Apathy & Hedonism

It's been suggested that dealing with the realities of climate change and/ or peak oil is like going through the stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It's important to note that these stages are not in any real order, nor are they complete. Additionally, one my slip back into any of them later, acceptance not necessarily being an "end" stage, but more of a temporary state between bouts of the other, less fun stages.
I have been feeling a lapsing of acceptance recently, receding back into denial and it's various permutations. Retail therapy is nice, and I've been buying art supplies, and getting my mind off of the ugly state of the world by retreating into my normal pattern of unsustainability and hedonism. I'm working on some art projects, going to work, and living day by day as so many of us do. I sometimes fin myself thinking: Why bother adjusting my life if I will have to eventually anyway? Block out all the misery and war, all the inevitability of our demise, and be happy for what you do have.
This may sound really absurd, but I ruminate on and remember fondly often an old episode of ALF.

yep, that ALF

Anyway- He has some brush with death that I don't recall- and realizes his own mortality in a really visceral way. He becomes monomaniacal, obsessed with the potential for his own demise.

He can't do anything about it, but he sure as hell can try.

He won't leave the house, because some disaster may befall him outside. Then he begins to see the danger all around him in his own home, and moves into the garage and won't budge. Eventually the little boy makes him see that, in essence, even in the most prepared, safe environment- he is vulnerable, and there is simply no way to make his well being a sure thing. He comes to accept that he may be hit by a car, or caught by the bad guys, or a can of paint might fall off a shelf and hit him in the head, but the very act of being alive puts him at risk for death.

This all seemed very profound as a kid, and helped me get over my acute fear of nuclear holocaust (Thanks to Akira Kurosawa's Dreams for that one) and become ok with the fact that things are really finite.

I guess that's kind of how I've been feeling. A conscientious denial. Ok, so the world is going to get worse, not better. But it's not specifically your fault and there's certainly nothing you can do personally to fix it. I can do things to make myself feel better, but they won't necessarily be to my advantage, because I cant see the future, and nor can anyone else, and as much as I try to make my life more transition friendly, there's absolutely no guarantee that it will have any affect at all on the well being of my family or myself.

If I plant a garden to help my family eat, there are any number of reasons my efforts could be in vain, for instance.

Not to say I should neglect doing the things I can that will potentially help and certainly not hurt- but to spend so much time fixated on the problem won't help me.

It seems obvious, but when faced with the information at hand of how the world is declining even now, it's hard to integrate calm into my life.

I guess I just hit a wall. At a certain point I just get ineffectually angry, but can't make change happen. So I have to step back from that information for awhile and cool off or I'll just get more and more pissed and depressed until I'm useless.

There's not a good end point here so I'm just going to leave it with this. I have what I have now, and for now, I'm happy and things are good. I should prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and not think too hard about what the worst may be and how likely it is to happen or what it might be, because we simply can't know the future.

Be aware, be informed, do what you can, but remember to be happy for what you have and appreciate this short, interesting, awesome life, or something.

One Point for the Doomers

Sometimes it's a little (or a lot) depressing and/or scary to think of the effects that the confluence of peak resources and climate change will have on this planet, and sometimes I feel almost excited for the change. I really don't know what will happen next. Sometimes, I feel like "Wow, it's about time mama nature kicked our asses."
When stuff like the griping, piddling, and quarreling that's happening in Washington about some unbelievable amount of money that we are mysteriously allowed to owe becomes a topic of "should we/ shouln't we" is the focus of our attention, rather than: "How did we get here, how can we fix this?" or "This is a totally unacceptable state of affairs, let's reexamine our expectations as a nation and figure out how we can solve this. If we don't fix this now, we'll be up shit creek right quick." I tend to lean towards the most nhilistic of these thought patterns.

Yep, we have it coming

(photo credit, me 2001)

A friend of mine on Facebook asked the seemingly innocuous question "should it or should it not be a constitutional amendment, given our current situation, to balance the budget" and a heated debate about the debt-limit ensued, but no one ever asked these basic questions.
No one said that we might be here because we have become used to a lifestyle that we cannot support (except me)- no one said, these are maybe not the questions our government should be asking. We have issued ourselves a credit card with a limit of a gajillion dollars- should we make it a gajillion an one? should we cut these basic social services, or these? (B/c of course taxing the wealthy and not being in several military scuffles at a time is out of the question) Do we really HAVE to be responsible? It's like saying:

"We are on fire, and currently burning to death, but I just noticed that our Prada Bag is getting a little warm, do you think we should set it down before it catches fire?"


We're suffering from the most epic case of denial that I can possibly imagine. When posed with this problem, it's such a surreal issue I can't even begin to formulate an answer.
When, in the near future, we are posed with questions that are much more severe, like water availability, or gasoline shortage- I begin to realize that the basic and fundamental questions I was previously certain we would ask ourselves will go totally by the wayside.
We will (and have currently) ignore/d the real issues, and try desperately to treat the symptom rather than the disease.
Tonight, I side with the doomers.

I am very afraid that we will not ask ourselves Why, How, or What can we do as a nation to fix this before it's too late to prevent catastrophic destruction. Rather- will put off the reality of it and continue to occupy this state of denial (it has cable!) until we have destroyed any possible hope of salvaging a graceful decent. We will eradicate our own future and that of our children's because taking the bus to work and turning off your lights is too much of a pain in the ass.

This is what I am most afraid of, and the more I see of human nature, the more likely it seems.

Literature and the Long Decent

I recently finished Sharon Astyk's excellent and book, Depletion and Abundance, and have begun The Long Descent, by the little known author John Michael Greer, who lives just a stone's throw away in Ashland, OR. So far, the book is exceptional, and has some of the most readable prose and rational long term thinking about the decline and fall of industrial civilization that I've yet read. Where James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency was perhaps the wittiest and most nhilistic, Sharon Astyk's the most inspirational, and Richard Heinberg's Peak Everything the most informative, on the subject of peak oil and resources, so far, Greer's has been the most poetic.
I separate peak oil and climate change in my mind as two separate entities because mainly, the subjects are separated, if unintentionally by their authors. Sharon Astyk points out, quite accurately, that they are approached by two different modes of thought. Peak oil is often studied by those who are concerned with the immanent danger to themselves or their families, and climate change science is often approached by those whose main concern is one of altruism for future generations. Both are legitimate concerns, and really, they should be viewed as one in the same problem: that is, the excessive consumption of resources by our industrial civilization an it's unreasonable expectations for the future.

They are, of course, the same problem, but again, she wisely notes, that they are both so major, and so pressing, that they frequently end up in competition with one another because they are simply too much for the psyche of the world to accept as one problem. For instance, my mother provides an excellent, if tragic, example.
When she discovered that her cancer was certainly terminal, and it had metastasized throughout much of her body- she was told that she could (an encouraged) to aggressively treat her liver cancer, though she would certainly perish of the lung cancer she also had shortly thereafter (if they were to miraculously cure the former). Now it is widely known that lung cancer is much more painful and unpleasant to die of, and she reasonably said
"Well, why bother treating one if I'm just going to die from the other?" but this did not, apparently, occur to the people who had suggested the expensive and experimental treatment for the liver cancer. It seems obvious. It's cancer- it's terminal- why *potentially* extend your life by a few paltry months if your death will be so much worse in the end? But this is the meat of the problem that we will face in the coming years, and I personally expect our world to opt for the futile treatment.
That is, when we run short of oil, as the Nazis did in WWII, we will expend every resource we have left to make liquid coal fuels in our cars an trucks. We will almost undoubtedly be in such fierce denial that we burn every last ounce of extractable fossil fuel to maintain our fading way of life.

My mother chose dignity and the brevity of a life lived by the ideals she had always maintained. One of the things her mother recounted to me before her recent passing was an idyllic scene of a daughter eschewing her mother's help at doing dishes
"Me do it my own self!" She exclaimed, and this is very much the way the rest of her life was lived. To face her own problems without unnecessary intervention or help- but we will not be so brave, I think. We will perhaps see the problem- I think we already do (peak oil)- but we will choose to ignore it until it becomes intertwined inexorably with a new an bigger problem (climate change) and perhaps we already have gotten to the point where the two have become one.
John Michael Greer speaks eloquently of past civilizations crumbling and declining until the feats of their ancestors become myth and legend. He mentions that in the future, a man walking on the moon might fade into such. It does not seem unreasonable, but it really hit me with a force that sustained-
We are not destined for the stars, as I and so many others (Carl Sagan, for one) had hoped, but instead for the earth. Our cities will crumble into dust and our children will live, confused, resentful, angry, and perhaps desperate in the rubble.
At some distant and unimaginable time not too long from now, the idea of space travel will be the stuff of fairy tales, not of the evening news.
We think that technology can invent a way but of a finite world only because we are so engrossed in our consumption. It would be wise for us to remember that Einstein said (misquoted her) you cannot invent your way out of a problem using the same technology that created it. We cannot solve our problems with technology. It is not a source of energy, but an invention of it.
We have burned hundres of millions of years of condensed sunlight in the space of a couple hundred years. We feel entitled to more only because we do not remember our lives before it.
Like a man at a fine dinner imagining the next course of his meal, but the larder is empty. He cannot conceive that there will be no dessert, only desert.
It is hard to swallow, even for me, but the longer I look, the more barren the pantry appears. I realize I've eaten all my rations and left nothing for tomorrow.
I feel especially bad about this for my son.
I've begun writing him a journal- like Sarah Connor but on paper rather than tape.
In case I cannot tell him I am sorry tomorrow, I tell him today.

The Dangers of Optmistic Environmentalism

Last night, I read this article in Rolling Stone. I had high hopes, since I respect and admire Al Gore's persistent, if somewhat futile and muddled, campaigning for better climate-conscious legislation.
I was reminded viscerally of an excellent essay in Richard Heinberg's exceptional book Peak Everything, called "Bridging Peak Oil and Climate Change Activism" in which he points out, essentially, that where these two intertwined and equally important fields of study should be like conjoined twins- inseparable and interdependent- they are in fact acting like competitive teenage siblings, each certain that it is more important than the other, and each vying for all the attention and love, instead of working together.
Gore says:

"We do have another choice. Renewable energy sources are coming into their own. Both solar and wind will soon produce power at costs that are competitive with fossil fuels; indications are that twice as many solar installations were erected worldwide last year as compared to 2009. The reductions in cost and the improvements in efficiency of photovoltaic cells over the past decade appear to be following an exponential curve that resembles a less dramatic but still startling version of what happened with computer chips over the past 50 years.
Enhanced geothermal energy is potentially a nearly limitless source of competitive electricity. Increased energy efficiency is already saving businesses money and reducing emissions significantly. New generations of biomass energy — ones that do not rely on food crops, unlike the mistaken strategy of making ethanol from corn — are extremely promising. Sustainable forestry and agriculture both make economic as well as environmental sense. And all of these options would spread even more rapidly if we stopped subsidizing Big Oil and Coal and put a price on carbon that reflected the true cost of fossil energy — either through the much-maligned cap-and-trade approach, or through a revenue-neutral tax swap."

This is such a heartbreaking thing to read because it shows that even one of the most passionate and noted climate change advocates has deep misunderstandings about the nature of available resources on our planet.
I'm not saying that energy efficient light bulbs and reusable grocery bags aren't the bees knees, but that is NOT going to cut it.
What I'm getting at here is something that's been pointed out by almost every peak oil/mineral advocate and should be utterly self evident to anyone wanting to restructure our energy consumption: We simply don't have enough stuff to create and maintain a new energy infrastructure. Both solar panels and wind turbines require rare earth minerals that are already in short supply. It's a nice idea, but it will never ever happen. The only way to reduce pollution is to reduce consumption.

Only a steep population decline (voluntary or not), an abandoning of all the products and services we love and cherish (TV, cars, computers, indoor heating and cooling, grocery stores, cheap clothes, etc), or a global economic disaster (what James Howard Kunstler refers to aptly as The Long Emergency) will drastically reduce our resource use... until of course those resources become so expensive that it becomes unreasonably inefficient to extract what's left of them.

While some theorize that we still have "time" to change, and some say it's too late- I personally think that it doesn't matter. Even if we did have time to change our ghastly habits, we won't.
Call me a sour Susan but it seems laughable to think that we'll all voluntarily switch off our a/cs and stop going to the mall to eat Sbarros Pizza and buy plastic jewelry and sweatshop jeans. Unless we simply can't afford to do those things, or they're wrenched from our cold, dead fingers, we will keep doing it till it kills us. We're addicted- like- SERIOUSLY addicted, and we're going to mainline that shit until we're dead in some squat in Hell's Kitchen with needles sticking out from our arms.
IMHO, of course, but this is all beside the point-

The misapprehension that we can continue on as we are if we all just recycle a little more and invest more in natural and renewable energies has become so deeply embedded in the environmental movement because no one has the balls to say (or possibly the knowledge that) "It takes a carbon based infrastructure to build and maintain a "renewable resource" infrastructure, and we have neither the resources, the political will, nor the social awareness to undertake such a massive shift."

When Bush sr. (then co opted by Dick Cheny and GWB) said
"The American way of life is not negotiable"- I don't think he was just being a snarky republican. I've seen "Think Green" stickers on more minivans than I can shake a stick at. We just don't GET it.

I watched a terrible commercial recently for Tom's of Maine where Sheryl Crow postures thoughtfully with her guitar and says deep shit like (I'm paraphrasing here)
"I have a philosophy that it's not about doing everything, it's about doing what you can" - This is dangerous thinking, but it's what most of us indulge in.
It's easy to try and hoist the moral burden of pollution and climate change off of our shoulders by buying organic- being environmentally aware is depressing, and it becomes a perfect storm of overwhelming horrors when you calculate in peak oil, and the looming economic collapse- I don't blame people for not facing the truth; but while climate change is a vague sort of
"We'll let our kids/grand kids deal with it in 60 years" thing, peak oil is happening NOW. We are ON the "Bumpy Plateau" where we are producing at maximum- and as demand continues to rise, so too do prices, which decreases demand, and then prices drop- but not back to where they started, because now the oil that we have left is more expensive to extract- but the prices drop enough so that demand rises, then prices go up again- but this time a little higher-
This is a game we simply can NOT play forever. Oil prices will never drop down to a buck a gallon ever again, no matter how much we subsidize.
It becomes less of a moral issue and more of a practical one. As much as the techno-fixers and optimists among us would love to build a nation of solar panels and wind turbines and geothermal plants- of high speed rails and hydrogen powered cars and organic farms.... it's simply not viable. Not only will it not happen for political reasons- it CAN'T happen. We do not posses enough raw materials to restructure our world to a more environmentally friendly one...... but then again, we can't keep going the way we're going either- Again- we are going to run into the wall of infinite demand VS a finite world.

We are going to have to (probably involuntarily) learn to live within our means- and in a world with 7 billion people facing a drastically changing climate- that is not going to happen the way we would like it to. I want to be positive about this, to see it as an opportunity for the human race to de-globalize and live a more peaceful agrarian lifestyle, but I don't think it's going to happen the way that the optimists predict- not because we are not capable of a gentle transition, but because nobody, not the oil execs all the way to Al Gore, will admit that we are living on borrowed resources even now.

The idea that we can/ will go on as before with just a few minor concessions is just the kind of magical thinking that is going to totally cripple our preparedness for the reality that is hurtling towards us.
We could soften the blow- or rather- advocates, writers, and activists could (because policymakers, government, and corporations won't and it's a joke to think we could influence their behavior) by simply making the public aware that they're about to run short or food, fuel, and plastic- so conserve and re purpose as much as you can- buy hand tools, learn to garden or knit or fix shit and you'll be in a much better position to protect the interests of yourself and those you love from the inevitable shift towards a post carbon life. The new American subsistence existence.

We're like Wiley Coyote walking over a cliff- still walking, we haven't looked down yet- but when we do- oh baby. We'll fall hard and fast.
I hope I'm wrong, I really do, but I think it's pretty indicative that I'm not when even people like Al Gore- who are in a real position to smack some sense into the common man are instead gently tapping his shoulder and saying
"Excuse me please, I hate to be a bother, but..."

What it's About

I'm mainly going to be using this blog for my own benefit. It's here to post links, photos, and text from interesting articles, videos, etc regarding peak oil, climate change, collapse, and so on.

If you don't know what peak oil or climate change are, or think they're a load of garbage, well, I'm sorry for you (but also a little jealous I can't be so gullible), and I can tell you now you almost certainly won't be interested in this blog.
At the moment I don't have a lot to contibute myself to the conversation, but I listen an awful lot, and I'd really like to keep a good record of things that I've read and seen that I'd like to be able to refer to later.

If you're also watching the poop sling around in the fan blades and looking for a place to hunker down before it splatters everywhere, then ride along with me and my blog and see where we end up.
Ecotopia or total collapse?

Who's on First?
Looks like some brainy and insightful folks over at RSA.
Let's see what they have to say.