Half Full or Half Empty? A Look at Renewable Energy and First World Demand

There are many basic presuppositions, conclusions and concerns within the circle of well-known figures studying Peak Oil, ecological degradation, resource constraints and the financial ramifications of these things. These conclusions and concerns form a body of commonly accepted “received wisdom” within this circle, and they frame the discussions regarding the seriousness of our energy and environmental predicament and the appropriate response to that predicament.

But those within the circle must beware of the tendency to form a closed society or “ghetto” that is cut off intellectually from the larger society. In view of the seriousness of the energy, economic and environmental challenges facing us, I think it's valuable to engage intelligent decision-makers within the mainstream in order to start and maintain a conversation regarding these challenges. (That is one reason why I like doing interviews – that I may ask, “Are we starting to see the same things?”.)

Thus I recently found myself conducting an interview with Dr. Slobodan Petrovic, a professor who is part of the Electrical Engineering and Renewable Energy programs at the Oregon Institute of Technology (OIT). Dr. Petrovic recently returned from a humanitarian mission to Tanzania, where he and several students from OIT designed and installed several small-scale solar photovoltaic projects for schools and hospitals. (You can read about it here.)

During our interview, we discussed small-scale renewable energy installations, the present peak of global oil production, and renewable energy prospects in the United States. My questions were as follows:

• Tell us a little about your renewable energy work on the African continent.

• It sounds like your work concerns renewable energy solutions applied at a local scale (neighborhood, district, or village) rather than a national scale. What constraints exist in African nations that prevent the execution of large-scale renewable projects scaled at a national level?

• Do you see such constraints at work here in the United States, particularly in economically depressed areas? Why or why not?

• Given the present contraction of the global economy and the continued decline of its resource base, what do you believe the most likely direction of renewable electric energy generation will be in the U.S. over the next 20 years?

• Do you believe that renewable energy technologies have a good chance of supplying a major portion of present U.S. energy demand in the near future? Why or why not?

• Is it possible that the U.S. will have to do some permanent "load shedding" in the near future in order to cope with a drastically lower availability of energy? What form would such permanent cutbacks take, and how can local neighborhoods prepare?

• What resource constraints affect current renewable technologies, particularly regarding strategic minerals located in poor countries with large indigenous non-European populations?

• In a time of economic contraction and resource depletion, what advice do you have for people who want to be engineers?

A podcast of the interview can be found at the Internet Archive, here. Feel free to listen and see whether we adequately answered the questions I posed above. Also, for those who live in the Portland metro area, Dr. Petrovic will be giving a talk in the near future on his work in Tanzania. I will post details as they become available.

Small-Scale Ambassadors

To those who have recently joined this blog, my apologies for not posting much lately. I have once again become very busy, working part-time at an engineering firm, teaching an engineering class at a local college, and enrolling in a college class myself.

The college class in which I am enrolled provides the theme for this week's post, which is a continuation of my recent posts on the role that immigrant communities can play in helping Americans form resilient neighborhoods in the face of economic contraction and collapse. There is much to be learned from communities of recent immigrants and of immigrants who have managed to maintain their culture in the face of the prevailing pressure to become “Americanized.” But how shall we thoroughly Americanized, native-born U.S. citizens learn from our immigrant fellow people unless we expand our horizons and learn to go out to immigrant communities right here in the U.S.A.?

One big part of that outreach consists of learning the languages of other nations and cultures. This summer, after the summer teaching session ended and before I realized that I would be teaching this fall, I decided that I was going to do something fun for myself and I signed up for a college-level introductory Russian class. I saw this as a means of facilitating communication between myself and the many Russian families in my neighborhood, along with their children, some of whom come to my house on a regular basis.

The class for which I originally signed up was to be a simple, community education-oriented introduction to Russian language and culture. It was canceled due to lack of enrollment, so I gave up on the idea, somewhat relieved because by then I found out that I myself would be teaching engineering. And then...through a strange set of circumstances, I found myself being invited to audit a for-credit Russian class for people on a degree track in languages. I must have been crazy for doing so, but I accepted the invitation. Now my time is quite fully occupied. The class is very nearly a full-immersion experience in which the teacher speaks mainly in Russian and where anyone caught speaking English is likely to be gently admonished with “По-Руский, Пожалуйста!”

This class has gotten me thinking. Many people are now writing about the need to form resilient neighborhoods composed of self-sufficient people who are disconnecting themselves from our major societal systems which are now in the process of breaking down. Some are now even starting to add their voices to the discussion of the value of learning from immigrant communities. Yet most writers seem to have missed the very obvious community-building step of learning other languages. Many of our attempts to build resilient communities are taking place and will continue to take place within urban areas that have by now become quite ethnically diverse and multicultural. Moreover, the rise of multi-ethnic communities is no longer limited to urban areas.

The need for knowledge of other languages is obvious to those “boots on the ground” in the neighborhoods I frequent, as I observed in a couple of conversations I had this week, one with a Russian high school student who is a friend of mine and who is taking Spanish, and another with a friend of mine from church who understands the realities behind our collapsing economy and who is actively pursuing steps of sustainable living. To those who want to take steps toward building resilient neighborhoods in the places where they live, one bit of advice I'd give is to learn at least one other language (and preferably two if you can manage it).

TH, Back From SoC

I just got back from a Labor Day weekend trip to Southern California to visit relatives. Due to time constraints, I actually thought about flying there...but at the last minute, I chickened out. (One factor that influenced my decision was finding out that the cost of a plane ticket plus a car rental in Southern California was about the same as the cost of just renting a car in Portland and driving down and back.)

Driving allowed me a chance to take in some thought-provoking (and frankly disturbing) scenery. I am thinking of the “Congress Created Dust Bowl” signs lining Interstate 5 from south of Stockton to just north of Bakersfield. These signs have undergone a transformation; their creators have changed the signs to read, “Stop the Congress Created Dust Bowl” and have added the names of members of the U.S. Congress who have been targeted by the American Right wing for removal. The connection between these signs and the rhetoric of the Tea-bagger/Glenn Beck/Fox News crowd is unmistakable, with their growth-at-any-cost message and their vehement opposition to any restrictions on the rights of wealthy agricultural landowners for the sake of the common good.

These signs have been designed to look like an expression of small-time, homemade grassroots activists from a distance. But there was one such sign on a wooden utility pole in an unfenced field near a gas station where I stopped, and upon closer examination I saw that its professionally produced message had been printed on a sheet of nearly indestructible Tyvek. As I said, there are dozens of these signs, as well as much larger billboard-sized signs with the same message in fenced fields within sight of the freeway. Making and installing these signs must have cost a lot of money.

The location of the signs tells us a few other disturbing things. Prior to 2008, the cost of farmland in the Central Valley averaged around $15,000 per acre, although by March of 2009 it had fallen to around $10,000 per acre. (Source: “California's Central Valley Farmland and Prices Not Immune to Recession”.) However, a quick search of agricultural land for sale revealed that most parcels under 40 acres cost over a million dollars. There are not very many small parcels near Interstate 5 that cost under $500,000. I only found one, and it was being marketed as a “home with property” for people who like “country living.” But then again, I only did a quick search. Those who want to try searching for themselves can go to a site like Schuil and Associates.

My point is that it seems to me that the people behind the “Stop The Congress Created Dust Bowl” campaign are all wealthy holders of large agricultural properties, and who are major players in the industrial factory farming model of agribusiness. They are not poor small farmers. Their signs are not homemade. They are not a display of grassroots activism.

They are, however, a display of the lengths to which the wealthy in this country are willing to go to seize, enlarge and consolidate their political and economic power at the expense of the rest of us and of the environment. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have the same rights of “free speech” and paid political expression as individuals, the wealthiest and most powerful members of American society are pulling out all the stops. Farms are on my mind, so I'll mention the forest of “Chris Dudley for Governor” signs I saw on my way through Oregon on Interstate 5. I think it's probable that most of the farms sporting these signs are also large, expensive agribusinesses. But it's also interesting how many large buildings in the Portland Metro area have been covered with Chris Dudley banners, regardless of whether the tenants in those buildings like Dudley or not. And there's uber-wealthy Carly Fiorina's bid to become a U.S. Senator. (See also “$200 Million GOP Campaign Avalanche Planned, Democrats Stunned”.)

The most disturbing sight I saw came when I arrived home again today shortly after midnight. I was on my computer checking my e-mail (and wasting time surfing a few sites) when I discovered that Thomas Nelson Publishers, who had released the "American Patriot's Bible" in 2009, was now agressively pushing this 'Bible' via Glenn Beck and Fox Television. Truly this would have been for me a “spew coffee all over keyboard” moment if I'd been drinking any coffee. According to several reviews, their “Patriot's Bible” is a compilation of stories of American patriots inserted into a New King James translation, along with commentary “illustrating” how Biblical principles “fit” into the founding of the United States. The aim of this “Bible” is to continue to promote the myth that the United States is an “exceptional” nation founded by God, and that the proof of this is unending material prosperity for America, as well as justifying all of this nation's wars of conquest.

You can read some objective reviews of this “Bible” below:

• “The American Patriot's Bible,” Burnside Writers' Collective,

• “The Patriot's Bible and Justified Torture,” Greg Boyd,

• And “Book Review: The Patriot's Bible,” Out of Ur.

It's interesting that this “Bible”, which was basically unheard-of for several months, should be aggressively pushed right now, only a few months before the November election. It's as if American evangelicalism with all of its entertainment/content “industries” had become simply another arm of a wealthy right-wing corporatist/materialist enterprise.

I'll say right here that I am a Christian – a Bible-believing, fundamentalist Christian. (Hopefully, that won't make you spew your coffee all over your keyboard;) But when I read the Bible, I come to conclusions that are radically different from those of the nationalists and xenophobes of the American right. I think that much of American history is an abomination. (Millions of former slaves, exterminated Native Americans and dead Iraqis would agree with me.)

I think of the religious parts of America not as Christian, but as Christ-haunted (in the Flannery O'Connor sense): destructive, materialist, greedy people who say the name of Jesus quite loudly, yet persecute as “Socialist!!!” anyone who suggests that maybe we should act like Jesus. The editors and publishers of the “Patriot's Bible” spent a lot of time inserting nationalist, war-mongering propaganda into their “Bible,” yet they failed to take heed to this passage from the Good Book: “I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if anyone adds to them, may God add to him the plagues which are written in this book...”

The American Patriot's Bible is yet another expression of the longing of many Americans for a magical, something-for-nothing life in which one never has to face the negative consequences of one's own foolish choices. It is yet one more piece of propaganda pushed by the wealthiest members of a rapidly shrinking American “mainstream” who fear a multipolar world in which they must learn to live within their means. The shrinkage of our means and the rise of that multipolar world are coming, whether we like it or not. Meanwhile, beware of denialist propaganda. It can be found oozing out of surprising places.

The Polyculture of Resilient Neighborhoods

I've been “out-of-pocket” for the last several weeks. This has been mainly due to my part-time teaching position as an adjunct at a local college. But now that finals have been administered and grades have been given, I have a bit of time to breathe and think.

One of the themes that was in the back of my mind is the subject of people, families and communities whose choices have positioned them for maximum survivability in this present time of resource depletion and economic collapse – even though they made their choices for entirely different reasons at the time those choices were made. I've recently met or read about a few such people and families, and have noted those elements of survivability in their lives which they chose for cultural or religious reasons, without necessarily thinking beforehand of the application of those elements to hard times. One characteristic of all these people is their separateness from the prevailing American culture. Over the next few posts, I'd like to explore the cultural roots (both religious and secular) of that separation, how it has made these people resistant to assimilation in present American culture, and lessons we can learn from these people as we seek to form resilient neighborhoods and communities in the face of ongoing economic collapse.

I'll state at the outset my hypothesis 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. If the predominant monoculture is that of present-day commercial America, these neighborhoods will likely be far less resilient.

Why is a polyculture more resilient than a monoculture in the face of changing times and hardships? Examples of the answer to that question can be seen in the realms of biology, ecology and computational networks. Regarding computing, it's no secret that Microsoft Windows is at present the main operating system used by computers in the United States (although Linux distributions are chipping away at this dominance). It's also no secret that the vast majority of computers in the world use processor chips made by Intel. And it's no secret that, as stated in Wikipedia, “all [such] computers have the same vulnerabilities, and like agricultural monocultures, are subject to catastrophic failure in the event of a successful attack.” That's why antivirus companies like McAfee and Norton have a brisk business, and it is also why Windows can be such a royal pain to use. Polycultural computing is inherently more resistant to damage and attacks from viruses; thus it is more resilient.

When speaking of culture as applied to human communities, I am thinking of the dictionary definition: “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a...group...the set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterizes a company...” (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Ninth Edition). What can be said of present-day American culture? (By the way, this applies, more or less, to the entire English-speaking world.)

It is first of all a culture of consumption and consumerism. People are trained from an early age to base their identity on the quantities and types of things they own. The definition of who is “normal” and how much is “enough” is left up to advertisers, marketers and growth capitalists who are forever “moving the goal-posts” in order to promote ever-increasing consumption. Cultural norms are routinely redefined so that what was “cool” five minutes ago is no longer cool. This produces an ever-present restlessness, an ever-accelerating struggle to “keep up with the times,” and an ever-increasing outlay of cash for those things that will make a person fit in with those who are “with it.”

This culture acts as a “universal solvent” in that it puts pressure on those who don't fit in or who haven't been assimilated into it. Recent immigrants and their children are judged on whether they have been properly “Americanized”; if their children lag behind in this process, they are deemed to be somehow “unhealthy.” “What?! He doesn't have an i-Phone?? You're isolating him; that's not good for his socialization!” As a universal solvent, mass American culture gradually strips away all competing cultural identities and distinctions. (An example of this: I was riding the MAX a few weeks ago when I saw four Asian teens getting on at one of the stops. Their accents were unmistakable, and marked them clearly as foreign-born, yet they were each wearing baggy shorts at least three sizes too big for them, along with oversized T-shirts that hadn't been washed in a few days and bling jewelry and sideways baseball hats with flat brims, and they were all cussing and swearing like homeboys – even down to the rhythm of the cuss words. Mighty strange...)

It's no surprise that the mass-produced culture of American consumerism should be hostile to all other cultures, since the existence of these other entities poses a threat to the growth of the profits of the masters of American culture. But there are other maladaptive cultures which are distinctively American and which seek to make themselves a dominant monoculture to the exclusion of all other cultures in America. I am thinking specifically of certain tendencies and ways of thinking embodied in the Tea-baggers and the more hard-core members of the Republican Party, who seem to want to create a pure white-bread version of the United States centered on some sort of Southern Baptist/Pentecostal/Revived Confederate-Antebellum culture in which members of other races and non-English speaking members of any other culture are either wiped out or subjugated.

There are two ways in which this thinking is expressed. First, there are those who through political action are seeking to “take back America for God!!!” – at least, for the God of their own imaginations, who seems to have promised them everlasting material prosperity which they would never be required to share with anyone else. Second, there are those who correctly see that the prospects for “taking America back” don't look very good; therefore they have chosen to buy gold, guns, baked beans and land, and to form militias to combat the waiting hordes of savage zombies who will arrive when their version of the Apocalypse kicks off.

In my opinion, elements of this second kind of thinking can be seen in the Life After the Oil Crash website of Matt Savinar. When I was first learning about Peak Oil in 2007, I used to read his site a lot, but over the last year, I've lost my taste for the some of the adaptive strategies he seems to espouse, as I think they are actually maladptive from a social and moral standpoint. We can't all run off to the hills. If we all try, many of us will find that our mutually exclusive claims to the best mountain hideaways are being extinguished via 30-06 or 5.56 mm ball ammunition. For that matter, those who try to purge America's various neighborhoods and communities of all cultural inputs and presences which they deem to be “un-American” will only make a destroyed mess. After all, those who are being “purged” will rightly object to such treatment, and they may object quite effectively.

How then should we view the existence of multiple distinct cultures in our neighborhoods? First, we who have been thoroughly Americanized should recognize that we have many things to learn from those who haven't been. Those who come from countries where life was harder and poorer have much to teach us about adaptive strategies for our own upcoming times of hardship and poverty. The biggest thing we can learn from them is the cultivation of a healthy, realistic state of mind – something which is lacking among many people who are “Americanized.” I am thinking of my neighborhood, which not only contains native-born Americans, but which also has large Russian and Hispanic populations, along with Asians and people from various African nations. Over the next few posts I will explore some of the lessons I have discovered in talking with these people (many of whom refuse to “fit into” American culture entirely) as well as telling the stories of some Americans who have begun to withdraw themselves from some of the worst and most corrosive elements of American culture. I also have a technology-related interview I am trying to line up. Stay tuned...

For more on this subject, check out the following:

• Immigration in America: Becoming Americanized : NPR

• Becoming Americanized can be depressing | ZDNet

A Short Station Break While I Grade Papers

I have a lot to write about, but this weekend I also have a ton of student papers to grade from my short-term teaching gig. I'll try to have another post ready soon. Stay tuned...

Place-Making For People of Small Means

Placemaking (or place-making) can be defined as, “the process of creating squares, plazas, parks, streets and waterfronts that will attract people because they are pleasurable or interesting...Being in places involves social encounters, immersion in the sights, sounds, sun, wind and atmosphere of a locale, and curiosity about the traces of thought, imagination and investment that have guided their construction and use over time. ” (Wikipedia, Placemaking.)

Another definition is, “An integrated and transformative process that connects creative and cultural resources to build authentic, dynamic and resilient communities or place.” (Toronto Artscape, Glossary.) I like this definition much better.

One of the challenges of this present time of economic contraction is figuring out how to make the places where we live into places that sustain us on a number of levels. This involves not only trying to create places that provide some or all of the essentials we need, but also creating places that encourage and promote a sense of community.

Some writers and thinkers have addressed this challenge, notably architects and urban planners from the “New Urbanist” movement. Their assumption has been that placemaking is primarily an activity reserved for governments, developers and other large entities with lots of resources to create well-designed, resilient communities from the ground up, or to re-fashion defunct, poorly designed communities into the sorts of communities that could be called good places to live. Things like redevelopment, transit-oriented development and gentrification come to mind when discussing the re-fashioning process.

The problem is that the money and resources for such a refashioning have already been largely blown in the United States. It's as if the nation collectively went to a store with $5 in its pocket, and blew the money on candy and soda instead of beans, rice and vegetables. Some key writers and economic analysts believe that the industrialized world in general, and the United States in particular, are in the early stages of a massive deflationary depression which will destroy the ability of large-scale entities like governments to do anything on a large scale.

It will therefore be up to ordinary citizens to make good places out of the places where they live. But there's another challenge, namely, that not that many of us own our own living places outright, and even now, not many can afford to pay for a place in cash. A deflationary depression will cause a drop in prices of assets like real estate, yet it will depress wages even faster. Such a drop in wages will make it hard for people who own “on margin” (that is, who owe money on the houses they “own”) to continue making payments on their debt, and it will turn many other people into sojourners without definite roots, as many young people in college and recent college graduates are now.

How can these renters - young people in college or recently graduated, and working poor people - make sustainable places for themselves in the places they rent? How can they make their neighborhoods into sustainable places? How can they engage in good placemaking?

In an attempt to answer that question, I interviewed Neil and Naomi Montacre, proprietors of Naomi's Organic Farm Supply in inner southeast Portland, Oregon. I first met Neil and Naomi during a tour of homes with backyard chicken coops in 2008. Their house impressed me, with its large chicken coop, its varied gardens, its “Hens for Obama” sign and a poster with pictures giving a guided tour of the place and their efforts. I asked them several questions about their place, the plans and steps they had taken in altering the place, and its impact on the neighborhood. In 2009, they added a greenhouse and more garden plantings. This year, they moved to a leased property of about an acre where they set up their store, and they continued with the activities and philosophy they had developed while living in their former house. In all these things, they took bold steps with property they were renting, to make that property a place that could at least partially sustain them.

In this week's interview, Neil talks in more detail about their activities with rental properties, and his philosophy regarding making good places out of the places where people live. The interview can be found at the Internet Archive, under the title, “Place-making For People Of Small Means.” There's also a video on Vimeo which shows a partial tour of Naomi and Neil's new location, as well as an interview with another renter in inner southeast Portland. The video can be found at Place-Making for People of Small Means, or you can watch it by clicking on the link below. Note how prominently urban agriculture figures in both examples of placemaking.

Place-Making for People of Small Means from TH in SoC on Vimeo.

Meretrix Activists

I want to know what became of the changes

we waited for love to bring.

Were they only the fitful dreams

of some greater awakening?

I've been aware of the time going by,

They say in the end it's the wink of an eye

And when the morning light comes streaming in

You'll get up and do it again,

Amen.

– Jackson Browne, The Pretender

I was thinking recently of some of the geeky things I did as a kid. Some of those things were expressions of nascent idealism and activism. My family was living in Southern California and I had become convinced that the place had to have a decent, modern mass transit system. So I ripped some blank pages from a class notebook and penciled a paragraph at the top of one of the sheets stating that I was collecting signatures to make the Government give us all a slick, technically advanced monorail system. (Those weren't the exact words I used – hey, I was only twelve years old at the time.)

I took my “petition” around to a couple of supermarkets and a nearby Thrifty Drug store, and asked the store managers if I could ask people to sign up for a modern mass transit system. I don't know what impression I made on them, but they all said “No.” So I knocked on people's doors and asked for signatures. I even managed to get a few. But to this day I can't remember what finally happened to my “petition.”

That experience formed a picture in my mind of participatory democracy as an expression of the energies and choices of motivated, idealistic people freely volunteering their time for causes they believe in, and manifesting their belief in the championing of both candidates and the citizen-sponsored initiatives that are supposed to be the backbone of direct democracy. But lately that picture has fallen apart. It's not as if someone threw a rock suddenly at the picture frame, but rather that the entire picture has been left out in the rain for a while.

I'm thinking of the last several months, and how my old employer was slow and very light on work, and then there was a period where we were so light on work that I stayed home for about five or six weeks. And I was diligently scouring Monster.com and Craigslist and other venues for employment offers. I am an engineer by schooling, but I have to confess that I looked at some of the other headings under “Jobs” on Craigslist. One such heading was titled, “Nonprofit Sector.” From January until just a few weeks ago, this heading was chock full of announcements that ran something like this: “ACTIVISTS NEEDED! $9-$14/hour,” or, “Fight for Change and Make $$$!”

To be sure, such ads generate a response. I got to meet several of the people who responded to these ads over the course of the late winter and spring. They tended to congregate on MAX trains, collecting petition signatures from a captive audience as we all whisked from station to station. Or a person could run into them at a New Seasons or Whole Foods market or at Trader Joe's, or in front of a post office, or at the Lloyd Center mall. Some of them seemed to be representatives of genuinely counter-cultural, grassroots organizations. And some of them actually seemed to believe in what they were doing. I am thinking especially of several petitioners I met who were collecting signatures for some medical marijuana initiative. (Now that's “grassroots”! But I didn't sign their petition, sorry to say.) I was also glad to meet people from the Bus Project.

There were also signature gatherers whose masters had a more troubling agenda. For instance, there was a group gathering signatures for a new casino east of Portland under the premise (and promise) that this casino would benefit schools, police departments, parks, and other public agencies. However, the backers of the casino initiative are in Toronto, Canada, and they have spent over $800,000 to insure that their measure is on the November ballot. I met a lot of signature gatherers working for this initiative, including one group a few weeks ago consisting of newly-hired canvassers on a side street who were being given an open-air training talk in the art of “selling” their petition to potential signers. (I have to tell you, they reminded me of a flock of pigeons converging on a loaf of bread.) I asked a couple of them how they found out about this job, and whether they knew anything about the petition for which they were about to collect signatures. Craigslist works wonders, doesn't it?

Then there was the usual suspects from Vote Oregon out collecting signatures for initiatives sponsored by Kevin Mannix, Bill Sizemore and Loren Parks. One such initiative, Petition 13, would impose mandatory minimum jail/prison sentences for certain felony sex crimes and driving under the influence convictions. I saw some of the “Vote Oregon” operatives at work selling this initiative, and they were slick - “Would you like to sign a petition to keep sex predators off the streets?” Who wouldn't say “Yes!”? There are only three problems, however. First, they don't tell you what laws exist at present to provide the very protection they claim their initiative will accomplish. In other words, maybe we don't really need this initiative. Second, the fine print of their initiative targets things other than sexual predation. And that leads to the third point, namely, that Mannix, Sizemore and Parks have long wanted to create a prison-industrial complex in Oregon just like that which exists in California, because they see prisons as a lucrative growth opportunity for themselves.

The thing about almost all of the signature gatherers is that they were all paid. The money came from somewhere. It was a lot of money. It would be nice to think that all that money came from altruistic souls giving their bounty of spare change to altruistic, civic-minded nonprofits concerned only for the common good. But the reality is that in too many cases, the money came from “point sources” – individuals or small groups of individuals with a lot of wealth and a vested interest in using the political system to generate a little more wealth for themselves. Anymore, it takes a lot to get an initiative qualified for a state ballot. And states are populous, big places. And getting people to notice your petition takes a lot of expensive advertising. My run-ins with signature gatherers were yet another reminder that the political system in the United States is almost wholly owned and run by wealthy people, whose sole aim is to engineer the system for the maximization of their own personal profit. Almost gone are the days of true grassroots activism of the kind that makes kids draft petitions and knock on doors just for the fun of it.

I won't even get into the funding that goes into candidacy, except to say that over the last month I have become rather frightened by everyone who is running for political office, both locally and at the Federal level. I recently rode past a big sign saying “We Need So-And-So for Governor!” and asking myself, “Just why do we need So-and-So? Who's paying that so-and-so to run for office?” Here's what would be very nice to have – political candidates who told us all the straight truth, who said, “I make no promises to 'fix' the economy and bring prosperity back again. Those days are over. American society in general and our locality in particular face an unavoidable contraction of the official, formal economy, due to resource depletion, environmental degradation, and the resulting collapse of our debt-based financial arrangements. All I can offer is to tell you the truth, and to arrange our government in such a way as to facilitate your adaptation to our new reality.” It goes without saying that there are no candidates willing to say such things, and few voters willing to hear such things. It's the people who promise the moon right now – and the people dumb enough to vote for them – who scare me.

Some bloggers have proposed a boycott of the next elections, and a few of them have gone so far as to say that such a boycott might withdraw enough support from our corrupt political system that it crashes. It would certainly be nice to have a government that had been rendered incapable of ruining our lives. But if you want to crash the system, a voting boycott is not enough. Some systems react strangely when lightly loaded. If there were a massive voting boycott in this country, who knows what kooks might make their way into office? It would be easy for the wealthy to find a few people who were willing to vote a certain way in exchange for a few bucks, thus buying an election and guaranteeing that our government continued to be a government by the rich, for the rich.

If one really wanted to withdraw his support from our present government, he would have to go farther than choosing not to vote. He would have to take away the power the government has to accomplish things and to funnel wealth to the wealthy. The removal of this power could be done legally, but it would be painful. For it would require that people chose to live very frugally – thus reducing the money that flowed to large businesses via the mass participation of consumers in a consumer economy. Secondly, once people drastically reduced their expenditures, they would have to drastically and voluntarily reduce their income. This would reduce the revenue available to the Government via taxes. Not many people are willing to take the first step. Even fewer are willing to take the second.