A Survey Of Solar Thermal Power Systems - An Interview

A few weeks ago I promised you an interview. Today I'm pleased to be able to deliver on that promise. I present to you an interview with Dr. Luther Clements, a member of the faculty of the Renewable Energy Engineering Program at the Oregon Institute of Technology. Dr. Clements teaches a course in solar thermal power systems, and my interest in this subject was aroused several months ago by an article I read in No Tech Magazine titled, “The Bright Future of Solar-Powered Factories,” written by Kris de Decker.

The premise of that article was that most of the interest in solar energy was biased heavily toward the generation of electricity, and that the huge potential for direct use of solar heating in manufacturing processes was being overlooked in the United States. The article included a number of references which described the high level of interest in direct use of solar thermal energy in Europe and other parts of the world, along with descriptions of some unexplored avenues for direct use of solar heat in metallurgy.

During my interview, Dr. Clements and I discussed the article and the possibilities which it described, as well as possible reasons for lack of interest in direct use of solar heating for American industries. He touched on the need for sound engineering and design standards for manufacturers of solar thermal systems. Lastly, we discussed the future of engineering in an energy-constrained world characterized by economic contraction. You can listen to the interview directly on this blog, or you can download the audio by clicking here.

Dreaming That We're Poor

This past week, the New York Times ran a front page piece titled, “Bleak Portrait of Poverty is Off the Mark, Experts Say.” It was basically a packaging of “expert” criticisms of a U.S. Census Bureau study titled, “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010.” The study stated that, among other things, the number of Americans living officially below the poverty line grew by 9.7 million between 2006 and 2010. (That figure is found in Table B-1, on page 62 of the report.) The report states that the number of Americans living in poverty has grown to 46.2 million, over four consecutive years of increasing poverty, and that the official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent. There are also now 49.9 million Americans without health insurance coverage.

The experts quoted by the Times (as well as the writers and editors at the Times) object to such a stark depiction of American poverty, saying that it does not take into account the availability of safety net programs for the poor as well as earned income tax credits. According to these talking heads, such things would cause “as much as half of the reported rise in poverty since 2006” to “disappear.” These talking heads grudgingly acknowledge a rise in the numbers of “near poor” people (what does that mean?!), who make too little to live comfortably and make too much to qualify for aid or tax breaks or reduced-cost medical care.

I find such talk to be very far from reality. It seems to me that the nation has become poorer. Social safety nets have been and are being gutted in every state in the Union while the rich continue to concentrate wealth. Access to social safety net programs is dwindling for most Americans. It's easy for so-called experts and their media mouthpieces to redefine “poverty” by fudging numbers. They have no idea what it is to experience life on $18,000 a year. But maybe I'm asleep, dreaming that most of us are poorer. If I just pinched myself hard enough, I'd wake up to find that most of us are rich.

Then again, maybe pinching myself wouldn't work. Maybe those of us who are tired of pinching ourselves should tell our stories to each other, lest the experts convince us that we're all crazy or dreaming. What if we bloggers mounted a campaign to contradict the Times and its talking heads by citing the Census Bureau study and posting our own stories of the poverty we're seeing?

By the way, if you want a copy of that Census Bureau study, you'd better download it fast. According to the Times, on Monday the 7^th of this month, the Census Bureau will publish a “long-promised alternate measure meant to do a better job of fudging the numbers counting the resources the needy have and the bills they have to pay.”

Renewables for Rich People - A Geothermal Hole

(This week, I'd like to give a big welcome to LindaM. She writes the blog hello it's me.)

As part of my present job, I am getting to mingle with people who have relatively deep backgrounds in the various facets of what is commonly called “renewable energy” in the United States nowadays. I am always eager to have my horizons expanded and my thinking challenged, so from time to time I talk with some of these people about their work.

A couple of Fridays ago I got to have coffee (for me it was actually herbal tea) with a geothermal engineer who holds advanced degrees. I was curious about geothermal energy, and was wondering as well about whether pursuing a post-baccalaureate education would actually be worth my time and effort. I learned a number of interesting things about geothermal energy.

First, the word “geothermal” has two common uses in the field of energy engineering. The first use, which more accurately reflects the classical definition, has to do with the energy, generated within the earth via radioactive decay, which is accessible via voids and discontinuities in the earth's crust that allow high-temperature matter to reach the earth's surface. Typically the high-temperature matter consists of steam, hot water, and high-temperature rock. The second use of the word has to do with the use of ground-source heat pumps to exchange heat between the earth (at shallow depths, typically less than 100') and a building which has spaces that must be conditioned (heated or cooled). (My geothermal engineer friend considers the reference of the word “geothermal” to ground-source heat exchange to be somewhat inaccurate.)

High-temperature geothermal energy resources are used for electricity generation and to supply heat for direct heating of spaces and for some industrial processes. My friend told me that in the United States, there is a strong bias toward using geothermal energy for electricity generation, and not nearly as much interest in using geothermal energy for direct heating applications, although there is a growing interest here in direct heat applications. I mentioned an article by Kris de Decker that I had recently read in Low Tech Magazine, in which Mr. de Decker stated that “Most of the talk about renewable energy is aimed at electricity production. However, most of the energy we need is heat...”

We discussed the bias toward electricity generation in the renewable industry in the U.S. and concluded that it must be due to the prejudices of the big economic players here who have sunk large amounts of capital in electric power plants and centralized schemes of electricity distribution. These players are only interested in a renewable source of energy to the extent that it can help them maintain and increase their profits via their current infrastructure and business model. Using a renewable resource for primary delivery of energy in a form other than electricity would undercut previous investments in electricity generation and distribution. (As an aside, my friend pointed out to me that non-electric uses of geothermal energy are very popular in Europe and elsewhere. China, for instance, has no geothermal electric plants, but has many applications of direct geothermal heating.)

We moved on to discuss how geothermal “resources” are discovered and exploited. I was interested in knowing whether the same methodology used for identifying potential oil and gas resources is used for identifying geothermal resources. My friend told me that historically geologists have used somewhat different methods for identifying geothermal resources, and that the oil and gas methodology is not altogether a good fit for identifying geothermal resources, due to the dynamic nature of heat flows within the earth's crust. A good (as in ethical, honest, accurate) geothermal geologist is therefore likely to include a much larger margin of error in his or her assessment of a potential geothermal resource than a petroleum geologist is in assessing a potential petroleum resource.

This puts a geothermal engineer in a bit of a bind, because the only true way to assess a potential geothermal resource is to drill a well, and wells require a lot of money up front. Therefore, venture capitalists and other lenders often demand that a geologist provide an unreasonable degree of certainty in identifying a resource prior to drilling. Of course, any geologist who identifies a resource with such certainty prior to drilling makes himself or herself professionally and financially liable if such an identification proves false. Typically, it is a petroleum industry service firm that drills a geothermal well, since such wells must be deep (at least 300 feet, and typically thousands of feet deep), and such firms normally collect hefty profits.

Although readily accessible geothermal resources in the U.S. are limited in availability, there are some good examples here of geothermal energy use. My friend told me of villages and towns in Alaska that are supplied with geothermal district heating. Also, there is the city of Klamath Falls in Oregon, which provides geothermal district heating to its populace, along with a geothermal heat and electricity plant at a state university campus in Klamath Falls.

One “take-away” point from our conversation is that geothermal energy is expensive due to high up-front capital and infrastructure costs. In a shrinking economy, this means a shrinking likelihood of expanding geothermal energy use. The American bias toward viewing renewable resources solely in terms of electricity generation is likely to have unpleasant consequences because of the age and increasing disrepair of our grid, along with the very high costs of an extensive grid overhaul and the rapidly appearing shortages of capital caused by our economic collapse.

What about ground-source heat exchange, then? We both agreed that it is a useful way to save energy. But here again, the up-front capital and infrastructure costs are high. Landlords and owners of large buildings would be far more likely to be able to afford the micro-tunneling needed to install a large heat exchanger in the ground next to a new building whose interior spaces were to be conditioned via ground-source heat pumps. Small landlords and homeowners would find the installation of ground source heat exchange to be quite “spendy,” to use an Oregonian term. Retrofitting an existing home – especially a home with a conventional joist floor – would be really spendy. (Think $30,000 or thereabouts.) This would be due to having to replace the floor with a concrete slab containing embedded heat exchanger pipes.

My conclusion at the end of our conversation was that exploiting geothermal energy or ground-source heat exchange is probably out of the reach of the vast majority of people in this country because of the high cost involved, and geothermal energy will therefore probably not be part of the toolkit of people looking to create resilient neighborhoods in this present time of energy and economic decline. Most of us will have to adopt low-tech strategies for getting our energy needs met. Geothermal energy has its place, but that place is limited.

And as far as me going back to school? I'll tell you all about that some other time...;)

P.S. Although I am an engineer, I am not a geologist. If any geologists read this, feel free to chip in your educated two cents...

No One For President, Or, Election-Proofing Your Life

(Before I start, I'd like to welcome Meg O'Halloran to my blog. Thanks for your readership! Also, a belated welcome to those who joined last year, including Neil and Naomi Montacre. If you live in the Portland metro area, feel free to check out their store some time.)

I've been thinking about my visit to the #Occupy Portland protests, especially in light of the mainstream media's continued lame coverage of the #Occupy movement in general. While the MSM have not been exactly enthusiastic or even diligent in their coverage of the protests, they have been very enthusiastic in providing coverage of the Republican presidential campaign. This is interesting in that it shows the rapidly widening rift between the MSM and the ordinary people of the United States.

One message that came through loud and clear in my interviews with the #Occupy Portland protesters is that increasingly, most Americans do not believe that either main political party serves the interests of the common people. Increasingly, people are coming to believe that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are actually interested in providing solutions or adaptive responses to the problems and predicaments facing ordinary Americans in this time of economic decline and contraction. An increasing number of Americans is waking up to the realization that the entire electoral and political process has been bought by the rich in order to serve the rich at the expense of all the rest of us. And more and more Americans are realizing that the story they are being fed by the mainstream media bears no resemblance to reality – especially the reality lived daily by ordinary people of small means.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is pushing stories about Texas Governor Rick Perry's proposed policies for America while Herman Cain chews up the airwaves with controversial and schizophrenic statements. (If ever there was a man suffering from a massive case of Stockholm syndrome, Herman Cain fits the bill. He's at least as bad as Clarence Thomas.) And AOL News recently ran a piece advising its readers which Republican presidential candidate would be best for their wallets. At least Sarah Palin has experienced a rare moment of decency and has decided not to run for president.

Increasingly, the Republicans remind me of a line from a Warren Zevon song, Werewolves of London: “You better stay away from him. He'll rip your lungs out, Jim...” And the Democrats? They are being paid by the werewolves to do nothing while the rest of us get eaten. In fact, I can see a few well-developed canine teeth in the mouths of many Democrat politicians. As for third parties in the United States, most of them also seem to be insane and more than a little bit feral.

Maybe we ordinary people should send an election year message of our own to whoever might be listening. I propose a campaign consisting of homemade bumper stickers (for those who drive) or bicycle helmet stickers (for those who pedal). Let the stickers read, NO ONE FOR PRESIDENT. I also propose that ordinary working-class people devise means for election-proofing their lives. This means finding strategies that will enable you to live in some measure of dignity without danger to your lungs or any other body parts, no matter which werewolf gets elected in 2012.

P.S. I will have a couple of more technical posts in the next few weeks, including (hopefully) an interview.

The Death Of The Central Valley

I will begin this post by amending my policy for comments on this blog. In the sidebar on the right, I originally wrote, “A Word On Comments: Comments are always welcome. I am flattered by those who read, and gratified by those who comment (even though we may disagree). I only ask that comments be 'family-friendly' – clean language, if you get my drift.”

That part of my comment policy still stands. However, I am now adding a new condition, namely, that anyone who wants to post a comment on this blog must do so via a valid OpenID. I will no longer be accepting anonymous comments. Why the change? Because of anonymous comments supportive of certain economic interests which were submitted for my posts, “The Chicken That Laid Leaden Eggs, And Other Horror Stories,” and “The 'Congress Created Dust Bowl'.”

But here's a paradox: today I am violating my own comment policy – just a little bit, and only this once. This past April, an anonymous commenter submitted two very hostile comments on the “Congress Created Dust Bowl” post. (I am just now getting around to addressing this person's comments. In April I was up to my neck in teaching and my office job.) Despite the hostility, I found the comments highly entertaining. (In another setting, they would have been downright funny, although the commenter was not trying to be humorous.) In many ways these comments are typical of the mindset of the “conservative,” jingoistic, materialist, supremacist, anti-intellectual element in modern-day America, even to the emotive name-calling, bad grammar and misspelling of simple words. The commenter also accuses me of allowing only comments with which I agree. Today, I have proven him wrong. If you want to read what he wrote, check out “The 'Congress Created Dust Bowl'” post. (And yes, Mr. Anonymous, whoever you are, I no longer live in California.)

Now I'd like to give a response to this person's comments, a response which will shed a rather different light on the challenges facing Central Valley agriculture. Hopefully this response will also shed further light on the fallacy of promoting unrestrained resource use of any kind in pursuit of economic growth. The truth is that in so many ways, our society has hit the wall.

My anonymous reader starts by saying, “The Central Valley produces 8% of the Nations (sic) ag on 1% of the total ag land in the country. Reservoirs made it possible to farm and feed you, yes feed you...When the state regulates your water use, and doesnt (sic) let you WATER YOUR CROPS its called, its a top down regulation. THUS CONGRESS CREATED...” He drives home his point by concluding, “IF THE STATE REGULATES YOUR WATER AND DOESNT (sic) LET YOU USE (sic) TO THE POINT THAT YOUR CROPS DIE AND YOU CANT (sic) FEED YOUR FAMILY! ITS CONGRESS CREATED!!!” (Emphasis in original.)

To provide some background to this man's rant, over the last few years the United States Federal government and certain California state agencies have imposed water use restrictions on Central Valley farmers in order to protect Central Valley groundwater supplies and to prevent ecological damage resulting from the over-exploitation of the Sacramento River. In response to these restrictions, a number of wealthy agribusinesses mounted a protest campaign whose most visible manifestation was the installation along Interstate 5 of hundreds of yellow signs with red letters reading “Congress Created Dust Bowl,” “Stop the Congress Created Dust Bowl,” and the names, Boxer, Costa and Pelosi (politicians who were being targeted by farmers for removal from office for helping to “create” the supposed “dust bowl”).

Here we have a very typical fight between a group of people who want to pursue economic growth at all costs, regardless of the collateral damage, and a group of people who acknowledge the very real limits to economic growth caused by limits on resources and the magnitude of the damage resulting from over-exploitation of those resources. Those who worship growth above all else demonize those who acknowledge limits and warn against trying to breach those limits. Those who see limits to growth in the Central Valley are branded as “Socialists!!!” and “LA liberals!!!” as my anonymous commenter called me.

But what if the pro-growth agribusinessmen got their way? I'd like to suggest that they would soon hit the wall anyway. In the Central Valley, that would mean the demise of large-scale agriculture, sooner rather than later – even if farmers were allowed to take as much water as they possibly could from available supplies. For intensive irrigated agriculture on a large scale carries the seeds of its own destruction.

The problem is the salting up of irrigated soils. This is a contributing factor to desertification – the result of farming too intensively, extracting resources too rapidly from the soils in a region, especially an arid or semiarid region, so that the land is not allowed time for natural processes to recharge and replenish it. (Desertification resulting from improper agriculture has caused a few ancient civilizations to fail, by the way.)

I will try to summarize the process by which soils become salted. Salts of various kinds are present in all soils, as well as in most naturally occurring bodies of water. However, salt accumulation in soils is usually the result of human activity. When water from lakes or rivers is used to irrigate lands used for agriculture, the salt in the irrigation water mingles with the salt in the naturally occurring groundwater. This is not a problem if the land has good drainage and if the amount of irrigation is relatively small. However, if the amount of irrigation is large or the land has poor drainage, there are a number of negative effects:

• Plants used as crops take up the irrigation water through transpiration, leaving dissolved salts behind in the soil.

• As large volumes of crops are grown in the same plot of irrigated land, the concentration of salt remaining in the soil increases.

• As land with poor drainage is intensively irrigated, a second mechanism increases the concentration of salts in the soil, namely, evaporation of water from flooded ground, leaving dissolved salts behind. This causes the naturally occurring groundwater to become increasingly saline as well.

The result of these effects is the buildup of soil salt concentrations to a level that prevents plants from growing. Then the field becomes unusable for agriculture. In extreme cases, the field can become barren.

This process is happening to the California Central Valley. It is happening because of the expansion of intensive irrigated agriculture. Many recent studies have been published which document this process. A study published by the University of California, Davis, in 2009 predicts that “...if salinity increases at the current rate until 2030, the direct annual costs will range from $1 billion to $1.5 billion...The production of goods and services in California could be reduced from $5 billion to $8.7 billion a year...the increase in salinity by 2030 could cost the Central Valley economy 27,000 to 53,000 jobs...” In short, Central Valley intensive irrigated agriculture, done intensively in order to maximize profit growth, is on the verge of serious trouble – even if Central Valley farmers get all the water they can get their hands on. The more water they get, the sooner they will all be in intractable trouble.

The problem of soil salinization and desertification is by no means limited to the California Central Valley. It is a worldwide symptom of modern industrial agriculture. In many places, man-made climate change will only make the problem worse. Smart people should begin thinking of alternative ways of getting their food.

References:

1. “Excessive Irrigation Promotes Desertification,” Willem Van Cotthem, 23 June 2008.

2. “The Economic Impacts of Central Valley Salinity,” University of California Davis, 16 March 2009.

3. “More With Less: Agricultural Conservation and Efficiency in California,” Pacific Institute, 2008.

4. “Dryland Agriculture, Irrigation, And Salinity,” University of Florida.

5. “Sustainability of Irrigated Agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley, California,” University of California, Davis; Los Alamos National Laboratory; Hydrogeologic, Inc, 25 October 2005.

6. “Irrigation Salinity – Causes and Impacts,” Cynthia Podmore, Advisory Officer, Natural Resource Advisory Services, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia, 2009.

7. “Salinity In The Landscape,” Geotimes, Pichu Rengasamy, March 2008.

Antibiotics Versus Natural Immunity - A Metaphor

I apologize for my lack of posting lately. Summer school ended five weeks ago and I spent most of the ensuing break catching up on things around my house. Not only did I not give much thought to blogging, but I also did not pay much attention to news from the larger world.

Thus I didn't hear about this week's big financial sell-off until Saturday, during a conversation with a friend. I guess several key global stock markets lost a significant portion of their notional value over the last several days. This friend brought up the subject as part of his discussion on the topic of collapse – a topic that I had first introduced to him over two years ago. This past Saturday, he related to me the strategies he considered to be important in preparing for collapse, including such things as stocking up on bicycles and bicycle parts, owning a gun and converting one's cash to gold.

I say “Amen” to the bicycles and bicycle parts. When we got to guns, I started to choke a little. He told me about how useful guns would be for self-defense and how ammunition was in short supply for a while after Obama was elected, and all I could think of in response was a mental picture of a nation of antisocial red necks each one of whom is convinced that all their neighbors are zombies. (I'm not knocking on my friend here, but rather the deluded doofuses who went out and bought all that ammo.)

I was also reminded of something Dimitry Orlov has said a few times over the last year or so, namely, that in much of the United States, social and cultural collapse have already happened. (If you want to know what that means, look up his “Five Stages of Collapse.”) Social collapse removes those volunteer associations and groups which provide mutual aid to people outside the immediate nuclear family unit. Cultural collapse goes further and reduces even members of the same family to people at war with each other.

Don't trust in a neighbor. Don't put confidence in a friend. With the woman lying in your embrace, be careful of the words of your mouth!

For the son dishonors the father, the daughter rises up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; a man's enemies are the men of his own house.

(Micah 7:5-6, World English Bible)

It's easy to see how, in such a scenario, people would be tempted to rely on guns and other instruments of mayhem as sources of security. But this to me is like people whose friendly intestinal bacteria and other flora have been wiped out because of living in our toxic industrial society, and who consequently get sick quite often, with the result that they rely on doctors and medicine as sources of security. Wouldn't it be better to rebuild natural immunity by re-establishing a healthy ecosystem in your body?

P.S. School break is almost over. I will try to post a bit more regularly. We'll see how it works.

A Kick In Kipling's Teeth

You know, I have to admit that I've been a bit in the dark regarding world news lately. I've been backed up with a mountain of papers to grade, although that will shortly end. So I might be forgiven for not knowing until today that there have been riots in “Great” Britain.

The riots were caused by the same sort of thing that often causes riots in the U.S.: London police thugs shot an unarmed black man and tried to say that it was because he was carrying a weapon that he fired at them. Their case looks like it's unraveling (the bullet that the man allegedly fired was proven to be from a police gun). People – disaffected, oppressed, persecuted, marginalized black people got angry. Now parts of England are on fire.

A few observations are in order. First, the British police have a long history of racist treatment of ethnic minorities. They're also building an impressive history of oppressing their own people, as the death of Ian Tomlinson shows. The British police are the servants of the British elite class in their subjugation and exploitation of the entire country.

Secondly, in the case of the present riots, the British press has uniformly supported this subjugation and exploitation. This has been somewhat true even of the Guardian and the Independent, which earlier helped blow the whistle on the police brutality surrounding Ian Tomlinson's death and the police harassment of nonviolent protest groups. Seems that maybe these newspapers aren't so “progressive” after all. The British press has almost without exception portrayed the riots as the acts of crazed, criminal youth disconnected from “civilization.” Very little effort has been expended in trying to explain why youth from certain ethnic backgrounds might be angry at constant discrimination and harassment while living in a society which has the lowest level of social mobility in the “developed” world.

However, the causes underlying the riots have somehow managed to leak out to the larger world. With just a few mouse clicks I learned today that in the weeks preceding the riots, there had been a very large peaceful protest march by London's black community to protest the death of a British reggae singer under suspicious circumstances during a search of the singer's home by police. That march was not reported by British media. But people are finding out about it now. Also, England has experienced more than a few riots over the last two decades.

Third, the entrenched holders of concentrated wealth and power in Britain have not been willing to admit the role their policies played in the eruption of the riots. Instead, they have mixed stern-faced “law and order” threats with appeals to British “civility.” The tactic is not working, because the people on whom it is supposed to work are people whose future has been taken away and who thus have nothing left to lose. This is an illustration of a point I made in my blog post, “The (Worldwide?) Peak Of Human Resources”: “...it stands to reason that there is a limit to the maximal sustainable rate of exploitation of human beings...Breaching this limit would cause the breakdown of an industrial society even if that society was well-supplied with all other production inputs. Moreover, there would be increasingly severe symptoms of breakdown as the society was driven further and further beyond sustainable rates of exploitation of its members. Finally, it would not be surprising to see the elites at the head of such a society rationalize and refuse to acknowledge the true meaning of these signs and symptoms.”

Maybe we're beginning to see the breakdown of England. The funny thing is that although the breakdown may well be starting with the black community, there are plenty of other places where it could have started just as well. It is true that much of the history of England has been a history of thuggish exploitation of other peoples, other lands, other cultures, in order to secure an elevated standard of living for Anglo people. (Indeed, there is so much blood on the hands of the British nation that one wonders how they can call themselves “civilized.”)

But now the exponential growth of the appetites of the British elite has resulted in the transformation of almost all the rest of the nation into an underclass – including many, many Anglos, and many youth from every background. Income inequality in Britain is at an all-time high. The Tories have only made it worse. It's not just black youth rioting in England now.

This brings up something else. Some Britons, and some U.S. citizens observing the British riots, might be tempted to retreat into the imagined safety of racism, saying that the people who are being oppressed somehow “deserve” to be oppressed. But it's important to note that societies which create underclasses always need an underclass in order to function. There will always be an underclass in such societies, even if the members of the original underclass are wiped out. Once again, the history of England bears this out. A survey of writings from authors such as Charles Darwin, G.K. Chesterton and Rudyard Kipling shows how, even in the absence of ethnic minorities from outside Europe, the British ruling classes sought to define themselves as the only truly human and “civilized” people. They despised anyone who was outside their circle, including the Welsh, the Irish, the Scots, the French, the Germans, the Poles, the Jews, the Italians, the Greeks, and the Russians. Even within England, they had their gradations of British “whiteness,” with disparagement and discrimination against Cockneys, Midland English, and others whose blood was not sufficiently blue. Amazing to think that these people all looked more or less like each other, yet they found the smallest of excuses for choosing off and fighting each other.

That is why I said in my post, The Polyculture of Resilient Neighborhoods, that the most resilient neighborhoods in the United States will turn out to be composed of a number of heterogeneous cultures whose members maintain certain key cultural distinctions while learning from members of differing cultures. The members of the component cultures of such neighborhoods will engage in reaching out to members of differing cultures within their neighborhoods, forming a common, somewhat weakly binding meta-culture of common courtesy and customs within which the component cultures exist as distinct entities. Within the over-arching meta-culture, there will be opportunities for cross-pollination between the members of the component cultures, with results that are hopefully beneficial to all. On the other hand, neighborhoods (and larger entities such as cities, counties and states) which are predominantly monocultural will probably tend to be less resilient.

A polycultural (or multicultural) neighborhood, region or nation that functions along these lines will tend to be a more pleasant place to live, because its members will be treated with mutual respect. It will also be more stable. (Singapore comes to mind as an example.) On the other hand, a neighborhood, region or nation that attempts to create ethnic underclasses dominated by a ruling majority will be a dangerous place to live, even for those who are in the majority. For if, over time, the members of the original underclasses are removed from such a society, the masters of that society will seek to create a new underclass from some of the remaining members of society. It will be like a game of musical chairs where the chairs keep getting taken away until almost no one has any place to sit down. The only person who wins such a game is the person who owns the chairs.