Closed The Shop, Sold The House...

It must be tempting sometimes for the most popular collapse-watchers and writers to wonder how others take their words – especially their advice. In this post I'll talk a bit about the effect a few collapse-watchers have had on some recent decisions of mine.

I remember several months ago how I started to become very interested in The Automatic Earth, a blog which mainly focuses on the financial aspect of the decline and contraction of our present industrial society. I learned a great deal about finance from the site (although I must admit that I can still be confused by some of the more abstruse aspects of the world of modern finance). If I had to summarize the main points of The Automatic Earth, I would state them as follows:

• The global industrial economy dominated by the First World, particularly the United States, is in the throes of a deflationary contraction.

• This deflationary contraction consists of the extinguishing of multiple, mutually exclusive claims on wealth and the contraction of available credit.

• The fact that credit and multiple mutually exclusive claims on wealth are being extinguished defines this present time as a deflationary time, even though the prices of energy and many commodities are now rising.

• The best short-term strategy for weathering the present deflationary contraction consists, among other things, of holding as much cash as possible while becoming debt free and securing the means to maintain your own existence.

There's a fair bit of wisdom in these things, as well as other strategies not mentioned here which are listed at the Automatic Earth. But whenever there is advice from a particular source, one is also likely to find somewhat contrarian advice from others.

Anyway, I found myself following the advice listed above, as well as other maxims, such as “Take care of your health,” and “Be worth more to your employer than he is paying you.” I've been working two jobs, one as a practicing engineer and one as an engineering adjunct instructor. Engineering is not the most poetic profession on earth, but then, as Chico Escuela used to say on Saturday Night Live, it's been “bery, bery good to me.” However, I've been working like a dog for nearly a year now. The cash flow has been good – if one's goal is to “preserve liquidity” in the face of a deflationary depression. And I deliberately negotiated a salary with my boss that was lower than the going rate for someone with my experience, so I believe I have been worth more to him than he's paying me.

But he's wanting more and more of me, and over the last several months, it seems that a great many aspects of my life have been put on hold while I devote myself to work and to teaching. This is not a very resilient arrangement, for if the economy suffers the sort of shocks that it experienced in 2008, my firm could lose a number of key clients. There are things I should be doing toward building a resilient neighborhood where I live, toward writing and chronicling the unfolding story of life on the downside of Hubbert's Peak, toward doing good and trying with my neighbors and friends to preserve those things that are of greatest value. The demands of my work have gotten in the way of such things. Most of my co-workers regularly put in workweeks that average between 50 and 60 hours. The only skills we seem to have are cubicle skills. And what good is the money if you die of a heart attack or stroke trying to earn more of it? Or, as the Good Book says, “For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world, and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”

Thus, over the last few months I have come to certain conclusions. A few weeks ago, I gave my boss notice that I am quitting Although I am willing to stay on long enough to finish a couple of projects, I intend to be finished before the beginning of summer. For the next several months, I will be relying solely on my income as an adjunct professor. (This is my version of voluntary “radical cashectomy”.) I will be reducing my monthly expenses as well. Fortunately my house is paid for and I have no other debts, so debt is not an issue.

I have written out a mission statement of sorts for the next couple of years. It could be summed up in one phrase: “transforming myself (along with the people I care about) into someone who might stand a chance, given the world's assumed trajectory.” (Hat tip to Dmitry Orlov for that one.) The savings I have accumulated will provide me with a bit of “learning curve” time to accomplish this. One of my main goals is to develop a suite of post-Peak skills, with an emphasis on understanding general science and engineering and their application to a post-Peak world. Another goal is to become a competent teacher of these skills, as well as a builder of resilient enclaves and a repairer of culture.

I will also continue to write pertinent posts for this blog. Stay tuned!

"Path to Freedom" On Probation

It came to my attention recently that "Path to Freedom," the urban homesteading project of Jules Dervaes and his family, has made some enemies in the urban homesteading/self-reliance/collapse preparedness communities. It seems that the Dervaes family has submitted for trademark registration several phrases commonly used by writers, thinkers, educators and other activists in the preparedness community. Not only have these phrases been registered as trademarks owned by the Dervaes family, but according to at least one source, the Dervaes family has begun sending cease and desist letters to Internet writers who use these phrases, as well as local volunteer urban food gardening teachers.

If these things are true, it would be a big disappointment - yet it would not be entirely unexpected. Many of those who are interested in urban farming and simple living are trying to escape a dominant, predatory economic system. It makes sense that those who rule that system would try to block the exits - or, perversely, try to charge escapees some sort of fee in order to use the exits. In my mind, Jules Dervaes and his family used to stand as a model for people who are trying to escape from a dominant, exploitative system into a more equitable way of life. Now it seems they are trying to cash in on the system they claim to be rejecting. One may as well try to collect rent from people who watch the sunrise. If that's what Jules Dervaes and his family are up to, it's unethical and immoral.

It may also cost him big time. I have written him an e-mail asking him about these things. If I don't hear back from the "Dervaes Institute" within a week, or if I don't like the answer I do get from them, I will remove all links to "Path to Freedom" from my blogs. I am sure there are many other bloggers who are of the same mind. But if on the other hand, we have all misunderstood the Dervaes family, it may cost some of us - in terms of humiliation, egg on our faces, sheepish apologies, admissions that we misunderstood some really decent people and let ourselves be swayed by rumors blown out of proportion. I really hope that it's the latter. I'll know in a week.

No Wings, But A Prayer

I guess I have an odd, quirky sense of humor. It comes out on occasion during dark and stressful times (like visits to the dentist), or sometimes while writing posts for this blog. Yet we have terrible things to talk about. These days are dark and stressful times for anyone who's paying attention and who cares about the direction our world and our nation are taking. There's a lot of bad news out there.

I am at a crossroads regarding my emotional response to it all (as well as my objective response). Many of the posts I have written deal with adapting to a post-Peak world, an industrial society that is in decline due to the depletion of its resource base. It's easy to be cheered by thinking about various adaptation strategies, to think that while the next several years or decades may be a bit rough, we might come out better off in the end.

Then something like the Deepwater Horizon spill occurs, and we ordinary common folk get to see how incompetent and feckless our leaders in government are in dealing with things like this, and how they seem so unwilling to inconvenience the holders of concentrated wealth and power who make messes like this. The rich seem bent on making as many messes as they can get away with in their pursuit of ever more wealth. There seems to be very little the rest of us can do to stop them. And when I look around, I see too many of my working-class fellows who are sympathetic to the rich. After all, they themselves hope to be rich some day.

Things fall apart. Sometimes it happens all by itself, as systems self-simplify to a more stable configuration. If you're a part of such a system, you can have a hope that the final configuration will leave you in a good place, or at least a decent, survivable place. But what if you're a part of a system whose masters are working as hard as they can to ruin it? A fellow blogger recently wrote a very angry post regarding the things now being ruined in our world – things like the livelihoods, health and ecosystems of the Gulf of Mexico. I have to say that I agree with her anger. What's especially galling is that there are unrepentant Republican politicians pushing for even more oil drilling off the coasts of the United States. In general, it seems that every Republican (or Fox News or Tea-bagger) position can be summed up in demanding the so-called “right” of the rich to maximize their short-term gains by destroying their fellow human beings.

But the Democrats are no better. 2008 was their chance to prove otherwise, and instead of doing so, they gave us Obama. He's a nice guy, genial, relatively young and well-spoken. He is also a Pavlovian symbol designed to fool people concerned about environmental, economic and social justice into believing that they've gotten a real change. The real mission of the Democrats seems to be to pretend to be concerned about the suffering of ordinary people and of the Earth because of the depredations of the rich, while doing absolutely nothing to stop these depredations. So as livelihoods, communities, waters and coastlines are destroyed by the ongoing Gulf oil spill, Obama will jet off to Gulf Coast communities so that TV cameras can capture images of the President stooping down on an oil-stained beach with a look of deep concern on his face. That's about as good as it gets. Here's another wager: I'll bet you that Obama does absolutely nothing about the stupid Arizona “immigration” law. Obama and the Democrats seem to find it more convenient to their cause to climb into the ring and pretend to be knocked out.

In this nation, narcissistic, greedy sociopathy has come out of the closet. This event was not announced as such, but the period from the start of George W. Bush's presidency until now has been one big coming-out party. While sociopaths can be found at every social stratum, I'd wager that they are most heavily concentrated among the very wealthy. Because they now control most of the mainstream media in this country, they have created a mass culture that almost perfectly reflects their values, and they seek to marinate all the rest of us in that culture until we all taste like them. “Greed is good!” “Helping poor people is socialism!” “Me first – regardless of the consequences to anyone else!” “I have a right to be racist!”

Against this backdrop, it gets a bit harder to write about strategies of adaptation to collapse. This week I lost my sense of humor. I hope it comes back. I'm trying to hang on to my optimism, but it's slippery and my hands are sweaty. We may all be as hapless as the passengers and crew of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, which crash-landed in the ocean in 1996 after hijackers forced the plane to fly until it ran out of fuel. Nevertheless, some of those people lived to find out that the flight attendants were telling the truth when they said that seat cushions could be used as flotation devices. Maybe some of us will be so lucky. Therefore I will keep interviewing people who have something to say about our situation and how we can adapt to it. And I will continue to work on my own steps of adaptation as well.

Speaking of which, I wrote several weeks ago that I got another job. I have mixed feelings about this. For one thing, I actually have to do a fair amount of driving on this job, and I don't like it. The Deepwater Horizon accident makes driving feel like such a violation of everything I stand for. But I sometimes wonder about the whole idea of trying to hang on to a “job” in these times. For the most part, hunting for or hanging on to a “job” means clinging desperately to the official economy – even as that economy continues to disintegrate. For those who have “jobs”, times may be good right now – if the jobs pay reasonably well, it is possible to enjoy the present season of relatively low prices for many things and to forget about the root causes of those relatively low prices and the prospect that those root causes might vanish very soon. There are a lot of people who are hurting, to be sure, but there are still a lot of people who have “jobs” and who are driving large, shiny, new SUV's to and from large, shiny, new suburban homes – people who have been lured into huge debts by temporarily favorable conditions. To such people it is inconceivable that they might soon need to start extricating themselves from the official economy.

For me, it is not inconceivable. I can clearly see the writing on the wall, and I've already taken several steps in that direction. But fear keeps me from going further – fear of the unknown, fear that I might look like an idiot before my acquaintances and neighbors, the fear that comes from not exactly knowing what the next steps are or the shape of the thing that will replace the present official economy. “Promise or a dare? I would jump if I knew you'd catch me,” as one songwriter said. Or, as Captain Mancuso said in the Hunt for Red October, “The hard part of playing chicken is knowing when to flinch.”

Good Water From Other Wells

I've been reading some great blog posts lately from some of my fellow writers, thinkers and doers. I thought I'd share them with you all.

First, Stormchild, author of the blog Gale Warnings, has written a good post titled, “Complexity vs. Complication.” It is a look at the dynamics of human systems, where complexity is the result of the connections between various parts of human systems and complication is the result of human “cussedness” or contrariness or indwelling sin. Complex systems can be fixed when they go wrong. Complicated systems can't, because there are people in those systems who don't want a fix. That insight can be applied to many of the large scale societal systems under which we suffer just now.

Jerry, author of SoapBoxTech, has a number of good posts. “SoapBox Thoughts on Arizona” presents intelligent commentary on the recent Arizona immigration law, while “Salvation, For Now” discusses the need for some locales to shift to dryland farming techniques as part of adapting to climate change. As to the viability of modern industrial agriculture, “How Technology Almost Killed Mixed Farming” is a good read. And “Transgenic GMO's Causing Bee Crisis?” discusses how genetically modified crops may be contributing to colony collapse disorder among honeybees.

Speaking of bees, Aimee of New To Farm Life has been writing about her experiences in learning to keep bees. Her latest bee post is “The Bee-Man Speaks”. Aimee and her husband are impressive in that while I might write about doing a thing, she and her husband both do it and find time to write about it. In addition to bees, they also keep goats and chickens (and who knows what else ;) ).

And for those trying out urban homesteading, I want to welcome a new follower of my blog, namely Heidi, author of The Itty Bitty Farm in the City. It's nice to meet another person who is learning to practice preparedness and sustainable living in an urban environment.

City of Portland Fix-It Fair - 30 January 2010, Introduction

I attended a one of the City of Portland's "Fix-It" Fairs today. The Fair was held in East Portland, and consisted of a variety of classes and exhibits hosted by City departments and volunteer groups. The Fix-It Fairs are designed to foster and encourage general neighborhood resilience in the face of disasters or economic distress.

I couldn't attend all the classes I wanted to visit (there were so many, and there was just one of me). However, I was able to get a friend to do audio recordings of some of the classes while I did video interviews and a video recording of a separate class. The classes we covered discussed resources for people with low incomes, rain gutter disconnection to reduce stormwater runoff, eco-roofs for homeowners, food gardening in the Pacific Northwest, and neighborhood preparedness and crime reduction. I also interviewed staff from the Portland Office Of Emergency Management, the Josiah Hill III Clinic, the Portland Master Planning Office, and many others.

I am hoping to soon have the audio and video clips up on the Web, and available for those with sufficient download speeds. (Unfortunately, uploading seems to take forever (and I mean, forever!) with my connection.) I also hope to post transcripts of some of the classes, as time permits. In addition, I will provide a bit of analysis of the material that was presented along with comments regarding applicability to differing communities. Stay tuned...

Preparedness Angst

At work, we have been having a series of “Neighborhood Resilience Brown Bag Lunch Discussions” over the last several months. Our discussions have covered things like bicycle commuting, peak oil, establishing neighborhood connections, and gardening. Now we have switched gears, and we are starting to discuss the book, Where There Is No Doctor. Our next discussion will be on chapter 11, titled, “Nutrition: What To Eat To Be Healthy.”

I picked up a used copy of the book a few weeks ago, and have been thumbing through it, and I have been struck with the realization of just how fragile human life can be, and how horribly things can go wrong at times. It has been a sobering realization, and I have to confess that sometimes it's hard for me to read certain parts of this book. This is the deeply unsettling part of confronting the possibility of the loss of some of the “complex systems we Americans depend on for everyday life” (to borrow a phrase from another blogger), and of confronting the need to learn real self-reliance. As I read some of the things that can go wrong with a human body, and the actions that an aid worker would have to perform to fix these things, I find myself asking, “Am I really up to this?”

At such times, I am reminded of an article I read about an interview with the captain of United Flight 232, who was able to land his plane in a (somewhat) controlled crash after he lost all of his airplane's hydraulic systems. He noted that, “...we were too busy [to be scared]. You must maintain your composure in the airplane or you will die. You learn that from your first day flying.” (Source: United Airlines Flight 232, Wikipedia) It also occurs to me that our high-tech society has made most of us into wimps. We have become so risk-averse that our idea of “safety” has evolved into dependence on experts with fancy equipment who dispense instant cures for everything.

We ordinary people are going to have to develop a new idea of safety and security: not the removal of all risks from life, but the possession of the competence and skills needed to successfully cope with unsafe and insecure situations. As time passes, it will become increasingly apparent that no one else is going to do it for us. I think we will also have to learn to tolerate uncomfortable situations for the long haul, instead of expecting an instant fix. All of this will take practice, just like the thousands of hours of practice and flight time that prepared the captain of United Flight 232 for that flight.