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LIVING IN PLACE! |
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March 24, 2005 What we CAN do about Peak Oil Peak Oil is a reality that the mainstream press are already thinking about mentioning one of these days. Until it appears on TeeVee, with a florid backdrop and dramatic music, it doesn't really exist in what passes for the minds of the American public. Nevertheless, petroleum geologists around the world are in agreement that Peak Oil will arrive soon, if it hasn't already, at a gas pump near you. The common response is: "Well, Somebody should do something about these high gas prices!" And who would that Somebody be? The Oval One won't do anything about it, at least not until he's told what to say by his oil-smeared handlers. This new crisis must not be revealed until it has been spun properly, allowing sufficient profit to be gained through futures speculation and other economic fantasies. The Vice-Oval has had Peak Oil in the plans for some time, even while holding the reins of Halliburton, just to mention one trans-national corporate oppressor at random. In 1999, Cheney told the Institute of Petroleum: "For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day." The Government is not going to bail us out of this one. They've opened the sea cocks and taken all the life boats, leaving us to cling to the fantail as we sink gloriously beneath the waves. It's think or thwim from here on out. Since we're left to our own devices, we may as well work our own way out of this mess. Centralization and industrialism are the core problems, so decentralization and local, small-scale production are the answers. We start at home. Choose a place to live that requires the smallest heating and cooling budget. Choose or modify our homes for maximum solar gain in the winter, minimum solar gain in the summer, well insulated with good non-metallic double pane windows. Grow as much food as possible around and in our homes. Choose our work places close to home so we can walk or bicycle to and from work, including at noon so we can enjoy a good nutritious vegetarian meal with our loved ones, and a glass of good wine. Choose our homes within walking or bicycling distance to markets, library, schools and live music and entertainment. Eschew television and other propaganda devices. Listen to local, independent radio, read progressive journalists, cruise the internet for alternative sources of news and information. Don't believe anything we hear and only half what we see. Participate in neighborhood associations, home owners associations, volunteer fire departments, neighborhood road associations. Attend local civic councils and assemblies and testify regularly in defense of neighborhood and community values. Run for local office. Work for local candidates for local office who support community values, democracy, local self-reliance and mutual aid. Buy what food we cannot grow at local farmers markets. Participate in food co-ops and community supported farming programs. Buy local until it squeaks. Do not darken the doorsteps of big box stores, food chains, fast food emporiums or malls for any reason whatsoever. Get rid of all but one small fuel efficient vehicle and drive it only once a week for 10 miles or less. Make use of the wonders of electronic media to confer with colleagues, share pictures with family and friends, visit exotic foreign lands. Get rid of every gadget around the house and neighborhood that has a gas motor attached to it. Yes, that includes the leaf blower. Especially the damned leaf blower! Get to know our neighbors, work with them on neighborhood and community projects. Block off the street and throw a block party. Organize a child care co-op for families where both parents work. Learn real practical skills: plumbing, electricity, home repair, car repair, appliance repair. Soon we won't be able to buy a new toy when the old one breaks; we'll have to fix things instead of pitching them in the "trash." Work on a farm, apprentice to a car mechanic, build a house, install a toilet. It's fun, it's cheap and it's empowering! Change our work from full-time to part time. Reduce our income drastically; that way we won't have to give so much money to the war machine. Sell our oversized houses and move into a rental home half its size. Hold a garage sale and get rid of all that stuff in the garage where our cars were supposed to park. Strive to never buy anything new except toothpaste and underwear. Everything we really need can be found used and in great condition at the flea market or thrift store. We'll know we're on the right track when we don't spend any money for three to four days at a stretch. Soon we won't know what to do with all the money that piles up around the place. Chuck it away, invest it in a home place that produces energy and food. When we lower our standard of living, we increase the quality of our lives. We don't own Things, they own us. If we do these things, that is, if we live as my wife and I do in our 5th and 6th decades, we won't care when the oil barons have all dripped dry. And we'll be living in a world the better for our decisions. Michael Leona Gulch Pacific Plate February 28, 2005 BioregionalismThe twin geophysical crises of global climate change and peak oil production, coming about coincidentally in human history, have precipitated a human social crisis. They have revealed, for all the world to see, the ultimate failure of the two hundred year-old human experiment in centralism and industrialism.Human beings have separated themselves from the mass of non-human life in two major areas: systemic centralization of power and authority, and the separation and commodification of natural resources for exclusive human use. No other species engages in systematic centralization of authority. Yes, some species do have pecking orders. These are transitory and do not result in systematic and unchanging hierarchies of authority and control. Only humans engage in coercive, centralized, political control. Only humans separate natural resources and guard them from access and use by other individuals and species. Only humans view the resources of the earth as "products" to be used for individual human gain and profit. In these two ways, humans are bucking the mainstream of biological evolution, among all the millions of species on this earth. And now the chickens have come home to roost. The bluff is called and we've revealed our cards, a miserable pair of deuces. The entire thrust of biological evolution, from the first replicating DNA strands to non-industrial Homo sapiens has been towards cooperation and mutual aid. Apologists for the industrial status quo point to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, mistakenly interpreting "survival of the fittest" to mean survival of the strongest individual, when in fact, Darwin observed that survival of the fittest meant the "community most fit to the existing environmental conditions." In any event, no matter how modern individuals interpret an historical treatise on evolution, its plainly obvious that "survival of the fittest individual" results in societal failure! Individualism cannot continue in a universe based on cooperation. If individualism were transcendent, if competition were the ruling law, then this "civilization," if that's what it is, would be triumphant, would be the epitome of biological evolution, instead of the miserable failure that is apparent at every turn. Since the centralization of energy, power, politics and economy has demonstrably failed, it is clearly evident that decentralization is the road we should have taken. When one is standing with toes hanging over the edge of the precipice, progress consists of turning around and taking a step forward. What would a decentralized, cooperative society look like? Such a society would be bounded by these bioregional principles: 1) Limitations of scale 2) Conservation and stability 3) Self-sufficiency and cooperation 4) Decentralization and diversity Government of such a society would be libertarian (defined as concerned with liberty), non-coercive, open and democratic. The people in such a society would be engaged daily in the processes of decision making in their neighborhoods, communities and bioregions. Food production would be dispersed throughout the community, with each family having its own gardens, and additional food provided in local, multi-crop farms providing nutritious, unadulterated food for local consumption. Energy production would be on-site, with each home and work place producing all the energy required to maintain its inhabitants, plus a surplus that could be distributed to those in need. There would be less of a boundary between city and country, less separation between work and home, less distinction between leaders and followers. All decisions within a bioregion would be based on a thorough understanding of the characteristics of the web of life of which we are but a part. Any action that threatened damage to the bioregion would be regarded with utmost horror, a crime of major proportions requiring drastic social sanction. The interests of the human community would be in all cases synonymous with the interests of the larger bioregional community. Decision-making would begin at the local level, with residents dealing with problems affecting their own neighborhoods. Problems that transcend the neighborhood would be dealt with by ad-hoc federations of neighborhood associations from among the neighborhoods affected. Problems affecting the community as a whole would be dealt with by a federation of all neighborhood associations. Problems that transcend the community would be dealt with by federations of community associations. Regional and "national" governing bodies would be replaced by federations of regional associations. Membership in the federations of associations would be by delegate appointment, with delegates authorized only to carry the brief of the parent association. The delegate would not be able to make any independent decisions on any issue without discussion by the parent body. All are expected to take part in the associations. Those who decide to not take part in the decision-making process, also decide to eschew the social benefits of membership in the society. In this way the local organization is engaged with all decision-making from the local to the meta-regional. There would be no central body to hand down decisions to the people. All would have a direct interest in the outcome of all issues, and all would have a say in any decisions. This seems Utopian to us in a society based on coercive, central authoritarian rule and representative republican government, where appeal to authority is the norm, and a centralized constabulary maintains social order. Yet, the vast majority of human history has been within societies based on the above principles. It is only within the past two hundred years or so that we have abandoned the major thrust of human society. It not only can be done, it is the only way that human society can continue much longer in the future. It's a bit scary, starting out on something new. But, as with everything, we start out with small steps. We start out by withdrawing our support from central, authoritarian rule in our lives: in our home, our workplaces, our local, city, state and national government. At the same time we work to build supportive, cooperative social structures, based on bioregional organization and mutual aid. We build local currencies and local economies, we support local food production for local consumption. We support locally owned businesses that provide locally produced goods and services. We work to preserve and defend local biological and social diversity. We teach our neighbors the skills necessary to become self-sufficient and self-reliant. We work with our neighbors and community members to build up systems of local political autonomy and reject the support and control of centralized government. In this way, when the central authority begins to crumble, we are prepared to carry our own weight, to provide for ourselves and for our neighbors, friends and families. We are engaged in the community of all life, a contributing member of our bioregion, giving to the whole, as we receive from the whole. Michael Lewis Leona Gulch Pacific Plate October 7, 2004 Another day of biodiversity on the Pacific Plate: This morning was crisp and clear, with a glissade of stars orbiting slowly overhead in the early morning sky as I biked to KUSP at 0 dark:30. Dawn crept slowly up the sky behind the eucalyptus along Schwann Lagoon, gently awakening the cormorants to carefully plan their day of hunter-gathering along the shore of Monterey Bay. By the the time the sun burst into the room with a lot of "what's all this"-ing and "what have we here"s, the Sparrow Serenade was tuning up and the hummingbirds were practicing their morning tunes outside the window. Dust motes danced to the cheery harmony of golden-crowned sparrows, as the sunlight squeezed through semi-opaque windows on the second floor of Park Place, once a community meeting hall, then a church, now an office complex for public radioheads, acupuncturists and New Age (rhymes with sewage) navel contemplationists. The workaday world: Jean and I keep our bit of Paradise functioning smoothly throughout the day, pretending to work as we play. This evening was our time as we made our way Downtown, such as it is, to observe the local flora and fauna, some of them indistinguishable from one another. We stopped for refreshment and conversation at El Palomar: venerable residential hotel, eatery and public house, for nachos and margaritas, and well sustained, made our way out into the teeming night. All the usual suspects were assembled: Umbrella Man, with his pastel plumage, shuffling, glacierlike, along the sidewalks, his bemused smile a permanent fixture; cross dressers in resplendent array; the black leather, pierced, tattooed set pulling their attitudes behind them on loudly squealing skateboards; "got change for a slice of pizza?"; the public flautist; the flaunting floozies; the cool jazz from the coffee house door. The P & P was quiet and smokeless, the thrift stores doing a steady but minimal business. We had to convince the proprietors to take our money for a pair of sandals that were unpriced. It's a community whose bell-shaped curve of phenotypic expression spreads far and a-wee. Three-piece suits to torn dungarees, chrome studded collars to silk ties, cool urban hip to the Land of the Lost. All within a four block length of a single street. Meanwhile, a short walk away, pelicans stow their ample beaks for the night, cormorants wheel through the darkening sky to their eucalyptus perches, great blue herons clack and glide to their nests in the high branches. Soon the night shift checks in, harbor seals and sea lions sing their barking chorus to the night herons, the bats and sleepless human neighbors. Biodiversity in this small piece of the planet is not what it once was, but it is what it is. Michael Leona Gulch Pacific Plate "As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness." - William O. Douglas, 1939 - 1975 US Supreme Court Justice Ah, Spring!There's something about the first warm day of spring that brings out the idiot in humanity. Dia del stupido! Perhaps the rays of the sun boil the brains accustomed to keeping themselves warm and dry through winter rains. I understand why men turn stupid in the spring. There's only so much blood in the human body, after all. When the young beach lassies bounce around on the vollyball court sans clothing, for all intents and purposes, the male mental apparatus empties itself of blood, as another male organ, far more demanding, takes command of the situation. The results resemble an obscene, doglike Disneyland creature carrying a large piece of driftwood. Nothing good can come of this, and it usually does. Meanwhile, the roads are clogged with vehicles of any description, filled with young bodies intent on scenic amusement, watching everything but the road ahead. Those humans temporarily motivating themselves on two feet scramble for the curb, bicyclists pedal furiously for safety, those who were riding in the bike lane to begin with at least. It's America at play, seriously consuming their way to what passes, for the moment, as happiness. Yes, we need more of this, the developers say. We need more spring idiots clogging the roads and sidewalks of our fair village, making it more like large coastal cities to the south, at least in the income department. Let's double the size of that there 1950s style hotel on the beach and build a huge parking garage across the street, so they can all park their SUVs and Hummers within gasping distance of the nearest gas station. What, that's not enough you say? Well, let's built a cute little trolley from the next village, so we can charge em nine bucks a head to travel to our bigger and better amusement attractions; both ways! It's important to pack them in and out as quickly and efficiently as possible, so as to keep the wheels of commerce eternally grinding out a profit, at public expense, for the fathers of our community. Those of us higher up the slope, out of sight of the frivolity on the beach, need only wait patiently for the ocean to rise as northern glaciers melt into the world's ocean. Our time will come. Our beachfront property is only another 8 mpg SUV away. Life is good. Michael Leona Gulch Pacific Plate The Over the Hill GangOut of sight, out of mind and out of their heads, 5 million human beings hum in busy angst on the other side of the San Andreas fault, on the North American continent, where they belong. It's a different world over there, tuned to the daily commute, coursing in six-lane veins of automotive circulation, congealing in clots of effulgent stationary frustration at every opportunity, fostering road rage, spousal abuse, alcoholic excess and other products of a fully modern anti-civilization. Life is good. Here on the Pacific Plate, life hums quietly to itself at a different frequency. Yes, the old-timers say it's gone to hell, but compared to everything else "American," life here is a peaceful idyll. Even 7th Avenue, just outside our bedroom window, as bad as it is at times, is a country lane compared to the automotive excess of the Bay area. It's no wilderness, though there are moments of passing solitude and contemplative quiet among the redwoods in the hills about. Just a short walk from the house is a preserved remnant of what once was extensive coastal prairie, dotted with venerable live oak, frequented by flitting bats, great blue herons, red tailed hawks and their rodent breakfast choices, a place to stand still for a moment and appreciate the unhuman complexity of Nature left to its own. From here you can see the peak of Loma Prieta, the epicenter of the 1989 earthquake that shook this community to its foundations, a reminder that, as always, Mother nature bats last. It's a nice place, a peaceful place. I think we'll stay here for a lifetime or so, maybe two. Unless the ninnies and feebs in Washington get too uppity, when it will be time to pull up stakes yet again and head for the nearest horizon, searching for a community where democracy is so common it has no special name. Michael Leona Gulch Pacific Plate November 28, 2003 In attempting to come to some understanding of the whole human/nature/living in place/capitalist/socialist/[insert -ism here] ... mess, several quotes popped up on my screen that set me to thinking: "We must learn to think not only logically but biologically." Ed Abbey "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Buckminister Fuller Yes. Biologic. A new model. What is biologic? Bio-logic. What is thinking bio-logically? The laws of ecology: "All things are interconnected. Everything goes somewhere. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Nature bats last." Ernest Callenbach Is this "Natural Capitalism?" Waste is food for the next process? Designing the human world to function within natural processes? Biomimicry? "If you become convinced that you exist as a part of something that is itself alive, you are more likely to take pains not to do damage to the other vital parts around you." - Lewis Thomas Is it sufficient to avoid damaging the other parts? Must we not contribute to the well-being of all as well? "To think out in every implication the ethic of love for all creation -- this is the difficult task which confronts our age." Albert Schweitzer Or is this an ethic, a new way of thinking about humans as part of the entire life envelope of this planet? "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise." Aldo Leopold We are aware. Now what do we DO with this awareness? Are we doctors? Psychologists? Repairmen? Inventors? Do we lead the way to a new world? Or do we take our place as it has always been, waiting patiently for our return? "Pardon me, I must run. The people are moving and I must get in front of them, for I am their leader." Mohandis K. Gandhi "Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us." - Carl Sagan This includes elsewhat and elsewhen. It's up to us. Now. "Things that can't go on forever, don't." Stein's law It's hard but it's fair. "More than at any other time in history, we are at a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us us hope we have the wisdom to choose correctly." Woody Allen So this is it, then. There's no hope. All paths forward lead to the edge of an inescapable and surely fatal plummet to the jagged rocks below. "When you have reached the edge of an abyss, Alwyn Rees said in Wales, the only progressive move you can make is to step backward. A New Zealander whose name escapes me improved upon this retrograde advice with an alternative; turn around, and step forward." David Brower, "Progress as if Survival Mattered" Is progress a straight line "forward?" A spiral, always moving upward? Or is progress non-linear, expanding in all directions at once. Is progress a single approach, or a diversity of approaches? Perhaps we should just turn around and fly off in all directions! What would happen if we, each in our own way, in our own bioregions, in our own communities, worked toward a new bio-logical model that is part of something alive, interconnected with all life, including and most especially our own. What would this look like? What would we do? How would we be? Let's get started now! July 6, 2003 I'll never forget the town of Bill, Wyoming 82631. I had a post office box there once. Bill is at the intersection of four ranches, each owned by a man named Bill. It consist of a store/postoffice... and that's it. Families come to Bill to get their mail and pick up goods they've ordered from Laramie, about 100 miles to the south, if memory serves, which it does with decreasing frequency these days. To the south of Laramie, on the road over Virginia Dale to Fort Collins, Colorado, is Tie Siding, Wyoming 82084. Tie Siding consists of a store/post office, a garage... and, that's it. Tie Siding used to be a..well, a tie siding, when the railroad was being built from Cheyenne to what later became Laramie. Crews brought railroad ties down from the denuded hills to be picked up and carried to the end of the line heading westward. Now Tie Siding is the place for local folks to get their mail and pick up goods ordered from Laramie. I spent a leisurely afternoon in Tie Siding once, pulling the engine out of my 1964 Volkswagon bus. Despite the hyperbolic claims of the Chamber of Commerce set, Life, The Universe (if that's what it is) and Everything do not depend on continued economic growth, an expanding population and a Mal-Wart on every block. Somehow we managed to get to this point without all the modern conveniences, well within my memory, and I'm only 53 years old! It's not that everything costs more these days. It's that expectations have been prised up and raised by corporate marketing, to the point that folks no longer know how to use a broom or a rake, or any form of simple machine that lacks a starter switch or a computer readout panel. The other day Jean and I witnessed a woman putting away her gasoline powered lawn mower after completing the daunting task of mowing the 3 feet by 6 feet patch of grass in front of her house. All right, seven feet. She could have trimmed it much faster with a pair of pinking shears. The family of four across the street use their legs and feet every day... to walk from the back door to their five cars, about eleventy bazillion times a day. When it came time to trim and tidy up their tiny two foot by twenty foot bit of botanical display outside their mobile home... yup, gasoline powered weed whacker, which not only whacked the weeds into powdery fluff, but destroyed the carefully designed, manufactured, shipped, displayed, sold and installed drip irrigating system as well. Then they poured herbicide on the remaining green, turning it brown, in place. What does this have to do with post offices? Rumors of the death of towns built on human scale are highly exaggerated. In small towns, folks have to know, or learn, self-reliance and self-sufficiency. They learn about scale, about the relationships among humans, plants and animals. They learn how to live in the world, not on it. When the Mal-Warts close their doors because they can no longer afford to ship cheap plastic goods from China, as we enter the end of the Age of Oil, we'll still have our post offices, clean and quiet communities and varied and spacious wild lands for our non-human coinhabitants. Michael Leona Gulch Pacific Plate |