Dismantle Civilisation

William Kotke’s article on Carolyn Baker’s Truth to Power website could have been written by us.

Since Babylon, the type of human culture that we live in has featured an emperor or surrogate who is surrounded by a handful of wealthy militarist/financiers. These people own and rule the realm. This class has historically gained their power and wealth by feeding off the people and by growth/conquest. This class has always urged growth as the means to increase their power and wealth. There were always new fertile lands to conquer and peoples to enslave. The configuration of the culture of empire which we call civilization, has not changed in six thousand years. Today in the U.S.A. less than one per cent of the population has more than three quarters of the wealth. Certainly they have enough wealth to buy and run the government and have a land ownership pattern that rivals the land barons of Guatamala.

This culture has increased its population by running a net deficit of the fertility of the earth. The soils, forests, fish stocks, pure water and over-grazed and desertified landscapes have been sacrificed to the god of growth. Now there are no more fertile lands to conquer and exploit, but the population continues to grow and the fossil fuel production reaches peak and begins to decline. The culture that has no vision of the future and no purpose other than material consumption hits the wall.

In the past few centuries the elites have gained a new method of growth/conquest. The lever of Science/technology has been used to further their power. Through the creation of industrialism, we now live in a manufactured environment. We civilized people have created machines and been conditioned by the machine world until we begin to act in a machine-like manner. Powerless, we are thoroughly dependent upon the machine for our food and shelter survival. Alienated and atomized, we move around trying to fit into a niche in order to obtain survival. The pressure to move to a job breaks nuclear families apart and certainly precludes the existence of extended families. We have become interchangeable ciphers in the industrial machine. We have been culturally conditioned from birth to have great regard for non-living manufactured items and have been alienated from living things. We have more regard for the dead wood of a church than for a living forest.

Today, when we look at the numbers and look back at those millions of acres of exhausted and eroded soils, common sense tells us that this is the end. The Patriarchs of empire have committed us to a fundamental biological error. Any organism that wantonly kills that which feeds it will not endure very long. The culture of empire does not have a political problem; it has a biological problem. It lives in a bubble of self-created definitions and has a dysfunctional relationship with the life of the earth. One might say that if the humans can’t keep the planet alive, they certainly can’t live here.

For several million years our successful ancestors maintained adaptation to the ecological energy flows of the earth. Now, humans have become so biologically maladapted that we are in the third mass species die-off, the last one being the dinosaurs.

It’s just common sense that we throw out the whole of the culture of civilization. If even a small part of the human species is to endure, we must return to foundational principles.

The millenniums-old project of the imperial elites to control every thing in front of them and indeed, wishfully, the universe, has failed.

That is the emphasis of Dismantle Civilisation, the perspective that civilisation is a con designed to centralise power and domination in the hands of a few people, while giving us the illusion of progress, freedom, development etc. To return to the root, which we need to do in order for some of us to survive on this beautiful planet, we need to throw out the whole culture of civilisation/empire. Thank you William, we couldnt have summed it up better ourselves.

The human species is seriously out of balance with the natural world. The obvious answer to this is for the species to regain balance with the natural world. Simple common sense morality would say that first we need a society that agrees that each of us is alive and not a bio-robot and that each of our lives have intrinsic value. We shift from a war/competition – death focus to a principle that all life has value. Life is the growth system. Consuming living ecologies in order to amass piles of baubles is ultimately not a growth system.

Common sense morality would say that we humans should aid the living earth and that the simple morality would be that we humans aid in the complete ecological restoration of the earth back to its climax condition. This is the least that we could do given the grievous damage that has occurred. Of course this is also the pathway toward our survival.

A modern human normally enters the world in an austere hospital, possibly experiencing birth trauma. The child is baby-sat by a TV and then later turned over to a mass education institution for further conditioning. After graduating they get to work in a cubicle until they retire and die.

In a culture in which the growth of life is the paramount focus, the pregnant mother would become a center of community energy. Recent scholarship has shown us how important it is for both mother and baby to receive soothing and comforting energies. Great community energy would also be focused on the children. Just like all the other species around us, the “growing” of children would be a central activity. In a Life culture we would assume that the society would be formed in such a way as to encourage every possible talent of each individual. As we symbolically move out of the patriarchal/intellectual to the feminine/feeling mode the social dialog changes. The successful growing of life of all kinds requires a feeling for it and some application of the intellect. We would begin to follow perceptions and conclusions brought to us by our feelings rather than conclusions derived solely from intellection.

Listen to your heart, the land, the trees. Pure intellect is sterile without the input of our feelings and recognition of the energies around us.

It’s just common sense. If humans want to live on this planet they will have to restore the life of the earth. This seems like a tall order but the imminent death of billions is also a large event.

Answers have come bubbling up out of our mass intuition. For decades skills have been building in the practice of Permaculture so that seed communities can restore ecosystems, build soil fertility and produce more food per acre than the industrial system. Hand-made houses with solar advantages built from local materials are scattered around the planet. There are examples of hand-made houses with solar advantages that can heat and cool themselves without outside energy. The world-wide move to ecovillages is well under way with Russia alone having now over eight hundred.

Bill Mollison, one of the co-originators of Permaculture says that, “Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order.” The intuitively forming ideal is extended families occupying their own private permaculture design with a number of these families occupying a watershed. A number of watersheds constitute a bioregion. This is a natural social/political framework in which the needs of the earth are re-presented in human society because the humans are advocating for the life and gaining survival from that life. We might call this biological democracy.

Human/earth centered, rather than object centered, this new movement promises to become the next human culture. Human social institutions tend to form around food survival systems and be resonant with the morals and purpose of those different activities to gain food; we would expect the new culture to do the same. When some or all of the seed communities make it through the apocalypse, they will be the ancestors.

Many flail about trying to save the dying beast of empire by recycling their tin cans or inventing free energy machines but it is just common sense that if we want to aid the life of our great, great grandchildren we will ignore the dying beast and put our living energies into the new way of life.

Just do it. Ignore this dying beast, perhaps help to put it out of its misery in whatever ways each of us is capable of, and work with us to create a new society and culture. We can learn a lot from the indigenous cultures of the world, and by listening to the land.

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Another fabulous post from Sharon Astyk. Good advice.

1. How not to panic.
2. How to learn things – and how to teach them.
3. How to get along with everyone else.
4. How to deal with an immediate medical crisis in an emergency.
5. How to feed yourself.

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An excellent introduction by By Aaron Newton & Sharon Astyk.

needs and wants locally would reduce our dependency on oil and natural gas in advance of their inevitable decline in availability. One obvious benefit will be the enormous amount of fuel saved by reducing the amount of food shipped all over the country. Fewer refrigerated tractor trailers crisscrossing the country means less oil needed as a nation.

Changes like removing some of the mechanization from our agriculture and reducing or eliminating the use of inorganic pesticides and fertilizers will reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and the foreign countries in possession of the majority of what remains of these fuels. Two thirds of the world’s remaining oil reserves are in the Middle East.[xviii] Much of the remaining natural gas is there too. If we needed a great deal less of their oil and NG to grow our own food, we would be less likely to get caught up in deadly conflicts that require huge amounts of money, energy and worse yet, the lives of our men and women in military service. Imagine if we refocused the amount of money and man power spent intervening in Iraq on learning how to again grow our own food without Middle Eastern oil. We could disengage from a region that obviously isn’t interested in our meddling.

Less oil involved in growing our food will also mean more oil available as feedstock for precious commodities like medical equipment and necessary pharmaceuticals. Rather than a drastic decline in the availability of really important petroleum derivatives, removing the fossil fuels from our food could help us more gradually adjust to decreasing stocks of these fuels. Even more important, the health benefits of a more localized, nutritious diet might reduce our need for medical equipment and drugs.

Making this change now rather than waiting until the peaking of fossil fuels creates more severe social disruptions is important because it will take time to learn how to grow our own food without fossil fuel inputs. And it will take time to learn how to cook with whole ingredients and to adjust to a more seasonal diet. These changes will be much easier if we do them now while we have time to adjust rather than more abruptly in a time of crisis.

Exactly what we have been encouraging people to do. This could be an opportunity to lessen the stranglehold that huge corporations have on us and our society too.

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Paranoid? We don’t think so. Conspiracy? Well, no, its just a system that engineers us all to think the same, put money before truly good things like health, community, fun, joy and love, and rewards the people who subscribe to this worldview the most with positions of power, privilege and wealth.

As Mike Adams, on Natural News says:

The social engineering recipe

Pulling this off, of course, requires a bit of social engineering by the USDA in order to force the public into demanding something be done. If you’re the USDA, you can’t just suddenly announce a national food sterilization plan; you have to prime the pump with a bit of dirty work. Here’s the simple plan for accomplishing that, if you’re the USDA:

1) Conduct poor inspections of fresh produce on purpose, in order to cause a large increase in food-borne illness outbreaks. (We’ve seen this increase happen over the last 12 – 24 months.) This can be easily accomplished by reducing the budget of food inspection offices, or removing inspectors from the payroll altogether (which has already happened).

2) Wait for the outbreaks to happen. When consumers get sick, run national press releases announcing how dangerous the food supply is.

3) Watch the consumer reaction as people and lawmakers demand “something be done!”

4) Fudge a study with the American Chemical Society to show that washing doesn’t work and that irradiation is the only solution. Time the release of this news to coincide with the public outcry that “something be done!”

5) Once the public is demanding a solution to food-borne illnesses, roll out a national produce irradiation requirement that sterilizes all the food.

Mission accomplished! This, of course, leads to point #6:

6) Watch the population become increasingly sick and diseased (thanks to the lack of phytonutrients that used to be found in the fresh produce), and cash in on your Big Pharma shares as the population is herded into hospitals for lucrative treatments with monopoly-priced pharmaceuticals.

Its not as though supermarket food is actually healthy, without irradiation! Take a look at those labels on the processed foods. They almost all contain the same industrial ingredients, and fresh food in the supermarket has been picked unripe, sprayed to stay ‘fresh’, even dyed to appear better, in some cases. About as far removed from a decent healthy fresh meal as is possible – or maybe not. Plans are afoot to nuke it all – presumably this would increase shelf life too.

What “they” really want: A dead food supply
Let’s be blunt about this: The corporations running this country (which also run the U.S. government) want the U.S. food supply to be dead. They don’t want foods to be used as medicines, and they sure don’t want the natural medicines found in foods competing with their own patented pharmaceutical medicines (that just happen to earn them a whole lot more money than any food ever did).

Don’t you find it curious that this attack on the food supply is coming out now, right after all this incredible news about the healing power of foods has been hitting the science journals? Every week, it seems, we find out about another amazing health property in a food. Black raspberries reverse oral cancer. Pomegranates halt prostate cancer. Green tea halts breast cancer. The list goes on. Just on this website alone, we’ve probably published 1,000 stories over the last two years on the disease-fighting properties of foods.

The thing to realize here is that many of the healing properties of these foods are destroyed through pasteurization or irradiation. If you’re a government that wants to “take away the People’s medicine,” the fastest way to accomplish that is to mandate the sterilization of the food supply. Kill the foods and you take away the People’s medicine, and that forces the population to use pharmaceuticals instead.

The FDA, for its part, has for many decades conducted its natural medicine censorship campaign, whose only purpose is to deny the People access to accurate information about the healing properties of natural medicines found in foods and herbs. But apparently that wasn’t enough: The Internet came along and people found a way to educate themselves. So since the FDA couldn’t keep the truth about natural medicine bottled up and censored, the government has now apparently decided to just sterilize all the foods, thereby destroying the natural medicine and transforming Mother Nature’s gifts into dead calories.

The USDA’s decisions here are not based on public safety, folks. They’re based on corporate greed. Just look at how they handled the raw almond controversy in these related articles: http://www.naturalnews.com/almonds.html

The USDA as operated today is a front group for wealthy corporations. It is not interested in helping the People. It’s interested in protecting the profits of corporations… even if that means destroying the food supply and turning the population into “dead eaters” who die from other diseases caused by the lack of phytonutrient protection.

Growing vegetables is so easy, and then you actually know what you are eating, aren’t giving money to huge destructive corporations, are getting exercise, and may even have surpluses to trade with your neighbours and friends.

I believe we must keep our food supply fresh and alive. (Sounds kinda obvious, huh?) And if there’s a little extra bacteria on the spinach, it’s nothing that a healthy body can’t handle anyway. Take some probiotics and avoid antibiotics, and you’ll be just fine. E. Coli is really only a threat to the health of individuals who have had their immune systems (or intestinal flora) destroyed by pharmaceuticals in the first place. There’s nothing wrong with some living organisms in your milk, on your almonds or on your spinach. Wash your food, get plenty of sunlight and avoid using antibiotics.

The human body is NOT a sterile environment. To try to make our food supply sterile is insane, and anyone who supports the irradiation of the food supply is, in my opinion, supporting a policy of genocide against the American people. To destroy the vitality of the food supply is a criminal act of such immense evil that it stands alongside the worst crimes ever committed against humanity.

You see, it’s not enough for them to poison our water (fluoride), poison our children (vaccines) and lie to us about the sun (skin cancer scare stories). Now they want to destroy our foods… and thereby take away any natural medicine options that might actually keep people healthy and free. Remember: A diseased population is an enslaved population.

Now go eat your Big Mac, drink your Pepsi and don’t ask too many questions.

And do as you’re told! yeah, right…. and a population that doesnt control its own food supply is in serious danger from those slave masters.

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Sharon Astyk tells us why we should be paying attention, and thinking about peak oil and climate change in the present tense.

So I thought it might be good to do a post not so much on what peak oil is (if you scroll down there’s some resources in the sidebar that can help there) but on why it is better to know what’s going on than it is to not, even when it is scary and overwhelming. And it can be. But there are a lot of resources out there to help you. And the truth is that we need people to screw up their courage and look hard at difficult stuff – because the problems caused by Peak oil, and the related crises (yup, they all go together) of climate change and the financial collapse are not something any of us can afford to ignore.

My guess is that most people reading this have some investment in the future – maybe in their own personal future, maybe in the future of their children or grandchildren, or the children of someone they know and care about, maybe in their dedication to the good of humanity. The truth is that you are needed, right now, to safeguard your own future, and the future of our posterity – that’s not campaign rhetoric, or storytelling – that’s simple truth. If you don’t participate in creating a decent future, we won’t have one. We need you, and you need you to take as hard edged a look as you can.

A lot of what you read about Climate Change, Peak Oil or economic crisis focuses on the future. Their goal is to motivate you to action by describing what may happen. I do some of that, but over the last year or so, more and more I’ve found myself replacing the future tense with the present, describing not what might happen, but what is. Unfortunately, the hard times I’m talking about do not lie in the conveniently distant future but have begun already. The only question is whether you or I have felt them yet.

We need to be building the society that we want, and that is sustainable. Peak Oil and climate change are disrupting the world as we have grown up in, we can either keep our heads in the sand and let politicians define the new reality, or we can take whatever steps we can to survive and work towards a fair world.

When I realized that everything was going to change, I was at first afraid. Because, I thought, if my government or public policy or other choices weren’t going to fix everything, what could I possibly do? What hope was there, if I had to take care of myself, if my community had to take care of itself?

But when I began looking for solutions that could be applied on the level of ordinary human lives, that involved changes in perspectives and pulling together, the reclamation of abandoned ideas and the restoration of strong communities, I began to feel hopeful, even excited. Because I realized that when large institutions cease to be powerful, sometimes that means that people start being powerful again.

Civilisation has always been based on slavery and exploitation. Industrial civilisation has enslaved the world and exploited everything. The machine, though, has to be stopped, if we are to stand any chance of living a sustainable life.

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Riane Eisler spotlights gender inequalities in the US, on alternet.org

Nothing, for example, has been said about the fact that poverty in this wealthy nation disproportionately affects women, so much so that, according to U.S. Census figures, women over the age of 65 are twice as likely to be poor as men over 65. Nor have we been told that, unlike the U.S., most industrialized countries have paid parental leave, stipends for caregivers, and even social security credit for the first years of home childcare — measures that vastly improve the lives of women.

This relegation of “women’s issues” to a secondary place is obviously terrible for half of America (actually the majority, since women are 52 percent). But it’s also terrible for the political and family health of our entire nation.

Let’s start with politics. For both the mullahs in Iran and the rightist-fundamentalist alliance in the United States, “getting women back into their traditional place” in a “traditional family” has been a top priority. There’s a basic reason for this. Rigidly male-dominated societies are also authoritarian and violent. Along with the imposition of a brutal dictatorship by the Nazis, their mantra was returning women to their “traditional” roles in a male-dominated family. Nor is it coincidental that the 9-11 terrorists came from cultures where women are terrorized into submission. Or that regressive fundamentalists in the United States (who also believe in top-down rule and “holy wars”) first organized as a powerful political block around a “women’s issue”: the defeat during the 1970s of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Its all part of the heirarchical structure of civilisation.

Yet in the United States, many people who consider themselves progressives still view anything to do with women as secondary. They fail to recognize what regressives do: that the ranking of male over female is a basic model children learn early on for equating difference with superiority or inferiority, with dominating or being dominated — a model that can then easily be generalized to different races, religions, ethnicities, and nations.

In recent years, American regressives have vigorously promoted a family where fathers make the rules and harshly punish disobedience — the kind of family that prepares people to defer to “strong” leaders who brook no dissent and use force to impose their will. Not coincidentally, over these same years aggressive wars were launched, gains for women and minorities were lost, and a “strong” executive branch held itself above the law.

Surely we can learn a lesson from this history: that progressives urgently need a political agenda that no longer relegates “women’s issues” to a secondary — indeed, invisible — place. We need a politics of partnership that recognizes that questioning “traditional” gender roles and relations is foundational to the movement to more democratic and egalitarian relations across the board.

In keeping with our view that society should be run on a local basis, how more local can you get than the home. With more emphasis on local food production and local relationships/community, women have to have an equal footing. The days of ‘the breadwinner’ going out to work, while the woman stays home to look after the children may be gone, along with the abundant energy society. We are being forced to change our society, its an opportunity to ensure equality and justice on all levels of society.

The equal valuing of the two halves of humanity — women and men — will obviously vastly improve girls’ and women’s quality of life. But it’s also essential if we are to move to a more democratic, peaceful, and sustainable future for us all.

Exactly.

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Thought provoking article on from the wilderness.

We quote the ending comment:

THE FAILURE OF COMPETITION

In the competition for declining oil reserves, ultimately everyone will lose. In the process of struggling for world domination and energy domination, both militarily and economically, we will drain the world’s remaining energy supplies without preparing for the coming transition. The net result will be a tremendous increase in suffering throughout the world, the further impoverishment of the world’s population, and a semi-secure, semi-comfortable position of limited power for the elite few who manage to stay on top. Yet it does not have to be this way.

If the United States would cut its energy consumption back to sane levels, there would be enough to build a better world for everyone. Instead of maximizing profits and trying to corner the market, we need to undertake a program to restructure our society. We need to increase energy efficiency and conservation. We need a massive program to provide more energy-efficient housing, transportation and industry. And we need to move from energy-intensive, export-oriented, and hydrocarbon-based agriculture to more sustainable, locally oriented, organic agriculture. Along the way, we can build a more socially responsible, and more democratic society, where everyone will benefit — or at least not as many will perish.

First we have to deal with our own greed and indifference. And we need to realize that competition will only result in misery. To get anywhere, we must act from a foundation of cooperation and mutual aid. There is very little time left to avoid a catastrophic future.

Unfortunately civilisation is a system that has allowed the greediest of us to flourish and take control of our society. The people in charge are the ones who have the smallest consciences, and we find it unlikely that they will start to co-operate, when their whole lives have been based on competition and heirarchy.
We are seeing tent cities in the US as its economy unravels, and the powers that be don’t seem to give a damn. USA forces are based in almost every country, while the IMF and WorldBank have spent 50 years forcing an economic system that benefits a handful of people at the expense of many, on the rest of the world. Democracy has been pushed too, but a democracy that is actually the opposite of what we mean by democracy. A top down system, where the most aggressive competitors win, has been adopted by oppressive governments everywhere, and used to suppress their own people, with the help of the CIA and MI6.

Yes, people of the world need to start talking about how we can fairly sort out the problems, and reduce CO2 levels. But the political and economic system is hardly fair. Perhaps we should stop even thinking about things on a global and government scale, start ignoring these power-crazed psychopaths, and concentrate on our own local neighbourhoods. Have you started talking to your neighbours about peak oil and climate change?

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More to think about from Sharon Astyk.

1. Shoes – I have a thing about shoes. You see, I have crappy eyesight, and there is zippo chance I will ever shoot a deer for moccasins. I’ve made felted boots and slippers, and could put old tires on the bottom of them with some work. But I don’t want to. I like good shoes. And with four boys going through three or four sizes a year, I already can barely afford to keep my kids shod . Goodwill is my friend. Yardsales are my friend. Bigger sizes while they are cheap are my friend.

I store extra kids shoes, and also extra boots and shoes for me and the husband.

2. Blankets!!!! It is going to be a cold winter for a lot of people. The thing is, it is perfectly feasible to sleep without supplemental heating – but you need blankets, and lots of them. Down is lovely, as are wool blankets, but almost anything will work if you layer enough of them. These are often cheap at yard sales and goodwill. Since I’m guessing we’re the abode of last resort, I want to have lots of these so that no one is cold.

They are also great to insulate your windows from cold loss, to hang on walls that are drafty, to make rigged “four poster” beds that are kept warm by your body heat and for a host of other reasons. Blankets are important – sleeping bags are especially great and often show up at my Goodwill. Other bedding is good if you are expecting a lot of people to come to you.

3. Yarn – Ok, I don’t need this, but I like it. Hats, mittens, fingerless gloves and wool socks are, I think, the key to happiness in cold weather, and I really like to knit,. So I get happiness and warm stuff – this is not bad. Or maybe this is just an excuse to have yarn .

4. Books – I’m a junkie anyway, so like yarn, this might just be an excuse to buy stuff I like. But in my case, five miles from a rural library which has a great kids section, but for adult material is better than mine only in the category of biographies of first ladies, biographies of first ladies’ dogs and Romance Novels, my feeling is that I *am* the really local library. We have a big house, and most of it has books in it – many thousands. And since I’m a writer, I never know what I’ll want to research next – I’m constantly hauling out random piles of books, looking for some fact or a quote I liked.

We’re also homeschoolers – and we think the best way to get the kids to read a lot is to read to them and have a lot of books around for them to choose from.

Yes, we invest in how-to books, but we’re also looking ahead to days when resources are dearer and our older kids may need homeschooling resources – physics textbooks and art history books are as important as how to books. Novels, of course – the frivolous and the serious. History books galore. We buy a lot of books very cheaply – they are so undervalued right now.

5. OTC medications, soap, basic toiletries – I’ll do a seperate post on my medicine cabinet at some point, so I’ll leave these. Most toiletries we don’t bother with, but we do use a few things. Baking soda can cover a myriad of sins, though.

6. Project materials – you know how you start building something (the bookshelves, the chicken tractor, the fruit press, whatever) or repairing something (the overalls, your bike, the chainsaw) and you suddenly realize you don’t have the parts for it, and you have to go to the store, and put the project aside until you do have the right parts? Well, some of this is unavoidable – things will break, and you won’t have the part. Still, some of this is predictable – buttons come off, things need nails and screws, hooks and chains. There are obvious parts of things that break or frequently need repair, and often these things are cheap. But as gas gets more expensive, the special trip to the notions store, the hardware store, etc… gets less frequent, and that means putting the needed item away longer. So having a reserve of these items is useful, and often not very expensive. Anything that fastens one thing to another, any part that is especially vulnerable, and basic repair kits are high on this list. And if you have the opportunity to scavenge scrapwood or things that might be usefully taken apart and repurposed, this is good (provided you have space to store these things).

7. Clothes in larger – and smaller – sizes. Everything I said about shoes goes here too, particularly since I do not like to sew (because it involves ironing and cutting carefully on lines and measuring, all things I loathe ) and am not good at it (for the reasons listed above), I’m all for storing a few sizes up. I also store a few sizes down, because I have high hopes that peak oil (and self-discipline, if I can stockpile that ) will be good for my weight issues.

8. Intermediate technology tools – think simple things that can run on human power or readily available things. Oil lamps, manual woodworking tools, treadle sewing machine, etc… These often show up at auctions, and are useful even if the world doesn’t end and you just want to cut your energy budget. In some cases the powered replacement is better – powering lights with electricity is less polluting than almost any other form of lighting, except perhaps very local beeswax candles. But in some cases, they really aren’t. I like the treadle sewing machine better than the regular one – it is tough and effective, and my dough mixer or my hands much better than a bread machine. All are worth experimenting with.

9. Extra dishes. In a crisis, we could expect quite a crowd, depending on where people were coming from. I like people to have enough to eat, and a chance to eat it at my house. Dishes are available at every yard sale, often very cheaply. There are some issues if you keep kosher, as I do, but for most people, cheap dishes are a good deal. I like to be able to feed a crowd.

10. Bicycles. People dispose of these frequently, and since I have growing kids, functional, decent bikes are a valuable thing. There are some older brands that are particularly worth buying – I’ll see if I can dig up a list and post it shortly.

11. Some toilet paper. Now I think cloth is probably a better solution to any long-term problem. But toilet paper is one of those niceties, and not everyone I know who might come to my house is cloth-tp ready. Plus, there are times of illness when you’d rather not use a reusable. So this is one item I buy in bulk. I don’t buy a lot of disposable things, but tp we do use.

12. Basic medical care items – again, I’ll do a full list, but in emergencies, hospitals and doctors are often overburdened, and the ability to meet basic medical needs at home – and also to understand when you need a doctor or other professional is, IMHO, important.

A good starting point list to consider. These are all things that people living on smallholding generally have, and that in the future, as we see it, are going to be essential.

How about things like essential oils (the essentials: lavender for burns, citronella for bugs)? Some way to make fire if matches and lighters aren’t available? Do you have a shed where you can keep old junk that might be usuble in the future? Stop throwing away (or recycling) those jars, you will need them to preserve stuff for the winter.

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Is the title of a new book, by award-winning photojournalist Ed Kashi with the geopolitical insights of UC Berkeley professor Michael Watts. Interview on Alternet.

They are wars that are already well under way. In mid-June, a Shell facility was attacked by local militants, disrupting production and sending the already sky-high price of oil to further heights before coming back online a week later. Attacks like those have increased in frequency, as Nigerian factions have fought for control of the nation’s lucrative petroleum resources, which are the largest in Africa.

The problem, especially as indigenous populations caught between Nigeria’s prosperous rich and their oil industry’s environmental devastation see it, is that viable land and resources have been wasted on a handful while the majority of the country falls into further disrepair and depression. From natural gas flares and oil spills to the destruction of native plants, animal species and other salable commodities, Nigeria’s oil industry has wreaked havoc across the land and its people.

And it’s only getting worse. And if you think it doesn’t affect America, think again.

And the rest of the ‘developed’ world.

MW: I hope that this book lays out the dynamics of oil and development in Nigeria and Africa, that it reveals the complicity in this perfect storm of international oil companies, foreign governments, corrupt oil-producing states and U.S. consumers. Perhaps in the same way that the “blood diamonds” issue showed our complicity and need to assess the conditions under which the resources we use are produced. In a sense, this book documents “blood oil.”

I hope that the book will contribute in some way to the struggle in Nigeria for a more democratic and transparent political system in which oil wealth can be deployed for productive purposes in a socially and ecologically just way. I also hope it contributes to a much wider debate in the U.S., and everywhere else, about the consequences of dependency, as well as the vast costs of hydrocarbon capitalism.

http://www.curseoftheblackgoldbook.com/

Lots of information and emotive images of the impact that the oil industry has had on the lives of people, and the environment, in the Niger Delta.

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