The Future According to Luz

Introducing my new graphic novel series for pre-teens about resilience, relocalization, and reconnecting with nature!

For some years now I have been working on a comic called "Luz: Girl of the Knowing", originally a weekly webcomic strip on Transmission-X. It's evolved since then into a full-length story about a 12-year-old girl who comes to realize that her consumer-crazy, fossil-energy intensive world around her is crumbling -- and she chooses to take the chance to bring her community together in becoming more self-sufficient and sustainable.





This series begins with book one, Luz Sees The Light, published by KidsCan Press, serving as an introduction to Luz and her friends, and to peak oil and energy descent. Subsequent books in the series will shed light on the urgent situations around: water shortages; retooling transporation in the face of peak oil; food production and preservation; health and shelter in a post-petroleum world; and an array of step-by-step reskilling activities such as making compost, xeriscaping, creating a natural greywater filtration system, and many more.



I invite you to pick up a copy of the book, read it and share it, even review it!, and help get the cultural transformation started so we can sever our dependence on cheap oil and start healing our toxic relationship with nature!

Farms for the Future

Here is a lovely introduction by Rebecca Hosking. An excellent 48 minute video which explains permaculture but also discusses issues of peak oil and transitioning to a more sustainable way of life...

MOBY - An Inner City Community Garden Project

This video is direct from Peak Moment TV, a site full of inspiring examples of people and communities changing their world to be more sustainable and resilient. Here, a Vancouver, B.C., neighborhood is building community while transforming an abandoned lot in a crack neighborhood into a flourishing community garden. Jason O’Brien and folks of all ages create a garden space out of what used to be an abandoned garbage dump frequented by crystal meth users. Watch the video to find out the whole story and see the beautiful work-in-progress...

David Korten on Radical Abundance

"We are burning down our house to keep warm, and fanning the flames to make it burn faster." - David Korten

Recipe Gardens

I don't know if someone's had this idea before (probably!) but I was just making hummus and babaganoush and looked at all the ingredients, and thought, wouldn't these all be growable in a personal garden? And hey, what if gardens were grouped by recipe? Here's what mine would look like...

Babaganoush and Hummus Garden
(ingredients: chinese eggplants, chickpeas, olive oil, tahini, garlic, lemon, pepper, parsley, paprika, all pureed together to a smooth paste)

~ Chinese Eggplants
~ Chickpeas
~ Olive Tree (or sunflowers in my zone)
~ Sesame Plant
~ Garlic
~ Lemon Tree (or lemon balm herb in my zone)
~ Black Pepper
~ Parsley
~ Paprika Pepper


Hmm... what other awesome recipe gardens could we build?


Bruschetta Garden
(ingredients: finely diced plum tomatoes, chopped basil, olive oil, minced garlic)

~ Plum Tomatoes
~ Basil
~ Olive Tree (or sunflowers in my zone)
~ Garlic


Pesto Garden
(ingredients: basil, walnuts or hemp seeds, garlic, olive oil)

~ Basil
~ Walnut Tree or Hemp Plants
~ Garlic
~ Olive Tree (or sunflowers in my zone)


Herb Tea Garden

~ Peppermint
~ Chamomile
~ Nettle
~ Milk Thistle
~ Dandelion
~ Lavender
~ Ginger
~ Raspberry Leaf
~ Sage
~ Lemon Balm

Our predicament in a nutshell

Have you heard of Peak Moment Television? Well worth checking out, it's an online library of videos interviewing laypersons who are doing what they can to become resilient communities.

This video, as it's described on the website, shares half an hour where "William Stewart reflects on the shadow side of the fossil fuel bonanza, which enabled hyper-individualism and mobility that have shredded our connections to community and place, along with increased violence and dysfunction. Likening our oil-dependent culture to an addict who must first bottom out, he suggests there may be a silken lining after collapse: the possibility of more communal and connected ways of life. The text William reads at the end is “Handy tips on how to behave at the death of the world” by Anne Herbert.”

Watch the video here

Desperation = Devastation

This recent UK Guardian article on what peak oilers have known for a while now brings to light that Saudi Arabia has in reserves much less untapped oil than originally believed, and that it will reach its highest output (ie. peak oil) as early as 2012 and at likely by 2020.

Although this article focuses on gas prices and the wikileaks sources, my personal reaction to this news is fear. Not fear of life with less or no fossil fuels, but fear of corporations and governments taking drastic actions to try to find more and more oil to keep up with demand now that the global oil giant is on its knees. We can already see the damage these superpowers have wreaked on the environment (oil spills, tar sands, irreversable toxic pollution) and on people (waging war on countries or locking them into debt in order to control those countries' oil sources). But these abominations have been done in a financial climate of plenty, with seemingly endless possibilities in growth, power and energy. What kind of drastic, desperate and deadly actions will the governments and corporations in power think of now that peak oil is clearly and publicly in view?

That's why I'm worried. They're capable of anything. Which is why it's so important that every individual -- and family, community, city, country -- actively wean ourselves from oil and significantly use less and less, so demand drops off before supply. This might be the best way to show those in oil power that searching for new sources is not necessary, and instead industry needs to focus on renewable and sustainable energy sources.

I realize it sounds vague to say "wean ourselves from oil". What does it mean? A hundred different things. The most direct ways which comes to my mind include the easiest steps:

~ stop driving
~ minimize buying stuff
~ buy local (food, clothes, supplies)

Bigger actions are things like no air travel, changing our job situations to be working from home or within non-driving distance, retrofitting our homes to use minimal energy... Just please let's do more than just change our lightbulbs.

photo from Treehugger

Info and Inspiration at Peak Moment Television

Looks like we can use our love of TV to our advantage while preparing for life after oil.

Here is a website that is an invaluable online resource bursting with hours and hours of video where experts and laypeople alike are interviewed about how they are becoming self-reliant and locally resilient in the face of changing times.

But don't take my word for it, go check out this great program. Click "conversations" to browse their extensive video library:

http://www.peakmoment.tv/

Home Sweet Home, Someday

Although we still live in a little rental property, I still think we would thrive in a home of our own. I have goals that are best achieved in a property that I can manipulate as much as I want. Here are some of the things I can't wait to do to my future home.

GREYWATER!
Move our laundry facilities to a second floor room facing the vegetable garden. This way we can construct a clothesline out the window over the yard, but also we can create a greywater filtration system with piping flowing from the washing machine down to a pond filter (anyone got a spare clawfoot tub?) and then out to irrigate the whole garden. In addition to a rain catchment system.

FOOD PRODUCTION!
Grow food, preserve food, make food, share food, all the while learning intensive permaculture methods for growing a food forest. And to top it off, wouldn't it be out of this world to convert a sunny room into a year-round greenhouse?

CHICKENS!
Oh yes, I would love to have chickens! Since I stopped being vegan, and having a child, what could be more amazing than to go out into our yard together to gather eggs in the mornings and tend to our little flock?

In my heart I would love to buy a property with one or two other families so we can minimize environmental impact while maximizing mortgage payments (must be debt-free). But it is challenging to get on the exact same page with other individuals, and even with members of my own family. Might be best, in our case, to buy a small house and befriend all our neighbours to try and unify our space to be mutually beneficial. Fingers crossed we don't get nightmare neighbours.

Alas, I'm still renting, on a second floor with no yard or insulation or green waste recycling facilities. Change, thank goodness, is inevitable.

Divide and Be Conquered

It's becoming clear that running for the hills in a crisis will not save us. We can't survive in isolation, neither in body nor in our hearts. As communities we need to act together, as difficult as it is to imagine doing so in any valuable way.

But that's not what I'm thinking about in terms of being conquered in dividing. We as a civilization have specialized in dividing all resources, splitting everything from atoms and molecules to cities and races.

We know that it is best to consume a whole foods diet -- whole grains, specifically. But instead we split the grains and take only the sweetest parts (the sugars in corn, the white flour in wheat kernels), and give the rest to our livestock. Then we only eat the parts of the livestock we like best (the plumpest chicken parts and meatiest cow parts), then grind up the rest and feed it back to those same herbivorous animals. We take land and divide the city from the country -- but keep spreading the city to take over the country, forcing us to import food from farther away, and pushing wildlife to farther reaches of the land. For that matter, we even take oil from underground and redistribute it in noxious form into the atmosphere and oceans.

Might it not be best to keep things in their whole forms? Eat the whole grain, fibre and all. Eat the whole chicken, organs and all. Keep people and land together. Leave the oil in the ground.

We know the old 3 R's...

Let's get on with the NEW 3 R's:

Start
RETRAINING!

Get
RELOCALIZED!

Become
RESILIENT!

To be told to reduce waste, reuse materials and recycle garbage is indicatively insulting to humans. These things are beyond obvious, and yet we need campaigns to tell us to do so and we still don't embody these rules for existing sustainably with the rest of nature.

And so, we've brought ourselves to the point where we can no longer continue our modern way of life which ignores not only these basic guidelines, but which has wreaked enough havoc on humanity, its spirituality, its connection with nature, and the environment itself, to need to re-focus our labour and energies to fixing the problem and re-learning to live harmoniously with what gives us life.

Hence, our new 3 R's. My plea to we who work in offices, malls, stores, highway construction, aviation, or any area of commerce reaching its inevitable end -- think ahead to what your community will need to provide for itself and go learn those skills. We need to refill ourselves now with the knowledge long lost to our recent generations to prevent panic when the time comes that we truly need to know how to provide and survive.

Michael Rupert

I haven't decided whether "Collapse" is a documentary of doom or hope, but either way I hope that everyone views this video that interviews Michael Rupert as he speaks passionately about the deluded human condition in this modern consumer world with respect to money, government, energy and survival...

COLLAPSE

Pre-Apocalypse?

I think a lot about the post-apocalypse... not that I think what's coming is an apocalypse. The changes to come will be major and completely life-altering on a personal and a global scale, of which in the end we as a planet are greatly in need. We all know of the damage we're doing environmentally to the globe, and many of us know the societal damage we're also doing with the exploitation of third world countries. And then a few of us realize the spiritual implications of our destructively consumptive habits these past few generations.

Anyway, while keeping the future in mind, and while remembering and learning from the past, maybe we should still try to focus on the present a little bit. On this "pre-apocalyptic" era. What better position could we be in? We know where we are, where we came from, and where we're going, so we could do what we want with the now! With where we are right now.

We can make now a time of change and of rooting into nature and enriching our spirits and creating community. We can now unplug our TVs and go outside and have a fire in the park and collect leaf compost for our gardens and support our local organic veggie market and go have tea and cake with our parents or friends. It's not about changing to fuel efficient light bulbs as it is to turn stuff off in the first place. Taking a sponge bath instead of a long hot shower. Walking to a neighbour's instead of driving to the box mall. Well, you get the idea.

Things To Look Forward To With Peak Oil, #6

USELESS JOBS -> VALUABLE UNPAID WORK -> ENLIGHTENMENT

I'll venture to say that most of the work we do in the "developed" nations is valueless, if not directly or indirectly destructive to the health and welfare of our world and its people. Now, take down corporations that promote consumerism at all costs and we lose millions of office jobs and manufacturing jobs and transportation jobs and jobs that are not essential to our well-being and that of our Earth. Instead we will have time to do and need to do volunteer work, raise our children, care for our elderly, grow food and store food and share food, care for our land and its fauna, talk with one another, educate ourselves and each other, share stories, think about our role on this planet and the meaning of life and become conscious beings with awakened hearts.

Meaningful work on the eve of the big change

Here is part of a letter I wrote to the good folks at Community Solutions about doing/finding meaningful, helpful employment for artists like myself:

I am an illustrator and graphic designer, and my husband is an illustrator and graphic novelist. For income we work on what most people in our field would be thrilled to work on -- books and magazines for children and adults with numerous publishers, and we're able to make a decent living at it. (However we still can't afford to buy a house or go on vacations.) I find it more and more frustrating and dissatisfying to be working on materials that, in the end, perpetuate our socially and environmentally destructive culture. What kind of work can we possibly do with our skills that will not only provide us with a living wage, but also assist in the transformation our community desperately needs?

I wonder if our earnings need to come from citizens as taxpayers (ie. by working for the government) or from citizens as consumers (ie. by working for corporations); doubting there is much work for artists in government circles, would it be ethical to make people have to buy our goods in order for us to earn a living, or does this perpetuate the consumer cycle that is the big problem in the first place? I think of all the new boutiques and online shopping venues that sell artists' creations without the middleman, but in the end the products sold are just more energy- and resource-intensive junk, albeit beautifully and creatively hand-made. I'm currently working on a comic book about a girl preparing for peak oil, which is very satisfying work, and am hoping that if it gets published I can not only earn a little income from it, but that it helps to plant the seed of change in people's minds.

As an aside, I also find that our economic system does not support a healthy low standard of living (I believe that a low standard of living is ideal, as long as it meets basic needs and affords plenty of time for family and personal development). A quarter of our income goes to taxes, another quarter to rent, and another quarter to childcare, and what's left is supposed to take care of all other expenses and savings. Not only is this unreasonable, but it seems to force employees (including freelance artists like myself) to continue corporate work in order to pay enough to cover all these costs. I'm sure you can sense my intense frustration about this through my e-mail. My apologies if this is inappropriate. But what can we do? Do we all just put our talents away to start farming, or open a neighbourhood herbal tea shop-slash-bookstore?

That is an exaggeration, of course, but is the essence of my question about what kind of paid work individuals of varying skills can do while engaging wholeheartedly in Plan C.

I'm very much looking forward to hearing what they suggest.

Becoming non-possessive

There's something about science fiction novels written by women. I love works by Octavia Butler, and just finished reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, a sci-fi story of a man raised in a communalist/anarchist utopia and the contrasts with its capitalist/archist neighbouring planet. As much as the man's home planet is idealized, it is also painted as complex, bleak, hard, imperfect, and contradictory. Anyhow, I'd like to share my favourite passages...


"A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well -- this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole."

"The means are the end. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!"

"You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."

"No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."

Thank goodness for the internet

Reflecting on the skills we need to survive and thrive in a post-oil world, it becomes obvious that we lack so many living skills that used to be passed on from generation to generation. They're all but forgotten in the developed world now, thanks to so much of our livelihood being made in office buildings and shops and on computers, instead of using our hands and heads to make what we need to live day to day and year to year.

I think that when resources begin to dwindle due to gas shortages, most of us will be caught completely off-guard, and scramble and panic and feel at a desperate loss of what to do, how to feed ourselves and keep warm and safe. This is why it's a good thing almost all our information comes from the internet. Not only are there a lot of excellent sources for everything from post-oil survival to homesteading, growing food in the city, collecting and purifying water, and even home-made recycled oil car engine refurbishing, the internet is the quickest way to find and share this info.

I used to think that a post-petroleum world meant no electricity along with no gas-powered transportation and energy, but I'm thinking now that there's more awareness and interest in oil-free energy, so it's becoming increasingly more plausible that even if auto transportation dwindles to almost nothing, computers will likely continue to hum away, especially as they become more efficient requiring less electricity and possibly even just powered by some solar cells. Maybe the sun will in the end help power the sharing of skills and info we need to live sustainably as it also sheds light on how quickly our current way of life is coming to an end.

Home Grown

Though it's been an age since I've posted on this blog since becoming a new mother, surviving and thriving in this city in a post-oil reality is still constantly on my mind. In fact, even more intrinsically since it's my daughter's future that matters to me most.

So I was delighted to see that in this week's NOW magazine (Toronto's weekly news and entertainment rag), the "ecoholic" focus was all about growing food at "home", ie. in the city. Below are all the great articles that they printed which I'd like to share with all my non-Toronto friends and readers:

The Future of Farming in Toronto
Making Use of the City's Wasted Spaces
The Right Tools
Can You Dig It? What to do about toxic soil
Home Grown, Introduction to planting at home
and
Gardens to Fight the Recession

Things To Look Forward To With Peak Oil, #5

GETTING FIT & EATING HEALTHFULLY

This post will likely have some critics -- then again, it might get some sounds of agreement, as well. I apologize if this sounds shallow in any way, because I know that habits, health and fitness are largely a matter of choice. Nonetheless, this is what I think: the end of petroleum will naturally mean being more physically active, and eating in a way that is better for our bodies.

Yes, I look forward to the day when I'll be more self-mobile, walking and biking exclusively, instead of taking the car because I'm in a hurry to get somewhere or haven't figured out how to haul a large load of groceries effectively. To when I'll not be sitting in front of the computer 8 hours a day, and instead be toiling outside to produce my own food and raise some chickens, rabbits and sheep.

Eating healthfully will be a natural byproduct of (relative) food scarcity. Sure, the first few years might be enormously challenging, and we'll "starve" compared to our excessive over-indulgent eating habits at present. But I have much faith in the abundance of permaculture practices applied to growing and raising food in small spaces, even urban settings, and hopefully in large, reclaimed public spaces in neighbourhoods for farm-scale production. Eating healthfully will be inevitable when there's no more fast food, processed "food", imported out-of-season produce, mercury-laden fish and pesticide-coated fruits and vegetables. We'll eat less, we'll eat seasonally, and we'll eat naturally.

Happily there is, of course, time to make the transition now. In a year or two, I'll have a home which I'll own and start to convert into the self-sufficient mini-eco-village I dream of, and begin the toiling and growing and making and working. And my 13-year-old car will likely be dead by then, too.

Struggling with moral purity?

Give up the struggle. Let it go. Throw it away.

After reading an interview with Derrick Jensen in Briarpatch magazine, it all became crystal clear to me. It's irrelevant whether a vegetarian is wearing leather shoes, or peak oiler owns a car. Why should the person's integrity get questioned when the point is that we're fighting a good fight, that needs to be fought?

I got the best quote from the editor of the magazine, which he got from CrimethInc:

"Purity is the opposite of integrity--the cruelest thing you can do to a person is make her ashamed of her own complexity."

Things To Look Forward To With Peak Oil, #4

COOLER CITIES IN THE SUMMER

When I leave the city to hang out at my country cabin, it is always noticeably cooler out there, by at least 5 degrees if not 10. The city is an incubator in the summer, with a blanket of smog hovering above us, trapping in the heat produced by the million cars and trucks (and factories and construction sites and industry...) always on the go. As vehicles retire permanently, the smog trap will (hopefully) cease to form, and the main source of heat (and pollution) will also be quieted. Ahhhhh. Of course, the concrete and buildings and glass towers will be a heat sink forever, but time might also allow green growth to slowly cover these thermal surfaces and turn into a cooling source of moisture and shade. Can you imagine it?

Winters will also change. Temperatures will drop for the same reason as above for summertime, which will mean the return of actual snow. It might even stay white longer. Our lake will be thankful for not being fed salt and brine, too.

The upside of biofuels

In my recent post "Ethanol will not save us", I summarized what I thought to be the many disadvantages with ethanol as fuel production. I still think this is true, though have found out about a few endeavours that make biofuels as a byproduct of fuel production, as opposed to a crop that replaces fuel (and hence food) production.

Greg Herriott of Hempola (Oilseed Works Inc.) founded the company in 1995 after several years of research and development in the field of industrial hemp. The company went on to invent hemp flour and launch its Omega 3 salad dressings in 1999. Around 2000, the company began to see a steady increase in demand for its hemp flour resulting in an over-supply of hemp oil. Herriott then developed and launched in 2001, its all-natural wood finish to bolster oil sales. Next, the work on its bio-fuel project began. Today, Oilseed Works Inc., is actively marketing its Flour Power program to farmer groups, commercial bakeries and developing countries. The basis of Flour Power is the sustainable cultivation and conversion of each harvest into a combination of food and fuel - primarily flour and bio-diesel. Cellulose material from these harvests also holds excellent potential as a feed stock for ethynol production.

And EverPURE: a pioneering, farmer-based, biodiesel co-op for Ontario, is a branch of the Everdale Environmental Learning Centre, one of the most innovative environmental agriculture centres in Ontario. Everdale houses a bio-fuel co-op that turns food waste into fuel. It is a defining principle of Everdale's work on biofuels that they are made entirely from recycled food by-products, thus avoiding a fuel-versus-food conflict on scarce farmland.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

—WENDELL BERRY

Thanks to my new friend Bonita Ford for sending me this wonderful and timely poem about feeling the bigger picture.

Ethanol will not save us

This is what I'm hearing in the news:

A growing proportion of American farmland -- about 20% -- is now being used for growing crops to produce ethanol. This is taking food away from people, to be replaced with food for machines. It is raising the price of food because there is less room and fewer farmers to produce it. It is costing Mexicans and latinos in the southwestern US twice as much to buy their staple food, corn, to the point of being unaffordable to millions. And that it would take 100% of the existing corn production in the US right now to produce a mere 12% of the fuel needed. Ethanol is also an energy-intensive substance, taking almost as much energy to produce as is produced from it, with only a net energy gain of 25%.

And information that's not in the news but can be easily found is about the environmental impact of producing corn. This monocrop requires chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce, as well as enormous amounts of water. And right now the United States are experiencing record levels of drought and water shortage. Corn crops can quickly render a farmland infertile after a generation or less. Just like fossil fuels, ethanol is a short-sighted solution with permanent consequences that affect the livelihood of people and the health of the environment.

Articles:
USA Today
New York Times
New York Sun

Things To Look Forward To With Peak Oil, #3

THE END OF CORPORATE INDUSTRY

Corporations rule the world, and they're the ones driving the destruction of our ecosystems -- from industrialized agriculture to computer technology corporations -- using up clean water, clearing land for production, strip mining for raw materials, and even abusing third world labour and environmental health to maximize profit. Begone corporate pigs, I will enjoy watching you shrivel as petroleum becomes scarce or causes your products to become unaffordable. I know, this means the economy will take a huge hit. But so it goes with the artificial comforts of global capitalism. And consumers (who ultimately fund corporations) are evidently being much too slow at making the choice to STOP BUYING STUFF. The discipline will soon enough be hoisted upon all of us.

Dear Earth

From Amadea Morningstar's book "Ayurvedic Cooking for Westerners"...

Thich Nhat Hanh, the internationally respected Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, wrote recently in Love In Action (©1993) "Our Earth, our green beautiful Earth is in danger, and all of us know it. Yet we act as if our daily lives have nothing to do with the situation of the world." We imagine we are unimportant. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is our emissions from our cars eroding the ozone layer up there.

It is our inappropriate consumption which feeds unscrupulous corporations. Without it, their power cannot continue to accumulate and degrade the biosphere. What we do matters. Where will you put your weight? How do you want to live? In a way that will help save the planet and its inhabitants, or in a way which will continue to destroy it?

Things To Look Forward To With Peak Oil, #2

RECONNECT WITH THE SOIL AND THE SEASONS

I love soil, and air and sun and rain. But I'm almost never out in it, especially in proportion to how much time I spend at the computer each and every day (even weekends!). When peak oil establishes itself and we need to turn our parklands and empty spaces into farming plots, I will enjoy toiling side-by-side with friends, family and neighbours as we plant our seeds, tend to our crops, and reap the harvest. Best of all will be experiencing the seasons and moon cycles as they come, as much as I'm sure winters will be cold and hard here in Canada. Depending, of course, on how much effect global warming will have (25C in mid-April is pretty alarming, but may indicate a longer growing season for us in the north, but more droughts for the south).

Things To Look Forward To With Peak Oil, #1

READ ALL THE BOOKS I'VE BEEN MEANING TO GET TO

I don't often buy new books, and love buying second-hand books, but inevitably in my enthusiasm when I do buy books, they end up in a "must read" pile that almost never gets visited. I forget they're there most of the time! And at the end of a long day, especially in winter when it's dark by 5 and too cold to go out, I admit I like to flake out in front of the TV for a few hours. Even though I love reading! So, although my efforts are always to power off and enjoy a non-electric passtime like reading, or knitting, etc, I think a lack of electricity will help sharpen my focus -- and discipline.

And I know I'll love digging into those books that are gathering dust waiting for me!

For The Future

Well here is an answer to an earlier debate about deconstructing civilization:

For The Future, an organization that encourages a process of reassessment and revisioning of our way of life at every level of American society. The members of this organization aim to inform the public, and to stimulate dialog about how to handle the transition to a stable, sustainable way of life. For example, they work on creating a lush food forest and teaches permaculture to promote local food security, and help people heal their relationship with nature, noting that many problems are rooted in this disconnection.


The Initiative for Sustainable Small Cities

Permanently increasing oil prices and, at some point, the inability to obtain fossil fuels at any price will make much of our urban landscape more or less untenable. Politics and the economy will become more locally-organized, and some localities will adapt better than others. Since peak oil has to do with the amount of energy available to run virtually every system important to civilization, every sector of local society, economy, and culture will be affected in one way or another.

For The Future is located in a potentially viable small city, Santa Barbara. We are reaching out to organize discussions with police and fire departments, planning boards, local government, the Chamber of Commerce, and various other organizations. Our purpose is A) to communicate the reality of the implications of peak oil; and B) to explore alternative local forms of transportation, fuel and food production, housing, and employment. Our emphasis is on “new urbanism,” featuring denser development and multiuse zoning, rehabilitation of existing older neighborhoods, encouragement of locally-owned businesses and farms, expansion of public transportation, and other adaptive choices that can make a relatively pleasant and prosperous way of life possible even in the absence of cheap energy.

Book review: Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn

Somebody recommended to me that I read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I'm glad I did.

This is a fiction novel with the premise of an intelligent gorilla trying to teach a human about how it came to be that our species is destroying our life-giving planet. Despite several little holes in the arguments here and there, the story is very good at helping the human (and us, the readers) try to think completely differently about humans as animals vs. humans as rulers of the world. Questions are asked such as, when did humans, during the course of our evolution, change from being a part of nature just like apes and slugs and fish, to manipulators of the natural world? And why? But most crucial is, can we undo the destruction we've wreaked on our planet? I'll give away the answer: the only way is to once again be a part of nature's cycle submitting to what the land gives us, and relinquish our self-imposed role of warriors against natural forces.

The thesis is that we humans have taken on a god-like role over the "natural world" thinking we can control it to our benefit, when the truth is, the world is not ours to control. And our attempts to do so yield the results we see today: famine in third world countries, climate change, extinction of species, melting of glaciers, pollution of air, water and soil, over-population, wars, depression, unfulfilment, addiction...

As with the thesis of David Korten's The Great Turning, the glimmer of hope is that perhaps our role as the human race is to see what our acts of ignorance and arrogance can do, learn from our erroneous ways, and spark a re-birth as a more enlightened family with a vision of harmony and humility on Earth.

Here is a blog post by Steven McEvoy reviewing books "that will change your life", including Ishmael.