08/25/2007
Guns and Gold
You may have read a little about the economic crash in Argentina and how nice middle-class ladies were seen attacking ATM machines with knives amidst other mayhem. Well here's an article formed out of what appears to have been a series of postings to a peak oil message board by a guy living in Argentina. From what he says Argentina is in a permanent post-crash situation and the article is both highly illuminating and very frightening with the advice it dispenses. Particularly worrying is the amount of time the guys spent talking about guns.
Yes I still believe that oportunites for community will occur but I after this I am much more convinced of the need to be prepared for, shall we say, other eventualities.
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08/24/2007
Home Work
Further to Ran’s discussion of roofing materials yesterday, I was indeed glad he bought the issue up, We will probably end up using a modern roofing material on the house we will build but I think we will make it steep enough so that long term some kind of thatch can be used over the top of it when it begins to fail, or else make the timbers strong enough that they can take homemade clay tiles if it comes to that.
Ran quoted an email of mine which ended with:
This roofing issue is hard, maybe we need to get away from attempting to go long term and look at what renewable materials are available locally so we know we can always maintain it.
If we’re looking long term then this really is our only option but I have to admit that it wasn’t my ‘position’ on sustainability that prompted me to make this comment. It was a combination of trying to think really long term along with a quote from a book called Home Work, by Llod Kahn. This quote got the point across to me in a way that no one had previously:
In the early 70’s I got on a charter flight to Ireland, crossed the Irish Sea and got a long ride with a salesman; when he learned I was interested in building he started pointing out buildings and showing us that each was built of materials from near the site. You see the slate roofs, there’s a slate quarry nearby…” and then, “Now the roofs are tile because there is clay in the soil here…” As we travelled through England, it was striking: the thatched roofs in Norfolk, land of marshes and reeds; the sandstone walls of the Cotswalds, where the light tan colours blend perfectly with the surroundings; cob in Devon; flint in Sussex…
I got the book because it has a photo collection of unusual and low-tech buildings in it. It will serve as creative fuel for when I get to designing our new place but it also has more than that. It's full of inspiration for dropping out and using non-mainstream methods of constructing homes. Plus it's great eye-candy. Here’s some of the pictures from the front cover. Note the house on the little island.
One thing that bugged me though was the collection of people in the book who had gone off the grid. The main focus for all of them was their wind and solar power generating systems. Clearly the issue of EROEI was never discussed but somehow it seems worse that in their attempts to get ‘away from it all’ they had actually bought ‘a lot of it’ with them. They had simply altered the energy equation so that they could maintain essentially the same lifestyle - except with the addition of more trees about the place.
A minor quibble though, it's a great book, not just for the know-how but also for the inspiration.
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08/18/2007
Well beaten path
Via Idleworm, we might be the last culture to try large cities but we certainly weren't the first - researchers discover that Angkor Wat in Cambodia used to cover an area the size of Los Angeles.
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08/14/2007
Armegeddon and all that stuff
Just read this excellent article from Information Clearning House by Carolyn Baker. I've read a lot of intelligent and scathing articles about the corruption of America by a guy called Mike Whitney at ICH but this, if anything, is better. For people who don't read Cryptogon or similar sites this article will give you a nice summary of where things are with the US economic system.
Carolyn Baker talks a lot about the corruption of the system and mentions the law changes that are going to be used to control the population, I just wish I could find someone in New Zealand who was making a similar conmmentary for us down here.
I think I'm going to have to resurrect my old radio show so I can have an excuse to interview people like Carolyn Baker.
Stop Press. No I won't. I just went to her website and saw that she already does radio.
Anyway, here's a wee quote:
It is crucial to understand that the current economic meltdown is a transfer of wealth from the middle and lower classes to the ruling elite. Wealth transfers do not just happen, nor are they the products of incompetency. They are intentional and well-planned. Central to wealth transfer is corruption at the highest levels of the economic and political systems
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08/12/2007
Paranoia
I'm feeling really frustrated at the level of paranoia that exists around these parts at the moment. Sure there is plenty of commentary about the technical issues surrounding the money markets, peak oil and the machinations of power but when these technical experts start trying to predict the human response to these technical situations they unknowingly step into an area where I think they are out of their depth. They seem to be quite unaware that their thinking has been colonised by the Mad Max 'scenario' that the elites regularly feed us through the media. I talked about community v Mad Max in a previous post but now I want to deal with this damn paranoia thing.
This has been triggered by Ted's post on the issue but it is just the tip of the iceberg for me.
The first thing I want to deal with is the idea of agent provocateurs. I've got a rough list of people I’ve seen mentioned in this context. Before I get into this though I want to say up front how appalled I am at the lack of judgement people seem to bring to this problem - relying instead on a kind of personalised suspicion to decide who to trust. I really want people to talk less about who the source a particular piece of news is and instead discuss the power of the facts and the argument they present. Naturally this is harder and involves reading more widely and building up our map of the world but if we hadn’t been dumbed down at school this is precisely what we would do without beign conscious of it.
Noam Chomsky. I’ve seen people say he is a CIA asset because of his position on the JFK thing. Whilst anything is possible in this world I find it hard to believe that anyone could fake the kind of analysis he brings to his writings. He’s the best there is in his area. I think we need to accept the role that human emotion plays in the lives of these people (of course to do that we have to first accept the role it plays in the decisions we make, but that’s another posting).
Chomsky is able to obliterate the US government’s stated reasons for it’s foreign policy by using it’s own documents. What he does is impossible to argue with if you’ve got an open mind - Impossible. I think he’s comfortable doing what he does, he's carved out a particular niche for himself and doesn’t see the point in straying into vaguer territory – and he basically says as much.
Besides, if he was a CIA asset he’s not doing a very good job because it was a Chomsky book that got me started on my move away from the mainstream. He’s a great gateway radical.
Amy Goodman and Greg Palast: Yes they have their limits too, they come from a traditional journalistic background and they probably just can’t handle the idea that 9-11 was an inside job (this is a problem for the vast majority of the population). They also hang out with other journalists, especially Palast with his BBC connections, and no doubt have the very human urge to want to be liked and fit in with their crowd. It takes a bloody-minded bastard like John Pilger to be the sort of journalist we’re looking for.
All that aside though, if mainstream journalists were like Palast and Goodman the world would be a profoundly different place.
Michael Moore: Basically Michael Moore is positioned where the Democratic Party is supposed to be, its entirely possible that he provides a boundary to what is considered acceptable leftism but on the other hand he has bought a few issues out into the open in a way that is accessible for a lot of ‘normal’ people and that’s nothing that anyone else I can think of has achieved.
He’s another gateway too, his website has links to more radical sites and he’ll set a lot of people off down a path of radicalism before he’s done.
Derrick Jensen: This suggestion was part of the discussion at Free Range Organic Human on the basis that Derrick does promotes the idea of destroying civilisation and that this would play directly into the hands of the elites. I can just see it now; “It’s not just swarthy men you have to look out for. Now the terrorists look like us. They could be your neighbour, or your friend, or the person behind the counter at the supermarket. You better look out!”.
That’s exactly where the PTB want to take us but Derrick is very real. Like Chomsky the power of his analysis is just too good to be conjured up. Reading A language Older than Words shifted my thinking in the same way my first Chomsky book did.
Having said that though, I see no reason why the PTB wouldn’t promote Derrick’s books, even without his knowledge, because a bunch of anarchists bombing cell phone towers and dams has got to be one of their ultimate dreams.
Daily Kos: OK this guy is pure CIA, no doubt about it
Gloria Steinem: Sorry folks, it looks like the CIA funded Ms Magazine. I found it hard to choose between the jesus-is-saviour link or the save-the-males link but choose the ‘males’ one in the end. There’s a bit of ranting about feminists destroying society but follow their links to their source documents if you want. It certainly does tie in with this astounding interview with Aaron Russo where he said the Rockefellers promoted feminism to help break up the family and make children dependant on the state from an early age.
Now here’s the catch, none of these people need to be CIA assets for this whole thing to work. I just wasted a bunch of time researching and writing this post to try to deal with the paranoia that’s out there, while other people are getting into arguments about it or are just plain confused about who they can trust. All an agent provocateur needs to do is seed a little doubt about various people and they very quickly get us all running around in circles like a bunch of headless chooks.
We shouldn’t forget that going to school made us think we need an authoritative voice to trust so it’s important to rebel by ignoring the personalities and developing our own judgement on these issues.
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The suggestion that Greg Palast was an agent provocateur came from some people commenting at Cryptogon (including Matt Savinar) and Matt turned up again, quoted by Sharon (link see comment 22), in a discussion about a proposed general strike in the US:
“I think most Americans may also be too frightened. I emailed the guy who hosts lifeaftertheoilcrash.com, and he emailed back that participation in a general strike would end with me being tortured and raped in an internment camp.”
I have to say I don’t know what else was in the email but the above advice is not very good. Matt Savinar has a great deal of technical expertise but not a lot of understanding of human nature.
Derrick Jensen has written that the Jews in Warsaw who actively opposed the Nazis had a better survival rate than those who kept quiet. He emphasises this a lot for obvious reasons and it’s something people in the US might do well to remember.
Aside from that though, a proper general strike would involve way too many people for the PTB to deal with. They might assassinate an organiser but getting everyone who strikes would be an impossibility. The PTB know this which is why they have schools and Television to keep everyone apathetic and afraid.
I’m starting to think that if anyone is an agent provocateur it’s Matt Savinar, the paranoia seeping out of LATOC is palpable and as I’ve said before one of my major fears about post crash culture will be the peak oil survivalists. I want to know where they are going to be so I can go somewhere else. Matt won’t tell anyone where he is and may well move again I hear. I don’t think there’s much more we can learn from someone who hasn’t the good sense to build a community around him.
Please note I’m not actually saying he IS a provocateur, I can’t prove that and he’s probably just a graduate of an American childhood of schooling and television. What I am saying though is his advice needs augmenting by reading some Derrick Jensen or Ran Prieur.
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08/10/2007
On the brink
I was planning to write a post about dropping out but geopolitical events of the last two weeks have rather distracted me. It really feels like the financial system is on the verge of a serious collapse. A few weeks ago there was a collapse of a couple of hedge funds in the US and this week there have been problems with funds in Europe as well and now the European Central Bank has released a truckload of credit into the system to make up for a lack of ‘liquidity’.
Basically no one is buying anymore.
Oh yeah, and China is threatening to withdraw it’s support of the US economy.
All this is kind of independent of the peak oil issue and It’s been a long time coming but I’m starting to feel like there’s not going to be much left to drop out of fairly soon. It’s not a good feeling.
I’m supposed to be working on getting prepared to ride out the crash but it’s so easy to get distracted by normal every day stuff – especially when you have children. I have to admit that when I wander round town with everyone going about their usual business it’s hard to hold the idea in my head that it’s all going to end – or at least change a hell of a lot. And when we were travelling in the bus, totally immersed in our immediate life experience it was nearly impossible to hang onto the idea.
It does feel more real this week though, especially as a friend told me ont he phone today that at a spiritual level he feels like a massive paradigm shift will happen in the next couple of days. I don’t yet know what he bases that on but it just adds to a growing sense of unease that I have – and it’s not helping me make decisions. I may actually just have to makes some guesses on a few things - which I don’t normally like to do.
However, in the event of life continuing in a kind of normal way for some time yet, which is just as likely, here’s some thoughts on dropping out;
I was looking in the Cryptogon archives the other day for an old posting and discovered this instead, it’s from the comments as opposed to an actual posting but here’s what Kevin had to say about dropping out.
… I formally studied insurgency and counter insurgency in college. I have a pretty good grasp of how low intensity warfare works, theoretically. I thought long and hard about how I could strike the most damaging blow possible to this diabolical system.
Drop out.
Dropping out to the extent possible is the best choice. Doing that hurts this system in a serious way.
And, nope, it’s not easy out here on the Farmlet. But nobody said it was going to be easy! If I ever start to feel as though it’s too rough, all I have to do is think about that corporate prison camp reality I left behind. Fixes me right up.
What interests me about this is that someone like Ran agrees with him. The two guys are operating in entirely different head spaces, one a philospher, the other a techie but they’ve arrived at the same place on this issue.
The only thing I would add to that is that the simplest way of dropping out is to become debt free, or at least less in-debted. I’d estimate that roughly half of economic activity is devoted to generating income to pay back loans, meaing that half of economic activity is dedicated to gifting money to the people who own our banks, bless their flinty little souls.
Put aside things like leaving our high paying jobs and living lightly, the one, most signficant thing we can do is to focus on getting out of debt. We got our of debt in about 6 years, which means we have deprived the banking system of 19 years of interest payments. The other benefit of course, is that we have a lot more freedom because of it, which was thereal motivating factor at the time - not striking a blow to the heart of capitalism :-) Although the two issues are intimately tied together.
Basically our entire society has evolved as a mechanism for creating wealth for banks, it’s why we must have growth for the economy to function successfully. It's so that us serfs pay our dues to our masters, except now they’ve realised there is a limit to growth and are in the process of engineering a fun new system for us.
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08/02/2007
Teeth 2 (the return of the teeth)
After my recent five-filling marathon at the dentist I decided that whatever modern dentistry had to offer, it wasn't enough for me. I followed some of the links Ran posted after his recent visit to a dentist and here's what I have learned. Some of this is from a retired chemist at this site. I include the link because it wasn't directly included in Ran's selection. In order to really review his ideas I would need to read his book which I haven't done but I do think there is a lot of merit in listening to people from other fields.
1. It's not bacteria that eat into our teeth, it's acid. It is often however the bacteria that produce the acid (by fermenting glucose) when they consume the food we put in our mouth. Apparently this is basic chemistry: The proton on the acid pulls the phosphate out of the enamel and fast, if you sip water is reacts with the acid to form a hydronium ion and saves the enamel.
2. Some food are naturally acidic, like citrus fruit and tomatoes. This makes sense to me, sometimes after drinking orange juice it actually feels like a layer has been stripped from my teeth.
3. The acid does it's stuff for only a short period which is why dentists say not to eat between meals, so that your teeth are free of acid for long periods of the day - if only they could have explained why.
4. Rinsing your mouth with water or milk or coffee neutralises the acid immediately so have a drink to sip while you eat. Note; I tried this and it does leave a weird taste if you've just had something like citrus fruit to eat.
5. Sugars have large molecules so they only eat into teeth slowly. Wash the sugar off by all means but don't panic about it. Also fruit sugars are more complex than refined sugars
6. Enamel is made of Calcium and Phosphate and it can rebuild if we are consuming enough of those minerals - which we currently do not - and I clearly am not.
7. Taking calcium pills and monosodium phosphate pills is one way of strengthening your teeth. Presumably there are foods that will do the same so I'm open to suggestions. Perhaps permaculturists can help us make sure we have the right minerals in the soil to ensure healthy teeth.
8. Vitamin D delivers calcium to the site - so go out and sunbathe! Actually the guy suggested more pills.
9. Brush your teeth with regular bar soap! Sounds gross I know but this guy insists it's a good idea. He says soap is anti bacterial and only takes 2 rinses to wash off. On the other hand normal toothpaste leaves glycerine on your teeth, because it takes 20 rinses to get off, and will prevent re-enamalisation from taking place, Someone on a forum suggested tooth soap which I had never heard of but it might be a more palatable option. Just check the ingrediants first. My 2 year old has experimented with brushing with soap but I have to admit to feeling strangely reluctant.
10. Avoid flouride, it's a heavily negative chemical (visit the site for a slightly lengthier explanation).
11. My teeth still feel funny after my visit to the dentist and it's been a week
Ran's latest posting on this subject has a couple more links one of which confirms some of this and also adds:
12. Don't brush straight after eating because the enamel will be soft and you'll brush some of it away.
It's ridiculous that I knew none of this information before I started looking. I'm going to try it out (not sure about the soap though) and see how it goes. I could hardly do any worse. If you want to add to this or argue please feel free, I'm keen to learn more.
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07/31/2007
Chaos and/or Community
There’s an interesting post over at Cryptogon where Kevin is warning people of the potential dangers of post collapse living, talking about militias, warlords and armed children and teenagers. I don’t disagree that this is one of the potential outcomes of a crash but I do disagree that it is the only way things will turn out.
It’s really important not to go into the crash thinking that it’s going to be mayhem and that you’ll need to be heavily armed to survive. It might be mayhem and you might need to be heavily armed but it would be profoundly stupid to be prepared for only this eventuality. What terrifies me most about that approach is the self-fulfilling prophesy aspect of it. I want to know where all the people are who think like this so I can go somewhere else.
Don’t get me wrong I think the point of view Kevin presents is useful and well argued, and I also think that people who are getting a bit starry-eyed about the re-birth of community should definitely take it on board but I think he also sets up a straw man by referring to new-age gatherings and charkas and auras as the counter to his argument.
Reading M Scott Peck recently he pointed out that real truths have a paradoxical quality about them and that misleading ‘truths’ are very one-sided. This definitely looks like one of those cases. I think it’s bad advice to offer people a single vision, no matter how well worked out.
If you want advice on what the future may hold and you only want to read one essay then Ran’s Fall Down Six Times is the place to go – it contains 6 different predictions and the reader is left with a much more complex understanding of what the future may hold and knows that they will have to use their judgement (which is now much better informed) to survive. If you’ve only got one side of the story, as seductive as it may be, it can be a bit prescriptive and you’ll be left clinging to a plan of the future that goes one way while reality goes another.
Anyway, in an attempt to paint a big picture I’m going to provide some links to stories of how people pulled together, in a very old fashioned way, in time of disaster. It’s the way people always have, and the way they always, will respond in times of crisis. AND here’s the main point again, these are not predictions of the future – they are stories that will inform your ability to cope with and plan for the future. It’s wide open baby.
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Here’s some of the text of an interview I did with Joe Polasicher. Joe is an Austrian born, New Zealand based permaculturist who was a child in Austria after WW2. He talks about that but also about a visit to a shantytown in South America where he discovered people feeding themselves from very small but highly complex stacked systems in tiny courtyards. It also has other useful links including to the original radio interview and this other posting about the same stories.
Here’s a radio interview of Geoff Lawton, another permaculturist.
He went to Iraq a couple of years back and discovered a town where the local people were keeping their infrastructure running by means of their own ingenuity. Again, I’m not saying the stories of mayhem in Iraq are somehow misleading, only that both chaos and community are happening as a response to their problems. Here also, are links to a Ran Prieur essay, scroll to the bottom to find some text about this interview.
Here’s something else I wrote about the issue of post-crash strategy that I just rediscovered.
Here’s Ran’s lesson’s learned from Katrina.
Here’s what I think is the best article about the untold story of Hurricane Katrina. But also: how people comandeered a bus, how people formed into tribes, and how soldiers threw bottles at people during the crisis in New Orleans.
And lastly, in Ran’s archives, a guest post from Patricia. I don’t know how to link halfway down a page so go there and scroll down to November 22. Here’s the first paragraph though;
So, I was following links around, and I see this conversation about survival in the suburbs -- and it made me depressed. What's wrong with these people? Not one of them is thinking about working on having a local community in place now, so that in the event of any trouble, the people in your neighborhood will work together and help and protect one another. Not one of them!
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The last thing I want to say is that instead of trying to create security with the end of a gun the best way to protect your food is to make so much food that you can afford to give it away. It’s a great way to make friends who will help look after you later on if it comes to that. It’s a big ask to try to get your entire district set up to produce an abundance of food but it’s my aim around here. I’ m not sure how much I can achieve but anything will be an improvement on sitting here with my tins of spam and boxes of ammo. So here’s the last link – to a town in Ireland that is setting the pace in community-wide preparedness.
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07/26/2007
Teeth
Quite by coincidence, when Ran’s new posting about his teeth appeared I was sitting here with a numb face having just got back from getting 5 new fillings in my teeth. There’s no holistic dentist near here so I went to the local one and asked for the white fillings thanks.
To be honest I despair about my teeth, when I left school I had no fillings but ever since then I can’t go to the dentist without getting more put in. This time I set a new record. Five in one go, in a marathon 2 hour session. The dentist shook my hand at the end.
For some reason I had this powerful sense of dread before going, which is why I had put it off for so long, the feeling gradually subsided while I was there but it didn’t help matters at the start. To make matters worse my jaw seized up at one point and I could barely open it. I was trying hard to focus on something else (I was estimating the length of my finger nails by sense of touch at the time) and had my eyes closed, when I realised that the dentist and his assistant were laughing, I became aware that my mouth had closed up and the assistant couldn’t get the sucker thing out. I hadn’t noticed previously because my entire mouth was numb and I couldn’t feel what she was doing. I could only hear the tool clattering against my teeth.
I’ve decided to fast today in an attempt to mitigate against the mercury that has no doubt flooded through my body since they removed an old amalgam filling in the process. I’m not sure how effective it will be but the whole family is away today so it’s an ideal time anyway.
As for what’s going to happen when lights turn out and the dentist can’t get painkillers any more I hate to think. To be honest this is probably my biggest fear of post-crash life. I know there is a native plant called Kawakawa which Maori used as a painkiller plus there is the option of getting bombed out of my tree before going for post apocalypse dental care but really I would prefer to just have good teeth.
And yes, I know about the Palaeolithic diet. Weston Price came to New Zealand, collected up a bunch of Maori skulls (don’t ask me how) and worked out that pre-European Maori had dental cavities at a rate of one in one thousand. I'm pretty sure I could live with that.
I congratulate people who have made this change to their life and I’d love to hear from anyone who has successfully put an end to dental problems this way, but I have a young family and other priorities. Making any kind of change is difficult but one like this is near impossible, especially as I doubt that I could convince the others to give up grain-based foods and I know we couldn’t afford it.
Additionally, food is a comfort device – some would say a necessary comfort for civilisation - and I imagine that until the temptation is removed there will be minimal chance of this happening for us.
Damn, I can still feel them aching…
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06/21/2007
I said it once but I think I got away with it
This has been on my mind ever since I started this blog but somehow I’ve never got to it until now. A Thursday a while back I had two interviews lined up on my radio show. The first was of a member of the NZ Green party and the second was of regular interviewee Jon Eisen (editor of Uncensored magazine). The first interview was my big splash, first time coverage of peak oil intended to bring an IMPORTANT SUBJECT to the attention of my listeners.
So I did that and then came Jon. I think the interview was supposed to be about free energy but Jon soon got on to rusbbishing Peakniks for being a bunch of unwitting suckers in a conspiracy to raise oil prices. I was a bit pissed about having my show hijacked and Jon is from New York so we were soon involved in a heated debate at the end of which I ended up saying something along the lines of; so we’ll probably never know whether peak oil is a scam or not but either we it’s going to happen to us.
Jon rounded it off by telling everyone to go to their computer and google ‘abiotic oil’. I myself found several sites, (including Ran’s, so it was definitely worth it!). Of specific interest were the Campaign for an Informed America run by a guy called Dave who had intersting stuff but who kept going off on tangents about a fued he was having with Mike Ruppert, leading me worry a bit about his judgement.
Far more credible was this site by J F Kenney who explained in great detail that the abiotic oil theory had been developed by the Russians a few decades ago and that the science had gone through a long periof of debate and was now considered to be accepted fact in the Russian scientific community. He also said that they had been drilling for oil very successfully using this theory for some time. My problem with this site was that it was very heavy on the science and I just didn’t have the time to wade through it all.
Now if you mention that you’ve been reading about abiotic oil to peak oilers they’re inclined to laugh at you in the same way that a rationalist will if you admit to believing in god. I’ve seen people’s entire credibility destroyed on peak oil lists with the simple but devastating “…but then he believes in abiotic oil”. Typical of the rebuttals of abiotic oil is this one by Richard Heinberg where he claims that only a small proportion of Russian scientists support the abiotic oil theory, he makes no attempt to explain how he came by this information, nor does he appear to speak Russian (unlike JF Kenney) so I'm kind of concerned about his biases too.
This is all a bit worrying, there seems far too much expectant excitement amongst peak oilers at the prospect of consumer culture and it’s consumers getting what they deserve. Aside from the dubious nature of this excitement it also seems to blind people to other things that are going on.
I’ve seen people rattling off lists of all the countries whose oil production is in the process of peaking without the slightest sign of awareness that the odds of that are actually quite small and that the peak refers to a global peak only and that it won’t necessarily coincide with any one country or field’s peak.
Coinciding with this first coincidence however we also have two more peaks. One in world wide natural gas production and another in world wide food production. Yes, that’s right; peak food.
On top of all that it would also appear that the US economy is also being being deliberately driven over a cliff by an apparently blind and incompetent US administration.I don’t claim expertise in any of these specific areas, and I'm open to having my mind changed but I do wonder just how unlikely the coincidences are and I especially wonder why hardly anyone is prepared to say it our loud. The only site I’ve noticed asking questions about what might be behind this is Cryptogon. Peakoilers are kind of scary, sometimes I even find them more scary than peak oil itself.
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02/14/2007
East Cape
Normally a country is forced into following the neo-liberal economic model by either the IMF or a CIA-backed dictator. New Zealand however, did it voluntarily causing a lot of disruption to the lives of the little people and having a permanent effect on the economy from which the country has only just recovered 20 years later.
When I say ‘the country’ it sounds as if the whole place is now prospering but in fact there are some areas that seem to have been permanently cut adrift. We’ve just travelled down the east coast of the North Island where I used to live as a child. My childhood memory may be a bit vague but the rural area really seems to be in a state of serious decline these days.
Travelling across the top of the East Cape it appeared that a lot of the farmland on the hills had been returned back to forest - by design or chance, I don’t know. Much further south near Gisborne the farms looked a lot more prosperous. In between though are the farms that are on the brink of failure.
The photos show very dry conditions but it’s not until you up close that the entire hillside has barely enough grass to hold the soil together. Most of New Zealand is quite lush so this was a bit of a shock and frankly I’m surprised people are still trying to make a living out of this land. The soil must be exhausted.
Remembering that this is an area where my family lived for a few years, I was stunned to discover some ruins at Tokomaru bay, 50 kilometres north of where we used to live. Except for the lack of bullet holes, the last time I took pictures like this was in Croatia eight years ago and I just didn’t know there was anything like this in New Zealand.
This must have been a thriving area at one point, these are large warehouses even by modern standards and the picture below shows what is still the country’s longest wharf. It has tracks on it for goods carts and must have been quite an engineering feat in it’s day.
In 2007 however the thing is barely able to take it’s own weight and there is a sign warning visitors to allow no more than ten people to every 12 metre span. Many of the handrails are falling off and underneath much of the reinforcing steel has rusted and broken through the concrete.
There are also a lot of abandoned houses and especially shops in the area but what really amazed me was to see people living in houses like this.
If you open any book on New Zealand history you’ll see black and white photos of buildings exactly like this with white settlers standing in front looking proud to have finally moved out of the tent.
This has always been a very remote part of the country – some farms had to use the beach for access right up until the 1970s - and while I freely admit to having lived only in the ‘nice’ areas for the last few years I was surprised to find an area with such a prosperous past where civilisation is so clearly in retreat.
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09/06/2006
the place to be
I’m starting to notice what may be the beginnings of trend amongst crashbloggers which is to finger New Zealand as the place to be survive the crash of civilisation. First Samadhisoft.com had this to say as he boarded a plane for a trip to the South Island of New Zealand: “I believe New Zealand is likely to be one of the best places in the world in which to get out of harm’s way”
And then I discover that Kevin from Cryptogon has just moved here to start an organic farm. Naturally my first thought was concern that we were going to be over run with people escaping the United State’s coming meltdown but then I realised that a) not many people are smart enough to work all this out AND act on it and b) those who are that smart are precisely the sort of people you want around during the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it.
Then of course I thought of c) which is that our countries immigration laws naturally select for rich stupid people. From what I can tell Kevin is marrying a New Zealander which is how he can do it.
The only flaw in this theory might be that in order to survive climate change access to a continent (north America for instance?) that runs from the equator through to one of the poles might be the best bet for real long term survival.
So anyway - who else is thinking of coming down here? - we could do with a few more organic farmers around where I live
ADDITIONAL: I mentioned JHKs visit in the previous post, well, he also has a post about his visit on his blog in which he says he was NOT here to find a plce to hide in the comign storm. Otherwise his observations of NZ were pretty much on the mark
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08/30/2006
James Howard Kunstler on mainstream TV in New Zealand
There's a guy with a top rating news show in New Zealand who keeps breaking the unwritten rules of mainstream journalism and last night he had James Howard Kunstler on his show. It's prime time (7pm) and it's not the first time he's covered peak oil. I think it's safe to say we're ready to move into the denial phase. Here's the link
It's far from ground breaking news to visitors of this website, I'm just surprised to see him there
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07/05/2006
What would Cheney do
Everyone seems to credit Dick Cheney with being as cunning as a fox, within the confines of his lunatic worldview that is, so here's an article about where Dick's putting his money.
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04/26/2006
Denial
The price of petrol down here is now pretty much double what it used to be a few years ago and because of that rising oil costs are now a common conversational topic. Because of this I have stopped being careful about how I bring up the subject of the coming crash and have accidentally confronted a few people with the idea.
In some ways it’s been fascinating because without exception everyone I have spoken to has gone into immediate denial. I’ve never been witness to such a clear example of the sub conscious mind steering the conscious mind - it’s kind of like there’s a gravitational force that pushes the conversation away from scary topics.
I wasn’t completely confrontational either. One couple I spoke to exist mostly in the fringy world I do, they’re good vegetarian, home-schooling, co-sleeping, alternative types but nonetheless the mention of the crash was immediately dismissed. Another person I talked to was someone I respect greatly who had just bought up the subject of the ‘end times’, we spent a couple of minutes with him coming up with alternative fuel solutions and me pointing out their flaws before I stopped when I realised he was starting to get a bit grumpy – something I have never seen him do before.
Another common response was to refer to a documentary that had been on TV a week earlier about the oil sands – it seems to have served as a reassurance that ‘things will be OK’ for a lot of people and must therefore stand as a truly masterful piece of PR/propaganda.
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04/14/2006
Crashblogger
There were some great comments by Ran yesterday about the power of words:
The best I can do with words is help people get their minds in a place to better navigate these interesting times, to see opportunity instead of horror, to see opened doors instead of closed doors.
This is actually something Ran excels at. His last essay, a collection of post crash scenarios actually succeeded in lifting my mood for the rest of the day – not necessarily the easiest of things to do I might add.
My fear is that the people who see an apocalyptic horror coming our way in the future and are preparing for it (a sizeable proportion of the peak oil community) will bring it about because there’ll be all these people around the place with bunkers full of tinned spam and defensive munitions waiting for the hungry hordes to come and attack them. Hopefully they'll all find their way to Ran's site soon/
Ran also wrote:
I think it's actually helpful to admit you're looking forward to the crash, because that puts out in the open something that a lot of people think in secret. It breaks a taboo that prevents us from seeing opportunity in catastrophe. I think pretty much all crashbloggers, even the most "pessimistic," are craving something, anything, that loosens up this tight, tight world, even if it kills them. As I once wrote:
Of futures where humans survive after this system falls, one of the worst imaginable would be where the earth is barren but the violent selfishness of civilization continues. But we know this as the "postapocalypse" genre of popular adventure movies like The Road Warrior. That's how bad our own world is -- that we fantasize about a world with war, hunger, and no trees, just because we'd get to be outside all day fighting for something that matters, instead of cowering in sterile buildings rearranging abstractions.
That last sentence is fabulous but I want to add that amongst the anti-civ sites I’m hanging out at online it also feels taboo to admit you like civilisation. The truth is I’m going to miss it, I’m going to miss hot showers, rock concerts and the fabulous technical doodads that I’ve bought over the years. I’ve got my life to a point where it’s reasonably disconnected from civilisation and I’m able to pick and choose what I participate in more than most people can. I like having groovy civilised stuff at my disposal but I’m also going to miss the world I grew up in. Even though I know how damaging it is, civilisation’s imminent demise makes me sad.
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04/11/2006
Here we go again
I first learned of Toby Hemmenway’s new essay during a visit to the Anthropik site. After reading their review of his work and the associated reader comments I was in full agreement with the idea that Toby had pushed things a bit far this time. However when I actually read ‘Apocalypse Not’ I discovered that there were whole sections that had not been referred to in the review. They’re sections that I think are incredibly important because they apply some critical analysis to Peak Oil dogma. They’re also sections that are liable to get a guy branded a heretic.
Something that has bothered me about the peak oil movement for a long time is the almost religious dogma that goes with it. It’s a dogma that a guy might challenge at great risk to his reputation within the movement. It’s no surprise that Toby Hemmenway is the one to make the challenge. As a permaculturist his reputation has been made (and can only be broken) in areas other than peak oil. Since I have no reputation to defend I too will come out in support of his ideas - despite still feeling the subtle pressure to fall in line (just don’t mention abiotic oil OK?).
To be fair there are bits of the new essay that don’t handle the scrutiny but I’m fine with that because there are whole other sections that raise important challenges to the peak oil mythology and that’s more important to me.
Ultimately what’s up for debate here is how fast we crash. I think a lot of the time people haven’t agreed on the definition of ‘crash’, or of ‘fast’ either. What Toby has shown in his essay is that the down slope from Hubbert’s peak will possibly be shallower than we might have thought. This is an important consideration because the gentler the slope the more time we have to adjust and the less chance there is of total chaos resulting. Will there, for instance be enough time for mass conversions of farm land to organic production – or even batter staggered conversions to organic agriculture.
Once again, I remind readers that I don’t think that organic agriculture is going to deliver us into paradise – only that it will provide a useful step on the descent back to the stone age – a useful step that will help prevent a lot of carnage.
The whole issue of time is important too. I’ve often come away from peak oil discussions thinking that disaster is imminent and that panic was the only option available to me. According to what I had read in the past I had thought the crash would be a lot more advanced by now. It could be that the crash is preceding at a fast pace considering the history of human affairs but that in comparison to the time scale of my life it is quite slow. For this reason I recommend Steven Lagavulin’s Timeline for Unfolding Crisis of Mankind since it’s written by someone who understands well the operation of our current economic system.
Of course there is the whole issue of environmental collapse which has the potential to make peak oil irrelevant or at least of compartively minor importance. I’ve seen a little of the article* I mentioned in the last posting and although I knew my country was in denial about it’s clean green image I have to admit surprise at just how bad things are here. Once again I reiterate, if this stuff is making it into the mainstream (without the usual ‘balancing’ with industry funded viewpoints) then it really must be too late.
Sleep well everyone.
* Only shows the first two paragraphs
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04/09/2006
More Loosening
Following the previous posts discussion of the mainstreaming of the environmental crisis - now that it's too late - This week's New Zealand Listener came out with a front page screaming "New Zealand's Dirty Secrets" The 10 worst eco-crimes and how they endanger us all.
And still on the front page; "The hot spots - From Auckland's toxic child-care sites to Alexandra's polluted air".
The front page ends with a reference to an article inside about the Rolling Stones who also are not what they used to be. Theres a picture of Keith Richards and he just looks terrible.
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04/02/2006
Catchment Plan
I flicked over to Anthropik this morning and discovered what appears to be the beginnings of a debate between Jason and Steven from Deconsumption. This is not the first time I have had this impression. Jason himself says that he likes to get into a debate to see what comes out of it but as has happened in the past I don’t think there is actually a debate here.
Steven posted his thoughts on how to choose a small town to move to in preparation for post peak collapse and Jason has responded by saying that small towns are no good because we’re going back to the stone-age (that’s extreme paraphrasing btw). The reason I think there is no actual debate here is that I believe Steven’s posting was about what to do next. Not what to aim for. Jason is talking about what to aim for but seems intent on reaching the end target at about the same time Steven will be getting to his next target.
Jason’s posting implies that small town’s surviving successfully on the agricultural model will have 100 years to prepare for the step where they go past agriculture to more sustainable survival techniques. His statement that they won’t be able to stay with agriculture for ever gets no argument from me and in fact this end goal of arriving back at the stone age is something I attempt to build into every bit of future planning I do. I presume that this is something that Steven also does (without stating it explicitly every time).
The real trick with all this I think (and this is something I have tried to emphasise before) is that for most of us going directly to stone age living is not an option. In fact I would have to argue that only childless and probably unmarried people in their 20s could contemplate it. I certainly know having a young family means I’m not in a position to do that. It’s not that the kids couldn’t cope – in fact I’m sure they’d be fine. The problem is me.
And I should add that (based on my own personal development) I wouldn’t expect a community of childless, possibly relationship-less people to last long. I had not achieved a sufficient level of personal growth at that stage of my life to be able to contribute to a tribe. I would have been a liability and so would most young civilised adults. This is not an indictment on them so much as the parenting techniques of civilisation.
Despite being well versed in the possibilities of the coming crisis I also know that I am not ready to walk away from civilisation, in fact I’m not ready to do anything different at the moment. Nuclear Family Hell (to borrow someone else’s phrase) is not a strong position to do anything from – it’s a position to endure. If it wasn’t I would already be preparing to set up a village. It doesn’t end with me though. I hardly think I could convince my parents to walk away from civilisation, so I need a better plan if they are to see out the rest of their natural lives.
In actual fact I don’t know anyone who I could convince to walk away from civilisation and join a forager tribe. So I need another plan.
At first I thought my old idea of living in an ecovillage might be the way but it soon became obvious that an ecovillage couldn’t absorb an influx of permanent visitors very well and it certainly couldn’t handle difficult security issues.
Therefore I’ve given myself the same advice people are trying to give to George Bush (if only he would listen). True security comes from catering for the needs of all the people. I’d like to aim at preparing my entire catchment to be ready for post peak living and if that goes well, to use that as a model for other parts of New Zealand. I know that last bit is a little ambitious but I figure it’s worth a try.
The first step in the long descent is actually to implement measures that will enable civilised life to continue pretty much as-is. This does sound a bit contrary but bear with me, this is possibly the most important phase. The main reason people aren’t ready is because they don’t know they need to be ready. They won’t know until it’s too late.
If I stand up today and tell everyone the sky is going to fall in they’ll laugh at me but after the sky has fallen I’m pretty sure they’ll be keen to listen. If a few measures like setting up a green dollar system can be implemented now it will provide a cushion during the period when the economy is passing from recession to depression to total collapse. During this time it will become apparent to more and more people that things are changing for good and they will be more inclined to walk away from modern ways of living.
But why do we bother with a bunch of civilised people who are in many ways the enemy of the earth? Because, in my view, to write them off is to be less than human. To write them off is to take the ‘civilised’ approach. To write them off is to be supremely rational and isn’t that one of or problems at the moment?
Of course the flip side of altruism is that it has a self-serving quality to it. Joe Polaischer mentioned in his interview with me that once people get desperate it’s too late. They stop caring for the environment and just look for the next meal to eat and the next tree to burn for warmth. It’s something he has seen in those parts of the world that are already in crisis and it’s something he is anxious to not see again.
Something else I don’t want to do is to write-off organic agriculture. Sure, it’s the food source of empire and sure, it still depletes the topsoil over time but once again it’s a step – and a pretty good step too. Talking to the organic farmer who presented at our GE hearing the first thing a farmer must do when they convert from conventional agriculture is to get the soil functioning again. They take an active part in this over a period of several years.
It’ll be a hell of a lot easier for the earth to repair itself if we’ve already done a lot of the work and it’ll be a million times easier to prevent chaos around you if the land is under organic ‘management’. I don’t care if we have to use capitalist arguments to convince people to farm organically – the more the merrier. It’s also a good way to turn farmers into activists which can’t hurt.
Anyway, once people really understand that the world is changing, and truthfully I still find it hard to believe, they will be ready to move on to those next steps. None of this will happen if I turn primitive and head for the hills. If I do that I shouldn’t be surprised if the part of the world I depend on follows the pattern that has already been set in the more desperate parts of the third world which is to fall apart under me.
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03/30/2006
Community Peak Oil Prep
It’s becoming more and more apparent that living in a small town might be the best bet for coping with Peak Oil and Steven over at Deconsumption has just written a useful article outlining the criteria by which someone might choose a small town to live in. However, for those of us who already live in a small town that fits the bill there is the next stage to consider.
My town Raglan (score 9.5 out of 10 on Steven’s criteria) is indeed well suited. I’ve talked before about the changes that Raglan needs to make to get ready. Essentially they can be listed as; Ensure a wide spread of permaculture knowledge, start seedbanking, start a farmer’s market, get a few people exploring alternative fuels, start a green dollar system and take the banking system out of the picture by extracting locally owned investment money from the corporate system and investing it in local people. Continue the great recycling scheme we already have.
What’s great about this stuff is that even without peak oil we’d be better off making these changes. What’s also great is that many of these changes/initiatives can be made without having to waste energy on getting the local council on board.
Having said that though there is a small town in Ireland that is preparing for peak oil and they do have the local council on board. My hat’s well-off to Rob Hopkins and the students of Kinsale Further Education College for their Energy Decent Action Plan and especially for the community consultation process that they used and especially-especially for being able to communicate their ideas to the council.
The section on food is particularly good with ideas like planting food forests on every available patch of public land (another thing that would make a town a better place right now) and encouraging slow-food and organic agriculture - with a detailed strategy.
I do have some criticisms but as the report was successful at swaying their local council the following comments must be read with the understanding that they are the sort of ideas that might put a council off and even though its important to consider them I myself would take them out if I was having to deal with an organisation like that.
The best example of what I am talking about is in their youth section. I’m not happy with some of their plans to ‘engage’ youth in the changes that need to be made – especially the ‘young mayor’ idea. This is exactly the sort of fakery that is a contributing factor in the troubled lives of young people in our culture. Teenagers are dying for something real to do and here we are with an emergency on our hands and we’re giving them more pretend stuff. I would rather see their energy put in to something that matters.
Most of the ideas are very directive which is typical of civilised thinking. I’m not sure how quickly teenagers raised in civilisation can get out of old habits (probably quite quickly if they are taken seriously) but I’d prefer to see them given a lot more leeway to come up with creative solutions to peak oil problems. Then rather than adults expending energy to keep them busy the teenagers (who have the most spare time and energy anyway) could be a net contributor to the problem solving. I’m not sure how this would work in practice but I know that we need to change our approach to this age group if we want to have a successful community.
As for Education – I’d love to see the schools closed down, the kids put through a permaculture course and the school grounds planted with a food forest. I don’t expect many people would agree with that but at the very least the teaching of permaculture could become a focus of the curriculum and rather than leaving it to the transition year like the Action Plan suggests I’d start teaching it at kindergarten age - judging by my 3 year old’s enthusiasm for the garden this would be very successful (do we need reminding that ‘garten’ is German for garden?). This way the children could plant their school grounds into a food forest themselves. Once they’d done that each class could also become responsible for getting a food forest planted on a patch of public land near the school. This would be a wonderful way of getting permaculture knowledge into all the homes in the town too, the kids could teach their parents! – how’s that for a revolution?
I don’t know what to do with their Housing section. I think what they suggest is good but the building industry is so closely tied to the economic growth engine that I think this area is going to be a really unpredictable one. I also worry that too many of our houses will be impossible to get right for a low/no energy future. Even here in the north of New Zealand where we have a benign temperate climate I feel that some houses will become dangerously cold in winter. I shudder to think what will happen in other parts of the world.
I have no major complaints about the rest of the report, I was surprised to see a section on tourism but upon reading it I can see what they are planning makes some sense. What I really should do now is get off my butt and start talking to other like minded people in town about the report and see what we can get happening.
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03/18/2006
Stir Crazy
I didn’t intend for this blog to be a catalogue of nuclear family strife but unfortunately that’s where my life is at right now - it’s bugging me a lot at the moment because the realisation is hitting home that despite doing a whole lot of things right in the way of attachment parenting it’s pretty clear from our kids that they’re still suffering from being raised in civilisation.
Unfortunately (but also fortunately) it is true that a lot of nuclear family strife would evaporate if we lived in a village. I’m sure not all of it will since we bring civilisation with us where ever we go but let’s dwell on the possibilities for the moment.
One of our current problems is that our oldest (at 3 and a half) is going stir crazy being stuck at home. We were out last night visiting friends who’ve got kids as well and the place was a mad house. In the midst of this was our daughter being incredibly calm and independent, totally different to when we are at home where the atmosphere is very calm and quiet and she feels compelled to create a mad house to bring the stimulation levels up to meet her developmental needs (at least that’s my theory).
She generally wants an adult nearby at all times. It’s fine if I am working outside, both the kids come out and muck around somewhere within sight of me but if I am spending the day on the computer – look out! Either I get constantly interrupted or Karen gets very little done.
The continuum concept discussion list has been discussing just this issue. One writer reminded us that in a stone-age village, small children would be able to wander around finding new and stimulating things to do without needing to drag an adult with them because there would be a variety of adults doing a variety of activities in a variety of places. Our daughter needs to be self directed at the moment but still wants an adult nearby so her solution is to try to get one of us to come with her. We of course resist and either go about our own work or try to direct her into another task.
Directing her into another task produces the best immediate result and for a while peace reigns throughout the house. Unfortunately we are once again reverting to civilised parenting techniques whereby we rob our kids of the ability to think for themselves and to learn about themselves. What our daughter is doing when she is bored is entering a ‘search pattern’ of behaviour. She is trying to find her own way and then we come along and treat her like she can’t figure out things for herself and give her an officially sanctioned activity to do. The central message of this approach is that she couldn’t possibly know what is right and therefore needs someone in authority to direct her.
This message is one of the most insidious that a child receives and one that John Taylor Gatto emphasises in his writings. Next time you’re at an adventure playground where under-fives are playing – go and observe the parents, in my experience they will almost all be telling their kids where to climb next rather than letting them explore. The constant dishing out of instructions seems to be almost instinctual amongst modern parents.
Now, at last, to the positive side of the post. The village vision/fantasy I have is that there will be the options necessary for self directed play. Children can play where ever they like; little kids can play in the central areas which most of the buildings look out to, the older ones can go explore the forest up the back of the village land (or the older ones can take the younger ones to explore the forest). Alternatively they can go hang out with adults doing work in the gardens and learn how to do permaculture, or they can stay inside and help an adult with whatever is going on there. They could go hang out with the elders and listen to stories or perhaps they will have arranged for one of the adults to teach them something that day and there will be a group doing that.
We are determined that we want nothing to do with organised schooling but worry that home-schooling could be as stressful as having little ones at home. Even if we make it work, it’s entirely likely that they’ll end up wanting to go to school anyway since that’s where many of their friends will be. But not if we live in a village. A village should be a safe environment and I really like the idea of just letting the kids run wild. Anything else would involve a degree of coercion and coercion is always so exhausting – for both parties concerned. I’m also very confident that children left to their own devices will learn most everything they need to know.
In the meantime, while we're not in a village we have to work on building a community around us anyway, one where there are similar options for our kids - we'll just have to connect up those options with out cars.
02:15 Posted in Big Ideas , Crash | Permalink | Comments (14) | Email this
03/03/2006
Survival Village
There’s an interesting posting on Deconsumption at the moment talking about how the coming crash is going to quickly divide us into either a group that can cope with the changes ahead or a group (much larger of course) that can’t.
Once again Steven mentions Ecovillages as a solution to post-peak living. Despite the fact that this blog was set up to record the potential creation of an ecovillage I’m not sure that I totally agree with him. I’m don’t want to rebut his argument though, so much as build on or add to the thinking that prompted idea that ecovillage living is a solution.
In a recent post I said that I thought Ecovillages were a great way to escape civilisation but not a great way to escape the crash of civilisation. I do think they are a great way of building a tight knit community, of building a tribe that will stick with you through thick and thin. There is no doubt that being part of a community will help us survive a lot of difficult stuff but the point is you’ll need to have a really tight-knit group by the time you have to do something like say leave the village and disappear into the forest (should it come to that) – and that will take time to acheive.
If a village is set up in a hurry as a post-peak survival technique it will fail, no doubt about it. Being united by desperation will only work for so long and pretty soon the profoundly different views that such a group are bound to have will start to tear it in different directions.
Also, someone moving to an ecovillage purely for survival purposes will also find after a time that they don’t really fit in. Actually I wouldn’t want to move to a village that would let in someone move in so easily anyway - It’s not for nothing that the successful villages have 3 month trial periods with new villagers.
My other concern about villages as a solution is that unless you are extremely isolated people are going to come knocking on your door for help and if you don’t give it they will likely make your life difficult. I mean, how many extra people can a village cope with? I don’t want to see friends and family suffering so does that mean I invite my relatives and friends to come and stay? What if everyone in the village does that?
What if we don’t do that?
I’m not sure that things are going to get that bad here in New Zealand but the US is a whole ‘nother ball-game, if you’ve got food and a roving band of hungry people want it, how are you going to stop them? The only cure for this kind of malady is prevention.
I figure the best prevention is to make sure your entire district is ready for the crash. This is something I’d like to see happen for the are I live in. It means having lot’s of food (and heritage seeds)ready to go, not just for the locals but for all the people who come to your area for help. It means having lots of permaculture knowledge in the community so that there are plenty of teachers for the many new students that we’ll soon have.
It also means having systems in place to make the crash as gentle as possible for the local community. First up is the necessity of planting permaculture food forests in all the public parks to cater for those who haven’t managed to make ends meet. It means having a green dollar system in place so that people can still trade locally when the bottom falls out of the economy and the national dollar becomes worthless. It also means having something like the Solari system proposed by Catherine Austin Fitts whereby existing wealth (in the form of life savings etc) is removed from the hands of the corporate sector and reinvested locally.
Eventually there will be no economy but these ideas are essential for softening the crash locally and maintaining security - especially food security - in your area. In the event of catastrophe a healthy district will fend off attack much better than a village. One additional point about that too. It’s entirely likely that the authorities will turn out to be one of our biggest threats. The best antidote to this that I can think of is to have a good relationship with your local non-white community because they’ve been well aware of the need to distrust those in authority for generations now and I imagine they’ll be much more useful to have around than a bunch of fearful whiteys who’ve been trained to snap to attention when authority comes calling.
Lastly on the topic of security I have some concerns about the peak oil movement. This is kind of counter intuitive but the peak oil movement and it’s survivalist tendencies worry me. These are the guys who are most likely to have their bunker and lifetime supply of ammo ready when the crash comes. It could be that the peak oilers turn out to be a major liability in a post peak world – intent as they may be on carving out some kind of Mad Max fiefdom for themselves. They lack a decent analysis of civilisation and are preparing for ‘total anarchy’. I know nearly everybody has a poor analysis of civilisation but most people caught short in a crash scenario will act on instinct and are quite likely to form into impromptu communities as happened in New Orleans. It’s the ones who’ve had time to do some forward planning that worry me the most. (I should add that I don't consider Deconsumption and it's readers to be in that category)
Essentially what I’m saying is that whilst ecovillage living is a much more sustainable way of life and one that does provide a useful model for post civilisation living and does encourage the learning of skills that we are going to need, there are other concerns that we will soon be facing and they come under the heading of security. It’s a rather militaristic term but as we have learnt from our horrific history of military excursions, true security comes from looking after everybody– not just from looking after number one and putting a big fence between yourself and the raving hordes outside.
22:50 Posted in Big Ideas , Crash | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
03/02/2006
Escape
I’ve recently realised that one of the great themes of civilised life is that of escape. Not that people will like to be told that a major factor of their life is the desire to escape civilisation but the way they live their lives surely betrays their words.
This only really hit home for me when I considered how advertising uses the concept. Holiday travels are always sold as ‘escapes’ or ‘the ‘ultimate getaway’. It is undoubtedly significant that we talk about our holidays from the pressures of civilisation in the same way that we talk about a jail break. Perhaps we should pay more attention to what our sub-conscious is telling us.
If we have a problem in life, our solution is usually that of escape. Job sucks – get out. Don’t like your town, evacuate! Don’t like your wife – run away! And if we can’t change the circumstance our usual recourse is to endure the circumstances until they end – again treating life like a prison sentence.
What happens then for people who escape civilisation by entering an ecovillage? Will they end up like the institutionalised prisoner who makes a break only to find that they don’t know how to live outside the prison walls?
Ran Prieur makes the point when giving advice about dropping out that it should be done slowly. Likewise with communities he recommends that the transition should be a lifelong one with movement back and forth between ecovillage and civilisation. There are after all, plenty of stories of people who try to make a total escape only to end up back in civilisation – perhaps like the mythical repeat offender who has come to prefer life behind bars.
Unlike the repeat offender I don’t imagine it’s practical for an ecovillager to spend long periods of time away from the village and in fact this is one of the potentially terrifying things about an ecovillage – especially the ones hidden deep in the middle of nowhere. Getting out is not easy. It is with some considerable relief that I’ve taken on board the idea that I might try to find ways of easing this pressure.
For instance I really like the town we live in and would feel disappointed to leave it and it’s people behind, so why not put the village in the town – or at least connect it up – maybe we can get the best of both worlds.
I had already come to the conclusion that in a post crash world a village standing by itself could be quite vulnerable and that getting my town (Raglan, pop. 3000) prepared for a post-peak world would make more sense for short and long term survival and security. It would be easy with Raglan too, there’s probably more permaculturists per head of population in Raglan than anywhere outside Australia.
I haven’t gone very far into this yet but I think the idea is worth pursuing. Land on the edge of town is quite expensive but in a post-peak world that will probably change. It also makes sense too in that we would then be ideally situated to do things like serve the town’s food and seedbank needs. I expect that are also other potential ‘synergies’ (to use a highly debased word).
One of the things I’ve learned about designing built environments for groups of people is that there needs to be physical places all along the public/private continuum so that people who want to have a quiet moment alone, people who want a small gathering and people who want a party can all be catered for.
Likewise I imagine breaking from civilisation might be the same. A village on the edge of town will hopefully have access to a wilderness out the back, a traditional group-life experience and also connections with the town. Connections with the town can then be broken down into full-on, such as working in the town, partial like doing business with the town (either by going to the town or the town coming to the village) or sporadic according to need or desire.
Sounds pretty good to me. I guess now it’s just a matter of figuring out how to make utopia happen.
21:35 Posted in Big Ideas , Crash | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
02/23/2006
Nomadic Villages
In a comment a few posts back Jason from the Tribe of Anthropik promised to write an analysis of where the early primitivist trailblazers went wrong and what his tribe was going to do differently. A couple of days ago he posted the article and whilst it is more theoretical than I had imagined (that being the problem with imagination) I have gleaned a couple of things from it that partially satisfy my curiosity on the subject. He writes:
The key is to end our reliance on civilization--not necessarily our interaction with it. Civilization will not allow that; rangers, CYS, and a whole array of government impediments have been erected to ensure that.
Which means they are:
…looking at buying several small pieces of land, adjacent to a national forest. The forest will be our range, but to avoid the attention of authorities, we'll own the land we actually live on. Land taxes, hunting and fishing licenses, and other such requirements mean that we will still need a small flow of monetary income. There are a number of ways to procure that, since the flow is quite small.
I must admit to still being frustrated about why previous attempts at primitivism have ended with the people going back to civilisation. To me there is not enough analysis available to learn from especially if I compare it to the information about the ecovillage movement where we see a generation’s worth (of a wide variety) of experiences. 90% of ecovillages failed but we are now in a position to figure out why and start to improve that percentage. I’m definitely no expert on this but I’d say we are lacking this experience base for forming hunter/gatherer communities at the moment.
It may be the case that with tribes requiring less civilisation and less complexity they will have less difficulties but even so I have no idea how far down the track primitivists are. I do know that the Tribe of Anthropik will make mistakes along the way, not because they are mistake-prone but because that is the lot of pioneers. I would say that they are well equipped to reflect upon their mistakes and make adjustments but ultimately only time will tell if they make it.
I’m going to keep going with the comparison between ecovillages and tribes, and for deeper reasons than that both are being looked at as responses to the crash. Ultimately both movements are an attempt to avoid the alienating void that civilisation has left us - as Brent Ladd discusses in his account of primitive life. Near to, or maybe right at the core of these two movements is a need for real community. I think that civilisation is by definition anti-community which is why so many people are trying to escape it. And I don’t just mean from within these two movements either. The overwhelming experience of most civilised people seems to be one of attempted escape. How many times do people leave their jobs, the towns or their relationships to escape some kind of problem – only, of course, to find the problem rear it’s head once again.
Relocating to a tribe or village can help us get around the problems jobs and towns bring us but with relationships it’s going to be different. For this issue it will be a case of: ‘We can take the people out of civilisation but we can’t take civilisation out of the people’.
Civilisation is clearly an abusive and destructive force at it’s edges where it’s gobbling up new territory but in order to staff the work of civilisation the stewards and foot soldiers at the centre of civilisation also need to be abusive and destructive. The best way of making people like this is to treat them in an abusive way – preferably from as early an age as possible.
That’s all a very complicated way of saying that civilisation screws us up big time. There is no doubt that we will bring civilisation (in the form of those screw-ups) with us to these other ways of living. It’s taken at least a generation and a myriad of different experiences to start to figure out how to form strong communities in the village situation and even now there is no guarantee of success for those starting a new community.
According to Jason Godesky:
The Tribe of Anthropik is a community. If you see us focusing more on the nitty-gritty, understand that's only because we've already forged our community and can now turn our attention to the practical reality of primitive life.
I must preface this by stating that I don’t know too much about the tribe and that I don’t doubt that they are a community but I would expect that their community hasn’t been tested yet – at least not fully. I would say that they all have a pretty clear handle on their tribe’s vision so that’s one essential base covered but as far as I can tell they haven’t yet had the experience of living together and sharing all their resources, (financial or otherwise).
Speaking more generally now it is my belief that a group of people endeavouring to fo