ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

I’ve been working my way through the Autobiography of Mark Twain, and I can’t help but think how diminished the world is and how much poorer we all are after over 150 years of “progress” and “growth”.

Twain describes his uncle John’s farm outside of Florida, Missouri – where he was born, and where young Sam spent his summers until he was twelve or thirteen,after his family moved to Hannibal:

It was a heavenly place for a boy. that farm of my uncle John’s. The house was a double log one, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting it with the kitchen. In the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady and breezy floor., and the sumptuous meals – well, it makes me cry to think of them. Fried chicken; roast pig; wild and tame turkeys, ducks, and geese; venison just killed; squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, prairie chickens; home-made bacon and ham; hot biscuits, hot batter-cakes, hot buckwheat cakes, hot “wheatbread,” hot rolls, hot corn pone; fresh corn boiled on the ear, succotash, butter-beans, string beans, tomatoes, peas, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes; buttermilk, sweet milk, “clabber;” watermelons, musk melons, canteloups – all fresh from the garden – apple pie, peach pie, pumpkin pie, apple dumplings, peach cobbler – I can’t remember the rest. The way that the things were cooked up was perhaps the main splendor. [p. 210]

People without much money were wealthy nonetheless. The household economy was rich. Folks didn’t need much money to share in the riches that surrounded them – and they had the time and the skills to make use of it. They did and made things for themselves and for their neighbors.

Twain describes a life immersed in an environment yet unspoiled, teeming with diversity and abundance:

The life which I led there with my cousins was full of charm, and so is the memory of it yet. I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off-hammering of wood-peckers and the muffled drumming of wood-pheasants in the remotenesses of the forest, the snap-shot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures skurrying through the grass, – I can call it all back and make it as real as it ever was, and as blessed. I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their end-fathers. I can see the woods in their autumn dress, the oaks purple, the hickories washed with gold, the maples and the sumachs luminous with crimson fires, and I can hear the rustle made by the fallen leaves as we plowed through them. I can see the blue clusters of wild grapes hanging amongst the foliage of the saplings, and I remember the taste of them and the smell. I know how the wild blackberries looked, and how they tasted; and the same with the pawpaws, the hazelnuts and the persimmons; and I can feel the thumping rain, upon my head, of hickory nuts and walnuts when we were out in the frosty dawns to scramble for them with the pigs, and the gusts of wind loosed them and sent them down . . . [p. 216]

That healthy, intact ecological system was the foundation of people’s wealth – wealth money could never buy and cannot ever replace.

But things were starting to go wrong, even then.

I remember the pigeon seasons, when the birds would come in millions, and cover the trees, and by their weight break down the branches. They were clubbed to death with stick; guns were not necessary, and were not used. I remember the squirrel-hunts, and prairie-chicken hunts, and wild turkey hunts, and all that; and how we turned out, mornings, while it was still dark, to go on these expeditions, and how chilly and dismal it was, and how often I regretted that I was well enough to go. [p. 218]

Passenger pigeons were once unimaginably abundant in the U.S., probably numbering 3 billion to 5 billion.  The slaughter was unmerciful. The last fully authenticated record of a wild bird was in Ohio in 1900. The species officially became extinct when the last known passenger pigeon died in in captivity in 1914.

Already in 1850, and the American dream was beginning its transformation into The Air Conditioned Nightmare. We’ve spent the 160 years since exploiting and destroying the ecosystems within which we live, converting them to money which we call “wealth”.

In Lane County at this very moment, a couple of already-wealthy “developers” have begun to rip down and crush up the entirety of Parvin Butte. They bought the whole butte a couple of years ago from Union Pacific for a pittance  ($360,000), immediately put it on the market for $30 million, and began destroying the forest, logging all the trees off the butte. Now they see the opportunity to turn their investment into even more millions, taking advantage of the opportunity offered by $50 million in state and federal government subsidies for the rehabilitation of the Coos Bay rail corridor which would enable them to ship their rock cheaply all the way to the coast. For the folks who actually live near Parvin Butte and in and around Dexter, it’s not a good deal at all. Their neighborhood and lives are being shot to hell, and there’s not a thing anybody can do about it. Oregon’ vaunted statewide planning program mandates that “protected” aggregate resources be made available for exploitation, just as it mandates that growth be accommodated, environment be damned.  If it’s not on a list, it doesn’t exist.  Except, of course, for aggregate.

When Earth’s ecosystems are degraded or destroyed, all the money in the world won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.

Note: “Mark twain” was one of the calls sung out by the leadsman on a  Mississippi paddlewheel teamboat. It meant that lead line indicated the water was 2 fathoms (12 feet) deep and safe for passage

Richard Heinberg has posted a really interesting piece at Post Carbon Institute on the relationship between energy and societal complexity. He ponders the consequences of the fact that reduced energy will inevitably result in simplification – a reduction in societal complexity or, more ominously stated, collapse.

Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies is the touchstone work. As Heinberg summarizes:

Tainter saw societal complexity as a strategy for solving problems (too many people, not enough food, warlike neighbors, changing climate, and so on). But investments in complexity yield diminishing returns, so eventually the strategy always fails and the society must simplify again. This simplification typically manifests as political and economic crisis, abandonment of urban centers, declining population, or war.

One of the reasons that returns on complexity begin to decline is that growth in exploitation of energy sources cannot be sustained: soils erode, forests disappear, fossil fuels deplete, the climate changes around us.

Heinberg poses the questions that we will be forced to confront: How will that simplification occur? How simple will society become?

Heinberg says adaptation strategies are likely to be more successful if we can organize the simplification process. But as we are seeing in the reactions to the multiple crises we’re facing, our automatic response is ever more complexity:

[W]e labor instead under the belief that our current problems can be solved with ever more complexity in the forms of technology (genetically modified crops and hybrid cars) and government bailouts for failing companies.

Will we as a society continue doing what we have been doing until it simply doesn’t work any longer and we’re compelled to do something else? Time will tell.

Heinberg helpfully lists others who have been exploring in their works the phenomenon of collapse and what it means for us: Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization; John Michael Greer, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age; and Dmitri Orlov, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects.

This great little animated video does a great job of explaining the concept of climate “tipping points.”

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

It’s a fun yet scientifically sound run-through of some major climate tipping points — all left out of the current IPCC projections — and what these might mean to us. It warns that vested interests pursuing economic growth pose a powerful obstacle to needed action.

What are the consequences of failing to act?

“Everything else we do in our lives will be destroyed – or become meaningless.”

But to show the implacable powers that global warming activists are up against, this new article by William Net and Christopher Cooper in ScienceDirect  advises:

“Our analysis proposes that the extent of Global Warming may be acceptable and preferable compared to the socio-economic consequences of not exploiting fossil fuel reserves to their full technical potential.”

Damn the Earth, full speed ahead.

This video clip of Hitler in a Nashville bunker ranting about being out of gas is really funny. Going out to eat may be challenging in our future . . .

Bush has signed the $700 billion bailout, calling it a “decisive action to ease the credit crunch that is now threatening our economy.”

However, what this moment really calls for is decisive action to save human civilization and the stability of Earth’s ecosystems. The bailout of the financial system is a  distraction terribly wasteful in both time and treasure.

Taking on the concept of “the economy” demands taking on the vested interests that profit so mightily from unbounded exploitation of the Earth’s resources. Rather than challenging the growth project or challenging the powerful interests that profit from it so mightily, we’re doing everything we can to patch the economic growth machine back together again, to keep it running for as long as we can.

This action by Congress and the Executive confirm to me that it’s now too late. We will not avoid either a devastating energy crunch or catastrophic climate change. The political leaders in the U.S. and the world are not up to the task of acting decisively and in a timely manner to overthrow the entrenched interests that have brought them to power.

As Tom Whipple points out at the Falls Church News-Press, talk of “rebounds” during an era when oil, natural gas, and eventually coal production will be declining shows a failure to understand the reality, which is that we depend on prodigious quantities of cheap energy for nearly everything. The depletion of our energy resources means that there are many decades of tough economic times ahead.

A slide from Jeff Vail’s presentation at the recent ASPO conference in Sacramento illustrates nicely the situation we find ourselves in:

click to view image

As Vail explains, we pursue the “geologically “easy oil” first, and are now left with the more geologically and net-energy challenging oil reserves. This same process also operates in the realm of geopolitics. Just as we exploited the geologically easy oil first, we also exploited the geopolitically easy oil first. Now, what is left is increasingly geopolitically challenging.

It seems that no one outside of those who understand the meaning and imminence of peak oil recognize that the “business cycle” of the industrial age is about to be turned on its head. Infinite growth is simply not possible. Peak oil is an example of bumping up against “source” limits to growth.

And the “sink” limits are even more terrifying. Global warming is the penultimate example. We’re overwhelming the capacity of Earth to absorb our waste products.

Juan Santos at Countercurrents sums up our situation nicely (if that’s the right word . . . ):

“Humanity faces a real crisis – one that threatens not only Wall Street, but all life on Earth. Call it Global Warming, call it Peak Oil, call it running out of water on a global scale, call it the collapse of industrial agriculture. call it fisheries collapsing, call it mass extinction. Call it the potential of planetary death. Call it what is inside the Black Hole made visible, palpable in its meaning. Call it the real event horizon. Call it the Killing horizon. It’s every bit as complex in all of its intersections as the financial “crisis,” but, unlike the financial “crisis,” it’s real.

“And what happens?

“Nothing. No significant action. At all.

“There’s no $700 billion plan to save the Earth – which sustains us all.”

The failure of our political leaders to act can’t be excused. The cases for both peak oil and global climate change are rock solid. The world is not lacking for those sounding the alarm, people of enormous intelligence, accomplishment, and reputation.

John Michael Greer reminds us of the story of Cassandra. Recall that Cassandra was a daughter of Priam, the last king of Troy. Greer summarizes the tale:

“Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy in an attempt to seduce her but, when she refused him, put a curse on her so that nobody would believe her predictions. She thus had to watch helplessly as all her warnings were ignored and her father’s city plunged headlong into the catastrophe of the Trojan War.

“When Troy fell to the Greeks, the Greek commander Agamemnon took her home with him as a captive. In a scene portrayed with stunning force in Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon, she foresaw his murder – and her own – at the hands of Agamemnon’s estranged wife; no one believed her then, either, and captor and captive died together.”

Greer sees “crowning irony” in the fact that Apollo’s curse has lost none of its power today. Now, when someone is described as “a Cassandra,” the phrase implies that the dire events that person predicts will not happen.

We have our Cassandras, but we are fated to ignore them. Like Agamemnon, we cannot escape the consequences. In a cycle much more ancient and enduring than the economic cycle, we are now living in a Greek tragedy.

Dutch-based Home Energy International has come up with a new design for home wind power.

click to view image

The eggbeater-like design spins quieter and at lower wind speeds than traditional propeller-type turbines. The firm asserts that noise from an Energy Ball is always less than the sound of the wind. And the device works even when the wind speed dips down to as slow as 4.5 mph, whereas the average turbine needs roughly twice that wind speed to turn.

The Energy Ball is that it has a horizontal axis and uses a different kind of physics, called the Venturi effect. The Venturi effect is characterized by a low pressure that occurs when a flow of air or liquid speeds up as it is constricted.
The constriction causes the pressure to drop inside the ball, sucking in air flowing and turning the rotor blades.

Venturi-based turbines are said to be 40% more efficient than a propeller-style turbine of the same diameter.

In a good location, a 1-meter ball can generate up to 500 kilowatt-hours and a 2-meter ball up to 1,750 kilowatt-hours per year. The typical U.S. household uses 11,000 kilowatt-hours per year.

Energy Balls currently are sold in sizes of either 1 meter or 2 meters in diameter. They can be installed on a pole or a flat roof in as few as four hours.
The cost of the Energy Ball is between $3,500 and $7,000, not including installation.

Oregon’s coastal and ocean resources are in trouble. Polluted waters, declining populations of fish and other marine life, degraded nearshore habitats, and impacts related to climate change all pose serious threats to the continued vitality of our ocean-dependent communities.

Marine reserves are an important piece of the strategy for repairing and restoring coastal and ocean ecosystems. The purpose of the new film Common Ground: Oregon’s Oceans is to put marine reserves on Oregon’s radar screen. The minute video is a primer about our ocean, the threats to ocean health and the benefits of a network of marine reserves.

The full 28-minute video, along with a shorter version and even shorter clips, are all available at the Common Ground website here.

Mark Twain’s publisher refused to publish The War Prayer (inspired by disgust at the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars), thinking it too inflammatory for the times. Twain insisted that it be published after his death, complaining:

“None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.”

Full text is below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

This great “Power of Wind” TV spot from Germany won the “Golden Lion” at Cannes.

I’ve been putting off saying anything about Jim Kunstler’s new novel World Made by Hand, having nothing of particular to add to the many reviews that are floating around.

A while ago at the library I picked up a copy of Teacher Man by Frank McCourt. McCourt’s memoir was so gentle and honest and touching – so human – that I resolved to finally read Angela’s Ashes, the memoir of his Irish Catholic boyhood that won him the Pulitzer Prize.

If we really want to envision what our future might look like when the scarcity and expense of oil and energy has led to a collapse of our comfortable little world, the glimpse that McCourt gives us into the not-so-distant past (circa late 1930s) in Ireland is truly terrifying. McCourt escorts us through a world where damp, dirt, hunger, and death are constant companions, a world where escape from a life of abject poverty and degradation is miraculous.

The ability to convey richness of character and detail and to share with us the minds and souls of his characters is what makes literature. Kunstler provides a thought-provoking scenario of what post-peak oil induced collapse might look like, but it’s peopled with no more than cardboard characters marched across a stage set. Which isn’t to say that it’s not a good read. An interesting Glenn Beck interview with Jim Kunstler talking about his book is available here.

Next on my list is McCourt’s ‘Tis, the American sequel to Angela’s Ashes. I was, unfortunately, put off for too long by a review I read, which I quote (as I remember it) in its entirely:

“‘Taint.”

SIXTY years ago the Orkney poet Edwin Muir wrote some lines which, with oil at $120/barrel while new supplies increasingly elusive, existing fields depleting, and infrastructure crumbling and vulnerable to attack, see like a premonition. They point to a world not too far in the future where our reliance on oil has become all too clear, and the way we live our lives all too fragile.

And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
‘They’ll molder away and be like other loam.’

The poem was about the world after a nuclear holocaust. Strange that the most horrific consequences we imagined in our post-WWII paradise of suburbs and Eisenhower’s interstate highway system, a paradise of unprecedented mobility and freedom, would stem not from that dreaded holocaust but from our dream of paradise itself.

The haunting title of this entry is also from Muir’s poem The Horses. The whole poem is below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

Seattle artist Chris Jordan has posted some of his current work from his series “Running the Numbers“. It’s very cool, and very powerful. He cautions that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended, as  their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in the little web images.

Here’s how he describes the pieces:

This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.”

Really, it’s awesome. Check it out.

Amanda Kovattana at the Energy Bulletin reviews Dmitry Orlov’s new book Reinventing Collapse. She finds one of his most pungent observations is that what holds America together – our common denominator as a people, what defines our membership in the middle class – is nothing more than everyone owning a car.

“Not education, not equal opportunity or equal rights, but the one-ton behemoth that we must have to get around the wasteful geography created by suburbia.”

Orlov points out that because we are so identified with owning a car as part of this American middle class identity we will be hard put to let it go. And when we are forced to (due to diminishing and increasingly expensive gasoline supplies) so will go the myth of the middle class.

Our ideologically indoctrinated minds are so invested in the American way of life that we regard it as “non-negotiable. Our minds are so closed to change we will be

“unable to retreat from the overextended, oil fueled, debt based economy which is poised to come crashing down, financed as it is by foreign investment that will eventually decide that we are not a good credit risk.”

The U.S. at the end of World War II produced half of all the world’s goods and services. Our oil wealth powered the West’s armies and the post-war boom. But U.S. oil production peaking in 1971, we changed from being a lender to a borrower nation in the early 1980s, and the U.S. is now a net debtor nation to the tune of about $2.8 trillion as of 2006 and getting farther and farther in debt at the rate of about $800 billion a year.

The time when the rest of the world will decide we’re no longer a good credit risk will come sooner rather than later.