Deep thought – Apr 25

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

Ok, Breathe
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
So my last post [We Regret to Inform You…] kinda hit a nerve. I broke 100 comments for the very first time (thanks for the lively discussion on nuclear power, guns, veganism and tomato plants), and made the top links at Savinar’s LATOC, the Automatic Earth, Energy Bulletin, etc… Can I just make one little complaint – I asked, nay, begged y’all to argue me out of this belief, and almost no one argued the basic premise at all. I really, really wanted someone to persuade me that things aren’t really going to hell in a handbasket.

Given that that doesn’t seem to be happening, what to do? Where do we go from here? I have compiled a list of suggestions, most of them fairly obvious.

1. Take a couple of deep breaths. Yes, this is a scary thing. Yes, this is a terribly sad thing. Yes, we have every obligation to bust our behinds to do what we can to mitigate the disaster unfolding before us.

And yet, let’s also note that this current crisis was 150 years in the making and had the participation of a lot of people. You didn’t do it by yourself, and you aren’t going to fix it by yourself.

… Rent a movie. I suggest a pre-1950s comedy, preferrably something with Cary Grant. “His Gal Friday” “Desk Set” (my favorite of the Hepburn-Tracy flicks), “The Thin Man” or the perfect, glorious “A Night at the Opera.” Nothing that reminds you of our present crisis – no “Modern Times.”

Have a beer or two. Throw or kick a ball with your kid or some borrowed kid from the neighborhood. Pat your seedlings. Pet your dog or cat or guinea pig. Hang out with friends and talk about trivial things. Do something life affirming for a short while.

And then, get back to work on the same things – because in a way, it doesn’t much matter if I’m right or not – the answer to how to do deal with a fast crash or a slow crash is the same – live differently, help other people adapt to living differently, grow food, enrich soil, share, talk to the neighbors, help each other out, take care of yourself and your own, give what you can to those in need, meet as many of your own needs as you can, keep services alive for those who are most vulnerable, speak out against injustice, do what good you can, and try and stop what evil you can, love one another, take pleasure in what you have and find a way to hope for the future. Above all, to paraphrase the words over the Holocaust Museum – DON’T BE A BYSTANDER. Be in your world, as deeply as you can, as bravely as you can.
(24 April 2008)

The Politics of Food is Politics
De Clarke and Stan Goff, CounterPunch
An Alternative Agriculture is Possible
—
In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the devaluation of the dollar create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance.

… Once again, gasoline and food are intimately entwined — in the mesh of dependencies that keeps us all obedient to the bosses of the monetized economy. Most people can’t eat without participating in the money economy because they have been driven off the land, and live in high-density “people storage” buildings without any access to living soil; or because, despite living in the suburbs or semi-rural areas with ample access to soil, they lack the skills and knowledge to produce their own food; or the soil they do have access to has been killed by industrial farming practises and can only “produce” by means of massive external inputs that must be purchased from the money economy (and the extractive industries).

… Many well-substantiated studies show that intensive biotic polyculture — that is, the cultivation of many species of food plants in a small footprint, using biotic soil amendments and nutrient recycling — produces far more food per hectare than factory farming; uses far less water; and builds, rather than destroying, topsoil.

Although more human ingenuity, care, and attention are required, the adoption of permaculture principles and techniques reduces the drudgery of food production considerably; the permaculturist is assisting food to grow rather than forcing it to grow (or more hubristically, “growing” it), which is much less work all round than our cartoon cultural memory of dawn-to-dusk backbreaking peasant labor (which became backbreaking to pay “tribute” and debts to people with weapons and ledgers, not survive).

… We are not accustomed, especially on the political left, to thinking about such practical activities as “political.” We are still trapped in a strategic-theoretical model that equates power with policy, and policy is then undertaken as a purely ideological struggle. The persuasion of the word and the concept is given primacy over the persuasion of actual conditions and deeds. Metaphorically, we have constructed a line, running from left to right, and we use a constellation of policy-issues to place both people and discourse along that line.

The system, however, reproduces itself most earnestly through “facts-on-the-ground.” Fighting a system with nothing more than ideas is the most Quixotic, and ineffectual, form of struggle. Before we can suggest ideas, we must first have some facts-on-the-ground of our own to point to.

… The job of Americans is to work with other Americans; and the more locally, the better. This is where we know each other culturally. This is the belly of the beast.

… “Self-determination,” that shopworn phrase used by right and left alike, is not practicaly feasible — in any guise whatsoever — without food independence. If someone else controls your access to food then you have, by definition, no self-determination. You can’t hold a strike without a strike fund. Why do you need a strike fund? So you can eat. Food independence — food autarky — is not possible without greater separation of food from the monetized economy: (money is a weapon of control, an entitlement against others).

… In the United States and the other metropolitan nations, there is an emerging — if not terribly vocal — food movement. It involves everything from fighting prohibitions on raw milk to farmers markets to community-supported agriculture to community gardens.

… The argument from the archaic left, i.e. that the Food Underground is simply individualistic voluntarism, has copped to the idea that all practical palliatives are somehow the realm of the individual.

… The Food Underground is already here. It has been invisible to many of us, because our eyes were fixed on “higher” ideological struggles… while the basis of effective counter-ideology — skill and design — quietly passed us by. It is time to change that. Political resisters need to learn and apply the skills and designs of the food underground; and the food underground needs deeper, more focused and intentional politicization.

De Clarke is a radical feminist essayist and activist living in the United States from 1980 to 2008. She now lives in Canada on her old boat. Much of her writing addresses the link between violence against women and market economics. While in the US, she raised vegetables and kept bees.

Stan Goff is the author of “Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft Skull Press, 2000), “Full Spectrum Disorder” (Soft Skull Press, 2003 He is a Methodist and an organic gardener. He has written about the military and militarism, and about masculinity-constructed-as-conquest.
(24 April 2008)
Long essay. Links and more at original.

UPDATE (Apr 26): Also posted at Insurgent American

Peak civilization and the winter of our disconnect
Carolyn Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
… Duane Elgin, author of numerous books including Voluntary Simplicity, postulated fifteen years ago that civilizations evolve through specific stages which ironically follow the shape of a bell curve, similar to the Peak Oil curve, in their development and to which Elgin refers as the “four seasons” of growth. This was long before the bell curve of Peak Oil was familiar to many other individuals besides M. King Hubbert, father of the Peak Oil theory, who died four years before Elgin’s book was published.

According to Elgin, Stage I of the development of a civilization, “Springtime” is characterized by high growth and an era of faith in future potential. During springtime, there is little bureaucratic complexity, and activities are largely self-regulating. Stage II or “Summer”, is an era of reason where social consensus begins to weaken and bureaucratic complexity increases with less self-regulation and more external regulation. “Autumn” follows, ushering in an era of cynicism where consensus weakens considerably, special interest groups surpass the power of a shared social purpose, and bureaucratic complexity mounts faster than the ability to effectively regulate. An era of despair characterizes Stage IV, “Winter”, and the collapse of consensus is supplanted by conflicting social purposes. Bureaucratic mechanisms and their complexity become overwhelming, and society begins to break down.

Elgin believes that three possible outcomes are likely to emerge from the breakdown of the system. One outcome is collapse as the biosphere is pushed beyond its limits and can no longer support the burden of humanity. Stagnation is another option, in which members of the system expend energy on simply maintaining the status quo. Revitalization is the most desirable option which results from a “period of intense communication and reconciliation that builds a working consensus around a sustainable pathway into the future.”

The author notes that we get collapse by “perpetuating the status quo and running the biosphere into ruin. We get stagnation when citizens are passive and rely on remote bureaucracies and technological solutions to handle a deteriorating local-to-global situation. We get revitalization only when we directly engage our predicament as individuals, families, communities, and nations.”

… Our challenge at this moment in history is to recognize and intentionally connect with the evolutionary season of winter in which Peak Civilization finds itself because as Duane Elgin admonishes us: “It is time to begin the next stage of our human journey.”
(24 April 2008)

Why Everything You Think You Know About Modern Society is Wrong (and Why it Matters When Thinking About Peak Oil)
Lakis Polycarpou, City of the Future (blog)
Over the past two hundred years, certain vested interests in the industrialized world have promoted a particular narrative about the nature of technology, development, economics and modern society. Eventually that narrative became so widely accepted that today it is virtually impossible to have an economic or political discussion outside its frame of reference. The pervasiveness of this narrative is, I have increasingly come to believe, one of the main reasons many people have difficulty accepting the reality and imminence of peak oil.

It is also the main reason proposed “solutions” to the problem-from the liberal “subsidize alternative fuels” approach to the conservative conviction that we should “let the market sort it out”-are so misguided. More surprisingly, I believe the dependency and learned helplessness this narrative engenders is a major cause of the fatalistic despair many so-called peak oil “doomers” feel.

What is this narrative? It’s impossible to summarize without resorting to caricature, but that’s how most people know it anyway. The story goes something like this …

If [the analysis of Kevin Carson, a self-described Free Market Anti-Capitalist of the Mutualist tradition] is correct, I believe at least two broad conclusions can be drawn that have relevance to the issue of peak oil.

First, the widespread belief that our large-scale, energy-intensive economy is the most efficient possible is false-even given the availability of cheap energy.

Therefore-technocratic admonitions to the contrary-it is not necessarily the case that a decrease in the size of the economy (as a decline in available energy implies) must lead to a dieoff, or even a dramatic decline in standard of living (depending on how one defines “standard of living”). The only thing that would make a dieoff inevitable would be government action (malicious or well-meaning) that further distorts markets or is punitive to small-scale enterprises. Unfortunately, as the situation with corn-based ethanol proves, non-intervention is anything but a foregone conclusion.

As surprising a conclusion as it is for someone who has always been a liberal, it seems increasingly apparent to me that the most important political action citizens can take on peak oil is not to support government-sponsored “Manhattan Project” energy programs but to resist state interventions that could complicate the inevitable process of relocalizing.
(24 April 2008)
I’m not sure of the reason, but it does seem as if current national governments have a talent for choosing “solutions” that end up making the energy problem worse. Maybe Polycarpou and Carson are right?

Lakis Polycarpou is an Energy Bulletin contributor who wrote the popular Is the desire to relocalize merely aesthetic?.
-BA