contention is that we are at the cusp of the fruit/compost period for this civilization. Growth, as Saint Donella Meadows has shown us, has Limits. We are now hitting many of those limits in this unique moment of time in the planets history.

Growth as an economic strategy is fine when the resources are abundant. It works well when there is new lands to settle, new resources to discover, virgin forests to exploit, ores and oil to be had with a high EROEI etc.

It has worked quite well over the last 200 years, no doubt about that. I will set aside the intended consequences of income disparity, oppression, and environmental destruction for now and try to stick to the economics of it.

The question we face today is that Growth is no longer possible, so why are we continuing to focus on that as a viable economic paradigm? It is quite clear that Growth, in your terms, is impossible for most of the worlds people. In fact, growth now is a cancer, eating into our natural capital. Earth Overshoot Day is now....September 25 http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/earth_overshoot_day/ . How do you promise Growth to the Chinese and Indians and Brazilians in the face of that reality?

As much as we all want to keep our comfortable life, the fact is that the only demonstrably sustainable lifestyle is , sorry ... hunter/gatherer. And as we well know with 7 billion humans, huge megalopilis enclaves, and already exploited natural resources, this is no longer an option for most of the planet. Defining Sustainability is like nailing jelly to a tree ... or like rubbing a rabbits foot. It is hard to get it right, but makes us feel good by saying the word. Like you, I have not yet found an economics designed around sustainability. And actually, I don't expect to find one that will provide the same level of comfort as the current growth model.

Subsistence living, scraping out your food and materials from your own plot of land, is portrayed as a horrible thing by you, and yet, hasn't it always been thus for most of the humans? And is it such a horror? Is it horrible to dig the soil, plant the seeds, harvest the fruit, manage the productivity of the soil, preserve your food, make necessary items from your own materials? Hard work, yes, but a horrible life? I dont agree with that. My own experience in just dipping my toe into gardening and soil building has shown it to be a 'spiritual experience' if I may use the term (mutters some pedantic reference to James and Varieties of ...here...)

It is quite a difficult problem in the macro sense. Capitalism, growth, this current economy with all its wonders ....I would love this to continue!! (with many mods to the capitalism and social justice part) But the hard fact is...it can not. There is simply not enough stuff here. For me, I take a good programmers approach: divide and conquer. I take one aspect of the problem about sustainability such as : It is not sustainable to fly lettuce from Chile to Calfornia, and I grow my own lettuce. I take the next problem : It is not sustainable to clear cut trees to make packaging that gets throw in a landfill after ONE use. I reduce buying packaged goods, I buy in bulk, and the packages I do use, I save and use as sheet mulch, eventually returning them to the soil here. The ultimate goal would be that I no longer purchase any packaged goods, but this seems like a Herculean task here in this current economy.

Localization of human needs seems the most likely candidate for sustainability. Small communities providing the light manufacturing, food production, and specialties for the local population. The down side of this is that the large corporations that have taken over all aspects human production, will need to go away. And that sir, is the political problem, not that people are afraid of hard work. The rivers of money that pollute our politics will always be spent on preserving the status quo of Growth and corporate hegemony over the basics of life. Until we agree that sweat is revolutionary, that individual effort and skill are the weapons of the revolution, the status quo will prevail. Gandhi, India, spinning wheels, and British cotton being the poster child on this idea.

No easy answers, and certainly no macro answers from this seat. I just see the data, see the storm clouds out there, and realize that I can only walk my own talk, and hope it does not get too sporty on the social scene. Because, as Mr. Lallo points out, humans are violent, and hungry humans are randomly violent. I do expect that social unrest, meaning people killing each other for food, may be in our future. No, Rodney, unfortunately we can't all get along.

But we get along better on a full stomach which is why returning to an agrarian state of mind in the physical world, while maintaining a high level of mental endeavour in the virtual seems to me to be the proper course. 1860 with laptops. I hope the society decides to preserve our connectivity, preserve our computing prowess and ability to manufacture these systems and maintain these networks, and allow the sprawl and freeways to revert to small roads and smaller houses, with gardens surrounding each, and community power being generated from each rooftop. And then I woke up.

Peace, freeBSD , and Compost,

Thom

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.