9,000 Miles Farther On

In 2005, as gas prices topped $3.00 a gallon in Southern California, I became a bicycle commuter. In January 2007 I bought the bike that at present is my main steed. This week I logged my 9,000^th mile on this bike. Most of those miles have been commuting miles (to the store, or to work), although I have done a few pleasure rides. A lot has happened over those 9,000 miles. Looking back, a few highlights come to mind:

• In 2005, I didn't “get” the real story behind gas prices – I was far from putting cause and effect together to get a clear picture of what was going on. But in 2007, I was one of the Southern Californians who read the Los Angeles Times piece “O Pioneers In Pasadena” about the Dervaes family and their urban homestead. In addition, in late 2006 I had read Divorce Your Car! by Kate Alvord. In February 2007, I discovered Global Public Media and all the podcasts explaining Peak Oil and climate change. Believe me, all of that set my hair on fire!

• In January 2007, I knew next to nothing about food gardening or “food security.” I only knew how to grow Bermuda grass, how to kill weeds with Roundup and a little about how to trim rose bushes. Over these last two years, I've had a bit of a crash course in growing my own food.

• From 2005 to 2007, I had been drifting steadily leftward politically. My discovery of Peak Oil and validation of climate change accelerated and amplified that “drift” into something much more definite.

• In the spring of 2007, as I was learning about Peak Oil, I saw gas prices in So. Cal. drift upward to nearly $4 a gallon – just as I discovered the World Without Oil “alternate-reality game” website. At the time I thought we were actually about to “live” the game right then. The world situation didn't deteriorate with the speed depicted in that “game”, but that's not to say that things didn't deteriorate.

• In January 2007, I was having to cope with a few dysfunctional elements in my neighborhood, yet I didn't think too much of it. By May 2007, I was asking myself, “If the new information I have about oil is really true, can this neighborhood really handle it? Can these people?”

• In January 2007, I lived in Southern California. By September 2007 I was living in Portland, Oregon. In January 2007, I had a 401K. By September 2007, I didn't. In January 2007, I had a mortgage. By February 2008, I didn't. The crashing noise I heard from May to August was the sound of falling home prices and stock values. I got out in the bare nick of time. One of my motivations was a piece written by Sharon Astyk, titled, “Pick Up Your Hat.” The real estate lady who sold my house couldn't quite understand my sense of desperate urgency. Friends who heard what my selling price was kept saying, “You should ask for more. You're practically giving your house away!”

• In January 2007, oil prices were in the $60-65/barrel range. By year's end, they were over $90 a barrel. In January 2007, media coverage of an economic slowdown focused mainly on falling house prices. By December 2007, there were reports of tent cities for the homeless.

• In the spring of 2007, as I was learning about Peak Oil and its likely effects, I regurgitated what I was learning in the presence of any ears willing to listen, including those of my So. Cal. co-workers. I think many of them thought I was slightly nuts. I wonder what they think now.

• In January 2007, those who were tuned in to the “collapse” meme were a relatively small, “cutting-edge” minority. Nowadays, almost everyone I talk to acknowledges that something is seriously wrong with our present society and economy. As Joe Walsh once wrote, “Well there's a change in the wind, you know the signs don't lie/Such a strange feelin' and I don't know why it's takin'/Such a long time. Backyard people and they work all day/Tired of the speeches and the way that the reasons keep changin'/To make the words rhyme.”

• From the spring of 2007 onward, I read the predictions of many of the vanguards of the “collapse” meme. A surprising number of them came to pass, although not always with the speed or in the way that the prognosticators predicted. Our situation is now much more precarious than it was a few years ago. My view of things has grown darker than it was even in 2007.

• In January 2007, the President of the United States was a somewhat clumsy liar and stooge of the rich and powerful, a member of a political party whose holders of elected office were fellow stooges. In June 2009, the names of office-holders have changed, but has anything else (other than our current President's charm)?

• In January 2007, I got a Surly Long Haul Trucker with a carbon-fiber seatpost, indexed trigger-shifters and a Fizik Rondine saddle. From then to now, I have ditched the carbon fiber seatpost in favor of a good old-fashioned steel one, have switched the saddle to a Brooks B-17, have gone from Schwalbe Marathon 26” x 1.5” to Marathon 26” x 1.75” tires, and have switched the shifters to Shimano Dura-Ace friction shifters on Paul's Thumbies mounts. I also added a dynohub on the front so I won't have to constantly remember to charge batteries for my lights. The people at Citybikes joke that my bike is built to ride out the collapse of civilization.

• In January 2007, my commute to work was a 12-mile journey, one-way. By September 2007, my commute had lengthened to a 17-mile journey, one-way. (Thanks be for the MAX and the buses around here!) I get rained on a lot more now than I did in 2007. And there are more hills, including some seriously gnarly ones.

I'm sure I could list many other changes. And now as I write this, I think of teens whose conversations I have overheard recently on the bus, talking about all the plans they've made and all the fun they're going to have this summer. I think of co-workers in my present office with whom I get into discussions regarding the present world situation, and how many of these co-workers assume that the future will resemble the recent past, and that we'll somehow muddle through our present difficulties without a drastic lifestyle adjustment. Then I start thinking about the predictions of the Hirsch Report and the Oil Report of the Energy Watch Group, along with the Barclays “Burning Violins” report and the CIBC report titled, “Oil Prices: Another Spike Ahead.” I think about the last several EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Reports, and how almost all of them have shown a drop in U.S. petroleum stocks of at least 4 million barrels per week. And I watch the movement of prices at local gas stations – sometimes inching upward, sometimes leaping upward.

The last 9,000 miles have certainly had interesting scenery. I have a feeling that the next few thousand miles will bring us all to views like nothing we've ever seen.

Neighborhood Resilience and Safety Nets - A "Lab" Question

Among the writers whose work addresses Peak Oil and its related crisis are some who still view these crises as abstractions or events of the misty future. When they discuss possible responses to these crises, they write in high-level terms about what policies mankind (and its leading classes) should adopt, rather than delving into concrete things individuals should do. I'll start this post by suggesting that the future imagined by many who have written about Peak Oil and its related issues is here now. The economic dislocation caused by climate change, Peak Oil and other resource constraints is happening now. And the behavior to date of the masters of our present economic and governmental systems in responding to our present crisis shows exactly what we can expect from these masters as the crisis continues to unfold – namely, little to no help at all.

As writers like Sharon Astyk have noted, Peak Oil, climate change and economic collapse will not manifest themselves as some new and exotic crisis, but will look to many like ordinary human suffering that steadily gets worse. Successful adaptation to this suffering will not depend on grand governmental policy initiatives so much as the local responses of individuals, neighborhoods and communities. This adaptation must have both an individual and a community component. Being a prepared individual in the midst of an unprepared neighborhood has only limited value. In my articles on neighborhood resilience and building safety nets of alternative systems, I have attempted to explore the process of adaptation as seen by dwellers in urban and suburban neighborhoods, as well as outlining some of the hindrances to this adaptation.

Now it is time to take this study entirely out of the realm of the theoretical and to ground it firmly in the practical. Therefore I want to consider three real neighborhoods in three real cities in the United States. These are cities with which I have personal experience, having visited all three and having lived in two of them. However, the exact details of the neighborhoods under consideration will be somewhat fictionalized in this post. I want to consider a hypothetical resident in each of these three locales, a resident who one day began to become “Peak Oil-aware” or “climate change-aware” or more generally, “collapse-aware.” How that resident did so may vary according to a number of factors. Perhaps he was shocked into awareness by the run-up in gasoline prices in 2008. Or maybe she ran into a friend or relative who suddenly dived into urban homesteading with both feet, and her curiosity was aroused. Or maybe he was hanging out at a bookstore and just happened to pick up a book written by a “collapsnik.”

Anyway, let's assume that this person had or is having his or her awakening sometime between the beginning of 2007 and now. The person comes to realize that he must radically alter and simplify his life, or that she must not only alter her life but must also reach out to her neighbors and educate them about the events now unfolding. Let's say that the “collapse” message comes to this person with the same sort of urgency with which it hit me – as, in early 2007, I began to devour everything I could get my hands on concerning Peak Oil, as I followed the “World Without Oil” scenario website with all the devotion of a sports fan watching his team in the playoffs, as I downloaded podcast after podcast from Global Public Media, as I watched the weekly fluctuations in gas prices, and so on. One of the chief questions this person will likely ask is, “If these things are for real, can I successfully prepare for and adapt to these things here, right where I live? And can I successfully educate my neighbors so that we can adapt together?” What sort of answer to these questions do you think such a person will find, given the following scenarios?

Scenario 1: Willow Street, La Habra, California

You are a technical specialist for structural engineering at a CAD (computer-aided design) software reseller's office located in Costa Mesa. You live in La Habra, having bought a house on Willow Street near La Habra High School. Your morning commute takes between forty-five minutes and an hour and forty minutes, and it takes about the same amount of time to get home. It is early 2008, and you have been a homeowner for five years. In early 2008, the price of oil is already over $100 a barrel and gasoline prices are floating up toward $4 a gallon. You don't make very much, and because you bought your house for over $250K, a large portion of your paycheck goes toward the mortgage. You decide that you can't take the continual hit at the gas pump, but you don't know what to do, other than look for a job closer to home.

One day you are at Borders' Bookstore at Beach and Imperial, looking for a book on ornamental plants for your wife. You pass by a section full of books on declining oil supplies and the impending energy crisis. Your eye is attracted to a book with an unusual title, “Divorce Your Car!” You buy the plant book for your wife, but you are intrigued by the “car” book, and you buy it for yourself. As you read it, you are introduced to several new concepts, including the concept of “Peak Oil.” For some reason, this concept sticks in your mind to the extent that you do a Google search on it at lunch one day. What you find astounds, disturbs and profoundly moves you.

At home, you begin making immediate changes. First, you put a clothesline in your back yard. Then you start trying to kill the Bermuda grass so you can plant some vegetables. You start talking with one of your neighbors who lives across the street from you about the real reasons for the high gas prices, as well as where you think the economy is heading. In your conversations, you are always asking yourself, “Does my neighbor 'get' it? Would he be interested in joining me in helping the neighborhood get ready?”

But there is a big neighborhood problem, namely, a single woman with a teenage son who lives three houses down from you and whose son attends La Habra High. He has recently gotten into the habit of throwing big weekend drinking parties at his house, with his mom's full knowledge and permission. Lots of his friends and classmates show up, driving recklessly up and down the street as they arrive, and frequently urinating and/or vomiting on residents' properties as they leave. Fights are not uncommon, and the police are regularly called to that house on the weekends.

You also notice that the steps you are taking are highly unusual for your neighborhood, as most of the other residents are trying to grow room additions on their property, and not vegetables. One of your next door neighbors is annoyed by the clothesline and the vegetables in your backyard. One day you and your wife come home to find that this woman and her husband have replaced the chain link fence between your houses with a seven foot-high redwood fence.

You want to stop driving to work, but you live over 24 miles away from your office, and public transit is slow and disjointed. At last you settle on riding the Metrolink from the Fullerton station to Tustin, then heading to the office from the Tustin station. From your house to the Fullerton station and from the Tustin station to the office, you plan to travel by bike. Your wife is a bit hesitant about this at first (because she doesn't want you to become an accident statistic), but you decide to give it a go. The leg from your house to Fullerton isn't too dangerous, but going from the Tustin station along Jamboree Road and Main Street in Costa Mesa, you sometimes have to ride on the sidewalk, because there are a few parts with no bike lane and the cars go pretty fast. You wind up pedaling over 24 miles each workday. It's a brutal commute in the summertime.

Scenario 2: Olmstead Avenue, Los Angeles, California

You are a black single mother with a teenage son. You live on Olmstead Avenue, in the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles, in a house you have owned for seventeen years. You are an IT support staff member at a hospital near the downtown area. You are pushing your son to excel in school, and he is responding well for the most part, though he sometimes resents your pushing. You tend to be stricter with him than other parents are with their children, believing that if you don't hold him to a high standard of behavior, he will find himself being judged and treated more harshly for youthful indiscretions than his classmates who aren't black. You believe this to be true even now, years after the Rodney King beating and the “changes” in the LAPD.

It is January 2007, and while reading the Los Angeles Times on a Sunday, you find an article titled, “O Pioneers In Pasadena,” about the Dervaes family, who have turned their house into an “urban homestead.” The article arouses your interest and lingers in your mind for several days. Intrigued, you do a Google search on the Dervaes family and on Jules Dervaes in order to find out more about them. Your search leads you to the Global Public Media website, where you find not only a podcast of an interview with Mr. Dervaes, but much, much more! What you find astounds, disturbs and profoundly moves you.

You start making radical changes in your life and home. Your son initially reacts by looking at you as if you were slightly crazy. It's hard for him to grasp the need to reuse and repair things, to voluntarily make do with less, when he sees all his friends getting the latest shiny new “stuff.” You fare somewhat better with the neighbors, several of whom you have known for years, many of whom are already starting to be squeezed by the incipient economic downturn. You form an “Olmstead Avenue Gardening Club” with some of your neighbors, and you all enthusiastically plant whatever you think you can easily grow without accidentally killing it. Soon your yards are full of cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes and sunflowers. One yard even has some corn and squash.

In early September of 2007, you and your neighbors decide to have a little streetside “Urban Farmers' Market” to show off your produce. You plan your “Market” for a Saturday in early October. Word gets around the neighborhood, and people from several streets away express interest in dropping by. On the day of the “Market, you all set up several tables in the front yards of your house and the houses of your next door neighbors, and there's a large, joyful crowd. Your son is also there along with his friends, some of whom have the typical “urban” uniform consisting of sideways baseball caps, baggy shorts, and long, unbuttoned shirts or long tees or tank tops with Lakers colors. These young men are not being disorderly in any way – in fact, they are helping set up tables and set out vegetables – but they attract the notice of a passing LAPD squad car. Suddenly, several LAPD units show up, and officers begin questioning people, frisking some and harassing all the young men, including your son. The officers respond very rudely to your protests that you are doing nothing wrong, nothing any more out of the ordinary than any block party or multi-family garage sale. In fact, they threaten to arrest you for disorderly conduct.

Scenario 3: SE 88^th Avenue, Portland, Oregon

You are a freight rail dispatcher at the Port of Portland, Oregon. You own a home on SE 88^th Avenue, in the Lents district of Portland, across the street from Lents Park. You have owned your home for nearly 30 years, having bought it with the aid of GI Bill benefits you received after you got out of the Air Force. Though your Port job paid well enough for you to have relocated several times to larger and more expensive housing, you have never felt the urge to move. Now you are glad that your house is almost paid for; in fact, you have enough saved up to pay it off outright if you need to.

In the latter half of 2008, you notice a steadily worsening drop in shipping and container traffic at the Port, compared to a year ago. The drop in traffic grows severe enough to force some employees, such as yourself, onto an involuntary part-time schedule, while other employees are laid off altogether. You know that the economy has something to do with your situation, and during your breaks and lunch periods, you and your workmates discuss what is wrong with the economy, as well as how to fix it. One day in November, an engineer for one of the freight lines overhears your discussions, and he starts talking about impending economic collapse. Because you and he are old buddies, he loans you a book written by a “collapsnik,” and you read it over a couple of weekends. What you find astounds, disturbs and profoundly moves you.

You start making radical changes in your life and home. This turns out to be relatively easy in Portland, with its well-connected system of mass transit and bicycle routes, in addition to its strong base of community and volunteer groups. You soon find out about organizations such as Growing Gardens and the Portland Fruit Tree Project, and after attending their classes, you are able to plant your first garden.

Several of your neighbors catch the gardening “bug” (several others already had it), and you all begin talking together about the present economic situation and what you can do about it. You make your last house payment in March 2009, and host a “Burn the Mortgage” party.

But in April, you and your neighbors find out that the City wants to turn Lents Park into a baseball stadium for a minor-league professional team. This news is profoundly disturbing, as both you and your neighbors can't afford to sell your houses and relocate, and you are wondering what sort of adverse effects you will all suffer from having a 9,000 seat stadium right next to your homes. You are especially grieved about Lents Park. Your kids played in that park. When your young granddaughter visits from time to time, you take her to that park just to sit and read stories or play. What will become of the place now?

Questions for Discussion

1. What are the destabilizing influences in each neighborhood?

2. What structural barriers to Peak Oil/economic collapse adaptation exist in each neighborhood?

3. If we assume that the persons in each of these scenarios could relocate, would you advise them to? To where would you advise them to relocate?

4. Assuming that these people cannot afford to relocate, what strategies would you suggest for helping them to adapt, to build local safety nets and a resilient neighborhood?

5. What other factors or elements would you insert into each of these scenarios? Notice that in these scenarios I haven't seriously examined the effects of massive job losses, polluted land or altered climate.

The "Small Stones" Of Adaptation

The focus of this blog, The Well Run Dry, is Peak Oil and the related issues that accompany it – climate change, other resource peaks and economic collapse. My blog is partly a diary of the day-to-day experience of this multifaceted predicament. Yet I also try to provide some in-depth analysis of these issues, as well as helpful strategies of adaptation. One disclaimer: I do not consider myself to be an expert by any means. I woke up to these issues – truly woke up – at the start of 2007, long after more well-known writers and thinkers had begun studying these issues. Consider me to be just another man on the street, yet a man who likes to tinker.

One thing many readers may have noticed over the last few months is that I have been talking about very small-scale, low-tech strategies of adapting to economic collapse – things like bicycle transportation, small-scale manufacturing, backyard gardening, and building resilient neighborhoods. My particular focus on resilient neighborhoods has dealt with present, obvious threats to neighborhood stability, threats that would negatively impact quality of life even without Peak Oil and the other emergent crises we face. Some may question what these things have to do with adapting to crises such as Peak Oil and climate change. Others may question the effectiveness of such low-level strategies in dealing with these issues. Some may say, “Why don't you formulate some grand policy proposals that society could implement? Why don't you come up with a technological solution?” I will now explain why I have chosen to focus on low-level strategies and local responses to these issues, and will try to make some sense of my recent posts.

First, let me tell you what I believe. I believe that global oil production peaked in 2005, and that the oil price spike of 2008 is the evidence that oil production has been falling since then. My belief is based mainly on the Oil Report of the Energy Watch Group of Germany which was published in October 2007. I also believe that the official global economy is experiencing a number of other resource peaks right about now, including peaks in such raw materials as copper and molybdenum. In this I can speak from personal experience because I work for a company that has a number of industrial clients.

Because the supplies of many raw materials have peaked and are now declining, the global economy has begun to collapse. There are fewer and fewer new sources of supply for these raw materials, and existing stores are being depleted. Therefore I don't think there is anything we can do to avert the continued shrinkage of the global economy. We must adapt to a lifestyle of living on less. Living in a way that is truly “sustainable” over the long haul means living much more simply than Americans and citizens of the First World are accustomed to.

This fact is something that we must accept if we are to begin successfully adapting to the world in which we now find ourselves. This is true both of individuals and of larger social units – families, circles of friends, neighborhoods, communities and nations. To the extent that anyone or any group fails to accept this new reality, to that extent that individual or group will fail to adapt successfully.

Yet our modern society has become addicted to the constant getting of more “stuff” – thus the insistence on growing the “consumer” economy. Moreover, the growth of that economy is for the primary benefit of the masters of that economy – the rich owners, officers and executives of corporations and the heads of governments who serve those corporations. They especially are addicted to the constant getting of “more.” (It is rumored that when John D. Rockefeller was asked how much money is enough, he replied, “Just a little bit more.”) These rich masters are the drivers and preservers of our present economy, and they are doing all they can to preserve the present economic arrangements even as these arrangements begin to fall apart.

We are a society of addicts run by an elite consisting of mega-addicts. Our present way of life is unsustainable, not only because we are running out of resources, but because our way of life is destroying the earth. Successful adaptation to our situation requires that we admit this to ourselves, just as substance abuse addicts are often told, “Get honest or die!” Yet when faced with the ultimatum to get honest, our society in general and our leaders and rich men in particular have resisted at all costs.

Consider the presidency of George W. Bush, who in concert with oil companies and automakers chose to start a stupid and illegal war rather than promote mass transit and other conservation measures in the U.S. Consider how he and the Republican-dominated Congress enacted laws designed to make it easier for the rich to prey on the poor. Consider how he turned Federal scientific agencies into climate change deniers. Consider who started our present round of Wall Street bailouts. But if one wants to believe that the Democrats are any better, one must ask how much has actually changed since Bush left office. The bailouts of the rich keep coming, as well as attempts to enact laws that would force average Americans to continue to rely on a breaking system.

A top-down, strategic, societal strategy of adaptation to Peak Oil, climate change and economic collapse would require that the leaders and those with power and wealth use it selflessly for the common good. Yet the evidence clearly shows that this is not happening – even though our collective window of opportunity for large-scale societal adaptation is shrinking. This is why I haven't written some essay for President Obama, why I no longer believe in writing my congressman, and why I am not really interested in formulating some large-scale policy that will never be implemented.

Nor am I very enthused about supposed “high-tech” solutions to our predicament. First, I don't believe that many of these solutions have much chance of working. Secondly, I am somewhat fearful of the unintended consequences that would arise if some of them did work. Now this is a personal opinion of mine, and intellectual honesty requires that it be tested in order to be considered valid – something I intend to explore in future posts. But I must say that I tend to agree with bloggers like Jeff Vail in his description of the unintended consequences and problems caused by the pursuit of ever-more complex technological fixes for the problems caused by technological advancement. I also tend to agree with those who mention the extreme technical challenges involved in implementing some of the proposed solutions to our present energy crisis. (For a good example of a description of these challenges, see Kiashu's humorous essay, “Solar power... in SPAAAACE!” at his blog, Green With A Gun.)

My focus is therefore on personal strategies of adaptation, because I believe that while the evidence is clear that many of our leaders would rather die than get honest, there are yet individuals out in the world who would rather live instead. And while we peasants have very little chance of directly influencing our leaders, there are things we can do as individuals and as neighborhoods to adapt to our new reality.

Those things include building alternatives to the failing systems of the official economy, as well as strengthening the communities in which we live. I can't fix the industrial food system, but I can grow potatoes (mine are coming up quite well now). I can't persuade the nation to fix its passenger rail system, but I can buy a Surly Long-Haul Trucker and use it for basic transportation. I can't repair the culture of my country, but I can repair the culture of my neighborhood. I can't force the mainstream media to tell the truth, but I can blog about the things I see, hear and know. Therefore I will continue to cover the small-scale adaptations that are within the reach of individuals without a lot of money or power, because I think these things will play an unexpectedly important role in our society's adaptation to our present times.

Two other things: first, I want to thank some long-time commenters for their readership and encouragement. In particular, I want to mention Kiashu, whom I mentioned earlier, as well as SoapBoxTech, author of the blog of the same name (http://litetechca.blogspot.com/), gaiasdaugter, author of the blog Homesteading on a Sandbar (http://homesteadingonasandbar.blogspot.com/) and of course, Stormchild, author of Gale Warnings which is listed on my blog under “Other Wells.”

Secondly, I see that the New York Times has published an article talking about the dangers to urban food gardeners from lead soil contamination. This is an interesting development, which I almost half expected. As more people start to decouple from relying on the failing system of industrial food production, it is to be expected that the rich owners of agribusiness will influence media outlets to write stories telling people that backyard gardens are potentially dangerous. This sort of story is what I tried to refute in my post titled, “The Chicken That Laid Leaden Eggs, And Other Horror Stories.” There is one other thing I expect, and that is that there will be many other bloggers writing pieces about remediation strategies for gardeners with lead-contaminated soil. I imagine that many of these bloggers will make the same points I made in my original piece. That piece was rather long, and I intend to write a more summary post later this week describing strategies for gardening in contaminated soil. (Who knows, someone might beat me to it... ;) )

Ecomotion Movin' On...

I regret to inform you of the passing of a uniquely Portland business with a uniquely Portland flavor. No, it isn't one of our unique locally-owned bookstores, nor is it one of our unique bicycle shops, shops that are light-years ahead of the rest of the nation when it comes to really “getting” the concept of the bike as basic transportation. Rather, it's Ecomotion, a seller of electric vehicles that is now going out of business.

I used to pass Ecomotion's showroom many times on the way to work as I rode my bike down Sandy Boulevard in the early morning en route to the bus stop on the other side of the river. The sight of the place provoked much curiosity and many questions in my mind, the chief of which was, “Who's buying these things, anyway?” My curiosity was again aroused when I saw the “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS” signs on the windows a couple of months ago. These signs appeared at a time during which many observers were noticing the links between the collapse of the economy and the drying up of investment in “green” technologies. This was also less than six months after gasoline and oil prices fell to levels not seen in over four years.

I try to never pass up a good story. I also wondered whether economic collapse and the collapse of oil prices had anything to do with Ecomotion's demise, and I decided to find out. It took several tries, but I was at last able to secure time for a short, rapid-fire interview with the manager one Friday afternoon a few weeks ago. The interview took place as the employees were liquidating the furniture and fixtures. Below are my questions (in bold type), and his answers.

Why did Ecomotion fail? Ecomotion is an authorized dealer for ZAP Electric Vehicles. Gas prices were over $4 a gallon during much of last year. This drove demand for alternatives such as electric cars to such an extent that Ecomotion sold out all its inventory in June. They therefore ordered many new vehicles, but ZAP's manufacturing base was in China. Unfortunately, their China supply line was slow to deliver, so their new vehicles didn't arrive until October 2008. By then gas prices were under $2 a gallon, causing electric vehicle sales to drop off a cliff. In the early months of 2009, the owner of Ecomotion decided to call it quits. The ZAP vehicles are not suitable for highway speeds – not quite right yet – nor do they possess a range of at least 100 miles, which many consider the minimum range for an electric car to act as a practical alternative to cars driven by internal combustion.

There are other, smaller ZAP dealers that are a bit more successful, due to their ability to cheaply modify the vehicles for increased range and speed. Ecomotion did not have the staff for these modifications. Also, they had leased a large building with the goal of becoming the largest electric vehicle (EV) emporium in the United States. But the large building made for high overhead costs.

Regarding our present economic and energy challenges, what advice do you have for our nation? If we're seriously going to invest in alternatives to gasoline-powered cars, let's do it right. So much of what we try in the name of “alternatives” seems deliberately wrong and designed to fail. A case in point: A couple of Pacific Northwest utilities have begun installing charging stations for EV's in the Portland metro area. But the chargers are supplied at 110 volts and require 8 hours to deliver a full recharge. A Chinese company named BYD is supposedly developing a “dual mode” car that will go 100 miles before recharge, as well as a charging station that can accept three levels of input voltage, and can charge a car in 15 minutes. The local utilities don't seem interested in looking into such chargers.

How do you feel about your experience with trying to sell electric cars? Is there a bit of frustration at how it all turned out? There's definitely frustration, but also a sense of accomplishment at having played a role in trying to make the world a better place. The frustration is the main thing. Why the frustration? Ecomotion was promised many things by ZAP, things that didn't happen, such as an electric SUV with a 300-mile range. The staff at Ecomotion feel a bit like they've been hung out to dry.

What will the American energy and transportation scene look like in the next 18 months? Not much will change. We'll still be relying primarily on gas-powered cars. If we want to see a real change, what's needed is a change in how we drive as well as dedicated EV car lanes, due to the limits on speed and power of EV's.

Do Americans need to change what they want? Should we learn to want less? No. The problem does not lie in what we want. Most Americans would be happy with a mid sized sedan that was electric, so we wouldn't have to send our kids to fight for oil.

* * *

With that last question, the interview was over. As I did further research on Ecomotion and on ZAP cars, I found a few troubling trends that seemed typical of some players in the EV industry. First, Ecomotion is hardly the first ZAP car dealer to go out of business (or get “ZAPPED”). The failure of ZAP dealers is actually rather common, and has a lot less to do with our broader economic troubles than with the way the company is run. A recent article in Wired Magazine described how the company attracts potential investors with promises of “cutting-edge” new electric vehicles that are so good that they will practically sell themselves. The problem is that these vehicles are always “just around the corner” – they never actually show up. The ZAP vehicles that actually make it to dealer showrooms are clunky, poorly made and extremely limited in power and range (think 17 to 20 miles on a charge). There is also the shady nature of the agreements dealers are required to sign in order to sell ZAP cars. (If one reads the Wired magazine account, one gets the impression that the chief executives of ZAP are sociopaths.)

There seems to be a trend among some in the EV industry of promising unbelievable cars with performance too good to be true, and coming to your doorstep one day very soon. In addition to ZAP, BYD, the Chinese company mentioned earlier, has also been promising “environmentally-friendly” cars with all the power and luxury of gasoline-powered cars. Yet their promised vehicles don't always arrive as promised. One model that actually exists, the FD3M, is touted as having an all-electric range of 60 miles and a top speed of 93 miles per hour. But at least one source states that the 60-mile all-electric range only holds true if the car is driven at less than 30 miles an hour. BYD (short for Build Your Dreams) claims to have sold several dozen of these cars, yet the car itself won't be mass-produced until 2010.

The biggest problem with the EV industry extends beyond the industry to our society in general. EV's are slower and more limited in performance than gasoline-powered cars. This is a fact of life that's not likely to change anytime soon, and we must face this fact. If you're going to rely on an EV as primary transportation, you'll have to change your lifestyle. Period. Even if this situation changes, EV's are not the environmental panacea that their promoters claim. They still require fossil fuels to run, because our electricity is generated by plants that run on fossil fuels. Steam turboalternators of the kind found in a coal or natural gas-fired generating plant produce electricity at a final efficiency very similar to the efficiency of any other heat engine – including gasoline and diesel engines. Then there are the transmission losses arising from sending the electricity from its source to its point of use. In this regard, EV's don't really solve anything. If we try to run EV's entirely on renewable and sustainable sources of energy, we will have to settle for a lot less than what we've been used to with gasoline and diesel engines.

This – learning to settle for less – is actually the key to successful adaptation to the times now upon us. Yet this is something that our society fights tooth and nail. So we wish and long for some techno-breakthrough that will allow us to live guilt-free in the luxury and ease to which we have become accustomed. One of my acquaintances always talks about how in driving his Prius, he's doing his part to save the planet and adapt to scarcity. The very way he pronounces the word is almost reverential – “driving a Prius.” He thoroughly rejects the notion that he might have to radically downsize his life very soon. He is typical of Americans who say, “I am getting fat because I eat ten pounds of French fries every day. But I have a solution: scientifically engineered low-fat French fries!”

Our unwillingness to consider living on less, and our longing for technological solutions to scarcity issues makes many of us suckers for hyped supercars and other things that will allow us to “save the earth” while maintaining our extravagant lifestyles. But reining in our lifestyles is the best thing we can do right now – we don't have to “send our kids off to fight for oil,” nor do we need some cutting-edge electric car breakthrough.

For Further Reading:

• “2008 Zap Xebra Review,” The Truth About Cars, 14 March 2008, http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2008-zap-xebra-review/

• “Hype Machine: Searching for ZAP's Fleet of No-Show Green Cars,” Wired Magazine, 24 March 2008, http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-04/ff_zapped

• “Ecomotion's Fire Sale – Would You Buy An Electric Car for $1210?”, On Portland, 9 April 2009, http://www.onpdx.com/green-living/ecomotions-fire-sale-would-you-buy-an-electric-car-for-1210/

• ZAP Corporate Website, http://www.zapworld.com/

• “Take A Look Inside A Chinese Smart FourTwo Cloning Factory,” Jalopnik, 24 March 2008, http://jalopnik.com/371517/take-a-look-inside-a-chinese-smart-fourtwo-cloning-factory

• “The Chinese BYD F3DM, First Mass Produced Electric Car, Fails With Consumers,” gas2.0, 14 April 2009, http://gas2.org/2009/04/14/the-chinese-byd-f3dm-first-mass-produced-electric-car-fails-with-consumers/

The Real Reasons For Frugality

Frugality has often been in the news over the last several months. Sometimes it is described in faintly negative tones by the mainstream media, who portray savers as a hindrance to the recovery of our economy. Then there are blogs whose authors try to make money from the frugality trend by offering financial advice and financial planning services. There are also people who define frugality as scoring the best deals on all the stuff being offered by our consumer economy. One peculiar article, titled, “America's New Frugality,” was published by Forbes Magazine in February of this year. It describes strategies “investors” can use to get at the savings of ordinary people who are now turning frugal. Some of their recommendations include investing in saving-and-loan institutions or bargain retailers like Amazon.com, since that's where the supposedly “frugal” people are now putting their money. (Source: http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/16/retailers-bank-stocks-intelligent-investing_0217_retailers.html.)

These attempts to “monetize” frugality would be really funny if the stakes weren't so high and the consequences weren't so tragic. Frugality should actually be viewed as a righteous response to scarcity, a choice to live gracefully with less. In fact, frugality is defined as “economy in the use of resources,” according to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition. As we see how scarce those resources have actually become, we begin to see the real reasons for frugality.

That scarcity is what I want to address in this post. But I must warn you that for many readers, what I am about to say will seem like very bad news. So you may want to sit down (if you're not already). Put on some appropriate mood music, if you think you need it. If you can't think of any, let me suggest Turn To Stone by Joe Walsh. The version he has on his album, You Can't Argue With A Sick Mind, seems appropriately doomful.

Let's start by talking about the last four years. During this time the world saw crude oil prices shoot up from slightly over $30 a barrel to nearly $150 a barrel. The once-hot and ever-climbing real estate market crashed under an avalanche of foreclosures. Prices for food and motor fuel skyrocketed to unsustainable levels and people found themselves unable to pay for these things. The prices of raw manufacturing materials such as metals rose to such levels that thieves were stealing not only residential wiring and plumbing fixtures, but even manhole covers in some cities.

Many who reported on these things treated them as isolated events that seemed to happen without any good reason. But the proper way to view these events is as symptoms of a deeper underlying problem, signs of Something Terribly Wrong underneath. Something's terribly wrong with our present society, our present economy, our present economic arrangements.

Our modern global economy is based on debt and requires continuous growth to function properly. It is based on debt in the sense that the banks who control our money supply loan money into existence. Their expectation is that this money will be paid back with interest, which means that they expect that borrowers will grow ever more prosperous as time passes, and will thus be able to pay off their interest-bearing loans. But for borrowers to grow more prosperous, their individual “net worth” must continually increase. This means either that their wages must continually rise or that some other asset (like a house or a 401K) held by borrowers must continually increase in value.

The other side of a debt-based economy is that many of the things needed by individuals and businesses are so expensive that they can usually be bought only on credit, that is, by taking out a loan. This is true of large businesses like airlines, who borrow money to buy new jetliners, and for ordinary people, most of whom don't have the resources to pay cash for a house or car or expensive medical treatments. As long as the economy is expanding, these borrowers can reasonably expect to be able to repay their loans with interest.

An expanding economy depends on an expanding base of resources. When a resource vital to an industry becomes scarce, its price shoots up and the products made by that industry become more expensive – or scarce. Then it becomes impossible to grow that particular industry unless a substitute resource is found to replace the resource that is now scarce. Our problem is that a large number of resources have now become scarce. Peak Oil is the name for one such resource constraint we are now facing. But there are other resources that are running out – everything from inorganic phosphate fertilizers to industrial metal ores to coal, and much more. There are no substitutes for these resources. And we are using up renewable resources like fish, trees and arable land at a rate far faster than they can be renewed. A shrinking resource base means the end of the growth economy.

Not only have we hit resource constraints, but the earth can no longer safely absorb all of the wastes generated by our global industrial economy. It is now all but certain that manmade air pollutants are causing potentially terminal climate change, that it is being felt now in many parts of the world, and that within a few years we may all be feeling it. The ozone layer of our atmosphere is still being destroyed by manmade chemicals. There are now huge islands of plastic trash floating in our oceans. The pollution of our oceans is endangering the phytoplankton from which half of our oxygen is derived, as well as destroying fisheries. The destruction of our world by our industrial economy means the end of the growth economy.

All of these symptoms are behind the present economic collapse. For instance, the skyrocketing prices of basic necessities from 2005 to 2008 made it impossible for many debtors to pay off their loans, and made it impossible for markets to attract large numbers of new consumers. The crop failures caused by climate change-induced drought are a big reason why some food grains got expensive. These resource constraints and destructive consequences of our industrial system are not going away, no matter how many governments offer “stimulus packages.” The long-term direction of our economy is therefore downward.

Most of us must therefore give up dreaming of getting rich. It has been a popular dream, especially in America, but the truth is that there is no longer enough of the “official” economy left for any significant number of us to achieve that dream. Those who pursue the dream of getting ever-more stuff will hit the wall of resource constraints or of environmental damage. The pie is shrinking. The well has run dry.

Some may ask then about the present time in which many things have started to get cheaper again, like gasoline. This is not due to our finding new resource supplies, but due to the removal of buyers from the market due to economic collapse. The number of people who can qualify for a loan is shrinking; therefore, house prices are falling. The number of people out of work is increasing; therefore, fewer people are driving and gas prices are down. But oil production, to name one resource, is still falling because old oil reservoirs are still being depleted, and oil scarcity is about to make a reappearance. Any attempt to “revive” the economy will run up against the same resource scarcities that caused the present collapse. I would not view this as a good time to go into debt or run out and buy a new big truck or SUV. I have seen a few drivers of these new vehicles lately, some of whom still have the dealer tags on their vehicles, and I can only say that their actions seem dumber than a bag full of rocks.

Frugality is thus the wise, righteous and realistic response to our present times, a learning to live gracefully on less and a learning to live for something other than money and material advancement. It is not a way of getting rich! If anyone is thinking of frugality as a means of socking money away for later investment in some get-rich scheme, I've got one bit of advice: Fahgetaboudit. Those days are over, probably for good. I suggest, instead, that we view frugality as one strategy in a portfolio of strategies for preserving that good which can be salvaged out of this present difficult time, to hand it down to future generations. These are strategies well worth exploring, and there are some very excellent writers tackling these topics. Some of these writers are listed under my heading, “Other Wells,” on this blog.

For Further Reading:

• “Ocean Pollution: Destroying What We Need Most,” http://oceanpollution.blog.ca/2009/04/22/phytoplankton-and-oxygen-5985274/

• “Ocean Pollution Worsens And Spreads,” http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5474

• “Our Finite World,” http://gailtheactuary.wordpress.com/

• “Crude Oil – The Supply Outlook,” Energy Watch Group, www.energywatchgroup.org/fileadmin/global/pdf/EWG_Oilreport_10-2007.pdf

• “Climate Chaos Predicted by CO2 Study,” The Independent, 30 April 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-chaos-predicted-by-co2-study-1676411.html

Homeboy Culture And The Solari Index

When I first moved to Portland, Oregon in the fall of 2007, I immediately noticed one difference between Portland and Southern California from whence I had come: the almost complete absence of “gangsta” graffiti. The rare graffiti I did see was almost entirely political – much of it quirky and quaintly humorous.

Over the last year and a half, that has changed. There has been an explosion of graffiti in our city during that time, and most of the new stuff is not political. Instead, it's a tired repeat of the same things I saw in So. Cal. – homeboys and “wanna-be” homeboys marking out their turf in destructive ways, much like cats marking their territory with their own urine. The City of Portland has a webpage with a link to a document titled, “How to Read Graffiti And What To Do,” describing the various types of graffiti now showing up everywhere in the city (http://www.portlandonline.com/index.cfm?mode=search&search_action=SearchResults). According to that document, gang-related graffiti now accounts for 15 percent of all graffiti in Portland, although that percentage is growing. (“Tagger” graffiti comprises almost all of the rest.) The document also states that most of this gang graffiti is now done by Hispanic/Latino/Latina gangs and gang “wanna-be's.” Curiously, the document does not mention the obvious link between gang graffiti and tagger graffiti.

This graffiti can be found on the usual public structures such as signs and freeway barriers, but it is also being applied to private buildings such as company offices and storefronts. Here's the kicker: some taggers are now putting their mark on private residential property, such as front yard fences, houses and vehicles. I'm sure these taggers are not asking the permission of the owners of said property beforehand.

This says something about the mindset and culture of these people, namely, that they can't feel comfortable living in a place unless they have had a chance to make it ugly and dangerous. Graffiti is the first step toward turning a place into a ground of armed battle – battle over things that are really stupid and insignificant, desperate attempts by gangbangers to provide themselves with an identity. That identity is not built around a worthwhile personhood devoted to making one's place a better place or becoming a productive member of one's society, but rather toward doing one's best to tear things apart – toward becoming known as the biggest, baddest nihilist (though most gangbanger wanna-be's can't even spell “nihilist,” let alone tell what it means). Gangstas and wanna-be's don't care if the things they deface are not their own things – in fact, it's more fun to destroy someone else's things, whether those things are publicly (i.e., taxpayer) owned infrastructure or privately owned buildings, houses and neighborhoods, or human lives.

Who is responsible for creating this culture? There are two answers to that question, I suppose. On the one hand, one can say that gangbangers are fully responsible for their actions, having knowingly chosen things that are wrong and evil, and that one day they will have to answer fully for their actions. There is a level on which that is certainly true. This should be a cause of great fear for gang members, if they are thinking with clear heads – namely, that one day, they will stand in ultimate judgment for every piece of defaced property; every stupid, senseless fight; every neighborhood ruined by senseless violence; everyone killed over gang signs, gang colors, ethnicity or other stupid reasons; every wounded or killed innocent bystander; every attacked outsider; everyone who was ever pressured by a gang peer group to do something criminal.

Yet gang members are not thinking with clear heads; if they were, they wouldn't be gang members. Gangs are dysfunctional groups that attract dysfunctional people. They are symptoms of a larger dysfunctional society. In my post, “Our Least Resilient Neighborhoods,” I described the “Solari Index” as a measure of how safe and healthy a neighborhood is for its residents, and I described how certain wealthy interests outside the American minority community were doing things that lowered the Solari index of minority neighborhoods in order to make money. The problems caused by this, and the culture that results, have become the emblems of minority culture in America. But a further problem is now becoming apparent – that the dysfunctional culture of the American 'hood has now burst out of the 'hood to infect the rest of America and the world.

It can be seen in places as far-flung as Sudan (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6915187.stm), and Britain, for instance, where over the last few years there have been incidents of gang-related gun violence and where in 2004, a well-known black personality on British TV criticized gangsta street culture as a “deadly virus” destroying a generation of African-Caribbean boys. According to a Guardian news article, the TV sportscaster, Garth Crooks, said “...there was a direct link between films and rap music glorifying violence and the drift of black boys away from education and into crime and violence.” (Source: “Gangsta Culture A Deadly Virus, Says Top TV Presenter,” UK Guardian, 12 September 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/sep/12/schools.society)

As drug use in American minority communities was partly boosted by CIA and Federal involvement during the 1980's and 1990's, I'd like to suggest that gang culture in America is being driven by forces outside that culture, in order to enrich certain powerful growth capitalists. The drivers of that culture include all the usual suspects, namely poverty, exploitation and gross material inequality. But I want to focus on two huge drivers of that culture: the prison-industrial complex and the entertainment (or “content”) industry.

It's fairly easy to trace the role of the prison-industrial complex in the growth of American gangsta culture. As the prison “industry” has lobbied for ever-tougher laws and punishments for ever more trivial offenses, the result has been an explosion of the American prison population. This has meant more jobs for prison administrators, staff, guards, and so forth, as well as more contracts for architectural and engineering firms who design these prisons. But it also means that one out of every 31 Americans is now in jail. One out of every 31 Americans is now being exposed to and shaped by a corrosive institutional culture in which gangs are prominent. One out of every 31 Americans will one day come home to a family that has been disrupted by that one individual's incarceration. Many of those families will have kids on whom the culture of the lockup will rub off.

The corrections “industry” has influenced the American judicial system to prey on minority communities first of all. But the corrections “industry” is a growth industry, like all industries in our global economy. Its success is measured in capturing market share and growing the bottom line as measured each quarter. Therefore, it can't remain static. It grows exponentially, as expressed thus:

Corrections Industry Growth = Ae^x

Those who want to grow it want really high growth rates, rates that are usually higher than the rate of population growth, so that they can get rich really quick. This can be expressed thus:

Corrections Industry Growth Ae^x > General Population Growth Be^y

This means that this industry is branching out beyond the minority community in its search for people to throw in prison. They're probably already looking for poor non-minority candidates for lock-up. Who knows? Maybe soon they'll be looking for formerly well-off people who can't pay their bills. They'll encounter ever more surprised fish as they move up the food chain. We may get to see what sort of culture emerges when a large percentage of America is thrown in the slammer.

Then there's the entertainment industry. I don't have nearly the time to trace all of the “urban-themed” entertainment now being marketed to impressionable American youth, but I suspect that it's quite a lot – from the rap, gangsta, hip-hop and other “urban” music, radio and music videos to the gang-themed movies. As I write this, Slumdog Millionaire comes to mind – not only because it shows how pervasively American hood culture has infected the rest of the world, but because the producer, Celador (now wholly owned by Sony Pictures) couldn't even make a movie about a non-Anglo country and culture without injecting American trash culture into it. Now Summit Entertainment is releasing yet another “urban” film, Next Day Air, with black people in all the settings customary to such a film – raunchy comedy, drugs, guns, and sex. There are even gang-themed video games for Microsoft's Xbox and Sony Playstation!

The trouble with all of this is that it's being marketed to an ever-younger audience. The self-imposed industry rating systems are a joke, as they are meant much more to protect the movie industry from strong regulation than to actually protect young kids from trash. The content industry says that consumers of its content are assumed to be responsible consumers who can properly process the unwholesome parts of the content they consume. But this is not the case with young kids whose powers of discernment are not only not yet developed, but are actively being short-circuited by ads for harmful movies and other content. The content industry says that its movies, TV and other offerings are not contributing to a general breakdown of society. But anyone who watches young kids acting out the “entertainment” they now see and hear knows that this is a lie.

The continued creation and strengthening of gang culture in the U.S. will be an impediment to the efforts of citizens to create local, resilient communities that can weather the effects of economic collapse, resource constraints and climate change. All of these threats will be difficult enough to handle without having to worry about dysfunctional people trying to tear down whatever anyone tries to build up, all for the sake of “keepin' it real.”

For Further Reading

• http://www.maverickentertainment.cc/films.php?CategoryID=1

• http://www.buzzle.com/articles/urban-movies-continue-to-rise.html

• http://www.streetgangs.com/movies/

• http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,302010,00.html

• http://houston.broowaha.com/article.php?id=2009

• http://www.latinheat.com/columna_det.php?col_id=3&column_id=3

• http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08158/887702-254.stm

• http://www.nancycarlssonpaige.org/articles9.html

• http://www.tothegame.com/ps2-1634-crime-life-gang-wars-for-sony-playstation-2.html

• http://www.us.playstation.com/Search?search&s=gangsta

• http://games.teamxbox.com/xbox/1091/Crime-Life-Gang-Wars/

• http://www.truthout.org/040309J

• http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2136

• http://galewarnings.blogspot.com/2008_02_13_archive.html

• http://galewarnings.blogspot.com/2008_02_17_archive.html

• http://current.com/items/87069981/visit_america_before_america_visits_you.htm