An Adaptor's Reading List

Over the last year I've picked up enough reading material to choke a horse. I guess my New Year's resolution will be to schedule enough time to read it all. Most of it serves the very useful purpose of equipping readers to adapt to the present and ongoing collapse of the Western industrial economy. (However, none of it is about how to reload your own ammo, where to find the best site for a bunker, buying gold, or the best brand of baked beans to stockpile in a mountain hideaway.) Some of it is in hard copy and some of it I downloaded for free from the Web. Here's a short list of some titles that stick out immediately:

The Humanure Handbook, Joseph Jenkins, Jenkins Publishing, 2005. This is a good book for learning why our present industrial Western system of human waste management is unsustainable, how this system is contributing to impending worldwide shortages of fresh water, and what individuals can do about it. I got a paperback copy for myself and I am about halfway through it. I also downloaded a free PDF copy from Joseph Jenkins' website.

Decentralised Composting for Cities of Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Users' Manual, Eawag/Sandec and Waste Concern, 2006. This publication is available as a free PDF download from the Eawag webpage “Department Water and Sanitation in Developing Countries,” along with a number of other publications. I just started this one. (I'm up to page ten.) While I like Joseph Jenkins' approach to humanure composting, I am always impressed with the potential of ordinary humans to foul something up. The problem is not in Jenkins' method, but in the incompetence of some people I know (who might also say the same thing about me ;) ).The Eawag/Sandec publication seems to be a good way to insure that the composting process is put into trained and competent hands, even at the neighborhood level.

Where There Is No Doctor, David Werner, Hesperian Foundation, 1992. I downloaded this one for free from the Hesperian website as well as picking up a used paperback copy from a bookstore. We've been going through Chapter 11 of this book at work, during my “Neighborhood Resilience Brown Bag Lunches.” My paperback copy has a slightly musty smell, as if it spent a lot of time in someone's backpack in the tropics. Nothing like having something well broken in by the time you get to use it! I also downloaded a PDF chapter out of Where There Is No Dentist.

The Barefoot Architect, Johan van Lengen, Shelter Publications, 2008. I ordered a paperback copy of this book from Hesperian. I was surprised by how thick it is. So far I've barely had time to scratch the surface of the book. But to get some idea of how useful it actually is, I brought it in to work recently and gave it to an architect friend of mine to check out. (I also wrote my name all over it, just to make sure I get it back ;) )He and his colleagues seemed quite impressed. Looks like it's a keeper.

Setting Up Community Health Programmes, Ted Lankester, Hesperian Foundation, 2009. I ordered a paperback copy. This one was also surprisingly thick. I've only had time to lightly peruse it. I saw one rather unnerving section on setting up private health insurance plans in developing countries. I didn't have time to really dig in and see what Mr. Lankester was advocating, so I am holding off judgment on that section for now.

All of these books present simple, low-cost solutions and methods for individuals and communities to meet basic needs for sanitation, shelter and health. These books definitely strive to avoid high-cost, technologically complex, energy-intensive methodologies. They are suitable for poorer people in the Third World. And I suspect that as the glamor and notional wealth evaporates from the societies of the First World, we will see how applicable these resources are to us as well. Already I believe there are municipalities in the U.S. which can no longer afford complex wastewater treatment, or which are facing rate increases due to privatization of wastewater treatment. (See America's clean water systems and “State's wastewater treatment facilities have problems on tap due to declining revenue” for instance.) As I read these books and resources, I may dedicate a post to a more detailed review of each publication.

If anyone has other books or resources they'd like to recommend (or further comments on the books I have listed), feel free to send me a comment. Next week, I hope to have a useful and interesting interview for you all. I also have a new series of articles in the works. Thanks for reading and have a good week!

False Flag Football?

This blog is, among other things, supposed to be a diary. This post is part diary, part commentary on recent events.

A number of writers have asserted that the recent attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound jetliner by a Nigerian man was a “false flag operation,” that is, an operation executed by agents of the U.S. government posing as agents of another country or of an organization in another country, in order to arouse public opinion in support of military action against another country. Immediately some will see this accusation and start saying “Tinfoil hat!” and “Conspiracy nuts!” But those who make the “false flag” accusation have some good points: first, the bumbling incompetency of the so-called “terrorist”; second, the fact that he immediately announced that he was from Al-Qaeda; and thirdly, the implausible string of breakdowns in security that allowed the man to board the jetliner in the first place.

Also in the news are recent allegations by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency that “rebels in Colombia have forged an 'unholy' drug alliance‎” with Al-Qaeda in order to smuggle drugs to the U.S. from Colombia via Venezuela and west Africa. According to the DEA, fiberglass submarines are being loaded with drugs and launched from Venezuela to travel to West Africa, where their cargoes are smuggled by Al-Qaeda to the U.S. This accusation has generated a counter-accusation from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez that the United States is engaging in false flag operations against his country in order to justify destabilizing it.

Whether you believe the accusations regarding false flags or not, one thing is sure. An increasing number of observers of events are becoming increasingly skeptical of the motives and pronouncements of the U.S. Government and of the mainstream media who are its mouthpiece. Our problem is that we've been spectacularly lied to before, and no one in power has really, truly come clean about the truth. We therefore look to places declared “trouble spots” by the government and the media, and we start asking, “What natural resources or geopolitical advantage is the government really trying to get in those places?” Color us cynical, but then again, once a man's wife has caught him cheating on her, it gets very hard for him to convince her afterward that he's home late because he had to work overtime.

More Commentary On The Nigerian “Terrorist”:

• “Why Wasn't Nigerian Subjected to Full Body Search? | Tikun Olam”

• “Is the Detroit Nigerian "Terrorist" A Patsy?”

• “Nigerian terrorist helps introducing Patriot Act 3.0 - Madsen – RT”

• “Questions mount over attempt to bomb Detroit-bound jetliner”

Iraq: A Good Heist?

A couple of weeks ago I read a bit of the December edition of the Oilwatch Monthly, an oil production newsletter published by Rembrandt Koppelaar, President of ASPO Netherlands. (You can get a PDF download here: “Oilwatch Monthly December 2009”; click on the link I have provided, then click on the link that says, “November 2009 – 1.24 MB – 33 pagina's” in the target page.) I came across a very curious statement under the discussion titled, “The Importance of Iraqi Oil Production,” which I quote as follows:

“European, Russian and Chinese oil companies including Shell, Lukoil, CNPC and BP are having a field day winning auctions to develop big Iraqi oil fields. Shell and Petronas have obtained the right to develop Majnoon with 7 billion barrels of reserves, Lukoil and Statoil the West Qurna 2 field which in total holds 9.75 billion barrels, and Total and Petronas the Halfaya field with 0.5 billion barrels. The only US company that secured a deal is ExxonMobil over the development of West Qurna 1, quite a disappointment given the amount of money the US has invested in Iraq through the Iraqi war...

“As demand is the driver of oil markets, and a continued shrinkage of the economy under a W or L shaped recession is more likely, the development of Iraqi oil is even more important due to its low cost structure. The costs to develop these fields are in the order of 10 to 20 dollars per barrel excluding war subsidies already incurred. Low cost Iraqi oil that ‘floods’ the market bringing oil prices down as supply vastly outmatches demand can give a huge boom to the economy. Albeit temporarily for only about five year as continued declines will eventually outweigh increases, it can create the breathing space to make some swift decisions to add resilience to national economies. In that sense the Iraqi war may not have been fruitless but create a boon for the global economy...”

Note the last sentence: “...the Iraqi war may not have been fruitless but create a boon for the global economy...” Frankly, I choked on this statement. I'd like to present a rather different view of things in today's post.

First, a minor unrelated criticism. For over a year I have been less enthusiastic about accepting the production figures in the Oilwatch Monthly, not because I think Mr. Koppelaar is not competent, but because those figures are based on figures published by the International Energy Agency. Since the middle of 2008, I have suspected the IEA of cooking the books a little to hide the reality of global oil production declines. I still think that 2005 was the year of maximum global oil production.

Secondly, a technical criticism of stated Iraqi reserves. It is common knowledge that many OPEC nations grossly inflated their proven and probable reserve numbers in the 1980's in order to boost their production quotas. Thus Iraq went from declared reserves of 30 billion barrels in 1980 to 100 billion barrels in 1987. (Source: “Oil reserves,” Wikipedia). Lately a figure of 115 billion barrels has been tossed around. It is very possible that such high numbers are a mere fiction.

In making these minor criticisms, I freely admit that I'm not a petroleum geologist or oil industry expert, but an average ordinary guy trying to make sense of things. I'm sure the experts know much more that I do. But on to my third criticism, which has to do with morality. Here I think I can speak with more confidence. The Iraq invasion was not “worth it” from a moral standpoint. Here are my reasons for saying so.

1. All of the “terrorism” and “weapons of mass destruction” excuses for the war have turned out to be false. It has been conclusively proven again and again that both the American and British governments fabricated evidence of Iraqi involvement in terrorism and continued Iraqi attempts to build WMD's, in order to build a case for invading Iraq. (Anyone want a little “yellowcake” to go with your coffee while you're reading this?) Further, no weapons of mass destruction were found after the invasion. None.

2. There are no moral justifications for attacking a country that was not planning or preparing to attack us. Some have attempted to justify the invasion on grounds other than American access to Mideast oil, but these justifications hold no water and are often mere attempts to deflect attention from the real reason for the invasion. I think in particular of how one prominent writer has stated that America invaded Iraq in order to “modify and influence the behavior” of other Arab powers in the region, in addition to sending a message to the Arab world in response to 9/11.

To me, this justification is unrighteous. So, Iraq and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with terrorism, Al-Qaida or the events of September 11^th, yet we destroyed that country in order to send a message to the rest of the Arab world? How would you like to be punished for a crime committed by someone else? Does that seem fair? Two wrongs do not make a right.

3. I agree with Rembrandt that it is obvious that the Iraq war was all about oil – specifically American access to Iraqi oil (and anything else of value that belonged to the Iraqis). Abundant proof of that is seen in the actions of Lewis Paul Bremer, the governor of Iraq appointed by President Bush in the aftermath of the American invasion. We went to Iraq in order to jack that country – all so that well-fed Americans could continue to drive outlandish, super-sized vehicles wherever they want, as fast as they want.

4. In the process of jacking Iraqi oil, we killed a lot of people. In considering this, some will think only of the American soldiers who died. That's typical of American self-centeredness. But how about all the Iraqis who died? (By some counts, this figure is over one million.) It just hit the news that a Federal judge recently dismissed all charges against five Blackwater operatives who massacred seventeen unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007.

5. Having stolen our way to Iraqi oil, we have not used our access to that resource in order to buy time for an orderly transition to more sustainable societal arrangements. Instead, we have done our best to keep industrial expansion and the concentration of wealth in rich hands going as smoothly as possible. We are indeed like a heroin junkie who, having just murdered and robbed a victim, is using the money not for rehab, nor even for methadone, but for another fix.

These are difficult times, and we will have to work together to insure that resources are allocated fairly to all the world's people. In times like these, it is dangerous to lose one's moral compass, and even more dangerous to decide that one does not need a moral compass.

The Power Of Aspirational Propaganda

Every child had a pretty good shot

to get at least as far as their old man got;

Something happened on the way to that place;

They threw an American flag in our face

– Billy Joel, Allentown

I picked up a copy of the Portland Tribune today on the way home from work, as I walked to one of the MAX stations. It had a number of articles that interested me, but it also had a few letters that frankly brought me up short. Most of the writers were complaining against the city government's plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Some of their sharpest criticisms were leveled at proposals that seemed to be actually quite innocuous at worst, and frankly beneficial at best. Take things like adding sidewalks to streets that lack them, or making routes to schools safer (as in freer from motor vehicle hazards) for children who walk or ride their bikes to school, or making bicycle commuting safer for everyone. These didn't seem to be particularly evil proposals to me; yet some who wrote letters seemed to view these as part of a radical leftist plot to push government control onto every aspect of our lives.

The letter that really made my jaw drop was not about the proposed climate action plan. It was instead a letter asserting that the hardships endured by the early Pilgrim settlers in North America were due to socialism, because the pilgrims shared their resources. The writer states, “Lesson: Capitalism works, Socialism doesn't.” I had no idea that the early Pilgrims were so leftist. The writer's real aim, of course, was to justify selfishness. (The truth, at least as far as the pilgrims' first winter in North America, is that their hardship was due to cold weather, scurvy, lack of provisions caused by arrival late in the year, and the sickness that resulted from all of these. Later, they did in fact switch from collective farming to individual farms, and their harvests increased as a result. But that in itself is a commentary on fallen human nature.)

The justification of selfishness is not entirely surprising, yet there are aspects of it that mystify me to this day – even after all the “teaching moments” which have hit our country upside the head over the last two years. For the thing that puzzles me is the fact that so many Americans still embrace this justification, this ideology of selfishness, even though they are being burned by it.

I want to make it clear that I don't see anything wrong with private property (within limits!) or a person working to support himself and provide for his own needs. The Good Book commands honest labor so that we may meet our own needs and have something left over for charity. It also says, “If a man will not work, neither let him eat.” But the idea that all sharing of resources is a bad thing is unbalanced, as is the idea that the only way to build a prosperous society is by appealing to the selfishness of its members. Societies that live by such a philosophy are ruthless and have no safety nets; thus when any of their members fall honestly and unavoidably into trouble, their fellows tend to brush their hands, shrug their shoulders and say, “Oh, well!”

Our problem in the USA is that we don't share well. Many of us tend to look with suspicion even on voluntary sharing arrangements practiced by others, even when no one is forcing outsiders into these arrangements. One example: several months ago, a community group was trying to install a community garden in East Portland, on land that was vacant. This would have been a valuable asset for working-class people near the garden plot, who could have cut down on their food expenses and gained experience in growing healthy food for themselves. But the proposed garden aroused opposition from a group of neighbors who feared that the users of the garden plot would be dope-smoking hoodlums. The neighbors even said things like, “These people shouldn't be growing vegetables during the daytime. They should quit being lazy and get a job so they can buy their vegetables at the store!”

Why do we not share well? Why do we look with suspicion on those who do? And why are so many of us trying to take apart what safety nets we do have, especially those safety nets provided by the government? I think it has to do with the myth of the American dream – namely, that anyone can get rich if he just works hard enough or gets lucky – and the reinforcement of that myth by American mass culture. For instance, there's a billboard in downtown Portland – I don't remember exactly where just now – with an ad from a cell phone company containing the caption, “Teach Your Children Not To Share.”

But it goes deeper than that. Yesterday, we had a surprise snowstorm that kept most of us from getting home from work until quite late. I was on a bus next to a grocery store. We were waiting for TriMet to come out and put chains on the bus. While we waited, a young woman dashed in to the store (twice!) to buy some sort of scratcher Bingo lottery game. It cost her three dollars each time, and she won only three dollars each time, so I guess it was a wash. But who knows, she might have struck it rich if only she had bought the right tickets. Then there's the lottery pool in my office, and the people who each hope that the day the tickets are bought will turn out to be the last day they have to show up for work. And there are the TV game shows like “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”, which reinforce the idea that with the right luck, some of us might have a shot at getting rich overnight (without having to work for it).

Of course, since any of us might potentially become a millionaire overnight through a stroke of luck, we must jealously guard the prerogatives of the rich, lest our own enjoyment of wealth be spoiled by the limiting of those prerogatives. At least, that's the propaganda pushed on us by the rich, who use all the media tools at their disposal to tell us how evil corporate taxes are (witness the large, expensive signs saying “Vote NO on Job-Killing Taxes!” in Oregon), how any government programs to help the poor are nothing more than “socialism!!!”, and how any restrictions on the use or means of amassing private property are totalitarianism.

This propaganda is so effective that many ordinary Americans are willing to vote against their own interests and to believe things that are against their own interests in order to preserve a supposed “right” to have no limitation or obligation imposed on their wealth should they ever strike it rich. So we have a society in which 20 percent of the American population controls 85 percent of America's wealth, and 80 percent of the population controls only 15 percent of the wealth – yet many of those in the 80 percent listen to Rush Limbaugh, and watch Glenn Beck, and voted for McCain and Palin, and oppose "socialized" medicine, and disbelieve in anthropogenic climate change because protecting the environment is “socialist.” Many of these people are sure that they or one of their relatives will be the next “American Idol,” or that if they invest just right, they will strike it rich, or that the next Lotto ticket will be the winning one, and that once that happens, it will be a sweet ride. We wouldn't want any moral obligation to our fellow man to spoil the ride, would we?

Most of us have no more chance of becoming rich than gasoline has of surviving the Last Judgment unburnt. Yet by wanting to be rich, and by indulging our fantasies of being rich, we continue to enable the selfishness of the rich. That selfishness is killing the rest of us.

Note: the figure on 80 percent of the population owning only 15 percent of the wealth comes from The New Elite: Inside The Minds Of The Truly Wealthy, by Jim Taylor, Doug Harrison, Stephen Kraus, copyright 2009, Harrison Group.

Christmas 2009 - Notes From The Road

I just got back from visiting family in So. Cal. The trip was an interesting experience, but then again, it always is. It's amazing what a guy notices when he moves away from a place and only returns for occasional visits. This time, I dropped by a former neighbor who lives in a house almost directly across the street from where I used to live. We got to talking about people we both knew, while a couple of his grandchildren showed me their new puppies and their Christmas presents.

He told me about another neighbor who sold his house a few months ago, for a bit over $250K. The man was forced to sell his house because of the lifestyle he had lived during the good years of the Southern California real estate boom. He had added a couple of rooms on to what was originally a Korean War vintage, two bed, one bath house in a working-class neighborhood, and had decked out the interior with genuine tile floors, granite countertops and the works. He had also bought an RV, two all-terrain tricycles, an SUV, and a boat in addition to his work truck. He paid for it all by refinancing his home loan with an adjustable-rate mortgage. He ended up owing a few hundred thousand more than he paid for the house when he bought it. When the mortgage reset, he could no longer afford the monthly payment. Even though he was able to sell his house and relocate, he is still massively in debt.

Of course, I had known that our present economic collapse would be hard on many Americans who had made foolish choices because they were seduced by wanting to live rich. But my friend began to tell me about his own situation, a situation of unavoidable hardship caused by economic contraction. My friend is originally from Mexico, and does not have a college education. He does, however, have a great deal of common sense, and he has chosen to live within his means. He too has a two-bed, one-bath Korean War vintage house, and he is paying only the original mortgage he received when he first bought his house. But his employer is slowing down and may close the place where he works. If that happens, he too will be forced to move.

This was sad news to hear. But it did provoke a discussion of true wisdom in these times, and the art of living happily without a lot of money. It also showed how sharp my neighbor is. As I said, he is originally from Mexico, and did not go to college. His English is not that good. (My Spanish is much worse, believe me!) Yet when, over two years ago, I put my house up for sale, I remember him coming by and asking why I was moving, and I explained to him all that I was then finding out about Peak Oil and the fragile state of the American economy. He got it. Every word. This is much better than I can say of many college-educated Americans I have talked with over the last two years, men and women who refuse to examine the back story behind the illusion of wealth in which we all have lived for the last few decades, and who refuse to believe that it's all about to end. My friend, on the other hand, is a clear-eyed realist. He still gets it.

For this trip, I drove down and back, as usual. (I no longer entirely trust flying.) I noticed that a lot of rest stops in California are now closed. Also, there didn't seem to be as many Highway Patrol cars as usual. I am sure that this is due to California's budget “crisis.” But these things got me thinking on the return trip, as I was driving north past Bakersfield and before Sacramento. On that particular stretch, I was listening to a podcast I had downloaded of a presentation given by a man named James Howard Kunstler to the Commonwealth Club of California in March 2007. (For those who have heard that podcast, it's the one where at the end, Kunstler doesn't realize that he's still being recorded and he asks the chairman of the club, “Where's my mug?” Maybe they give commemorative mugs to their guest speakers.)

Mr. Kunstler had stated in his talk that social systems organized on a giant scale would get in trouble in an era of economic contraction. Those closed rest stops were just one sign of the trouble that California is in. But those closed rest stops made me ask what the citizens of California were actually getting in return for their tax dollars. For they had been asked to accept severe cutbacks in State government services in order to balance their budget, yet they were still required to pay taxes. I know that money is not going toward maintaining a safety net for Californians, because many of them have been trained to regard government safety nets as evil. And they surely are not building that high speed rail line that voters approved in 2008.

Anyway, it seems that we all, including those of us in government, will have to quickly learn the art of living happily without a lot of money. As the benefits provided by government at all levels continue to shrink, this will mean that we must do much more for ourselves.

Riders Of The Mean Streets

Maybe it's me, but it seems that Oregon (or at least the Portland metro area) is no longer quite the state I encountered when I moved here over two years ago. This state and the city of Portland both had a reputation for outstanding bicycle friendliness among the various regions of the USA. During the infrequent occasions when I drove, I was shocked to find laid-back motorists who actually let you into their lane when you turn your signals on.

Things have changed for the worse. It seems that there's been a massive influx of jerks from other regions (most notably, from So. Cal.), people who drive like toddlers throwing a tantrum. They come from places where even minor arterial suburban streets are often over 80 feet wide to a place like Portland, where most streets are narrower, and they pitch a fit. (Of course, Portland has a very good mass transit system and an awesome bus service, but these people are too dysfunctional to ride mass transit.)

The tantrum these people throw consists increasingly of speeding through residential neighborhoods on streets that only allow one lane of traffic because they are so narrow. The trouble is, these are the very streets favored by bicyclists who want to avoid regions of heavy traffic. Cyclists are increasingly having to contend with impatient tailgating motorists driving threateningly inches away from them. Motorists are also increasingly guilty of attempted “right hooks” (this is when a driver pulls in front of a cyclist, then jumps into the bike lane to make a right turn without providing adequate clearance between his car and the bike).

This sort of behavior is characteristic of a nation that has been driven insane by selfish materialism. After all, it was a bunch of Americans who trampled a Wal-Mart employee to death last year because they each wanted to be the first to score an after-Thanksgiving deal on consumer electronics.

Whatever the psychological cause of this behavior, I don't care. I only know that a.) I don't want to burn my money in a gas tank; b.) I don't want to die in a crash; and c.) I'm tired of jerks in motor vehicles. Of course, many drivers are not jerks. But some of you are. So let me tell you what I propose.

If you are a driver and you don't think you can control yourself in traffic, beware. I am in the midst of conversations with the Portland police department, who have expressed their willingness to add traffic patrols to areas where bad drivers are a hazard. If you drive in the residential neighborhoods around the 42^nd Street MAX station, either north or south of I-84, you had best slow down. The same thing applies to any of the residential streets west of 42^nd Street and north of Broadway. And don't go racing down Ankeny. You might get busted. As the saying goes, “Kill a cyclist, go to jail.”

But if these things don't move you to change your behavior, at least slow down for your own sake. Think about it: you have driven pedestrians off the road, you have driven small children away from playing outdoors in their own neighborhoods, and you are attempting to run bicyclists off the road. The road has become a much more dangerous place because of you. Now your jerk driving, and the fact that there are so many of you who drive like this, is starting to threaten your own property. Just Google “car hits house,” click on “Images,” and you'll see tons of pictures like this one:

I have a feeling that with increased congestion and diminishing motorist sanity, incidents like this are becoming quite common. It would be interesting to do some sort of historical survey. Along those lines, check this out: “The curious frequency of cars hitting houses.”

For those of us who are cyclists, I propose that we take back our cities. One way is to map out hidden, unnoticed, car-free ways, interstitials and informal thoroughfares that exist in your locales, and to learn to use them. Here are some links that talk about this: “Interstitials and informal bike routes,” and “Bicycle Wayfinding in the Early 21^st Century.”

Digital Fabbers, Resilient Communities and The Flow Of Stuff

Here's the next installment of my study of digital fabbers and their role in building communities that are resilient in the face of resource constraints and economic contraction. My interest in this subject is not merely academic. Rather, I am confronting this study as a man who realizes that the world has become a very messed-up place, and that the country I live in has become a particularly messed-up nation. I consider these issues in much the same way that a man's interest in aerodynamic principles might be sharpened by being in a seat on a turboprop flying through an ice storm.

When people are in trouble, it is only natural for their attention to be focused on evaluating potential solutions to their trouble. The world in general, and the United States in particular, face a number of very severe predicaments caused by the end of a cheap resource base for our industrial economy, the destruction of the environment due to that economy, and the resulting contraction and disintegration of that economy. Yet our leaders (and many of the common citizens) are proceeding cluelessly into the future, lost in wish-fulfillment fantasies. I see what's coming, and I want to make my passage through the coming trouble as easy as possible.

So I'm looking at John Robb's concept of “resilient communities” and the prominent role played by continually advancing technology (especially the digital fabber) in these communities, and I've been wondering, “can these concepts save me and my community from some serious trouble?”

In previous posts on this blog, we considered small, home-made digital fabbers (microprocessor-controlled automatic fabricators of machined parts) as a means of jump-starting small-scale manufacturing in the United States, a country which over the last several decades has outsourced the majority of its manufacturing to low-wage countries, and which is now heavily dependent on imports. The most laid-back promoters of digital fabbers point out their potential to empower local communities to make for themselves the goods on which they rely, without having to depend on regional or international trade networks. This is a benefit, as declining energy supplies and economic contraction will likely cripple large-scale or global trade networks.

The more enthusiastic promoters of digital fabbers tout them as a key step along the path to “superempowerment” of individuals and small groups. Digital fabbers enable small groups or individuals to make most or all of the things that are now provided by large corporations or governments. This democratization of manufacture is very similar to the democratization of the creation of artistic media (movies, songs, recordings, published writings) which occurred because of advances in microelectronics and digital communication.

According to some of the sources Robb quotes, the technologies with potential to drive the advance of resilient communities do not have fundamental constraints such as energy use that limit progress. This is because they achieve the expansion of their capabilities by miniaturizing functions, thus enabling more to be done in a smaller space with fewer resources. (Microelectronics are a prime example of this, with the size of discrete transistors, diodes, etc., shrinking all the time, so that the number of components that can fit on a chip increases exponentially as time passes – “Moore's Law” in action.)

Robb has speculated that this miniaturization might also be applicable to non-electronic systems – in particular, social systems organized on the community level might evolve to foster an exponential increase in wealth creation for the members of such communities. Such social system improvement would be enabled by, and dependent on, the continued availability of cheap, highly capable microelectronics and digital communication. (For instance, see “RESILIENT COMMUNITY: Fabrication Networks.”) These communities would be able to “enjoy the benefits of globalization without being vulnerable to its excesses.”

Can technology-driven “resilient communities” such as those envisioned by Robb deliver on such promises? I don't have a definitive answer. But I do have a few cautionary observations. First, I question the digital fabbers that would form the backbone of relocalized manufacture. We have already seen that they cannot yet make their own microelectronics. We have also seen that the making of silicon-based microelectronics is very energy intensive. Organic electronics don't require nearly as much energy to make, but they also don't perform nearly as well as silicon-based devices, and they require the use of exotic materials like nanotubes in order to boost their performance to levels approaching that of devices made of ultrapure silicon. The exotic additives to organic electronics also have high energy costs and require manufacturing facilities almost as elaborate as those used to make silicon devices. This means that even communities that had local small-scale fabricators would still depend on large-scale, centralized manufacturing facilities for some of the goods used by them.

But let's say that we were able to make digital fabbers that could make nearly anything, and could fit in the average suburban garage (right next to the washing machine and just behind that exercise machine you no longer use). We are immediately faced with a second question: where do we get the feedstocks used by the fabbers to make their goods? For instance, let's say I want to fabricate steel tubing for use in bicycle frames. I need a source of steel for the fabber to work on. Who will provide the steel? Or the plastic for fabbed plastic parts? Or the other feedstocks? What if some of these feedstocks require large amounts of concentrated energy for their production? If I want to make things out of aluminum castings, for instance, I must realize that producing raw aluminum as a feedstock requires large amounts of energy in mining bauxite ore, and in separating the aluminum in that ore from the other components. Then someone must deliver the finished aluminum to me. In a future of declining energy, how much raw material and what kinds of raw material will be available even for local manufacturers (let alone the big guys) to turn into finished products?

Next, how do local communities who possess their own means of production prevent the draining of wealth from themselves? It's fine to talk about relocalization as a means of keeping wealth within local communities. But we must realize that this is a reasonable goal only if the primary factor in the flow of wealth is the choice of the members of the community in spending that wealth. Now, however, we are seeing that the flow of wealth within communities and between communities and the larger world is no longer within the control of the members of those communities. Relocalization was a defensive response by communities to the sucking of wealth out of those communities by the super rich who were far removed from these communities. But the goals of relocalization have been overruled by the super-rich, who have enlisted the government as a tool to continue siphoning wealth from communities in order to concentrate that wealth within their own hands.

There are two obvious examples of this: the continued bailouts of the financial sector by the U.S. government, approved by politicians from both parties over the objections of their constituents; and the proposed “health care reform” legislation in Washington which would force all Americans to buy private health insurance. As the fortunes of the rich are threatened by the contraction of the global economy, they will increasingly use the government as a tool to extract wealth from the rest of us. This will mean the passage of laws designed to force ordinary members of ordinary communities to continue paying arbitrary “rents” of one form or another to the rich. As long as this happens, no community can achieve “resilience,” if resilience is defined by enjoyment and possession of material wealth in a technology-driven community.

I guess my main issue with John Robb's vision is that sooner or later, technology runs up against limits. Our limits are arriving fairly quickly. Soon we will not have access to large quantities of highly refined, specialized feedstocks for high-tech goods. A declining energy supply, combined with the exhaustion of available ores and other materials, will lead to scarcity of these things. I think that communities that are resilient (in the way I am now thinking of resilience) will be made of people who know how to reuse, how to hack things that already exist, and who are wise enough not to need or want shiny new stuff all the time. Such communities will be able to exist in the absence of globalism, which is a good thing, since I don't think anyone will be enjoying the benefits of globalism for much longer.

What might a different flavor of community resilience look like? In a future blog post, I might just give you a small picture of that. Meanwhile, though I don't think Mr. Robb even knows I exist, I hope he reads my little series of ruminations on his ideas. It would be interesting to hear his answers to some of my questions.