Dismantle Civilisation

Here’s an interesting article, exploring the native american term ‘Sumac Kawsay’, or ‘Buen Vivir’:

(Portuguese to Spanish Translation by Blanca Diego.
Spanish to English Translation by Christopher Reid (Decolonial Translation Group)

NOTE: The original article “Sumac Kawsay” was published on the Web site of Foro Social Mundial on 6 February 2009. The Spanish translation by Blanca Diego, “Buen Vivir,” was published on the same site on the same day. English translation by Christopher Reid. The French translation by Angélica Montes, “‘Bien Vivre’, un concept de la pensée décoloniale indigène en Amérique latine,” is available at the Web site of le Mouvement des indigènes de la république (MIR). )

Perhaps because I am a Brazilian, the first time I heard the expression buen vivir I immediately thought of “buena vida (2),” a term which in our country is used pejoratively to refer to an easy and unconcerned life, one filled with little work, plenty of evening strolls and other luxuries, and zero political consciousness.

I was completely mistaken. Buen vivir means nothing of the sort. On the contrary, according to the indigenous peoples of the Andean region, and the Aymara people in particular (3), buen vivir is a solid principle which means life in harmony and equilibrium between men and women, between different communities and, above all, between human beings and the natural environment of which they are part. In practice, this concept implies knowing how to live in community with others while achieving a minimum degree of equality. It means eliminating prejudice and exploitation between people as well as respecting nature and preserving its equilibrium.

According to this definition, the culture in which we are submerged is utterly devoid of buen vivir. We are in complete disequilibrium with ourselves and with nature when we buy more than we actually need; when, without remorse, we exploit the land, water and even other human beings themselves; when we search for exorbitant profits which, the majority of the time, only benefit one person or a very small group of people.

Technologies continue to improve and every day the comforts and conveniences which these offer are increasing, but only for a few people. Meanwhile, for the majority of people what are increasing are poverty, exploitation, prejudice, competition and individualism. This is the logic of the system in which we live. There can be no doubt that we are not practicing buen vivir.

On the other hand, we hear in the news all the time about the spread of the world financial crisis, the dollar’s falling value, the risk associated with dwindling water resources….In sum, they are continuously reminding us of the failure of the system.

In the face of all of this, it seems ironic to hear indigenous people referred to as ‘savages’ whose way of life is backwards and primitive. How can this be, given that they have always known how to live in community with one another, to produce what is necessary for their survival and to live in harmony with nature and with other living beings; to nourish themselves on fruits, legumes and other vegetables, and to understand better than anyone else the secrets of nature and of natural medicine? Furthermore, they have lived in the Americas for thousands of years in a sustainable manner – though they may not have used precisely this same term – long before the so-called “discovery” of America. Is this really what a savage is?

Recently, at the ninth meeting of the World Social Forum which was held in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, in the city of Belém do Pará, a defense of the concept of buen vivir was presented. For those who were there at the Forum, the participation of indigenous peoples was quite significant, and not just because of the rituals and music which they performed, or for the tattoos on their bodies or their colorful clothing. It was also significant because of the consistency of their discourse and the courage they demonstrated in defending what they believe in: ‘good living’ and ‘living well’.

Sumak kawsay, or buen vivir, is a concept which has already been incorporated into the debates of the Ecuadorean Constituent Assembly. Having recently been approved by voters in a popular referendum, buen vivir is guaranteed in Bolivia’s new constitution. Buen vivir was the hallmark of this World Social Forum. Perhaps it will also be the beginning of a possible new world.

ENDNOTES

1) TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The literal English translation is “good living,” but it is important to observe that buen vivir is itself an imperfect Spanish approximation of the (indigenous Ecuadorean) Kichwa term, sumak kawsay. Meanwhile, in Bolivia, a similar concept stemming from the Aymara Indian cosmovision and language – suma qamaña – is customarily translated into Spanish as vivir bien, or “living well.” The author, a Brazilian thinking and writing in Portuguese, has opted to utilize the Ecuadorean Kichwa/Spanish terms throughout her article rather than attempt a concrete Portuguese translation of the concept.

2) TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Literally, “(the) good life.”

3) TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Again, to avoid confusion on the part of the lay reader it must be emphasized that sumak kawsay and buen vivir are specifically Ecuadorean Kichwa and Spanish terms, respectively; they are not the actual terms used by the Aymara and Spanish speakers of Bolivia (see translator’s note 1).

Sumac Kawsay is what we believe is key to building a new society, one which is built on interdependence and communities rather than hyperindividualism, one which views ourselves as part of nature rather then seperate, and one which strives for equality and not for individual power and selfishness.  Dismantling Civilisation is about building our lives and comminites around Sumac Kawsay as our central story, and not around the Civilisation’s story of greed, conquest and expansion.

No Comments »

While an awful lot of people are talking about Adam Sacks’ admittedly brilliant and Grist-breaking article, called “The Fallacy of Climate Activism“, quietly and without fanfare Dave Pollard has been undergoing his own seismic shift. Dave runs the grandly titled blog “How to Save the World“, and up till recently he has used his expertise in behavioural analysis to build up a workbook containing all sorts of important and useful ideas for creating global change.

It seems that, after more than five years of diligent blogging, Dave finally snapped, and produced something which on the surface looks harmless enough, but which is in fact highly subversive and very refreshing. He calls it “Creative Activism” — I call it “Personal Revolution”:

Today I joined the Applied Improv Network, in part to signal my move from passive writer and idea-ist and story-teller to activist. One of the things I like about Improv is that it is focused completely on the Now. It’s active and attentive. In an earlier article on Improv I defined it as “minimally structured play”:

It includes conversation, group stand-up, jazz improv, dancing, cooperative games (frisbee etc.), flirtation, play (with those who have not forgotten how), and perhaps even sex…

The competencies to do it well include: active listening, paying full attention, inventing, self-expression, reacting quickly, remembering, teaching/helping quickly, learning quickly, letting go and letting come. There is a zen-like state that you can get into if you have, and practice using, these competencies: It’s a combination of extreme alertness and extreme relaxation. That’s only a paradox to the incompetent. Arguably, it is our natural state.

In my most recent article on the subject I argued that what we must do, as individuals, and as members of communities and organizations, is to become more adaptive and improvisational, because the important challenges we will face in this century do not lend themselves to political or economic or planned solutions, and they will introduce permanent shifts, not the temporary and cyclical ones we’ve been accustomed to. We are long past the stage of controlling our own destiny — nature has come to bat, and we are about to see our ephemeral ‘victory’ over her disappear quickly and utterly. But she has never been our opponent. She is just here to clean up the mess we couldn’t clean up ourselves. We’re on her team, and it’s time we helped her get the job done.

So what do we do? How do we, as activists, creatively and humanely obstruct, disrupt, sabotage and stop these and other organizations that are killing us and ruining our world, now?:

the big carbon polluters: mining, mountain-top removal and burning coal, the tar sands, offshore shale, the auto and road-building industry, the oil exploration companies (especially in the arctic), the aircraft and airline industry, the military, the cement industry, the air conditioning industry

the nuclear industry

the toxic industrial agriculture industry (especially factory farm operators and other huge users of water and oil-based chemicals)

the building industry (making cheap crappy houses and energy-wasting shopping malls)

the politicians who wage unwinnable and devastating wars (including fucking Obama in Afghanistan)

the forest industry, especially clear-cutters, tropical and old-growth forest destroyers

the industrial fishing industry

the multinational corporations, arms dealers and other gangsters in affluent nations who mindlessly exploit and desolate struggling nations for the profit of a tiny elite

the politicians and other corrupt corporatists who systematically exploit and brutalize the weak, the poor, the sick, the disenfranchised and the vulnerable (manifested by our prison system, our treatment of the mentally ill and the uninsured, and a ‘justice’ system that punishes victims and rewards perpetrators)

the financial industry that funds all of the above, and which plays brinksmanship with our economy by incurring grotesque and unrepayable debts that will be left, along with the other toxic products of our industrial growth economy, to be dealt with my future generations

the mainstream media whose propaganda machine absurdly oversimplifies what it reports, and fails to report what is really important

the education industry which dumbs us down, beats individuality, creativity and autonomy out of us and pounds us into believing that the way we live is the only way we can live

the pharma and insurance industries which exploit illness and ignorance and fear and obstruct the delivery of needed health products and services to those who really need them because they aren’t profitable

We have tried the demonstrations and the petitions and the blockades and the gentle forms of sabotage, and all they accomplish is to get us killed, jailed, tasered, blacklisted, brutalized and labeled as terrorists, using their political cronies, thuggish police and security agencies, and compliant media to paint us as the criminals.

We need to organize and get more creative. We need to use technology to organize in virtual ways, networked and collaborative not orchestrated, so we cannot easily be infiltrated and rounded up. We need to use imagination and ingenuity to disrupt and dismantle the operations of the corporatist criminals in ways that don’t get caught until they’re too late, and in ways that don’t get us caught. We need to hit them from a million points at once, coordinated but independent, so they are so busy trying to deflect us and deal with our successes that they simply never get operational again. Understand, they’re massively centralized, and hence enormously vulnerable. It’s a hugely fragile system they’re maintaining at enormous cost, one which is falling apart by dint of its sheer massive and unwieldy size. If we’re smart, we can stop them. We need to find and exploit their points of weakness — they are utterly dependent on cheap reliable power, oil, water and telecommunications for example. We make make them so frustrated that they give up, take their enormous nest-eggs of money and just quit.

We have to stop fighting them on their terms, and stop grandstanding for the media, which gets us nowhere. The measures of our success will be a consistent drop in GDP and a commensurate rise in more relevant indexes of genuine well-being, and in equitable distribution of wealth. And, of course, a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions.

To get this all started, we need to talk. One-on-one, in small groups, in unofficial meetups and conferences. We will need a name that says what we’re for, not what we’re against. Our product will be practical ideas and actions on how to stop the worst aspects and abuses of the industrial growth economy, relentlessly.

We must put the corporatist criminals out of business. Just as the people of some neighbourhoods have taken their neighbourhoods back from street gangs by collective action, by standing up to them, it is time for us to develop collective strategies that will take our beleaguered planet back from the corporatist criminals who are brutalizing and terrorizing us and our world.

This will be a raw movement, an improvisational one, one where we say and act on what we care about, what we feel. We’ll get terrible PR, because the corporatists run the media and have all the money, but we’ll have to put up with that, and keep working to get the job done. We have to keep asking: What kind of a world do we want, and want to leave as a legacy for future generations, and what do we have to do to achieve it? That will guide us, tell us, without need for central direction, exactly what we need to do.

This is just a seed I’m planting. It feels right. It feels like it’s time for it.

I feel I am finally ready to break free of what has been holding me back, what has had me sitting on the ledge for two years, urging myself to act but not acting. I think the breakthrough was when I realized that in order to really change, to really move, you have to let your heart be broken. You have to stop living in your head, inside those stories, thinking yourself to death, and ask yourself: What do you feel? What do you really care about? And then you let those feelings pour out: The anger. The rage. The loathing of those who keep fucking up this world. The self-loathing of realizing we’re doing nothing to stop them, that we’re actually part of the problem. The grief over the sixth great extinction, Gaia’s suffering.

No Comments »

A short article, sent by one of our readers, Brant Evans.

I once told a friend that knowledge of our current situation without appropriate action is the same as complete denial, but now I’m not so sure. I’d been working on my friend over the past couple months trying to open his eyes to the reality of our culture and lifestyle, just as my eyes had been opened by another friend. Some people seem right on the verge, and if you can find the right nugget of information or analogy, the puzzle pieces fall into place for them and they start to see the bigger picture. This particular friend knew enough to be pissed off, and he knew enough to start contemplating the changes that need to happen. He could see a vague image of the picture, but he was still not ready to act on his own.
To be sure, knowledge without action is a symptom of insanity, plain and simple. In a culture where this type of denial is the norm, most of us have learned to accept it, unfortunately. I recently broached the subject of peak oil with my dad. After introducing him to the standard argument (I like peak oil as an introduction for people unfamiliar with the anti-civ movement because it’s very practical), he furrowed his brow, and admitted that a lot of the conclusions I offered seemed pretty inevitable. The next day, he gave me a lecture about the importance of starting to save money while I’m young. Clearly, the gravity and reality of our discussion had not hit home. In a world where our government just dropped a trillion dollars of imaginary money into our “economy” to keep it churning, I can’t imagine that saving up little pieces of green paper will be all that important for the future. Good riddance.
After we’ve dealt with stubborn people hell-bent on remaining in a shell of denial more than a few times, many of us stop trying to forcing the issue on these types of people. This could be a mistake.
As I mentioned, I once told a friend that knowledge without action is the same as complete denial. You’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem. That was my position, but I can see another angle now.
My friend has one foot on the grass and one foot on the fence. He might not initiate a mission to blow up Monsanto. But guess what? He sure as hell isn’t going to call the cops if someone else does. Revolutions may require guerilla warriors, to be sure, but equally frustrating for those in power are those silent villagers who might know a little more than they let on.
We need to spread this message, because right now, most of the “villagers” are enamored with the system that is making them so miserable. We need to be a little rude and force the issue. Not talking about these things because they are socially awkward is another example of surrender. Just remember to choose your battles.

3 Comments »

I imagine there are people, those of us who care passionately about forests, oceans, wildlife, nature in all her magnificent glory, who have been recognising just how good for the planet the ‘global economic downturn’, as its being called, is. Richard Heinbergs latest Museletter post says what i suspect many of us have been thinking.

And there are undoubtedly millions of indigenous peoples, subsistence farmers, people who live closer to their landbases than us children of empire, and evn perhaps trees, who are breathing a collective sigh of relief, and even cheering with all their hearts at each and every step of collapse. Oil and capital have fuelled the seemingly unending march of ‘development’ (so called), pushing people away from the land that has sustained them for 100s of generations, oppressing, exploiting, turning living creatures and in fact the whole web of life into consumer durables, with built in obsolescence, channeling everything – food, people, metals, fuel, water etc, into the ever growing dead zones we call cities.

But, peak oil, round one, and the chaos it has initiated in an economic system that needs huge amounts of energy and unlimited growth (impossible on a finite planet) to exist, has slowed down the devastation in many parts of the world. Its not enough, though.

This culture of empire, this system of death, the forces of darkness, the matrix, whatever you want to call it, is so hugely destructive of all things good – everything from joy to clean water to freedom, anything that can’t be commercialised is destroyed and anything that can will be until it is just a shadow of its former self, a plastic replica of the real thing – that we MUST help bring it down by all means necessary.

The empire thrives on war, and suffering, and is at war with nature. It even wages war on its own citizens, enslaving us, poisoning us, forcing us to suppress our own human natures, our instincts, our joy as living breathing beautiful animals.

The systems own unsustainability is helping to bring it down, and I appeal to all people of conscience, everyone who cares that this planet should be able to sustain life, all who refuse to be cogs in a damned infernal devastation machine. Rise up. Do what you can against the life destroying machine we call civilisation.

Stop buying stuff – particularly food from far away or in packaging. For too long we have been conned into thinking that vegetarianism, or green consumerism will make a difference. Industrial agriculture makes deserts. Full stop. Plastics and other ‘products’ makes poisons. It doesnt matter what the food is, if it has been grown far away, transported, packaged, sprayed, poisoned…. it does you little real nutritional good, and leaves a trail of devastation in its wake.

Plant food forests, rewild, use your time to help repair some of the damage done, and learn from your landbase – watch and it will tell you what it needs to regain its health. As empire contracts more and more damaged places will be abandoned. Nature can repair herself, amazingly, but with a little help from us, planting pioneer nitrogen fixing species, perhaps digging swales to retain water in dry areas, simply planting tree seeds, we can speed up the healing process while directing our local habitats to produce perennial food crops for us.

It wont be easy. Extricating ourselves from empire will be hard for most of us, born into this system, addicted to toxic foods, drugs, lifestyles, habits… but the whole sorry experiment is unsustainable and will fall, even without any help from us, in time, so to start extricating ourselves now will not only help bring down the beast, but is sound advice.

For a time, we may well find ourselves straddling both worlds, a natural world of trees and fresh from the plant foods, freedom and joy of life, while still having to give our pound of flesh to the devil, still having to submit to the boss and pretend to be good little citizens. This can be incredibly difficult, becoming easier and undoubtedly worthwhile when the global supply lines fail as they will, its just a matter of time. Life will become increasingly hard for the citizens of empire, although this may be almost directly proportional to the relief felt by billions of humans and animals as empire slows down, while those of us who has already started living a low carbon, community sufficient (self sufficiency in local communities) and lower energy life will find it easier going than many.

And finally, as the structures of empire become irrelevant, we’ll need to start dismantling them to help nature reclaim – particularly dams that stop the flow of the earths arteries. There are many ways we can help push this poisonous system into collapse. Use your imagination.

Recently I’ve begun compiling a list of things to be cheerful about. Here are some items that should bring a smile to any environmentalist’s lips:
• World energy consumption is declining.
That’s right: oil consumption is down, coal consumption is down, and the IEA is projecting world electricity consumption to decline by 3.5 percent this year. I’m sure it’s possible to find a few countries where energy use is still growing, but for the US, China, and most of the European countries that is no longer the case. A small army of writers and activists, including me, has been arguing for years now that the world should voluntarily reduce its energy consumption, because current rates of use are unsustainable for various reasons including the fact that fossil fuels are depleting. Yes, we should build renewable energy capacity, but replacing the energy from fossil fuels will be an enormous job, and we can make that job less daunting by reducing our overall energy appetite. Done.
• CO2 emissions are falling.
This follows from the previous point. I’m still waiting for confirmation from direct NOAA measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere, but it stands to reason that if world oil and coal consumption is declining, then carbon emissions must be doing so as well. The economic crisis has accomplished what the Kyoto Protocol couldn’t. Hooray!
• Consumption of goods is falling.
Every environmentalist I know spends a good deal of her time railing both publicly and privately against consumerism. We in the industrialized countries use way too much stuff — because that stuff is made from depleting natural resources (both renewable and non-renewable) and the Earth is running out of fresh water, topsoil, lithium, indium, zinc, antimony…the list is long. Books have been written trying to convince people to simplify their lives and use less, films have been produced and shown on PBS, and support groups have formed to help families kick the habit, but still the consumer juggernaut has continued — until now. This particular dragon may not be slain, but it’s cowering in its den.
• Globalization is in reverse (global trade is shrinking).
Back in the early 1990s, when globalization was a new word, an organization of brilliant activists formed the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) to educate the public about the costs and dangers of this accelerating trend. Corporations were off-shoring their production and pollution, ruining manufacturing communities in formerly industrial rich nations while ruthlessly exploiting cheap labor in less-industrialized poor countries. IFG was able to change the public discourse about globalization enough to stall the expansion of the World Trade Organization, but still world trade continued to mushroom. Not any more. China’s and Japan’s exports are way down, as is the US trade deficit.
• The number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is falling.
For decades the number of total miles traveled by all cars and trucks on US roads has relentlessly increased. This was a powerful argument for building more roads. People bought more cars and drove them further; trucks restocked factories and stores at an ever-growing pace; and delivery vans brought more packages to consumers who shopped from home. All of this driving entailed more tires, pavement, and fuel — and more environmental damage. Over the past few months the VMT number has declined substantially and continually, to a greater extent than has been the case since records started being kept. That’s welcome news.
• There are fewer cars on the road.
People are junking old cars faster than new ones are being purchased. In the US, where there are now more cars on the road than there are licensed drivers, this represents an extraordinary shift in a very long-standing trend. In her wonderful book Divorce Your Car, Katie Alvord detailed the extraordinary environmental costs of widespread automobile use. Evidently her book didn’t stem the tide: it was published in the year 2000, and millions of new cars hit the pavement in the following years. But now the world’s auto manufacturers are desperately trying to steer clear of looming bankruptcy, simply because people aren’t buying. In fact, in the first four months of 2009, more bicycles were sold in the US than cars and trucks put together (over 2.55 million bicycles were purchased, compared to fewer than 2.4 million cars and trucks). How utterly cool.
• The world’s over-leveraged, debt-based financial system is failing.
Growth in consumption is killing the planet, but arguing against economic growth is made difficult by the fact that most of the world’s currencies are essentially loaned into existence, and those loans must be repaid with interest. Thus if the economy isn’t growing, and therefore if more loans aren’t being made, thus causing more money to be created, the result will be a cascading series of defaults and foreclosures that will ruin the entire system. It’s not a sustainable system given the fact that the world’s resources (the ultimate basis for all economic activity) are finite; and, as the proponents of Ecological and Biophysical Economics have been saying for years, it’s a system that needs to be replaced with one that can still function in a condition of steady or contracting consumption rates. While that sustainable alternative is not yet being discussed by government leaders, at least they are being forced to consider (if not yet publicly) the possibility that the existing system has serious problems and that it may need a thorough overhaul. That’s a good thing.
• Gardening is going gonzo.
According to the New York Times (”College Interns Getting Back to Land,” May 25) thousands of college students are doing summer internships on farms this year. Meanwhile seed companies are having a hard time keeping up with demand, as home gardeners put in an unusually high number of veggie gardens. Urban farmer Will Allen predicts that there will be 8 million new gardeners this year, and the number of new gardens is expected to increase 20 to 40 percent this season. Since world oil production has peaked, there is going to be less oil available in the future to fuel industrial agriculture, so we are going to need more gardens, more small farms, and more farmers. Never mind the motives of all these students and home gardeners — few of them have ever heard of Peak Oil, and many of the gardeners are probably just worried whether they can afford to keep the pantry full next winter; nevertheless, they’re doing the right thing. And that’s something to applaud.

But wait, before our cheering becomes an uncontrollable frenzy, we should stop to remember that most of these developments are due to an economic crisis that is taking a huge toll. With the possible exception of the last item on the list (and maybe some of those bicycle purchases), we’re not talking about voluntary behavior that’s evidence of forethought and collective intelligence. Whatever gains in sustainability these trends signify have come at an enormous cost in terms of unemployment, homelessness, and lost retirement savings.

Take all this to its tragic extreme. What if a billion humans died over the course of, say, the next ten years from starvation or swine flu? That would take a lot of pressure off natural systems. There would be more space for other species to flourish, and consumption of natural resources (oil, coal, water, and so on) would decline dramatically, improving the economic prospects of the survivors. So from a certain perspective this unimaginable nightmare might be seen as a good thing — though hardly anyone who actually experienced it would likely see it that way.

Parenthetically, it’s worth noting that this whole line of thought may be dangerous. Some free-market PR hack from the Cato Institute is likely reading along right now just as you are, trying out headlines for a press release. “Environmentalist delights in economic collapse!” might be a good one, or “Environmentalist wants billions of humans to die!” One way to avert that kind of backlash is to keep mum about the fact that economic contraction actually does have benefits, and so far most other environmental writers have been playing it safe in that regard. I’ve crossed the line here, so watch out. I might get us all in trouble.

Now back to our theme. At its core, the dilemma is this: We humans have overshot Earth’s carrying capacity through overpopulation and over-consumption, and have created all sorts of other problems in doing so (such as climate change). But nature will take care of all these difficulties. Overpopulation will eventually be solved by starvation and disease. Over-consumption will be reined in by resource depletion and scarcity. Climate change will take longer to fix, maybe thousands or millions of years — assuming we don’t turn Earth into Venus.

But nature’s ways of solving our problems are not going to be pleasant. And so the enormous, overriding question confronting our species during the remainder of this century will be, Are we humans capable of getting out ahead of nature’s checks so as to proactively rein in our population and consumption in ways we can live with?

Boil down all the environmental literature of the past century, and that’s the essence of most of it. So far, that literature has not had its desired effect: our species has continued to expand both in numbers and in per-capita impact.

But the items outlined above suggest that we’ve turned a corner. It’s no longer a matter of nature “eventually” providing checks on humanity’s boisterous expansionism. That’s starting to happen. And it’s not yet due to climate change: yes, we are indeed seeing potentially catastrophic impacts in terms of melting glaciers and so on, but those by themselves have not tempered the economic juggernaut. Instead, it is resource depletion that has begun to slow the freight train of industrialism. Over the past two or three years, high energy prices burst the bubble of unsupportable property prices and pulled the rug out from beneath the teetering financial derivatives market.

That’s what the whole Peak Oil discussion has really been about. It’s an attempt to identify the key resource whose scarcity will tip the global economy from growth to contraction.

But wait: this essay was supposed to help us look on the bright side. The discussion’s getting kind of dark here.

Okay, my point is this: we have reached the inevitable turning point. The growth trance that has gripped the world for the past several decades is in the process of ending. Even if we get short periods of economic growth, that growth will be in the context of a significantly contracted economy and will only be temporary in any case, as Peak Oil and other resource constraints will quickly damper increasing economic activity. Gradually, as “recovery” gets put off for another month, another year, another few years, people may begin to realize that the expansionary phase of the era of cheap energy is finished. There are of course no guarantees that the public and their business and political leaders will indeed finally “get it,” because the urge to hang onto the growth illusion will be very strong indeed. But if the misery persists, there’s at least a chance that understanding will finally dawn in the collective mind of our species — the understanding that we must get out ahead of nature’s checks and deliberately reduce the scale of the human enterprise in ways that maximize the prospects of both present and future generations.

But all won’t automatically come to that conclusion on their own. A fundamental change in our comprehension of the human condition will depend on more and more public intellectuals articulating the message of deliberate adaptation to limits, so that the general populace has the necessary conceptual tools with which to mentally process their new circumstances. We will also need far more people working on practical elements of the transition. Those will be ongoing needs — a growth opportunity, if you will pardon the irony, for smart and articulate young people interested in making a difference. And they’ll be most successful if they find ways of framing needed behavior and attitudinal changes in ways that are attractive and inviting — as the Transition Initiatives so brilliantly do.

So in that sense, when I say “Look on the bright side,” no irony or sarcasm is intended.

Its the end of the world as we know it, and its up to us to say ‘basta!/enough!’ to those who would make us mindless consumers and slaves, enough to the devastation of our planet in the name of money, and to decide what kind of world we want to live in, start creating it while doing everything in our power to help kill this monster that has been imposed on us.
Just do it!

No Comments »

They’re all at it: Nicholas Stern, George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, James Hansen, Al Gore…name your environmental campaigner of the day, week or month, and read what they write. No question there is good sense — oh yes, the science is there, and all sorts of backlash and hard words aimed at the powers that be — but the same mistake is made time after time, scattered through the books, articles and papers, like a relentless 2/4 marching forwards to the beat of the system’s internal drumbeat.

We need change: total change. Unequivocal, radical, unprecedented change that tilts us with a giddy rush of welcome adrenaline away from the fiery pits of climatic hell and ecological malevolance.

The writers and the campaigners can see the urgency, they understand it, but they do not accept it! Acceptance of our situation, in all its horror, means acceptance that the very institutions that comprise Industrial Civilisation — the corporations, the political parties, the media conglomerates, the advisory panels — are intrinsically evil, like rafts of malignant tumours that corrupt every bit of goodness they touch. Acceptance of the catastrophe we face means acceptance that these institutions cannot change: they are the very stuff of civilised society, wholly culpable for our condition.

A corporation that doesn’t make a profit will fail; a political party that represents the people has no power; a media conglomerate that no longer sets the agenda cannot control its audience; an advisory body that writes destruction from its agenda no longer speaks for civilisation. They are what they are: change them and they no longer exist.

It is no longer excusable to request, even demand, institutional change. Only people can change. Start speaking to them before it’s too late.

No Comments »

Consider an indigenous community, and the past comes rushing back – at least for those people indoctrinated into a culture that detests any forms of living that do not lie open-mouthed under the teat of market capitalism. The drips of golden promise that sate the appetites of the brainwashed are enough to keep the lie going: “Anything that doesn’t contribute to economic growth is irrelevant.” In this mindset, we reflect on indigenous communities as the “old way”, something that is elsewhere in time and space; something we have moved on from.

We are killing our species in a systematic, centrally controlled manner, destroying countless other organisms that take the shrapnel of our cluster-bomb capitalism, and wiping out any chance of future habitation as our toxic dream takes shape in the citadels of technology, wealth and power. And then…crunch! The dream ends, and it’s too late to realise we never woke up.

Meanwhile, in the last viable places, the indigenous people cling on, because they were spared the lies. And perhaps these people are closer than we think; for as some of us decide to walk away from the machine, however briefly, we feel the pull of connection, and start to understand that to be indigenous you don’t have to be unseen: you just have to be in touch with what you depend upon.

Something as apparently ramshackle and uncontrolled as a protest camp is, in fact, far more like an indigenous community than it would first seem to be – we can learn from the camps many important lessons that could help us make new lives for ourselves. Protest camps, like the one I am using as a model – which I will call “Camp A” – are communities set up out of necessity. Primarily, they exist in order to achieve a short-term ambition; but to achieve even a short-term goal, such as blocking a road, they must exist in a manner that takes account of their surroundings and the services available to them.

It is immediately apparent that this is how indigenous communities operate – not for any “ethical” reasons, but in order to survive. There are probably three main factors that are responsible for Camp A’s “indigenous” behaviour: convenience, cost and practicality. For instance, most staple goods are bought from the local, low-cost supermarket (straight away you see the “ethics” factor taking a back seat), simply because it is close to the site; for more specialised goods there are a range of outlets within walking distance, and some sources, like a local Farmers Market, are cheaper for certain goods, which is the main reason that non-perishables are bought in bulk. Convenience and Cost are playing a major part. The purchased goods are, by necessity, but also to provide an element of essential connection to the land – thus reinforcing the reason for the camp existing in the first place – supplemented by allotment-grown fresh produce. This takes time, but also saves money, reducing the need further for external forms of income – breaking the ties with the capital system.

Practicality plays a major part, especially in terms of non-food items: this is governed by something called “incumbence”. Hunter-gatherer tribes, more than other types of indigenous community, have little use for material goods, and the more nomadic the tribe, the more of an incumbence material goods are. Unless the goods have ongoing practical use then they are not acquired – and this seems to place Camp A far more in the hunter-gatherer category, than that of the established village-based community. In the event of an eviction, anything that cannot be immediately gathered up is likely to be destroyed, stolen or lost, so personal and collective material goods are kept to a minimum. This has the side-effect of reducing the individuals’ dependence on material goods: a positive cycle of independence (as opposed to the negative, civilized cycle of dependence) is created. The camp progressively becomes more indigenous.

On top of this is the need for self-sufficiency in a psychological sense – effectively maintaining distance between the civilized state of mind where the road (in the case of Camp A) is wanted, and the collective desire to prevent the road. This psychological self-sufficiency is vital in maintaining the community: the community must have a number of collective needs in order to stay together. The reason many protest camps fail is because there are too many disperate motives – there is no sense of community. In order to be successful, the protest camp must cultivate this indigenous behaviour: no tribe has ever succeeded in the long-term without a collective sense of belonging, and the needs that accompany that.

Camp A is not just a place, it is a state of mind. It is, to all intents a purposes, a unique culture. We could do a lot worse than look to these protest camps, and the communities that sometimes form as a result of them, and learn from them. By losing our dependence on the civilized world, and becoming “indigenous” we have a far better chance of survival than the drip-fed, dependent masses.

No Comments »

Obviously, to dismantle civilization we need to stage a revolution. Society cannot be replaced by an ‘un-society,’ that is, a state where humans digress to a lower stage of development and remain unaware of their environment. But what would revolution look like? And what would society be replaced by?

The biggest problem with revolution is that, in the mind of the public, it can often border on anarchy. Most imagine that the state is dismantled and then ruled by whoever has the brute strength and force to overtake the others. This is not the solution, as it is identical to our current state of affairs.

All of the problems with civilization seem to surround power. Someone has too much, someone has too little, and in the end no one is happy. Can we envision a culture constructed without power? How about something like a collective farm, where everyone has his or her own duty and plays an equal part in contributing to the product/society? In turn, they all receive equal shares of the profits/benefits. This type of arrangement is distinct from socialism or communism, as it does not hold one party in charge of harnessing the wealth and distributing it equally. It is simply a responsibility shared by everyone.

Even more productive than pushing the case to dismantle civilization may be brainstorming ways to replace it. What do you think? What would you like to see happen to civilization after it is dismantled?

2 Comments »

by Jason Bradford on The Oil Drum: Campfire

Reskilling for an Age of Energy Descent

Transition Towns founder Rob Hopkins calls the educational work we need to be doing over the next couple of decades “the Great Reskilling,” acquiring and re-acquiring the skills we will need to manage the energy transition we face. I’ve already written a bit about the organizational skills we will need on the local level. Here I want to offer some thoughts about the sorts of practical skills adults and children alike could start learning now to cope with a world of drastically reduced and altered energy sources.

We’re not talking here about turning back the clock in all respects. We come at the prospects of a generalized powerdown with a lot of technological advances that may make the transition smoother. Granted, photovoltaics entail a lot of embodied energy and currently draw on raw materials we can’t continue sustainably to withdraw from the earth, to take just one example. Nor could we hope to replace the energy currently derived from fossil fuels from photovoltaics, wind power, small-scale hydro power, solar hot water, biomass, hydrogen fuel cells, wave energy, etc. That’s part of the problem. But we can employ some or all of these technologies as part of a transition; and we need people who know them well and keep up with advances.

The same is true in transportation. We have lots of options for individual and mass transit that didn’t exist a hundred years ago. Electric bicycles and scooters have reached a high level of sophistication, as have the batteries that run them. Light rail (OK, we had light rail a hundred years ago) is an important option for inter- and intra-urban transport that already has a small industry behind and some good examples on the ground. Plug-in electric vehicles, especially buses and mini-buses, have to be part of any transition. So we need more (transportation) bicycle builders and repair people. (I emphasize transportation, because most of the bicycle skills around today are for sport biking, which bears the same relation to our future needs as the military-industrial complex does to civilian technology development – yeh, maybe it has contributed to advances, but the cost just in misdirected energy has been enormous.) And we need rail specialists and electric vehicle people and people to figure out how to configure roads so everybody can safely bicycle without wearing funny clothes.

Some Skills for All

But there are also daily living skills that will become more important as cheap energy fades from view – or suddenly disappears. Growing food is one of those closest to my heart and experience. We’ve already seen a two-year jump in seed sales for home gardens. Books on how to do it appear with increasing frequence, from my glance at the listings. And for good reason. Growing your own food takes some doing, especially if you plan to do it on a really suitable scale. It can be done on a surprisingly small patch of ground, but it takes attention and technique. And getting started takes hard work. The good news is that more and more schools are incorporating kitchen gardens into the school environment and the curriculum. The bad news is that most of this effort is directed toward “giving children a sense of where their food comes from,” not toward training future farmers and gardeners. The best and biggest school gardening programs can have difficulty attracting students, for reasons I’ll explore below.

Kids are also learning to cook, as are their parents, though progress is slow considering the continued profitability of the fast foods industry. Beyond cooking, we also need to preserve food for those lean times. Jason Bradford has described a couple of options for maintaining an adequate food supply in a powereddown future. Storing basic grains and low-energy canning and preserving are old skills with sometimes new techniques that we will need to learn.

Powerdown means energy conservation. It also means we’ll have to wean ourselves from our throw-away culture, starting with the food front. Already many countries and localities have banned plastic bags. What do we use for packaging? How do we make it? You can buy fancy “green bags” for keeping fresh vegetables, but anyone with minimal sewing skills can make muslins bags that serve just as well – which is not just as well as plastic, in most instances; learning to shop frequently, or depend upon the garden more, is also an important new skill for most of us. We might also learn to cook more at one time. M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating starts with her World War II ear book, How to Cook a Wolf, where she talks about strategies for cooking a week’s meals with minimal uses of (rationed) energy by cooking one-pot dinners, sharing oven space among several dishes, and other tricks.

For the really ambitious on the food front, there are all those old animal husbandry skills. They haven’t changed much, though we know more about disease today than a hundred years ago. What we’ve lost with the new knowledge are the old skills at handling disease. Today we rely on the vet to vaccinate, dose with pharmaceuticals, or put down out animals; but the old skills are still useful and still used, especially among those who raise large animals. One of the main obstacles to raising animals for food is the regulatory system. While you can still keep chickens, and even goats, in many cities in the United States, in other places, even semi-rural ones, planners trained at urban universities have written codes that make such “unsanitary” practices illegal. In most places, it’s also illegal to sell fresh (so-call “raw”) milk, or extremely costly to set up the procedures for doing so legally, making it difficult for a family to dispose of the 3 to 8 gallons of milk daily that a dairy cow produces.

But how about those sewing skills? I can remember my grandmother darning socks for my father and her daughter’s seven children. Who darns anymore? A recent intern on our little farm was a professional costume designer, who spent her spare time hearing knitting socks with amazing patterns and getting started on a bikini. None of the knitters I know has advanced much beyond the winter cap. We’ve started, at least, to turn old bedsheets and scraps of clothing into rags to replace paper towels and store-bought shop rags. But making clothing at home? Who has the time? As the Depression deepens, it’s clear, more and more people do. But as long as Wal-Mart has access to Chinese factories, incentives may be short.

And then there are all those steel blades that make our life so easy. Most of us are in the habit of tossing out a knife when it dulls, or giving it a perfunctory run on the steel strop that comes with every kitchen knife set. And many knives, especially the serrated ones, simply can’t be sharpened with any ease. Sharpening is a lost art, but one that can be easily learned. And once you’ve gotten used to it, all sorts of tools become fair game, from chisels (brittle and requiring heavy-duty grinding once they chip) to lawn mower blades. Last year I bought a hand-forged scythe to keep our yard and orchards trim. It requires regular sharpening and occasional peening, banging out with hammer; but it’s a wonderful tool, and the sharpening is just part of the ryhthm of the work.

Some of what I cut turned out to be medicinal herbs, which my wife is now anxious to cultivate. Most of us, it turns out, already self-medicate. We don’t trust doctors, or the pharmaceutical companies, often for very good reasons, and we’re in searching of better answers. We tend to look for them, like everything else, off the shelf. A better answer might be to learn to identify and grow your own and prepare them to suit your needs. It’s not hard, and it’s not rocket science, despite a sophisticated industry dedicated to extracting the “active ingredient”, and just that ingredient, from herbs in an effort to give a veneer of science (and expense) to what has always been a folk art. If you’re willing to trust that the folk art works (as reliably as the medical art works, at any rate), herbal medicine may be a skill you need to cultivate.

Then there are basic mechanical and carpentry skills. I learned a good deal from my father when I was a kid, but I succeeded, in a mostly academic life, in handing down few of these skills to my children. What a shame. We’ll need to build for ourselves a good deal more in a powereddown world, I suspect, and do more of our own repairs. I’m in the middle of building a shack for one of my younger daughters, and I’ve sharpened those old skills considerably in the process, using hand tools as much as possible. The skill saw certainly came in handy, as did a portable drill occasionally; and I may yet regret that I don’t have a table saw. But the whole process is one of learning when and where to expend what sorts of energy.

The Great Unskilling: Why It May Be Hard to Stop Saving Labor

The bottom line is that we need to engage in a serious effort at reskilling, not just ourselves but our children and our society as a whole. We’ll also need to promote some serious changes in attitude, because two centuries of cheap energy have led to expectations that don’t bode well for powerdown. Chief of these is the expectation that “labor-saving devices” will make for a better and brighter future. That, together with the myth of the unending drudgery of traditional work, militate against any mass embrace of the Great Reskilling.

As industrialization proceeded, small producers of all kinds were forced into “jobs” that allowed little time for the everyday tasks of providing for oneself, and into urban environments where the resources for doing so were very scarce. At the same time, consumers were increasingly recruited to enjoy ready-made products and home appliances that ended time-consuming processes of home cooking, manufacture and upkeep. Services were professionalized so that householders could count on professional plumbers and electricians, builders and gardeners, to do work that used to be done by everyone. In the 1920′s advertising was devised to save American manufacturing from a crisis of overproduction by encouraging ever-growing consumption of such goods and services. (The other vehicle for sales was a foreign policy dedicated to opening and keeping opening foreign markets for American goods and buyers – a policy choice whose direct descendants are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

One result was the Great Unskilling, when homemakers forgot how to cook and sew and keep a garden (see Betty Friedan’s classic account, The Feminine Mystique) and their husbands forgot how to build and repair and raise crops. Another, more insidious, was the discovery of “leisure.” The advertisers led us to believe that leisure was a product of modern ingenuity. In fact, most peasants over the millenia have enjoyed more leisure time than late twentieth-century Americans tied to the daily grind of the job, fifty miserable weeks a year. What modern ingenuity gave us was time on our hands, and marketers and others quickly moved to fill it up with something called “entertainment.” Who could wish it otherwise? After 8 or 10 hours on the job and a serious commute to and fro, many people just want to “veg out” in front of the tube, not tend the garden, cook a meal from scratch, mend clothes, or build a new chicken coop. Who has the time? Let’s watch TV! The TV industry has been glad to accommodate with endless choices and endless spots for advertisers.

Along with the Great Unskilling came a growing aversion to physical labor. That – if you were unlucky in school – was for the job, not for home. For those who felt restless, or concerned about their weight, or worried about their health, the market produced a growing array of expensive hobbies and exercise regimes. God forbid we should put what energy we had left after work to use providing for our own needs. We had professionals to do that, even professionals dedicated to tending to our needs for physical exertion.

Perhaps worst off are the children. In place of jobs, we subject them to school, perhaps the worst job yet. There they have to please the boss – multiple bosses by the time they reach high school – who sets them progressively more difficult, arbitrary tasks and judges their worth on their performance. At the end of five or six hours of this, they are sent home with “homework,” usually even more arbitrary than the tasks set during school hours. Parents not only go along with this but often demand more homework, on the supposition that the harder the kids work themselves as 10 or 16 year olds, the better their hopes of what is called a good job in later life. Traditionalists may require “chores” on top of all this, and many parents worry that they are not demanding enough in this regard.

Is it any wonder that young people come away from this experience with a profound aversion to work and a dedication to entertainment that is rival to none but that of professional entertainers themselves? The real wonder is that so many of them – though not as many as in the benighted past – acquire a taste for making music themselves, a last gasp of creative self-assertion that seems to have wide societal sanction and is even encouraged, at local levels at least, by the entertainment industry. Most, however, would prefer chatting with friends on the internet or watching old sitcoms packaged by Netflix to tending to their pets, never mind cleaning the house, mending a shirt, or fetching salad from the garden. Who can blame them? Deprived of any contact with real life, driven to spend hours on meaningless tasks on the promise that this will prepare them to undertake equally meaningless tasks the rest of their lives, they are naturally drawn to the life of leisure that the entertainment world promises them if only they can wrest some time from their homework and their parents.

The myth of drudgery, of course, isn’t entirely a myth. Even today in most households cleaning the bathroom is a reminder of the unpleasant and time-consuming tasks that go with providing for oneself. Keeping a garden starts with making a garden, often back-breaking work, especially if you’re starting, god forbid, with a lawn. Then there’s keeping up with the weeds, and the bugs, and the watering. Having animals means cleaning up after animals, feeding them on a regular schedule, and looking after their deaths and births. There are all sorts of joys in this work, as people who undertake it quickly find, but there’s also lots of work.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? If we want to (or will have to) provide more for ourselves, we’ll have to learn to work. If the Great Reskilling is to take place before we really need it, and not under duress, we’ll have to do a lot of re-education, of ourselves and our fellow adults, our children, and our schools.

The good news is that there is a lot of enthusiasm out there for reskilling. Our intern was one of a series of “WWOOFers,” mostly young people attracted to our place and several thousand others around the globe through World Wide Opportunities in Organic Farming. They bring energy (human energy, that is) to our little farm and learn some of those skills in return. We should be looking for such exchanges wherever we can find them. And older folks are learning new skills around the country and willingly sharing them. So there’s hope yet and maybe a plan of action: share your skills, take a workshop, organize a reskilling course in your community.

No Comments »

Following on from Techno-Peasant’s eye-opening, but ultimately realistic article about living outside of civilization, I thought this would be a perfect time to publish Sharon Astyk’s brilliant list of “100 Things You Can Do to Get Ready for Peak Oil“. Lists rarely cut it when looking at real life solutions or providing effective advice: these things are better accumulated as life-experiences and shared knowledge. However, this list is far too good to ignore – American-centric it may be, but considering that the USA is probably the most oil-dependent culture on Earth, it seems a decent basis for all industrial cultures. Some items may not be relevant, some are obvious, some are a little wishy-washy, but taken as a whole you would be foolish not to read it:

SPRING

1. Rethink your seed starting regimen. How will you do it without potting soil, grow lights and warming mats. Consider creating manure heated hotbeds, using your own compost, building a greenhouse, or coldframe, direct seeding early versions of transplanted crops, etc…
2. Your local feed store has chicks right now – even suburbanites might consider ordering a few bantam hens and keeping them as exotic birds. Worth a shot, no? You can grow some feed in your garden for Them, as well as enjoying the eggs.
3. Order enough seeds for three years of gardening. If by next spring, we are all unable to get replacement seed, will you have produced everything you need? What if you can’t grow for a year because of some crisis? Order extras from places with cheap seed like www.fedcoseeds.com, www.superseeds.com, www.rareseed.com.
4. Yard sale season will begin soon in the warmer parts of the country, and auctions are picking up now in the North. Stocking up on things like shoes, extra coats, kids clothing in larger sizes, hand tools, garden equipment is simply prudent – and can save a lot Of money.
5. The real estate “season” will begin shortly, with families wanting to get settled in new homes during the summer, before the school year starts. If you are planning on buying or selling this year, now is the time to research the market, new locations, find that country property or the urban duplex with a big yard.
6. Once pastures are flush, last year’s hay is usually a bargain, and many farmers clean out their barns. Manure and old hay are great soil builders for anyone.
7. Check out your local animal shelter and adopt a dog or cat for rodent control, protection and friendship during peak oil.
8. As things green up, begin to identify and use local wild edibles. Eat your lawn’s dandilions, your daylily shoots, new nettles. Hunt for morels (learn what you are doing first!!) and wild onions. Get in the habit of seeing what food there is to be had everywhere you go.
9. Set up rainbarrel or cistern systems and start harvesting your precipitation.
10. Planning to only grow vegetables? Truly sustainable gardens include a lot of pretty flowers, which have value as medicinals, dye and fiber plants, seasoning herbs, and natural cleaners and pest repellants. Instead of giving up ornamentals altogether, grow a garden full of daylilies, lady’s mantle, dye hollyhocks and coreopsis, foxgloves, soapwart, bayberry, hip roses, bee balm and other useful beauties.
11. Get a garden in somewhere around you – campaign to turn open space into a community garden, ask if you can use a friend’s backyard, get your company or church, synagogue, mosque or school to grow a garden for the poor. Every garden and experienced gardener we have is a potential hedge against the disaster.
12. Join a CSA if you don’t garden, and get practice cooking and eating a local diet in season.
13. Eggs and greens are at their best in spring – dehydrated greens and cooked eggshells, ground up together add calcium and a host of other nutrients to flour, and you won’t taste them. We’re not going to be able to afford to waste food in the future, so get out of the habit now.
14. Make rhubarb, parsnip or dandelion wine for later consumption.
15. Now that warmer weather is here, start walking for more of your daily Needs. Even a four or five mile walk is quite reasonable for most healthy People.
16. Start a compost pile, or begin worm composting. Everyone can and should compost. Even apartment dwellers can keep worms or a compost Bin and use the product as potting soil.
17. Use spring holidays and feasts as a chance to bring up peak oil with friends and family. Freedom and rebirth are an excellent subjects To lead into the Long Emergency.
18. Store the components of some traditional spring holiday foods, so that in hard times your family can maintain its traditions and celebrations.
19. With the renewal of the building season, now is the time to scavenge free building materials, like cinder blocks, old windows and scrap wood – with permission, of course.
20. Try and adapt to the spring weather early – get outside, turn down your heat or bank your fires, cut down on your fuel consumption as though you had no choice. Put on those sweaters one more time.
21. Shepherds are flush with wool – now is the time to buy some fleece and start spinning! Drop spindles are easy to make and cheap to use. Check out www.learntospin.com
22. Take a hard look back over the last winter – if you had had to survive on what you grew and stored last year, would you have made it? Early spring was famously the “starving time” when stores ran out and everyone was hungry. Remember, when you plan your food Needs that not much produces early in spring, and in northern climates, A winter’s worth of food must last until May or June.
23. Trade cuttings and divisions, seeds and seedlings with your neighbors. Learn what’s out there in your community, and sneak some useful plants into your neighbors’ garden.
24. If you’ve got a nearby college, consider scavenging the dorm Dumpsters. College students often leave astounding amounts of Stuff behind including excellent books, clothes, furniture, etc…
25. Say a schecheyanu, a blessing, or a prayer. Or simply be grateful for a series of coincidences that permit us to be here, in this place, as the world and the seasons come to life again. Try to make sure that this year, this time, you will take more joy in what you have, and prepare a bit better to soften the blow that is about to fall.

SUMMER

1. If you don’t can or dehydrate, now is the time to learn. In most climates, you can waterbath can or dehydrate with a minimum of purchased materials, and produce is abundant and cheap. If you don’t garden, check out your local farmstand for day-old produce or your farmer’s market at the end of the day – they are likely to have large quantities they are anxious to get rid of. Wild fruits are also in abundance, or will be.
2. Consider dehydrating outer leaves of broccoli, cabbage, etc…, and grinding the dried mixture. It can be added to flours to increase the nutritional value of your bread.
3. Buy hay in the summer, rather than gradually over the winter. Now is an excellent time to put up simple shelters for hay storage, to avoid high early spring and winter prices.
4. Firewood, woodstoves and heating materials are at their Cheapest right now. Invest now for winter. The same is true Insulating materials.
5. Back to School Planning is a great time to reconsider transportation in light of peak oil. Can your children walk? Bike? If they cannot do either for reasons of safety (rather than distance) could an adult do so with them? Could you hire a local teenager to take them to school on foot or by wheel? Can you find ways to carpool, if you must drive? Grownups can do this too.
6. Also when getting ready to go back to school, consider the environmental impact of your scheduling and activities – are there ways to minimize driving/eating out/equipment costs/fuel consumption? Could your family do less in formal “activities” and more in family work?
7. Consider either home schooling or engaging in supplemental home Education. Your kids may need a large number of skills not provided By local public schools, and a critical perspective that they certainly Won‘t learn in an institutional setting. Teach them.
8. Try and minimize air conditioning and electrical use during high Summer. Take cool showers or baths, use ice packs, reserve activity When possible for early am or evening. Rise at 4 am and get much of Your work done then.
9. Consider adding a solar powered attic fan, available from Real Goods www.realgoods.com.
10. Don’t go on vacation. Spend your energy and money making your home A paradise instead. Throw a barbecue, a party or an open house, and invite The neighbors in. Get to know them.
11. Be prepared for summer blackouts, some quite extensive. Have Emergency supplies and lighting at hand.
12. Practice living, cooking and camping outside, so that you will Be comfortable doing so if necessary. Everyone in the family can Learn basic outdoors person skills.
13. Make your own summer camp. Instead of sending kids to soccer Camp, create an at-home skills camp that helps prepare people for Peak oil. Invite the neighbor kids to join you. Have a blast!
14. Begin adapting herbs and other potted plants to indoor culture. Consider adding small tropicals – figs, lemons, oranges, even bananas can often be grown in cold climate homes. Obviously, if you live in a warm climate well, be prepared for some jealousy from the rest of us come February .
15. Plant a fall garden in high summer – peas, broccoli, kale, lettuces, Beets, carrots, turnips, etc… All of the above will last well into early Winter in even the harshest climates, and with proper techniques or In milder areas, will provide you with fresh food all year long
16. Put up a new clothesline! Consider hand washing clothes outside, Since everyone will probably enjoy getting wet (and cool) anyhow.
17. If you have access to safe waters, go fishing. Get some practice, and Learn a new skill.
18. Encourage pick-up games at your house. Post-peak, children will Need to know how to entertain themselves.
19. For teens, encourage them to develop their own home businesses over The summers. Whether doing labor or creating a product, you may rely On them eventually to help support the family. Or have them clean out Your closets and attic and help you reorganize. Let them sell the stuff.
20. Buy a hand pushed lawn mower if you have less than 1 acre of grass. New ones are easy to push and pleasant, and will save you energy and that Unpleasant gas smell.
21. Keep an eye out for unharvested fruits and nuts – many suburban and rural Areas have berry and fruit bushes that no one harvests. Take advantage and Put up the fruit.
22. Practice extreme water conservation during the summer. Mulch to reduce The need for irrigation. Bathe less often and with less water. Reduce clothes Washing when possible.
23. This is an excellent time to toilet train children – they can run around naked If necessary and accidents will do no harm. Try and get them out of diapers now, Before winter.
24. Consider replacing lawns with something that doesn’t have to be mown – Ground covers like vetch, moss, even edibles like wintergreen or lingonberry, Chamomile or mint.
25. If it is summer time, then the living is probably easy. Take some time To enjoy it – to picnic, to celebrate democracy (and try and bring one about , To explore your own area, walk in the nearby woods.

FALL (AUTUMN)

1. Simple, cheap insulating strategies (window quilts and blankets, draft stoppers, etc…) are easily made from cheap or free materials – goodwill, for example, often has jeans, tshirts and shrunken wool sweaters, of quality too poor to sell, that can be used for quilting material and batting. They are available where I am for a nominal price, and I’ve heard of getting them free.
2. Stock up for winter as though the hard times will begin this year. Besides dried and canned foods, don’t forget root cellarable and storable local produce, and season extension (cold frames, greenhouses, etc…) techniques for fresh food when you make your food inventory.
3. Thanksgiving sales tend to be when supermarkets offer the cheapest deals on excellent supplements to food storage, like shortening, canned pumpkin, spices, etc… I’ve also heard of stores given turkeys away free with grocery purchases – turkeys can then be cooked, canned and stored. Don’t forget to throw in storable ingredients for your family’s holiday staples – in hard times, any kind of celebration or continuity is appreciated.
4. Go leaf rustling for your garden and compost pile. If you Happen into places where people leave their leaves out for Pickup, grab the bags and set them to composting or mulching Your own garden.
5. Plant a last crop of over wintering spinach, and enjoy in The fall and again in spring.
6. Or consider planting a bed of winter wheat. Chickens can Even graze it lightly in the fall, and it will be ready to harvest in Time to use the bed for your fall garden. Even a small bed will Make quite a bit of fresh, delicious bread.
7. Hit those last yard sales, or back to school sales and buy a few extra clothes (or cloth to make them) for growing children and extra shoes for everyone. They will be welcome in storage, particularly if prices rise because of trade issues or inflation.
8. The best time to expand your garden is now – till or mulch and let sod rot over the winter. Add soil amendments, manure, Compost and lime.
9. Now is an excellent time to start the 100 mile diet in most locales – Stores and farms and markets are bursting with delicious local produce And products. Eat local and learn new recipes.
10. Rose hip season is coming – most food storage items are low in accessible vitamin C. Harvest wild or tame unsprayed rose hips, and dry them for tea to ensure long-term good health. Rose hips are Delicious mixed with raspberry leaves and lemon balm.
11. Discounts on alcohol are common between Halloween and Christmas – this is an excellent time to stock up on booze for personal, medicinal, trade or cooking. Pick up some vanilla beans as well, and make your own vanilla out of that cheap vodka.
12. Gardening equipment, and things like rainbarrels go on sale in the late summer/early fall. And nurseries often are trying to rid themselves of perennial plants – including edibles and medicinals. It isn’t too late to plant them in most parts of the country, although some care is needed in purchasing for things that have become rootbound.
13. Local honey will be at its cheapest now – now is the time to stock up. Consider making friends with the beekeeper, and perhaps Taking lessons yourself.
14. Fall is the cheapest time to buy livestock, either to keep or for butchering. Many 4Hers, and those who simply don’t want to keep excess animals over the winter are anxious to find buyers now. In many cases, at auction, I see animals selling for much less than the meat you can expect to obtain from their carcass is worth.
15. Most cold climate housing has or could have a “cold room/area” – a space that is kept cool enough during the fall and winter to dispense with the necessity of a refrigerator, but that doesn’t freeze. If you have separate fridge and freezer, consider disconnecting your fridge during the cooler weather to save utility costs and conserve energy. You can build a cool room by building in a closet with a window, and Insulating it with Styrofoam panels
16. Now is a great time to build community (and get stuff done) by instituting a local “work bee” – invite neighbors and friends to come help either with a project for your household, or to share in some good deed for another community member. Provide food, drink, tools and get to work on whatever it is (building, harvesting, quilting, knitting – the sky is the limit), and at the same time strengthen your community. Make sure that next time, the work benefits a different neighbor or community member.
17. Most local charities get the majority of their donations between now and December. Consider dividing your charitable donations so that they are made year round, but adding extra volunteer hours to help your group handle the demands on them in the fall.
18. Many medicinal and culinary herbs are at their peak now. Consider learning about them and drying some for winter use.
19. If there is a gleaning program near you (either for charity or personal use) consider joining. If not, start one. Considerable amounts of food are wasted in the harvesting process, and you can either add to your storage or benefit your local shelters and food pantries.
20. Dig out those down comforters, extra blankets, hats with the earflaps, flannel jammies, etc… You don’t need heat in your sleeping areas – just warm clothes and blankets.
21. Learn a skill that can be done in the dark or by candlelight, while sitting with others in front of a heat source. Knitting, crocheting, whittling, rug braiding, etc… can all be done mostly by touch with little light, and are suitable for companionable evenings. In addition, learn to sing, play instruments, recite memorized speeches and poetry, etc… as something to do on dark winter evenings.
22. While I wouldn’t expect deer or turkey hunting to be a major food source in coming times (I would expect large game to be driven back to near-extinction pretty quickly), it is worth having those skills, and also the skills necessary to catch the less commonly caught small game, like rabbits, squirrel, etc…
23. Use a solar cooker or parabolic solar cooker whenever possible To prepare food. Or eat cool salads and raw foods. Not only won’t You heat up the house, but you’ll save energy.
24. A majority of children are born in the summer Early fall, which suggests that some of us are doing more than Keeping warm . Now is a good time to get one’s birth Control updated .
25. Celebrate the harvest – this is a time of luxury and plenty, and should be treated as such and enjoyed that way. Cook, drink, eat, talk, sing, pray, dance, laugh, invite guests. Winter is long and comes soon enough. Celebrate!

WINTER

1. Your local adult education program almost certainly has something useful to teach you – woodworking, crocheting, music training, horseback riding, CPR, herbalism, vegetarian cookery… take advantage of people who want to teach their skills
2. Get serious about land use planning – even if you live in a suburban neighborhood, you can find ways to optimize your land to produce the most food, fuel and barterables. Sit down and think hard about what you can do to make your land and your life more sustainable in the coming year.
3. The Winter Lull is an excellent time to get involved in public affairs. No matter how cynical you tend to be, nothing ever changed without Engagement. So get out there. Stand for office. Join. Volunteer.
4. Now is the time to prepare for illness – keep a stock of remedies, including useful antibiotics (although know what you are doing, don’t just buy them and take them), vitamin C supplements (I like elderberry syrup), painkillers, herbs, and tools for handling even serious illness by yourself. In the event of a truly severe epidemic of flu or other illness, avoiding illness and treating sick family members at home whenever possible may be safer than taking them to over-worked and over-crowded hospitals (or, it may not – but planning for the former won’t prevent you from using the hospital if you need it).
5. Most schools would be delighted to have volunteers come in and talk about conservation, gardening, small livestock, home-scale mechanics, ham radio, etc…, and most homeschooling families would be similarly thrilled. Consider offering to teach something you know that will be helpful post-peak (although I wouldn’t recommend discussing peak oil with any but the oldest teenagers, and not even that without their parents permission
6. Now is the time to convince your business, synagogue, church, school, community center to put a garden on that empty lawn. If you start the campaign now, you can be ready to plant in the spring. Produce can be shared among participants or offered to the needy.
7. The one-two punch of rising heating oil and gas prices may well be what is needed to make your family and friends more receptive to the peak oil message. Try again. At the very least, emphasize the options for mitigating increased economic strain with sustainable practices.
8. Get together with neighbors and check in on your area’s elderly and disabled people. Make a plan that ensures they will be checked on during bad weather, power outages, etc… Offer help with stocking Up for winter, or maintaining equipment. And watch for signs that they Are struggling economically.
9. Work on raising money and getting help with local poverty-abatement Programs. After the holidays, people struggle. They get hungry and cold. Remember, besides the fact that it is the right thing to do, the life you save May be your own.
10. Get out and enjoy the cold weather. It is hard to adapt to colder Temperatures if you spend all your time huddled in front of a heater. Ski, Snowshoe, sled, shovel, have a snowball fight, build a hut, go winter Camping, but get comfortable with the cold, snowy world around you.
11. Have your chimney(s) inspected, and learn to clean your own. Learn to care for your kerosene lamps, to use candles safely, and how To use and maintain your smoke and CO detectors and fire extinguishers. Winter is peak fire season, so keep safe.
12. Grow sprouts on your windowsill.
13. Now is an excellent time to reconsider how you use your house. Look around – could you make more space? House more people? Do projects more efficiently? Add greenhouse space? Put in a homemade Composting toilet? Work with what you have to make it more useful.
14. If a holiday gift exchange is part of your life, make most of your gifts. Knit, whittle, build, sew, or otherwise create something beautiful for the People you love.
15. If someone wants to buy you something, request a useful tool or preparedness Item, or a gift certificate to a place like Lehmans or Real Goods. Considering giving Such gifts to friends and family – a solar crank radio, an LED flashlight, cast iron pans, These are useful and appreciated items whether or not you believe in peak oil.
16. Do a dry run in the dead of winter. Turn out all the power, turn off the water. Turn off all fossil-fuel sources of heat, and see how things go for a few days. Use What you learn to improve your preparedness, and have fun while doing it.
17. Learn to mend clothing, patch and make patchwork out of old clothes.
18. Write letters to people. The post is the most reliable way of communicating, And letters last forever.
19. Make a list of goals for the coming year, and the coming five years. Start Keeping records of your goals and your successes and failures.
20. Keep a journal. Your children and grandchildren (or someone else’s) may want To know what these days were like.
21. Wash your hands frequently, and avoid stress. Stay healthy so that you can be useful To those around you.
22. For those subject to depression or anxiety, winter can be hard. Find ways to relax, Decompress and use work as an antidote to fear whenever possible. Get outside on sunny Days, and try and exercise as much as possible to help maintain a positive attitude.
23. Memorize a poem or song every week. No matter what happens to you, no one can ever take away the music and words you hold in your mind. You can have them as comfort and pleasure wherever you go, and in whatever circumstances.
24. Take advantage of heating stoves by cooking on them. You can make soups or stews On top of any wood stove or even many radiators, and you can build or buy a metal oven That sits on top of woodstoves to bake in.
25. Winter is a time of quiet and contemplation. Go outside. Hear the silence. Take pleasure in what you have achieved over the past year. Focus on the abundance of this present, this day, rather than scarcity to come.

2 Comments »

To celebrate 21 years of anti-capitalist financial innovation
Radical Routes and Rootstock
present a one-day conference and workshops.

How can we protect our remaining social and ecological resources from the convulsions of capitalism?

Places are free, but booking is essential.
Click here to download a booking form.

Keynote Speaker
Paul Mason , economics editor of the BBC’s Newsnight

Confirmed Workshop Leaders:

Liz Cox from the New Economics Foundation on sustainable community economics

Rufus Pollock , Mead Fellow in Economics, Emmanuel College, Cambridge and co-director of the Open Knowledge Foundation
on free information and open economics

Chris Cook of Open Capital on innovative legal structures and financing

We hope also to have speakers from the Permaculture Association, Transition Towns Inititiative, West Midlands New Economics Forum and many more. Workshops are likely to cover gift economies, local currencies, co-ops and collectives, property in common ownership, anarchist economics, income sharing, etc.

We will be holding the Rootstock AGM during the course of the day. At the same time and again after the conference, we will show the newly released film, ‘Age of Stupid‘ , starring Pete Postlethwaite.

This event is supported by the New Economics Foundation and by other supporters.

Join us in the evening for our 21st birthday celebration, with Attila the Stockbroker, David Rovics, Wholesome Fish and the Carbon Town Cryer. The Anarchist Teapot Mobile Kitchen and Veggies Catering Campaign will be providing an evening meal and selling snacks and Brighton’s Cowley Club will be running the bar. Gig only tickets are £8/£4 concessions, tickets for the gig plus evening meal are £11/£6 concessions. Click here to read more about our birthday bash .

If you would like to book an info-stall at either the day-time or evening events, contact stalls(at)radicalroutes.org.uk

Conway Hall is in London, nearest station Holborn. It has a long tradition of supporting radical and left-leaning events.

Click here to read more about Conway Hall.

Click here for location information and directions.

No Comments »