Cooper -
I hope this message reaches you and that you are now an author on this blog. This means you can add posts, and they will show up as posts coming from you that others may read and comment on.
Be prudent in your posts, and thoughtful.
It's clear you've gone to good lengths to educate your self and expand your conceptual and knowledge bases. Here now is a place where we can discuss and debate and comment.
Be welcome, love,
dad
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Observations
So I'm going to turn this into more of a true journal than a forum for essays. I may still essay, but I will also log notes and items of interest. Too much going on for long, thought-out commentary.
There is a certain dualism at work in my life at present, in that I have been in touch with my old cadre of friends from my teenage years - Kevin, Steve, Frank, Ed, Roger, Mark. Some of these guys I haven't seen in oh, twenty eight years or so.
At the time, I considered us a crew of misfits - the crew that hung together because they had no one else with whom to hang, and so enjoyed each others company. But there is a bond there - these are all intelligent men, some in more than one way.
But each of us is very different. The most common shared interest is motorcycles, but there are several members of the group (myself among them) who have never owned motorcycles. I was perhaps the most misfit of all. A foster child, ridiculed in a new school in the midst of an unfamiliar culture, I nonetheless found in these men - and they were men, even then, the way men should be: independent and clear thinking and gracious to others, even strangers.
So I was, and am each time we get together for a few beers, surrounded not by others like me, but others unlike me, and more importantly, unlike each other, but very accepting of each other for the value they brought to the group (I wonder what my contribution was).
This was and is anew quite different from my military experiences and my banking experiences.
Military experiences for obvious reasons; banking experiences because I worked in a bank that was until fairly recently locally owned, and so there was a kinship there. But in that case, I was the outsider in a room full of people familiar with, and very much identifying with, each other.
It was an experience of the South, as well, with it's uneasy peace between the races. This lack of trust causes each community to tend toward greater internal homogeneity. The reason for this should be clear: each has a defined 'other', and in human experience, 'other' often means or is perceived to mean 'threat', which is often then met with hostility. It is therefore important not to be seen as 'other' and thus to work hard being part of one's culture. Race trumps class, in the South, for the most part.
For this reason, the South seems to me to have a dualistic nature, and there is precious little space for someone not of either camp. We're tolerated, if we remain in our place.
Here in the Finger Lakes, it's different. I am surrounded by sub-cultures, each as different and distinct as the friends I have re-met. The same level of tolerance is there, and acceptance of each group by all other groups - even groups with whom they may deeply disagree - is an expected part of life in this broad community.
This is a strength, undermined somewhat by what my observations suggest is a widespread myopia with respect not to others' viewpoints, but to each subculture's viewpoint. Each seems almost critically unable to perceive the possibility for a larger synthesis in which their views, strengths and skills are brought to bear not as ideals, but as perspectives.
Most groups appear quite hostile to even modest challenges to their particular platform, even when facts are brought to bear.
I intend to pay closer attention to this issue as time passes.
There is a certain dualism at work in my life at present, in that I have been in touch with my old cadre of friends from my teenage years - Kevin, Steve, Frank, Ed, Roger, Mark. Some of these guys I haven't seen in oh, twenty eight years or so.
At the time, I considered us a crew of misfits - the crew that hung together because they had no one else with whom to hang, and so enjoyed each others company. But there is a bond there - these are all intelligent men, some in more than one way.
But each of us is very different. The most common shared interest is motorcycles, but there are several members of the group (myself among them) who have never owned motorcycles. I was perhaps the most misfit of all. A foster child, ridiculed in a new school in the midst of an unfamiliar culture, I nonetheless found in these men - and they were men, even then, the way men should be: independent and clear thinking and gracious to others, even strangers.
So I was, and am each time we get together for a few beers, surrounded not by others like me, but others unlike me, and more importantly, unlike each other, but very accepting of each other for the value they brought to the group (I wonder what my contribution was).
This was and is anew quite different from my military experiences and my banking experiences.
Military experiences for obvious reasons; banking experiences because I worked in a bank that was until fairly recently locally owned, and so there was a kinship there. But in that case, I was the outsider in a room full of people familiar with, and very much identifying with, each other.
It was an experience of the South, as well, with it's uneasy peace between the races. This lack of trust causes each community to tend toward greater internal homogeneity. The reason for this should be clear: each has a defined 'other', and in human experience, 'other' often means or is perceived to mean 'threat', which is often then met with hostility. It is therefore important not to be seen as 'other' and thus to work hard being part of one's culture. Race trumps class, in the South, for the most part.
For this reason, the South seems to me to have a dualistic nature, and there is precious little space for someone not of either camp. We're tolerated, if we remain in our place.
Here in the Finger Lakes, it's different. I am surrounded by sub-cultures, each as different and distinct as the friends I have re-met. The same level of tolerance is there, and acceptance of each group by all other groups - even groups with whom they may deeply disagree - is an expected part of life in this broad community.
This is a strength, undermined somewhat by what my observations suggest is a widespread myopia with respect not to others' viewpoints, but to each subculture's viewpoint. Each seems almost critically unable to perceive the possibility for a larger synthesis in which their views, strengths and skills are brought to bear not as ideals, but as perspectives.
Most groups appear quite hostile to even modest challenges to their particular platform, even when facts are brought to bear.
I intend to pay closer attention to this issue as time passes.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Sometimes it seems, it my relationships with others of my kind, that I am walking in a vast swamp, where most of the ground is a deep, muddy morass. The vast majority of my kind are mired deep within this muck. I seem somehow to be able to discern and gain the dry, high points in the swamp, and so pass through relatively unencumbered, although, it must be said, not without mishap nor stain.
Every so often I may encounter a soul I particularly admire and wish to help in its efforts to be freed from the muck; but no matter how I may pull and tug, I am usually unable to drag the soul from its prison into the light of day.
Every so often I may encounter a soul I particularly admire and wish to help in its efforts to be freed from the muck; but no matter how I may pull and tug, I am usually unable to drag the soul from its prison into the light of day.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Faith and Reason
I awoke depressed today, for no good reason. It does get lonely here. I don't yet know many people, and certainly don't know their habits and schedules, and so don't yet know what opportunities for social connection exist.
I expect it will take some time. Perhaps more so than for most people, given my solitary nature.
And I've been doing some thinking lately, and that can sometimes do it - the kind of thinking where I am gravely concerned over the manner of world my children and grandchildren will inhabit, and I then become infused with a sort of parental guilt at the behavior of my generation and the one previous.
What have we wrought?
The weather, of course, is challenging; this boggy, clammy, soup of a week or so we're having, interspersed with brief respites of sunlight, crisp air, and brilliant vermillion waves cresting atop the ridges and sloughing into the valleys of the autumn sea. Like swimming in a lake of despair, with but brief breaths of hope.
The sheer volume of work necessary and remaining to transform this wonderful house and our property nearby into the vision we have for our home and our livelihood is astounding. Doing as much as possible by hand and by myself, without cost to our cash, can be exhausting and isolating.
Even certain minor political considerations have arisen unanticipated, and unsettlingly:
When the gentleman arrived to inspect and connect my wood furnace, I inquired as to the possibility of placing a wood stove in the dining room and connecting it to the existing, original chimney and taking the oil furnace off line.
He informed me that would likely not meet code, as a wood stove alone is deemed insufficient to heat a home. I'm still finding pieces of my jaw when I sweep the dining room floor. Why ever should the state care, much less dictate, the manner in which I heat my home, save a legitimate duty to ensure, for the common welfare, that it is poses no risk to others within the community, and to a certain extent, minor children (if any) within my household (the State has no legitimate right to be concerned with risk to myself, but I welcome its informed opinion should it perceive one)?
The tentacular nature of the state is becoming alarming.
It should not be so challenging to be a compliant citizen; indeed, when the burdens of compliance with abstract, meaningless, and punitive rules that add no value to society's general well being become so onerous and contradictory that compliance is impossible, it then becomes not only the best interest of, but also the duty of, each citizen not to rail against them, but to ignore them, wholesale.
And if they should do so, all of them, at once, and those charged with upholding the law, yet realizing that the law is absurd, where to at the same to cease to enforce absurd lawitry, and choose instead only to enforce those laws that were beneficial, then we might have a world that made sense.
In the meantime I must endure the despair of having encountered yet another obstacle.
But to heap scorn upon injury, the final irony arises: my oil furnace, the duct work recently cleaned, has now taken on a loud humming when in operation; something is amiss, and I shall have to have it remedied. This will entail more time, more work, and more frustration.
Yet I am told by the state that I must prefer this noisy, smelly machine lurking in the bowels of my home, itself requiring scores of square feet of sheet metal in the form of piping to carry its product about, and electricity to feed its noisy fan to assist it in doing so, to the quiet comfort of a near-to-hand wood stove, radiant and comforting to arthritic bones, provisioned by my hand alone, serviced by my hand alone, and quite capable of warming the home with no mechanical action whatsoever.
And this in a region that seeks to pride itself on its green efforts, in a state that offers subsidies to consumers to promote reduced energy footprints.
Dear State: Will you please get out of my way?
So being depressed, and injured, and scorned, and feeling more than a little sorry for myself, and quite lonely at times, and rather poor compared to my accustomed lifestyle, I mope.
This, then, is the call to discipline that I am today given, that I must match my challenges not with toil and endurance and strength and a grim, quiet acceptance of pain, as when a soldier. Nor must I employ the odious tools used to navigate the Machiavellian halls of banking, that corrupt and stinking corpse in the living room of our society, in which I was until recently employed.
That second set of tools I am loathe to ever employ again, and suspect I am therefore forever unwilling to accept corporate employment again, unless some substantial move towards a genuine ethic were to spontaneously arise in corporate America. The first may aid me somewhat in my toils, but are not equal to the task before me.
I am not given the opportunity to simply bull on through; I must have faith and employ reason. I must have faith in myself and my purpose, and in those whom I know stand with me. I must keep to reason, and not be lulled by stochastic events that appear to counter the trend. I must have faith in my own ability to reason; in my independence graced by my presence in a community; and in my ability to discipline myself.
Each day I must recall the reasons I have chosen this path. Each day I must review the progress. There must be some physical labor each day, and on most days, a full day of labor is expected. Each day, I will remind myself that this thing I call the Jupiter Project is my attempt to build a safe and secure place for my family and my community against the storm I know is coming.
And what if I am wrong, and no storm comes? Then no harm has been wrought: if successful I will have established an independent small-hold farm capable of sustaining itself and its denizens, with appropriate support from the community and with appropriate returns to the community.
My food will be healthy and self-produced; my days and evenings my own; my labors directed so that the profits accrue to me, and not to some distant chief executive and his crony shareholder. Were I capable of prayer, I would pray that this outcome should occur.
And if I am right, then I will have built a place secure from the worst of climate change, at least as secure a place as I am able to achieve given the limitations of resources and my place in space, time, and history.
As for poverty, I am yet hopeful that I am this winter, barring some future misfortune, as 'poor' as I am likely to get. Next year, if all goes as planned, the work on the home will be finished, and the work of producing food will begin in earnest. I will at that point be wealthier than I am now, for having invested my time and toil in the preparation of this place to that end, with comfort beckoning at the close of each day, to be shared with my wife, herself isolated in her toils far away from me, striving toward our common end.
For what is wealth, but an amount of capital available to one that exceeds one's immediate needs, accumulated over time, so as to improve ones' life and measures of ease, and the closeness of family? I am too accustomed to thinking of wealth as money and the ability to get things on a moment's notice, by walking into a store.
True wealth is the possession of resources sufficient to ensure one's survival, and then some. It is the possession of the means of production of food, shelter, and all of the necessities of life, embedded within the community of which one is a part.
The wealth of man has grown endlessly since the first hominid chose to carry with him (or her, for that matter), rather than abandon after use, a rock he picked up as a tool. On some distant square meter of ground, at some moment in deepest history, that rock found itself in a place where it was useful, and where it had value for the simple fact that no other rocks were around and a rock was needed.
At that moment it ceased to be a senseless burden, and became wealth.
Like that primitive creature who reasoned the usefulness of the rock and kept faith with its own decision until proven right, I will hew to my faith that I am right, that this is necessary, and that it is my task to prepare this place for my kin.
These things shall keep despair from my door during this long winter and into the spring, when I will offer to my beloved wife this house as our home.
I expect it will take some time. Perhaps more so than for most people, given my solitary nature.
And I've been doing some thinking lately, and that can sometimes do it - the kind of thinking where I am gravely concerned over the manner of world my children and grandchildren will inhabit, and I then become infused with a sort of parental guilt at the behavior of my generation and the one previous.
What have we wrought?
The weather, of course, is challenging; this boggy, clammy, soup of a week or so we're having, interspersed with brief respites of sunlight, crisp air, and brilliant vermillion waves cresting atop the ridges and sloughing into the valleys of the autumn sea. Like swimming in a lake of despair, with but brief breaths of hope.
The sheer volume of work necessary and remaining to transform this wonderful house and our property nearby into the vision we have for our home and our livelihood is astounding. Doing as much as possible by hand and by myself, without cost to our cash, can be exhausting and isolating.
Even certain minor political considerations have arisen unanticipated, and unsettlingly:
When the gentleman arrived to inspect and connect my wood furnace, I inquired as to the possibility of placing a wood stove in the dining room and connecting it to the existing, original chimney and taking the oil furnace off line.
He informed me that would likely not meet code, as a wood stove alone is deemed insufficient to heat a home. I'm still finding pieces of my jaw when I sweep the dining room floor. Why ever should the state care, much less dictate, the manner in which I heat my home, save a legitimate duty to ensure, for the common welfare, that it is poses no risk to others within the community, and to a certain extent, minor children (if any) within my household (the State has no legitimate right to be concerned with risk to myself, but I welcome its informed opinion should it perceive one)?
The tentacular nature of the state is becoming alarming.
It should not be so challenging to be a compliant citizen; indeed, when the burdens of compliance with abstract, meaningless, and punitive rules that add no value to society's general well being become so onerous and contradictory that compliance is impossible, it then becomes not only the best interest of, but also the duty of, each citizen not to rail against them, but to ignore them, wholesale.
And if they should do so, all of them, at once, and those charged with upholding the law, yet realizing that the law is absurd, where to at the same to cease to enforce absurd lawitry, and choose instead only to enforce those laws that were beneficial, then we might have a world that made sense.
In the meantime I must endure the despair of having encountered yet another obstacle.
But to heap scorn upon injury, the final irony arises: my oil furnace, the duct work recently cleaned, has now taken on a loud humming when in operation; something is amiss, and I shall have to have it remedied. This will entail more time, more work, and more frustration.
Yet I am told by the state that I must prefer this noisy, smelly machine lurking in the bowels of my home, itself requiring scores of square feet of sheet metal in the form of piping to carry its product about, and electricity to feed its noisy fan to assist it in doing so, to the quiet comfort of a near-to-hand wood stove, radiant and comforting to arthritic bones, provisioned by my hand alone, serviced by my hand alone, and quite capable of warming the home with no mechanical action whatsoever.
And this in a region that seeks to pride itself on its green efforts, in a state that offers subsidies to consumers to promote reduced energy footprints.
Dear State: Will you please get out of my way?
So being depressed, and injured, and scorned, and feeling more than a little sorry for myself, and quite lonely at times, and rather poor compared to my accustomed lifestyle, I mope.
This, then, is the call to discipline that I am today given, that I must match my challenges not with toil and endurance and strength and a grim, quiet acceptance of pain, as when a soldier. Nor must I employ the odious tools used to navigate the Machiavellian halls of banking, that corrupt and stinking corpse in the living room of our society, in which I was until recently employed.
That second set of tools I am loathe to ever employ again, and suspect I am therefore forever unwilling to accept corporate employment again, unless some substantial move towards a genuine ethic were to spontaneously arise in corporate America. The first may aid me somewhat in my toils, but are not equal to the task before me.
I am not given the opportunity to simply bull on through; I must have faith and employ reason. I must have faith in myself and my purpose, and in those whom I know stand with me. I must keep to reason, and not be lulled by stochastic events that appear to counter the trend. I must have faith in my own ability to reason; in my independence graced by my presence in a community; and in my ability to discipline myself.
Each day I must recall the reasons I have chosen this path. Each day I must review the progress. There must be some physical labor each day, and on most days, a full day of labor is expected. Each day, I will remind myself that this thing I call the Jupiter Project is my attempt to build a safe and secure place for my family and my community against the storm I know is coming.
And what if I am wrong, and no storm comes? Then no harm has been wrought: if successful I will have established an independent small-hold farm capable of sustaining itself and its denizens, with appropriate support from the community and with appropriate returns to the community.
My food will be healthy and self-produced; my days and evenings my own; my labors directed so that the profits accrue to me, and not to some distant chief executive and his crony shareholder. Were I capable of prayer, I would pray that this outcome should occur.
And if I am right, then I will have built a place secure from the worst of climate change, at least as secure a place as I am able to achieve given the limitations of resources and my place in space, time, and history.
As for poverty, I am yet hopeful that I am this winter, barring some future misfortune, as 'poor' as I am likely to get. Next year, if all goes as planned, the work on the home will be finished, and the work of producing food will begin in earnest. I will at that point be wealthier than I am now, for having invested my time and toil in the preparation of this place to that end, with comfort beckoning at the close of each day, to be shared with my wife, herself isolated in her toils far away from me, striving toward our common end.
For what is wealth, but an amount of capital available to one that exceeds one's immediate needs, accumulated over time, so as to improve ones' life and measures of ease, and the closeness of family? I am too accustomed to thinking of wealth as money and the ability to get things on a moment's notice, by walking into a store.
True wealth is the possession of resources sufficient to ensure one's survival, and then some. It is the possession of the means of production of food, shelter, and all of the necessities of life, embedded within the community of which one is a part.
The wealth of man has grown endlessly since the first hominid chose to carry with him (or her, for that matter), rather than abandon after use, a rock he picked up as a tool. On some distant square meter of ground, at some moment in deepest history, that rock found itself in a place where it was useful, and where it had value for the simple fact that no other rocks were around and a rock was needed.
At that moment it ceased to be a senseless burden, and became wealth.
Like that primitive creature who reasoned the usefulness of the rock and kept faith with its own decision until proven right, I will hew to my faith that I am right, that this is necessary, and that it is my task to prepare this place for my kin.
These things shall keep despair from my door during this long winter and into the spring, when I will offer to my beloved wife this house as our home.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
A Legacy of Useful Things
The one real legacy available to us as our empire winds down and energy scarcity begins to become very real for many people is that of Useful Things. We have these in such abundance now it is difficult to imagine a time, past or present, when it was not so.
I've all but given up trying to convince people that renewables such as solar and wind aren't really going to solve any problems. Certainly we'll find ways to breathe life back into useful technologies like windmills and waterwheels - but it won't be to magically manufacture either fuels or endless high-pressure streams of electrons, both intended to drive machines that spare us much physical labor in today's world.
We will have energy, and we will have fuels, and we will be able to use that energy and those machines to do work. We just won't have the energy to do so much of it as we do now. We will have to begin making choices regarding the cost of energy use versus its benefits. This is nothing new: as fuel prices have risen many of us have made choices in response to the rising cost such as purchasing smaller cars or driving fewer miles.
What most don't seem to grasp, however, is that this is but the tip of the trend. Imagine what it would mean to have say, even 20% less energy available for your immediate use than you now consume. Just 20%. Now think about which 20 miles out of every hundred you won't drive. Which 20 hours of every 100 of lighted darkness you won't illuminate. Which 20 loads of every 100 loads of clothing you won't wash, and you begin to get the idea.
As we're eventually going to return to levels of energy availability roughly equivalent to those available prior to the discovery of oil, 20% of course is but a step down on the Long Descent.
But my goal today is not to belabor the energy discussion, but rather to discuss what should be done with the time we have remaining when energy is rather abundant. To what uses should we put it it? And by 'we' I don't mean us as a species, a people, or even a community, large or small. I mean 'we' as in each of us - what choices can and should we make as the last of the easy oil is consumed.
I'll confess that I am not a purist: I don't intend to limit my energy use simply to prevent harming Mother Earth. I admire such sentiments, and I admire those who practice austere lifestyles for that reason. But I am at heart a pragmatist. Such efforts, while valiant, are hopelessly in vain against the scale of the problem. The world is unmoved. Energy will continue to be consumed until it is gone.
One of the consequences of energy scarcity that I don't hear much discussed is that of the impact on manufacturing and construction. One hears a great deal about the impact on food production and transportation, and people are moved to re-create walkable communities and increase local food production, but one never hears discussed where we shall get the replacement parts for our Subarus, or plastic sheeting and trowels and towels and matches and metal forks and all sorts of useful things.
These are all made in some factory somewhere. And one of the second-order effects of energy scarcity is going to be a scarcity of things. Things that will take us by surprise, like staples and paper clips. Can you make a paper clip? Can you make a water glass? And I don't mean fashion one from some other object - I mean take some raw material and make a glass. And if a tool is necessary, then you first must make the tool. Ad infinitum.
Think about that for a bit. Let it settle in and gel.
The same holds for construction of new infrastructure: we don't really know how to do it without large machines any more. When the engines of the cranes fall silent for lack of fuel, how will we lift large objects? Who among us knows how to use a block and tackle, much less make one, or make the rope it requires to operate? What plants that grow locally can we use for fibers? How should we harvest and prepare the fibers? What tools are necessary for turning fiber into rope? Who knows how to make those tools?
Now eventually, we will learn to do without or to make Useful Things things ourselves. Kunstler addresses this admirably in World Made by Hand. And if the decent is slow, as opposed to rapid, then the making do without or the making by hand will develop naturally, until one day we look around and realize our standard of living has changed in real ways, but life isn't, after all, so bad.
So the guy down the street makes barrels, and John makes shoes, and I grow tomatoes for sauce I sell and all that's really changed is that our lights are lit by the electricity produced by the generator on Smith Street, behind Courtney's house, in the gorge, and we don't travel so much, nor nearly so far.
The village has only a couple of cars, and (biodiesel) fuel is laboriously produced by at one of the local farms, so that when emergencies arise and horse-drawn wagon is too slow, we can still send our emissary as rapidly as possible over the rutted roads to Syracuse, or Ithaca, or if we need to power up one of the old, big machines we can, at least for a few hours.
There are times when I think and hope we yet accomplish this, even if only by default.
But the stirrings of the #OccupyWallStreet movement, which I view as a continuation of the Tea Party Protests, albeit taking its energy from a different range of the political spectrum, have about them the whiff of revolution in the making. As America is now an empire in decline, which has recently demonstrated a willingness to inhere its chief executive with the right to conduct extra-judicial killings of American Citizens, the whole affair is likely to get very messy.
This of course is against the backdrop of Peak Oil, climate change, and population overshoot.
So if the whole affair does get messy, then Useful Things are likely to prove themselves in very short supply, and the manufacturing of Useful Things is likely to be curtailed for some time, perhaps a very long time.
So what things to store up then? I'm no subscriber of the Eschaton - I fully expect human societies to survive whatever collapse is coming, without falling into some sort of Mad Max dystopian existence. This is not to say that it won't feel like in places and at times. Certainly, the Bosnian and Rwandan experiences have taught us what is possible, even today.
But if one is caught in that sort of situation, then no amount of preparation is really sufficient. If some local boy decides to become a warlord, and succeeds in so doing, and I and my family were to become a target, the likely outcome is our death. Such is the lesson of history.
So guns and gold, while useful, are really needed only in very limited quantities. Unless one plans to outfit a militia, or open a bank, then mere arms and cash are silly things to hoard.
There are other things one might hoard, in plain sight, and without even realizing one is doing so. This is because wealth is a funny thing - and it's not at all what we perceive it to be. We perceive wealth to be either money, or one of it's manifestations: the possession of objects of no utility; the possession of useful objects that cost far in excess of the utility they provide (such as million dollar automobiles); power; and freedom of mobility.
All of these things are 'purchased' with what we think of as wealth today.
Yet true wealth is something else entire, and it begins with the possession of land (and not, I beg you, 'real estate').
To that land you can add infrastructure - and this should be carefully thought out. The infrastructure should be purpose-driven: does it help me access the resources of the land, from which I hope to make my living. (And I concede that at some point we're going to have to solve the issue of the state requiring us to rent our own land from it, in perpetuity, in the form of property tax. I don't mind paying taxes, but some basic parcel of land should be immune from taking by the State.)
But once one has a place to live what then? Then, Useful Things. The things that will be difficult to come by later: books and tools and equipment and containers. Not warehouses full, but equivalent to one's needs and in sufficient quantity to provide a spare or two over the next generation. It takes a long time to wear down a shovel.
More pointedly, now is the time to store up, in reasonable quantities, those things now produced by the use of easy energy. We can take our personal share of easy energy in several ways - we can squander it, as our species has done and continues to do (just imagine what would have been possible if we had devoted our species' legacy of fossil fuels to the exploitation of space instead of shopping malls and McMansions).
We can disinherit ourselves, and forgo its use.
I believe both of these choices are foolish. My task is to survive, and to drag along with me as much of my family and as much of my community as I am able. This is the essence of the Jupiter Project. To survive the coming winter. I want a safe and sheltered place; I am willing to do my part to ensure its continuation, and if that includes using great quantities of energy now to establish the conditions for future success when portable energy will be unavailable in quantity, then I will make that choice.
It is the only logical choice. If energy is going to be unavailable to me tomorrow, then I had better make good use of it today, either by building things that sustainably generate energy (to include generating sufficient energy to permit the maintenance of themselves as well as an an energy surplus turned to useful purposes); by building things that improve access to my resources; or by acquiring things that will permit or assist in the accessing and sustainable exploitation of those resources, in all cases for myself, my descendants, and by extension my community.
This philosophy extends to beliefs about what my community should do: here in the Finger Lakes we are endowed with substantial water resources and a topography that permits energy self-sufficiency. We don't need to be on-grid, here in Moravia. Our efforts and taxes could go to the deliberate consideration of what life might be like if gasoline cost, say, 30 dollars a gallon, or was entirely unavailable. How might we be forced to live differently?
This is the reality our children, alive and peopling the Earth right now, will face. To deny this is illogical. The math insists it must be so.
Should we not now use the energy that is available to us and begin transforming ourselves and our communities, in anticipation of that eventuality? Use our machines and our wits to build power generation along our creeks and streams, and determine where to place electric trains that will carry workers to and from the fields and produce to the villages? Before our machines become scrap for want of fuel?
While we still have the time and energy to build the trains and the rails?
To rebuild the mills driven by water, designed using technology that uses parts that can be made locally, and including in our reconstruction efforts support for the development of local industries that manufacture replacement parts?
Should we continue to squander our wealth, or at last make real use of it, before it is gone?
Anyone older than 46 - which includes me - is responsible for the legacy our children are about to inherit. Corrupt (or at best useless) government, crushing national and personal debt, unemployment, shrinking resources.
But we still have the opportunity to mitigate that legacy, if we begin now to acquire and build Useful Things. Five acres and a quality set of hand tools would be a tremendous legacy during most of human history; and yet we have the opportunity to leave our children so much more.
The choice to stockpile Useful Things - the things that will continue to hold value and do work and produce other things with limited or no energy inputs - is the only sensible choice. We must do it ourselves, and we must encourage others to do it. We must make our homes and our communities snug.
We must learn to grow and preserve our own food in meaningful quantities. We must learn to thrive in circumstances with far fewer inputs. But not yet.
When we must, we will make do without energy. But now, while we have it, we should turn its use to that of preparation, and that means building and making and collecting Useful Things, that later generations might have them still when their making is difficult. So that future generations will have a fighting chance to build a lifestyle that, while perhaps not as luxurious as ours, is yet comfortable and safe and provides some measure of amenity.
I've all but given up trying to convince people that renewables such as solar and wind aren't really going to solve any problems. Certainly we'll find ways to breathe life back into useful technologies like windmills and waterwheels - but it won't be to magically manufacture either fuels or endless high-pressure streams of electrons, both intended to drive machines that spare us much physical labor in today's world.
We will have energy, and we will have fuels, and we will be able to use that energy and those machines to do work. We just won't have the energy to do so much of it as we do now. We will have to begin making choices regarding the cost of energy use versus its benefits. This is nothing new: as fuel prices have risen many of us have made choices in response to the rising cost such as purchasing smaller cars or driving fewer miles.
What most don't seem to grasp, however, is that this is but the tip of the trend. Imagine what it would mean to have say, even 20% less energy available for your immediate use than you now consume. Just 20%. Now think about which 20 miles out of every hundred you won't drive. Which 20 hours of every 100 of lighted darkness you won't illuminate. Which 20 loads of every 100 loads of clothing you won't wash, and you begin to get the idea.
As we're eventually going to return to levels of energy availability roughly equivalent to those available prior to the discovery of oil, 20% of course is but a step down on the Long Descent.
But my goal today is not to belabor the energy discussion, but rather to discuss what should be done with the time we have remaining when energy is rather abundant. To what uses should we put it it? And by 'we' I don't mean us as a species, a people, or even a community, large or small. I mean 'we' as in each of us - what choices can and should we make as the last of the easy oil is consumed.
I'll confess that I am not a purist: I don't intend to limit my energy use simply to prevent harming Mother Earth. I admire such sentiments, and I admire those who practice austere lifestyles for that reason. But I am at heart a pragmatist. Such efforts, while valiant, are hopelessly in vain against the scale of the problem. The world is unmoved. Energy will continue to be consumed until it is gone.
One of the consequences of energy scarcity that I don't hear much discussed is that of the impact on manufacturing and construction. One hears a great deal about the impact on food production and transportation, and people are moved to re-create walkable communities and increase local food production, but one never hears discussed where we shall get the replacement parts for our Subarus, or plastic sheeting and trowels and towels and matches and metal forks and all sorts of useful things.
These are all made in some factory somewhere. And one of the second-order effects of energy scarcity is going to be a scarcity of things. Things that will take us by surprise, like staples and paper clips. Can you make a paper clip? Can you make a water glass? And I don't mean fashion one from some other object - I mean take some raw material and make a glass. And if a tool is necessary, then you first must make the tool. Ad infinitum.
Think about that for a bit. Let it settle in and gel.
The same holds for construction of new infrastructure: we don't really know how to do it without large machines any more. When the engines of the cranes fall silent for lack of fuel, how will we lift large objects? Who among us knows how to use a block and tackle, much less make one, or make the rope it requires to operate? What plants that grow locally can we use for fibers? How should we harvest and prepare the fibers? What tools are necessary for turning fiber into rope? Who knows how to make those tools?
Now eventually, we will learn to do without or to make Useful Things things ourselves. Kunstler addresses this admirably in World Made by Hand. And if the decent is slow, as opposed to rapid, then the making do without or the making by hand will develop naturally, until one day we look around and realize our standard of living has changed in real ways, but life isn't, after all, so bad.
So the guy down the street makes barrels, and John makes shoes, and I grow tomatoes for sauce I sell and all that's really changed is that our lights are lit by the electricity produced by the generator on Smith Street, behind Courtney's house, in the gorge, and we don't travel so much, nor nearly so far.
The village has only a couple of cars, and (biodiesel) fuel is laboriously produced by at one of the local farms, so that when emergencies arise and horse-drawn wagon is too slow, we can still send our emissary as rapidly as possible over the rutted roads to Syracuse, or Ithaca, or if we need to power up one of the old, big machines we can, at least for a few hours.
There are times when I think and hope we yet accomplish this, even if only by default.
But the stirrings of the #OccupyWallStreet movement, which I view as a continuation of the Tea Party Protests, albeit taking its energy from a different range of the political spectrum, have about them the whiff of revolution in the making. As America is now an empire in decline, which has recently demonstrated a willingness to inhere its chief executive with the right to conduct extra-judicial killings of American Citizens, the whole affair is likely to get very messy.
This of course is against the backdrop of Peak Oil, climate change, and population overshoot.
So if the whole affair does get messy, then Useful Things are likely to prove themselves in very short supply, and the manufacturing of Useful Things is likely to be curtailed for some time, perhaps a very long time.
So what things to store up then? I'm no subscriber of the Eschaton - I fully expect human societies to survive whatever collapse is coming, without falling into some sort of Mad Max dystopian existence. This is not to say that it won't feel like in places and at times. Certainly, the Bosnian and Rwandan experiences have taught us what is possible, even today.
But if one is caught in that sort of situation, then no amount of preparation is really sufficient. If some local boy decides to become a warlord, and succeeds in so doing, and I and my family were to become a target, the likely outcome is our death. Such is the lesson of history.
So guns and gold, while useful, are really needed only in very limited quantities. Unless one plans to outfit a militia, or open a bank, then mere arms and cash are silly things to hoard.
There are other things one might hoard, in plain sight, and without even realizing one is doing so. This is because wealth is a funny thing - and it's not at all what we perceive it to be. We perceive wealth to be either money, or one of it's manifestations: the possession of objects of no utility; the possession of useful objects that cost far in excess of the utility they provide (such as million dollar automobiles); power; and freedom of mobility.
All of these things are 'purchased' with what we think of as wealth today.
Yet true wealth is something else entire, and it begins with the possession of land (and not, I beg you, 'real estate').
To that land you can add infrastructure - and this should be carefully thought out. The infrastructure should be purpose-driven: does it help me access the resources of the land, from which I hope to make my living. (And I concede that at some point we're going to have to solve the issue of the state requiring us to rent our own land from it, in perpetuity, in the form of property tax. I don't mind paying taxes, but some basic parcel of land should be immune from taking by the State.)
But once one has a place to live what then? Then, Useful Things. The things that will be difficult to come by later: books and tools and equipment and containers. Not warehouses full, but equivalent to one's needs and in sufficient quantity to provide a spare or two over the next generation. It takes a long time to wear down a shovel.
More pointedly, now is the time to store up, in reasonable quantities, those things now produced by the use of easy energy. We can take our personal share of easy energy in several ways - we can squander it, as our species has done and continues to do (just imagine what would have been possible if we had devoted our species' legacy of fossil fuels to the exploitation of space instead of shopping malls and McMansions).
We can disinherit ourselves, and forgo its use.
I believe both of these choices are foolish. My task is to survive, and to drag along with me as much of my family and as much of my community as I am able. This is the essence of the Jupiter Project. To survive the coming winter. I want a safe and sheltered place; I am willing to do my part to ensure its continuation, and if that includes using great quantities of energy now to establish the conditions for future success when portable energy will be unavailable in quantity, then I will make that choice.
It is the only logical choice. If energy is going to be unavailable to me tomorrow, then I had better make good use of it today, either by building things that sustainably generate energy (to include generating sufficient energy to permit the maintenance of themselves as well as an an energy surplus turned to useful purposes); by building things that improve access to my resources; or by acquiring things that will permit or assist in the accessing and sustainable exploitation of those resources, in all cases for myself, my descendants, and by extension my community.
This philosophy extends to beliefs about what my community should do: here in the Finger Lakes we are endowed with substantial water resources and a topography that permits energy self-sufficiency. We don't need to be on-grid, here in Moravia. Our efforts and taxes could go to the deliberate consideration of what life might be like if gasoline cost, say, 30 dollars a gallon, or was entirely unavailable. How might we be forced to live differently?
This is the reality our children, alive and peopling the Earth right now, will face. To deny this is illogical. The math insists it must be so.
Should we not now use the energy that is available to us and begin transforming ourselves and our communities, in anticipation of that eventuality? Use our machines and our wits to build power generation along our creeks and streams, and determine where to place electric trains that will carry workers to and from the fields and produce to the villages? Before our machines become scrap for want of fuel?
While we still have the time and energy to build the trains and the rails?
To rebuild the mills driven by water, designed using technology that uses parts that can be made locally, and including in our reconstruction efforts support for the development of local industries that manufacture replacement parts?
Should we continue to squander our wealth, or at last make real use of it, before it is gone?
Anyone older than 46 - which includes me - is responsible for the legacy our children are about to inherit. Corrupt (or at best useless) government, crushing national and personal debt, unemployment, shrinking resources.
But we still have the opportunity to mitigate that legacy, if we begin now to acquire and build Useful Things. Five acres and a quality set of hand tools would be a tremendous legacy during most of human history; and yet we have the opportunity to leave our children so much more.
The choice to stockpile Useful Things - the things that will continue to hold value and do work and produce other things with limited or no energy inputs - is the only sensible choice. We must do it ourselves, and we must encourage others to do it. We must make our homes and our communities snug.
We must learn to grow and preserve our own food in meaningful quantities. We must learn to thrive in circumstances with far fewer inputs. But not yet.
When we must, we will make do without energy. But now, while we have it, we should turn its use to that of preparation, and that means building and making and collecting Useful Things, that later generations might have them still when their making is difficult. So that future generations will have a fighting chance to build a lifestyle that, while perhaps not as luxurious as ours, is yet comfortable and safe and provides some measure of amenity.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Fall's First Blush
(Final edit for grammer and punctuation 2000 25092011)
The trees are hinting at visions yet to come. The fields turned a week or so ago, the ambers and yellows deepening, being joined by browns and oranges, waning from green and waxing toward reds and yellows and brilliant burnt umbers and the thousand non-green hues of fall to which northern latitudes are privileged.
In some short time, if the rain may please to check itself, and the temperature drop just ever so much, approaching frost but not yet there, then we may hope for a fall in all its glory. My anticipation is high. It was thirty years ago this October first I left western New York - some 200 miles west of here, near the Seneca Nations, a town called Smith Mills, population maybe fifty, bound for Parris Island and Marine Corps Boot Camp.
As it happens, I tonight received a text from and made a call to an old marine buddy of mine, Brett Williams - we talked for an hour or so, catching up after a dozen or so years; I won't bore you with the details.
Our Alaskan Cruise adventure has ended - I'll post pictures soon, I promise - and fun was had by all, especially the Moms, for whom the cruise was intended as a late-life adventure. I've been back a week now and hard at work on the downstairs bathroom the whole time. Come Monday, I will mud the walls and mortar the floors, placing the first layer in the shower pan. By the end of the week, I should have the tiling in, and will be thinking about finish carpentry and paint.
I would prefer not to have to strip a bathroom to studs and sub-floor again, but it has been a learning experience. Pictures (with a few still on the camera, coming soon) are to the left. Plumbing and electrical are in - two new sewer lines, a new hot and a new cold water line, and three lines moved, a wall moved, enclosing a window that will be inside the shower, necessitating custom glass. Shower enclosure custom built, pocket door installed.
Total assistance: one plumber to cut in a side hole on an existing sewer line (I rerouted the other new provision myself) and one carpenter to frame the new wall.
My cat has been returned; I am glad as I was woeful lonely without her.
So that's the update on the mundane stuff. I've had time time think as well.
I write beside the fire, out back of 17 Park. Fall approaches - today I harvested all of my neighbor's basil, a thick handful of stems forming a bouquet of basil leaves two feet long and a as big around as my thigh. It's hanging to dry in the kitchen.
My northern and southern neighbors are preparing to flee the cold, to Florida, to winter over. Thus, with the cold will come the sealing of my solitude, as often days it is to these neighbors alone to whom I speak. With their absence, the likelihood that I will pass days without human contact grows.
Time moves slowly, lackluster waves rolling gently into a grey shore, unhurried insistence begging notice.
Events coalesce. The Bundeswehr recently released a report (Bundeswehr Report) (detailing certain of the same likely outcomes of peak oil as the Joint Chiefs did in the 2010 JOE. Fascinating reading, the circumstances these two militaries predict our now-global society will face in the coming years - and I mean years, as in, two to five, not years, as in, some indefinable but certainly very far future time.
I stress that the time frames are theirs: the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Bundeswehr, organizations not given to histrionics, generally, and perhaps two of the more fact-based decision making bodies on the planet with any immediate power.
Time is short, and the tipping point is upon us.
My religious acquaintances are well acquainted with this concept: they call it the rapture, the moment when the saved are lifted up to heaven, and us heathens are left here 0n Earth, which will by then have become the Devil's cauldron.
That there will be a cauldron I agree. With the assertion that it will be global I concur as well. The likelihood that some percentage of our population will be spared it's horrors by magical intervention I deem unlikely.
It will happen by the end of the decade. Our current way of life will slowly (if we are lucky - if not it will be rapid and bloody) crumble, and change will come. It is inevitable. As inevitable as the slow drift of yesterday's leaves to to the forest floor.
The markets are troubled, governments seem ineffective, with every action taken to promote 'growth' falling short, failing to reignite the economy. This is because it is a futile endeavor. It cannot be ignited, not anytime soon. Not in the manner nor on the scale to which we are accustomed.
Wealth distribution is too skewed. The subsidies of fossil fuels, like a mismanaged trust account, are dwindling, and the climate is just beginning to discover it can roar. We are an engine that has ceased running, that is choking from lack of fuel, running on fumes, desperate for a fill up, but none is to be had.
Leadership at all levels is absent. What passes for leadership is mere hubris and sanctimony, as often as not applied for short term positional gain by insisting upon sacrifice by others.
More personally, this is a time of great reflection for me: upon the fall in general, ever my favorite season, and my true progression into mid-life, and my reaction to the outcomes of the choices I've made.
It is a confluence of falls. It is the fall of this year, and it is the tail end of the summer of my life, perhaps a bit early for true fall yet, but nonetheless the promise is in the evening air. It is the fall of this great empire of America, where I have been privileged to have been born and raised. And it is in the fall of our species, grown too plentiful too fast on the promise and potential of a resource that itself is nearly played out.
Civilizations will be realigned, destroyed, created, reworked.
As to that, while I am apprehensive regarding certain historical patterns that seem to be repeating, and what they portend, I am nonetheless confident and content that I have prepared as well as may be against the gathering storm, and I consider myself well positioned to weather the storm and shelter those close to me if need be. I like who I am, and I like who I am becoming even more.
I am aware I may fail - but it will not be for having been blind and caught unaware. It will not be for having been careless. It will be instead for having been defeated, by the elements, or chance, or another stronger than I.
But there is no shame in defeat - only in failing to strive.
And it is nice to feel so deliberate, to feel so in charge of one's one destiny, to feel that finally one is choosing one's own path. And though I live in the lap of austerity, yet I am more satisfied than ever I have been, to wake each day and spend my labors and my thought and my property improving my immediate environment, answerable to no man, and beholden to none.
I am 47, and I am beginning to discover what it means to be free. It does require meaningful sacrifice. It does require prudence, and honest, hard work. But it offers so much space in which to think, it which to consider what it truly means to be human, and to be alive. To recall our choices and look back over our path.
To learn that perhaps the ways we have been taught are flawed, and that other ways are available to us.
And thus I reminded of an axiom a man related to me, related, in turn, to him by another man. The first man admired the second man, and had for some time, this was clear. And so he had received this 'wisdom' from the first man in the spirit of an acolyte receiving guidance from one of the Learned.
And he took it to heart, and never considered the implications, and related it to me some years later:
'Sometimes, if you just can't make someone happy, it's best to let them go be unhappy someplace else'.
Can you spot the condescension? The hidden assumption of righteous authority on the part of the original utterer of this nonsense?
The occurrence was on the occasion of my resignation, announced well in advance: two month's notice was given. The resignation had been prompted by ad hoc changes in levels and types of responsibility far exceeding the nominal duties of the position I held, and, due to the financial crisis I was informed that compensation had been 'frozen' for everyone.
At the time I was questioning the value of my career, and my desire for the level of responsibility I was being asked to take on, without any corresponding rise in compensation (for the second time, mind you - the first occurrence of that I let pass with little comment).
Coming as it did in the van of the financial crisis, I bethink I was viewed as somewhat disloyal, that I would not accept endless increased responsibility at no additional charge to the company - that I did not become more productive out of duty and loyalty to the company in tough times.
There's more to the story, of course, but it isn't particularly relevant; I relate this only because some background against which to discuss the above comment is necessary.
So I was unhappy, and I was also being told that my being unhappy because I was dissatisfied that my responsibilities had increased while my compensation had been frozen was selfish. Even here, I might have accepted this line of reasoning, had the circumstances been similar for all involved; yet nothing was further from the truth.
What really bothered me was the assumption, inherent in the statement, that if I did go somewhere else, I would remain unhappy. In other words, my unhappiness was due to a flaw within myself. It must be so, because, if this company couldn't make me happy, then it must be that I could never be made happy.
How else to interpret '...let them go be unhappy someplace else.'?
What stunning arrogance! It's like the abused wife being told by the abusive husband that she has no business complaining - he's the only one that will ever love her!
I have spent two years thinking on this brief verbal exchange, occurring in passing at a meeting of no great import, merely a casual comment made with bonhomie and a chuckle to ease the sting of the admonishment.
And I have learned to my own satisfaction, and realized only because I have withdrawn from that world and found the time to think with a clear head, that it was not, after all, my inability to be happy that was the problem. It was not greed that provoked my departure, nor was it a lack of willingness to sacrifice for the larger good.
Clearly I am capable of happiness, as I am happier now than ever I have been. And near the poorest, at least in terms of cash flow. And have and will continue to give freely of my meager skills to all worthy comers.
I am not, after all, some flawed denizen of the corporate world, dissatisfied with everything and forever grumbling. I'm not some greedy, insatiable tool demanding ever more. I'm just a man who felt treated unfairly, and was made to feel worse for being made to feel disloyal. Despite no such loyalty having been either earned or demonstrated in return by the company.
And I am also a man who has watched with some puzzlement as this company, our society, and our species have all continued to make inherently unsustainable choices focused solely on short-term expectations and desires, in the face of clear and growing evidence that what has worked previously will absolutely not do so this time around.
It is the cohesion of these two trains of thoughts that is so welcome. Our world is broken. This is reflected not just in the grand sweep of history that topples and births nations, and which is now a gathering wave that will sweep the globe like fire as humanity experiences a crisis the likes of which it has never seen.
It will be the Anasazi and Easter Island on a grand scale.
It is also reflected in our personal interactions, in our values of and for each other. And I don't mean to invoke transactional measures here: the coin a man is paid for his labor. I mean in the unspoken perspectives we have for each other. The discourtesy evidenced while conversing on a cell phone while driving. The lust for oil, regardless of environmental costs, because we don't have to live with the mess personally, do we, or at least most of us don't.
The hubris evidenced by '...let them go be unhappy someplace else."
I still watch the progress of that company from afar - I spent a great many years of my life there, working very hard and giving my utmost. It's the only way I know to work. The company may survive, but I have my doubts. If it were healthy, it might survive a second crisis, but it's yet on life support from the last.
I will be sad for most of it's people when the end comes. But the leaders will merely reap what they have sown, disregarding Aristophanes as all leaders seem to eventually do, to their peril.
And so, in the fall of this year, in the early fall of my life, in the fall of our empire, and of our species, I witness as well the fall of one company, important to many, but no different than the countless other corporate leaves of our deciduous global society, doomed to a slow fade from green to flame, and then to fall and fade, much as this complicated world we have fashioned out of cardboard and sand is doomed to subside.
The cycle will turn, however bloody and desperate humanity's future proves to be. I don't think we shall destroy ourselves completely, but another dark age is certainly possible.
Meanwhile, the leaves blush, absolutely immune to the meanderings of humans; a hundred million years ago, the maples showed such hues to the uncaring (we presume) animals of the forest. A hundred million years hence, they will likely burst as brightly, though whether any sentient being with color vision will be present on the planet to appreciate the show is anyone's guess.
But I am here now, this mind I call 'I', and I take my pleasure in the hues of nature, and in the sense of justice done.
The trees are hinting at visions yet to come. The fields turned a week or so ago, the ambers and yellows deepening, being joined by browns and oranges, waning from green and waxing toward reds and yellows and brilliant burnt umbers and the thousand non-green hues of fall to which northern latitudes are privileged.
In some short time, if the rain may please to check itself, and the temperature drop just ever so much, approaching frost but not yet there, then we may hope for a fall in all its glory. My anticipation is high. It was thirty years ago this October first I left western New York - some 200 miles west of here, near the Seneca Nations, a town called Smith Mills, population maybe fifty, bound for Parris Island and Marine Corps Boot Camp.
As it happens, I tonight received a text from and made a call to an old marine buddy of mine, Brett Williams - we talked for an hour or so, catching up after a dozen or so years; I won't bore you with the details.
Our Alaskan Cruise adventure has ended - I'll post pictures soon, I promise - and fun was had by all, especially the Moms, for whom the cruise was intended as a late-life adventure. I've been back a week now and hard at work on the downstairs bathroom the whole time. Come Monday, I will mud the walls and mortar the floors, placing the first layer in the shower pan. By the end of the week, I should have the tiling in, and will be thinking about finish carpentry and paint.
I would prefer not to have to strip a bathroom to studs and sub-floor again, but it has been a learning experience. Pictures (with a few still on the camera, coming soon) are to the left. Plumbing and electrical are in - two new sewer lines, a new hot and a new cold water line, and three lines moved, a wall moved, enclosing a window that will be inside the shower, necessitating custom glass. Shower enclosure custom built, pocket door installed.
Total assistance: one plumber to cut in a side hole on an existing sewer line (I rerouted the other new provision myself) and one carpenter to frame the new wall.
My cat has been returned; I am glad as I was woeful lonely without her.
So that's the update on the mundane stuff. I've had time time think as well.
I write beside the fire, out back of 17 Park. Fall approaches - today I harvested all of my neighbor's basil, a thick handful of stems forming a bouquet of basil leaves two feet long and a as big around as my thigh. It's hanging to dry in the kitchen.
My northern and southern neighbors are preparing to flee the cold, to Florida, to winter over. Thus, with the cold will come the sealing of my solitude, as often days it is to these neighbors alone to whom I speak. With their absence, the likelihood that I will pass days without human contact grows.
Time moves slowly, lackluster waves rolling gently into a grey shore, unhurried insistence begging notice.
Events coalesce. The Bundeswehr recently released a report (Bundeswehr Report) (detailing certain of the same likely outcomes of peak oil as the Joint Chiefs did in the 2010 JOE. Fascinating reading, the circumstances these two militaries predict our now-global society will face in the coming years - and I mean years, as in, two to five, not years, as in, some indefinable but certainly very far future time.
I stress that the time frames are theirs: the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Bundeswehr, organizations not given to histrionics, generally, and perhaps two of the more fact-based decision making bodies on the planet with any immediate power.
Time is short, and the tipping point is upon us.
My religious acquaintances are well acquainted with this concept: they call it the rapture, the moment when the saved are lifted up to heaven, and us heathens are left here 0n Earth, which will by then have become the Devil's cauldron.
That there will be a cauldron I agree. With the assertion that it will be global I concur as well. The likelihood that some percentage of our population will be spared it's horrors by magical intervention I deem unlikely.
It will happen by the end of the decade. Our current way of life will slowly (if we are lucky - if not it will be rapid and bloody) crumble, and change will come. It is inevitable. As inevitable as the slow drift of yesterday's leaves to to the forest floor.
The markets are troubled, governments seem ineffective, with every action taken to promote 'growth' falling short, failing to reignite the economy. This is because it is a futile endeavor. It cannot be ignited, not anytime soon. Not in the manner nor on the scale to which we are accustomed.
Wealth distribution is too skewed. The subsidies of fossil fuels, like a mismanaged trust account, are dwindling, and the climate is just beginning to discover it can roar. We are an engine that has ceased running, that is choking from lack of fuel, running on fumes, desperate for a fill up, but none is to be had.
Leadership at all levels is absent. What passes for leadership is mere hubris and sanctimony, as often as not applied for short term positional gain by insisting upon sacrifice by others.
More personally, this is a time of great reflection for me: upon the fall in general, ever my favorite season, and my true progression into mid-life, and my reaction to the outcomes of the choices I've made.
It is a confluence of falls. It is the fall of this year, and it is the tail end of the summer of my life, perhaps a bit early for true fall yet, but nonetheless the promise is in the evening air. It is the fall of this great empire of America, where I have been privileged to have been born and raised. And it is in the fall of our species, grown too plentiful too fast on the promise and potential of a resource that itself is nearly played out.
Civilizations will be realigned, destroyed, created, reworked.
As to that, while I am apprehensive regarding certain historical patterns that seem to be repeating, and what they portend, I am nonetheless confident and content that I have prepared as well as may be against the gathering storm, and I consider myself well positioned to weather the storm and shelter those close to me if need be. I like who I am, and I like who I am becoming even more.
I am aware I may fail - but it will not be for having been blind and caught unaware. It will not be for having been careless. It will be instead for having been defeated, by the elements, or chance, or another stronger than I.
But there is no shame in defeat - only in failing to strive.
And it is nice to feel so deliberate, to feel so in charge of one's one destiny, to feel that finally one is choosing one's own path. And though I live in the lap of austerity, yet I am more satisfied than ever I have been, to wake each day and spend my labors and my thought and my property improving my immediate environment, answerable to no man, and beholden to none.
I am 47, and I am beginning to discover what it means to be free. It does require meaningful sacrifice. It does require prudence, and honest, hard work. But it offers so much space in which to think, it which to consider what it truly means to be human, and to be alive. To recall our choices and look back over our path.
To learn that perhaps the ways we have been taught are flawed, and that other ways are available to us.
And thus I reminded of an axiom a man related to me, related, in turn, to him by another man. The first man admired the second man, and had for some time, this was clear. And so he had received this 'wisdom' from the first man in the spirit of an acolyte receiving guidance from one of the Learned.
And he took it to heart, and never considered the implications, and related it to me some years later:
'Sometimes, if you just can't make someone happy, it's best to let them go be unhappy someplace else'.
Can you spot the condescension? The hidden assumption of righteous authority on the part of the original utterer of this nonsense?
The occurrence was on the occasion of my resignation, announced well in advance: two month's notice was given. The resignation had been prompted by ad hoc changes in levels and types of responsibility far exceeding the nominal duties of the position I held, and, due to the financial crisis I was informed that compensation had been 'frozen' for everyone.
At the time I was questioning the value of my career, and my desire for the level of responsibility I was being asked to take on, without any corresponding rise in compensation (for the second time, mind you - the first occurrence of that I let pass with little comment).
Coming as it did in the van of the financial crisis, I bethink I was viewed as somewhat disloyal, that I would not accept endless increased responsibility at no additional charge to the company - that I did not become more productive out of duty and loyalty to the company in tough times.
There's more to the story, of course, but it isn't particularly relevant; I relate this only because some background against which to discuss the above comment is necessary.
So I was unhappy, and I was also being told that my being unhappy because I was dissatisfied that my responsibilities had increased while my compensation had been frozen was selfish. Even here, I might have accepted this line of reasoning, had the circumstances been similar for all involved; yet nothing was further from the truth.
What really bothered me was the assumption, inherent in the statement, that if I did go somewhere else, I would remain unhappy. In other words, my unhappiness was due to a flaw within myself. It must be so, because, if this company couldn't make me happy, then it must be that I could never be made happy.
How else to interpret '...let them go be unhappy someplace else.'?
What stunning arrogance! It's like the abused wife being told by the abusive husband that she has no business complaining - he's the only one that will ever love her!
I have spent two years thinking on this brief verbal exchange, occurring in passing at a meeting of no great import, merely a casual comment made with bonhomie and a chuckle to ease the sting of the admonishment.
And I have learned to my own satisfaction, and realized only because I have withdrawn from that world and found the time to think with a clear head, that it was not, after all, my inability to be happy that was the problem. It was not greed that provoked my departure, nor was it a lack of willingness to sacrifice for the larger good.
Clearly I am capable of happiness, as I am happier now than ever I have been. And near the poorest, at least in terms of cash flow. And have and will continue to give freely of my meager skills to all worthy comers.
I am not, after all, some flawed denizen of the corporate world, dissatisfied with everything and forever grumbling. I'm not some greedy, insatiable tool demanding ever more. I'm just a man who felt treated unfairly, and was made to feel worse for being made to feel disloyal. Despite no such loyalty having been either earned or demonstrated in return by the company.
And I am also a man who has watched with some puzzlement as this company, our society, and our species have all continued to make inherently unsustainable choices focused solely on short-term expectations and desires, in the face of clear and growing evidence that what has worked previously will absolutely not do so this time around.
It is the cohesion of these two trains of thoughts that is so welcome. Our world is broken. This is reflected not just in the grand sweep of history that topples and births nations, and which is now a gathering wave that will sweep the globe like fire as humanity experiences a crisis the likes of which it has never seen.
It will be the Anasazi and Easter Island on a grand scale.
It is also reflected in our personal interactions, in our values of and for each other. And I don't mean to invoke transactional measures here: the coin a man is paid for his labor. I mean in the unspoken perspectives we have for each other. The discourtesy evidenced while conversing on a cell phone while driving. The lust for oil, regardless of environmental costs, because we don't have to live with the mess personally, do we, or at least most of us don't.
The hubris evidenced by '...let them go be unhappy someplace else."
I still watch the progress of that company from afar - I spent a great many years of my life there, working very hard and giving my utmost. It's the only way I know to work. The company may survive, but I have my doubts. If it were healthy, it might survive a second crisis, but it's yet on life support from the last.
I will be sad for most of it's people when the end comes. But the leaders will merely reap what they have sown, disregarding Aristophanes as all leaders seem to eventually do, to their peril.
And so, in the fall of this year, in the early fall of my life, in the fall of our empire, and of our species, I witness as well the fall of one company, important to many, but no different than the countless other corporate leaves of our deciduous global society, doomed to a slow fade from green to flame, and then to fall and fade, much as this complicated world we have fashioned out of cardboard and sand is doomed to subside.
The cycle will turn, however bloody and desperate humanity's future proves to be. I don't think we shall destroy ourselves completely, but another dark age is certainly possible.
Meanwhile, the leaves blush, absolutely immune to the meanderings of humans; a hundred million years ago, the maples showed such hues to the uncaring (we presume) animals of the forest. A hundred million years hence, they will likely burst as brightly, though whether any sentient being with color vision will be present on the planet to appreciate the show is anyone's guess.
But I am here now, this mind I call 'I', and I take my pleasure in the hues of nature, and in the sense of justice done.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Men, Horses, Rivers, Steam, and Trains - On the Record.
We already know what a sustainable technology looks like: men, horses, rivers, steam and trains. Men for the planning and work requiring intelligence and manual dexterity. Horses for the 'horsepower' - to which we still refer today, when discussing the capacity of engines of various sorts.
Rivers for steady, relentless conversion of energy into different, more useful forms: electricity, sawmills, grain mills.
Steam for where even horses are insufficient - and by way of note on that topic, we have here in Moravia two working steam engines - magnificent beasts, I know not how old, but near a hundred, I think, carrying a couple of thousand gallons of water in a nose tanker over the boiler. They still operate, and I am told they used to be used to pave roads and other challenging tasks. Replacement parts are custom-made by a foundry in Pennsylvania, I am told.
Trains for transportation - the commercial isn't kidding when it says it can move a ton of freight on a gallon of fuel - trains are very efficient ways to move things, and, as importantly, require much less infrastructure than other forms of distributed, often private, transportation.
Humans got by quite well with all of this save trains, of the mechanical variety, anyway. History spoke of caravans and trains long before we ever made one of iron and put it on rails.
So we know how to do sustainable, although the factors outlined above are in no way what those who eat, live, and breath 'sustainable' as both a 'lifestyle' and an ideology are thinking. No, what those folks are thinking of as 'sustainable' translates to, in plain speak, as: 'a guilt-and-relatively-cost-free-method, preferably less expensive than current methods, of living fairly closely to the way I currently live, and without the toxins in my seafood'.
We want sustainable without having to affect our livelihood in significant ways. Most people I encounter who participate in behaving sustainably do, in fact, lower their footprint. But it's on such a small scale as to be nearly meaningless. 'Rationing' trips to the store. Growing more at home. Re-purposing items, bartering, etc.
Great stuff! I'm a huge fan, as much because such actions bring us closer to a true exchange of value than paper money has any hope of doing, as because such a lifestyle is a fundamentally more human way to live. And in the particular case of barter, as each party to a barter is calculating not only their advantage, but their trading partner's advantage as well - and, if ethical, not just to ensure that one is receiving a fair value, but that one is granting a fair value as well, it's a more humane way to live as well.
Taking advantage in a barter economy gets one aught but trouble. Barter economies tend to be small, and reputations tend to be known and taken seriously.
Eh. I digress.
The root of it is, going sustainable means using electricity only during certain periods of each day. It means doing most things by hand - without the aid of powered machines. Of living more locally and simply.
If a public conversation were to be had, and I were to maintain - as I until now have maintained privately and here maintain publicly - that the point at which we will soon find ourselves is much nearer the known sustainable technology point than it is to the hoped-for sustainable technology point, then I should expect to soon be roundly criticized and mocked. (And I am no stranger to these circumstances, but mostly on a personal scale in intimate conversations with fellows. Only rarely am I greeted as at all insightful).
Anyway, as the anti-sage once said, "bring it on".
The truth is, and I believe it's about to become very up close and personal to each of us, is that we're very soon - and here I mean weeks and months - going to have to get used to getting by with a whole lot less of everything, but mostly energy, and it is, after all, energy upon which our making and getting of everything else is based.
I don't know how many nails I can pound in a day with a hammer, but it's certainly fewer than I can drive with a decent nail gun and a compressor.
And that's leaving aside the energy input into the two architectures. The first, of course, is simply a man, a hammer and a box of nails. We'll call it Architecture'. It's components all require energy to grow or make, it is true. Make note of it.
Yet it's sustainable based entirely upon energy inputs from the sun - no manufactured nuclear energy, nor any recaptured solar energy (hydrocarbons), is necessary. The man, the hammer, and the nails may all be produced, directly or indirectly, via the energy received from the sun over the course of a normal human lifetime.
(It's getting late, and I don't much feel like adding a logical proof of that last point, but if you wish to challenge, feel free to e-mail me (jeffrey.saeli@knology.net))
But then consider the energy input that goes into manufacturing the nail gun, the nails, the adhesive or paper or plastic or wire holding the nails together, the box in which they are packaged, the compressor, the hoses, the brass fittings, the entire delivered-electricity network, to include, just by way of one example, that industry and it's components responsible for felling, preparing, transporting, and employing the buried dead trees to which we attach the copper wire to carry the electricity to power the compressor.
And, of course, the vehicle upon which to load and transport the gun, the nails, the compressor, the hoses, the cords; and the vehicle's associated industries and ad infinitum,and we are all guilty, myself as much as anyone.
We'll call this Architecture". Architecture" is not sustainable because it relies either upon energy inputs that are either so toxic as to destroy our species with cavalier elan; or are fast diminishing and irreplaceable over the course of at least the next two decades (and likely never).
Do you think we have a sustainable future with nail guns? Do you know how many 'green' types I have met here cheerfully running around building off-grid houses using nail guns? Is our cultural sense of irony decayed, retarded, or, alas, dead?
So for those who have asked recently, this why I do as much as I can by hand. To understand what it takes to do these things by hand, that used to be done by hand, and now are done by hand if at all only with the assistance of myriad waldos, realized and unrealized. Because Architecture' is going to win, and I'm just trying to get ahead of the curve, so that when things get rough, at least my hands have been toughened.
I sense I'm soon not going to have a choice, so it's simply sleeves-rolling-up-time.
Semper fuckin Fi', Rangers Lead the Way, Deeds Not Words, and all that oo-rah and hoo-ah shit, which, if you get right down to it, at least has the virtue of being up close and personal. Plus, those are worthy codes. There is honor in every one of those credos. Something profoundly lacking in our society.
Someday soon when the wheels of commerce seize and the banks are broke and falling like ashes and money has once again become mere paper, then the unexpected outcomes will kick in - when trade fails, and we notice that we make nothing of immediate usefulness here in this country; certainly not the stuff we need every day, then we'll begin to understand what it means to have such limitless quantities of energy at our fingertips, every second of every day, that we may have our shoes made half a world away, and the laces elsewhere still, somewhere across yet another distant ocean, and our tomatoes from across a continent, and yet we make nothing ourselves, every day.
We'll understand when it's taken away.
Sometime during that realization, we'll all begin to understand much, much better what it means to get by with things, as James Howard Kunstler would put it,"...made by hand." Because we'll have to make so much more in exactly that way. And walk so very many more miles than to which we are so recently accustomed.
I have told my family now, for some time, and I have spoken of this to some few others as well, that I believe 2011 is the year when, as I put it, 'the wheels come off'.
I believe this is the year when our currencies collapse, when our global population enters the early stages of collapse, when climate change becomes undeniable to all save the most fringy, when our governments fail, when our trade ceases, when corporations crumble, when war erupts and the grand chaos so desired by Christians, claiming it portends the rapture and their salvation, waxes in mournful splendor, casting us humans aside as pawns-in-play on a ne'er used chessboard sweep aside the dust of centuries.
Mind: we are not the pawns. We are not so grand. We are the dust.
Rivers for steady, relentless conversion of energy into different, more useful forms: electricity, sawmills, grain mills.
Steam for where even horses are insufficient - and by way of note on that topic, we have here in Moravia two working steam engines - magnificent beasts, I know not how old, but near a hundred, I think, carrying a couple of thousand gallons of water in a nose tanker over the boiler. They still operate, and I am told they used to be used to pave roads and other challenging tasks. Replacement parts are custom-made by a foundry in Pennsylvania, I am told.
Trains for transportation - the commercial isn't kidding when it says it can move a ton of freight on a gallon of fuel - trains are very efficient ways to move things, and, as importantly, require much less infrastructure than other forms of distributed, often private, transportation.
Humans got by quite well with all of this save trains, of the mechanical variety, anyway. History spoke of caravans and trains long before we ever made one of iron and put it on rails.
So we know how to do sustainable, although the factors outlined above are in no way what those who eat, live, and breath 'sustainable' as both a 'lifestyle' and an ideology are thinking. No, what those folks are thinking of as 'sustainable' translates to, in plain speak, as: 'a guilt-and-relatively-cost-free-method, preferably less expensive than current methods, of living fairly closely to the way I currently live, and without the toxins in my seafood'.
We want sustainable without having to affect our livelihood in significant ways. Most people I encounter who participate in behaving sustainably do, in fact, lower their footprint. But it's on such a small scale as to be nearly meaningless. 'Rationing' trips to the store. Growing more at home. Re-purposing items, bartering, etc.
Great stuff! I'm a huge fan, as much because such actions bring us closer to a true exchange of value than paper money has any hope of doing, as because such a lifestyle is a fundamentally more human way to live. And in the particular case of barter, as each party to a barter is calculating not only their advantage, but their trading partner's advantage as well - and, if ethical, not just to ensure that one is receiving a fair value, but that one is granting a fair value as well, it's a more humane way to live as well.
Taking advantage in a barter economy gets one aught but trouble. Barter economies tend to be small, and reputations tend to be known and taken seriously.
Eh. I digress.
The root of it is, going sustainable means using electricity only during certain periods of each day. It means doing most things by hand - without the aid of powered machines. Of living more locally and simply.
If a public conversation were to be had, and I were to maintain - as I until now have maintained privately and here maintain publicly - that the point at which we will soon find ourselves is much nearer the known sustainable technology point than it is to the hoped-for sustainable technology point, then I should expect to soon be roundly criticized and mocked. (And I am no stranger to these circumstances, but mostly on a personal scale in intimate conversations with fellows. Only rarely am I greeted as at all insightful).
Anyway, as the anti-sage once said, "bring it on".
The truth is, and I believe it's about to become very up close and personal to each of us, is that we're very soon - and here I mean weeks and months - going to have to get used to getting by with a whole lot less of everything, but mostly energy, and it is, after all, energy upon which our making and getting of everything else is based.
I don't know how many nails I can pound in a day with a hammer, but it's certainly fewer than I can drive with a decent nail gun and a compressor.
And that's leaving aside the energy input into the two architectures. The first, of course, is simply a man, a hammer and a box of nails. We'll call it Architecture'. It's components all require energy to grow or make, it is true. Make note of it.
Yet it's sustainable based entirely upon energy inputs from the sun - no manufactured nuclear energy, nor any recaptured solar energy (hydrocarbons), is necessary. The man, the hammer, and the nails may all be produced, directly or indirectly, via the energy received from the sun over the course of a normal human lifetime.
(It's getting late, and I don't much feel like adding a logical proof of that last point, but if you wish to challenge, feel free to e-mail me (jeffrey.saeli@knology.net))
But then consider the energy input that goes into manufacturing the nail gun, the nails, the adhesive or paper or plastic or wire holding the nails together, the box in which they are packaged, the compressor, the hoses, the brass fittings, the entire delivered-electricity network, to include, just by way of one example, that industry and it's components responsible for felling, preparing, transporting, and employing the buried dead trees to which we attach the copper wire to carry the electricity to power the compressor.
And, of course, the vehicle upon which to load and transport the gun, the nails, the compressor, the hoses, the cords; and the vehicle's associated industries and ad infinitum,and we are all guilty, myself as much as anyone.
We'll call this Architecture". Architecture" is not sustainable because it relies either upon energy inputs that are either so toxic as to destroy our species with cavalier elan; or are fast diminishing and irreplaceable over the course of at least the next two decades (and likely never).
Do you think we have a sustainable future with nail guns? Do you know how many 'green' types I have met here cheerfully running around building off-grid houses using nail guns? Is our cultural sense of irony decayed, retarded, or, alas, dead?
So for those who have asked recently, this why I do as much as I can by hand. To understand what it takes to do these things by hand, that used to be done by hand, and now are done by hand if at all only with the assistance of myriad waldos, realized and unrealized. Because Architecture' is going to win, and I'm just trying to get ahead of the curve, so that when things get rough, at least my hands have been toughened.
I sense I'm soon not going to have a choice, so it's simply sleeves-rolling-up-time.
Semper fuckin Fi', Rangers Lead the Way, Deeds Not Words, and all that oo-rah and hoo-ah shit, which, if you get right down to it, at least has the virtue of being up close and personal. Plus, those are worthy codes. There is honor in every one of those credos. Something profoundly lacking in our society.
Someday soon when the wheels of commerce seize and the banks are broke and falling like ashes and money has once again become mere paper, then the unexpected outcomes will kick in - when trade fails, and we notice that we make nothing of immediate usefulness here in this country; certainly not the stuff we need every day, then we'll begin to understand what it means to have such limitless quantities of energy at our fingertips, every second of every day, that we may have our shoes made half a world away, and the laces elsewhere still, somewhere across yet another distant ocean, and our tomatoes from across a continent, and yet we make nothing ourselves, every day.
We'll understand when it's taken away.
Sometime during that realization, we'll all begin to understand much, much better what it means to get by with things, as James Howard Kunstler would put it,"...made by hand." Because we'll have to make so much more in exactly that way. And walk so very many more miles than to which we are so recently accustomed.
I have told my family now, for some time, and I have spoken of this to some few others as well, that I believe 2011 is the year when, as I put it, 'the wheels come off'.
I believe this is the year when our currencies collapse, when our global population enters the early stages of collapse, when climate change becomes undeniable to all save the most fringy, when our governments fail, when our trade ceases, when corporations crumble, when war erupts and the grand chaos so desired by Christians, claiming it portends the rapture and their salvation, waxes in mournful splendor, casting us humans aside as pawns-in-play on a ne'er used chessboard sweep aside the dust of centuries.
Mind: we are not the pawns. We are not so grand. We are the dust.
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