Finding a new American Dream

by Cindee Karns

I’m one of the last baby boomers, born in 1959 to 2^nd generation Americans, who continue to have strong ties to our German heritage.  However, my parents, just like everyone else in America,  totally embraced the new post WWII American values of industry, medicine, machines, and, well….corporations.  Life was supposed to get better and if they bought into the American Dream, their children would have it even better than they did.  It was amazing to them all of the modern conveniences they had, compared to what they had as kids.  Electricity whenever they wanted it.  No more trips out to the outhouse.  No wood stoves.  No butchering their own chickens.  A vacuum cleaner?  Really?  My grandparents and my parents rode the wave of the oil era, with a belief that things could only get better.  The wave made the American Dream a reality for them and they assumed it would only get better for their children.

My grandfather Plucker's first car

Indeed I was brought up with those values, that if you work hard like my immigrant great grandparents, grandparents, and parents to get all the newest stuff that belonged in the Dream, I too could live beyond my wildest imagination, with things to make my life easier and easier.  I watched the Jetson’s every Saturday morning to remind me that the dream of the future was true.  As I got older and watched Star Trek, the dream of the future continued.  There was absolutely no realization that the American Dream was held up by the stilts of big oil. 

My dad's first car

Yes, there was a hiccup in 1976.  Our family was on a road trip through the Lower 48, with a bumper sticker on our car that read, “Support the Alaska Pipeline.”  Ironically we had to wait in line at gas stations for gas.  My dad would always get out of the car and talk to anyone he could about why we needed the pipeline.  And sure enough, the pipeline was built and our worries were over-----just a slight wobble and the Dream was off and running again.

The story of the dream was quite compelling.  I became a History teacher and told the story over and over again to 8^th graders.  My year always began with having each student tell the story of how their ancestors arrived in this country---even if that story was 10,000 years ago or on a slave ship.  The year always ended with having each student tell how he/she would continue the dream---how he/she would make the country become a better place. 

Our cabin near Chena Hot Springs

As a teacher I always did the projects with the students.  My year always started with the same story of my great grandparents leaving the old county and arriving in South Dakota, but every year I would change the story about how I could make the country a better place. Maybe it was the cabin in the woods our family would visit every summer, maybe it was re-reading Thoreau, or it might have been The Universe Story by Brian Swimme, that made me redefine my story and look at the world differently.  Maybe it was always inside of me.  Whatever the trigger, I began trying to figure out how I could get out of the American Dream of buying stuff and start a new dream of living simply.  It’s really hard to wake up and change your own story---the story we’ve all been immersed in.   

Now the Dream is getting unsteady across the country, the stilts are wobbling and people are noticing things aren’t quite so smooth.  Many can see that we, as a country, are on unstable ground and it wouldn’t take much to kick one of the stilts out from under us.  Walden Pond is looking more and more like a better story---a better American Dream, but how do we get there from here?  That indeed is the question.  

Check out Mary's blog!

Our own Mary Logan is blogging pretty regularly.  Please check it out.  It's excellent:  http://prosperouswaydown.com/

New Yorker Blasts Obama

 EXCELLENT ARTICLE from the New Yorker!

Storms Brewing

by Elizabeth Kolbert June 13, 2011

When President Barack Obama arrived in Joplin, Missouri, on May 29th, the sun was shining. He toured one of the neighborhoods that the previous week’s tornado had destroyed, then spoke at a memorial service for the dead. (By late last week, the official toll was a hundred and thirty-eight people.) At the service, the President’s tone turned brooding. “The question that weighs on us at a time like this is: Why?” he said. “Why our town? Why our home? Why my son, or husband, or wife, or sister, or friend? Why?” Such questions, the President went on, cannot be answered, as “these things are beyond our power to control.”

Obama’s visit to Joplin was the third that he had made in a month to the site of a weather-related disaster. In mid-May, the President met with Memphis residents who had been left homeless by the flooding of the Mississippi River, and, not long before that, he toured sections of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that had also been flattened by a tornado.

Meanwhile, even as the President was consoling the bereaved in Joplin, residents in Vermont were bailing out from record-high water levels around Lake Champlain; Texas was suffering from a near-record drought that could cost the state more than four billion dollars in agricultural losses; and officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were forecasting that the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season, which formally began on June 1st, would once again be “above normal.” (The 2010 season was tied for the third most active on record.)

The news from abroad was, if anything, more worrisome. Last week, the Chinese government estimated that more than four million people were having trouble finding drinking water, owing to a drought along the Yangtze River. The French agricultural minister warned that an exceptionally hot, dry spring would reduce that country’s wheat harvest. And in Colombia more than two million acres of land have been submerged after almost a year of nearly continuous rain. “Over the past ten months, we have registered five or six times more rainfall than usual,” the director of Colombia’s meteorological agency, Ricardo Lozano, said.

For decades, climate scientists have predicted that, as global temperatures rose, the side effects would include deeper droughts, more intense flooding, and more ferocious storms. The details of these forecasts are immensely complicated, but the underlying science is pretty simple. Warm air can hold more moisture. This means that there is greater evaporation. It also means that there is more water, and hence more energy, available to the system.
What we are seeing now is these predictions being borne out. If no particular flood or drought or storm can be directly attributed to climate change—there’s always the possibility that any single event was just a random occurrence—the over-all trend toward more extreme weather follows from the heating of the earth. As the cover of Newsweek declared last week, “weather panic” is the “new normal.” The larger problem is that this “new normal” won’t last. Each additional ton of carbon dioxide that’s spewed into the atmosphere contributes to further warming, thus increasing the risk of violent weather. The day after the President visited Joplin, Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, in Paris, announced that, despite the economic slowdown, global CO2 emissions last year rose by a record amount, to almost thirty-one billion metric tons. “I am very worried,” Birol said. “This is the worst news on emissions.”

When Obama took office, he appointed some of the country’s most knowledgeable climate scientists to his Administration, and it seemed for a time as if he might take his responsibility to lead on this issue seriously. That hope has faded. The President sat on the sidelines in 2009 and 2010 while congressional leaders tried to put together majorities in favor of climate legislation.

Since the midterm elections, Obama has barely mentioned climate change, and just about every decision that his Administration has made on energy and the environment has been wrong. In March, the Administration announced that it would be opening up new public lands in Wyoming for coal mining. In April, the White House delayed plans to impose stricter controls on the mining technique known as mountaintop removal. In May, the Administration put on hold rules aimed at cutting pollution from power plants at places like paper mills and refineries. Also in May, the President announced plans to increase domestic oil production by speeding up permits to drill off the coast of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico. “Is Obama’s call for more drilling bad messaging masquerading as cynical policy—or vice versa?” the liberal blog Climate Progress asked.
 
Of course, it almost goes without saying at this point that the President’s potential opponents next November are all worse on the issue. Tim Pawlenty, who, as governor of Minnesota, took some commendable actions on climate change, has now renounced them, saying that everyone “has got some clunkers in their record.” Much the same holds for the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, minus the commendable actions. National Journal has summed up the situation this way: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe.”

It would have been insensitive for the President when he visited Joplin, or Memphis before that, or Tuscaloosa before that, to have turned the conversation to climate change. Grieving relatives and displaced families aren’t the right audience for a discussion of energy policy. It should be noted, too, that tornadoes are very tough to predict, and no one yet knows whether this year’s unusually deadly season is the start of a new pattern, or just an aberration.
But, now that the immediate crisis has passed, the President needs to stop asking the kind of questions that can’t be answered and start addressing those that can. Obama knows—and, indeed, has stated as much—that if we continue along our present path we’ll guarantee our children a much more dangerous future.

Taking the steps that would reduce the risks of climate change is not going to be politically popular, which is why it is the President’s obligation to press for them. It may be beyond our power to control the climate, but we can determine it. This is precisely what we’re doing right now, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. ♦

ILLUSTRATION: TOM BACHTELL

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/06/13/110613taco_talk_kolbert#ixzz1Ob84cX3V

GOP Denial

From TPM

Every Single GOPer On House Energy Commitee Won't Say Climate Change Is Real

Thirty-one Republicans on the House Energy And Commerce Committee -- the entire Republican contingent on the panel -- declined on Tuesday to vote in support of the very idea that climate change exists.

Democrats on the panel had suggested three amendments that said climate change is a real thing, is caused by humans and has potentially dire consequences for the future. The amendments came on a Republican bill to block the EPA from offering regulations to mitigate the results of global climate shifts. The global scientific community is in near unanimous agreement that climate change is real, and that humans contribute to it.

None of the 31 Republicans on the committee would vote yes on any of the amendments (Rep. Marsha Blackburn [R-TN] declined to vote on one.) The committee's 21 Democrats voted yes on all three.

Though the result may seem shocking to supporters of climate legislation, activists say this is pretty much what they expect from the GOP these days. There was a time when members of the mainstream GOP were ready to offer their own solutions to climate change. But in the tea party age, those Republicans are few and far between at best, observers say.

Upton Sinclair wrote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." How true...

News from Costa Rica: Wow: Some enlightened Policy!

I just learned something interesting -- about some enlightened policy in Costa Rica. From ICE (the government owned electric monopoly): As consumption goes up, so does the rate. The first 200 KWh sells for $0.13. From 200-300 is $0.24. Everything above that is $0.33/KWh. They actually want you to use less! And not just paying lip service to it, but building it into their pricing structure. If you want to be wasteful, you will pay!!

Then, to top it off, they have net metering, and run the meter backward at the highest rate! Unlike some US utilities that buy it back at wholesale...

And, unlike almost everything else that is imported here, they waive import duty on solar PV so material costs are relatively low. And installation labor is cheap. I was just quoted $4.65/Watt installed cost for 5-20 KW systems.

80% of the country's electricity comes from hydro. A few years ago it was 100%. As demand goes up, they have to fire up extremely expensive oil-fired power plants at $0.85 KWh to make up the difference. Two years ago when climate change brought about a 2-week delay in the rainy season, the country had rolling blackouts. It is not in ICE's interest to have to build new fossil-based generation capacity just as oil production is peaking.

How nice to see some enlightened policy -- something besides drill baby drill. Hope the CIA, the Bushes, the WTO and CAFTA don't screw it up!

Alternative energy companies are thriving here. Here's a link to a nice 'Bill Reduction Tool' by one of them.

A fantasy or a breakthrough that changes everything?

Organism Makes Diesel Fuel With Sun, Water, CO2

Posted on: Tuesday, 1 March 2011, 06:30 CST

Biotechnology company Joule Unlimited said on Monday that it can produce the fuel that runs some cars and jet engines using its genetically-engineered organism that secretes diesel fuel or ethanol wherever it finds sunlight, water and carbon dioxide.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company said it can control the organism to produce the renewable fuels on demand and at unprecedented rates, and can do so at costs comparable to the lowest-cost fossil fuels.

The breakthrough could mean "energy independence," the company said.

"We make some lofty claims, all of which we believe, all which we've validated, all of which we've shown to investors," Joule CEO Bill Sims told the Associated Press (AP).

"If we're half right, this revolutionizes the world's largest industry, which is the oil and gas industry," he said.

"And if we're right, there's no reason why this technology can't change the world."

However, the task is not yet complete, and not everyone is convinced the company can deliver on their claims.

More...

Why we can't just pay for some carbon credits

I'm concerned with the reductionist, narrow thinking that leads us to believe that we can actually solve the problems that we are now facing. We have delayed too long, and the problems are now something to adapt to rather than to solve, as JM Greer suggests. My comments below were originally addressed to Charles Wohlforth after he gave a lecture to the Complex Systems Group at UAA on climate change. Cindee said to post them, so I have.

Einstein said that problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them, thus inferring that one needs to think at a larger scale to solve problems. I listened to your talk yesterday and wondered what solutions could come out of a focus on climate change? Carbon credits? Tax credits for hybrids? The former is just a way for corporations to make money off of green initiatives, and a way to give lip service to green behaviors, for a problem that is long-term and secondary (sink pollution) to the real problem. The latter is just a way to churn more corporate profits while allowing business as usual (BAU) to continue. Arguably the embodied energy and use of rare metals in electric (or hybrid) cars, in addition to the costs to run them in terms of using more even higher quality (costly) batteries and/or electricity which is mostly derived from other non-renewable fuels (coal and recently natural gas) is another chimera.

So what is the bigger scale problem that Wohlforth failed to mention in his discussion? His graph plotting the correlation of GDP with CO2 emissions was accurate, but again fails to take a long enough time perspective at the larger scale. What causes CO2 emissions? A better graph would encompass the era of the entire industrial revolution with its population growth plotted against growth in the use of fossil fuels. The real issue is a population in massive overshoot due to 200 years of copious surplus energy in the form of non-renewable fuels.

Given the issue of peak oil, climate change models are probably not even accurate. Meteorologists are notoriously uneducated regarding peak oil, and fail to incorporate a plateau and fall in fossil fuels production starting in about 2005. Climate models extrapolate increasing oil production, while even the EIA is currently (and finally) predicting something different.

Peak oil is going to impact us much faster than climate change, and is a bigger, more imminent threat, as witnessed in the violent responses recently in Egypt. I do not believe that it is a coincidence that Egypt stopped exporting oil last year for the first time, and is now vulnerable through the need to import oil. Energy flows through all of our systems and is essential to our complex society--the take home being that physics tells us that a society with less oil will be less complex. How that loss in complexity plays out is the problem that we need to be addressing now through science.

If you think that the converging crises that we are facing can be addressed by global warming policies, then you're just not thinking on a grand enough scale regarding our problems.

How to talk about the coming changes to planet Earth?

Carolyn Baker in her blog SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER, wrote an outstanding entry this week called "Paradox: Lynchpin of the Long Evergency"  which should be required reading for all of us in the Transition Movement. 

Because some of us in our transition group have been dancing around this issue, this particular paragraph was important to me.

For me, it is crucial to acknowledge and name the collapse of the current paradigm as such. To avoid the word, tip-toe around it in fear of “scaring people,” or cosmetically alter the unraveling of industrial civilization, is essentially tantamount to celebrating a rebirth while ignoring that a death occurred. To deny death while focusing only on transformation reveals the level of denial in which we are steeped and profoundly insults masses of human beings around us who are terrified of the future because no matter how much we prattle about “potential,” “opportunities,” or “resilience,” they are terrified in the marrow of their bones of what the future holds. They do not need us to fluff pillows and bring them a cup of tea, but to validate what they already know is so, even if they are kicking and screaming with all their might against what they know—and to provide them with support for talking about their fears. Every human knows in their gut when someone or something around them is dying because whether we acknowledge it or not, we are connected with everyone and everything on levels which humanity has only begun to understand.

I hope you get a chance to read the whole article.  

Environmental Hypocrites

Are environmentalists hypocrites?  Am I?  Over my lifetime I've heard many, many people say they don't go to church because church is filled with hypocrites: folks who talk the talk, but don't walk the walk. It's true that many of them are there seeking support to walk the walk, but aren't quite there yet. Others are there to be associated with the Christian movement, but they have no intention of changing their lives. It seems that same thing is happening to the environmental movement. Many people are pointing to environmentalists who haven't changed their own lives, they just want to be in the GREEN CLUB.

This morning I got up and read The secret of herding cats | Energy Bulletin. I was especially struck by this line: "leaders who are perfectly willing to talk in the abstract about how people need to ditch their autos and give up air travel, but insist that they themselves need their SUV for one reason or another and wouldn’t dream of going .... by train." It just so happens that I was talking last night about how much I need my SUV. I already feel guilty for driving it when it's not being used to pull our boat to the Chitna River to get salmon, or to Valdez to get halibut, or to the Yukon River to get moose. My SUV allows us to eat Alaskan meats. Is that an acceptable excuse? What about my friend who doesn't fly except to get to world wide environmental gatherings? Is that acceptable? 

Transitioning to a carbon neutral life is hard. Maybe the best thing I can do is to talk about what my struggles are and ask others what they are struggling with. That would at least add credence to my talks, but is it going to be too little too late? Do I really need to quit oil cold turkey in order to be able to talk to others about the severity of our oil addiction?  Do I need to move to town so I can walk/bike everywhere? 

What are the credentials of an environmentalist?  I'd like some of your thoughts on the subject. 

Trying to see the larger picture

To follow the butterfly metaphor, I just have to repost a blog I follow from Eco Justice Ministries.  The end of the year is a great time to picture the bigger picture: 

The end of December is a perfect time to ponder humanity's place in the whole creation.

As we live our daily lives in this human-dominated world, our experience and routine awareness let us think that "this is the way it has always been."

Of course, we know about the scientific cosmology that tells of a vast sweep of time. We know that modern humans occupy just a tiny sliver of that long historical record. But we hold that knowledge in our heads, not our guts. The vast 4.6 billion year history of the Earth is way too big for us to grasp in a meaningful or personal way.

And so I have often been touched by narratives that condense the history of the Earth into a more manageable time frame. There are many variations -- some do it in a week, others in a single year. Some start the story with "the big bang" while others begin with the formation of the Earth as a recognizable planet.

New Year's Eve is a wonderful occasion to feel the long story of the Earth, and to appreciate our part in that narrative. On the last day of a calendar year, it is easy to connect with the "one year" image. And so, as we come to the end of December, I invite you to feel a condensed time frame for the Earth's story ...
January 1^st marks the origin of Earth. By the end of February, the first simple cells appear. All the way through the spring and early summer, simple plants enrich the atmosphere with oxygen.

Around mid-August, complex cells emerge, and coral appears in the ocean. Beginning in mid-November, the oceans fill with multicellular life-forms. In the last few days of November, freshwater fish appear, and the first vascular plants begin to grow on land.

About December 1^st, amphibians venture onto dry land. The great swamps that formed today's rich coal beds existed between December 5^th and 7^th. On December 12^th the largest of the Earth's mass extinctions wipes out 95% of all species.

Life bounces back, and dinosaurs evolve on December 13^th. Flowering plants come on the scene on December 20^th. In another great extinction, the dinosaurs disappear shortly before midnight on December 26^th, opening a space for modern mammals to emerge on the 27^th.

On the evening of December 31^st -- about when you might gather with friends for the evening's celebration -- the first hominids evolve in East Africa.

At 10 minutes to midnight on December 31^st -- about when all the New Year's party-goers are really starting to watch the clock -- Neanderthals spread throughout Europe.

At one minute to midnight, agriculture is invented. The Roman Empire fills 5 seconds, and collapses at 11:59:50 -- the moment when the New Year's ball starts to slide down the pole at Times Square, and the great 10-second countdown begins.

In the last 2 seconds before midnight, we enter the modern industrial era. In those last two seconds we find the explosive growth of the human population, the rise of complex technologies, and what we might call a globalized human culture.

The entire history of the United States fits into the last second of this narrative. The "petroleum era" of cheap and plentiful energy is crammed into the last half of a second, as we're holding a deep breath, ready to shout our start-of-a-new-year greetings. The fireworks start as our dash through Earth's history brings us to the current moment.

+     +     +     +     +

Sierra Club founder David Brower often told such a condensed history of the Earth. He ended the account by saying, "We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for [the two seconds since the Industrial Revolution began] can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark, raving mad."

If we keep flowing in our compressed race through global history, by the time we have finished shouting "Happy New Year!" we are already 200 years into the future. The available supplies of oil will have been exhausted, and the effects of global climate change will have taken dramatic hold. If our current way of life continues, a huge percentage of the Earth's species -- both plant and animal -- will have been driven into extinction. By the time you take your first deep breath in the next year, the Earth's climate and biology will have been forever altered by the human influences of the previous year's last moment.

In this compressed history, the Age of the Dinosaurs lasted almost two weeks. Unless we change our ways dramatically, the Age of the Humans may only last 15 or 20 minutes, and the span of human civilization will fill less than two minutes.

+     +     +     +     +

The biblical narrative begins with two beautiful and meaningful creation stories. In both of those accounts, people are part of the Earth's history from the very beginning of time. If we think that people pretty much like us have been key actors in the Earth's entire history, it is easy to think that our story is ultimately important.

This New Year's Eve, I challenge you to remember how brief our human span on Earth really is, and to reflect on the scope of our planetary impact. May that broadened perception help motivate us in our work toward a more sustainable way of life.


Shalom! Rev. Peter Sawtell
Executive Director, Eco-Justice Ministries

To read from their website:  Eco-Justice Ministries

The End of Money and the Future of Civilization Part II

I just started reading The End of Money and the Future of Civilization on my brand new kindle. In the first chapter, the author quotes Elizabet Sahtouris' butterfly metaphor. (I think there's a way to share passages I highlight on the kindle, but I don't know how to do it yet, so here is something more or less the same, from another source...)

"My favorite metaphor for the current world transition, first pointed out to me by Norie Huddle (Butterfly, 1990), is that of a butterfly in metamorphosis. It goes like this: A caterpillar crunches its way through its ecosystem, cutting a swath of destruction by eating as much as hundreds of times its weight in a day, until it is too bloated to continue and hangs itself up, its skin then hardening into a chrysalis. Inside this chrysalis, deep in the caterpillar’s body, tiny things biologists call ‘imaginal disks’ begin to form. Not recognizing the newcomers, the caterpillar’s immune system snuffs them as they arise. But they keep coming faster and faster, then linking up with each other. Eventually the caterpillar’s immune system fails from the stress and the disks become imaginal cells that build the butterfly by feeding on the soupy meltdown of the caterpillar’s body. It took a long time for biologists to understand the reason for the immune system attack on the incipient butterfly cells, but eventually they discovered that the butterfly has its own unique genome, carried by the caterpillar, inherited from long ago in evolution, yet not part of it as such (Margulis & Sagan, Acquiring Genomes 2002).

If we see ourselves as imaginal discs working to build the butterfly of a better world, we will understand that we are launching a new ‘genome’ of values and practices to replace that of the current unsustainable system. We will also see how important it is to link with each other in the effort, to recognize how many different kinds of imaginal cells it will take to build a butterfly with all its capabilities and colors.

As I understand it (after having read only a few pages...) the author finds a structural linkage between the current monetary system and the caterpillar's goals (consume!, grow!, more!, faster!) and the proposed alternatives (e.g. LETS) as an integral part of the metamorphosis to a new emerging paradigm.

A couple of other thoughts:

1. The caterpillar is not "bad". In fact it provides the "nutrient soup" for the emergent butterfly.
   
2. It doesn't go quietly. It's immune system tries to fight off the invader until it is overwhelmed. Competition, struggle and death are involved--and part of the natural order.
   

Singing to the Choir

I’ve been thinking about my neighbors this week.  I have some GREAT neighbors with lots of good skills and knowledge.  Most of them, however, haven’t been following the Peak Everything movement.  What will happen if they are caught unaware and even a short collapse happens?  Is it my job to help all of them?

This is written by my friend, Alan, who is the Director of Training at Prince William Sound Community College and Special Projects Manager for the Municipality of Skagway.

Seven steps to survival

By ALAN SORUM, For General Aviation News

April 7, 2010

The Seven Steps to Survival, developed by AMSEA, is an easy way to remember a sequence of steps that can help anyone who becomes stranded in a remote location survive.

THE SEVEN STEPS

   1. Recognition: Realize that your circumstances have changed and you must face new challenges. Recognize that your situation has been altered and it is time to think like a survivor.

   2. Inventory: Take time to consider your available resources and the issues that you may face. Take stock of your personal abilities, physical condition, supplies and tools on hand, and any immediate needs. Ask yourself “Is anyone is hurt? Is it safe to stay where I’m at? What resources do I have at hand?”

   3. Shelter: You need to stay out of the weather and conserve heat. How will you be protected from the elements? Remember clothing is your most immediate form of shelter.

   4. Signals: Identify ways to help others find you. How can you attract attention and be seen? Learn how to use your emergency locator transmitter (ELT) and ensure it’s been manually activated. Consider purchasing a GPS-equipped 406MHz model if you haven’t upgraded your old ELT yet — and be sure to register it.

   5. Water: Secure a safe source of drinking water. You should drink two to four quarts of clean water each day to prevent dehydration.

   6. Food: Eating isn’t an immediate survival need. Know what food is safe to eat and don’t eat without water also being available.

   7. Play: Studies of survival situations show that having a positive attitude is key to success. It’s important to play and stay busy while waiting for help. People survive often because they believe that they will survive.

(Original article:  http://www.suite101.com/profile.cfm/asorum)

I learned these steps more than 20 years ago while living in Southeast Alaska and haven’t forgotten them.  However, the one that I’ve remembered the most is number 7. 

I believe that is why the Transition Town movement has spread so quickly.  It follows these steps and particularly focuses on Step 7.  Transitioning to a different Eaarth (title of Bill McKibben’s book) requires these same steps. 

At a recent Transition Meeting, someone said it’s important to reach beyond the choir.  It’s true that we are working through the survival steps already and we have already recognized that we are in a crisis situation, while most folks in Anchorage, and perhaps the world, haven’t realized the first step.  But it’s true, our circumstances have changed, although most continue to live life as if all is well.  The question is: is it our job to awaken them to the realization that our situation has altered and there are new challenges ahead?  Will that cause more panic than we can deal with?  OR, is our job to prepare for all of us?   If the latter is true, we don’t want to be the blind leading the blind. What resources/skills do we need to lead the blind, once realization occurs?  We have a lot to learn!

I’ve come to the conclusion that Transition Town is about preparing for all of us.  Even our neighbors who don’t have an extra can of soup in their pantry.  We need to be able to teach others how to find food, water and warm shelter.  And most importantly we need to remember to play---that it’s a big adventure and we have the ability to bring those not prepared with us. 

So in this holiday season, turn off the TV and invite your neighbors over to sing Christmas carols.  Have a left-overs party.  Build a snow cave and see how warm you can make it.  And if you are really organized, have a neighborhood pantry-stocking and cold storage building party.  We’re all in this together.

A tale of two spoons | Energy Bulletin

A tale of two spoons | Energy Bulletin

The End of Money and the Future of Civilization

Following up on Iaato's question "Where do we start with an Alaskan-local currency?", I did a bit of googling for answers, and posted the following to another forum I'm involved with:

---

From LETSLink UK

LETS - Local Exchange Trading Systems or Schemes - are local community-based mutual aid networks in which people exchange all kinds of goods and services with one another, without the need for money.

How do they work? Should my community try to implement something like this? What are the pitfalls?

---

I also found these criticisms of LETSystems at wikipedia (my highlights added). They seem like a good guide for things to watch out for, pitfalls to try to avoid?:

LETSystems often have all of the problems confronting any voluntary, not-for-profit, non governmental, community based organisation. LETS organisers often complain of being overworked, and may suffer burnout. Many schemes have ceased operation as a result. Many of these problems can be overcome through effective community organization and development. and effective use of software.

LETSystems, whilst generally appealing to people supporting a general communitarian or environmental ideology, have in many places managed to successfully translate themselves as social welfare initiatives. There are far fewer systems that have managed to communicate and translate themselves into a local business initiative catering to locally owned small to medium businesses. This is generally considered to be an unfortunate weakness of LETSystems to date by the initiators, as they feel that LETS potentially has the capacity to allow small business to compete on a level playing field with larger national and transnational business corporations.

A number of people have problems adjusting to the different ways of operating using a LETSystem. A conventional national currency is generally hard to earn but easy to spend. To date LETSystems are comparatively easy to earn but harder to spend. The success of a LETSystem is therefore determined by the ease with which a person can spend their LETS credits, and improve their quality of life by participation.

I got a number of responses to my request, but only one from someone who is actively involved. He recommended Thomas Greco's The End of Money and the Future of Civilization as a must read. Here are a couple reviews (click link above for more)...

“Thomas Greco dedicates his new book to the causes of social justice, economic equity, personal liberty, world peace, and ecological restoration. He begins by showing that none of these can be achieved until we give birth to a just and sustainable paradigm for exchanging energies. Clearly written, the roots of our current financial predicament are revealed, and the need for something better is lucidly explained. The serious reader will appreciate the author’s long experience with alternative currencies: this book is a concise and efficient way to get up to speed on the history of alternatives to conventional ‘money’ as well as enter the new world of technologically liberated exchange that has the potential to bring about the end of money as we have known it.”--Paul Grignon, creator of the movie Money as Debt

"Greco ... outlines the increasingly familiar story of how things got so bad, and he tells it as well as anyone has ever done.... More than that, Greco writes about how to change what has gone wrong. His credentials as an engineer, college professor, author, and consultant are impeccable. His book is among the most important written in this decade. It is truly a book that can alter the world and, if taken seriously, give large numbers of people a practical way to survive the gathering catastrophe."--Richard C. Cook, author of Challenger Revealed and We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform

“Greco precisely identifies the conflation of interests and confusion of thinking that have given rise to today’s monetary muddles and proceeds to elucidate a viable strategy by which we all, as individuals and in association with one another, can unravel the tangle and build the basis for mutually profitable exchange.”--Arthur Edwards, Director, Centre for Associative Economics

I just ordered the book from Amazon. Anyone else interested in starting a serious discussion?

Aquaponics Experimenter's Kit

re "...things we are doing to prepare for life in Anchorage after peak oil/natural gas, after cost of living here rises, and while our climate is changing" ... here is something I've been working on -- a design for a DIY "Aquaponics Experimenters Kit".

It is made from used 55 gallon plastic drums and $100 or so worth of PVC piping & fittings. Both the name and the concept were inspired by / adapted from Allpower lab's GEK (Gasifier Experimenters Kit). The basic idea behind both is to develop a relatively low cost, but sophisticated kit for experimenters to explore, learn, help develop, and contribute to the body of knowledge. Oh yeah -- and have a ready supply of fresh organic salad greens year round. Oh yeah -- and see if such small scale local food production systems can be made thermodynamically efficient enough that they could be powered by renewable energy sources, (like the GEK).

My design is based on, and draws from the work of many others, linked to below. (We all stand on the shoulders of giants.) It can be summarized as a "flood & drain" (per Speraneo), CHOP ("Constant Height One Pump" per Hallam) "barrel-ponics" (per Travis Hughey) system using a loop siphon (per Affnan, et al), (simplifying and hopefully improving on more complicated flapper valves, bell siphons, timers, float switches and/or electronic controls, etc. used by others) to generate the flood & drain cycle without moving parts. It is a lot less expensive than comparably sized commercial units, and (I like to think) it simplifies and improves on the earlier systems it is based on. For those not familiar with aquaponics, it is ...

"...the marriage of aquaculture (raising fish) and hydroponics (the soilless growing of plants) that grows fish and plants together in one integrated system. The fish waste provides an organic food source for the growing plants and the plants provide a natural filter for the water the fish live in. The third participants are the microbes (nitrifying bacteria) and composting red worms that thrive in the growing media. They do the job of converting the ammonia from the fish waste first into nitrites, then into nitrates and the solids into vermicompost that are food for the plants.

In combining both systems aquaponics capitalizes on the benefits and eliminates the drawbacks of each. It should not be confused with either.

Read more...

Slow Money: Nurture Capital

Bringing Money Back to Earth

Slow Money: “Nurture Capital” for Communities & the Environment

"Woody Tasch is a financier with an idea, and it’s a humdinger. Since the government isn’t too interested and industry is too self-interested, he argues, we need to assemble a new type of investment structure and put money directly into sustainable farming. He calls it Slow Money, inspired,as he explains below, by the Slow Food movement and by realizing that the dizzying speed of money flows in the 21st century has ripped finance away from its moorings in reality. Tasch proposes the opposite: invest in food systems down the road, slow the money down, and watch it do things in the real world.

More compelling still, Tasch has the experience to back it up. He is chairman emeritus of Investors’ Circle, a nonprofit network of angel investors, venture capitalists, foundations and family offices. Since 1992, Investors’ Circle has moved $130 million to 200 early-stage companies and venture funds dedicated to sustainability. Before that, Tasch was the treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation."
...

"what would the world be like if we invested 50 percent of our assets within 50 miles of where we live?”

"We’re not investing in farm land, we’re not saving organic farms or small farms, and we’re not building local processing, we’re not supporting restaurants that source locally, we’re not building infrastructure for farmers markets, and we’re not helping CSAs expand. It’s quite a list of things that people who know about the state of agriculture very quickly understand are components of a healthy local food system from a business standpoint. We’re talking about entrepreneurship. We want to support the entrepreneurs, including farmers. We want to give these entrepreneurs the capital they need to grow their small food enterprise. If the money is not doing that, which it isn’t right now, how are we ever going to get there?

...the whole issue of the efficient market hypothesis is now under question on Wall Street. I usually hold up a recent issue of The Economist that has on its cover a picture of a textbook that was falling over and melting into the desk, and the title of the textbook is Modern Economic Theory.

This is potent, we’re not talking about a progressive publication like Mother Jones — this is The Economist. The story was about the fact that leading people on Wall Street are beginning to admit that the efficient market hypothesis no longer describes reality. It can’t be relied upon. It’s not working. Then I ask the audience, “How many people think this sounds efficient? We have $500 billion of private foundation assets in this country, and I’d like you in the audience to guess what percentage of those assets is granted to sustainable agriculture groups every year.” It’s a bit of trick question because it’s a percentage of the assets, not a percentage of the grants, but both numbers are very low. Anyway, people guess and then I say, “OK, don’t tell me your number, divide it by ten, and now tell me your number.” Usually I hear 0.1 percent, and it’s still off by a power of ten — the actual figure is a hundredth of a percent. A hundredth of a percent of the assets of U.S. foundations is given as grants to sustainable agriculture groups, meaning about $50 million total U.S. grant budgets to sustainable agriculture. Then I zoom back and again ask how many people think that’s efficient. What is the market actually efficient at? It’s not efficient at solving the problems that our survival depends on at this point — it’s very efficient at propagating capital, but where the capital goes, how it’s distributed, what it’s used for are grossly and frighteningly inefficient. That’s how we weave the bigger money questions together with the food question.

Slow Money is definitely about local food systems and about organics and soil fertility, that’s our core. It is about food but it’s also the recognition that real structural alternatives on a macro-economic level are desperately needed, and they are not going to come from Wall Street.

Read More...

The Urge to Bolt

The problems that Cindee has listed are inextricably linked to our economy. The reason the economy has begun to contract is because of Peak Oil. Each year the global production of fossil fuels will be less from here on out, leading to permanent economic contraction. Understanding the real threats and the long-term nature of the problem is the first step. After that, what do we do about it?

I’m concerned because I have had several friends recently who decided to pick up and move to places Outside, based on nothing more than fear of what could come. And fight or flight is a very human response to a short-term crisis. The problem is, this is not going to be a short-term crisis. This is the first downturn in the growth of our American economy for the first time in 200 years. This current economic contraction will continue over the longer term of decades, and economic problems will be how Peak Oil presents during this period.

Alaska’s main problems are it’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels for heat, food, and transportation. But we also produce oil, coal, and gas, and we have many options for renewable energy production. We have a functional rail system and most of our communities are on the railbelt or are accessible by barge. There are less people in proportion to the amount of land and natural resources than any other state, and we are buffered from potential mass migrations when things start to fall apart by the isolation of the state. And many of the people in the state are well prepared for lifestyles that are less reliant on fossil fuels through their outdoor pursuits.

If you’re feeling the urge to bolt right now, you need to figure out what your needs and goals are, and whether moving Outside would just be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. And do not discount the sense of community and close ties that many Alaskans have. The most important component of coping with a crisis is having a community of friends and neighbors who can work together to deal with problems. Do not look for state or national leadership for significant help—there are too many of us, and our reliance on fossil fuels at this point is too great. The most effective help will come from small local community groups. Transition groups or common security clubs could help in the formation of these groups.

Probably the biggest reason to move would be if you need to be nearer to family outside. Air travel will get much more expensive in the future. We get 2/3 of our fossil fuels from other countries, and the collapse of global currencies including the dollar will impact trade of oil and other goods.

If you do decide to stay here, be sure you have a back-up source of heat for your house that is not based on natural gas. And position yourself so that you could take mass transit or bike or walk to work. And Alaskans should always have well-stocked pantries—the threat of a bad earthquake should be reason enough for all of us to be concerned about these issues, even without the looming long emergency of Peak Oil.

Here’s a helpful link about whether to adapt in place or not from Energy Bulletin by Astyk.

If you need a peak oil shrink, the doctor is in.

And if you are just figuring all of this out now, and are in the panic stage, be calm, take a deep breath, and settle down. This will not all happen tomorrow. Humans have a very short-term orientation to life. The changes that we are talking about here will occur over decades. But we should have started 40 years ago, so we are way behind as a civilization. It is time to get to work, now.

For those of you who decide to stay in Alaska, there is a long list of things that need to be done, including more renewable energy, retrofitting homes to be energy efficient with multiple heat sources, food storage, local foods, and improving mass transit. What have you done this month towards these goals?

Too Much Information

Never before in the history of mankind have we had so much information.  Suddenly our generation is aware of climate change, carbon levels in the atmosphere, how much oil is left in the ground and how humans are contributing to the problems.  Now that we know these things, the question is:  how do we deal with them? 

If we know that we are at peak oil and that oil dependent things are just going to get more and more expensive. . . .  If we know that the climate is changing and we know that water is going to be a huge issue for the planet. . . . . . If we know that driving our cars to and from work is causing more and more carbon in the atmosphere (not to mention heating our homes in this extreme weather). . . . .     What can we do??? 

One option is to believe it's all going to be fine because somehow we will have some techno fix to solve the problems and continue living life as if nothing were wrong.  Another option is to leave Alaska and move to a place where you don't have to heat so much or drive so far.  A third option is to plan for the descent; to plan to live in Alaska like we did pre-pipeline days. 

This is a blog for folks who want to contribute to positive ideas about staying in Anchorage and living a good life:  growing more of our own food, learning how to store food, and sharing tools and expertise with our neighbors. 

Feel free to post and or make comments here.  It's good to know there are others out there thinking similarly and not drowning in despair.  Was it Einstein who said, "If you can dream it, you can do it?"  Let's do it!