misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
January 17. I was originally planning to continue my trip south until the end of the month, but I didn't get a lot of invitations, my truck burns a lot of gas, and eastern Washington is super-warm right now. So I'm driving back to Spokane today.
January 15. Portland now has three tool libraries.
And here's a smart technology article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? It goes through the whole history of how information technology has affected human consciousness, from writing to the clock to the internet, which is changing us from deep thinkers to skimmers.
January 14. I've just added John Robb's Global Guerrillas to my daily links (and removed AlterNet, after they ran an unfair hit piece on kombucha). I should have done it a long time ago. Just scroll down Robb's page and look at all the great ideas. For example, yesterday he pointed out that the present economy, where workers and employers have zero loyalty to each other, is an ideal environment for forming new tribes. The day before that he wrote about resilient communities, and the two previous days he posted a bunch of good links. And he's even more concise than I am. An entire comment from January 4: "Drone porn hits YouTube. DIY drone porn is next."
January 14. Since I'm still talking about space and ecology, I want to go back to Avatar. Maybe my disagreement with the lefty critics boils down to ethics vs tactics. It's disrespectful to indigenous people to show them being saved by a leader from the invading culture -- but the result is that hundreds of millions of viewers in exploitative systems are learning the story of shifting their allegiance to nature-based cultures.
But on another level, Avatar is both inaccurate and tactically misleading. The inaccuracy is that the Indians win. In The Holocaust We Will Not See, George Monbiot writes:
...engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the native Americans is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which a remnant population flees in terror as it is hunted to extinction.
Then he goes through a great summary of the atrocities of the European invaders... and fails to answer the fascinating questions he raises: What if Avatar had followed history? And why didn't history happen like Avatar? To answer the first, I would love to see a movie where the Na'vi get crushed, Pandora is developed to near extinction, the resources are wasted on space suburbs, and as the whole system collapses, the avatar population finally learns to appreciate the ways of the Na'vi. That movie would have sold about 17 tickets.
It's the second question that reveals the tactical mistake: no ecological society has ever won a violent war against an extractive society, because an extractive society is inherently more ruthless, and if there are resources to burn, more physically powerful. The Seminoles held out for decades in the swamps of Florida. Now Disney World is there. In a hundred years, squid and jellyfish will swim through its ruins. You cannot defeat the Empire with force -- you can only outlast it.
But then, as any given empire declines, it is defeated with force... by the next empire. I'm not sure how that story will play out in the future, with so many resources used up.
January 13. Yesterday I mentioned the idea of expanding the extractive economy into space. I've just finished reading Gaiome, a book about expanding a sustaining economy into space. Here's the Gaiome introduction from the author's site. I think this is the most unpopular book I've ever read, because there is so little overlap between the audiences for ecology and space travel. The author, Kevin Scott Polk, is both a permaculturist and an astrophysicist. In the first chapter he sets up and knocks down all the usual stories about going into space: to extend exponential growth, to escape the dying Earth, to bring back resources, and to shift our consciousness from biology into machines. His argument against the first is one I've never seen before: he does the math and shows that even if we could expand civilization at light speed out into the galaxy, even a very low rate of exponential growth would quickly overwhelm the geometric growth of our sphere of expansion.
He concludes that we first have to learn to live sustainably on Earth, which is relatively easy, before we learn the much more difficult skill of living sustainably in small constructed environments in space. Then he lays out his plan. First, a space tourism rocket with the same safety standards and flight frequency as a large airliner. Meanwhile, much more research into tiny cycling ecologies like Biosphere 2. Then, technologies for extracting materials from asteroids and turning those materials into gaiomes, and into bigger asteroid extractors and space fabricators, and so on. His eventual utopian vision is 700 trillion people living in 80 billion gaiomes all over the solar system, all of them self-sufficient but grouped into cultures and nations, and by then new technologies will make it easier to expand this model to other star systems.
In terms of current knowledge, Polk doesn't miss anything. He cites Richard Heinberg, Chellis Glendinning, Jared Diamond, and loads of hard science. But I'm thinking, how much have our scientific paradigms changed in the last 500 years? And why shouldn't they change just as much in the next 500? Maybe when our first space probe reaches Alpha Centauri, it will be picked up by someone who just walked there.
January 12. Some links I've been saving up: George Monbiot on Consumer Hell:
That we might hop, like the aliens in Independence Day, from one planet to another, consuming their resources then moving on, is considered by these people a more realistic and desirable prospect than changing the way in which we measure wealth.
The Americanization of Mental Illness, with fascinating details about how illness (both mental and physical) varies across cultures.
The Caveman Lifestyle in New York City.
Ancient Hominids May Have Been Seafarers.
And Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant, with genes to make chlorophyll and get energy from sunlight. Humans next?
January 12. Yesterday, coincidentally, Jeff Vail also wrote about the end of identity politics, but from a different angle, in this post, Eco-Nationalism, Identity Politics, and Sustainability. He points out that a green white power movement is silly, because in an ecological society, without a constant flow of resources from the bottom to the top of a hierarchy, there is no basis for an "in-group".
Indeed, the concept of whiteness has only ever existed in the industrial age. The idea is to divide the people against each other, the same way you might turn two kids against each other by giving one of them more stuff, so that they fight each other instead of fighting the "parent". What white racists fear is that the parent will switch and give the other kid more presents... but soon the parent will not be giving presents at all.
I would add, the end of whiteness is not the end of race, or the end of conflict between people with different cultures and appearances. That's probably been going on since before our ancestors walked on two legs. There might still be an ecological village that considers pale skin superior. But if so, dark-skinned people will simply move to the village up the road. Racial tension might exist between communities, but not within them. The world will be like high school, with a bunch of cliques, but no popular crowd.
January 11. (permalink) By popular demand, I'm going back to Avatar. First, we shouldn't be surprised that conservatives hate Avatar... unless we think about the meaning of "conservative". The movie supports the most traditional of traditional values: a tribal society living in balance with nature, and defending its culture through violence. So how can "conservatives" hate it? Because in practice, conservatism is an emotional state, and people in that state don't care what's traditional or radical for humans in general -- they only care what's traditional or radical for them personally. So you can make the most untested and wildly maladapted society in history, and after a couple generations, all the traditionalists will angrily defend it and attack the ways of the previous hundred thousand generations.
It also turns out that leftists hate Avatar, but only a particular breed of leftists, those with academic training in identity politics. Annalee Newitz wrote When will white people stop making movies like Avatar? And David Brooks, a centrist, calls Avatar the White Messiah fable. Their point is that this is one of many films that turns someone from our culture into the leader and "most awesome member" of an alien culture, and that it would be more politically correct to show the aliens saving themselves without our help.
That's a good point, but it's hard to count the number of points they're missing: A movie must take viewers on a journey, and the journey has to start from where we are. If the people from the alien culture were the protagonists, only a few dedicated liberals would go see it. How many of you have seen El Norte? And any Hollywood blockbuster must make its protagonist super-awesome. Nobody complained that Bruce Willis was more awesome than anyone else in Die Hard. Avatar opens the door to that complaint by putting its hero among another race, but you'd have to be blind to think that race is the heart of the movie.
Of course, Newitz and Brooks are blind. Newitz is a techie and Brooks is a huge supporter of "progress", so they can't stand the thought that Avatar has made a billion dollars with a message about ecology and the human race: that we are not the rulers of a pile of resources but the servants of a living planet, that an extractive economy is not just unsustainable but evil, that our place is among dangerous wild creatures and not our own sterile devices, that it was wrong for us to conquer the Indians, not because their skin was a different color, but because they lived better.
Did we conquer the Indians? When lefties say that Avatar purges white guilt, they are making several questionable assumptions: that we are white, that we feel guilty, and that white guilt is a good thing. This is an obsolete view of race. A more helpful view was pioneered in the zine and book Race Traitor: that "white" is a social class only loosely connected to pale skin, that thinking of ourselves as "white" makes us obedient to an unjust system, that the best thing "white" people can do is not to sit around feeling guilty for the crimes done in the name of whiteness, but to disown whiteness and take the other side. Every one of us has ancestors who lived more or less like the Na'vi, and who were violently conquered by disconnected, resource-extracting cultures. If we all stop identifying with those cultures, the whole game is over.
We did not conquer the Indians. The Babylonians, the Romans, the English, the Spaniards, the Americans conquered us... but not completely. The reason Avatar is so popular, and so important, is that it is helping us to remember who we are.
Of course, what to do with that awareness is a much harder question. No matter who we think we are, we are still dependent on the conquering system for our survival. We're not going to voluntarily kill ourselves, and I think it's silly to try to limit ourselves to technologies that existed 20,000 years ago. The important thing is that we make the shift from an extractive economy to a sustaining economy, and from the made world to the found world. And we might not be able to make that shift once and for all -- we might have to keep making it again and again.
January 9, late. I'm done with the Olympia events and heading down to Portland tomorrow. At my talk Thursday, and at the Awakening the Dreamer symposium today, I kept noticing one issue: When affluent Americans ask "what can I do", they mean, "What can I do to save the whole world? What can I do to turn industrial capitalism around in its tracks, to halt species extinction and reverse arctic melting, to feed all the starving people without further increasing the population, to transform human consciousness and witness a global utopia in my lifetime?"
My answer is, you can't do shit. And I'm a woo-woo optimist. I think that beneath all events is an invisible Flow that is intelligent and loving. I think that any human system that goes out of balance with human nature, or with other life on Earth, is doomed to fail. I think that in all possible futures, dandelions will grow through ruined Wal-Mart parking lots. But within this optimism, I see room for epic catastrophes. And some catastrophes are now so far along that "what can I do to stop it" is the wrong question, and the right question is "what can I do to survive it, to help others survive it, to minimize suffering and prepare for recovery?"
Find a landbase and build the topsoil; plant fruit trees and vegetable gardens; learn to forage and hunt and repair stuff; learn uncommon useful skills; make local friends; work to make your city and region more sustainable and resilient; make friends in other regions in case you have to move; gradually shift more of your activities and dependencies out of the money economy; break your addictions; get healthy; spend your money on tools and skills and long-keeping food; meditate; exercise your intuition. This is not meant to be a complete list, but a list of examples of the kind of thing you should be doing. The title of my talk was "Weeds through Pavement", because when pavement turns to forest, the pavement does not turn green and put down roots -- plants crack the pavement and grow through it. So do that.
January 6, late. More new year/decade pieces: Kunstler's 2010 forecast, and from last month, Dmitry Orlov's predictions for the decade, focusing on the concept of autophagy. I have to admit, when I wrote Civilization Will Eat Itself, that's not what I had in mind -- I just got lucky.
And here's Eskil Steenberg on decades, reminding us that decades are defined by events, not numbers. I think we can all agree that the cultural line between the 1950's and the 1960's was the JFK assassination in 1963, and the 1990's ended on 9/11/01. Steenberg thinks the 2000's ended in the fall of 2008, maybe because of the financial crash or the election of Obama. I think it's going to take more than that.
January 5. Busy week. Today I'm driving across the state, then I'll be spending Wednesday with family, and going down to Olympia on Thursday to lead a discussion on the possibilities for complex society after industrial civilization.
January 4. Here's a remarkable reader project, the illuminated thread. Brett is between the second and third stages of a giant bike ride all over the country, on which he makes videos, records himself whistling in water towers, does parkour in ruins, and repeatedly gets in trouble with the authorities for photographing active and abandoned industrial sites. There are some nice thoughts in the Q and A section, and he needs to raise more money for stage three.
Next, go check out Jeff Vail. Just today he posted his 2010 predictions, in which the big systems will commit to a pattern of making very expensive patches for various problems, instead of making fundamental changes, thus guaranteeing a long and bumpy collapse. And back on December 28 he made a post rethinking the precise way that the different nodes would be connected in a "rhizomatic" or "diagonal" economy.
Finally, Anne has more info on yesterday's thatching link:
Research into good thatching wheat varieties continued into the fifties and sixties. Of the last good developments, Maris Widgeon and Maris Hunter are still available commercially -- I bought a few grams of Maris Widgeon seed from Bountiful Gardens and replanted out to a fairly good-sized patch. KUSA seeds might also have something. The chokepoint for thatching isn't a good wheat varietal, its finding a reaper-binder that can harvest the field without crushing the stalks (ruining the waterproofing ability of the resulting roof).
January 3. I'll write something about the new decade after I see what other people are writing. Here are a bunch of unrelated links, mostly good news:
After 20 years, the sea lions have mysteriously vanished from San Francisco's pier 39. Obvious joke: "So long and thanks for all the fish."
Baker/thatcher brings back ancient grains that can be used for both baking and thatching. Remember that grains aren't fit for human consumption unless they've been sprouted or fermented.
A nice article on the toilet revolution, focusing on the value of urine. For the value of poop, read the humanure handbook.
Norway stops MRSA by using isolation and careful attention instead of throwing antibiotics at it like everyone else. (Thanks Kevin.)
And finally, yet another inspiring article about someone living with no money, in this case a young woman squatting and scavenging in London.
January 1. Today I finally made it to see Avatar. Some questions: 1) Why do the men have nipples but not the women? 2) Why does the best ever Hollywood film about Indians have to pretend to be about aliens? 3) Why does fictional entertainment keep getting better while politics and news keep getting worse? 4) How weird is it that Europeans came to North America, exterminated almost all the native people, consumed all the resources for money, and then made a movie about it, taking the side of the natives? I guess it's true what they say: you are what you eat.
January 1, 2010. New policy for the new year. I will no longer answer hard thinking questions over email. Lately I've been swamped with them and it's beginning to get stressful and exhausting. You're still welcome to ask non-thinking questions, and to contribute your own deep thoughts, but if you'd "love to hear what I think", you might be out of luck. If you're not sure what category your question is in, you can always ask it and find out.
December 31. I've had loads of free time over the last three weeks -- there were days when I started writing a post when I got up, and didn't finish until it was getting dark. That luxury is now coming to an end as I get ready for a busy January, so posts will not be as long or deep. Today, some links:
A couple readers tipped me off that this slashdot post just linked to my readings section, specifically Man of the Future, a Loren Eiseley chapter about an extinct hominid with a giant brain. The book it comes from has been in print for fifty years, and yet the Boskop people have now become famous overnight because of this article, What Happened to the Hominids Who Were Smarter Than Us?
Only one day after Discover posted that, NPR posted this, which similarly challenges our myth of progress: Sustainable Aliens: A New Theory On Why E.T. Hasn't Arrived. But again, the idea is not that new. Back in 2007 the Archdruid wrote this, in Solving Fermi's Paradox:
If unlimited technological progress is possible, then there should be clear evidence of technologically advanced species in the cosmos; there is no such evidence; therefore unlimited technological progress is impossible.
And back in 2005, I wrote the same thing in the "Intelligent Life in Space" section of The Critique of Civilization Changes Everything (scroll down two thirds). Please tell me I wasn't the first person to think of it, because it's so obvious! Although it might not be true. Here's a PDF article by Jacques Vallee, Incommensurability, Orthodoxy and the Physics of High Strangeness, speculating that aliens are trying to contact us, but they are so different from us that we dismiss their communications as too strange to be "real".
Finally, I have to throw this in because of the date, an article about how the decade never had a name.