Culture Change Round-Up: 10 - On the Legacy and Spirit of Joshua Slocum

On the Legacy and Spirit of Joshua Slocum      
Written by Capt. Paul Flowers   

A Personal Narrative On the Legacy and Spirit of Joshua Slocum, and the Schooner Wanderer
- by Cpt. P.W. Flowers, master of the Wanderer

In 1892, Captain Joshua Slocum, having retired, received as a gift, or I should say, a joke from Capt. Eben Pierce, a "ship" which proved to be a very antiquated sloop in Fairhaven, CT, that the neighbours had said must have been built "in the year 1." She was on the hard, meaning ashore, propped up on stands, miles from sea and people thought that the only thing this ship was good for was to be broken up into fire wood. Capt. Slocum felled his first oak-tree a month later and began refitting her.

Thirteen months later, at a cost of $533.62, Capt. Slocum had refit that little ship from the keel to the topmast, and it became the world renowned "Spray" and was the first to circumnavigate the globe single handedly. Joshua Slocum's "Sailing Alone Around the World" has since become one of the greatest adventure stories of all time. No one thought he could do it, and most didn't believe that he was doing it when he pulled into their ports. He took a year and a month to rebuild his sloop from the keel up, and got a boat that lasted him almost 20 years. He disappeared forever in December, 1906 on board the Spray while en route the Caribbean.

The story of Slocum's adventure stirs the hearts of many to this day, and is one of my greatest motivations as a sailor. However, there is a great lesson to be learned from this. If you want to do something, there is truly no one save yourself that can stop you. He let no one get in his way, or dampen his spirits. Many told him their opinions of how the ship should be refit, and many balked at his methods and designs. But he was not only successful, but became world famous as the first person to prove that a single man can circumnavigate the world.

Now, in December of 2006, exactly one hundred years since Joshua Slocum set sail for the Caribbees, never to be seen again, his spirit is found in the refit of the Schooner Wanderer. She is a topmast Schooner, of a 1903 Grand Banks design. Hand built by master shipwright Henry Thomas Vokey in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland in 1985, the Wanderer was his last and greatest tall ship project. The Wanderer is the ships second name, her first name was given to her by Vokey; "J & B" after his four daughters, Jane, Josephine, Beatrice and Bonnie.

The Wanderer has seen some rough seas, having been a tourist attraction charter craft for 21 years, and if she were less of a ship, she wouldn't be afloat today. She was dismasted by a shrimp boat in Georgia in October of 2006, and she now sits, dejectedly at anchor in Jekyll Island, GA, where many of the locals look upon her as the locals of Fairhaven looked upon the Spray. No masts, rotting bulwarks and cabin trunks, and the modern disease of epoxy covering areas of rotting wood that should have long ago been replaced.

She's been more engine than sails for five years, after her former master installed a gigantic Caterpillar engine to be able to power the boat with tourists aboard even if he was sailing against the wind. He never replaced the original sails, only kept them patched, "because it looked piraty." Now, I seek to do to the Wanderer, what Capt. Slocum did to the Spray. What nobody thought he could do with that little ship, he did, and her name is famous to this day. While Slocum was the last great sailor of the first golden age of sail, I seek to carry the Wanderer into the third golden age of sail.

By 1892, sail-based commerce was on its last legs. Slocum commented; "...for I had already found that I could not obtain work in a shipyard without first paying fifty dollars to a society, and as for a ship to command – there were not enough vessels to go around. Nearly all our tall vessels had been cut down for coal-barges, and were being ignominiously towed by the nose from port to port." Today, the only tall ships still sailing, are doing so for historical preservation and eduactional purposes only. There are no tall ships plying the seas bearing freight, mail, or passengers in transit rather than on vacation.

Sailing is arguably mankind's oldest way of life, and dates back to prehistoric times. Everything we have ever achieved in this fascinating modern age we live in has been a result of sailing. Undiscovered countries charted out and inhabited. Freedom fought for and won. Regular trade routes established, and trade relationships fomented on the quarterdecks of some of the greatest examples of human achievement ever recorded. I think of Joshua Slocum's undertaking in the Spray every time I stand on the quarterdeck of the Wanderer. I dedicate this restoration project to the legacy and spirit of Joshua Slocum. He undertook the impossible, and sailed it around the world by himself. The undertaking of the Wanderer is by no means a one man operation, however, she, like the Spray, is but one small boat on a great sea.

What I wish to achieve with the Wanderer is to put some wind, as it were, into the sailing world once again. After languishing in luxuriant decadence for 60 years, the rich have thrown away sailing as quickly as they throw away all other pastimes when they are no longer a symbol of great status. The world moves too quickly for sailing, and people have lost interest in this purest and noblest of human endeavours. The world is moving too quickly for its inhabitants. As we run out of our precious resources, which we have become so dependant on, that in four short generations we have forgotten where we came from almost altogether.

Not only are people not sailing anymore, except for a brave few who buck the system, like myself, but they are not gardening, not building their own homes, not fixing things and making do, but throwing them away when they get upon them, the smallest speck of dirt or wear. I firmly believe that if mankind is to survive another four generations and beyond, we are going to have to look back at where we came from to be able to move forward.

The world is fighting wars over the resources we use to transport goods across the seas and around our respective countries. When we were still under sail, we didn't fight wars for the cloth the sails were cut from. Wars were bitter to be sure, but they weren't for money as much then, as they are today. We are running out of these resources, and are facing the bitterest war of all in our lifetimes. The answer to the dilemma of mankind lies in the seas, under sail. While we are furtively trying to invent new technology to solve the energy and transport crises emerging daily, the answer is sitting dejectedly at anchor, in Jekyll Island, GA, in need of love and attention. In need of people like Joshua Slocum who see not chores, but challenges. Not impossibilities, but successes. Not falling apart old seabirds, but diamonds in the rough. Not a lot of work, but a finished product before the project has even begun. I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, are you a Josh Slocum?

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The Sail Transport Network webpage: sailtransportnetwork.com

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Culture Change Round-Up: 9 - Sicko and the Ecology of Health Care Reform

Sicko and the Ecology of Health Care Reform
Written by Dan Bednarz, PhD and J. Mac Crawford, RN, PhD  

Editor's note: Up against the broken U.S. health-care system, the nation's disease-ridden population thinks these are tough days because of the financial aspects of medical care. However, these are our salad days, compared to what is to come when the effects of peak oil and climate change devastate the economy. In light of Western medicine's massive dependence on petroleum for cheap energy, materials such as plastics, drugs from petrochemicals, and the centralized, top-down structure of hospitals dependent on motor vehicles, the future of health care in a changing world should be discussed now. Growth of the economy and the stability of the petroleum-oriented infrastructure are dangerous assumptions, as we see oil moving toward $100 per barrel and beyond. Co-author Dan Bednarz told Culture Change, "We ask what health reform possibilities peak oil opens up to the people." His concern is that reformers such as Michael Moore are "wedded to the notion that large insurance companies and hospital/medical complexes are the crux of the issue. In my view they are symptoms." - JL

Can Michael Moore's Sicko catalyze health care reform? Despite widespread praise for this exposé we doubt that any message carried on the big screen can meet this high threshold. On the other hand, Internet Movie Database [1] has links to 124 reviews of Sicko with hundreds of impassioned readers' comments. Moore examines an institution that tangibly affects everyone –- in the quality and span of their lives and in their pocketbooks.

In this review we highlight Sicko's success as a modern day muckraking triumph. Also, it is critical to examine the shortcomings of Moore's views of health care reform in the context of energy, ecology and sustainability.

One of Sicko's feats is its ability to shame and throttle many apologists for the current health care system. Who wants to come right out and argue that it's good for our national character to force a man to decide which severed finger to discard? Such "choices" mock the American mythology of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism. Nonetheless, some critics of Moore are foolish enough to serve up innuendo, red herrings, and fear mongering about the horrors of universal coverage in other nations.

Sicko renders these charges indecent -- simply "busted" -- because there's no way to win a propaganda war with Michael Moore on this: If you live in Canada, England, France or Cuba you will never have to choose which digit to save, bear the mortification of moving into your adult child's spare room because you've gone bankrupt from medical bills, work during your "golden years" to afford medication, or be told you must transport your literally dying child to an "approved" hospital for treatment -- that's as sicko as it gets.

What flummoxes defenders of the status quo is their inability to deflate the emotional wallop of Sicko, especially when Moore concludes by asking "Who are we?" to crystallize the values underlying the business side of health care in America.

If any movie can motivate, this is the one. So let's imagine for the moment that Sicko energizes the health care reform movement. After all, most Americans favor universal coverage, although in the past they have been easily misled and frightened into preserving the present system.

In bare-bones, Moore wants to exclude insurance and pharmaceutical companies; he wants money out of the temple of medicine.

Fine, and imperative; but we have some questions. First, as urgent and humane as it is to make medical care a right regardless of one's of financial status, will this solve our healthcare problems? Second, how sustainable is the new medical system Moore envisions? Third, how do we overcome the behemoth structure now in place to institute genuine reform?

We depart from Moore and the vast majority of reform proposals we've seen by locating health care in its ecological context, and assert that all three questions have an ecological answer. Since this will sound odd to many, let us repeat this in slightly different language: the economy, of which medicine is a subsystem, exists within and is wholly dependent upon the natural environment (also known as the ecology or the biosphere, among other designations). The ecology is not ancillary or subservient to the market economy; ultimately, it supplies the energy and resources necessary for human economic activity.

This is obvious, a truism, but -- to our knowledge -- unappreciated by most of those seeking to overhaul medicine. Indeed, many reformers operate as if healthcare is fed with manna from heaven. We are not picking a fight with them; we ask them to ponder our point of view that current medical care problems go far beyond cost and coverage to our relationships with nature: how we extract and then use energy and resources from the earth and how we live several degrees removed from the natural environment. And, how what we do to the natural environment affects our health and nature's health.

Let us explain our point of view.

Approximately four decades ago scholars began to consider the future of our species through the lens of how the economy affects the earth's ecology. We are referring to works such as Donella Meadows' et al, Limits to Growth (1971); E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful (1975); William Catton's Overshoot (1980); Nicholas Georgescu-Reogen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971); and more contemporaneously Reg Morrison's The Spirit in the Gene (1999). Many writers now adopt this perspective, which helped organize the ecological economics paradigm represented in the works of Kenneth Boulding, Herman Daly, C.S. Holling, H.T. Odum, Robert Costanza, and Robert Ayres.

Despite differences in style, emphasis and theoretical orientation, a central question they raise is: given that the earth is finite and that its resources make economic activity possible, how sustainable is the perpetual growth economy? Schumacher puts it succinctly,

"The idea of unlimited economic growth … needs to be seriously questioned on at least two counts: the availability of basic resources and, alternatively or additionally, the capacity of the environment to cope with the degree of interference implied" (p28).

Now, in the first decade of the 21st century, as these authors anticipated, ecological bills are coming due, energy is becoming scarce -- peak oil -- and the planet is heating up -- global warming. The writings of Catton, Meadows, et al, Schumacher and the others can no longer be ignored, distorted or fobbed off as peripheral to understanding "the market." They are about its sustenance and future.

A pertinent illustration helps. Many readers of this site know that Meadows' et al, Limits to Growth has been excoriated, derided, and allegedly "proven false." Matt Simmons [2] writes that as an oil industry banker he witnessed ritualistic, probably anxiety-reducing and group-cohesion-building denunciations of Limits He notes that after reading the book he is convinced no one he heard criticizing Limits had read it.

Now we offer one example of a health problem and its connection to the ecology. Our health care system has in some ways mirrored the suburban experiment that took limitless amounts of energy and land for granted: central-city hospitals built regional, suburban hospitals and clinics, which seemed sensible at the time but nonetheless made sub- and exurban populations virtually dependent upon cars and interjected a degree of alienation from nature. The concept of a "walkable community" was rarely realized -- and certainly not valued -- in the suburbs, be it to go to the store, get a hair cut, visit friends, or get to work. This reliance on the automobile reflects oil dependence and has health consequences [3].

Our nation and the world are experiencing an "obesity epidemic," with attendant maladies of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, musculoskeletal problems, and social marginalization, among others. The classic public health approach calls for study of the problem; creation of academic "centers for obesity research;" and "interventions" to promote healthy food choices and exercise routines; this requires massive government resources. Overlooked is the implicit link between obesity and fossil-fuel-based, sedentary lifestyle and culture. Instead of having physical exercise "built-into" life, one has to consciously "intervene" to seek out exercise -- typically at the fitness center or health club. Pithily put, how many sidewalks are in the suburbs? How many readers know of shopping centers and malls that are literally (or dangerously) inaccessible to pedestrians or bicycles?

Some of the "smaller carbon footprints" achievable through conservation solutions to peak oil and climate change are the same for the obesity epidemic: walking to public transit stations, bicycling to work and for leisure, eating primarily vegetable foodstuffs, and growing some of our own. These practices -- which should be part of normal life -- are recommended by preventive medicine and public health for conditions like metabolic syndrome [4] and its attendant health effects. How many people do you know who have said, "The doctor told me to exercise"?

Our next point is critical. The present medical care system is simply too expensive and consumes too much energy and other resources, and universalizing coverage will not solve these problems. Improved population health would lead to lowered demand for traditional medical treatment, which is imperative given the era of scarcity of energy and other resources we are entering. This in turn contributes to reducing the need to travel to physicians' offices, clinics, and hospitals.

Traditional treatment-medicine will always be needed, but a "relocalization" of the system is in order. ( Sicko refers to the cost-control and health benefits of preventive health practices in other nations; this is an oblique acknowledgment of the ecology-health connection.) Not only should patient preference for physicians and treatment facilities be of importance in any national health plan, but we believe proximity to care should also be considered. The Archimedes Movement, which holds that "health is the product not just of health care, but also of education, housing, stable employment and a clean environment," offers a vision of how ecology and medicine can be synthesized.[5]

Relocalization of food production, manufacturing, water distribution (as opposed to bottled water), shopping, and residential construction is a trend playing out across the country and soon will be mandated by peak oil. A realization of this in medicine and public health could further inspire the massive transition we must make. This is made all the more urgent by the aging of the baby boom generation.

Finally, how do you change the deeply entrenched status quo of the health care industry? It is relevant to note that Upton Sinclair's The Jungle riled up Congress as it was in the process of passing the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. However, that act and the Pure Food and Drug Act were in the main the result of large corporations lobbying for regulation to gain a competitive advantage and to standardize interstate commerce instead of dealing with the possibility of 48 states regulating businesses [6]. That's right, commerce sought out regulation; Sinclair's polemic was of minor importance.

Since we laud Sicko's potency and Moore's championing of the common person, we submit that he incorporate a colossal point: the medical establishment, and the pharmaceutical and insurance industries are living on borrowed time and will not survive the energy downturn in anywhere near their current forms [7]. They are complex and require steady, large streams of energy and resources. They are a manifestation of what Catton termed "The Age of Exuberance." Simply put, they are highly vulnerable.

Imagine the debate we would now be having if Moore had located Sicko in the context of the ecology and the driving forces of peak oil and global warming. He would be "connecting the dots," educating his audience about the fundamental issues confronting health and health care -- and our daunting and unprecedented future. He can still do so and we suggest that he does.

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Notes:

1. Internet Movie Database: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386032/externalreviews.
2. Simmons, Matthew. 2000. "Revisiting the Limits to Growth: Could the Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All?". Energy Bulletin. Net. Part 1: http://www.energybulletin.net/1512.html Part 2: http://www.energybulletin.net/1516.html.
3. See: Terry Tamminen, Lives per gallon: The true cost of our oil addiction, 2006. Island Press.
4. Wikipedia, "Metabolic Syndrome." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_syndrome.
5. The Archimedes Movement: http://archimedesmovement.org
6. Wood, D.J. 1986. Strategic uses of public policy. Marshfield, Ma: Pittman Publishing.
7. See Bednarz, Dan. 2007. "Medicine after Oil," Orion Magazine, July/August. orionmagazine.org
From the article: "The scale and subtlety of our country's dependency on oil and natural gas cannot be overstated. Nowhere is this truer than in our medical system." The article has numerous examples of this dependency.

Further Reading:

"Peak Oil and the health care crisis in America", Culture Change article by Dan Bednarz, 2005:
http://culturechange.org/

The Right Medicine: How to Make Health Care Reform Work Today , by David Cundiff, MD, and Mary Ellen McCarthy, Humana Press (1994)
Money Driven Medicine – Tests and Treatments That Don't Work, by David Cundiff, MD, published by Cundiff (2006)

Fasting for healing and inner peace", by Jan Lundberg, Culture Change e-Letter  92:
http://culturechange.org/e-letter-Fasting92.html

Currently watching : Sicko (Special Edition) Release date: 2007-11-06

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Culture Change Round-Up: 8 - The Extractors and climatocide

The Extractors and Climatocide        
Written by Jan Lundberg     

Culture Change Letter 164 - July 25, 2007

Introduction

The end of the extractive economy is in sight, when sea level rise alone will undermine and depopulate coastal cities worldwide, causing enough inundation and destruction to terminate most global trade. This apparent certainty is more than enough reason -- even though petrocollapse could happen faster -- to question the way we produce and live. To understand the rise of The Extractors through Western Civilization's reign can help us see how we have clung to a faulty and lethal system.

Extraction is euphemised as "production," in part because the latter term is commonly considered a basic fact of life in our industrial minds. History reveals our succumbing to the extraction culture through force as well as feel-good advertising. The Extractors concept describes what we allow done to us when we submit to others for complete domestication in order to cater to their devouring the Earth, while we willingly participate.

Extracting is also an apt vision, as depicted in the film The Matrix, for using humans as energy sources. This is only fanciful in the particular method in the movie, where people are bred from embryos on through maturity like cattle by heartless machine-beings. With a similar wake-up message, The Yes Men guerilla political-theater group has fooled oil-business addicts with an elaborate pseudo-corporate proposal for Vivoleum ("Solves Global Warming and Peak Oil"): left-over human biomass soon to be available when petrocollapse and climate disaster hit. These artistic depictions of the extractive mentality and our plight refer to the dominant culture's intent to plug everyone on the planet into slavish consumption and work.


Extractive industries' colonialism and imperialism are sold as job-producing and "opening up markets" for "free trade." How can that really be "greened?" It can't, but some would use environmentalism to soften the extreme excesses of corporations and government and try to keep us on board the good ship Titanic with faith-based navigation. Questioning the ongoing waste economy and its global injustice, the green ethic of re-use and recycling is -- without necessarily realizing it -- antithetical to economic growth as measured by gross domestic product and mega-corporate profits.

The Extractor Economy cannot do the right thing for the ecosystem, and neither can the environmental movement if it keeps undermining itself by accepting unending extraction and consumption. The consumer lifestyle depends on nonstop extraction for increased electricity use, although limits are starting to be seen along with fresh water shortages due to climate developments in this time of continued population growth. Environmentalists generally avoid focusing ..ping many activities threatening our future existence. Instead, they promote the status quo, e.g., higher C.A.F.E. standards for ever more motor vehicles, and constructing ever more buildings with greener materials such as mushroom-based insulation. There's an "unlimited market" for the technofix, such that the obdurate fundamentals of overpopulation-via-petroleum dependence are swept under the rug.

In the previous Culture Change article on ecological economics, John Feeney wrote that mainstream economists were in effect promoting homicide when they try to grow the economy. Indeed, growth on a finite planet is not only crazy and homicidal, but is rushing at breakneck speed. Pouring gasoline on a fire, "The exploding growth in China's and India's economies (current GDP growth of 11% and 9% respectively) is placing demands on the world's natural resources in a way that is unprecedented." [Colorado's State Geologist Vincent Matthews, Peak Oil Review, ASPO-USA] Is this not "climatocide?"

Extraction culture dating from Sumer until present

Several thousand years ago, after about 200,000 years of anatomically modern human existence, a group of people in what is now the Middle East gradually gave up the hunter-gatherer way of life. They chose to rely on farming and town settlement. Thus, "civilization" was born. It ultimately gave rise to today's Western Civilization and all its trappings such as the global economy, and it inexorably led to the climate crisis becoming our worst fear in only the last few years.

That original culture that developed agriculture and living in cities may have taken this path out of the need for simple survival and in incremental steps, assuming it was not a predatory impulse to begin with. Regardless, a clear case can be made that the preference for civilization was an ecological mistake that now, centuries later, on a grand scale threatens the world as we know it. Extraction of fossil fuels, of forests, of crops with the attendant tilling and erosion, industrial animal farming, as well as the regimentation of the population as workers and other forms of servants of empire, all derived from the original culture of extraction that evolved in the Middle East.

The extractors, or "takers," do more than use the environment and other people. They systematically squeeze out all the benefit they can for selfish, short-term reasons. What is left behind is devastation and impoverishment. Desertification was one major result of this culture in the "Fertile Crescent" which supported the oldest of empires, Sumer.

This was in all likelihood the beginning of rigid social hierarchies on a massive scale, and inequality that resulted in slavery, poverty as well as kings and opulence. The well-organized takers also allocated much of the extraction or wealth for social and political purposes, as in crumbs off the table to aid in the control of the population. This is called good government or altruism, but however generous or justified this can be made to appear, the main beneficiaries are the ruling extractors. In the beginning of this culture in the Middle East the process meant the first regular "surplus" created for armies, the priest-scholars, "public works," and other institutions.

Combining with the first agricultural societies were herders or pastoralists, at first at odds with farmers that horsemen preyed upon. Eventually, animal husbandry and cavalry became a major feature of the nascent Western Civilization, and the pastoralists and nomads have been driven almost entirely to extinction. Animals in close quarters with domesticated, "penned" people caused diseases (and substantial immunity to them), as well as new strains still with us that are mutating. Today, animal farming is a major and growing extractive industry that is so unsustainable that cow flatulence ranks among the highest sources of global warming gases. Agriculture uses and wastes mind-boggling amounts of of fresh water, energy, and topsoil, but factory farms for animal products' extraction are the worst culprit.

The greatest example of modern humanity's extraction-oriented way of living is the constant use of electricity. As we are hardly ever harvesting truly free electricity such as from a llightning bolt, the extraction of electric power comes with a cost, mostly in entropy (i.e., waste in the form of degraded states of matter). Despite the obvious consequences of electricity addiction, such as dams that hurt fish runs, radioactive waste lasting thousands of years, greenhouse gas emissions, acid rain -- to name a few -- we still insist on using power wastefully instead of sharing appliances and using manual tools, for example. Older buildings had few electric plugs; now every wall has perhaps two sockets.

The public is brainwashed to believe electricity is on a par with shelter and drinking-water as essentials. More is better: electric cars, electric tooth brushes, computer information instead of print media, etc. Instead of doing without, such as living without household refrigerators, the only option is supposedly more efficient units. This cycles more pollution-boxes into the landfills, as efficient models also wear out.

From the July 16th disaster at the largest nuclear power plant in the world, the Kashiwazaki Kariwa in Japan, we are reminded that our addiction for extractive power remains unquestioned. The radiation leaks and the official deception have been criticized by news media, but weren't they inevitable, as are more so-called accidents in future around the world?

Extraction aided by modern technology and social forces

Today the dominant culture and the global corporate economy practice extraction on every level. Growing food was where it began, ending up so: farm soil is used as a mere medium, stripped of beneficial bacteria and other ingredients, for growing a few species of plant via petroleum fuels, machines, and petrochemicals. Tilling releases nitrous oxide to help warm the globe.

Water and everything in it is considered a "resource" to be exploited and used up, rather than treated as a sacred, vital part of life to share and keep pure. [see Culture Change's global water crisis report; link at bottom.]

A worker, in almost any job, has his or her time and energy legally extracted for the benefit or profit of the few. A job that is pleasant and good for our Earth is considered rare and it generally pays much ess.

The principal extraction industries are usually identified as timber and minerals (including fossil fuels). But when we stop and think about modern human activity, it is organized around extraction. The pattern and objectives are short-term and not about sustainable use or restoration of the ravaged ecosystem.



Oil and energy get the most attention, as the corporate press frets about profits and growth of consumption. But minerals aren't in the news -- yet. They "are also experiencing unprecedented demand -- with prices in the 21st Century increasing markedly for virtually all base metals, precious metals, minor metals, and even cement. The average price increase for 25 important metals in the past four years was 538%. .. In the last 3.5 years, the price of uranium has increased from $10 per pound to more than $130 per pound... There are 20 strategic and critical materials, with uses in alternative energy applications, for which the U.S. is dependent on imports for 50% or more of consumption. A large number of the extractive operations in the United States are owned by foreign corporations... For the first time, China needed to import coal in 2006." [Vincent Matthews]

Despite the rising interest since the late 1960s in saving the environment from disastrous abuse, world population growth and relentless extraction have so far negated any well-meaning new tendencies to conserve or preserve. The failure to turn the corner and reverse trends that imperil the whole world and our survival as a species is clear to even the most optimistic promoters of the Utopian technofix; nevertheless they persist in avoiding the crux of the issue.

But reformers who would substitute more efficient and less toxic products and systems are misguided in their hopes for perpetuating the present economy and social order. These are hopes rather than calculations that they don't fully do; one never sees an attempt to prove that renewable energy can really substitute for petroleum on a comparable scale. Besides the unproven and elusive economics and technology for substitution, an extractive economy that makes motor vehicles drive further on less energy is doomed to fail, in part because energy efficiency leads to growth of the use of technologies that stretch the resource in question. Additionally, and fundamentally, population growth cancels out per capita improvements in energy use. This is why entire systems such as the car and truck need to be retired immediately. Their efficiency for actually moving a person or a widget or load of food is actually a tiny fraction for the energy used up by the vehicle and spewed into the environment as waste.

When we:

- use a car, we are extracting in the worst way, and not giving back to the ecosystem.
- tear off another plastic bag for our vegetables, we are being extractors.
- pave over some land for cars, we are feeding only our extraction.
- buy paper not of high post-consumer-waste content, we support extractive industry.
- see an job-ad that depicts a happy applicant, the extractors are shaping our minds.
A local-based economy cannot remain extractive for long. Therefore, extraction means a far-flung ecological footprint as well as aggressive tactics to obtain the "resources." Petroleum is the best example: its extraction is called production, even though depletion is the only possible outcome for the land whence it came. Oil peaked in global extraction in about 1964, and despite propaganda to the contrary, subsequent wars were essentially over resources, especially petroleum.
Why is the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan? We now import fully two thirds of our oil. The State Geologist of Colorado recently wrote that U.S. history does not support the view "that technology will save us."

"Since the U.S. peak (in oil extraction) in 1970, we have had huge advances in frac technology, seismic processing, 3D seismic, CO2 oil recovery, computing power and software innovation, horizontal drilling, and on and on. Yet, our oil production has been in nearly constant decline." [Vincent Matthews]
Extractors use up a vital component of the environment -- the web of life -- and then move on, in "boom and bust" fashion. From forests to coal to oil, modern civilization has come to offer us plastic chairs, plastic eating utensils, patented petrochemical medicines and massively accelerated entropy, in place of high quality goods and local-based plant medicines, to cite a few examples.
The extractors only know removal, growth of this removal, and brutal repression of those who directly question and fight extraction. Extraction is violence. Whether reformers of today's extraction, or the blind fanatics of growth who support military-means for continuing extraction, they are determined to keep their system running regardless of the impacts. They know no other way of living or of organizing society to be a real community. So, despite their disasters, they tell us what must be, as they cling to holy Civilization and admonish us to support their schemes. Their message dominates because people, including some environmentalists, are well paid to spout it, or delude themselves to believe it.

People accept this unfair, teetering system of never-ending extraction in part because they are so trusting. The limited information and slanted news consumed by any citizens open to change passes, unfortunately, for answers to problems of resource depletion. But these problems are very rarely publicly acknowledged as relating to today's hyper-extraction. Recycling can never overcome relentless extraction and throw-away consumption. Re-use, however, gets closer to doing so.

Creating a non-extractive economy based on local ecological limits is clearly what is needed, and the test for acceptance by the extractors would be how much it would upset them. The extractors will never give up, so unless we put our hope in the collapse of their ability to keep extracting, they should be consciously stopped. How to do this with hope for success toward evolving a modern nonviolent culture, when we're running out of time?

Measures involving yanking dollars from the insatiable maw of the growth economy suck the life blood of extractive industry. So, they offer more hope and are more reasonable and effective than fighting cops or smashing SUVs, for example. Julian Darley and I, in our 2005 joint essay, had some ideas in cutting car use drastically which would tend to bring down the extractive U.S. economy (and likely other parts of the global economy). The car is the ultimate in extraction, such that the mining and manufacturing processes spew more air pollution than what exits the tailpipe. Each car in its lifetime is responsible for three dead trees and 30 'sick' trees. [Environment and Forecasting Institute, Heidelberg, Germany ].



How to stop extraction and extractors is approached by both reformers and cultural revolutionaries. How to stop the extractive society and culture, and therefore Western Civilization's death march, is a bigger question. As explored in prior Culture Change Letters, the socioeconomic system is destroying itself, such as by trying to exceed retrievable supplies of petroleum. Petrocollapse may bring on, in the aftermath of chaos and die-off, a sustainable culture. If not, the human species and countless other species by definition cannot be sustained.

The notion of re-wilding or going back to the land is dismissed today by all who have bought into global economics and the power of the industrial state. A hunter-gatherer society is indeed impossible if there is very little to hunt and gather, when agriculture is the only viable way to produce food on a huge scale. However, as wild species keep disappearing, crops will ultimately fail if their diversity continues to be compromised and there is too much climate distortion as well as loss of pollinators, as the current bee die-off may portend.

Hunting and gathering is the only proven method of very long-term human existence, so it should be encouraged on a phased-in basis, with repopulation of wild species achieved via habitat restoration. The "civilizers," whether missionaries or capitalist imperialists, have mostly succeeding in scaring people away from free living in nature. Calling it primitve and barbaric, the civilizers' attack on the lifestyle is really fear of the non-materialistic way of relying on renewable resources.

Instead of extracting and degrading the ecosystem, the hunter-gatherer or nomad appreciates the beauty of essential living and being able to roam. How scary is it to only work a few hours a day and a few days a week, as "primitives" do, compared to workers enslaved by extractors? But if people are now hardwired to be able to hop in their own car and drive to a hospital, instead of trusting the village's folk medicine and shaman, we have an impediment to voluntary change. Kicking and screaming, modern humanity will have to give up extraction and excess, and see how much "improvement" upon living in raw nature is realistic over the long haul.

Instead of economic extraction, the modern human experiment must be about ecological restoration, starting now. Delay for the sake of "jobs" (in extraction) is often in the name of social justice, but short sightedness and continued domination by the chief extractors are heading us toward equal-opportunity extinction.

An economic system of predation that grows and grows can't be sustained indefinitely, so join in its replacement -- if you believe a crash sooner will hurt less than postponing it to the point of maximum pent up pressure for total collapse and climatocide.

Psychologically, modern humanity has bought into having material things on an unprecedented scale. This cultural mutation cannot be erased by mere education or elections. We are awash in material things [see link to photos of discarded stuff, below] due to extraction and consumption. The act of consumption is actually part of the process of extraction. To understand consumerism and how to stop it, extraction has to be understood and stopped. If extraction can be hindered enough or subverted by alternative economics, if enough people refrain from consuming the fruits of extraction and don't buy new products, consumption easily withers and people rapidly wean themselves from "all this stuff" -- or, we will be part of mass starvation and perhaps our species' extinction.

Psych-op for nonstop hyper extraction

Unlimited and therefore terminal extraction cannot occur without controlling the minds of the population. Drugs and industrial pollutants such as carbon monoxide are one level of manipulation. Other levels include the emotional, via fear mongering and the indulgence in sex and violence in media, and faith in religion or quasi-religion such as, respectively, sky-god omniscience and the unquestioned acceptance of technology and science. Almost every sports-hero and film-star promotes consumption and therefore extraction, impressing upon the adulating mind that success means having and using rather than being and doing.

Imitation people have been put ubiquitously before humanity by corporate advertising and government psych-op/propaganda programs. Models and useful celebrities don't seem like a terrible thing; after all, they can be ignored, right? Unfortunately, day-in, day-out, an unlimited number of smiling, good-looking, apparently intelligent and sensitive people are telling us to consume, smile, shut up, and be grateful.

"Cooperate with the designs of the capitalists and enforcers of the empire" -- we never hear it put anywhere near so honestly. False diversity, as in people of color pictured in advertisements, reinforces the idea that we are one people under a flag sharing common values. Anyone fighting the war machine or fomenting class consciousness against the elite is unrepresented in the visible landscape that has been clearcut by corporate homogeneity.

Extracting resources for ever more products makes the models -- imitation people -- grin and appear confident. The message: resistance is futile; go compete, get a job, and -- if you don't stumble with ill health -- afford stuff that gives the illusion of personal power while isolating and dividing everyone. As obedient citizens we were never supposed to factor in the nonstop trashing of the planet. Granted, a kinder, gentler version than the U.S. rat race exists elsewhere, such as in Canada and Europe, where the social safety net relies on less extravagant wealth accumulation. But extraction at half the rate of the U.S. per capita use of energy, as is the case in western Europe, is still unsustainable. It is a cultural flaw that cannot be erased without upheaval, collapse and a return to conscious living enjoyed by our distant ancestors.

The Nazi system: brazen extractors

Nazi Germany could pursue its policy of domination and terror by offering some hope and security to a majority of people in a nation that had suffered war and economic depression. Control of the mind of the citizen was essential, and the Nazis were really "with it" when it came to pushing industrial and technological progress. This passed for civilization which was automatically a good thing, right? Unfortunately, the purpose of civilization and industry was questioned by very few, such as Herman Hesse who saw a war between machine-people and rebels. Those agitating for a bigger piece of the pie for the downtrodden workers could be attacked by the resurgent Germany's fascist leaders as unpatriotic. Communists and others were labeled a threat to a stable rise on up the economic ladder by the patient worker who kept his mouth shut (except to "Heil Hitler").

Nazi Germany, regardless of its blatant horrors, was merely more extreme in extraction aspects than the other corporate states which stood supposedly in stark contrast. Much of the Nazi technology and methods of extraction for chemical industries such as poisons and drugs -- that came out of the same factories -- were taken over by the victorious U.S whose major corporations and blue-blood financiers collaborated and supported the Nazis until forced to stop. Examples were Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon), IBM, Ford, and the current president's paternal grandfathers. Given our dire situation today in a putative democracy extracting far more from the Earth than the Nazis did, it's a perilous pity that the similarity of economies between these extractive nations was not appreciated then or today.

The social and political systems were also brought closer together by the conflict of war and subsequent pacifying of Nazi Germany. Few war criminals were prosecuted, especially SS experts in "intelligence," espionage, torture, propaganda, who herded people at will and used terror to subvert unions and others who didn't like unbridled capitalism or fascism. Many of the Nazi perpetrators or enablers of genocide were brought into the U.S.'s growing national-security apparatus, just as Nazi aerospace and weapon experts were brought into the U.S. industry and government programs for missiles, space rockets and secret projects.

When the name of the game is extraction, controlling the population through media and political messages must be pursued relentlessly and ruthlessly. The U.S. government's secret Operation Paperclip started as a harvest of Nazi know-how and personnel, but continued as an "intelligence" program for many years after World War II involving publishing companies, editors and reporters who parroted the party line to drum up public support for the Cold War and avoid being labeled a Red. The profits from armaments and building bases in countries forking over their resources had to be increased, ostensibly for the grandeur of Old Glory (the U.S. flag). Growth and extraction were absolutely unquestioned.

The Nazis demonstrated best, up until their reign ended, the potential for technology to dehumanize and automate the process of extraction and exploitation. Killing innocent people was not the only purpose of the Holocaust, but rather to use them as disposable laborers. It was a model of efficiency, in the view of the fascists, as it had the extra benefit of culling the population of designated malcontents and undesirables. The U.S. and the growing transnational corporate state has surpassed in subtle ways what the Nazi system could accomplish in human and material extraction, while fooling many into believing fascism -- "Corporatism" in Mussolini's ideal -- was vanquished.

Extracting gold and other jewelry, as well as gold fillings, and precious art, was a gigantic theft that the Nazis perpetrated against what they reviled as lesser humans: Jews, mainly, for their wealth. The executed and worked-to-death prisoners had their clothes as well retrieved for distribution to the Reich's programs. Indeed, the Reich Economic Administration was a top SS agency responsible for prisoner-processing and liquidation.

Lest we start thinking of The Extractors as "Them," who are We? If we are complicit even as moderate consumers in today's global economy, we need to extract the Extractors out of our brains and admit that the U.S global-warming economic engine is tantamount to a holocaust of unprecedented proportions.

 



Conclusion: "alternative" economies are the only way

Our evolutionary past is not just a reference point for contrasting natural, tribal living with today's extreme extraction and growth-economics. As the only model for our sustainable future is the indigenous, traditional cultures, most of which have been snuffed out, new respect must be given to simple living and "primitive" ways. To make life last -- a new worry for our species -- breaking with civilization's errors is called for urgently.

An Ecotopian or neo-primitive way features maximum recycling that includes composting, grey water and treated human waste for local food gardens, and gathering wild plants. Decentralized energy systems that do not extract will come to the forefront. The ecosystem has been too degraded, and petroleum supplies too depleted, to support more than one billion of us perhaps. Just as we have not faced our culture's and our economy's extractive nature, we have refused to deal with population growth. Nor have we addressed institutionalized greed, nor explored on a substantial scale cooperative living that puts the community first. So, the still unpopular "alternative" to the culture of extraction is our only option. It will become universal at some rather late date for the human family, even if it comes tomorrow.

* * * * *

Further reading and references:

"Can ecological economists stop the mainstreamers before it's too late?",    by John Feeney, Culture Change, July 2007:culturechange.org/cms

Blue Salon conference report: Oceans dying; Fresh water supply to plummet; Vulnerability to peak oil not yet appreciated    -    Culture Change Letter 163 - July 1, 2007
culturechange.org/cms

"Ways to end car culture along with the globalized trade godzilla" - articles by Jan Lundberg and Julian Darley, March 11, 2005:
culturechange.org/cms

A Green History of the World and A New Green History of the World, by Clive Ponting
rbooks.co.uk(Random House UK)

Ishmael and My Ishmael, Daniel Quinn:
ishmael.org

"Increased Global Demand for Energy and Mineral Resources" Vincent Matthews, Peak Oil Review, Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas - USA:
aspo-usa.com

"The Environmental Cost of the Car", "dirty from cradle to grave," by John Whitelegg, covering the study by Umwelt-und Prognose-Institut Heidelberg "Öko-bilanz eines autolebens" (Environment and Forecasting Institute, Heidelberg, Germany:
lead.org.au

Sea level rise: "Puget Sound: Deeper troubles," Seattle newspaper editorial:
seattlepi.nwsource.com

Discarded stuff: incredible images and stats on consumer culture (e.g., two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes):
chrisjordan.com

Honor The Earth (exective director is Winona LaDuke) creates awareness and support for Native environmental issues by using music, the arts, the media, and Indigenous wisdom:
honorearth.org

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Historical note from the American Heritage Dictionary

Su·mer  (soo-mer):   An ancient country of southern Mesopotamia in present-day southern Iraq. Archaeological evidence dates the beginnings of Sumer to the fifth millennium B.C. By 3000 a flourishing civilization existed, which gradually exerted power over the surrounding area and culminated in the Akkadian dynasty, founded c. 2340 by Sargon I. Sumer declined after 2000 and was later absorbed by Babylonia and Assyria. The Sumerians are believed to have invented the cuneiform system of writing.

Currently reading : The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) By Joseph Tainter

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Culture Change Round-Up: 7 - Blue Salon conference report (June 2007)

Blue Salon conference report: Oceans dying; Fresh water supply to plummet        

Written by Jan Lundberg     
Culture Change Letter 163 - July 1, 2007

Vulnerability to peak oil not yet appreciated

The Blue Salon conference on water was held June 16-17 in Washington, D.C., at the Swedish Embassy. Ambassador Gunnar Lund and the local Green Salon group convened a wide-ranging program where the conferees could overlook the Potomac. The first day was devoted to fresh water, and the second day devoted to oceans. I was a lucky invitee and learned much. The information was scary and sometimes exciting, and the active participants were a gift to all. But it took me a week to figure out exactly what I learned conceptually about the big picture. After much digestion, here's my report.

The related situations for fresh and salt water can be approached separately, as they usually are, but there is more in common between them than just being in dire shape with no remedy in sight. The common denominator for the whole world's water crisis was not identified at this conference, although half the people there might have agreed privately that the problem is the plague of modern humans and their filth and selfishness.

Given the diverse backgrounds and loyalties of the participants, and the backdrop of the town's politics and powerful interests, it is to be expected that no unified approach or solution would be immediately forthcoming. It's too much for one guy from San Francisco to come there and do this, and my very brief contribution was to bring up the role of energy (petroleum) for fresh water, and plastic in the oceans.

It's as if the water crisis is not serious enough yet for humanity to deal with it. We can't even quit the clear damage we heap on the oceans and our disastrous waste of fresh water, despite all the information and warnings anyone could ever need. Rather than following mistaken policies on resources, we are witnessing and are part of a war on the biotic community. It's difficult to strongly address the catastrophe when the financial incentive for both the corporations and the average working people's survival does not relent.

Water experts say that over 1.2 billion people lack safe water supplies. Climate specialists anticipate that due to global warming and sea-level rise, one billion additional people will be without adequate, clean water in a few decades. This totals over two billion, but the future is murky, and the figure could be low because all the scientific consensus-warnings on climate change have been too conservative. Additionally, changes in world climate have happened much sooner than expected.

Fresh water withdrawal rates even exceed population growth. When certain trend lines cross, something on the chart takes a dive.

Perhaps the overarching problem can be termed the global culture of extraction and expansion. Ironically, a favored solution by some corporate and technocratic elements at Blue Salon qualifies as the most cohesive approach, although many activists would cry out in objection to this. But overcoming the profit-maximizing/technofix approaches along with the whole extractive culture seems to lack adherents among passive consumers and even victims of water privatization and dams.

The Blue Salon welcoming statement included questions that Culture Change readers can relate to: "What does 'growth' really mean? What is 'progress'? How do we assign value to life and the precious resources that keep us alive?"

One sometimes doesn't know if good words are heartfelt or just used as buzzwords. After getting to know these Washington-based activists and thinkers at Green Salon, I'm sure they are not just careerists. One organizer with Green Salon told me, "the point of the Blue Salon is to acknowledge the problems and create a dialog towards solutions." Another said "We strive to provide the hope necessary to garner the courage to face the horror." Yet another challenged me to come up with what did motivate me "by the Salon despite the cynicism?" He offered that "the Salon is about connections between people, being touched, and showing that we are capable of high quality intelligence. We are making a circle around nature, learning about things we never would have." I have to embrace this as well.

Because the water crisis is astoundingly daunting and negative, as it pervades the lifestyles of intransigent, rich countries, it swamps our ability to solve it over an appropriate and necessary time period -- including of course one weekend. The conference's success did not include a clear plan of attack to scale us way back to "primitive," sustainable levels of use. One must first quantify the problem and explore options. Then, after enough time on that necessary approach, as the crisis still mounts and leaders don't lead, the stark truth starts to overtake everyone paying attention: the overuse of fresh water and shrinking supplies due to glacier melt require us all to shut off the valves of wasting water, just as we must pull the plug on generating greenhouse gases. For our oceans' health, our blue salon did not come up with a clear way to give our imperiled seas immediate relief from fossil-fueled warming, over-fishing and unaddressed plastic debris (more on this later in this report). But if anyone can, the Green Salon and their Swedish Embassy colleagues can envision a hard-hitting Blue Salon II to do so.

The issues of energy for maintaining pumps for water was partially addressed, yet it was left to a solar power manufacturer to make an unrealistic claim instead of acknowledging, with his fellow speakers on the first panel, that peak oil presents an unprecedented challenge. Thus unanswered was my question:

"Given the world's peaking oil extraction occurring about now, and the possibility of petrocollapse, what would be the probable levels of pumping of water that can be done without petroleum, and how much energy would be needed to pump critical supplies of water?"
I was asked to clarify, indicating perhaps that imminent, major energy shortage is not anticipated or feared just yet. Phrased again, my question was: without cheap petroleum in abundance, what will be the future of water availability? This question needs an answer soon, so that the anticipated deficit of energy for the water deficit can be grappled with in advance of the full crisis when it hits. It will probably come without clear warning, although many of us will not be surprised. Among today's ignored warnings for cities is adequate fire-fighting water in the event of an earthquake, for example, when water might be extra scarce due to post-peak oil energy supply failure. The stupidity of U.S. energy policy as it starts maximizing biofuels is compounded by these crops' extra demands on water that will run out.
Fresh water problems are many and interrelated, having to do with consumption of beef, for example. Such agriculture uses many times the amount of water and energy than grain crops require. Yet before we assume that we can play a numbers game by cutting way back on agriculture's 70% of irrigated water-use in the U.S., for example, we must remember even grain farming is unsustainable on a large scale when water is short and the increasingly salinized soils spoil good yields -- just as they did in Sumeria, the cradle of irrigated Western Civilization now strewn with depleted uranium.

Another issue brought forward at Blue Salon is that of virtual or invisible water as a component of products traded globally, whereby certain agricultural items may reflect vastly different amounts of water used in production. (The same is true with energy content, from petroleum usually, that is embedded in products, packaging and transport, including renewable-energy system-products imagined to be free of the petroleum infrastructure.) A mind-blowing comparison of food items' virtual water component: one potato has 25 liters. One hamburger has 2,400 liters.

There is actually no shortage of fresh water when we consider that what we really have is a longage of people with their modern habits. We used to be be able to say this of the fisheries too, but many have become so degraded along with the health of the oceans, it is a worse situation than mere longage of people. Things are so severe that if the human population voluntarily cut its numbers down drastically in a couple of generations, much damage and unraveling is already out of control. Whether from overfishing or climate change, certain parts of our watery world have their whole ecosystems in full retreat, scientists have found -- and the plastic plague is not yet factored in or understood, except that it will go on for centuries even if we stopped making plastics now.

Overpopulation was the elephant in the room because no speaker's presentation included the issue. But, when it was raised by an audience member, and when another member wondered what it is we are supposed to eat if we can't eat meat or fish, a voice in the hall suggested "Each other!" Not one speaker advocated human population stabilization or reduction -- even though 2.4 billion people lack access to good sanitation today. A small fraction of the excess wealth in the world, for example from the arms trade, could easily solve such a tragedy of poor sanitation (and lack of basic education, etc.), but it's probably insane to believe good policies are ready to be adopted if only the rich and the greedy will check out and heed the latest nonprofit NGO report. This is why it's essential to gain understanding of the hard-wired (and haywire) extractor culture that dominates the world.

Another major subject that was not part of the conference, due to time constraints, was specific advocacy for the group to stop water waste in the most egregious practices. However, it takes very progressive thinking to question some aspects of the car-dependent American Dream. One day when the fresh water crisis has finally hit home, former car owners won't dare admit they washed their cars and wasted good water. Typically, at least 100 gallons are used each time if the job is done in one's driveway or on the street. About half as much water can be used at a commercial car wash. But given the other costs of car washing, i.e., poison runoff of road grime and detergent going into the environment, and the energy required to pump the water to the household or business, there is no justification for ever washing a car -- it doesn't affect how it runs whatsoever. The crises of water, climate and energy are not being taken seriously until washing cars and then the personal possession of a car are outlawed (most likely on the local, spontaneous level).

Golf courses are a vast, notorious waste of water and pollution. However, as with the car habit, people will continue to extract the water for the golf industry and maintain that lifestyle as long as they can get away with it. No conservation movement is shutting it down, and by the time people target the nearest wasteful golf course, the industrial economy will be failing due to petrocollapse. The massive waste of water for golf courses (and other wastes such as cattle ranching) is used as a reason to suggest that a high population of people is not the problem; "it's just what some selfish people do." That reasoning assumes people under the dominant culture can do the right thing to reform, whereas the culture is bent on destruction and self-destruction as long as big bucks can be made.

Privatization of water and the political struggles against it, along with its questionable record, was addressed, primarily by Maj Fiil of Food and Water Watch. She's not radical, and therefore it struck me in private conversation that her approach can be blind-sided by the dominant culture. But her honesty and passion gave a grassroots dimension to the conference. Little new was presented during the whole conference in terms of new privatization schemes or new ways to combat privatization, but we learned about the poor record of privatization that the world lenders don't seem to recognize.

The world water market is estimated at $400 billion already, according to Goldman Sachs. No wonder Nestle, for example, plans 40 plastic-water bottling factories in the U.S. where pristine watersheds are inhabited by folks who generally want some more employment and tax revenue. When contracts are signed for water rights, this can be hard to change because the World Trade Organization can step in on behalf of the corporation.

The Blue Salon's inability to make strides to strike down water privatization and the dangerous trend of bottling water was partly because of the presence of industrial interests at the Blue Salon. One speaker with the Water Advocates was alleged to have Coca-Cola corporate representatives on or linked to his nonprofit's board of directors. It's not only that Coca-Cola sells millions of plastic water bottles that ought not to go into the environment, especially when tap water can easily be of higher standards than bottled water. Across India, for example, severe water shortages have been experienced by communities that live around Coca-Cola's bottling plants. Thanks to the India Resource Center, Coca-Cola was banned from the Make Poverty History March on July 2, 2005, a march of close to 300,000 people in Edinburgh in Scotland.


[pic]
Billboard of dry water pump in Chennai, India. Coca-Cola sued photographer Sharad Haksar.


Tens of millions of people within India have been displaced from their homes, villages and farms by the various hydroelectric projects dating from India's independence. This is part of the worsening potable-water crisis, the biggest problem for rural peoples worldwide. As part of the "development" process, trees are removed from the land and whole ecosystems. So everyone's survival is thus threatened, and the multiplier of climate change adds to the general global catastrophe.

A World Bank environmental director at Blue Salon, dealing with coral reefs, was energetically positive as she touted the Bank's activities until she was harshly dealt with by a panel member who tracks the World Bank.The Mangrove Action Project's Alfredo Quarto informed me that the Bank claims it has stopped shrimp-farming practices that degrade the environment, but that it is simply not true. Unfortunately, the Bank can keep doing its top-down thing with a major budget, unlike the grassroots activists. These corporate types did not squelch discussion at Blue Salon. The conference seemed designed to attract them and make them feel included rather than vilified.

The technological, capitalist sentiments and proposals on the table nearly comprised a philosophical approach for perhaps half the attendees. The trouble was, few of these efforts dealt with the global scale required in an energy-poorer world, with the readiness needed to implement soon, with justice for the people affected, and the usual problems of mechanical feasibility, bureaucratic competence, and political acceptance. Some conference participants appeared as mainly business promoters without much substantial progress to point to.

These participants, along with several well established nonprofit and for-profit organizations on hand shared a top-down approach to dealing with parts of the water crisis, while applauding the idea of grass roots action. Yet, Roshanak Ameli-Terhani, a Green Salon moderator with the Avand Institute, felt compelled to address this sector's top-down, technological and capitalistic global presence and massive power by correcting the assertions and assumptions that say bottom-up approaches are only workable with top-down participation. I led the applause for her.

Here is how water, climate change and politics/war/genocide can interact: U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon recounted recently that twenty years ago the rains in Sudan began to fail. Some, including scientists, hoped it was a quirk of nature. But it coincided with temperatures rising in the Indian Ocean, disrupting monsoons. The drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, therefore in part, from human-caused global warming, he says, and he adds that it's not just a coincidence that violence in Darfur commenced during extreme drought. Until then, Arab nomads with their herds lived alongside farmers:

"...black farmers would welcome herders as they crisscrossed the land, grazing their camels and sharing wells. But once the rains stopped, farmers fenced their land (so) there was no longer enough food and water for all. Fighting broke out (and) evolved into the full-fledged tragedy we witness today."
- Washington Post, June 16, 2007
Could Ban Ki Moon add that population growth was a factor in the strife, and that farmers may have been forced to grow cash crops for export? I have not researched the situation.
Should affluent westerners believe they are impervious to water shortage as a nemesis, consider the southwest U.S.: climate-change induced drought; depleting aquifers; diverted and degraded rivers (the Colorado does not even reach the Gulf of California), and risk of levee failure at the Sacramento River delta that can affect millions of people and acres of farmland to the south. Emblematic of the Southwest's vulnerability to water mismanagement and peak-oil impact on water pumping is Las Vegas. The town's weekly CityLife newspaper will soon feature an article on these topics with input from Culture Change.

Oceans, coral, mangroves

The presentations on the state of the oceans were disturbing and alarming, as expected. A one-two punch on coral reefs and mangrove forests was worth the price of admission all by itself. The price was free for all of us, thanks to the generosity of the Swedes and the Green Salon, but you know what I mean.

Tom Goreau with the Global Coral Reef Alliance, and Alfredo Quarto, of the Mangrove Action Project, both gave well informed and moving presentations on their areas of study and activism. Goreau made it clear that the IPCC assumptions and data gathering techniques downplay the total pressures on the atmosphere and oceans from greenhouse gases and their feedback loops. His was a climate-change rundown that could make anyone say, Uh Oh. The monumental death rate for the world's corals is so far underway, it's as if we went to sleep one day with a natural world around us, only to wake up like Rumple Stiltskin to find the planet has been ravaged to an unimaginable extent.

Goreau also presented on a later panel his project that revives the oceans via "Biorock mineral accretion." He amazed all present with pictures of growing coral reefs that are started and maintained with the placement of simple rebar structures kept charged with a small amount of electric current. Calcium deposits make "biorock" on the metal, and corals, once planted (although animals are not planted any more than plants are animaled), grow faster than wild corals ever do -- despite the warming, polluted sea. These new reefs protect beaches even to the extent of holding off the erosive effect of sea-level rise. The coral reefs and better sand deposits lure tourists, but the hotel business is not yet visionary enough to see the whole picture. Unfortunately, the current is always necessary, and eventually the sand build-up destroys the reef. But the sea life gets a real lift for several years. Goreau is a true activist, fighting government agencies to protect the last natural reefs in the U.S., with next to no budget for his campaigns.

Mangroves are disappearing fast too, mainly because of shrimp farming. This lucrative, subsidized activity deprives the wild fisheries of breeding grounds and also removes the shoreline's line of defense against storms and tsunamis that a mangrove forest provides. Shrimp farming is almost as shortsighted as beef-ranch or crop farming in a rainforest: soon after the first yields, the production goes way down. In the case of shrimp, they get diseased, die-off massively, and the farms are soon abandoned -- and never restored ecologically.

EarthEcho International was co-founded by Jacques Cousteau's granddaughter Alexandra Cousteau. She moderated the ocean-protection panel of the second morning of Blue Salon. Her own presentation was on a specific fisheries crisis that touches on diet, culture and trade: she told the conferees much about sharks. All the large ones are drastically dwindled in numbers, and the effects of this on the whole food chain will not be known until it is too late. (Similarly, the acidification of the oceans from excess carbon dioxide uptake, causing some organisms to dissolve, is part of our new age's theme of "entering the unknown" which pervades the planet's ecological crisis.) Cousteau's slides of the changing business of shark-fin harvesting was so moving that one could almost wish for a large dorsal fin to approach next time one takes a swim. The point is that the large fins are no longer available; fins harvested the size of coins are now de rigueur, sadly.

Ms. Cousteau, with her fervent idealism, hard work, good track-record, stunning looks as a tall blond, and her famous name, could be a cinch to become the kind of major celebrity the world is waiting for. She could do far more good for our world than, of course, than the usual Hollywood types and politicos being fawned over by the mass media, but also she could accomplish more than the unsung garden-variety activist or scientist trying to save the planet.

Naomi Rose, with Humane Society International, gave a solid overview of the plight of marine mammals. Erik Hagberg, CEO of a cooperative called PAC International, shared his vision of sea cucumber harvesting by locals. The keynote address for the whole conference was by Anders Berntell, executive director of Stockholm International Water Institute which has a mastery of the global water situation that includes acknowledgment of peak oil. An impressive speaker on fresh water was Mark Shannon who heads up national teams and databases out of the University of Illinois. It would be a shame if Dr. Shannon's dedication, management skill and knowledge is too much in service of the status quo system of government and corporate prerogatives.

I was surprised that the plastic plague was not much of a factor in the Oceans discussions. This slight was easily because other crises at hand are huge and demanding. Nets (of plastic) were mentioned as still able to kill after they drift on and .. being lost at sea. After the panel on the importance of salt water sources was through, and the audience participation segment started, my question was

"Petroleum and plastics have not been mentioned, although I just did. I have with me materials from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, including the award-winning documentary Our Synthetic Sea, that I can provide anyone." [Ambassador Lund was one who graciously accepted the DVD after I told him of the preponderance of plastic debris compared to zooplankton, and how toxins are biomagnified up the food chain thanks to plastics.] "The question part of my question is, given the panel's dire assessment of the impacts of economic activity on climate and the oceans, with the only example of let-up having been the collapse of the Soviet Union, do you advocate alternative economic systems or advocate economic collapse?" (laughter)
The only answer I got was that the Humane Society speaker felt she addressed plastics by mentioning the nets.
Concerning energy inherent in ocean tides, two companies, Natural Currents and Verdant, presented conceptual and r&d programs to generate electricity at the ocean's edge, which feasibly could also be used for desalination of sea water. These appear to have potential for certain applications more favorable than wind and solar energy system solutions. My reaction to the presentations was not "Great, we've found the answer!" because, in general, the technofix approach is hopeless for broad application anywhere along the lines of today's economic system. We are in an overpopulated world that will see demand-destruction through industrial collapse. Culture Change does support localized, specific, decentralized approaches to obtaining energy for minimum purposes -- but not for running cars and electric appliances and gadgets in houses for individualistic, isolated consumption, especially for a huge population.

For the whole conference, the networking among the kind participants and the fine food was extremely worthwhile -- just the potential for participation in the Sail Transport Network, the fledgling Culture Change project, among people able to immediately feel the allure on the azure pure sea lanes of sustainability, was worth my traveling to this conference.


I took the train from the San Francisco Bay, where sail transport is awaiting to be reborn, and back there, I mean here, to find out how to pronounce my name from the Swedish Ambassador's lips. Mission accomplished, and you may call me Yawn as Jan is supposed to be pronounced in Sweden.

On the train I ran out of my own filtered water supply in glass and steel containers, as always happens when the all important organic food supply weighs enough already. Amtrak water, however, is not as bad as Amtrash's plastic-encased food, I discovered, because if one drinks from the bathroom faucets then the questionable taste of the paper water-cups is avoided along with the dioxin residue from paper-bleaching. Before knowing this, I received from a new activist-friend some of his New Zealand water from a polycarbonate container from which he had been swigging. I did this even though I figured there was bisphenol-A in the plastic to possibly disrupt my endocrine system.

A suitable beverage substitute on Amtrak is beer, but it costs five bucks a pop. This is not a new idea to substitute water with alcoholic drinks: Johnny Appleseed was useful for spreading apple orchards for white settlers who needed the cider as an alternative to any doubtful water supplies. Shipping beer or any other beverage around the world is inappropriate in our greenhoused world, so I suggest powdering the formula much as cola drinks are reconstituted locally, shipping it with sail ships or mules. If such an abominable drink would not revive local brewing and wine making from any available fruits, then I'll guzzle a coke out of a plastic bottle in 2012 if I'm proven wrong.

* * * * *


Resource links

Global Coral Reef Alliance:
globalcoral.org

Mangrove Action Project:
mangroveactionproject.org

SIWI, Stockholm International Water Institute:
siwi.org - see Stockholm conference on water, August 2007

EarthEcho International (Alexandra Cousteau, team leader):

A. Cousteau

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Culture Change Round-Up: 6 - Unlucky to have a job

Unlucky to have a job        
Written by Jan Lundberg     

Prospects for social change amidst the culture of work
Culture Change Letter 162 - June 25, 2007

Introductory note: A recent cross-continental train ride brought forth the thoughts in this essay. I observed and heard workers on and off the rails, and saw settlements and landscapes not quite humming with health, conviviality and equality. I seemed closer to sensing what it is a worker today has really gotten into. Individual overparticipation in false values is mostly a victim's unnecessary plight. I try to expose the lie of the American Dream. Detailed sections include "Energy slaves and the housing bubble = 'wealth'" and "Dealing with the job problem." This essay concludes with comments from Tim Bennet, Dmitry Orlov and Tom Yamaguchi.

Future reports will deal with more dimensions such as the growing abuse of questionable pharmaceutical-petrochemicals. Past articles have focused on sustainable economics and lifestyle change, and these topics will be revisited. - JL

- - - - -

We are conditioned to believe we are lucky to have a job. The belief is understandable as a mistaken and tragic notion, if we consider we are generally raised in ignorance regarding, for example, infinite and universal human potential that is wasted. Society's rulers have their own agendas that aren't necessarily in your or the average person's interest.

There is also major brainwashing for the idea that industrialized, technological society has conquered ignorance. While much information (and misinformation) is well circulated, ignorance of the invasive reach of the dominant culture only grows as we continue to be submerged by materialism, commercial propaganda and manufactured fear. We are losing daily much critical wisdom and information from non-mainstream holdouts, mainly elders whose traditions include wisdom and skills for community self-sufficiency.

All around us much is done to foster a culture of work. It has gone on for thousands of years in much of the world, more strongly as religious piety and family cohesion have waned among modern workers. Formerly these attributes were the highest approved priorities for reasons for living, but they had to make way for bald-faced economic imperatives often cloaked in "freedom." Perhaps when Calvin and his work ethic came along, and as Protestantism got rid of the plethora of uneconomic Catholic holy holidays on behalf of the bourgeoisie, the triumphant connection between maximizing work and social control was historically ratified.

The idea of having a tolerable or even a nice job is to buy into the assumptions and rewards that help whitewash the slavery of working for others. Some forms of work are less unpleasant than others, so it is reasonable to compare one's plight or advantage with those who are held by other jobs. We are told we "hold jobs," but it's more like the jobs hold us. And to get to the root, it is the richest class and their institutions that control, maintain and enforce the worker society.

Evidence for this is in our face, as ostentatious wealth and income-disparity between top dogs and hard working employees are at record levels. The power structure and corporate media condone, reward and celebrate this.

But as soon as the consumer economy falters and lets down the scores of millions who are barely stretching their paychecks from one to the next, we may face a French Revolution sort of backlash against the rich. More likely, reactions and upheaval will be directed especially toward those who "have something," as severe shortages and the toll of deprivation and chaos quickly mount while the corporate economy's distributive system takes a holiday or dissolves. Then people will wonder what all their jobs were for, when they lack survival skills, and people can't get essential services or adequate food from the degraded local ecosystem. Their nice home-appliances, fashionable clothes and furnishings are seen to neither provide nor protect.

Freedom and rights are greatly diminished compared to conditions long ago. It's only getting worse, as the population explosion and greed continue unabated without regard to our children's future. Freedom of the primitive and traditional kind is almost nonexistent where the dominant culture invaded and grew. Yet, to characterize today's industrialized world as a "slave culture," and our cities "work camps," sounds outlandish. We have been told constantly that there has been amazing technological progress, and that there are pleasant, creative and lucrative paths that lead to "freedom" from want and from violation of privacy. It's true one can obtain almost unlimited material things and become safely isolated, but not without working hard and long -- one's whole life -- while remaining limited, excluded or confined.

Work has been sold as a virtue, to the point of terminal illnesses and loss of personal purpose. Let us question the arrangement further, in light of today's changing world: The worker who takes home the paycheck and typically buys "toys" and has a commute is contributing to global ecocide and corporate domination. It's almost counter-intuitive that a non-worker or welfare recipient is living as the better planetary citizen, even if by happenstance.

Let's also take a moment to promote the lifestyle of being lucky not to have a job. Instead of simply being rich enough not to have to work, there exists a more conscious and adventurous way of living that maximizes community and relationships, thereby sharing, enjoying mutual support, and growing "spiritually." Such a person may be the activist, artist, healer, and the determined non-taxpayer -- all of whom may succeed in living closer to nature than the herd of downtrodden consumers who are assumed stuck in their urban and suburban treadmills.

Workers are actually trying to obtain basics that were always naturally free -- safe food, clean water, and materials for shelter and clothing right from the Earth. Additionally, workers are trading dollars and losing wealth when many could be bartering to get most items and services they need.

Some say they love their work, but these must be mostly people who have done little in the vast world they have scarcely seen. Then there is the great number of jobs in the huge category of "someone has to do it." Is it really so, or are people pushed and misled?

See my daddy in bed he's dyin'
See his head it's turnin' grey
He's been workin' and slavin' his life away
- The Animals' song, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, 1966
It's understandable that in any country of private property and/or state control, where accessible open space is almost nonexistent, a worker would want a "box" to call home, to emulate what everyone else seems to have. A hope for happiness and security is promised by the box and the grid of boxes and technology known as a city or town. The reality, however, is also stifling and conducive to disease, insanity and despair. One can raise a family in such conditions, and we are all familiar with the sugar-coating of the stereotype households depicted on television. Novels tell a more honest story oftentimes, as pain, abuse and chaos -- and a measure of freedom for those who rebel and take risks -- are recounted. The strain of debt such as mortgage is part of the reality that is almost always aspired to, and is central to the unspoken oppression of materialist society. We are made to feel lucky to be full participants in a swindle, as pristine nature and the commons disappear.
This radical critique, or "negative" social analysis is abhorrent to those who want to remain in their mental bubble and lack the guts to challenge society or change their lives. Many comfort themselves by emphasizing the good and the kind instances in everyday life -- under the thumb of dominant industrial slave culture.

Love does exist under these conditions, and people seek it for nourishment as they are handicapped by oppression, ignorance and fear. Nurturing children and sacrificing for them through working to the breaking point is a touching form of love, but it is hyped as the only way or the best way. Often, though, family cohesion fails anyway, as manifested by individualism or predatory behavior within families in today's private-property system that legitimizes greed.

The dutiful worker who does all the right things usually finds him- or herself more isolated and lonely than less work-oriented members of the same family. When one masters the games and rigmarole of daily striving, without a basis of land-connection or strong community, the time spent alone or set "above" the average person (who's working less) increases. Ironically, a disabled person may find more companionship, love and leisure than the hard worker, although perhaps from only a small circle of people who work comparatively little and have "extra time."

Religion and military subculture, as well as academia and corporate subculture, are quite useful for trying to control the mass of ignorant slaves who want to believe they are free. When these institutions do not function to control a given individual, there remain the powerful institutions of prison and/or medical-psychiatric tyranny. One way to skirt unpleasantness by oneself is the dead end of addictions that can be kept just short of catastrophic.

Energy slaves and the housing bubble = "wealth"

The working class person, and just about everyone in the modern world, actually has slaves in the form of energy used. These "slaves" can be expressed in calories, horsepower, kilowatts, etc, and are rapidly getting more expensive and less abundant. Cheap petroleum by the middle of the 20th century allowed the average modern worker to live much like the rich actual-slave-owning masters had been living.

- A modern person's energy consumption is equivalent to having about 60 to 100 energy slaves, if one is a European, and typically 120 to perhaps 200 slaves if one is North American. At the low end of calculation, this energy-work takes care of such business as heating houses and offices and carrying us to and from work or the mall. The biggest component is in transportation. The average human around the world has 20 virtual slaves for energy...
- A single flight in Europe for one passenger represents as much energy as 6 pairs of legs bicycling over a full year... A small moped uses the equivalent of 15 to 20 human beings bicycling...(Jancovici)

- However, providing humans with food, clothing, and shelter requires many times more energy than just the calorie value of the food we eat. And due to the inefficiency of the human body in turning food energy into muscle work, the energy requirements of human beings are even higher.

- During a one-hour car commute, the energy for a 30-miles-per-gallon car works out to 360 virtual people moving the car. Because car engines are about 25-percent efficient, only about 90 virtual people keep the car moving while all the rest of them fly uselessly out the tail pipe. All this energy can be for just the driver and no passengers, or one can say half of all this energy is needed if two people are sharing it in the car...

- "This does not include the number of coal- and oil-eating virtual people it takes to dig rocks from the ground and pull the iron and aluminum and other materials from them, which are then shaped by yet other virtual people into cars, airplanes, computers, cell phones, Ipod Nanos, houses, highways, etc., etc., -- and each American's indeterminate share of virtual people who move the American army to the other side of the earth, and so on"... (Burruss)

Middle-class affluence in the 20th century featured much material wealth and little need for physical exertion. For decades this seemed like completely positive and good. It was lauded by society because so many people were making money off the fact that people were not getting enough exercise and gave up their own power in more ways than one.
With the steady decline in cheap petroleum supply, with rising energy prices -- prices subsidized to appear lower than they are -- workers have had to work much harder and longer and take on a second or third job. Women can hardly stay home anymore to be housewives and attentive mothers. This is even less possible when formerly "free work" from elders in the family has disappeared, as they've stopped living in the same household as their children and grandchildren live, in favor of nursing homes or retirement homes.

The loss of cheap energy for the consumer lifestyle has partly been made up for by the housing bubble. It has enabled the upper economic tier of workers to borrow on their "ever more valuable" homes to increase spending and thus emulate the rich.

In this fashion, the home has tended to become more of a center of wealth, investment and speculation than the haven of infinite security and love for all members of a family that the home always was. The home has become for scores of millions of people a mere place to sleep and stash their stuff, due in part to work pressures and the all-importance of jobs. The perceived need to work has grown in the post-cheap oil era, such that families enjoy less time together than ever before. In addition to working longer hours and extra jobs, families are separated also in their own homes by technological entertainment and "office" devices. Households were already beset by homework and sports practice that, while catering to and fostering competition, formally extended the public-school intrusion into family time.

Public school was originally patterned after prisons over a century ago in the U.S. northeast, as the city fathers strove to condition children to respond to bells, orders, respect for authority in the form of strangers -- all to produce useful, obedient factory workers. Prisons were and are work farms, thus being bastions of slavery.

The typical working and housing conditions today that get media attention, such as the suburban dwellers who want a little more time for themselves and loved ones, and who are willing to make a little less money, are for the fortunate workers; poorer people and immigrants work for the lowest wages and without "benefits." The mass of workers including executives are increasingly likely to be automatons who do not think freely or responsibly. They usually do not want to learn about their jobs anything "unnecessary," such as larger issues even if relevant to their jobs. An example is retail workers' (and up the line to distribution and manufacturing sectors) not being aware of the toxicity of the products they sell or serve to the public (e.g., bisphenol-A in cans of food and bottle/jar caps). When informed of such issues, such workers are disposed to just shrug and keep foisting off poison to the public. This is much like the reluctance or resistance to recycle if procedures are not in place.

Unions have done little to protect their members that might rock the boat of complicity with manufacturers, and are famous for opposing fuel-economy standards for cars, for example. Unions have served people well under the dominant system, but have been weakened to the point of barely holding the line on pay levels, at best. If one is questioning work and jobs to arrive at a sustainable and healthful way of life, it doesn't make sense to entrust this to union leaders who may be too compromised in keeping the status quo. When was the last time you heard of a general strike in the U.S. to fight for the improvement of all working people, such as to deliver them from costly militarism and environmental/public health onslaughts posed by the bosses of society? It's not as if there is an opposition party fighting the government or the corporate state to make real change.

Dealing with the job problem

By this point the reader tending toward the mainstream might cry, "Enough! Even if I agree somewhat, what can I do?" If the question is insincere, the implication is that there is nothing one can do. Disempowered workers who have little stomach to organize and strike have been well taught to let experts or activists deal with vexing problems. And what passes for rebellion is often the false example of the rock star or other entertainment celebrity. Churches and religions are more likely to prop up the status quo than to challenge it.

How can people survive without jobs, i.e., employment under capitalists or government agencies? How will people eat if they don't assume the role of worker? These are valid questions, but they are almost always asked only rhetorically. This essay is not an attempt to flesh out an alternative economic system. But we can recognize that people can and will self-organize in response to sudden need, perhaps as tribes. In fact, this has begun, and is about to accelerate because of clear need and desperation.

To offer a way out of slave culture and the box existence is a daunting task. It would be easy to advocate rebellion such as violent acts against figurative pigs whose society ensures they are allowed to own vast wealth, while suffering and deprivation rage on. However, such a solution has limited appeal or rational basis, if we consider that bloodshed and the taking of lives is exactly what must be eradicated, and is what the state was founded upon and relies upon.

The solution, then, would appear to reside in creating or joining an alternative to the slave society and box living. Self-interest is already fueling a change in attitude about lifestyle, as peak oil and climate change nudge some of us to look to a sustainable, alternative location that offers lower population. Aside from "getting out of Dodge," this change is commonly made by the individual ..ed levels, such as an artist's use of tools and skills to portray truth and sensitivity in a time of deception and delusion.

Communes or intentional communities may be the only way of extricating oneself from the grind of working for others. In such communities, or even small, urban collectives of do-it-yourselfers or anarchists, mutual aid and support of one another's dreams, talents and needs can prevail. If not, these communities and households tend to break up, especially when the allure of high-paying jobs and urban diversions can still tempt us. Material advantage or mutual defense alone are attractions that, if emphasized at an intentional community or urban collective, differ little from the coldness of slave box society.

To advocate an alternative in the alleged Real World of material struggles as isolated individuals is to meet derision and dismissal. If the alternative is not easily dismissed, it is met with fear or threats. "If everyone did what you suggest, order would break down. We must run the machinery, keep the peace with a police force, update our military, build more schools, fix the roads, expand the prisons..." Some more extreme citizens would add, "Promote public prayer, destroy possible terrorists, pursue technologies to keep up today's level of consumption and communication and travel..."

To allow present society and the global economy to collapse is not a sane option in the minds of both die-hard reactionary conservatives and compassionate liberals. To advocate a sooner-rather-than-later end to the present arrangement of slave box culture raises concern over a worse successor -- this illustrates how fear can keep the status quo. However, when the present system is only generating more fear, because the global warming machinery and rabid militarism raise deep criticism and panic, today's practices of convenience and affluence are finally questioned and attacked by people from all walks of life and political parties.

The fact remains that present society is unable or unwilling to change course ecologically or for social justice. This helps assure that collapse is inevitable due to overpopulation and the imminent end of growth through nonrenewable resource depletion -- especially petroleum.

Our choice as individuals and as a people is to begin "alternative" living and build a sustainable culture, or wait for collapse. Direct opposition to society's visible head, such as government or the occupying U.S. military, does not apply or occur to present successful consumers/slaves. A third route is to undermine the present economy by only buying local goods, and resisting materialism and the institutions of private property, patriarchy and illegitimate authority.

"We are free roving bovines, we run free today. We will fight for bovine freedom and hold our large heads high. We will run free with the buffalo or die." - Dana Lyons, Cows with Guns
To end on a facetious note may honor exactly what we need in our so very "advanced" world that lacks, some of us notice, enough art, laughter, song and dance.
* * * * *

Relevant to this essay, Tim Bennet, writer and director of What a Way to Go - Life at the End of Empire, wrote to us on June 15 in reaction to the previous Culture Change Letter on Ancient Innovations:

Most mainstreamers seem to stumble vaguely through life, holding onto the story that "this is good." When you point out to them that, no, in fact, this really sucks, for most of the people on the planet, and most of the other life forms, and, in fact, when you look at jobs and wage slavery and mental health statistics and physical health statistics and drugs and addictions and war and boredom and community and relationships and divorce and abuse and all of that, you see that most of the people living comfortable lives right in the heart of empire aren't happy or whole either, they get angry and say stupid things like "you want us to go back to the stone age?"
...when they hear about collapse, (they) respond with some version of "that can't be." And when you question them about that, they admit, "it can't be because I don't want it to be." -- as if civilization is so good for them, they are so comfortable, that it can't collapse because it doesn't fit in with their plans! An astounding notion if ever there was one...

I'm hoping, they say.
For what, I ask.
For this to keep going, they respond in some way.
Sorry, I say. You can't have that.
Impossible!

Tim's powerful documentary, produced by Sally Erickson, was reviewed in Culture Change Letter 159: culturechange.org/cms
Dmitry Orlov reviewed a draft of this essay, and commented,

Let's not exclude the possibility of a few excellent jobs out there, that anyone would be lucky to have. Such a job must:
- Take little or no time
- Pay quite a lot of money
- Undermine the system

Rather than advocating voluntary unemployment, I would prefer it if people tried to find or create jobs that fit the above criteria. You may say that it's too difficult, and that few people would succeed. But then, if everybody did it... we'd be living on a different planet, and I wouldn't be writing this, so it's a moot point.

-Dmitry

Tom Yamaguchi, a Culture Change volunteer, added:
The first on my mind is health care and how many of us are at financial risk because our jobs to do not include health insurance. Another is values: Finding employment that is consistent with my values and ethics is a challenge. How much am I willing to compromise my values to make money? Should I take a job for an environmental agency if that job forces me to drive a car or fly to business conferences? How much money is enough?
We certainly need housing, food, medical care, clothing, transportation, etc. We also need to save enough for the years when we are too old to work. The irony is that we earn money in the quest for freedom and independence. As you point out, we become enslaved by our pursuit of financial wealth. We are slaves to our jobs, our houses, our insurance companies, etc.

After working with homeless people for over a decade, I would not trade what I have now for that type of life. I do see a world where we share more and, as individuals, own less. I would like to create a world where that is happening because I know that is where true happiness lies.

We believe that the more independence we have, the happier we are. In fact, as we become more self-centered and separated from others, we feel alienated and end up being unhappy.

* * * * *
References:

"How much of a slave master am I?" by Jean-Marc Jancovici, August 2005:
manicore.com

"100-Watt Virtual People", by RAP Burruss, December 2005:
esva.net

Dana Lyons' song Cows With Guns:
cowswithguns.com

Note on the low number of references for this Culture Change essay:
Not many of the thoughts for Unlucky To Have A Job are totally original, but pinpointing their first appearance in books or other media of expression would be difficult. I have come to understand and retain much of what I know from many years of reading, listening and realizing. Some publications from Culture Change's 19 years have become sources in themselves, with Culture Change cited. For further background I suggest reading other essays in Culture Change, in this website's Main Menu (News/Essays, Archive Essays, and Magazine Archives), where you can see references and links to others' fine works. - JL 

Currently reading : Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work By Andre Gorz

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Culture Change Round-Up: 5 - Ancient innovations for present conventions toward extinction

Ancient innovations for present conventions toward extinction        
Written by Jan Lundberg     

Culture Change Letter 161 - June 10, 2007
"It's roads which use the pretext of the free movement of goods and men to accelerate the orders of the empire, which strangles us to satisfy its ambition." - Vercingetorix, king of the Gauls - 58(?) BC
(from Druids, a film by Jacques Dorfmann, 2000)

- - - - -

Editor's note: This exploration of our common dilemma covers the Mind-set toward extinction, followed by a section on Growth and roads, and lastly on Expressing cultural rebellion
- - - - -

As people feel deeply the developments on climate and the impacts of toxic living, the main question becomes: will we soon be going extinct? This question elicits little overt agitation, although it would not be extremely unusual to overhear the question in public today. Follow-up probing can be crucial:
If we humans go extinct due to our own behavior in the next several decades, does it matter if other species can endure beyond us? The answer to that question is "No" for far too many of us today. The anthropocentric or religious "No" would mean we are completely stuck in the deepest trouble in human history, for we have not learned why we've gotten into this terminal mess. Some species went extinct since you started reading this. The web of life is being allowed to rapidly unravel.

Common assumptions and conventions need to be questioned by more than a few intellectuals and avant-garde rebels. Even if this happens, the obstacle of mass dissemination is significant in this age of corporate media consolidation. Another obstacle is via self-censorship in the environmental movement. The idea of significant die-off is taboo outside private, frank conversations.

I don't delude myself that humans as a whole will do the right thing to plan for survival and sustainability, as long as change can be put off. However, humans will exercise animal instincts and use ingenuity to try to survive. Unless the average sperm count drops too low, we will procreate and may well endure somehow. Efforts to use knowledge and wisdom could be successful enough for a viable population. For long-term survival and continued evolution, we must get our act together very soon. Reformed policies for a broken and corrupt system will get us nowhere, except where we are unfortunately headed: the equivalent of a lifeless desert. So our task is nothing less than to create a sustainable culture that reigns supreme without domination.

If our species survives long-term, it will not be because commuters dutifully made it to work. It will be because people have questioned the concept of work and production -- and much more. What is implied in working and productivity is really specialization, and that means individuals and segments of society no longer gather food, make clothes, erect shelter, care for the sick, defend the community, etc.

It is clearly unrealistic for the majority of the population of the world, which now lives in big cities, to "go back to the land." Yet, it is crucial to understand what we have lost because we are still losing it with every new and widened road, for example.

A related and even less-discussed development is humanity's loss of wildness. Being wild is rejected out of hand as outmoded and barbaric, but such an attitude turns our back on our long, successful history as a species. It can be argued that today's world-threatening crises are embedded in the average person most strongly when all vestiges of wildness, such as self-defense and an intimate relationship with nature, have been squelched.

For people to understand the high stakes presented by global warming and other forms of environmental devastation -- such as "development" and the plastic plague -- people may need a foundation of seeing in a critical light Western Civilization's negative tendencies and dubious achievements.

No one wants to throw the baby out with the bath water, but if you had to choose between surviving and not: Can you live with not knowing more about star matter via astrophysics, nor being able to play Mozart recordings? Would it be so bad if we are reduced to pondering once again what that moon up above is really made of and how it orbits our Earth? And having to put up with more primitive music? At least we'd be alive and appreciating what we can directly sense.

The dominant culture seeks its security and self-preservation, measuring success in population growth and land conquest. But a society that is founded on outmoded beliefs, and that undermines itself long-term, will fail -- while maintaining the delusion of material power as an addictive crutch, a crutch that does not allow us to give up on it and run and flee.

People might see through this, but they refuse to act if there is no solidarity or support. Nevertheless, some are morally compelled to live as if a revolution is possible (even when they doubt it is), because they see society valuing private property more than human life. That fact is no secret, but it has to be swept under the rug by those resigned to muddle on at any cost each day for a fist-full of dollars.

Revolution as we know it is much like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, if revolutionaries see the world as constructed as an acceptable place "if only wealth was shared." The coming revolution in culture is like nothing seen before. While social injustice will be part of it, and is worth fighting for, it has recently become starkly clear to more and more people worrying about global warming and petrocollapse that there is no value in gaining today's world if we are fighting for anything resembling what the industrial elite built. Their buildings, roads, harbors, jets, power generating stations, weaponry, industrial agriculture, and the whole infrastructure, have been a colossal mistake. Scientists monitoring Earth's life support system are getting to realize this, but are afraid to say it. Western Civilization has been the biggest mistake humans ever made, yet we cling to business-as-usual in false hopes of reforming the disastrous creation.

There are several reasons all this happened (not necessarily in this order):

Written language primarily served hierarchy, as typified by the elite that was (and is) involved in commerce for the purpose of greed and power. A careful reading of ancient history shows the rise of male domination and a subordination of tangible, natural images, in favor of the alphabet's power to manipulate with the left hemisphere of the brain [The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Shlain].

Daniel Quinn is famous for pinpointing "totalitarian agriculture" as a major factor in the rise of Western Civilization. The domination of all other species is the hallmark of this "mother culture" that modern people have blindly accepted as the only rational story for our existence and origins. As the agricultural revolution enabled city-building and the division of labor, surpluses could be created and manipulated for the purposes of priesthoods and forging empires.

It has recently been reported that humanity's change toward agriculture and cities coincided with genetic change. By 200,000 years ago, people in Africa looked like modern humans. Since these super-ancient people's brain size hardly changed to the present, "the brain change that produced behaviorally modern humans must have been in structure." This line of research was covered by Newsweek in its March 19, 2007 issue by Sharon Begley, who went on to say that the source of such structural changes always comes from genes. Certain genes emerged just when language, art, culture and other products of "higher intelligence" did, as researchers found. The most recent out of three gene changes for modern humans is called ASPM and it too involved brain structure. It came about approximately 5,800 years ago: "That was just before people established the first cities in the Near East and is well after Homo sapiens attained their modern form. It therefore suggests that we are still evolving."

But Daniel Quinn pointed out to Culture Change, "If the 'brain change' that prompted city-building occurred 5,800 years ago, how is it that it occurred only among those who were practicing totalitarian agriculture?... If the whole of 'humanity' incurred a genetic change, then why did only the people of OUR culture 'change toward agriculture and cities'? ... There is no evidence whatever that the neolithic farmers were genetically different from modern-day hunter-gatherers."

The Middle Ages brought about two major discoveries that helped develop the modern world-view, and they became what may be permanent habits:

Linear perspective in painting and drawing, enabling people to disengage further from nature and be passive observers to see the world as if through a window, paved the way for ego-delusion of mind separateness. It also prepared us for television's long periods of sitting still to absorb others' suggestions. In Robert Romanyshyn's book Technology as Symptom and Dream, he wrote about "the technique of linear perspective drawing [that inaugurated] a change in human consciousness which separated the eye of distant vision from the matter of the world and the body." I have found Romanyshyn's full analysis to be as good as any for an understanding of how modern people can be so removed from their actions that they unconsciously destroy the world or allow others to destroy it.

To bolster the advent of perspective for two-dimensional images to support the status quo, the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in the mid 15th century further defined what passed for intelligence and leadership. What was assumed to be essential knowledge spread rapidly when made possible by Gutenberg's technology, and it contributed to the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. Now, the written credential (i.e., valuable papers) and the heavy reliance on language and documents, with the aid of in-animate images, are sacred pathways to becoming authority. These serve to ensure domination by the leading proponents of the culture's practices of deceit, aggression and oppression.

Cartesian thinking, and that of Locke and others, also helped bury Earth-centered, female-oriented spirituality that stood in the way of male authority for the emerging state and bourgeoisie. In "Dead on Arrival" (Culture Change magazine 20) we see how the forces of "science" suppressed "nature" in a form of religious war, as capitalism expanded and pagan village life was targeted.

Whether we are displaced from nature or we succumb to modern temptations to distract and divert ourselves, the idea of hierarchy must be dealt with if we are to find the key to survival as a species.

"Like the mind-set that places men above women, whites above blacks, and rich above poor, the mentality that places humans above nature is a dysfunctional delusion." - Petra Kelly, Green leader and author
Well, so much for history and how we turned out this way. The task we face is not understood by all, but in the end that doesn't matter. Whether we see our current point in history as proof of the need to dispense with civilization and its toxic, ecocidal baggage, or whether we merely see the need to promote society to do better at conserving, we will end up in the same place: After collapse of industrial society from climate chaos and petrocollapse, the vestiges of "progress" and the "religion" of science and technology will not be so central to common concerns and daily life.
The reluctance of the rich to make any sacrifice, such as to cut back on greenhouse gases significantly, is continually taken by liberals as a mild surprise or a temporary and acceptable impediment to political progress. This tolerance is much like the expectation of "greening" the polluting corporations, even though they will not give up profitable activity unless, in so doing, more profits can be made.

Regarding the need for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, "Beijing's stance (is) that China should not have to sacrifice the emissions-intensive economic growth which industrialised nations went through on their path to greater prosperity." [Reuters, June 1, 2007] What is prosperity and who really has it? Is it splendor for all, without the external costs of manufactured plenty? Surely the cancer epidemic from petrochemicals and the looming climate disaster cannot be called prosperity, but it is all one package. It's hard to imagine anyone has a right to pursue it anymore, when this is not 1907 but 2007.

Is Beijing's attitude -- or the Iraq occupation, to take a similar example of intransigence for the sake of economic gain -- something to merely oppose with words? When will people be willing to risk arrest from Gandhian civil disobedience? Perhaps they would if they understood how prosperity has become a false game and a perverted, deadly, outmoded measurement of social values. And people would take bold action to save themselves if they realized there is no way out of the maze but to scale the wall or break it down.

Protestors in Germany for the Group of 8 meeting literally tried to break the wall down. China and the principal mega-corporations who rate as nations are encouraged by the Bush Administration's position at the Group of 8 meeting, as the White House said it would hold firm against concrete long-term targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Then the Bushies promised to consider reductions. More effective than promises and treaties to break down the wall would be for large numbers of consumers to hold back on purchasing new items such as cars and anything shipped great distance, such as from China.

My original point is that these questions, while burning, may not be relevant when humanity is in the heat of action, as disharmony increases. Fortunately, out of the chaos and flames may come a wiser, smaller, nature-oriented alternative to global corporatism. A major question for an alternative culture to ever flower is whether carbon dioxide levels will rise much above 400 parts per million. We are already in the midst of a monumental extinction period in the history of life on Earth, due to human "progress." To count on hopes for climate salvation may be like hoping one's executioner will have a change of heart even though he still has his hood on.

The challenge we face is that we all need to act in our own collective interests to defend life immediately. If people sit by while others joust on climate policy for energy use, etc., then the short-term economic powers will push us over the brink. They already may have done so, according to many scientists studying tipping points of today's ecological reality.

Of the following innovations that became conventions, would you agree they helped move us toward extinction, and how many can you imagine doing away with?

- Non-tribal living, resulting in minimal community cohesion.
- Work -- primitive societies have no word for "work" -- usually for the gain of the rich.

- Specialization, which meant losing basic skills to survive, formerly found all in one family.

- Language as writing (as discussed in the first section above). It does not have a bad reputation, as true with most conventions, and -- like a computer in the service of good -- written language sure is handy.

- Sky-god monotheism, taking spirituality out of everyone's direct experience, propping up a patriarchy. Some would say that the only problem is people's failure to live up to prophets' messages of peace. But why do we need to follow special persons and some written moral code?

- Medical cult (later the medical industry) which replaced individual/folk healing. Treatments by others substituted for self healing. Anatomy and wonderful discoveries are saving lives, but still we face extinction, some say due to technology.

- Women's greater fertility from staying settled. Male domination, and the need for more workers and farm-hands, all helping to fuel the population boom still booming.

- Cities and Crowding, resulting in disease and the end of wild humanity. Primitive societies have no world for "free."

- Mental illness. Most modern people are disassociated from reality: through the artificial environment, people are removed from nature. Madness and disconnection became normal in their minds from their environment and the surrounding denial of the herd. Despite the herd's huge size, lack of community is rife in modern lifestyles.

- Public schools that teach compliant behavior to conform and not ask inconvenient questions. It becomes more clear that society's goal is more to control a budding work force when the arts are cut back and prisons are maximized.

- Addiction to substances, shopping, technology, and to spectator sports.

- "Progress" and "growth" as automatically good and as the real way of our species.

Note: Spectator sports and church-going have benefits, but are still institutions that are not about individual freedom and creativity. They came about only after cities and crowded conditions came along, and pass for community while in some respects undermining it. A case can be made that nature is what really needs to be worshipped, instead of a sky-god, the afterlife, and "sports gods." Other activities can be much more convivial and cohesive, and honor the wild in us as well.

The acceptance and impact of technological and sociological changes in recent decades have been covered in previous Culture Change articles; one development not dealt with is the recent convention of letting in almost anything, even the unknown, into one's body. A major change in the way people relate to the world has been brought about by unnatural, industrialized foods that are not grown in the community. This is related to the spread of toxins and radiation in and around us, as if these are acceptable costs of "progress,"
Growth and roads

Growth was never a paradigm until after the Middle Ages. Today we are attached strongly to it, just like the cancer cell is.

Every person should rightly be an economist. That is, understanding his or her householding, and by extension the whole dimension of one's area of operation in one's territory. The community's input, output and balance of resources are essential to know and live by. That's the way it always was before "economists" came on the scene.

After economics took over as a specialty to justify the rape of the planet and the enslavement of people as workers, a new specialization had to come along: Activism. Today, if activism is physically aimed against what we can call the Global Warming Economy, such activists are legally considered terrorists. Some of these alleged saboteurs were sentenced a few days ago to prison in federal court in Eugene, Oregon, These "terra-ists" got more much severe punishment for arson (that hurt no person or animal) than non-terrorists do who burn down buildings to get the insurance money.

If you don't take personally the anti-nature, money-driven affronts that occur daily we can see through open eyes, you may not be full of hate. But to feel something and care is human and essential when survival and other species' suffering are on the line, and when justice and self-respect are of true concern.

"US economic growth slowed to 0.6 per cent last quarter in the worst performance for the economy in four years, according to the latest government estimates. The anemic performance was worse than economists expected but is likely to be viewed by the Federal Reserve as a prelude to a broad-based recovery." (Peak Oil Review, June 4) The value judgment of "worse" reflects cultural approval for unsustainable and catastrophic resource extraction.

This is no longer only a Western crime. In China,

"Every road throughout the nation is being refinished with concrete. From highways to one-lane roads that were formerly dirt, nearly every road in every province is being upgraded to allow movement of goods and people at a faster pace. This would account for China's usage of 45% of the world's cement year upon year. This is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 8.5% (or 90 million metric tons) during the 2006-2007 period... Traveling by rail through Sichuan Province and everywhere else, parallel rail lines beside existing lines are being built for rapid transit and high speed delivery of goods and people. From now to 2010 the Chinese government plans to complete an additional 19,800 kilometers of new tracks and up grade 15,000 kilometers of existing routes." (ibid) Rail is not great news in itself, particulary when it expands the global economy. But one advantage that railroads have over road building with concrete is that the making of cement is a major greenhouse gas source, and roads of asphalt mean more oil consumption.
Growth is what China wants, to beat the capitalist West at its own game and to enlarge the new Chinese elite's wealth.
Around the world, turning people into economic units, or the equivalent of machines, is so opposite to our vast preponderance of human evolution, that it is unthinkable for primitive people and our wild selves to relate to. Modern society may someday be known as yesterday's misfortune to experience.

The traditional, spiritual idea of being one, all of us and everything as one, has been systematically rejected by the innovators of capitalism and colonialism. This attitude serves their unethical and greedy agendas. A key tool to bring about acceptance of their behavior was to generate or exaggerate fear. When psychological-ops did not work, divide-and-conquer through violence and corruption did the trick. When one person sells out and can claim respectability, everyone not in the elite's game suffers immeasurably.

Expressing cultural rebellion

Fortunately, some writers and performers are asking great questions and exposing raw truth. Using performing arts to question commonplace assumptions can engage people to undermine the dominant paradigm even more than a bunch of great cartoons or paintings. For example:

Dancing in public has been suppressed by control-freak societies beginning with the ancient Romans, followed by organized religions' cracking down, continuing to this day. In her article "Dance, Dance, Revolution," Barbara Ehrenreich eloquently exposed the authorities in New York City and elsewhere who wish to suppress subversive dance [New York Times]. The fact that dancing is a threat, in any country at any time, means there is hope for healthy rebellion and a resurgence of human feeling. When Emma Goldman (1869-1940) said "If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution," she wasn't joking. Ehrenreich did not use this famous reference, perhaps out of the Times' intolerance for dancing around, figuratively, with an icon of anarchism.

"We learn language so we can apply for jobs, not so we can express ourselves." - Dutch singer Stef Bos [Ode, May/June 2000]

There are informative messages more poetic than essays and books that advise us of the folly of modern ways, whether from plays, films or songs. From Druids, a film by Jacques Dorfmann, 2000:

60 BC: "Just don't abandon the path of knowledge when you take the road of action."
- Archdruid (Max von Sydow), pointing to the Romans' road:
"The Romans act without true knowledge - See what they do: A sword of stone right through the living heart of land!"
"Roads: The free movement of goods and men." - Julius Caesar (Klaus Maria Brandauer)

"It's roads which use the pretext of the free movement of goods and men to accelerate the orders of the empire, which strangles us to satisfy its ambition." Vercingetorix, king of the Gauls (from the film Druids, starring Christopher Lambert ) - 52(?) BC

A song can also say it from the heart in the few words, with the additional impact of melody, harmony, beat and rhyme:
How Many Roads
How many roads
How many roads

When the first road had been built
Then our spirits could be kil't
Half the forests soon were gone
Climate change had soon begun

How many roads
How many roads

When am I gonna get
My SUV
When are we gettin' wet
From the risin' sea

No more species do evolve
Round the sun we still revolve
Solar panels, videos
Watchin' nature just indoors

How many roads
How many roads

2002, Depaver Jan
 


Technology as Symptom and Dream, Robert Romanyshyn, discussed on The Jung Page, "A Conversation with Dolores E. Brien":
cgjungpage.org

Dead on Arrival: The Fate of Nature in the Scientific Revolution, by David Kubrin, Culture Change magazine 20 which was never printed, 2002:
culturechange.org

Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
ishmael.org

Chellis Glendinning on women and civilization, from What a Way to Go - Life at the End of Empire, reviewd by Culture Change: culturechange.org/cms

Thinking Green: Essays on Environmentalism, Feminism, and Nonviolence, by Petra Kelly, 1994, Parallax Press, Berkeley, Calif., ISBN 0-938077-62-7 (Chapter 2, Creating an Ecological Economy)

Beyond Stones & Bones: The new science of the brain and DNA is rewriting the history of human origins, by Sharon Begley, with Mary Carmichael, Newsweek:
msnbc.msn.com

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, by Leonard Shlain, Viking, reviewed in "Curse of the Alpahbet", Ode Magazine, June 2007, print version only.  Website:
odemagazine.com

Dance, Dance, Revolution, by Barbara Ehrenreich, New York TimesJune 3, 2007:
nytimes.com

Julius Caesar: Gaul (58-50 BCE)
fenrir.dk

Incredible images and stats on consumer culture:
chrisjordan.com

"Bush Rebuffs Germany ..ting Emissions at Group of 8 Meeting", New York Times, June 7, 2007:
nytimes.co

Currently reading : Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed By Jared Diamond

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Culture Change Round-Up: 4 - Record gasoline prices amidst hyperconsumption and slaughter

Written a year ago, still relevant today, wouldn't you say?

- Tim

Record gasoline prices amidst hyperconsumption and slaughter        
Written by Jan Lundberg     

Culture Change Letter 160, May 28, 2007

For someone who professionally analyzed gasoline prices and the petroleum industry from 1972-1987, maybe it's a bit surprising I've not had much to say about May's record gasoline prices. For many years I've not been one to often make a prediction on the price of gasoline or oil. This is because I'm much more interested in bigger issues that cover more than prices and particular fuels.

With that sense of priorities, I'm much less desirable as a most-quoted U.S. energy analyst, as I once was. Up until two decades ago I spouted many a market pronouncement taken seriously by those interested in short-term economics, whether for a household or to serve corporate power. When I gave it all up to fight pollution and perhaps help improve the way people live in this country, I was freed from the data-gathering and analysis of price changes that increasingly struck me as trivial. This was partly because I became a non-driver.

Mainstream news media are nowadays a little more prepared to hear oil analysis that's more ecological, and price changes can occasionally be discussed in dollars-per-gallon changes than cents-per-gallon. So it's time for a look at gasoline prices with a whole-system approach.

I do agree that oil-industry factors in price run-ups have recently included strained refining capacity and high demand. I don't believe the price of oil and gasoline are really driven by a control-Iraq conspiracy aimed at the world oil market, although the Middle East is a playground for such appetites. Nor do I subscribe to the perennial notion that oil companies are "keeping full tankers off shore" to deprive consumers of the cheaper gasoline that many believe they have a right to burn to no end.

But the most basic reasons for high gasoline and crude oil prices are seldom-heard because they are about bigger trends: (1) geologically rather than geographically determined supply, and (2) infrastructure-investment in a system that has no future. First, Peak Oil implies a survey of the landscape for extraction trends, interpreting sketchy reserves data, and, usually neglected, an understanding of market-driven supply dynamics -- all allowing us to acknowledge that cheap oil is gone forever and a new world is opening up. In the context of history's fossil-fueled fling, global Peak Oil is here now.

We have strung ourselves out so far with the car-oriented economy that it wrecks local economies, and it suppresses national reorientation toward more efficient, less deadly transport and land use. Subsidies -- hidden and direct -- to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year nearly the size of the Pentagon budget, keep us on oil and gasoline and in cars, even as fuels and vehicles rise in price. Meanwhile, workers must work harder and harder to afford energy and to travel the daily distance to and from work and for needed services. The price at the gasoline pump may really be $15 per gallon because of subsidies, according to the International Center for Technology Assessment's study ten years ago. That figure does not include environmental or health costs.

The USA clings to an illusion of post-World War II cheap oil and the one-worker per suburban household "American dream," when oil came out of the ground at up to 100 barrels extracted per one barrel expended to drill. The toxic petrochemical nightmare inherent in consumerism was barely known then. Recent efforts, e.g., oil wars, election fraud, propaganda, cannot reverse geologic trends and "mistakes" such as the General Motors/oil industry criminal destruction of several dozen urban rail trolley systems.

I was interviewed on Chicago-area radio on May 12, and when pressed, I made a prediction of gasoline reaching at least $4 per gallon this summer. Most interesting about the show (WKRS 1220AM, Waukegan, Illinois) was that almost all discussion during the nearly two-hours, including callers' questions, centered around cars somehow getting all the desired alternative fuels (or not getting them, as I repeatedly explained). Some of the same callers were dubious of global warming and Peak Oil. The experience made me wonder if I'd been wrong to disagree with those who've said the West Coast is a different culture. It's "all about consciousness," and it's on the rise in many quarters, more so on the West Coast.

A question I'm asked frequently, but seldom by mainstream reporters, is "When will petrocollapse hit?" It can happen anytime now or within a few years. This analysis is based in part on seeing the nine percent shortfall for U.S. gasoline deliveries in 1979 that triggered our Second Oil Shock, that my then-family business forecast. Picture another such shortfall today, but on the grander scale with the same percentage, due to three decades of unwise growth of the extractive economy and of the population of humans and cars. Perhaps this summer there will be one or more global-warming-charged hurricanes hitting petroleum facilities. This could mean too tight a market for EU countries to fill in the supply gap, as happened in 2005 after the U.S. Gulf Coast hurricanes. Throw in a major interruption of oil flow from an oil exporter, and we have a situation that gets quickly and terminally out of control for millions of drivers and other users of oil. How can one predict prices when in Nigeria the "main insurgent group, the MEND, who recently announced they were through with kidnappings of foreigners and were about to embark on a program to destroy more of the country's oil infrastructure"? [Peak Oil Review, May 28, 2007]

Another possibility is that an energy crisis will be masked by a global financial development, or war involving China perhaps, that spells massive disruption and oil supply breakdown.

When people cannot get to their jobs or get the foods and services they require daily, any significant breakdown can escalate into violent chaos with no floor, toward complete socioeconomic collapse and failure of government. Big government will not be able (or interested in?) helping you, especially in cities as large as and larger than New Orleans. I believe the national and state governments will retrench under stress and choose to favor saving and supplying the rural areas; they are productive, whereas consuming-centers of huge cities may be written off and become die-off zones. Climate-change induced drought can also have a major effect and boost fuel demand at a sensitive time. If natural gas were absolutely unlimited and plentiful, there would be a much less harsh energy scenario to offer. But gas has already peaked in extraction in North America. So called solutions such as liquified natural gas, and other technological fixes, are not ready on a massive scale and will not be ready to stave off petrocollapse.

When SUV sales have not been as hurt as much as the car-industry average in recent months, it's a heavy reality-check on our collective awareness that suggests "people are hopelessly unconscious." And when car travel is not being forgone for summer vacation-planning, despite nearly $4 a gallon gasoline, we are in La-la Land -- one of the more fitting nicknames for L.A., the biggest gasoline market and the originator of freeways and self-service gasoline.

Death from war versus car

There's a major, awful story in "Americans have opened nearly 1,000 new graves to bury U.S. troops killed in Iraq since Memorial Day a year ago. The figure is telling -- and expected to rise in coming months." [Associated Press, May 26, 2007.] Why so many people who are affected by this thoroughly discredited war are putting up with it is an interesting question. To get to the heart of it, we must look at culture and conditioning:

Record gasoline usage, which as we may discover is occurring (when the figures are in), means more deaths on the road and in the cancer wards. This is a holocaust surpassing 100,000 U.S. residents each year. It could be drastically reduced if our society really valued life over greed. Looking at the actual number of deaths of U.S. troops in Iraq (aside from the far greater Iraqi civilian casualties), the 3,440-plus figure is but a fraction of ongoing car slaughter and lethal exhaust-caused diseases in this country. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. drivers also die from unhealthy hearts caused by the sedentary lifestyle.

We have to keep hammering that we are experiencing -- hello! -- 7,500 car-related and unnecessary deaths every month in the U.S. The Dept. of Transportation changed terminology from "accidents" to "crashes" in the mid 1990s, perhaps because they know that in general predictable numbers of crack-ups are not truly accidental. Drunk driving explains 40% of the fatalities from crashes, and faulty cars and roads account for more, so all in all it's not accidental; it can be numerically anticipated. This slaughter (of also a million animals daily on U.S. roads) is allowed especially when more roads are built or widened, and even maintained.

The top speed limits are so far above safety levels and optimum efficiency -- which would be approximately 45 miles per hour -- that society is apparently not "ready" for conservation of fuel or of lives. But the government would not go so far as to say it is "policy" that 100,000 U.S. residents die annually from crashes and exhaust-fume related diseases. The Iraq war has cost almost as many Iraqi civilian lives as the U.S. has lost domestically during the same period from car and oil dependence. So, it may be that U.S. citizens' tolerance for the war -- not stopping it somehow -- may be related to being inured to death by violence and government "policy" decade after decade. It certainly is industry policy.

I was at a policy meeting of the U.S. Dept. of Transportation in or around 1990 for a small public meeting on car and traffic issues. What struck me there was that lobbyists from industry got away with saying for the feds, "So, the car and its traffic and infrastructure work well most of the time, except two times a day (rush hours)." That's the way they want to frame any debate: cars are fine, although they can stand a little tinkering. During that same meeting, when I said I worked toward a national paving moratorium, one jaded old car-industry lobbyist grinned at me like he relished the extremely unlikely consideration due my concept.

One reason that gasoline price musings leave me cold is that it's horrifying to think that the car madness carries on year after year. For many of us it has been forty years of observing the highly questionable, unbridled consumption of toxic fuels and non-renewable resources. This year's motor gasoline consumption in the U.S. can easily be over 140 billion gallons and become a new record. I was astonished at the mere 90 + billion gallons I tracked for 1971, brand by brand, state by state, month by month. If such quantities of gasoline burned and spilled appeared crazy to some of us way back then, it's even more absurd today due to the cumulative effects of pollution. Society as nutty and ecocidal is the real issue, not the amount of price movement of gasoline and crude oil -- even though plenty of consumers want to know about prices of "essential" commodities. They are also "naturally" interested in interest rates, school tuitions, and the possibility of more jobs available that help trash the planet and harm public health. The dominant pattern is actually unnatural when system breakdown and climate chaos are guaranteed..

With the car so troublesome and a waste of money -- one can be liberated enough to live without a car -- it is tragic that so much effort goes into fiddling with the technology to clean up only the propulsion. We are hearing more and more about hybrid cars not being the energy savers, overall, compared to gas-guzzling cars, when all the energy involved at every step is taken into account (first reported in Culture Change a year ago). If only dealing with the exhaust were enough to clean up the car and its total effect on the environment, on economics, on health, and military urges. So we must put flies in the ointment (petrochemical, no doubt), showing biofuels and hydrogen to be unlikely on a major scale, as because these systems would not be sensible or sustainable. Additionally, as this column repeats, the average speed of the U.S. motorist is only about 5 miles per hour, as Ivan Illich found, when all the hours going into supporting the car are taken into account. But society continues to tolerate and reward charlatans catering to the driving habit and the economic forces that also reach into the funded environmental movement.

Piston heads, thinkers and lemmings

Could it be a sign that the times are a' changin'? The former automobile industry honcho who was Bush II's chief of staff was loudly booed at the University of Massachusetts on Friday. Former White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card was verbally confronted by hundreds of students and faculty members as he rose to accept an honorary degree. The boos and catcalls -- including those from faculty members who stood on stage with Card -- drowned out Provost Charlena Seymour's remarks as she awarded the honorary doctorate in public service. Card was, until 2000, president and CEO of American Automobile Manufacturers Association.

It was most likely the war that soured people on Card and his former boss in the White House, and not the fact that cars by the millions kept being forced on us by corrupt corporate influence of government. Meanwhile, trains and better land-use are not forced on us. The lowly bus is superior to the car safety-wise, by a factor of ten. If sane transport and land use had been policy since the mid-century years when freeways and cars took over, gasoline might be a luxury item today and not a staple for hapless commuters -- they barely have a chance to get jobs in walking- or biking-distance to home. Or have a chance to get housing near work.

If America had a bigger passenger train system, of course, more travelers would have an alternative to high gasoline prices that heavily benefit overseas oil companies, which are increasingly government-controlled, and a way to travel that leaves a smaller carbon footprint. - Ross Capon, Executive Director, National Association of Railway Passengers
We hear the "blameless" oil Industry claiming the biofuel push may hurt at the pump. The New York Times reported recently that as
Gas prices are spiking again -- to an average of $3.22 a gallon, and close to $4 a gallon in many areas… some oil executives are now warning that the current shortages of fuel could become a long-term problem, leading to stubbornly higher prices at the pump. They point to a surprising culprit: uncertainty created by the government's push to increase the supply of biofuels like ethanol in coming years.
"$7-Gallon Gasoline" is a concept that Dave Pollard explores as part of his ongoing, online How to Save the World:
...The bottom line is that, while $3.50/gallon gasoline was a cakewalk (just a catch-up after decades of after-inflation price decreases), $7-gallon gasoline will be nightmarish. Not because we can't afford to pay $140 to fill our gas tank, but because we can't afford to pay twice as much for the oil we eat, the oil we wear, the oil that drives our entire economy. And our economy is stretched so tight, and is so over-extended and over-leveraged, we have no room to maneuver.
This is the incredible bind we've gotten ourselves into: Coping with global warming and the End of Oil (before the nightmare outlined in The Long Emergency befalls us) demands a large increase is the price of energy to dampen our appetite for it. But that large increase could easily plunge the world into another Great Depression.

...So the real problem is not that gasoline prices are too high, or that they are too low, it's that we think the price of gasoline is the real problem, and that changing that price will solve it. (May 23, 2007)

In a petty analysis that would have been mortifying to me if I were still running Lundberg Survey, the U.S. Energy Information Administration "took issue yesterday with a private survey that concluded Americans are paying more per gallon than at any time in history when inflation is factored in, [saying] the average price of a gallon of unleaded regular stands at $3.22. The agency pegs the inflation-adjusted record high at $3.29, set in March 1981... The Lundberg Survey, which is conducted every two weeks, said the inflation-adjusted price of a gallon of regular unleaded was $3.18. According to Lundberg, that price beats the 1981 record of $1.35 - or $3.15 in today's dollars." [The Journal News, andLower Hudson Online, May 24, 2007]
Future generations or future intelligent species will deem humans and their industrial society to have become "too intelligent" for their own good. Much will be judged by the immense amount of useless crap left behind, if we can put climate distortion aside for a moment. However, it's worth remembering that humans managed cleanly and at a reasonable population size for untold millennia before the recent frenzy of consumption and fouling of our nest -- Earth.

The motorized lemmings are still at it, the USA Todaymade clear with its top story on May 26:

"Soaring gas prices did not appear to be deterring Americans from hitting the road and airports this Memorial Day weekend for what many expect will be record holiday travel... One in eight Americans will travel more than 50 miles from home this weekend, the Travel Industry Association and AAA said. That represents 38 million travelers, 2% more than last year's record. More than 32 million of them will travel by car, truck or RV, the groups say."
In reviewing a draft of this article, one of our volunteer editors, Dmitry Orlov, chimed in with the following thoroughly unrealistic but interesting thought experiment:
A lot of people seem to think that the solution to the problem caused by cars is... more cars. New ones. That sort of piston-headed logic has to be ridiculed, not patiently argued against.
I seem to think that the solution involves fewer cars, if any, and I have a Modest Proposal: Ban manufacturing and importation of motor vehicles and internal combustion engines. This will improve the situation in the following 8 ways:

1. It will improve the efficiency of every car on the road, since the older the car, the more highly amortized it is in terms of energy that went into its manufacturing.

2. The older the car, the more unsafe it is. Therefore, people will be forced to drive more slowly, saving fuel.

3. After a while, old cars no longer run. The fewer the number of cars available, the more passengers per vehicle, resulting in greater efficiency.

4. An entire industry devoted to manufacturing and marketing of cars will be forced to shut down, saving valuable energy.

5. The existing cars will need plenty of highly skilled mechanics to keep them moving, relocalizing the transportation part of the economy.

6. Old cars tend to be rusty, ugly, and uncool, and so people will look for alternatives to driving to get around, saving more energy.

7. With fewer cars on the road, fewer roads have to be maintained, saving money and energy.

8. With fewer cars on the road, there will be fewer crashes, limiting a major source of American morbidity and mortality, and making the population more productive.

9. With cars available to fewer people, more people will be forced to walk or bicycle, improving their cardiovascular fitness, and reducing health care costs.

10. It will send a powerful message that the age of the automobile is nearing its end.

-Dmitry

I would add these principles, because I'm not quite in the spirit of ridiculous fun:
- To make sure the car ban happens and we save the planet from too much CO2 and methane, we must, prior to the banning of manufacture and importation of cars, strive to buy only used cars. This forces the economy to reorient itself away from national and global manufacturing which will take a tumble, perhaps in the form of a significant depression that rational economists were predicting long before now.
- The rejection of new cars and then the coming banning of cars (except for health-emergency, e.g., food-growing/distribution vehicles) will clearly address extricating ourselves from laziness (i.e., not walking or bicycling when able) and from petroleum in general including plastics that poison the inside atmosphere of cars.

Some of Dmitry's other mock-initiatives this holiday weekend are:
- scrapping overseas military bases and repatriating the troops instead of leaving them stranded in hostile lands with no way to get home
- shutting down and moth-balling all nuclear facilities, to prevent nuclear material from falling into the wrong hands as the US collapses into chaos

- announcing a jubilee -- forgiveness of all debts, public and private, since they will not be repayable in any case

Dmitry makes it clear he does not expect any of these initiatives to produce any results: "They are an exercise in creative futility -- a public art project, if you like." As Albert Bates said in our interview in Culture Change, it is the artists, not the scientists, who will save us.
* * * * *

Further reading:

Peak Oil Review, ASPO-USA, Tom Whipple, Editor:
aspo-usa.com

Holiday travelers ignoring fuel costs, by Andrea Stone and William M. Welch, USA Today, May 26, 2007:
usatoday.com

Questions for the gasoline guru-ess (Culture Change Letter 146):
culturechange.org/cms

Andrew Card booed by hundreds of students and faculty members at UMass:
truthout.org

Oil Industry Says Biofuel Push May Hurt at Pump, by Jad Mouawad, NY Times 05-24-07:
hendersonvillenews.com

Dave Pollard:
blogs.salon.com

The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler"
kunstler.com

Paul Lepek & Company, weekends on Lake County, Illinois talk radio:
wkrs.com

National Association of Railroad Passengers, Phone 202-408-8362:
narprail.org

"Not so fast on gas price record, agency says" by Allan Drury, The Journal News, Lower Hudson Online, May 24, 2007:
thejournalnews.com

Green Wheels Corporation unveils Super-Hybrids™ next to Ford Hybrids at Humboldt State University, Arcata, Calif.: humboldt.edu
"Don't buy hybrid hype" - Transportation analysis from Greenwheels, by Aaron Antrim :
humboldt.edu


Energy Information Administration, US Dept. of Energy, petroleum consumption table:
eia.doe.gov

Featured link: International Center for Technology Assessment (CTA) is devoted to exploring the economic, ethical, social, environmental and political impacts that can result from the applications of technology or technological systems:
cta.org


 

Currently reading : Surviving in the oil patch. (Petro-Canada Ltd.'s safety and security measures)(Special Issue): An article from: Security Management By Joan H. Murphy Release date: 2005-07-28

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Culture Change Round-Up: 3 - "What a Way to Go - Life at the end of empire"

"What a Way to Go - Life at the end of empire" Documentary        
Written by Jan Lundberg     

Review of documentary film written and directed by TSBennett, produced by Sally Erickson, 2007
Culture Change Letter 159 - May 20, 2007

"What a Way to Go" is a total rejection of the self-destruction paradigm that hard-wires our culture. Brutal honesty is applied to issues of our day.

But these aren't just issues of our day; they are issues of the universe because the planet itself is becoming altered before our eyes toward unending extinction. The film makes clear that we are caught in a broken myth of progress and technology, expecting those cultural bulwarks to save us even though they caused the crisis: climate chaos, petrocollapse and individual isolation and despair.

I get excited about very few movies, but this is one of them and is perhaps the most important media message of our time.

The movie centers around the awakening of the narrator, "a middle-class white guy" coming to grips with global issues right in his face that threaten his children's and everyone's survival. He tells the story in such a way that almost every modern human being can identify with. His expectations and world-view had been normal. He was a hard-working consumer who believed in the scientific, forward-thinking society that bestowed on him the historically unprecedented material advantages common in the First World.

Juxtaposed with almost every verbal phrase are flashing images of scenes and archival news photos of our collective experience: atom bomb tests, armies in the field, environmental devastation, and hordes of nameless consumers massed in cities and on clogged highways. The soundtrack's music builds tension without drawing attention to itself. The overall effect is immediate; right away in this film the viewer feels to be on a train ride with the narrator, and it's out of control. Welcome to the reality that society tries hard to deny.

In this fashion the points of the narrator, Tim Bennett, are rammed home effortlessly. All the viewer has to do is sit back and take it in -- there's no difficulty, no controversy. Even the concept of peak oil and the positive feedback-loops of climate distortion are presented simply and without confusion.

The documentary is in four parts: "Waking on the train", "The train and the tracks", "The locomotive power", and "Walkabout." So, in a well organized fashion, in just over two hours, the film thoroughly explores elements of our planetary predicament: how we got into it, how bad it is, and what our prospects are for recognizing our collective dilemma before it's too late. One gets the clear sensation of needing to immediately save our planet for the approximate half of today's living species that may still be around in a few decades.

For a critic of peak oil activism and, for much longer, of environmental activism that I called "compromisentalism" in 1990, I half expected this film to be full of things I could yawn at and even find fault with. I have suffered through many a novice's revelations, and, much worse, the cynical, fraudulent compromisers' technofix BS, for many years. It has happened more than once that I find that my own message is the one missing element that would greatly improve a movie, book, article, etc. This can be from feeling that activists and commentators have a skimpy understanding of how we got where we are and why things are the way they are. However, I have no regrets about "What a Way to Go" as a background resource, forthright statement and shocking wake-up for the average citizen as well as the savvy activist. I am not needed in that movie! Here's why:

Featured interviewees include Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael; Derrick Jensen, author of The Culture of Make Believe; William Catton, author of Overshoot, and Richard Heinberg, author of The Party's Over. Unlike "The End of Suburbia," the peak oil movie staring Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler and assorted peak-oil and New Urbanism commentators, Bennett's movie does not rely so much on a series of talking heads and their constant, sometimes redundant opinions. Instead, specific points are being made, even by unknown citizens who are friends of the film makers. Their statements gather force as an honest cross section of thinking people, and leads the viewer right up to full realization of our culture's dead end. The End of Suburbia is a great movie, but perhaps self-limited by the scary implications of peak oil: die-off and the end of urban life as we know it. These topics are only hinted at in The End of Suburbia. One reason What a Way to Go can do it relentlessly and effectively is that the script and images burst the bubble of science as a religion pushing on blindly toward a technotopia.

In "What a Way to Go," all is placed onto the table before us. We can't walk away and ever be the same. With the peak oil challenge, in comparison, people can shrug and wonder if alternative fuels are going to come on like gangbusters, or wonder what portion of the population will be around in future to get around without cars. We are past that stage; our death warrants are posted, and time is running out to turn the situation around with unprecedented direct action.

For those who may be asking, "Is there an answer that this film offers?" Actually, in part, yes: instead of a train ride that ends as we plummet into a chasm, we are urged to leave our present system and figuratively switch conveyances: the boat. The end of the movie shows Bennett walking along roads, finally onto a an unpaved path, ending up on some a beach looking out to sea. A song, "Let's build a boat" starts up, and he is joined by Sally Erickson, the film's producer, and a raft of friends and family, with their backs to us. I immediately thought of the parallel solution thought up by Culture Change in the 1990s: the Sail Transport Network.

The movie is not about solutions or happy endings. Instead, it takes us to that point and leaves the task to us -- as it should be. I happen to know that the film makers have first-hand knowledge of intentional communities, but don't present them here as the logical destination. The future culture of sustainability is too big a topic for this film. It is not a criticism to say that "What a Way to Go" does not lead us out of this mess. To get out of it, we must first understand our problem and, as the film shows, talk about it.

Various devices work to succeed in this movie, including the music, the amazingly tight editing, the range of feelings and concepts explored, and the plaintive and original voice of the narrator. It is not a Hollywood announcer's deep voice, but is sincere and original.

It is a great feat for one movie to serve as an entire wake-up call and a complete analysis of our global dilemma. "What a Way to Go" delivers as few films in the history of documentary cinema do. Along with Our Synthetic Sea, which makes clear a heretofore unknown disaster creeping up that is the plastic plague, Bennett's and Erickson's documentary are all anyone needs, who has yet to wake up from the toxic dream and propaganda of the dominant culture.

Some of the script that got to me, as the images flashed by:

"The stores are filled with bandages for the wounds of Empire." - TS Bennett

"The world looked insane to me, but nobody else seemed to notice, so I buried my thoughts, and muddled on. Deep inside, this was tearing me to pieces." - TSBennett

"What if we run into a tipping point where we have this kind of accelerated scenario of climate change? We're gonna get our butts kicked." ~ Paul Roberts, The End of Oil

The Earth supports as great a collective mass of ants as it does people. It can do so because ants aren't building 6000 square foot homes, driving two hours to their jobs, buying plasma TV sets, and killing each other with depleted uranium munitions." - TSBennett

"Thirty six years after the first Earth Day, forty-four years after Silent Spring, the planet is closer now to ecological meltdown than it has ever been. If what we want is to stop the destruction of the life of this planet, then what we have been doing has not been working. We will have to do something else".- TSBennett

"We're in a culture of two-year-olds where we just won't look at the limits." - Sally Erickson, Producer

Here are the film-makers' plans for the movie:
"We are currently organizing screening tours of the Northeast this summer and the West coast and along Amtrak routes this Fall. We are looking for groups and individuals to sponsor screenings and house parties. We plan to have a DVD for sale to the public on our website before the end of August. We have a couple leads on distributors to put the movie in theaters but are getting more encouragement to pursue viral marketing via the internet and word of mouth.
"To be notified of screenings and DVD release dates, to check out our blogs, or for further reading and links: you can get in touch with us at the What A Way To Go website (link below)."

Culture Change is puting together a screening for our local readers in the San Francisco Bay area.. Contact us so you can be notified of the screening date and location. Tel. (215) 243-3144 or email: info "at" culturechange "dot" org. Or stay tuned. To get on our emailing list for weekly reports and essays, sign up at lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/culturechange
* * * * *

Further reading and links:

What a Way to Go
whatawaytogomovie.com

Another paradigm-shifting movie, with solutions that inspire, is "The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil." Obtain from Community Solutions, Yellow Springs, Ohio: www.powerofcommunity.org

Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael and other books

Derrick Jensen, author of The Culture of Make Believe and other books

William R. Catton, author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, Foreword by Stewart Udall

Richard Heinberg, author of The Party's Over and other books

RIchard Manning, author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization and other books

"The End of Suburbia" website for the award-winning documentary:
endofsuburbia.com
"Escape from Suburbia" - sequel to The End of Suburbia, to be released soon. escapefromsuburbia.com

"Our Synthetic Sea", award-winning documentary from Algalita Marine Research Foundation" algalita.org

Sail Transport Network: sailtransportnetwork.org
 
 

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Culture Change Round-Up: 2 - The teeming plasticized masses’ awakening

The teeming plasticized masses' awakening        
Written by Jan Lundberg     

Culture Change Letter 158, May 5, 2007

Curious to check on any news on plastic bag bans or bag fees, I did a Google search for plastic bags to complement Culture Change's new story on Berkeley's joining San Francisco's lead. I was amazed that there were roughly three dozen stories from around the world in the twenty-four hour period up to May 4. These stories were about the problems and future of plastic bags, and did not, for example, include the usual stories about crimes committed with plastic bags.

Among the most exciting developments is that a town in Devon, UK has entirely rejected plastic bags for environmental reasons, the first place in Europe to do so. This is just one of the many stories covered in the mainstream corporate press on the new news-genre of the plastic plague.

Headlines around the world include "Ethiopia: Outlawing Plastic Bags; Will That Take Shopping Backwards?" and "Boston eyes plastic bag ban". One story from India asks, "Ever thought of defeating the plastic peril? If yes, then use alternatives to plastic bags" (Deccan Herald).

More obscure publications blare,

- "Age of plastic belongs in the past" (Nanaimo News Bulletin, Canada)
- "Household store IKEA starts charging for plastic bags" (Channel News Asia, Singapore) "First it was the 'Bring Your Own Bag Day' initiative, now retailer IKEA has stopped providing free plastic bags."
Want evidence of more mainstream coverage?
- USA Today, May 3, 2007: "San Francisco, a reliable source of laughs and hyperventilating policy decisions, has decided to ban evil plastic bags." (Environmentalism vs. skepticism article)
- Forbes magazine is on it, in Steve F.'s "Our Secret Weapon" column on May 4. After all, how can he ignore "Bengal bans plastic carry bags below 40 microns", for example? (Zee News, Kolkata, India, May 4, 2007)
The world has had environmental awakenings since the first Earth Day in 1970, but almost four decades later it has been too long an awakening. The wasted and lost time has thrown our survival and the Earth's benign climate into doubt. However, reaffirming Culture Change's optimistic facet:
Now there may be a new quality of awakening that can mushroom into a more meaningful, stronger movement. The difference may simply be that the lid is coming off the plastic container of lies about plastic itself. The tide of plastic trash is about to ebb. This has implications larger by far than beautifying the landscape or saving some sea animals.

As we begin to realize what plastics do to the environment and to our bodies, it will be an excellent test of resolve to take effective, broad action on many levels. To cut back on -- or lose -- the convenience of petroleum, e.g., plastics, is to face the difficult limits we are running up against when it comes to petroleum's role in daily living and its destructive power. Efforts to both grow crops and raise animals to produce substitutes for energy and materials will soon prove far too unrealistic for perpetuating the consumer economy.

But we may be changing course as a society and a culture. We will not change enough via voluntary, rational means, but at least the direction is now clear. By the time petrocollapse may hit, the average person may be aware, just as s/he is aware of the effect of greenhouse gas emissions, that we have gluttonized too long on wasteful products made from petroleum. The human population just about doubled since 1970, made possible largely by petroleum. Meanwhile, our added numbers magnified the harm done by petroleum use.

Better late than never, millions of consumers in San Francisco and other cities are about to learn this year that plastic bags made of petroleum are not a good thing and that they have been replaced. The several answers to "Why aren't they a good thing?" will soon become apparent to all but the obstinate or the brain-dead.

Culture Change made the connection to peak oil for the San Francisco Dept. of Environment when the city agency was formulating the ill-fated plastic-bag fee in 2004. The proposed ordinance for a 17-cent fee per bag stemmed from the cost of cleaning up the city's collected compost and the streets from trash consisting of plastic bags. The destructive effect on sea life was already known, as were the factors of war-for-oil and harm to the climate, from 180 million plastic bags disposed of in the city each year.

By switching to the compostable bags, the city will be conserving 430,000 gallons of oil used to make traditional bags, the equivalent of keeping 140,000 cars off the street for a day, according to Jared Blumenfeld, head of San Francisco's Environment Dept.

There are over 100 billion plastic checkout bags distributed through U.S. retailers each year, and the production of these bags burns up more than 12 million barrels of oil. If that weren't bad enough, plastic bags take up to 1,000 years to degrade in a landfill.

As reported in recent weeks in Culture Change, San Francisco overcame its mayor's rejection of the bag fee and the even more treacherous state ban on bag fees last year. The mechanism of relying on bioplastics this spring was not ideal, but now we do have petroleum plastics finally on the run: compostable bags or paper bags as well as canvas reusable bags will the only bags offered at all major supermarkets and large pharmacies in a matter of months.

Topping the anti-plastic fervor:

"'Plastic is a bigger danger than global warming, or at least it is in the immediate sense, considering it is snuffing out the lowest common denominator in the food chain,' says Neil Seldman, a waste recycling expert and president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance, an organization with a long track record of promoting sustainable communities." (Greenbiz.com)
Berkeley
At the Berkeley City Council meeting of April 24, 2007, the ball got rolling for a ban on petroleum plastic bags. It was approved on the Consent Calendar to have the city's Zero Waste Dept. investigate adopting a San Francisco-style change-over to compostable bioplastic, paper and reusable bags. Speaking in favor of the measure, I gave testimony before the council:

My preliminaries -- my name and affiliation (Culture Change), that in San Francisco I had worked toward that city's ban on petroleum plastic bags -- were extended in an attempt to link plastics to the big picture: I added that I was working on a petrocollapse conference, and that plastics are related to that project as well as to global warming.
To satisfy the greenest council members, I explained that relying on bioplastics was not the point of the San Francisco legislation, as that city's government realizes that reusing canvass bags is the actual goal. I added that a report on culturechange.org, "Peak Soil," questioned as sustainable biofuels and therefore bioplastics.

"Banning plastic bags made of petroleum is the first step we have to make. Not only are the Pacific Ocean's two garbage patches -- each larger than Texas -- filled with six times as much plastic debris as krill -- the zooplankton at the base of the food chain -- we all have plastics in our bodies due to migration or leaching of the toxic chemicals in plastic. These cause cancer, diabetes, obesity and birth defects.

"So we must look at all plastics after we deal with just the bags: bisphenol-A, phthatlates, and PVC... "BING!" [timer goes off and it's time to leave the podium]. Thank you for this good work."

The "Compostable Bag Ordinance" agenda-item that passed read:
"Recommendation: That the City Council refer San Francisco's new ordinance requiring compostable, recyclable paper or reusable bags to the Zero Waste Commission for analysis and recommendations for a possible City of Berkeley ordinance. Financial Implications: None"
Mayor Bates said, "banning the bags could benefit the city's greenhouse gas reduction plan because using compostable bags would reduce the amount of energy it takes to recycle the bags." (Berkeley Voice) "In November, 81% of Berkeley's voters approved a measure calling for the city to drastically slash greenhouse gases. The city hopes to trim greenhouse gases by at least 25% by 2020 and by 80% by 2050." (Berkeley Voice)

From the Berkeley Daily Planet (not daily, but a few times a week):

"...[P]assing unanimously was a referral to the Zero Waste Commission and the Community Environment Advisory Commission to look at adopting an ordinance similar to the one passed in San Francisco that would ban large grocery stores and chain drug stores from using non-compostable plastic shopping bags.
"Speaking during the public comment period, Jan Lundberg said the goal was to replace the plastic, not to use less harmful kinds of plastics."

Los Angeles followed San Francisco's lead several day's after history was made by the Bay. L.A.'s Daily News reported with its headline editorial: "Bag the bags - L.A. must cut down on plastic pollution":
(4/11/2007) "Those ubiquitous plastic shopping bags that most every retailer in the land uses as a courtesy to their customers may have seen their time come - and go.
"The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday agreed to study a ban on petroleum-based plastic shopping bags, and in so doing join a growing trend. San Francisco County supervisors enacted a bag ban last month. New York state is considering the first statewide ban on the bags.

"Knowing what we do about global warming and the human hand in polluting the planet, this is a debate that Los Angeles must have. But the reality of such a ban is going to take some working out. About six billion such bags are sold in Los Angeles County. Banning them could have tremendous cost to consumers and business. Replacing the bags with biodegradable forms might not be an answer either, as some research indicates that if they are not composted properly they could clog landfills and hurt marine life.

"Still, it's something that can and should be worked out. There is a growing understanding that we must start stepping lighter on this Earth. And by choosing - perhaps with just a tinge of coercion - to stop filling up our landfills with disposable, nonreusable bags is a great way to ring in Earth Day 2007"

Albertsons supermarkets are getting the jump on the changeover, discouraging plastic bags.
Santa Cruz is entertaining a petroleum-plastic bag ban too.

The State isn't doing much, but: "A statewide law that goes into effect this summer requires all grocery stores to give customers a place to recycle plastic bags.

Eugene, Oregon can pass a bag-fee ordinance, unlike California which is limited to bag bans. I spoke with the mayor, Kitty Piercy, last month about a ban or a fee, and she was receptive. I gave her a copy of Our Synthetic Sea, the award-winning documentary DVD, plus a fact-sheet from the Campaign Against the Plastic Plague.

Outside the United Plastic States of America:

The first plastic bag-free town in Europe is Modbury. Biobag, a firm in the UK, has supplied Modbury shops with up to 60,000 Mater-Bi bags which are being sold alongside paper, reusable cotton and jute bags. [Jutes were old invaders who nevertheless lived a heck of a lot more sustainably than the descendents of the British tribal melange. Long live the Jute (bag)! - ed]

Spurred by environmental fervor and growing concern about the 100 billion or more plastic bags thought to be littering the world and clogging the seas, the idea of a plastic bag-free town came from Rebecca Hoskins, a young Modbury-born-and-raised wildlife camerawoman. She went to the Pacific last year to film marine life for the BBC but experienced horrendous plastic bag pollution. She said: "We are not saying plastic is bad at all - if it is used wisely."

Elsewhere in our plastic world, in Pakistan, the city of Nazim vowed to free itself from polytene bags. According to Associate Press of Pakistan, "Meanwhile, the magistrates of the city government during the last five days sent more than 70 people behind bars who were selling plastic bags."

Stay tuned to Culture Change with its finger on the pulse of San Francisco -- that's a hint on futher action against plastics!

* * * * *

"Plastic Waste: More Dangerous than Global Warming": http://www.greenbiz.com/news/reviews_third.cfm?NewsID=35029

Deccan Herald, India "Village tales" (May 4, 2007): http://www.deccanherald.com

"You Can Make a Difference: Plastic bags", Novato Advance:
http://www.novatoadvance.com - TXT

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com

Pakistan: ban on polytene bags in public interest: City Nazim Monday, 30 April 2007:
http://www.app.com.pk

European Plastics News and Plastics & Rubber Weekly magazines: http://www.prw.com/

Devon town bans plastic bags:
http://www.theage.com.au

Plastic bag data for U.S.: http://reuseablebags.com

The Berkeley Voice - http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us - PDF

Our Synthetic Sea, the award-winning documentary DVD, is available through: http://algalita.org

Campaign Against the Plastic Plague:
http://earthresource.org/campaigns/capp/capp-overview.html
 
 

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Culture Change Round-Up: 1 - Albert Bates

Albert Bates, guide for our post-petroleum, globally warmed future        
Written by Jan Lundberg     

Culture Change Letter 157 - April 16, 2007

The April issue of Vanity Fair-online features The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee. Albert Bates gets a lot of ink in that article, as he has spent most of his life on The Farm making his mark in both publishing and education. There, his original skill set as a lawyer and horseman in 1972 was expanded to include Permaculture design, and he became an author (Climate in Crisis, introduction by Al Gore, 1990). He became a global authority on ecovillages, founding the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology. He directs the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm, where he has instructed students from over 50 nations since 1994.

More recently he has been warning people about petrocollapse and sudden sea-level rise. His latest book The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook came out last fall from New Society Publishers. He has spoken at Culture Change's Petrocollapse Conferences in New York City and Washington, DC, and has just returned from a series of California appearances. Rare is there a fortuitous blend of knowledge, wisdom and patience in one public figure for the task at hand, so let us see what such a person, Albert Bates, has to tell Culture Change readers.

[pic]
After Petroleum, After Warming, After Population: Earth, a place for hippie respect.


Albert K. Bates is a very busy man, but well-rounded and generous enough to keep abreast of many efforts begging his attention. So when I asked him to comment on a reader's reaction to Alice Friedemann's "Peak Soil" new tour de force on biofuels, I was rewarded with these inspiring words:

"Once we recognize that the fate of all life on Earth is now in the balance and what we do right now matters in that outcome, we can dispense with arguments for cutting, coppicing, pollarding, energy crops or other ways of shortchanging net sequestration. We have to consistently choose maximum sequestration. Everywhere. At once. The tipping points are falling like dominoes and we are in a race now. We are losing. We need to sprint. Now."
He elaborated: "Diverse, multi-species boreal forests supply twice as much, and also sequester twice the GHG, and diverse, multi-species rainforests twice that. The diminishment comes when you slice and dice them for energy, food, or human habitat instead of growing them out and up for maximum carbon uptake."

One vital aspect of Albert Bates' set of knowledge on climate change and energy is that he has delved into net energy -- perhaps the major concern over renewable fuels. In keeping with his long practice of tracking Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI), he told Culture Change "EROEI calcs have to recognize that nothing breaks even; entropy always has a finger on the scale."

The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: recipes for changing times, 237 pages, has a foreword by Richard Heinberg, author of The Party's Over. People knowledgeable about peak oil have to agree with Heinberg: "There is a profound and growing need for a Peak Oil Survival Guide." But why a cookbook too? Heinberg says, "There is nothing more basic to human life than eating, and Peak Oil will require some serious adjustments in how we feed ourselves." Heinberg concludes his foreword eloquently with a message Culture Change readers (and predecessor Auto-Free Times readers) have heard for over a decade: "Start living a post-petroleum lifestyle now and avoid the rush."

I daresay that Albert's book is essential for the clueless, if they can get a hold of a copy. If they spend just a few minutes perusing it they may start to see the real world opening up to them. And for the clued in, there are countless tips and facts that can bolster our skill-sets and resolve to keep plodding along. The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook is useful for a generation, the way the Whole Earth Catalogue was, as a handy reference guide (first aid, substitutions, recipes, and more).

Albert's experience on The Farm has prepared him for this historic task to educate us gently yet honestly, while urging us on toward community and simplicity. He cites Dmitry Orlov, who has passed along his knowledge of Russian farming villages and the Soviet Union's collapse to Americans wondering about the effects of peak oil. Albert has taken in much insight and experience for our benefit, to conclude in his Afterword: "Peak oil is a horrible predicament. It is also a wonderful opportunity to do a lot better. Let's not squander this moment. This will be the Great Change."

Albert, your book The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook seems to be the only light-hearted -- while very practical -- book on peak oil and the ominous changes to come from society's losing cheap energy and the ability to consume endlessly. Can your book remain eminently relevant even when events get out of hand? To what extent -- recipes and how-to living tips? Or are there major changes possible that could make you want to write a sequel, or, alternatively, give up on publishing?

I am not ready to give up publishing yet, but I am certainly aware of the sudden collapse scenario and in that event all bets are off. A year from now, or a month from now, we could be using books to keep warm and cook our food, not for the advice contained in them. In my lectures of late I have been giving people mind-mapping tools to allow them to plan contingencies in uncertain times. You have to plan for several scenarios simultaneously, and people will weight them by whatever credence they place in reports of where we are and what we are about to experience, now and ten years from now.

I think we have an individual preparedness to be concerned with, and that involves securing a supply of food, water, shelter and other basic needs for yourself and your immediate community. And then we have a larger social preparedness, without which there is no hope for the individual to survive. This second area involves threats that can only be addressed by better public policy and general mobilization of the whole macro society -- threats like world population, climate change, nuclear hazards, biogenetics, toxic timebombs.

Few recognize how close we are to human extinction, or even that we may have passed an irreversible line that could lead to that and worse -- extinction of all life on Earth. History becomes nearly irrelevant in those circumstances, as do most of the plans we have laid for ourselves and our descendants. We will not be colonizing Mars. In the centuries to come, we can speak of success if there are still human colonies on Earth.

I believe we can and should make our own luck. We won't survive unless we stop consuming our seed corn. When you are running out, it isn't enough to slow down. You have to stop. Much as you think you can make it just fine in a cave, saving the whole planet involves getting engaged with public policy, not digging a bunker in Idaho, or sitting on a zafu and chanting om.

Don't get me wrong on chanting om, though. We need to begin from a clear, quiet, peaceful and respectful center. Get there how you will.

You are essentially an activist who knows how to write, speak and educate. Is activism going to come back big-time, or are people waiting for leaders and gurus?

I hope they don't wait. We are already too absorbed with cults of charisma. Charisma has its place and can be a tool for advancing a social agenda, but it is both a dangerous and flawed tool. The best charismatics in history, Lao Tsu for example, understood this.

To quote Elvis Costello, who was post-hippie, "What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?" Can hippie-ism return big time without morphing into survivalism or some doomed pacifist cult that will be eaten alive by hungry, violent rednecks?

I was interested to see Time Magazine have a special feature on 51 things you can do to reduce global warming that included at least a dozen items we owe directly to the hippies, things like going without a tie, wearing vintage clothing, and giving up meat. It seemed to me that people are beginning to recognize that hippies were right about a lot of things. We were right about civil rights, the freedom rides, gender rights, Native Americans, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, organic food, police corruption, the pedagogy of public education, Vietnam, genetic engineering, globalization, hospital birth, funerals and weddings, Christmas-Card religions, meditation, pacifism, private property, corporations... name your poison, long before most of the rest of the population. We also invented iPods.

But I think the hippies were a social movement of the past, like the Diggers, or the Cathars. We can learn from them, but we need to move on and invent our own new best ways. These days I relate a lot to the Chipko movement in India. I think our children will be tree planters.

Can you say more about that?

There was an award-winning animation made from the book by Jean Giorno, The Man Who Planted Trees, and you can now order a copy at http://www.herondance.org. This is a children's story, but it is also a parable for our time. It tells the story of a man who just quietly starts planting acorns and reforesting Europe after the First World War. This is the kinds of story we need to be telling our children, not The Robinsons or Cars.

Some time ago The Farm came to recognize that if biodiversity is a serious goal for our land stewardship we need to accumulate larger contiguous blocks of forest. Larger and larger. We founded the Swan Trust, which took its name from our watershed. To date, we have about 3000 contiguous acres under Swan management in addition to the 2000 acres of The Farm. We need to be acquiring 25000 acres to secure the upper reach of the watershed.

I have been planting trees to more than offset my personal carbon emissions for at least 15 years now, but we have started a few initiatives here that are eminently replicable. One is Trees for Tennessee, which accepts donations to help volunteer treeplanting efforts locally. Another is Trees for Airmiles, which adopts various treeplanting efforts around the world and raises money through our website at i4at.org. Our currently sponsored project is following bulldozers around the occupied territories in Palestine and replanting trees, particularly olives and figs, that are being destroyed. This is a joint effort by Israeli and Palestinian permaculture activists, working together. I have been in thousand-year-old olive groves in Palestine and marveled at the husbandry that was required to keep those up. Fifty generations and nary one grandson failed to carry the water up to the grove in dry months in all that time.

You have said that your feelings about the world's condition got more pessimistic by the time your book got printed last year. What exactly has happened?

I think more shoes keep falling almost every day. I have to shut up and stand back for a while just to absorb what is being said.

What has happened is that after six years, 2500 scientists, 450 lead authors and 800 contributors in 130 countries have issued a definitive report that makes no bones about the fact that we are on the road to Hell on Earth, that we won't see the cool planet we had just 20 years ago for maybe 20,000 years more, maybe 200,000 years, if ever, and that there is a chance that nothing we can do can now stop Earth from being reduced to a lifeless desert world like Mars, perhaps even within the lifetime of some of those now alive; my granddaughter, for instance.

What has also happened is that Condi Rice made a trip to India, forgiving them for violating the NPT and TBT agreements and said, "We are going to arm you with your own nuclear weapons manufacturing plants so you can be our front line against China," forgetting that Pakistan is in a nuclear arms race with India, and that Kashmir is a hot war zone. And we have the Chinese arming the North Koreans and the North Koreans arming every little splinter cell in the world that could deliver a nuclear weapon to any city on Earth in a Sealand container. Madness.

Countries like France and China still pursue the fantasy that fission, or worse, fusion, reactors will save us from petrocollapse or warming, heedless of proliferation of wastes, weapons, and greenhouse gases that those efforts only thinly conceal. We are essentially throwing our children into furnaces to heat and light homes. And we are piling up toxics that we soon won't have the energy resources to manage.

I have now watched Albert Bartlett's lecture on the exponential function even more times than Al Gore's slide show, which I have been watching for more than 20 years. We show Bartlett to every group of students at our training center. To borrow his analogy, we are bacteria in a bottle and it is 2 minutes to midnight. We know we double our population every minute but we are seduced by all that open space in the bottle. Even if we could find more bottles they would be too little, too late. Are we humans as smart as bacteria?

Worldwatch Institute's State of the World 2007 has a graph of our global ecological footprint. As humans, not bacteria, we are dripping out of our bottle now. All biological systems can take stress for a while before they break and wither. We are like prisoners who have been tortured just too long. Recovery may no longer be possible for us now.

Even if you don't subscribe to all this, to what I just laid out, ask yourself if you believe in the precautionary principle. Can you rule out the possibility that we are driving off a cliff and about to make a catastrophic descent, as a life form, from which no recovery is possible? Given the possibility, no matter how remote, that our habits are extinguishing all life on Earth, what should you be doing right now?

It is a question I ask myself a lot.

The name Albert Bates should be a household word. Why isn't it? Is that changing?

I am not sure I would like it to be a household word. It isn't me that has any special importance here. There is a message for our times that isn't seeming to be coming through the mist quite as much as it should be, and although others are voicing it also, and some much better than I can, I felt the pressing need to lend my voice and hopefully raise the volume to more of a chorus. And I think it is beginning to have some effect, although still far too little. I invite more people to also raise a voice. Some strong voices have been silent for a long time. This is not the time to be silent.

You helped educate Al Gore about the Climate back in the 1980s. Why did he omit you in his movie; was it a fear of hippie-association? Do you have access to him? What would be your advice to him, in one sentence, today?

I don't agree with your premise. Al Gore is one of the smartest individuals I have ever met, and he is quite capable of reaching his own conclusions. He was influenced by his former mentor, Roger Revelle, while an undergraduate at Harvard. I actually came to the subject somewhat later. We both started speaking out about climate change, with graphical travelling road shows, at approximately the same time.

As a public interest attorney fighting deepwell injection in Tennessee on behalf of a coalition of environmental groups, I only learned about climate change in the late 1970s because the security of future water resources were being argued openly in court. In a real sense, both Gore and I, as well as Charles Keeling, Stephen Snyder, James Lovelock, Mark Lynas or any of the other lookouts we have been hearing from, came much too late to the party. Svante Arrhenius had the killer powerpoint one hundred years ago. In 1906 he estimated that a doubling of CO2 would cause a temperature rise of 5 degrees Celsius. If he is right, and I believe he is, we are already past a tipping point.

While it is not for me to advise Al Gore, whose talents greatly exceed my own, if I had only two words, they would be, "Illegitimus non-carborundum." I look forward to his Nobel speech. I pray it is not an epitaph for our race.

What is your opinion of the Vanity Fair article. Was it fair or vain?

Vain, and it missed the big picture. A fairer view in presenting a hippie history in context is contained in Rupert Fike's book, Voices from the Farm, but that also missed much of a bigger picture. The Farm is more than the sum of its parts. It made history. It continues to.

Can you visualize great changes on The Farm soon? Will plastics be banned? Should people be visiting now and taking any lessons away to share with the world?

I don't think our residents are keen to be a travel destination, nor is The Farm set up for that. People can and do visit and are welcome, within our limits to handle the flow and remain hospitable. There was a time, in the Seventies, when we were overwhelmed by visitors. It felt like Disneyland here. We don't want to have that happen again. The Farm offers "Experience Weekends" to moderate the flow, and people who want to visit might first check our online calendar for those dates.

The Farm is what I would call a "proto-ecovillage." It is a long way from being anything approaching sustainable, and I think most of us would agree that our ability to achieve the kind of harmless lifestyle we aspire to is still a work in progress. We steal from our children with every trip to the movies, every kilowatt-hour of TVA power, and every plastic item we carry home from SuperRama. To say we use only a tiny fraction of the gross consumption pattern of North Americans, or that an increasing amount of that is green-sourced, is scant comfort.

Plastics will not be banned because that is not our way. We have no refrigerator police, no bathroom police, no bedroom police. Who among us would want to stop everyone at the front gate and frisk them for credit cards, deodorant or ballpoint pens? What is this, Homeland Security? People change because they gravitate towards better ways of doing things, like buying wooden toys or starting home gardens. Change at The Farm, like everywhere else, comes from seeing better examples and emulating those.

What you will notice as our contribution is that we are still here, still trying to live up to our beliefs, and in our fourth generation now. The first generation wasn't the pioneers in bellbottoms, it was the parents in polyester, who came later. The second was the pioneers. The third was the children of The Farm, and the fourth, now in our grade school, was the children born to the children, often with the assistance of the same midwives who helped bring in their parents. That is a statement of hope.


Why do you not enjoy doing presentations? Your talk at the Regenerative Design Institute in Bolinas on March 31st was a mindblower and the audience stayed for hours. You have the stamina, so what's the problem?

I guess I feel awkward still, presuming that I know something more than anyone else in the room. I keep getting to a point where I stop and listen, but what I am hearing suggests people in the audience are not as well informed as they should be, so I end up talking more. What makes me uncomfortable is any suggestion that I have any special gift or knowledge that most other people wouldn't have if they did what I do. And the thing is, what I do isn't public speaking. That is sort of required as a catalyst of public policy, which is needing to change, quickly. What I do is permaculture and ecovillage, which is to say, creating and cultivating human ecosystems that are better models for the future.

Your book prominently uses the term "petrocollapse," the first time in any book. Is this term going to take firm hold, or will the world experience some other kind of meltdown that will serve to continue to deceive the public about the reality of peak oil's having been reached?

It is a convenient coinage, but language will always be imperfect. We strive to express what we think and feel, and in doing that we limit the ways we think and feel. All expressions through language are only truncated, partial glimpses of our thoughts or our capabilities to perceive and reason. A book that uses imagery other than language can get a more proximate glimpse, and other media, like touch, still more.

Those with ears to hear will catch the signs early and react. Some will help tell others and develop organized responses. Some will not hear, or ignore what they hear, until the hurricane arrives. And then, as this century unrolls before us, we may come to recognize Peak Oil is the least of our troubles.

Your knowledge of climate change gets as deep as a non-scientist can get. How does your knowledge of the book Six Degrees square with the IPCC? Should we run for the hills now?

Six Degrees takes some studies down off the shelf that were put up there by the IPCC. If I can make the analogy to stovepiping, it is as if the IPCC report, going through the consensus UN process, is somewhat muted in what it says. It speaks of those things that have a high degree of confidence, and you know, those are pretty scary by themselves -- a major human die-off and species extinction, inability to reverse the trend, and so forth and so on. Reading Six Degrees is like getting the raw CIA field reports, only filtered by the Office of Special Planning. You have to take that with a grain of salt. Still, there is a whole lot more there. These reports have made me go back and re-read Jonathan Schell's classic work on nuclear war, The Fate of The Earth, because it ran out the implications of extinction in a very visceral, eloquent way.

Running for the hills won't help. If you want to help, get a vasectomy and start planting trees as fast as you can.

Are you mainly interested in enjoying your family and life's simple pleasures, or has Earth entered in your mind the waking nightmare stage? Are you going to work for the public until all order evaporates?

Well, I am 60 years old and have to think about my health. Last year I became a grandfather and that has made me wonder what kind of world changes that child will witness. With my family and community, we are preparing for hard times ahead. Simple pleasures are still possible. You have a choice about how to take on this knowledge and still function. I think having something positive you can do matters. My son and I plant and tend bamboo. My granddaughter will grow up learning that too.

You have been attracted to Culture Change for a few years, and our readers would like to hear what you have to say about culture change rather than technofixing and reforming "The System." Do you see a future society with "new" values?

Plan A is no longer possible. If we can mobilize fast enough and get across the hurdles coming right ahead, then we have a chance to redesign human civilization. We could get a second chance. A steady-state economy is really our only option in a physically-finite world. So what does that look like? To me the notion of progress is faulty if it assumes we can have endless growth of consumption (and comparable production to support it), but realistically we _can_ have infinite expansion of creativity, arts, intelligence, and human potential. We need to restrike the balance and restore harmony to nature where we, the bi-peds, have disturbed it. Lynas points out that Earth is an old gal as planets go, maybe in her 60s in human terms. She will burn up some day when our sun expands, even if we don't destroy her first. She is probably too old to do the experiment of life a second time if it gets lost this time, and that would be a pity. We didn't really know how far we could take this life-form, and we had only just begun exploring all its various dimensions.

You know, I am beginning to wonder if there really isn't something to original sin. We are such a flawed species... way too flawed to have become as powerful as we did.

What is your recommended list of books, movies and organizations?

A bit too long for this space. We are creating a library of tools at links at i4at.org, the greatchange.com and thefarm.org. I think people should read The Party's Over, Six Degrees, Lovelock's Revenge of Gaia, Holmgren's Permaculture and follow the discussion in journals like Permaculture Activist and Orion. I read the Energy Bulletin and Oil Drum websites and many others, pretty much daily. I recommend, and frequently show, films like Robert Newman's History of Oil, An Inconvenient Truth (with the ongoing updates to the slide show), Bartlett's lecture, Escape from Suburbia, Power of Community, and Power of Nightmares. More good bits are coming out every year.

If there is anyone likely to save us now, it won't be the scientists. It will be the artists.

Hear, hear!
Do you have any final words?

Be well, live long, and prosper. May your children live in interesting times.


[pic]
Albert Bates at The Farm (photo by Gasper Tringale, Vanity Fair)
* * * * *

"Between the ice and ocean: The rising tide": Albert Bates, Culture Change, July 2006:
culturechange.org/cms

Albert Bates' current slide show is available through his website:
thegreatchange.com

Vanity Fair online article on The Farm:
vanityfair.com

The Farm and Albert Bates' main project The Ecovillage Training Center: thefarm.org

"Relearning how to live as voluntary peasants": John Siman, Culture Change (this article will have a follow-up and countering piece in Culture Change in spring, written by "Farmies"):
culturechange.org/cms 

Currently reading : The World Without Us By Alan Weisman

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