Goodbye 2022! Happy 2023 (just around the corner)!

Hello 2017!

It has been a very very long time since I've even thought about this blog. I wasn't even sure I could log on again into this blog since it had so long but here we are....

They say that time heals all wounds. Don't know if that is completely true but I am definitely in a better place than last year. Ah wisdom.....

Its been a great year! Got to do alot of travelling, was healthy, family & friends were healthy. What could be better than that? 

With that said, am going to wish all a very healthy & happy new year. This year should be interesting...very interesting. 

May we all be better for whatever we learn this year, remain healthy & happy & get to do even more travelling!! 

"Why Sustainability" by Richard Heinberg

This Museletter from Richard Heinberg brings together two essays. The first, written for an exhibition on Nature and Sustainability in Istanbul, asks the big question 'what is sustainability' and how might we get there? The second is his response to a new Harvard study on rising global methane emissions and what it means for US energy policy.

Why Sustainability?

The essence of the term sustainable is simple enough: “that which can be maintained over time.” We want our culture, our institutions, and our society to be durable rather than fragile. A society that is sustainable is built to last, while one that is unsustainable will fail sooner or later.

Of course, no society can be maintained forever: astronomers assure us that in several billion years the Sun will have heated to the point that Earth’s oceans will have boiled away and life on our planet will have come to an end. Thus sustainability is a relative term. It seems reasonable to use previous civilizations as a yardstick; their lifetimes ranged from several hundred to several thousand years. A sustainable society, then, would be one capable of maintaining itself for many millennia.

The word sustainable is often used, in a general and vague way, merely to refer to consumer products reputed to be more environmentally benign than others. But sustainability has a life-or-death importance for us in an era of rapid population growth, resource depletion, widespread species extinctions, and catastrophic climate change. The term is key to understanding humanity’s current ecological dilemma, and to finding a way toward a future in which we live happily within nature’s limits.

The History of Sustainability

The essential concept of sustainability was implicit in the traditions of many ancient and indigenous peoples. For example, the Gayanashagowa, or Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee (the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy of North America) implored chiefs to consider the impact of their decisions on the seventh generation to come.

The first known European use of sustainability (German: Nachhaltigkeit) occurred in 1712 in the book Sylvicultura Oeconomica by German forester and scientist Hannss Carl von Carlowitz. Later, French and English foresters adopted the practice of planting trees as a path to “sustained yield forestry.”

The term gained widespread usage after 1987, when the Brundtland Report of the World Commission of Environment and Development defined sustainable development as development that “meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This simple definition of sustainability is still widely used; nevertheless it has been criticized for its failure to explicitly note the unsustainability of the use of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels, and for its disregard of the problem of population growth.

Defining Sustainability

In an effort to help clarify the basic concept, I have formulated four axioms (self-evident truths) of sustainability, based on a survey of prior published definitions. These might be thought of as basic design criteria for building and managing a sustainable society.

1. Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained indefinitely.

Human population has grown for many centuries, and much more rapidly in the last few decades; this growth has obviously been sustained up to the present. How do we know that it cannot be sustained indefinitely? Simple arithmetic shows that even small rates of growth eventually add up to absurdly large—and plainly unsupportable—population sizes and rates of resource consumption. For example, a simple one percent rate of growth in the present human population (less than the actual current rate) results in a doubling of population every 70 years. Thus in 2090, the Earth would be home to 14.6 billion humans; in 2160, nearly 30 billion; and so on. By the year 3050, there would be one human per square meter of Earth’s land surface (including mountains and deserts). Obviously, long before we get to that point the human population will have ceased to grow.

How big should our population be? Our economy? We should agree on science-based targets.

2. To be sustainable, the use of renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is less than or equal to the rate of natural replenishment.

Renewable resources are exhaustible. Forests can be over-cut, resulting in barren landscapes and shortages of wood (as occurred in many parts of Europe in past centuries); and fish can be over-harvested, resulting in the extinction or near-extinction of many species (as is occurring today globally). The first clue that harvesting of renewable resources is proceeding at a rate greater than that of natural replenishment would be the decline of the resource base (e.g., forests or fish are disappearing). However, a resource may be declining for reasons other than over-harvesting; for example, a forest that is not being logged may be decimated by disease.

Nevertheless, if the resource is declining, pursuit of the goal of sustainability requires that the rate of harvest be reduced, regardless of the cause of the resource decline. Sometimes harvests must drop dramatically, at a rate far greater than the rate of resource decline, so that the resource has time to recover. This has been the case with regard to commercial wild whale and fish species that have been over-harvested to the point of near-exhaustion, and have required complete harvest moratoria in order to re-establish themselves—though in cases where the remaining breeding population is too small even moratoria are not effective; the species simply cannot recover.

3. To be sustainable, the extraction of non-renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is declining, and the rate of decline must be greater than or equal to the rate of depletion.

No continuous rate of extraction of non-renewable resources (metals, minerals, or fossil fuels) is sustainable. However, if the rate of extraction is declining at a rate greater than or equal to the rate of depletion (defined as the amount being extracted and used per year as a percentage of the amount left to extract), this can be said to be a sustainable situation in that society’s dependence on the resource will be reduced to insignificance before the resource is exhausted.

4. Sustainability requires that substances introduced into the environment from human activities be minimized and rendered harmless to biosphere functions.

The most serious forms of pollution in the modern world arise from the extraction, processing, and consumption of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels. If (as outlined in Axiom 3) the consumption of non-renewable resources declines, pollution should also decline. However, where the consumption of non-renewable resources has been growing for some time and has resulted in levels of pollution that threaten basic biosphere functions, heroic measures are called for.

This is the situation with regard to atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from burning fossil fuels; it is also the case with regard to hormone-mimicking petrochemical pollution that inhibits reproduction in many vertebrate species. Merely to reduce fossil fuel consumption by the global depletion rate would not suffice to avert a climate catastrophe. Similarly, in the case of petrochemical pollution, merely to reduce the dispersion of plastics and other petrochemicals into the environment by the annual rate of depletion of oil and natural gas would not be enough to avert environmental harms on a scale potentially leading to the collapse of ecosystems.

All of these four axioms have to do with environmental sustainability. However, economists and political scientists might add two guidelines (they are too vague to be called axioms) to this list. Social sustainability requires that inequality in incomes, wealth, and political power not become overly great, as societies with sharp social divisions breed misery and contempt, and ultimately tend to succumb to revolutions. And financial sustainability requires that total debt (government as well as household and business debt) not increase far beyond levels that can be repaid).

Measuring Sustainability

How do we know if our society is sustainable or unsustainable? We can’t just wait to see if it collapses; we need indicators to tell us how we are doing now, so that we can prevent future collapse.

Seeing the need for such indicators, Canadian ecologist William Rees in 1992 introduced the concept of the Ecological Footprint, defined as the amount of land and water area a human population would hypothetically need in order to provide the resources required to support itself and to absorb its wastes, given prevailing technology. Implicit in this accounting scheme is the recognition that, for humanity to achieve sustainability, the total world population’s footprint must be less than the total land/water area of the Earth. That footprint is currently calculated by the Global Footprint Network as being about 30 percent larger than the planet—which is made possible only by drawing down resources at unsustainable rates.

More recently, Johan Rockström from the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Will Steffen from the Australian National University identified nine “planetary boundaries” that define a “safe operating space for humanity.” Beyond these boundaries there is a risk of “irreversible and abrupt environmental change” that could make Earth less habitable. They attempted to quantify just how far these systems have been pushed already, and estimated how much further we can go before our survival is threatened; they concluded that three of these boundaries—climate change, biodiversity loss, and the biogeochemical flow boundary—appear already to have been crossed. Unfortunately, it is not necessary for all nine boundaries to be transgressed before global calamity threatens; all it takes is for one boundary to be breached far enough, long enough.

Post-Keynesian economists including Steve Keen have suggested that a nation’s financial sustainability can be measured in terms of its debt-to-GDP ratio (that ratio hit a peak in 2008, which it has recently surpassed). Income inequality is commonly measured by the GINI index, which represents the income distribution within a nation (most nations are seeing a worsening of numbers in that regard).
What Would a Sustainable Society Look Like?

Is it possible to describe a sustainable society in more specific terms?

First, our hypothetical sustainable society would have a steady-state economy rather than one based on continual growth. It would be a conserver society rather than a consumer society. There would be far less advertising than we are accustomed to today, and products would be made to high standards, so they could be reused and repurposed indefinitely rather than being thrown away and replaced. All materials would be recycled or reused.

No fossil fuels would be used for energy; instead, all energy would come from renewable sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass. Average global per capita energy consumption would be much lower than is currently the case in North America and Europe. Because no fossil fuels would be burned or turned into petrochemicals, air and water would be less polluted. Environmental toxins of any kind would be rare.

Biodiversity would be stable or slowly growing rather than diminishing. Forests would be increasing rather than shrinking. Bird populations would be healthy. The oceans would be clean and sea life would be flourishing.

People would have an intimate and interdependent relationship with the natural world, often spending time in nature. They would understand where their food comes from because more households would be participating in community gardens. People would know that while nature supplies resources for human benefit, humanity has the responsibility to keep its appetites within nature’s long-term ability to provide.

Our sustainable society would also be one of relative equality, in which the highest and lowest members of society could still rub elbows. And it would be a society that relies minimally on debt.
How Do We Get There From Here?

Clearly, our imaginary sustainable society would work very differently from the nations of today’s world. Fortunately, however, there are efforts under way to move us in the direction of sustainability.

The renewable energy industry has been growing dramatically in the past few years, with solar and wind power together increasing faster than any other energy source. Meanwhile climate activists are persuading large institutions such as universities to stop investing in fossil fuel companies. These two efforts—to force extractive industries to leave fossil fuels in the ground, and to replace fossil fuels with renewable alternative energy sources—represent today’s most visible and important sustainability efforts. However, it is clear to most analysts that it will be difficult to fully replace the energy of fossil fuels with solar and wind power due to the intermittent nature of sunlight and wind resources. Thus, as we transition to an inevitable renewable energy future, it will also be important to reduce overall energy demand. Doing so will serve the interests of sustainability in other ways: all energy use entails environmental impacts, so the pursuit of sustainability will require highly industrialized nations to scale back energy usage in any case. The actual process of reducing energy usage while maintaining a high quality of life will require innovation and behavior adaptation throughout society—in agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, and the economy in general. Here are just a few examples, again highlighting efforts already underway.

If we are to have a conserver economy rather than a consumer economy, then extraction-dependent manufacturing sectors must shrink, while other sectors will have to be transformed so that they use renewable energy and recycled materials. The implications for jobs and investment are significant. The field of ecological economics has for years been exploring how this transition can be accomplished in a way that actually improves lives.

The “passive house” movement in Germany has pioneered techniques of building construction that yield structures using up to 90 percent less energy for heating, cooling, and lighting.

Green transport advocates around the world have been working to reduce consumption of oil through the replacement of internal-combustion vehicles with electric vehicles; through the promotion of walking and bicycling; and through investment in rail and public transit.

The local organic food movement aims to reduce the amount of transport energy in food systems. The market share of organic food—which requires no fossil fuel-based nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides—is growing by leaps and bounds. And advocates of regenerative agriculture hope to remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in healthy topsoil.

Forest advocates note that climate remediation can also be accomplished through planting more trees, which would help protect the world’s remaining biodiversity. Conservationists are also seeking to preserve and restore native forest, prairie, desert, and ocean ecosystems.

With regard to the financial and social dimensions of sustainability, debt and equity problems have become subjects of more widespread discussion throughout the world in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and the Greek debt crisis. While solutions to these problems still seem to elude national governments, communities have quietly begun experimenting with the sharing economy, time banking, and alternative currencies.

It has been shown that high population growth rates can be brought down by raising the education levels of women, and by empowering women to take charge of their own reproductive lives.

These are all welcome and praiseworthy efforts. But they need to be appreciated in context: society has spent many decades on an unsustainable path; time, courage, and collective effort will be needed to transform unsustainable practices still embedded in nearly every aspect of our economy. We cannot know how long we have before the accumulating impacts of climate change, species extinctions, resource depletion, environmental pollution, debt, and inequality force changes upon us that none of us would want. The voices of sustainability-inspired artists, as well as those of conservationists, renewable energy advocates, and the rest, call not just for the moral improvement of society, but for a widespread awakening that might rescue us and countless other species from the consequences of more than a century of reckless, fossil fuel-based expansion.

We should listen as if our life depends on it.

************************************************************************The US: A Nation In Dire Need of Energy and Climate Policy

A new Harvard University study finds that world methane emissions have recently spiked, and that the US appears to be the site of most of the increase. Natural gas fracking is the apparent culprit. This finding should be (though I wouldn’t bet on it) the final nail in the coffin of the “natural gas as bridge fuel to a clean energy future” argument.

The Obama administration has fixated on replacing coal with natural gas for electricity generation as a major pathway to meeting Paris COP 21 commitments for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Its strategy required the EPA to begin regulating CO2 as a pollutant (as the centerpiece of the “Clean Power Plan” or CPP). But industry fought the regulation all the way to the Supreme Court, which did something quite rare. It stepped in to block federal regulations going into effect until a lower court made a ruling, even though the lower court itself had denied a similar request. Now, following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia (who sided with the “conservative” majority halting implementation of the regulation), there appears to be the possibility for an eventual reprieve of CPP.

But what’s the point? If natural gas from fracking harms the climate about as much as coal (higher methane emissions on one hand versus higher CO2 emissions on the other), then the entire strategy is revealed as ill-conceived and useless.

What is really needed is a national plan for a systemic energy transition, including policies, goals, and funding. Such a plan would break out the economy sector by sector, exploiting ways of radically reducing energy consumption over all while replacing oil, coal, and natural gas with renewable resources like solar, wind, biomass, hydro, and geothermal. The plan would have to take into account the vast magnitude of the undertaking by enlisting the entire population along in a visionary, multi-decade odyssey that will entail shared sacrifice as well as opportunity.

Since that effort appears to be currently impossible to mount for political reasons, policy makers have naturally fallen back on smaller projects that just might be achievable. The result is CPP—which, as we have just seen, is not just insufficient, but possibly a waste of effort altogether.

The most likely scenario going forward: environmental groups will lobby to save CPP, and if Democrats win in elections later this year, the regulation may just survive. A great deal of political capital will be spent on both sides, whatever the outcome. But the achievements could be largely symbolic in any case.

Half of US total natural gas supply now comes from fracked shale resources, and, as groundbreaking Post Carbon Institute analysis by David Hughes has shown, production from shale gas reservoirs is set to decline by the end of this decade for purely geological reasons. In fact, strong growth in overall US gas production has now halted, and most of the plays that figured in the recent shale gas boom are in steep decline. Tight oil production is falling, too.

In September 2014, at the U.N. Climate Summit, President Obama boasted that “Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution by more than any other nation on Earth.” But as is now clear, the huge shift from coal to natural gas for electricity production has come with the largely-ignored spike in methane emissions—a far more potent greenhouse gas. (And even this ignores the reality that much of the coal that was displaced was simply shipped abroad while many of the goods we import were manufactured in coal-powered factories overseas.)

At the same time, the Obama administration took credit for soaring US oil and gas production resulting from the fracking frenzy, and cheered industry hype about energy independence and exports.

This is what served as energy and climate policy for the past eight years. Now hopes and dreams of energy abundance are about to be tested. Many analysts assume that current production declines are entirely due to low oil and gas prices, and that once the market is rebalanced, American oil and gas production levels will resume their ascent. If our analysis is correct, tight oil and shale gas production may never surpass 2015 levels and may instead plummet.

What happens then? How will policy makers distract the public from the evident fact that they have no long-range plan to deal with either energy supply or climate change?

No doubt they’ll think of something.

Hello 2016!

New Year & 1st blog entry of 2016!!

I am grateful for a new year. At each year's end, I always try to consider what happened during the past year, what changes do I want to make, where am I in the big scheme of life....heavy, heavy.

I am happy to be in a very good place now. Was a long time comin....Moving to my current locale was a great idea. I have found my people. I had zero community at my former residence, no neighbors in the true sense of the word & much ignorance & closed minded people surrounding me. I still find myself profoundly grateful for all I enjoy & at times look around, wondering if the legal owner of my home will show up & kick me off the place.

So spring is on it's way & I am embarking on a new venture. One I can remember being interested in when I was in my 20s, which was a while back......that of being a truck farmer.

Am learning the ropes on growing produce & have doubled my bee hive inventory, thanks to going in with a friend on this business. Have been cleaning bee hives & frames & readying all for the new bee packages we hope to get in April.

I am home in my garden or outdoors. Blessed greatly by the Great Mystery. Life is good!

Grief And Carbon Reductionism

Grief And Carbon Reductionism, By Charles Eisenstein

FEBRUARY 5TH, 2016

Reposted from A New And Ancient Story

The environmentalist Michael Mielke just wrote to me the following, “We came back over-and-over to the realization that the climate movement must proceed through the several stages of grief to get to Acceptance.”

I am happy to see the growing recognition of what he is talking about. The grief is essential in order to integrate on a deep level the reality of the situation we face. Otherwise it remains, to most people, theoretical. After all, our social infrastructure insulates us pretty well from the tangible effects of climate change (so far). For most people, compared to say their mortgage payment or their teenager’s addiction problem, climate change seems quite remote and theoretical — something that is only happening in the future or on the news. As long as that is the case, they will not take meaningful action either, and it won’t change through persuasion. Persuasion does not penetrate deeply enough. No one is ever “persuaded” to make major changes in their life’s commitments, unless that persuasion is accompanied by an experience that impacts them on a physical and emotional level.

As long as grief is not fully experienced, then normal still seems normal. Even if one is intellectually persuaded of the reality and gravity of climate change, the felt reality is still, “It isn’t real,” or “It’s gonna be fine.”

Of course, by the time that the impact of climate change penetrates the structures of normalcy and causes food shortages, catastrophic weather events, etc. that impact modern Western society, it will probably be too late. So far the elite nations are able to insulate themselves from the harm that ecological destruction causes. Therefore it seems unreal. The air conditioner still works. The car still runs. The credit card still works. The garbage truck takes away the trash. School is open at 8am and there is medicine in the pharmacy. The narratives that define normal life are still intact. If we wait for those narratives to be demolished by external events — by geopolitical and ecological catastrophe — it will be too late.

That defines the challenge before us. How do we bring people to care as much about climate change as the residents of Flint, Michigan care about the lead in their water?

Here is what I want everyone in the climate change movement to hear: People are not going to be frightened into caring. Scientific evidence-based predictions about what will happen 10, 20, or 50 years in the future are not going to make them care, not enough. What we need is the level of activism and energy that we are seeing now in Flint. That requires making it personal. And that requires facing the reality of loss. And that requires experiencing grief. There is no other way.

That is why I am suspicious of the entire framing of the climate change issue. To focus on an abstract, global quantity (CO2 or GGE’s (greenhouse gas equivalents)) creates a gap between cause and effect that requires an intellectual buy-in to the very same systems of authority that have long presided over and defended our ecocidal system. That framing, which I call CO2 reductionism, also lends itself to globalized and financialized solutions that, we have seen again and again, often have damaging ecological and social effects on the local level. CO2 reductionism has been used to justify and promote things like biofuel plantations that destroy traditional farming or wild lands, hydroelectric projects that submerge pristine ecosystems, nuclear power plants, GMOs, and even fracking.

Environmental organizations have long understood, at least unconsciously, the power of accessing grief; hence the success of campaigns invoking superstar species like elephants, rhinos, or whales. I think we can learn from that in the area of climate change. I like to make the point that everything that we might oppose on CO2 grounds can also be opposed on more local, tangible grounds. The Alberta Tar Sands projects are an example. Even if you know nothing about the greenhouse effect, what is happening there is heartbreaking. The same with mountaintop removal of coal. The same for oil field development. The same for offshore oil drilling and the whole petroleum industry (looking at oil spills). By framing them in terms of CO2, I am afraid we distance people from the aspects of those things that provoke grief and horror. If what is wrong with those things is CO2, and we avert our eyes from the immediate horror on the ground, then it seems perfectly reasonable to say, “Well, we’ll offset that gas field by planting a forest. And besides, it’s just transitional until we get enough wind turbines operating.”

Paradoxically, the CO2 framing actually enables the continuation of all the activities that are generating CO2.

I know this verges on apostasy, but I think we need to drop CO2 as the defining narrative of “green.” If you want to step into and the through the grief process as a society, CO2 is a hard sell. Sure you can say that such-and-such grievous flood in Bangladesh or drought in Niger was worsened by climate change, but people have to accept it as an article of faith, because Science Says So.

I’m not saying climate change isn’t a factor. But there are causes that are a lot more tangible. In many places people say, “The rains stopped coming because we cut down the forests.” I think we need to move toward making the forests sacred again, and the mangroves, and the rivers… to see them as sacred beings and not as instruments of human utility, to be protected because of their greenhouse mitigating contribution.

The attitude of instrumental utilitarianism toward nature — that is the problem. I’m talking about the idea that the world outside ourselves is basically a pile of resources whose value is defined by its utility. If that doesn’t change, nothing will change. And for that to change, for us to see nature and the material world as sacred and valuable in its own right, we must connect to the deep part of ourselves that already knows that. When we make that connection and feel the hurts of the planet, grief is unavoidable.

From this stance, we still seek to change everything that the CO2 narrative names as dangerous, but for different reasons and with different eyes. We no longer have to conjoin environmentalism with faith in Big Science and institutional authority, implying that if only people had more trust in the authorities (in this case scientific, but it extends to all the systems that embed and legitimize the institution of science) then things would be fine. You know what? Even if the “climate change deniers” are right, it wouldn’t alter my environmental passion one bit. Granted, I am a sample of one person here, but to me that indicates that it isn’t important to win the intellectual debate with the skeptical forces. That isn’t necessary to make people care.

I am grateful that awareness of the importance of grief is entering the environmental movement. Now is the time to translate that awareness into our framing and strategy.

Your worst enemy

There is a saying that a Marine can be your best friend or your worst enemy. I can understand that. But perhaps one's worst enemy can be oneself.....Love this blogger's writing style & his message.

Posted 23 Nov 2015 from: Prayforcalamity.com

Cold northern air pushed south for a few days granting us the slight chill we have come to expect on a November morning. Heavy winds rattled the bare fingers of oak and hickory like blades of prairie grass. Woodsmoke seasoned the air and warmed my soul as I walked the compost toilet bucket out to the pile to be dumped and covered. Two days later temperatures were right back up again as firearm deer hunting season opened. I wanted to spend my Sunday morning waiting quietly in a tree, scanning the ridge line for a sizable white tail, but decided against it when I saw that the high for the day would be seventy degrees. The forecast calls for the cool air to return, so for now, I postpone the hunt, and cross my fingers in the hope that driving home from work late at night I will see a freshly hit roadkill deer that I can harvest instead. Their habitat long converted to highway, I honestly prefer making use of a collision killed deer than pulling the trigger anyway.

The collapse blogs and forums are often rife with talk of such things. There are those who suggest that in a world where grocery stores are shuttered or where there is no money to purchase what they might still contain, people will need to return to hunting and foraging where possible. At such suggestions, there are those who counter that the skill to harvest and process and meat is lost of the vast majority of the population. There are others who then counter that actually, in such a scenario the fields and streams would quickly be stripped bare of any game or fish as hordes of people begin shooting at anything that moves, whether they know how to properly process and preserve the meat or not. After years of collapse minded discussion on the internet, I think it is fair to say that there are many pockets of cliches and conventional wisdoms that have taken root and found their loyalties. Fast collapse, slow collapse, hyper inflation, deflationary depression, bug out, bug in, long slow die off, near term human extinction, etc. ad nauseam. Flow charts of collapse hypothesis each complete with their experts and their laundry list of survival purchases.

Over the years I have found myself settling in the realm of thought promoted by the Dark Mountain Project. I do my best not to make a lot of predictions that don’t go beyond vague guesses at trends, and I primarily try to push the notions of personal and communal endurance, adaptability, and dignity. History’s arc is very long, and it is easy to find ourselves as individuals belonging to a time that we believe from where we stand to be of particular importance or meaning. Such assumptions are vanity. The decline of industrial civilization, yes, will result in the creation of miserable conditions for most of humanity, and as we live through and beyond such times, we shall be tested. We are not going to solve the major crises. We are going to be called upon to endure them. Such endurance is likely beyond many in the western world who have never imagined, let alone suffered true hardship. The age of fossil fuels has not only softened rich bodies, but it has softened rich hearts and minds. It has convinced many that death and pain are an unfairness, one that we could, and should, banish from existence. More vanity. More hubris. To be sure, more blindness, as such soft minds are closed off to the suffering and death that formed the foundation of their very comfort to begin with.

Banish your vanity now. Welcome the dirt under your fingernails. Accept that you are not, nor your culture, the protagonist in a meaningful drama. Visions and stories you have created in your mind in which you are a central performer are phantoms of your own amusement. Dispel them. Be here. Take a good stock of who you actually are.

—

Mutant zombie bikers (MZB’s for short) are the foil of those who monitor collapse. MZB’s are the unwashed masses. Unprepared for collapse, they don their truck tire armor and necklaces strung with the teeth of their victims and then move over the suburbs and hinterlands seeking families and farmers to massacre in their grand quest for canned peaches, gasoline, and murderous skin harvesting glory. They are the primary enemy portrayed in the dystopian future sketched out in most collapse related conversation.

I would like to offer a counter notion; your worst enemy will be yourself. This suggestion, I hope, can steer us from the primacy of the notion that navigating social collapse is going to be best achieved by those who most willingly point guns at everyone else.

If in fact, a grand collapse of sorts occurs and the social and economic systems that the vast majority of people rely upon fail, it will not likely be a man built like a WWE wrestler riding a tricked out Harley and brandishing a flaming nail bat who kills you. It will be your own inability to work with a group. It will be your own lifetime of poor health choices. It will be all of the ebooks about wild edible plants that you downloaded and never read. It will be your hubris, your panic, your depression, your anger, and primarily your inability to adapt to unpredictable and ever changing conditions.

For what it is worth, this is the concept I would like to toss into the gyre of collapse discussion. How self improvement now not only increases one’s chances of survival in the event of any emergency, short or long, but further, how such improvement greatly benefits one’s life even in the absence of societal breakdown. Successfully navigating dire circumstances that present physical, mental, and emotional challenges requires fortitude on all fronts – body, mind, and soul. Doing the work to improve oneself on these fronts is not likely to be a waste should calamity never strike, in the same way that “prepper” purchases of five years worth of EZ Mac and banana chips might be. Mice will never eat your improved physical stamina. A flood will not wash away your uncluttered mind.

—

Let’s face it, life in the modern era in western nations has shaped most of our interactions to flow along the patterns and dictates of the economic system; capitalism. Short, shrift transactions where one exchanges paper notes for food do not establish a bond between buyer and seller. More often than not, the owner of such food is not even present, and we interact with low wage workers who operate cash registers, and the bulk of our acquisitions of necessities is at the behest of a system which at times even generates resentment of all the other humans around us. We are infuriated by traffic, long lines, and crowded spaces. Community bonds are threadbare. True reliance on one and other that flows equally back and forth is rare. So what happens when this social and economic paradigm crumbles? Do you have the ability to work well in a group? Can you keep from yelling or being over bearing? Do you dominate conversations and interrupt others? Do you dismiss women or people who aren’t white? Do you even notice if or when you do these things? When the humans around you become a de facto band that must cooperate to survive, can you set your ego and your ideology aside? Can you be the first to give before having received? Can you politely disagree? It may seem silly to present such concerns, but truly, communication has been so degraded by generations of commercial transaction replacing communal reciprocity, not to mention newly invented forms of abbreviated, faceless, eye-contactless device to device texting, that I think a focus on just being able to talk to one another in order to effectively organize crisis response should be a priority. Do you really want to find yourself outcast because everyone around you thinks that your a blowhard asshole?

Of course, habits that trend in the opposite direction could be just as deadly. Are you a doormat? Do you speak up for yourself? Are you easily manipulated? Do you fear speaking your mind when your opinion is unpopular? Can you say “no” and mean it? An ability to judge when to defer to group dynamics and when to pull back from activities you believe to be foolish, dangerous, or a waste of energy is crucial. Of course, navigating the emotions and egos of others is a delicate matter, and doing so forms the basis of politics. When your life is on the line, you will need to swallow your pride one day, draw a line in the sand the next, and hopefully make the right choice as to the when and why for both.

Meanwhile, our habits and addictions will haunt us when all of the usual patterns change, and then change again. If right now you are a smoker, a drinker, if you are addicted to sugar, to caffeine (my personal drug of choice) or just happen to need a particular anti-depressant or antipsychotic to get out of bed, how will you fare when the chemicals your brain requires to function are not available? What is your current physical status? Here in the US, the lion’s share of the population travels by some form of petroleum powered vehicle on a regular basis. Has this made you a bit soft around the middle? Or has a steady diet of sugar softened you sort of all over? The ability to walk long distances over varied terrain while carrying a load, perhaps water, perhaps wood, perhaps a child, would probably serve well. The ability to defend yourself without a weapon, would probably serve well. The ability to live two weeks on nothing but mashed turnips without flipping out on everyone around you at the slightest annoyance because your body is craving a Diet Coke and a Parliament Light might just serve you well.

And I am not pitching machismo. I know too well that a smile, a nod, a low calm voice, can in the right circumstances carry more power than a grounded right cross. Well rounded and adaptable, clear headed and resourceful, that is what I am pitching.

This is why I decry the prepper mentality of stockpiling large caches of goods. That is just consumerism. That is just altering a bad habit to feel like a good habit. Sure, having food in the house, useful tools, toilet paper and jumper cables does make sense. Twenty-Five buckets of mylar sealed white sugar is an absurdity. No matter what emergency you encounter, be it a car accident on a stormy evening, a house fire, or full on “the-grid-went-down-thanks-to-Chinese-hackers-cracked-out-on-energy-drinks-and-promises-of-state-provided-communist-love-girls,” the one thing you will always have on you, is you. Your mind, your body, and your spirit are primary. If these are out of balance or in a dysfunctional state, why would you assume that a Rubbermaid Tub full of Pepto-Bismol would be of any use?

You need to fill your mind, hone your body, and steel your spirit. This is a constant as we live. The work never stops. But as we travel, and work at our wisdom, our knowledge, and our fitness, we must also learn how to successfully integrate this blossoming self with others. Communities don’t just happen, because trust doesn’t just happen; communication doesn’t just happen.

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Tribe is hard. Manufactured tribe, anyway. I have never experienced a true tribe; a family linked through time and space, culture and common cause. What I have experienced are groups of people who came together with grand purpose. The torment of hours long meetings with Occupy, the drama of interpersonal conflicts with pipeline blockades, the sheer inability to commit to the work required at failed communes and intentional communities; I have seen it all. In each case, there was success and their was failure. In each case, good intentions ran head first into fatigue, a lack of resources, and at times, post traumatic stress. And in each of those cases, the greater support system of society still existed as a fall back. Dirty, cold and hungry, I watched people do unexpectedly amazing things, no doubt. But stores still had food, even if the only food we could afford was in the dumpster. We could check out, step back, any time we wanted. When the stress of it all was too much to bear, one could return to the “real world” and level out. A collapse scenario will offer no such quarter.

It is said that tough times don’t last, but tough people do. I am not trying to sell some notion of myself as complete or without flaw. I am just as guilty of seeing myself not as I am, but as I have imagined myself to be. I possess plenty of traits and habits which I need to work to better, starting with my ability to calmly and accurately communicate. If I were slower to frustrate and to anger, that would likely be a boon. Despite the constant work that living in a post collapse world would require, I could personally benefit from a greater ability to slow down, to sit still, and to meditate. To just breathe and exist. I think it would strengthen my spirit, even if only by allowing me to take in more beauty and joy that I currently let pass me by in favor of tending to endless tasks. We talk tirelessly about survival, but forget sometimes that without attention to the things that make life worth living, we can never truly thrive.

The time to work on ourselves, is now. Your communication, your patience, and your tolerance, all are best improved now while daily caloric intake doesn’t necessarily rest upon them. The time to break habits of sloth, or poor diet, or of resistance to any work that makes muscles sore and brow sweat, is now. The time to take self dense classes and to increase your self confidence and endurance, is now. The time to abandon phantom notions of your protagonist self in favor of honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses while simultaneously relieving yourself of your doughy first world comfort requirements, is now. Take cold showers. Eat more vegetables. Forgive small debts. Compliment and be patient with others. Walk.

Of course, the hard part is that the pizza is still hot, the beer still cold, and the new season of Game of Thrones is on, and all of it is available twenty-four seven and you wouldn’t even have to speak to another human being, let alone be kind to them, to get any of it. And there is work. And there are bills to pay. Maybe next month when I get a little further ahead. I’ll quit smoking. I’ll quit drinking. I’ll spend less time on the internet and more time with other people. Next month.

You are your worst enemy, but you don’t have to be.

Environment vs $$$$$