Working Hard to Live Simply

May 30, 2009
By Andy Parks
http://www.echonews.com
The idea of growing your own food and living a more simple, sustainable lifestyle is something that more and more people are aspiring to do – but it’s certainly not a new concept.
One study by the Australia Institute found 23% of Australians aged 30 to 59 had decided to “downshift” in some way, reducing their work hours in order to pursue other aspects of life that were important to them.
Leigh Davison said it was called “voluntary simplicity” in the early 70s and, after spending time in Asia, he knew he wanted to make a change in the way he lived his life.
“I was an engineer by profession and spent a few years living in India and Indonesia and was impressed by the fact that people who lived very simple lifestyles, you would probably call them poverty-stricken, seemed to be a lot happier than myself and many of the others living so called wealthy lifestyles,” Leigh said. “I was doing PhD at the University of NSW and got interested in agriculture and organic farming. I rented some land outside Sydney and started growing organic vegies and making compost.”
By the late 70s he had met his wife Ellen in the United States and convinced her to come and live with him on a “hippy commune” at The Channon. Thirty years on and the community is close to providing all of their own food, shelter and power needs.
“We do buy some food, but if Woolworths closed down tomorrow, we would very quickly be able to get to a point where we could be self-sufficient… If you look at your dietary needs, you need carbohydrates and we have a variety of pumpkin that is very sustainable, because it has no pests. We grow potatoes, although we do have to import the seed from colder places like Dorrigo… Sweet potato is very well adapted to this climate, sweet corn, and bananas, they’re God’s gift to humanity. Goldfingers do incredibly well here in the subtropics,” he said. “Then there’s protein; that all comes from the dairy – we make two 3kg cheeses a week. And we make yoghurt, butter, cottage cheese and feta cheese.”
There are 18 permanent residents living in eight houses on the property, as well as a guest house where WWOOFers (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) regularly stay and help around the gardens.
There is also a communal house where five times a week they get together for communal meals and sort out the rosters so work is shared in an equitable way.
“One of the main purposes of the place is to explore this idea of living more simply and there are three fundamental principles: respect for the land, respect for each other and to grow as much of our food as we can on the property,” Leigh said. “You have to work really hard to live more simply… Every Saturday morning is garden morning. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but everyone who is here goes down to the garden and we work on whatever patch (is needed). Each person has one or two crops that they’re in charge of and that (produce) gets shared around. Rather than everybody growing a little bit of everything, it’s much more efficient to do one or two things. At the moment I’m doing winter zucchinis and potatoes… My wife Ellen does broccoli and a few other things.”
Composting toilets are a particular passion of his and grey water systems feed the gardens and orchards. Leigh and Ellen recently upgraded to a solar system on their house, but for many years their electricity was generated by a hydro system made with an old Holden alternator.
The property is 102 hectares and there is ongoing maintenance work on roads and dams and watering systems that are generally done on Fridays. One of the other conditions of being a member of the community is that you can’t be on the dole; you have to have an income from outside the property. Leigh is a senior lecturer at SCU’s School of Environmental Science and Management and also the director of their Centre for Eco-technology.
His university work is about 20 hours a week and the rest of the time he spends working on the property.
“It’s a former dairy farm and about 20% we have dedicated towards farming and the rest we are restoring to native forest. Bush regeneration is my hobby, so I don’t have to belong to a golf course or a gym,” he said with a laugh. “One of the ideas that came along with voluntary simplicity was the idea of ‘creative leisure’, so you don’t have to spend a fortune (on leisure activities), you can get your kicks out of growing vegies.”
Leigh said he sees an important educative role for himself and others with similar experiences teaching people about growing food and community models in the future.
“Peak oil is probably happening about now. Peak phosphate is probably going to happen in about 20 years time. Conceivably you can replace oil with other things, but you can’t replace phosphate and the world’s agriculture runs on phosphorus fertiliser… The price of food is going up and will continue to go up. When my mother was born in 1913 the average Australian working class family spent 40% of its income on food. By 1950 it had come down to 20%, by 2000 it was 10%. We’re spending all our money on overseas trips and electronic gadgets, but food is going to go up because it’s very dependent on fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources… You can’t have a sustainable planet with 10 billion people and a lifestyle anything like the one you and I enjoy now… If we want a sustainable society there’s got to be a lot more equity, not just internationally, but inter-generationly. My generation has consumed 50% of the world’s non renewable resources in just 50 years.”
Although he has been involved in establishing a sustainable community, Leigh is very aware it is not a model that can be replicated in many other places.
“The reason we are here is because it was cheap. (When it was bought) in 1972 the land had no agricultural value… Land around here these days is much more expensive and the planet’s not big enough to give everyone 100 hectares. But you could do what we’re doing on a lot less.”
He said some of the lessons they have learned about communal living are already being replicated and will need to be a part of the future if we are to combat urban sprawl taking over prime agricultural land.
“As part of my work with the university, I’ve visited places in Denmark where they call it ‘co-housing’. Basically urban or suburban areas where 40 families have got together and bought some land and built these very interesting communal dwellings… There is a zone for teenagers so when they get to a certain age they’re not at home blasting the walls down.
“Everybody realises we’ve got to be less car dependent. We’ve got to make our urban environments cycle-able, walkable or public transportable and I think one of the plusses that’s going to occur when petrol becomes too expensive for the average person is we’ll be forced to do things more communally,” he said.
Leigh is currently on Lismore council’s sustainable environment policy advisory group and last year he gave a presentation on sustainable settlements for the NSW North Coast at a climate change forum at SCU. In that presentation he asked, amongst other things, what a sustainable Lismore would look like.
“Human settlements are going to have to get more compact… I think you could do some of the sorts of things we’ve done here on the MO (multiple occupancy), but closer to town. There is a movement towards communal gardens and I think we should be identifying sites where market gardening could be conducted. The ideal site in my view is opposite the showgrounds. There is some country there with a few cattle on it, up the hill there are gullies that could be dammed to have gravity fed irrigation. It’s not suitable for residential development because of the saleyards and the speedway and you could get the poo from the saleyards as a resource. These are the types of places we should be identifying now.”
http://www.echonews.com/index.php?page=News%20Article&article=26452&issue=406

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Ordinary Human Poverty

May 28, 2009

by Sharon Astyk
http://sharonastyk.com

Note: This is a rerun, a piece I wrote last fall, at the tail end of high energy prices. What’s interesting to me is that our collective crisis seems to play out this way no matter what element – financial collapse, energy prices, food crisis…whatever is in ascendence, we end up in the same final outcome. For me, this is perhaps *the* central notion of my work – if you are prepared to be poor, poor in a sense that most Americans do not know, you will probably get along through the coming crisis. The problem, of course, is that we’re not prepared.

At one point in his writings, Sigmund Freud (who, btw, was not at all the caricature that many readers imagine him as) wrote about the difference between two states – one of them abnormal, and subject to resolution by the “talking cure,” the other ordinary and not necessarily remediable. The first he called “neurotic misery,” the other “ordinary human unhappiness.” His point was that psychoanalysis could only address pathological states, and neither it nor any other solution could preserve us from the ordinary bad experiences of being human. Thus distinguishing ”ordinary human unhappiness” was essential in diagnosis. Ordinary human unhappiness did mean, of course, that one was unhappy every second, merely that one accepted that normal human states had periods of suffering, sadness, anger and fear in them too – it was important to recognize that nothing, no tool, could ever make life good every second.

Riffing on Freud, for some years, I have been arguing that the reality of peak energy, climate change and our precarious financial situation was leading us towards re-experiencing “ordinary human poverty” – a state that I would argue is fairly normal, if at times unpleasant. I also believe it is the future for most of us. And it would be easy to imagine that this meant that our future was one of true horror, an pathological nightmare from which we cannot awaken. The despair many of us feel when we see that word “poverty” can’t be underestimated.

I think we are now at the point where the argument I’ve been making all these years – that peak oil will be less about whether there is gas in the gas stations or whether the grid crashes – and more about whether we can buy gas or whether the utility company shuts us off for nonpayment is pretty much certain. Right now, we are watching the crisis unfold mostly far from us. It is coming home – and rapidly, and we are shifting to a lower eocnomic level. Consider housing – we have a vast inventory of houses at high prices that no one particularly wants to buy – and certainly, no one wants to build more. Moreover, we have a rapidly aginging older population, many of whom relied on those houses for their financial security. Add to this the pressures of age, job loss and economic crisis and there’s every reason for people to move in together, and every reason for people not to build or buy new house. Expecting growth in the housing market is a lot like expecting growth in the VCR market – the moment is past.

We could make much the same analysis for many other segments of the economy. Whence the high paying NYC and other urban restaurants that depend on high finance types buying expensive meals? Poof! Whence travel and tourism in an era of unemployment and rather inexplicably rising gas prices (last time the price per barrel of oil was this low, gas prices were significantly lower). We may go some places – those who still have money may head to the beach, rather than Cancun – but the overall amount of wealth flowing through the economy has dropped like a stone. And the fear takes the rest of it with us, as we become afraid to spend, afraid to invest, afraid to lose what little we’ve got left. Bailout or no, the economy is headed into something deep and dark, and most of us are going into this new world with it. Poverty is about to go back to being our human norm – just as it always has been for most of the world’s people.

And yet, the reason I’m using Freud’s language here isn’t just to remind us that poverty is a normal state for human beings – although it is. Those of us who are so terrified of losing our wealth should remind ourselves that 85% of the world is poorer than we are – that is, we are not entering truly unknown territory.

But more importantly, I use Freud’s language to imply that there is a distinction between the deep suffering of what I would call “pathological poverty” and the functional poverty that is “ordinary human poverty”, sometimes unpleasant, probably always troubling in comparison to the relative wealth we’ve had, but a basically livable state. In it one can have periods, even long periods of happiness and security and comfort along with some less pleasant moments. And I believe that while none of us can insulate ourselves entirely from the trauma of the darker ends of this, there is a great deal we can do to ensure that our coming poverty is not the pathological kind.

Dmitry Orlov observes, in his excellent essay “Five Stages of Collapse” – that on the one hand, there’s not much cheery about the fact that we’ve jumped from Stage One to Two. But there is the reality that we can do a great deal to keep the elevator from dropping down to the basement.

What is the distinction between “pathological poverty” and “ordinary human poverty?” Well, cast back in your heads to your grandparents or great-grandparents. Among the stories of hardship in post-war Europe and Asia, of recurring crises across the Globe, and of the Great Depression in America are likely to be moments that distinguish between the pathological poor. “We were very poor, but there was always food on the table.” “We were poor, but we didn’t really know it.” “It was a struggle, but we were happy.” We will also hear stories the other side of poverty – the pain of hunger, the blind terror of being turned off with no place to go, the deaths and the pointless losses and tragedies.

The question becomes how do we turn this story into one where most of us can say “We were poor, but we had enough – just enough, but enough.” How do we make the story into one where our kids may grow up not really realizing just how poor we were? How do we accustom ourselves to the ordinary human unhappiness that is our shift in wealth, without allowing ourselves to fall through the floor, into the deeper stages of collapse?

There are three answers to this. The first is to reduce your needs. I expect that for a long time, the stigma that attaches to any kind of poverty will keep many of us struggling to keep up appearances. We are likely to feel ashamed the first time we have to ask for help, ashamed that our clothes are no longer as fine, that dinner is plainer and that we now share our homes. The best way, I think to get over these feelings is to get over them in advance – to change your values as so many here have. Thrift shop clothes and patches should be sources of pride, symbols of your independence from industrial manufacturers. The food on the table – and the people who share it – are the point – not whether high-social value elements like wine and meat are present. The need to speak out against the culture that tells us that poor is dirty and bad becomes paramount – because the more resources we waste keeping up appearances the harder it will be to adapt.

The second is self-sufficiency of the kind most of us are trying to achieve. The garden, the sewing needle, the saw and hammer, the ability to make and repair, to grow and produce and nurture things – these are things that demonstrate, as Jeremy Seabrook has contended, the opposite of poverty is not wealth, it is self-sufficiency. None of us will ever be wholly self-sufficient – but to be able to say that it doesn’t matter if you can afford shoes this year because you can repair last year’s boots, or to not have to spend much of your money on food means that you have a much better chance of covering that emergency medical bill or the property taxes.

But these things alone are not sufficient. One’s self-sufficiency can be taken away too easily when we lose access to land. You can lower your standards to allow “poor but decent” but when we get to “filthy and rat infested” that’s not such a good idea. The only way to live in the world of ordinary human poverty is to live there in a world where your pocket isn’t picked constantly, where you aren’t the victim of endless resource conflicts, where your government doesn’t sell your future out. And the only way to be a nation of reasonably self-sufficient, ordinarily poor people living decently is this – to remember that the reason we use the word “ordinary” here is that there are a lot more of us peasants than there are of the powerful. The truth is that repressive governments, or even well intentioned but stupid and misguided governments are scary – but they never have enough troops, enough power to stand up against the unified dignity of those who are simply ordinary, and simply want enough. But that requires that we trust each other, that we work together, that we create the institutions of ordinary poverty, the ones that have fallen into disuse – Granges, Unions, Consumers Unions, neighborhoods, land use committees, voting blocs, and larger groups that can be used to pull us together. These things too are ordinary and human – and it is getting to be time to build them.

Sharon

http://sharonastyk.com/2009/05/22/ordinary-human-poverty-2/

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The Myth of Efficiency

May 26, 2009

by Peak Oil Hausfrau

http://peakoilhausfrau.blogspot.com

Efficient, adj. 1. Acting or producing effectively with a minimum of waste or effort. 2. Exhibiting a high ratio of output to input.

Along with freedom and progress, efficiency rounds out the triad of America’s most treasured ideals. We like things to be “efficient,” without really knowing what it means. Americans tend to use the term efficiency as a code word for getting things done cheaply and conveniently. Take agriculture, for example. It certainly is an achievement to churn out food at prices that are far less than historical averages (by percentage of family budget spent on food). That frees up a lot of money for people to spend on other things – clothes, travel, books, furniture, whatever your desire might be.

But what makes efficiency? Is it clever management? The “productivity” of human resources? Economies of scale? Centralization? Better information and computer systems? The competition of markets? Business people give credit to these innovations, and all of these changes may contribute incrementally to the cheapness of our food, but these are just icing on the cake. The real underpinning of what we think of as efficiency is cheap energy – especially cheap oil.

Farms here in America have been consolidating for over 50 years. The average size of a “farm” is now 459 acres. They are managed with the aid of GPS systems, barns of tractors, and miles of irrigation systems. The farms of today have replaced people, armed with knowledge of local conditions and crop varieties and supported by rainfall and rich topsoil, with machines fueled by gasoline and regular applications of chemicals created from fossil fuels.

Efficiency, in other words, means replacing energy from humans and animals and plants with the incredibly cheap, concentrated energy found in oil. It does not mean less waste (at least when measured in BTUs). Americans pride ourselves on our innovations, but we did not in fact create better, less wasteful farming systems – we just found ways to pour as much of this cheap energy into our farms as possible, without considering how long the resource would remain cheap.

Small farms are actually more productive and efficient than large farms. They produce more per acre. However, while fuel is inexpensive, small farms cannot achieve the massive economies of scale enabled by the replacement of people with gigantic tractors and chemicals. Since a gallon of oil can replace the energy of hundreds of hours of human labor, at a fraction of the cost, it makes a whole lot of economic sense to use it in place of people.

Replacing man (and horse) with machines may seem efficient, but it is not the efficiency of nature, which uses every particle of matter and energy and creates no waste. It is the economic efficiency of man, which inevitably generates pollution and destruction because the costs are not borne by the user, but by nature and by the community at large. What we call efficiency is simply the conversion of a fossil fuel inheritance millions of years in the making into cheap fuel and food for a few generations.

What we call “efficiency” is actually the height of inefficiency. The foundation of modern agriculture is mostly just the addition of more energy to the system, and any fool can do that. Our current food systems are only made possible by massive wastefulness, ruination of natural systems, and unbridled use of our inheritance of fossil fuels. These are the costs that our economic accounting does not take into account.

How efficient will it be to manage a 1,000 acre farm when production of oil begins to decline? How efficient will it be to ship lettuce 1,500 miles when gas costs $6 a gallon? How efficient will it be to use 20 calories of fossil fuels to create one calorie of food? What will we be left with when the age of oil begins to wane? Eroded topsoil, depleted aquifers, and the loss of the valuable farming knowledge of entire generations of Americans.

Here in Oklahoma, we are lucky to have small farmers still holding on to their farms and activists dedicated to reviving our local, sustainable and organic foodsheds. We have the Oklahoma Food Co-operative, an Extension Service supportive of sustainable agriculture, Community Supported Agriculture shares, and several local farmer’s markets. Many of the people living here have memories of farms, of growing gardens and raising animals, and many continue to grow fruits and vegetables regardless of whether they live in the country or city. Here we are not that far away from our food.

As the price of fuel rises, the myth of efficiency will be exposed. We can choose to recognize that our ideal was an illusion, and rebuild our local food systems and economies now, or we can choose to be a deer in the headlights as the price of food rockets along with the price of fuel. We can use real design innovations, like permaculture and integrated pest management, which rely on careful observation and knowledge of the ecology, instead of the application of chemicals. We don’t know when high gas prices will return, but oil has already demonstrated an ample capacity for volatility. Let’s prepare now, so that we won’t have to pay later.
http://peakoilhausfrau.blogspot.com/2009/05/myth-of-efficiency.html

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DSM Trilogy: Framing the Insanity

May 22, 2009

By Kathy McMahon
http://www.peakoilblues.com

“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”

———-Prime minister Margaret Thatcher, talking to Women’s Own magazine, October 31 1987

…she should know. She did a heck of a job destroying her society. Was it an accident or was it a planned outcome of promoting Free Market capitalism? Was the dramatic rise in addictive behaviors during her term in office related to this “war on culture?” Read on.

Introduction
This paper will argue that the very “Free Market” values that Thatcher embraced, created the demand for the increased social program that she disparages in this quote. To Thatcher, and all Free Market leaders, there is no “society” because they have spend decades destroying it, intentionally, to “free the power of the markets.”

The Problem of Community
Whether we are wealthy or poor, there is little stability in our lives. Jobs evaporate without notice; our interlocking relationships with our communities are weak and unstable; and often connected by thin threads of “PTA” or “team sports.” Our marriages end and our lovers change. We live long distances from our families. We switch occupations, looking for job security, and we’re forced to switch again. Technical skills need constant updating, and co-workers come and go. We may switch religions, therapists, spiritual practices, or even ideologies as we progress through our lives. Where there was one income, now we need two, and if either one is terminated, our lives can’t continue as they were before, so we are twice as vulnerable as we were in the past. Our cultural infrastructure is fragile as well as our ecosystem. We see this tenuous connection as accidental or inadvertent, but what if there is some underlying demand that requires is fragility between people, their spiritual values, their notions of the physical world and even their self-concept?

Addicted to Oil
I started out this piece believing that the phrase “addicted to oil” was an inaccurate one, because, as is true, oil is such an essential aspect of our current culture that we could no more say that we were “addicted” to oil, than to say we were “addicted” to the blood that pulses through our veins.

But the brilliant work of Bruce Alexander has modified my argument. I encourage my readers to review his work first, and then return to this post. I’ve come to see that we cling to our “lifestyle,” not for neurobiological or purely psychological reasons, but because we live in a political and economic system that has demanded it. Free market systems, or any ideological system based on production and growth, strips us of the very foundations that makes us human, and addictions, in the broadest sense of the word, allows us some relief from this “gilded cage.”

The veil is thick and the acculturation so thorough that it is difficult to believe that it wasn’t “always thus.” But history points out the patterns if we pay attention to them. Let’s start with our relationship with nature:

Freed From Nature
As a child after school, I spent my time playing in a narrow strip of woods that separated my family’s land from our neighbors. There were areas where my buddy and I would find an opening in bushes, and play inside endlessly, tucked away from the world around us. The ground had bugs, the leaves had webs. We felt at home.

When my daughter grew up, I was in graduate school, and read child psychologists who recommended that a child have hours each day to play alone, without parental interference. We lived in a working-class neighborhood, and there were local kids she could just go outside and play with. She went to a private school during the day, and most other parents had their childrens’ lives scheduled daily with sports teams, lessons of various sorts, and “play dates.” Few were available to “come over and play” if she spontaneously called them. None could do so without a ride. Events needed to be scheduled in advance, even for 7 year olds. In contrast to her school friends, her neighborhood kids created their own games on the street. She learned to fight, make up, establish friendships, and navigate group relationships, all away from the constant supervision of adults. My daughter as a toddler, used to “kiss worms.”

It’s safe to say that today, most parents don’t feel like their Popsicle Index (the score you’d give to how “safe” you’d feel allowing your child to go to the corner store and buy a Popsicle) is high enough for them to feel safe allowing their children to play unattended. Today’s 7 year olds often don’t prefer to play outside anymore, unless it is in organized sports with adult supervision. They prefer to play video games inside. Nature is something they “move through” or “use” when they need to. They may take “nature courses,” but they are unlikely to develop the desire to kiss a worm.

As adults, many of us spend our days having little direct unstructured time out of doors. We move in a whirl from a commuter’s car ride to an indoor parking garage, and an air conditioned office. We often arrive early and leave late. We press a button and our remote-controlled garage door opens, and we go back inside our homes once again.

Evolutionarily, this is a bizarre way to live.

WORK
For many of us, our labor is stripped of its most basic meaning. We stare into a computer screen, answer telephone calls, sell products, and little of it has anything to do with materially benefiting the people we care about, except through our incomes.

Many of my students who come back to classes to become Marriage and Family Therapists do so, usually taking a cut in pay in their current jobs, because they “want to make a difference” to people. They want a deeper connection to those they interact with. They see their current jobs as providing a way of making a living, but they want more. They want an image of what they see as a “better life.”

There was a time, before the rise of “free markets,” when the work you did was directly tied in to who you were and how you served others. Even our names, Baker, Taylor, Wheeler, Smith, Farmer, and Priest told the world our place in it. The shoes you made went on real feet. The food fed people you knew.

Farm boy Rebellions
Most of us today, can easily point out the advantages that industrialization has brought us, but few can describe the constant rebellion industrialists faced, as “farm boys” left the fields and headed to the factories. They refused to obey the clock that told them when to show up for work. They would work until they were paid, and disappear, often on extended drunks, until their money ran out. They worked, as they had on their farms, at their own pace, and in their own time. Family priorities continued to be dominant, and they would leave to return home whenever they were needed.

They had to be shaped. They had to be conditioned to a life where they were never able to see the light of day. They had to learn to accept the control that told them when they could eat or toilet. The rhythms of their lives were dramatically disrupted. They didn’t rest in the winter. They lived in cramped quarters with very little green space around them.

They did a set of repetitive movements, instead of getting fresh air and exercise. Their lives were de-contextualized. Their labor meant nothing more than a way of getting currency. Oftentimes, they developed a set of symptoms that we’d classify as depression, anxiety, alcoholism, or antisocial behavior. In a word, they went “crazy.”

Immigrant Communities
Immigrant workers fared worse economically, but often better socially. Their ghettos provided context for them, a common language, a web of cultural traditions and mutual obligations. Often, they would leave their homelands and land in a new city where they recognized people from “back home.” Those without a network of “people like me,” were most symptomatic, displaying more paranoia, disability, and adjustment difficulties. Those who could successfully create the “Little Italy’s” or similar insular communities, seemed least impacted by the dislocation.

Moving Up
Their adult children were often encouraged to move away from these ethnic ghettos, and a funny thing happened when they did: They got more prosperous and they got more symptomatic. The wealthier they became and the farther removed they were from these “working class” roots, the more social problems they experienced. To their families, they were “successes” in their educational and occupational attainment. Internally, though they often were cut off from the very lifeblood of the community that no one told them they needed.

Those children who refused to leave the “neighborhood” were considered “failures” educationally or economically, but often “successes” socially. These were the adults who kept their cultural traditions alive and took care of aging parents. Sometimes, however, even if they wanted to stay in their neighborhoods, gentrification in the inner cities made this impossible. They were forced to live in more suburban settings, and often their cut-off created similar problems to their more prosperous peers.

Stamping Out Culture
For the free market to really be free, workers need to rely on their employer as their primary allegiance. Currency has to replace barter and community self-sufficiency. Elements valuable to an individual’s emotional and social well-being in traditional societies such as clan loyalties, village responsibilities, guild rights, charity, family obligations, social roles, or religion–all “distorted” the free play of markets, and interrupted the laws of supply and demand. While ‘Farmboys’ were unruly and “too independent,” after several generations, their urban children were shaped into what Alexander calls “dislocated people,” stripped of their traditional cultural identities and affiliations, and too far removed from the rhyme and rhythm of farm life to believe that any other system of life could actually “work.”

Colonializing the Mind
Futurist Valerio Evangelisti, talks about how our most intimate visions of the world are shaped by the free market. A constant barrage of messages were needed to shape peoples’ imaginations, dreams and our most intimate visions of the world and our place in it. It took “carefully engineered management, advertising, taxation, and mass media techniques [to] keep people buying, selling, working, borrowing, lending, and consuming at optimal rates,” according to Alexander. These efforts were “deliberately undermining… countervailing influences.” Even those who wanted to change their lives and get out of the “rat race” often found it unworkable to leave their cages without severe penalty.

People naturally want to strengthen ties, to eat together, to make work more relevant, but their efforts are undermined by the free market system. Rather than promoting connections, strengthening ties, and reestablishing new forms of psychosocial integration, these are suppressed. My clients can’t find a time when the family can eat together because of work and childrens’ obligations. The modern worker has to fight a powerful tide when we attempt to create meaningful local connections. We are the “David” to the Goliath of multinational corporations when we try to develop our own small businesses. The system works against us, to benefit the flow of goods and markets that we are fit into, and have to fight hard to reshape.

But when the free market can effectively ‘colonialize the mind,’ rebellion is minimized, and cooperation strengthened. “Normal” behavior is numbing, places a high value on consumption, increases income discrepancy, and maintains dependency. It clears the way for free trade, while boosting the rate of addictive behavior in its workers. We are given a set of “alternative behaviors” to buffer the loss of real meaningful connection to people, work, and nature. We are given ‘systems’ that allow us to “place” our children for care, “distribute” our food, (increasingly pre-cooked,) and disconnect emotionally or physically because if we are watching the media or driving in our cars, we’re left with the feeling of going somewhere, anywhere but where we’re stuck.

We numb ourselves, drug our kids, and wonder why greater material wealth isn’t buying us health.

Patch of Ground
Traditional people are tied to the land, and embedded in their clan, so they do not relocate easily or willingly. People must be driven off the land violently. When we are effective at disconnecting people from their cultural and historic roots, from any meaningful affection for nature and appreciation for their part OF it, then “nature” becomes nothing more than a set of entertainment or “lifestyle” options.

Realtors complain that people often ask to be both lakeside, and on a mountainside, with no appreciation for why this is impossible. When children grow up inside, with electronics instead of outdoor environments, they don’t care what happens to the earth around them. Even pets become “utilitarian” rather than precious creatures, and are forgotten and can be left to starve without parental intervention. Our contact with nature is recreational, and we become “outdoorsmen” instead of men and women embedded in nature. Our lakes are stocked for fishing, and our “wildlife” becomes our zoo animals. Nature is what happens outside the big picture window of our climate-controlled lives.

If our neighborhoods become polluted, we move. We ship the garbage “away,” without a clue that there is no “away” to throw. Our transformation is complete when the child asks the farmer who pulls a carrot from the ground: “How did you get that in there?” Even my rural neighbors are shocked to find that eggs and milk come out warm. Like our spouses, religions, families and friends, nature is discarded when it no longer fits our “lifestyle needs.”

REBELLION
In Alexander’s view, alienation from traditional “family values” is an essential feature, not an unexpected outcome of an affluent society. We are removed from the restrictions and meagerness of a traditional culture and in exchange we are given a great deal of material success. All but the very poorest among us expect to live with electricity, heat, running water, hot water, and telephone. We work for the promise of consumer goods, but in our affluence, we are left with an emptiness of the soul, or “poverty of the spirit.”

Therapists replace priests in our “search for meaning” and in a corporate healthcare system, instead of room to question the very fabric of our existence, we are given “interventions” to “resolve” our “symptoms.” “Recreation” gives us a short break from the daily grind. Consumption and energy use to keep us “comfortable” are accepted as “necessary diversions” to keep our minds entertained and our hungry souls temporarily satiated. Like an addict, if it leads to our ultimate destruction or the death of our children, we can’t seem to focus on this today. We’ll think about it tomorrow.

ADDICTION
“Addiction” in Dr. Alexander’s view, is caused not by a predisposition to a particular drug, or a “’disease’ of aberrant individuals,” but instead by a “poverty of the spirit,” which he calls “dislocation.” “The key to controlling addiction” he argues, “is maintaining a society in which psychosocial integration is attainable by the great majority of people. People need to belong within their society, not just trade in its markets.”

Alexander traces the history of systematic social dislocation under the system of free market economies, but he argues, while capitalism has been most effective at stripping people of their sense of belonging, place, and clan, any political system that destroys psychosocial integration on a grand scale in the interest of economic development and ideological purity, (such as the USSR), can also dramatically increase addictive behavior.

According to Alexander, “In a word, addictions is overwhelming involvement…that is, being so wrapped up in something or somethings, that all the rest of the things that make a normal, satisfying, socially productive life diminish in importance.” “We aren’t addicted to oil,” he argues “we are addicted to an affluent lifestyle.” Addiction is a harmful lifestyle, which may or may not involve drugs, which more and more people in free market society are adopting as a desperate measure to prevent themselves from being crushed by severe, prolonged dislocation.”

Climbing Down
It is easy to understand the logic that says that this cultural indoctrination is so complete, and reinforcing and restraining in so many ways, that change will not happen voluntarily.

Addicts who need their drugs for a whole host of reasons, seldom give them up voluntarily. Instead, perhaps through “fellowship” they find a new connection and community that replaces this former “retractable problem.” Worse still, though, our lifestyle addictions aren’t framed in terms that make them appear to be anything but normal and acceptable life choices. It is hard to imagine why anyone would voluntarily return to the “hardships” and “provincialism” of earlier times. Like a junkie or alcoholic, our thinking is in absolutes. It is intolerable to imagine a world without our “fix.” It is inconceivable that a system has been structured to create the demand, the need for the addiction itself. However, in order to change, like the addict, we must accept this possibility, and reframe our problem.

Once our outlook accepts this as a possibility, we can see historical evidence that dramatic cultural change happens, and while the evidence of this change is slow and evolving, the emotional shift that requires it is instantaneous.

Evidence of Change
There are a number of times in history when large numbers of people rejected their culture’s dominant paradigm, and chose instead to insist on a new world order that dramatically shook up the world they were living in, and caused them great personal hardship. It was just such a Christian rebellion against slavery which may have been instrumental in the fall of the Roman Empire. The Civil Rights movement in this country was successful when large numbers of people refused to accept the “status quo.” We may well be on a edge of another dramatic paradigmatic shift.

The Broadening of Brown
According to Porter Novelli, a PR firm studying these issues for businesses, seven percent of the population identify with issues Novelli calls “dark green.” Edson Freeman and I call it Brown. Browns reject consumption, and is just one of many shifting perspectives that may not be “televised” but are nonetheless growing movements. Peak Oil, permaculture, environmental action, and relocalization are just some of what is directly talked about here. The evidence of this sort of “mass movement” is diverse but growing:

A magazine devoted to backyard poultry is printing 10 times what they had anticipated the demand to be. People are building coops in their urban yards, illegally. Our economic climate is tossing many otherwise “normal” people out of middle-class jobs, and as many as half of us might find ourselves in the “alternative economy” within a few years time. Oil pressures will create a more even playing field for local growing and manufacturing. Violent shifts in climate conditions drives popular sentiment away from “nature as tool” to a more integrated view of humans as a small part of the greater whole.

It will not be a smooth transition.

We will face a lot of hardships and difficulties along the way, but the good news is that as we re-activate community and kinship networks, we’ll see a reduction in addictions as well. First, however, we are likely to see a tremendous increase in problematic compulsive behavior, as people seek out “substitute” addictions to calm their nerves. One might even want to examine the viability of their communities based on the level of addiction among the population, as an indication of that area’s level of dislocation. This is likely to worsen before it improves.

If Alexander is right, that all elements which preserve an integrated, vibrant natural and social employment have to be destroyed, to allow the free market to rein, let’s hope the opposite is true. As we see a deteriorating international marketplace, we may see a return to community viability and cohesion. We will likely see a rise of religious and spiritual involvement. But if we are to take acts to shape this transformation, we have to understand what we are dealing with.

If we see this dislocation as accidental, we may be misled. If we accept that it was a necessary step to first destroy our kinship, clan, land and religious bonds, in order to have our consumer culture thrive (at the cost of our spiritual or emotional well-being) we may then cautiously welcome these back into our lives, instead of viewing them as an reactionary intrusion from the past. In either case, this transformation will not be uniform, and clearly some of our more stable communities, perhaps poorer, but already high in traditional kinship and community associations, will fare better than those which have been more effectively decimated socially, while they may have been thriving economically.
http://www.peakoilblues.com/blog/?p=1469

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Posted by miltonics

Halve It!

May 20, 2009

Sharon Astyk
http://sharonastyk.com

Note: I’ve been without internet access now since Friday, with the occasional slip over to my local library for their wireless, so if you’re wondering why so quiet, that explains it.  With luck, I’ll be reconnected by tonight.  In the meantime, here’s an older post of mine.

If you are new to trying to lower your impact, or just trying to save money and energy, it can be helpful to think in terms not of giving things up, but of halving them – using a combination of techniques to stretch things out a bit, and let you use or need only half as much. Because everything you halve, means half as much pollution, half as much waste, half as much money.

Sometimes we think too quickly in terms of all or nothing – instead, we can start in the middle, which seems much less intimidating. Now one can’t cut everything in half, but if you use what the manufacturer recommends or what fits in those little convenient measure containers products give you, you almost always can cut it in half, or at least get more out of it. For example, I use an environmentally friendly dish detergent. When I get a bottle, I squeeze half of it into an old bottle, and fill both the other half with water – ta da! Two times the dish detergent, and I don’t find I need any more to get things clean.

By using old shirts as “table bibs” for my messy kids, I only need to wash half as many clothes. If your water isn’t very hard, most dishwashers and washing machines will work fine with half the detergent called for, or even less and still get things plenty clean. Unless you have terrible allergies or are a slob like me who really needs to do these things *more* often, you could probably vacuum half as often and clean your toilet half as often as you do now.

Unless you’ve already pared down, you could probably get rid of half of the clothes in your closet without really noticing – studies suggest most of us only wear about 1/3 of what we own regularly. If you changed your style slightly, you could probably get your hair cut professionally half as often (unless you can cut it yourself, which is even better – I can’t).

You could almost certainly buy half as many consumer goods as you usually do each year, and still have everything you need. You could eat dessert half as often, and unless you are super careful about fats, you could use half as much oil, sugar and salt and be the better for it. The average American could cut their meat/dairy use in half and replace it with half again as many whole grains and fresh vegetables, saving money on both their food budget and health care.

You could commit to producing half as much food waste, and really work carefully on using up leftovers and making sure things don’t rot in the fridge – nearly 30% of all the food we buy gets thrown out. If you live within a few miles of a store, you could take half of your trips by foot or bike, and feel better as well as limiting emissions. You could commit to trying to consolidate your errands and try and make only half as many trips in the car over the course of the year.

You could try and cut your vacation distance travelled by half – see something local you’ve always been meaning to explore. You could watch half as much tv, and try and use the rest of the time for trying out a new skill, catching up on sleep or volunteering. You could spend half as much money on some special luxury you care about – makeup, or trips, or something, and donate the rest to charity.

Halving it doesn’t mean giving up anything you love – it simply means extracting as much pleasure as possible from every bit of what you have, and taking the extra, and making good and wise use of it. All of us can do that. In the peculiar mathematics of good fortune, often you get more than twice as much pleasure – you feel healthier, save money, improve the environment, have more time, more peace, more quiet, a slower pace. Sometimes half as much means vastly more than double the return.

http://sharonastyk.com/2009/05/13/halve-it/

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The world’s next breath

May 18, 2009

by Carol Smith

http://ourworld.unu.edu

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”

Not everyone fully appreciates the meaning of this Arundhati Roy quote. But Rob Hopkins’ does and uses it in his talks. The dynamic Brit is at the centre of Transition, a movement that has been dubbed “the most significant and potentially ground-breaking social experiment of our time”.

The Transition Town idea was born from an “energy descent action plan” put together by permaculture teacher Hopkins and some of his students in Kinsale, Ireland after they watched the peak oil documentary The End of Suburbia.

This “intentionally designed way down from the oil peak” for Kinsale sparked interest from other communities and led Hopkins to see its potential for wider application to towns, islands and cities everywhere.

Central to Transition is the belief that, rather than waiting for governments to find all the answers or for individuals to act on a large enough scale, communities can be a catalyst for the societal redesign required to respond to climate change and prepare for the coming end of cheap oil.

A Transition Initiative sets off a process for connecting citizens, local groups, businesses and government with the aim of designing a long-term plan for their community to become low carbon and locally sustaining. Transition efforts have the added benefit of making a community more socially connected and more equitable, resulting in a more fulfilling lifestyle.

Intelligent transformation

“As a species, we’ll be transitioning to a lower energy future whether we want to or not. Far better to ride that wave rather than getting engulfed by it.”

This quote from the Transition Primer, provided by the non-profit Transition Network to help interested communities design their own metamorphoses, is typically sensible and bright. The transformation it sets out is a gradual process in which the initiating group (open to all) considers, adopts, adapts and implements a model by actively “unleashing the collective genius” of its members.

The twelve steps contained in the primer are not meant as a template but rather as a set of principles to be adapted to local contexts and the particular geniuses at hand. These priorities include awareness-raising, forming working groups, learning relevant abilities (also known as “reskilling”), etc., to the final goal of creating an energy descent plan for the community.

Apart from the primer, Hopkins wrote a Handbook that expands on the entire Transition Culture (incidentally also the name of his website). He also collaborated on the recently published Transition Timeline and the Economics Addition to the Transition Handbook.

However, the real focus of Transition Initiatives is action. As highlighted in Step 7, “[i]t is essential that you avoid any sense that your project is just a talking shop where people sit around and draw up wish lists. Your project needs, from an early stage, to begin to create practical, high visibility manifestations in your community.”

Across oceans too

Hopkins describes Transition as a “viral idea” and it does seem rather contagious. Transition Town Totnes in Devon, England — the first initiative and where Hopkins now lives — started up in September 2006 and has achieved momentum.

“In Totnes we are certainly not a fringe thing, we have the full endorsement of Totnes Town Council, Totnes Chamber of Commerce and the local Strategy Group,” Hopkins said in a blog post responding to a query from permaculturist and author Ted Trainer regarding how many town residents are typically involved in an initiative.

“If 10% of people are actively engaged, and the majority of everyone else are supportive, then that seems to me to be an excellent basis for action, with any increases on that being an added bonus.”

Further, the movement is spreading quickly in the UK and has hopped oceans as well, with initiatives springing up in everything from tiny towns to cities like Portland in the US, to even large areas like the Sunshine Coast of Australia. Worldwide there are 159 Transitions in progress, at various stages, and there are over 900 more that are “mulling”, the stage where an original core group is considering starting an initiative.

Last fall, Japan’s Transition Fujino joined in as the 100th formal initiative and the first in Asia. A town with the population of approximately 10,000 located just outside Tokyo, Fujino was already a permaculture centre when Hidetake Enomoto and his initiating group got together. Currently they number about 20, Enomoto told us recently when he stopped by the United Nations University on a break from an eco-village conference, and are just in the early stages.

Nonetheless, Enomoto said he found a “hunger among people to get something started”, so Fujino already has several active working groups and the response to their efforts has been quite positive. As a member also of Transition Japan (an initiating hub), he says Fujino will be an important model to show other “muller” communities in the country.

(Watch the video below to hear more of Enomoto’s thoughts on Transitioning.)
http://vimeo.com/4522094

No reason to unravel

Changing the world is a topic that could spook many members of oil-addicted consumerist societies, leading some to dismiss it out of hand. Nonetheless, it is a particularly relevant issue that the entire world is due to face. As scientific facts about climate change are piling up and peak oil experts lining up, the magnitude of our present predicament is destined to start weighing on minds worldwide.

Once one becomes “peak oil aware” however, another common initial reaction is a sense that nothing can be done. A lot of people predict societal collapse after the peaking of oil production causes prices to steadily mount, Hopkins said in one by-video appearance at an international forum (he no longer flies). But he disagrees:

“I think the same ingenuity, creativity and adaptability that got us up to the top of that peak in the first place can get us back down the other side. There’s no reason everything has to completely unravel when we hit that point.”

Of course the movement has caused its share of controversy and has detractors that criticize it for its apolitical stance. In response, Hopkins argues:

“It is my sense that the tools the environmental movement has had thus far (campaigning, lobbying, protesting) are insufficient for the job in hand, that of navigating a society through energy descent…. I think that some of the new tools we will be utilizing include a drawing together of a diversity of individuals and organizations that we have never seen before.”

“Part of achieving this, it seems to me, is to make the process as unthreatening as possible, and to skillfully seek to put in place more democratic, low energy and localized infrastructure in such a way that it is perceived as positive, fun and unthreatening. The traditional activist dynamic of seeking someone to blame is completely inappropriate in this context.”

A call to arm oneself with the Transition Primer and seek out one’s neighbours, perhaps?

Catch the Transition movie premiere!

The network’s film In Transition will have its online premiere on Saturday, 23 May 2009.

http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/2009/05/12/the-worlds-next-breath/

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Posted by miltonics

The End of the Information Age

May 16, 2009

by John Michael Greer

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com

One of the repeated lessons I’ve learned over the three years since The Archdruid Report began appearing is the extent to which many people nowadays have trouble grasping some of the most fundamental facts about the crisis of our times. I had yet another reminder of that a few days back, when the comments on last week’s post started coming in.

A point made in passing in that post was that railroads, while they are much more efficient than automobile or air transport, still require relatively large amounts of concentrated energy, and so may become uneconomical for many uses at a certain point well down the curve of fossil fuel depletion. One of my readers took rather heated exception to this comment. Only America’s backwards railroads, he pointed out indignantly, relied on fossil fuel; since European and Japanese railways used electricity, they would be unaffected by fossil fuel depletion and could keep rolling along into the far future.

This kind of logic is common enough these days that it’s probably necessary to point out the flaws in it. Electricity isn’t an energy source; it has to be generated, using some other energy source to do so. The electricity that powers the European and Japanese rail systems is mostly generated by plants that burn coal, with significant help from nuclear reactors and a rather smaller assist from hydroelectric plants. Of these, only the hydroelectric plants are a renewable energy source; the others are poised just as firmly on the downslope of depletion as the diesel oil that runs American locomotives.

Coal is turning out to be much less abundant than the cozy estimates of a few decades ago made it sound, and of course there’s the far from minor impact of coal burning on an already unstable global climate. Fissionable uranium is well down its own depletion curve, and it’s worth noting that the enthusiastic claims sometimes made for breeder reactors, the use of thorium as a nuclear fuel, and other alternatives to conventional fission plants are very rarely to be heard from people who have professional training in the fields concerned. Thus my reader was quite simply wrong; the European and Japanese rail systems that so excited his admiration are just as dependent on nonrenewable fuels as the American system, and are also just as vulnerable to the economic implications of supply and demand as energy supplies dwindle.

Now of course there are other reasons why railroads may be kept in service, at least for certain uses, long after they become economic liabilities. Many of the world’s larger nations – the United States and Russia among them – grew to their present size only after rail transport made it possible to exert political and economic power on a continental scale, and future governments may well keep long-distance rail links going as a matter of national survival. That likelihood, though, does nothing to counter the point central to last week’s post: that in a world with much less energy, older and more energy-efficient transport methods such as canal boats may turn out to be much more economically viable than their more recent and more extravagant replacements, and those cities and regions well positioned to take advantage of waterborne transport may therefore thrive in the 21st century as they did in the 19th.

The same logic can be applied usefully to many other aspects of the future taking shape ahead of us right now. Probably the best example is the looming impact of a future of energy constraints on the ways that modern industrial cultures store, process, and distribute information.

It’s hard to think of a subject that has been loaded with anything like as much hype. Our time, the media never tires of repeating, is the Information Age, an epoch in which economic sectors dealing with mere material goods and services have been relegated to Third World sweatshops, while the economic cutting edge deals entirely in the manufacture, sales, and service of information in various forms. As usual – can you think of a short-term trend that hasn’t been identified as a wave of the future destined to rise up an asymptotic curve to infinity, or at least absurdity? I can’t – the standard assumption is that the future will be just like the present, but even more so, with more elaborate technologies providing more baroque information products and services as far as the eye (or, rather, the webcam) can see.

This is hardly a new vision of the future. In his 1909 novella “The Machine Stops,” which should be required reading for anyone who buys into the Information Age hullabaloo, E.M. Forster provided a remarkably exact dissection of contemporary cyberculture’s idea of its destiny most of a century in advance. It’s a great story on its own terms, but it also puts a finger on the central weakness of an information-centered society: information does not exist without a physical substrate, and if the physical substrate goes, so does the information.

In Forster’s story, that substrate was the Machine – an interconnected technostructure that spanned the globe and provided the necessities and luxuries of life to uncounted millions of people who spent their lives in hivelike cells, staring into screens and tapping on keyboards like so many of today’s computer geeks. Adept at manipulating abstract ideas, the inhabitants of the Machine lost touch with the fact that their universe of information only existed because the physical structure of the Machine kept it there, and their attitude toward the Machine gradually evolved into a religious reverence devoid of any reference to the practical realities of the Machine’s workings. The skills needed to apply physical tools to pipes and wires dropped out of use, and the consequences – minor malfunctions snowballing into major ones, and finally into total systems failure – followed from there.

Now of course fiction is fiction, and the events that cause the Machine to stop are unlikely to be repeated in the real world. The central concept, though, demands attention, because our Machine – the internet – depends just as much on a physical substrate as the one in Forster’s novella. In our case, that substrate is the global network of communications links and server farms, and the even vaster economic and technical infrastructure that keeps them funded, powered, and supplied with the trained personnel and spare parts that keep them running.

Very few people realize just how extravagant the intake of resources to maintain the information economy actually is. The energy cost to run a home computer is modest enough that it’s easy to forget, for example, that the two big server farms that keep Yahoo’s family of web services online use more electricity between them than all the televisions on Earth put together. Multiply that out by the tens of thousands of server farms that keep today’s online economy going, and the hundreds of other energy-intensive activities that go into the internet, and it may start to become clear how much energy goes into putting these words onto the screen where you’re reading them.

It’s not an accident that the internet came into existence during the last hurrah of the age of cheap energy, the quarter century between 1980 and 2005 when the price of energy dropped to the lowest levels in human history. Only in a period where energy was quite literally too cheap to bother conserving could so energy-intensive an information network be constructed. The problem here, of course, is that the conditions that made the cheap abundant energy of that quarter century have already come to an end, and the economics of the internet take on a very different shape as energy becomes scarce and expensive again.

Like the railroads of the future mentioned earlier in this post, the internet is subject to the laws of supply and demand. Once the cost of maintaining it in its current form outstrips the income that can be generated by it, it becomes a losing proposition, and cheaper modes of information storage and delivery will begin to replace it in its more marginal uses. Governments will have very good reasons to maintain some form of internet as long as they can, even when it becomes an economic sink – it’s worth remembering that the internet we now have evolved out of a US government network meant to provide communication capacity in the event of nuclear war – but this does not mean that everyone in the industrial world will have the same access they do today.

Instead, as energy costs move unsteadily upward and resource needs increasingly get met, or not, on the basis of urgency, expect access costs to rise, government regulation to increase, internet commerce to be subject to increasing taxation, and rural areas and poor neighborhoods to lose internet service altogether. There may well still be an internet a quarter century from now, but it will likely cost much more, reach far fewer people, and have only a limited resemblance to the free-for-all that exists today. Newspapers, radio, and television all moved from a growth phase of wild diversity and limited regulation to a mature phase of vast monopolies with tightly controlled content; even in the absence of energy limits, the internet would be likely to follow the same trajectory, and the rising costs imposed by the end of cheap energy bid fair to shift that process into overdrive.

The waning of the internet will pose an additional challenge to the future, because – like other new technologies – it is in the process of displacing older technologies that provided the same services on a more sustainable basis. The collapse of the newspaper industry is one widely discussed example of this process at work, but another – the death spiral of American public libraries – is likely to have a much wider impact in the decades and centuries to come. Among the most troubling consequences of the current economic crisis are wholesale cuts in state and local government funding for libraries. The Florida legislature was with some difficulty convinced a few weeks ago not to cut every penny of state support for library systems – roughly a quarter of all the money that keeps libraries open in Florida – and county and city libraries from coast to coast are cutting hours, laying off staff, and closing branches.

Some of the proponents of these budget cuts have been caught in public insisting that with the rise of the internet, nobody actually needs public libraries any more. (The fact that many of these people call themselves conservatives proves, if any additional proof is needed, just how empty of content today’s political labels have become; what exactly do they think they’re conserving?) Now of course public libraries provide many services the internet doesn’t, and it also provides them to all those people who can’t afford internet access. The point I’d like to make here, though, is that the public library will still be a viable information technology in a postpetroleum society. When Ben Franklin founded America’s first public library, it may be worth noting, he did it without benefit of fossil fuels.

If public libraries can be kept open during the waves of economic crisis that punctuate the decline of civilizations, then, everyone will likely be the better for it. I am sorry to say that this is probably not the most likely way things will fall out. The current wave of library downsizing is probably a harbinger of things to come; pressed between too many demands and too little funding to go around, library systems – like public health departments, for example, and a great many other institutions that make community life viable – are far too likely to draw the short straw. Exactly this sort of short-term thinking has driven the loss of vast amounts of information and cultural heritage in the collapse of past civilizations.

As we move into the penumbra of the deindustrial age, then, it’s crucial to start thinking about the options open to us – individually and collectively – with an eye toward their long-term viability and to the hard reality of a world of ecological limits. When today’s data centers are crumbling ruins long since stripped of valuable salvage, and all the data once stored there has evaporated into whatever realm magnetic patterns go to when they die, the thinking that led politicians to gut viable library systems on the assumption that the internet will take up the slack will look remarkably stupid. Still, the habits of thought instilled by the age of cheap abundant energy are hard to shake off, and from within them, such mistakes are hard to avoid.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/05/end-of-information-age.html

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The Illusion of Sameness

May 14, 2009

by Kathy McMahon
http://www.peakoilblues.com

Maybe you’ve noticed it too. It seems like conditions in the mainstream media can go from bad to worse without ever acknowledging that there was an earlier cheery prediction.

It is the Illusion of Sameness that’s operating. I think we can all safely conclude (and could have for a while) that the economic crash is well under way. Those of you who have opened up your retirement accounts know it. Yes, that sick feeling in your stomach, is upsetting the Illusion of Sameness, whenever you think about it. It will happen in other areas as well.

In food markets, “sales” will seem like the “regular”prices of last week. You’ll ask “Who’s leaving on the lights?” after you open your electric bill. The pump will suffer ‘price creep’ once again, and you’ll watch your credit card balances, if you aren’t constantly vigilant (or have already chucked the credit cards out…) begin to climb, while your credit limit sinks. No, it wasn’t that your payment was a day late. It’s that the bank has to lower their risks. And if you own a business? One of the most outrageous “new” practices is the “surprise” when small businesses open their business checking and find out that their credit card processors have stolen a large chuck of cash. Surprise! They call it a “reserve,” and it might put you right out of business. Angie’s List got 2.5 million sucked out of its account without notice. They got it back after three weeks and big lawyers bills, but what if you don’t have the cash for lawyers or you can’t wait three weeks? These are the “vultures” encircling the corpse, my friends, and they are making quite a few corpses all by themselves.

Wait! All of that is already happening? Yes, it is, but the Illusion of Sameness can blind you to it.

Have you noticed the new ads, by even formal dining establishments, for 2-for1 specials and the like? Are you watching airlines and car companies closing down? Noticing more friends who are “looking” for a new job? I could go on, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll outline some of the ways of thinking that suggests that you are also in a dream world living with the “illusion of sameness:”

(1) You can’t plant a garden this year, because you planned your vacation during harvest time.

Some of you caught on there, right? There are two ‘illusions of sameness’ in that thought? One is that you are planning to go anywhere on vacation and the second is that you think that planting a garden is one of those “nice to have” hobbies. Gardening is soon to become a central way to get an affordable food source, and the notion of “disposal income” to spend on vacations is soon to be something few of us can afford.

If you aren’t planning to put something in dirt this year, you have to ask yourself, in all seriousness, why not. Don’t have the time? Illusion of sameness. Don’t have the money? It’s ‘dirt cheap.’ You can even buy vegetable plants with SNAP food stamps. Cut out that cable bill or ditch your cellphone, neither of which you can eat, last time I looked. Live in an apartment? Does it have windows or a balcony? How about a community garden? And what ELSE could you be doing with the money you are spending to travel? Perhaps you are seeing family and strengthening ties. This is a worthwhile goal. But if you are trying to find sources of amusement, you are thinking the old way. There are dozens of ways you can educate yourself right here at home, to help you smash the Illusion of Sameness.

(2) “There is a lot I would be doing, but my spouse (friends, kids, lovers, boss, pets) is not on-board.”

It’s hard to go against the culture and your loved ones, too. We all hope, for our own sake, things will work out and it’s our own fears and paranoia, and that the world is right: there’s nothing to worry about. So few of us have been taught to trust our own gut instincts and not beat ourselves up when we’re wrong. Assess the situation, and explain how you see things. Listen to your loved ones, understanding the same fear that they live with, and then chart a course together, with build-in corrections along the way. It’s a bad situation to be looking at the folks in the same cramped lifeboat and hear “if you only listened to me earlier!”

(3) My car is old and needs to be replaced. They are practically giving away new cars now, so I’m going shopping.

Even a “cheap” stripped down car like a Ford Focus will drain you of more than $30,000 over the next five years. A Ford Focus that’s 5 years old will cost you $24,500 by the time you figure in repairs. What else could you do with that money?

Now is the time for creative thinking. Can you carpool and share expenses? What about using one car between two people and each carpooling 1/2 the rest of the time? How many miles do you actually drive? Could you rent a car when you needed to go out of town? If you are like most people, you are saying “But I NEED a car!” I find it hard to wrap my head around how I’ll live without one, too, or something equally “car-like.” This future is so hard to wrap our heads around, it’s hard to pause to ask if there could be another alternative.

I live out in the middle of nowhere. I feel a panicky feeling in my stomach to imagine a world in which the decision to travel in a car has to be weighed against 10 other uses for the same fossil fuel. That seems crazy. When I stick with that thought, I feel a panicky sick feeling in your stomach. If I sit with it long enough, I realize that I do have options, and I can choose which ones I’ll use.

(4) “When I retire…” “When we visit Mitzi in Spain in 2012…” “I’ll buy it now, because after I find a better job…” “When the economy picks up and our sales recover…”

Planning on a brighter future? Any plan that expects tomorrow to be much like today is similar to whispering into the dice and saying “Papa needs a new pair of shoes!” Perhaps our collective luck will change, but you’re betting on it. Are you really willing to gamble with your future? Most people don’t even know its a gamble in the Illusion of Sameness.

(5) “I’m not really worried. My job/pension is with the State/City/Feds…”

No one wants to seriously consider the likelihood of a job loss, but never rule out the possibility. No matter how “secure” you think your job or pension is today, you’d be better off asking yourself how you and your family will manage without it, especially if rules of hiring and lay-offs put you closer to the door. What would you do if your income stopped or was cut in half? Would you take a pay cut so that others could keep their jobs? What things would you do to dramatically alter your lifestyle? If you can’t think about any of this, without grabbing a beer or watching “Survivor” re-runs, you are living with the Illusion of Sameness. That “sick” or “panicky” feeling is telling you things have to change. It isn’t enough to “know” stuff is happening. You have to start living differently and planning for even greater change. Whenever you find yourself saying “That will never…” or “That’s impossible…” you are all wrapped up in it.

It’s hard to change our thinking. Harder than actually doing things differently, for most of us. It takes a dramatically different examination, and a change of action, in order to smash the overwhelming power of the Illusion of Sameness.

Here’s one option I’m thinking of, with a hyper dog like my Greta. Still, I haven’t figured out where to “park” her!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHjmABFfGJU

Nice to be back, all.

What are some of the Illusions of Sameness you are seeing in your everyday lives?
http://www.peakoilblues.com/blog/?p=1404

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Posted by miltonics

Barter, Baby, Barter

May 12, 2009

Barter, Baby, Barter
by Sharon Astyk
http://sharonastyk.com

The first year we lived here, Eric’s job was half-time, and we (Eric, me, Eli, new baby Simon) lived on 17,000 dollars a year. About half of that went to our mortgage, since we were trying to pay it down quickly. $3K of the remainder when to replacing the well lines, which exploded the first time it froze. It was very little exaggeration to say that we had no money.

What we did have was time – despite the fact that I was pregnant or had a new baby, Eric was teaching only about half time, and I was home with the kids, claiming to work on my doctoral dissertation, but really not doing any such thing. From our efforts to substitute time for money came a whole lot of good things – first our gardens, then our small CSA, which made a big dent in our budget. And a whole lot of barter.

In those first few years, we bartered a number of things – babysitting for our kids, a time-shared vehicle with another family, vegetables and gardening help for help with other projects, eggs for firewood. I remember experiencing every transaction as a breath of air – here was something that I could not afford in dollars, but that I could fairly and honestly obtain for my family and offer something good in exchange – and know that although we couldn’t afford credit card fees and borrowing, we had a measure of credit that didn’t come with fees – the good credit and relationships that came with barter, and that meant that neighbors were willing to go out of their way for us, because they knew we’d do the same.

We have a bit more money now, but we still barter a lot – for example, I barter the use of our large pasture and day to day sheep tending work for lamb, help with fencing and wool. I have gladly bartered my books for other author’s books, and happily accept barter for participation in my classes (although many people still use paypal, since it can be hard to barter long distance). I still feel that sense of gratitude whenever I have a bartered relationship with someone – the idea that we could function out of the money economy is a great joy to me.

Which brings me to the marvellous Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest essay, which is just a delight – in it she properly takes aim at the idea that the newly unemployed should work full time at job hunting, and argues that this is keeping us artificially passive. She offers a list of useful things one could and should do with their time, now that they are unemployed, to which I’d like to suggest “get as far out of the money economy as possible.” Now this is not a magical panacea, and for households with a single earner, or multi-earner households where all earners are unemployed, at some point, someone is going to have to get a job if at all possible, even if it is a crappy one.

But until a job appears, the reality is that there are things one can do to minimize one’s dependency on the formal economy – and those things include thrift, subsistence labor (ie, making, scavenging, growing, preserving, fixing the things you would ordinarily pay for), and barter. Frankly, I think that these are more productive and better things for the world as a whole than many of the things we do as jobs, and to the extent that it is possible for one to spend one’s unemployment fighting for justice or even just growing beans (ideally both), I think that most of us do less harm this way, and a great deal more good.

Moreover, I think that the loss of our time, and the trade we’ve made of time for money hasn’t always been a good one for us – it makes us more passive politically and dependent personally, and the first things lost when we lose time are human relationships. We simply don’t have time to depend on one another – so we move further and further into the money economy, where money acts as a shorthand for what talk and meals together once did for people. We become more dependent on the public economy as a whole at each step.

I’m particularly fond of barter because while it is often not possible to pay the property taxes that way, barter can cover an awful lot of other territory. It is astonishing what barter can bring about – and while I like barter networks and other programs, and can see their advantages, I am particularly passionate about barter that takes place in human relationships – because I think it kills two birds with one stone, not only does it save money on the particular exchange, but it helps us give up our general dependency on money in place of community. I see all the uses of internet barter networks, which give you credit you can use with people for what you need, even if the person who has the other thing doesn’t need your resource. And yet, direct barter – the oldest form of human exchange, in which my eggs and your honey meet one another, has something special going for it.

And that is the reality of human exchange – in monetary exchange, and I think by necessity to an extent in barter networks, things have a fixed valuation. This is convenient, of course, but it also changes the nature of the relationship. When your eggs equal on “barter buck” or “credit hour” you are shopping for the best possible bang for your buck.

But when you and your neighbor who have a relationship are figuring out how many eggs a week are worth a cord of firewood, something more is at stake besides the precise exchange – you have entered into a relationship that can’t be commodified fully, one in which you have to talk to each other, have to interact. And this is always just the beginning – someone who eats eggs will probably keep wanting them. Someone who heats with wood may want more firewood. The relationship will be based on two things – your perceived equity (ie, it was fair) and your pleasure in the relationship – this is also true with some kinds of shopping, and is why people like going to farmer’s markets and hate Walmart (in part).

But the thing about barter that I find true is that it brings out the best in us for the most part – because it is never possible to full equate eggs with logs, because they are fundamentally not the same, in barter, you are never fully sure that the price paid is a fair one – you can’t be. And what I see in barter relationships is a turning around of economic exchanges – because we want fairness even in ourselves mostly, because few of us like to beholden, or to look cheap, we find ourselves feeling as though the relationship is never fully even – at its best, both barter participants always feel that they got the better of the deal, that they paid too little, and thus, “owe” a little on next time. Instead of *getting* the best bang for your buck, barter becomes about *giving* the best bang for your time.

One of the things that worries me about our present economic situation is how very vulnerable we are in our total dependence on the formal economy – and we are taught to look only there for our security. So when the formal economy fails us, it seems that there is nothing left, that all that remains is the empty rote of enacting participation that we cannot truly succeed in. I don’t claim that barter will save us from poverty – it won’t. But it may save us by offering us a kind of livability that the formal economy when it cracks and fails cannot. What we may get back in this crisis, difficult as it is, is time – and the chance to use time instead of money.

Moreover, it offers us credit we can afford – when I and my neighbor make those first tentative gestures towards exchange, we are at first still caught in the monetary economy, still calculating what is fair. But after a time, we are in relationship in such a way as to know that we can trust one another not to take advantage (and it should go without saying that if anyone does, that’s it for the relationship), and thus, the valuation of things change – a good exchange is one where you feel you are invested already in the next one, relieved from the pressure of the money economy, because your credit ”is good with them.” In a society where credit is disappearing, this may be the only kind we have.

http://sharonastyk.com/2009/05/07/barter-baby-barter/

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Paradigm Shifts and Permaculture

May 10, 2009

Permaculture is especially good at addressing the causes of problems and not just the symptoms, which is something that the world desperately needs and why we at Transition Chicago are particularly interested. – Milton

**********

Paradigm Shifts and Permaculture
by Douglas Barnes
http://permaculturetokyo.blogspot.com

Not long after I started this website, I came to the shocking discovery that there are those who express an almost violent hatred of permaculture. At the time, I could not understand why anyone would object to a system that simply seeks to provide us with the tools to make our lives sustainable. What could possibly set someone off against a system that treats long-term sustainability as a serious endeavor and works to develop simple, affordable systems that lead us in that direction, I wondered. I had thought that even if one is set on continuing their life within the model of the status quo, surely they would be happy that we permaculturists are there in the background working out solutions to current and future problems.

I was wrong. There is something in permaculture so inherently threatening to some that I occasionally receive very irrational attacks, extending on one occasion to what basically amounted to a death threat. What could it be that causes some people to react so irrationally?

One clue is the origin of the attacks. They are always coming from individuals in wealthy nations. The comments I have received from people living in economically poorer nations have always been ones of appreciation and support. For one group, the need for inexpensive, sustainable solutions that really work is readily apparent. For the other group, people can currently afford to ignore reality, and the suggestion that change is needed is threatening.

An example of the first group expressing appreciation is my relationship with the Green Tree Foundation in Andhra Pradesh, India. Though formerly a tropical region, Andhra Pradesh is now a semi-arid zone receiving as little as 500 mm of rainfall after very long and hard dry seasons. Rainfall is the source of water; and there are tense times waiting for the rains. (Last year they even tried cloud seeding to get rainfall, and when the rain finally fell, I felt relief from 10,000 km away.) The need for sustainable solutions is not a matter of debate there; the solutions are literally needed if they are to survive the short term. Food is produced locally, and drinking water is sourced locally as well.

That can be contrasted with a First World equivalent. Consider an average ¼ acre lot in Tucson, Arizona, which receives 253,621 litres of water a year via rainfall, but the average 3-person family there consumes 454,248 litres (almost twice that nature provides them with). Additionally, the 253,621 litres it receives in rainfall is largely shunted away quickly by storm drains.1 Water supplies come from expensive outside sources. Food is trucked in from other parts of the U.S. and from other nations. Only monetary wealth makes such waste possible.

For the Third World, there are few illusions regarding their future. They know they are in trouble and the trouble will only increase without serious changes being made regarding the capture and storage of energy and resources. The Third World not only comes from poverty, they remain in poverty. The First World, however, has come out of poverty into a spurt of opulence. Once one acquires a taste of opulence, though, it is like a drug – hard to let go. And any suggestion that living high is no longer possible is met with lashing out similar to the confronted junkie.

Rereading the ideas of science historian Thomas Kuhn recently, I came to realise that what I was seeing in the attacks was a clash of paradigms.2 The old paradigm of progress driven by monetary wealth has a science fiction version of the future with fantastic technologies addressing every issue of material need and opening us up to a world of constant leisure time where human beings are freed from labour, able to pursue whatever endeavor their hearts desire. (Ironically, the monetary paradigm is giving us less and less free time to go along with the ever increasing amounts of technology it gives us.)3

This paradigm is so enticing that real answers to serious questions are glossed over. The appeal to technology as savior is the “sweeping under the rug,” in the late physicist Richard Feynman’s words4, of pressing problems humanity now faces. The appeal of seeking technology as an answer is understandable. As historian Ronald Wright pointed out in the 2004 Massey Lectures:

Our technological culture measures human progress by technology: the club is better than the fist, the arrow better than the club, the bullet better than the arrow. We came to this belief for empirical reasons.

Wright also points out, however, that “[o]ur practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology – a secular religion which… is blind to certain flaws in its credentials.”5

Technology, it is said, is neutral – it is neither harmful nor beneficial. Only its uses determine helpful or harmful outcomes. I think it is rather the case that technology normally creates new problems that require ever more technology to solve the problems that technology creates.6 For instance, the creation of the modern steam engine led to the increased mining of coal, increasing the volume of machinery making coal inadequate to meet energy needs, necessitating the internal combustion engine, creating a car culture, necessitating highway systems, leading to the increased use of oil, leading to the current problems of peak oil and climate change, both very pressing problems we now face. The worst possible outcome I can imagine for the problem of peak oil is a technological fix providing the replacement of oil with some form of abundant, cheap energy. Energy on the scale we use today is only needed to continue us on our current path of ever more growth. At current world growth rates, we would see a doubling in economic output in a little more than 20 years time. However, each doubling of the world economy requires an equivalent to all the resource inputs for all of human history prior to the last doubling.7 In other words, to double the economy from where it is today, we will need to use up as many resources as we ever did in the past. Clearly, this would be disaster. Under the current paradigm, a technological fix to the problem of peak oil would lead to ecological collapse.

None of this is controversial, but if you are committed to the current paradigm, any reminders of such facts are threatening. If your way of life ends, so too do the dreams of the bright, shiny technological future. By seeking workable solutions only by currently existing technology and only by technologies that have either a chance of being sustainable or putting us on a sustainable path, permaculturists are indirectly shining light on the threats to the current paradigm. Permaculture then becomes an unwanted reminder that the days of the current paradigm are numbered. If one is emotionally invested in that paradigm, one may lash out against it.

Choosing to practice permaculture, on the other hand, means shifting paradigms. As Kuhn points out, one can only fully understand the perspectives of a given paradigm if one is in that paradigm itself. Permaculture causes a shift in perception of the world.

Traveling through a new subdivision, for instance, I do not see nice new modern homes that I would like to live in. Rather I see homes built without consideration for the energy needed to heat or cool them – homes that need tremendous energy inputs to make them livable. Looking inside, I see internal room layouts that do not facilitate either work or movement within the home, and little or no understanding of what patterns in architecture actually make people feel comfortable within a home.8 I see urban development without any consideration of community or energy. I see land dedicated only to conspicuous displays of opulence rather than the production of healthy food.

Walking into the forest, I don’t see trees and dirt. Rather I see complex, symbiotic networks of fungi, microbes, plant and animal. I see parasitic organisms not destroying, but carrying out vital roles in keeping the overall system healthy and even increasing diversity .9 I don’t see “problem” organisms, I see organisms whose importance I do not yet recognise. Looking at a field, I see potentials for the capture and storage of water and the possibilities for a vibrant and dynamic diversity of organisms that can be placed to create an ecosystemic system to meet not only the needs of the individual organisms, but also the people living on the site.

Under the old paradigm, an infestation of corn borers means you need to spray pesticides, or spend millions of dollars to genetically engineer a variety of corn to produce a toxin (then still need to spray anyway). Under the new paradigm, you first of all see an over-abundant food source for parasitoids. Secondly, you see evidence of some sort of imbalance: soil infertility perhaps, lack of predator habitat, over concentration of borer food, etc. The costs of the old paradigm are ecological destruction and risks to human health both known and unknown. Additionally, there is a rather substantial monetary cost in the form of chemical and genetic research (funded in large part by tax payers), externalized health costs and clean up costs, and costs to the farmer for seed and chemicals. The costs of the new paradigm are investments in learning the functional ecology of your system and an acceptance of temporary losses while balancing the system.

What are you talking about?

Coming from a completely different paradigm, communication with those in the old paradigm becomes difficult, as Kuhn points out. Were Claudius Ptolemy to jump through time to today and teach a first-year physics class, he would tell his students,

The Earth does not rotate; otherwise objects will fling off its surface like mud from a spinning wheel. It remains at the centre of things because this is its natural place – it has no tendency to go either one way or the other. Around it and in successively larger spheres revolve the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, all of them deriving their motion from the immense and outermost spheres of fixed stars.10

The students would either think it was a joke, or an argument would ensue with each side wondering why the other could not understand what was clearly the nature of the universe as evidenced by observation.

In my own experience, pointing out the potential dangers in biotechnology as an approach to pest problems11, for example, I am always met with stunned silence when I ask why there is a pest problem in the first place. One rarely encounters devastating pest outbreaks in natural systems, and there is a reason for that.12 That reason, however, is only visible from within the new paradigm. The new paradigm lets us see that the problem is not one of pests attacking corn or cotton or brinjal, or weeds choking out soybeans. The problem is approaching a piece of land as a factory. The “pests” are only doing what organisms do: finding a niche and filling it. Create a niche conductive to early-stage pioneers (what people commonly call “weeds”) and you will see a lot of those pioneers. Create vast monoculture smorgasbords of pest food with little or no reserves for pest predators (or kill the predators by spraying insecticide on them) and you should know what to expect.

Point this out to people dedicated to the old paradigm and at best they will just ignore you. More likely they will dismiss your approach a priori as impossible or unworkable. Or worse, they will lash out at you.

To give another example, this one less extreme but still important, a colleague of mine recently did a large design and implementation job for a farm in Australia in which I participated by providing graphics for swale designs. Not only is Australia dry, they have not been receiving normal amounts of rainfall over the past few years, so the swales where really the cornerstone of the design. Without the capture and storage of water, there is no guarantee that the trees planted on site will survive and the site would definitely not do as well without them. Unfortunately, the client did not operate from the same paradigm as my colleague and decided that the swales were unnecessary and would not put them in. As a result, our expectations for the site are not high. If nothing else, this can serve as a practical warning to designers of cross-paradigm communication. Clients need to understand fully what you are doing and why.

Shifting gears

For the permaculturist him or herself, the paradigm shift has its own challenges. The greatest obstacle to overcome is fear. Permaculturists in the First World must step out of the material culture that they grew up with. This is a huge challenge, even if they identify that paradigm as the source of many of the hardships they face in their lives. Questions arise as to whether or not they should just keep doing what they’ve always done: Can you really heat and cool a home passively? What happens if I attempt to grow my own food and the entire crop fails? Do I know enough about animal husbandry? Gardening? Building? Will I be adopting a way of life that leaves me alone and isolated? Will I miss the old life I had? How will I get land? Where should I get land? Can I use the site I’m on now? How can I pay for the initial expenses of setting up my system? Will this stuff really work? Really?

Studying permaculture is a bit like going to a swimming pool: you are there because you want to jump in. The pattern most follow is dipping their feet in the permaculture pool as it were. You know that after jumping in, you will quickly adjust and enjoy it. It’s just that initial jolt you fear. People generally step in and step out, staying in longer each time until finally they just jump right in.

Once in, you don’t want to come out again. Personally, I am on the verge of selling off vacation property to purchase acreage on which to build a home of my own design and set up systems on a scale that I have only had the opportunity to do on others’ land. The choice between that and returning to my old life in the suburbs of Tokyo is clear. I will be happy to give a requiem for the nightlife, the hustle, the gleaming technology, the grocery bills, the water bills, the path that I know is not sustainable. It had its moments, but the perspective gained from the new paradigm makes living the old life impossible for me. As the physicist cannot go back to the Ptolemaic model of the universe revolving around the Earth, the permaculturist cannot look at the status quo conceptual framework of industrial society as even remotely sensible. Change becomes a necessity, even if that threatens some.

1. Lancaster, Brad. Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands. Volume 1: Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain into Your Life and Landscape. Tucson: Rainsource Press, 2006, p. 18 .

2. Bird, Alexander. “Thomas Samuel Kuhn” Dictionary of Literary Biography (2003), draft version available at http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plajb/research/papers/Kuhn_for_DLB.pdf; Okasha, Samir. Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; Strohman, Richard. Epigenesis and Complexity: The Coming Kuhnian Revolution in Biology. Nature Biotechnology, March, 1997, pp. 194-200.

3.3 The San of the Kalahari work about 750 hours a year living in one of the harshest environments on Earth. By contrast, most North Americans work close to 3000 hours a year, more if you count housework. The best I have personally heard a permaculture system to achieve is around 620 hours a year. The is on a par with hunter-gatherer societies, which, counter-intuitively, require much less work to sustain themselves than “civilized” societies.

4. Strohman (1997).

5. Wright, Ronald. A Short History of Progress. Toronto: House of Asansi Press, 2004, p. 4.

6. This is not to say that some otherwise destructive technologies – the bulldozer for instance – cannot be put to very productive uses such as the creation of water catchment earthworks. However, I think a lot of the “green” technology is going to turn out to be subject to the Jevons Paradox, allowing increased and accelerated resource depletion because of increased efficiency.

7. Smith, Rod. Lecture to the Royal Academy of Engineering, Carpe Diem: The Dangers of Risk Aversion. Civil Engineering Surveyor, October 2007 cited in Monbiot, George. What is Progress? December 4, 2007 available at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/12/04/what-is-progress/

8. For a guide to good design, see Alexander, Christopher et al. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

9. For example, Armillaria mushrooms (honey mushrooms) kill off trees, but in doing so, they can create open pasture in forest. This creates new habitat for a variety of species that otherwise would not exist. It also sets up a rich edge ecology on the forest/pasture border. See Stamets, Paul. Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Berkley: Ten Speed Press, 2005.

10. Verma, Surendra. The Little Book of Scientific Principles, Theories & Things. Sydney: New Holland Publishers, 2005, p. 16.

11. Problems include but are not limited to unknown and unpredictable effects from gene order disruption, gene scrambling in or around the insertion points of transgenes, genome-wide disruptions, deletions of genes, currently marketed GMOs with anti-biotic marker genes, possible undesirable gene activation due to promoter genes, recombination hotspots within the CaMV 35S promoter gene, unpredicted allergenicity or toxicity, unintended environmental consequences from toxin expression in insecticidal GMOs, problems from increased use with herbicide-tolerant GMOs, etc.

12. Pest plagues in nature are almost always temporary whereas in conventional agriculture, they are systematic.

http://permaculturetokyo.blogspot.com/2008/03/paradigm-shifts-and-permaculture.html

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