Updates, Current Activities, Schedule

The Jupiter Project, as originally and still conceived, is an effort to relocate to a less densely settled part of the country; become a part of a smaller, local community; and return to a way of life that at its core fulfills the following values:

• Self-reliance and resilience to the impacts of climate change, resource depletion, and population overshoot;
• A slower, less frenetic pace of life but one that involves - and values - real, physical labor alongside intellectual labor and lifelong learning;
• The application of labor to real capital in order to provide for basic needs of the self, the family and the community without stripping the land of resources in an effort to maximize profit;
• The replacement of non-sustainable, energy intensive technologies, such as large scale automobile use, by re-localizing the production of basic human needs and making basic resources locally available by walking or animal borne-travel;
• The retention of valuable, sustainable technologies that enhance human life, such as communications devices, the Internet, and medical science;
• Avoidance, to the extent possible, of corporate and governmental (and really, aren't they the same thing in this grand new oligarchy of ours?) influences over my life;
• Doing this in such a way that when the need arises others - and in particular our children, descendents, and community members - are provided opportunities to exchange labor for resources that meet their needs and fairly share in whatever modest profits we might produce

The Project is entering it's third phase.  The first phase involved the decision to adjust our lifestyle and move to a suitable location; the securing of resources, chiefly land and basic tools; and the move itself.  This phase did not end as planned - an attempt to build a home on the land we purchased ended when we determined we could not afford the proposed structure.

The second phase included the purchase of a home near our land, with the intent to occupy it while we developed the land.  The purchased home required more repairs than expected.  In response, we returned to paying jobs to acquire cash to finance the repairs, and at the same time began modest improvements to the land and began adjusting our lifestyle to include more manual labor, the self-production of some food, and heating exclusively with manually self-produced firewood.  This phase is now ending successfully.

I will (very thankfully) leave full time corporate service on July 3rd, and will return my full attention to furthering the goals of the Jupiter Project.  In the short term, I have several tasks that will fully occupy my time over the next several weeks:

• Involvement with the local chapter of the VFW has required increased participation in veteran's events; In addition to regular meetings and activities, I have been asked to speak at an event on Memorial Day, and in late June to attend an opening ceremony for a fundraiser whose proceeds benefit veterans disabled by their wounds.
• Involvement with the Village Planning Board.  Our Village Plan is fifty years old and in need of updating.
• I have jury service on May 19th; if seated I will have a number of grand jury sessions to attend over the course of the following three months.
• The closing out of multiple projects at work.
• Time allocations to fuel production and gardening.

Commencing on July 4th, my personal Independence Day, I will begin attending to the following projects that will mark the opening of the third phase of the Jupiter Project. 

• Competing final work to the house - tiling and trimming the kitchen, replacing the existing kitchen window, and sundry small tasks elsewhere that have been bypassed while primary renovations have been ongoing.
• Arranging for and accepting part-time labor for pay or barter in and around the community.
• Clearing portions of the land in order to prepare them for the construction of outbuildings for the storage and maintenance of equipment and on-site business office space.
• Clearing portions of the land that we intend to return to active agriculture.
• Improvement of the existing road, bridge, and proposed homestead site.
• Research and training with respect to suitable crop selection, production and marketing.
• Forest management, chiefly thinning to encourage the growth of desirable species and individual trees.
• Developing foot paths throughout the land and bridges across several small streams on the land.

At this time we are not prepared to hire employees, but any children of ours that would like to participate in this effort are welcome to discuss the matter with us. 

Next year we hope to begin small-scale crop production on Creek Road, with an eye toward scaling up over the coming years to the point where we become a community resource that provides produce, forest products, and employment to the local community.  We hope to open a road-side stand on Creek Road where we will sell our own produce, and perhaps permit others to sell non-competitive products alongside our own.

My intention also is to return to this blog after Independence Day, to again chronicle in words and pictures our progress, and to engage in conversation and debate with Connor Stiles, my son and fellow author on this blog.  Until then, I will be reading, re-reading, and pondering his thoughts and words.

Meanwhile, later today I will exchange the front end loader that is currently mounted on my tractor, and too large for the tractor itself to handle, for a three bottom plow.  I'll let you know how it goes.

Saintgermane

Thinking

Whatever else, things need to move along to the next thing.

Welcome Cooper

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

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.

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.

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.

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.