"Path to Freedom" On Probation

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

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

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

My Resilient Neighborhood, Part 2 - A Homeschooling Experiment

In my last post, I said that as teaching has become an integral part of my strategy of personal resilience, so it has become the mainstay of my outreach to my neighborhood. I also began to describe my efforts in teaching guitar to some of the kids in my neighborhood. In this post I'd like to talk a little about a few of my motivations for teaching these kids.

Much of what has been written about building resilient neighborhoods has focused on the psychological, relational and social aspects and benefits of building community. So it is that many posts on building resilience have focused on the social power of collaborative efforts such as group cannings, neighborhood block parties, people meeting to sing together, and so forth.

Believe me, I value these aspects just as much as anyone else, and I see their importance. I think particularly of the human element of working with children, and how emotionally stretching such an exercise can be. Anyone who has taught kids (and who has cared whether they learn or not) knows that working with kids can break your heart sometimes – or be the source of some of the best experiences in life at other times. (The anticipation of those “best experiences” is what keeps me going.) I also think of how good it has felt to befriend some of my neighbors – especially those who are not originally from the U.S. – and for us to begin to learn to rely on each other.

But to focus only on the psychosocial or relational aspects of building resilient neighborhoods turns many resilience-building activities into mere symbolism rather than practical actions that can meet practical needs. Therefore I have also focused on the practical applications of initiating an neighborhood teaching effort. I am thinking particularly of a C-Realm podcast I heard of an interview with Jeff Vail back in July 2010, in which he described how the “nation-states” of the world are in decline due to the failure of various “states” (national and sub-national governments) to live up to their social contract to care for their constituent “nations” (that is, the people who actually live within the notional borders of the various “states.”) Of course, we can see that the failure of the social contract between states, especially in the First World, and their constituent nations is due to the hollowing out and wholesale ripoff of these states by the wealthiest members of the constituent nations.

What this means is that the median members of various nations are seeing their standard of living and quality of life being gutted in order to maintain the wealth and prerogatives of the richest members of those nations. Government programs and institutions which were created in order to raise the quality of life of all are now being gutted in order to maintain the wealth of society's richest members. The government's sole remaining claim to legitimacy is that it controls the official, visible market of the official, formal economy. However, the abandonment of median citizens by the state is opening a huge door for the emergence of a parallel, “diagonal economy” consisting of locally-created alternative arrangements for median citizens to get their needs met, or, as Jeff Vail puts it, “...for highly networked groups of scale-free, self-sufficient communities to begin taking care of themselves within the crumbling or increasingly irrelevant auspices of [the State].”

What does this look like where I live? Well, one parent I know told me a few months ago of her concern over the Portland school system's decision to cut school hours and class offerings for her elementary school kids. Social institutions such as public schools have already been largely turned away from providing median children with a real education, and now in many states the small benefit that public schools provide is in danger of being removed entirely due to strapped state budgets. The failure of the State to provide for the education of its median children (i.e., the vast majority of children who are not from rich families) opens a door for local, volunteer-based, grassroots educational solutions.

But the test of a “diagonal economy” or the emergence of local, grassroots alternatives to services no longer provided by the state or its official institutions is that these alternatives must work at least as well as the things they are replacing or supplanting. Otherwise the emergence of a “diagonal economy” or local alternatives is nothing more than useless symbolism. Thus it is that in my efforts to teach guitar, I am actually trying to teach guitar. I aim to make my lessons fun, engaging and relational; borrowing a page from Ivan Illich, I try to create a convivial learning environment. But I also am doing my best to make sure my students know all the chords in first position, how to tune a guitar in standard tuning, how to read music in standard notation, what a time signature is, what a key signature is, how to fingerpick ergonomically so that they don't develop tendinitis, and how to play interesting and challenging pieces.

This is all being done pro bono, after hours, informally, and I think it is the way a lot of people in a lot of neighborhoods are going to be doing things as they seek to meet the educational needs of their own neighborhoods. Moreover, if I can get away with providing a rigorous, technically exact basic education in music in this way, it will prove to me that I can also teach other subjects in this way – necessary subjects like mathematics, biology, basic Mendelian heredity including plant-breeding, small livestock husbandry and other subjects pertinent to a post-Peak future.

This leads to the question of what sort of subjects would make a good curriculum for post-Peak education and how rigorously those subjects should be developed. Although some writers have already tackled this question, I'd like to add my two cents. But not tonight; I've got to practice guitar for a bit.

My Resilient Neighborhood, Part 1 - Laying The Foundation

As I promised in my post, “Adjusting My Own Oxygen Mask,” I want to write a bit about the steps I am taking to make my life and my neighborhood more resilient in the face of uncertain times. In this post, I will briefly state some of these steps.

The Personal: I see the need for a proper balance between the pursuit of money and the achievement of other life goals. This is especially true now that the money economy is fragile and my place in it is uncertain. My time goal now is to work between half time and ¾ time so that I can have the remainder of my week devoted to building a healthy lifestyle and a healthy neighborhood. My money goal is to be able to live on less than half of my salary so that the rest can be devoted to meeting personal and neighborhood needs. So far I am doing well on the money part of this goal, although the time part has lately been a bit harder to achieve.

Both the time and the money goal are important, and cannot be neglected. In this time in which many powerful politicians, rich people and media voices are promoting selfishness, in which many government social safety nets are being shredded, it is ever more important to prepare oneself to live a life of charity. As the Good Book says, “Let our people also learn to maintain good works for necessary uses, that they may not be unfruitful.” (Titus 3:14) I intend to use my spare time and money in some interesting ways. There'll be no room for certain right-wingers to howl “Socialism!!!”, because, after all, it's my time and money to do with as I please, isn't it?

I've been working part time as an engineer and teaching part time as an adjunct engineering instructor. I'm thinking of going back to school myself to get my master's degree. Such a move would make it easier to get a job teaching full time. If I decide to go back, I might study semiconductor fabrication with a view to learning more about organic semiconductors. It's not that I think organic semiconductors will enable us to live a high tech lifestyle, but rather, that I believe that in a low-energy future, the only semiconductor technology that will be available to society will be based on organic materials with performance that is not nearly as great as the silicon-based semiconductors we enjoy now. But a little bit of something is better than nothing at all.

I've almost finished building a chicken coop in my backyard. (I can hear people saying, “What?! You write a blog like the Well Run Dry and you don't have chickens yet?!!” Hey, I'm working on it...) One of my other projects is quite mundane: I need to clean out my garage this spring, so that I can start a workshop. I intend to explore home-based small-scale manufacturing and refurbishing. I am also continuing to study Russian, although my effort is confined to self-study right now. Once I become reasonably competent, I'll brush up on my Spanish.

The Neighborhood: As teaching has become an integral part of my strategy of personal resilience, so it has become the mainstay of my outreach to my neighborhood. In “My (Somewhat) Walkable, (Somewhat) Russian Neighborhood,” I wrote about the Russians and eastern Europeans I have met here where I live. One of them found out that I play guitar, and he asked me if I could teach some of his relatives. So over the last year I have had a handful of kids over at my house once or twice a week. It has been an experience, believe me! The kids are typical of kids everywhere: warm, sensitive souls one minute and crazed creatures the next. (The fact that I'm teaching them shows that the Almighty has a sublime sense of humor...)

I also may get to enjoy the privilege of being a learner in my neighborhood, as I have been talking to one of my Russian neighbors about having one of his relatives teach a beekeeping class to some of us. Hopefully that will happen this summer.

Teaching, both at a university and in my home, has gotten me thinking about many things – things such as pedagogy, the “diagonal economy” of Jeff Vail's writings, neighborhood-based solutions to neighborhood needs, and the process of developing a curriculum for the learning of skills appropriate for a post-Peak society. In future posts, I will explore these themes as I describe them through the lens of my weekly guitar class and my other neighborhood initiatives. My aim will be to show how a neighborhood composed of diverse cultures can come together in a calm and reasonable frame of mind to improve its quality of life even in the midst of a declining economy.

Laser Bigotry

I'll start this post with an illustration.

Lasers are interesting devices. The word “laser” is actually an acronym formed from the first letters of the words “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.” Lasers work as follows: a “lasing” material (either a special crystal or gas or semiconducting material) is “pumped” with electromagnetic energy. This energy raises the electrons in the atoms of the material to higher “orbits” as the electrons store the energy pumped into the material. Then as electrons start to give up this energy and fall back to lower energy states, the energy is released as photons (light), which strike other atoms in the material, causing them to give up their pumped energy as well, ultimately resulting in a cascading flood of photons which comprise the light of the resulting laser beam. The laser beam has some unusual characteristics, which make it both interesting and useful. First, the light of the beam is monochromatic; that is, it is composed of light of one color only. Second, the beam is coherent; that is, it does not spread out except over very great distances. The light of the laser beam is the result of a series of deliberate choices by the designers and makers of lasers, as laser light is almost never found in nature.

Which brings me to the Arizona shootings this weekend, and to further reflections on American social life in these troubled times. There are many who write and comment on the societal consequences of resource depletion and economic collapse, and who state their belief that such times promote the rise of fascism, bigotry and intolerance. The way these writers talk, however, makes it sound as if adverse conditions cause fascism, bigotry and intolerance to just bubble up from the body politic in some inexplicable way that can only be described as a mysterious social force untraceable to any one individual.

I think such an explanation is nonsense. There are, to be sure, many idiots, bigots, and all-around doofuses in the United States these days. Our American society is now faced with post-Peak Oil, the depletion of a host of other resources, an economy which is long since past its peak, an environment which is increasingly degraded to such an extent that it can no longer support life, and the decline of our influence and hegemony in the world. Even within the U.S., the dominant Anglo sons and daughters of privilege are finding that they must now function within a multipolar, multicultural society. They have been used to being the sole center of attention for too long. For too long, they have been overloaded with all the toys a kid could want, and they have not had to share with anyone else. Our post-Peak nation in a post-Peak world will be forced to learn to share. This is a cause of angst and resentment among some of the sons and daughters of privilege.

Given the right environment, this angst and resentment could be constructively worked out. After all, having to share is not the end of the world. On a purely physical, technical level, it is quite possible that we could all live securely in a managed contraction of our economy, with high quality of life, if we were simply willing to share what we have with each other. But ours is not the right environment.

The present social environment of mainstream America is the deliberate product of its makers and designers, who are the wealthiest of the sons and daughters of privilege. They would rather tear this country apart than share the mountains of things they have piled up to themselves via the impoverishment of the rest of the nation and the world. They own the majority of the media and the majority of its politicians and most prominent mouthpieces.

So we have Fox TV and Fox News telling us that the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 arose because banks were forced to lend to minorities. We have Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh making all kinds of bigoted, racist statements to the world. We have Fox News agitating for war in Iraq even though the war was unjustified. We have all the Fox talking heads calling Obama a closet Muslim, a terrorist and a Nazi, even though their accusations had no basis in fact. We have Steve Forbes and Dick Armey creating the “Tea Party” and we have nearly all mainstream American media focusing an inordinate amount of attention on the Tea Baggers while ignoring genuine grassroots expressions of public opinion that run counter to the “me first” message of the Tea Baggers. We have Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes now able to vomit their hatred through thousands of mouthpieces. We have the Arizona immigration law and Republicans poised to try to push similar laws in several other states. We have the primary school textbook industry now taken over by right wing zealots who want to use public schools to push their jingoist propaganda. We have places like Walmart and Fred Meyer hawking books by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and George Bush – right next to the newsstands carrying Star, the National Enquirer and Cosmopolitan. And we have Sarah Palin targeting her opponents in the crosshairs.

Under such a media onslaught, it's not surprising that a few narrow-minded working-class redneck types would find themselves getting “lased.” Like atoms being pumped by light of a certain frequency, these people are gladly allowing themselves to get pumped by propaganda that validates their evil beliefs and desires. Is it any wonder that when they release their “pumping energy”, the result is violently destructive deeds?

To be sure, there is now a “debate” in the mainstream media over whether the right-wing garbage now emanating from most American media mouthpieces is actually responsible for the appearance of white supremacist militias and acts of violence such as the Arizona shootings. According to the McClatchy Tribune, a professor from USC “cautioned against coming to any conclusions about the motivations of the shooter in Tucson.” Similar backpedaling can be seen from Fox TV and Sarah Palin. And one person wrote, “Leave it to the liberals to expect one person to be held accountable for the individual actions of every person who hears them. It's representative of the liberal nanny state dream come true!”

Funny thing, though, is that a couple of decades ago, when these very same right-wingers were religiously campaigning against indecency on television, their opponents tried to deny any causal link between indecency in the media and sexual activity among young watchers of TV and movies. Now the right wingers are trying to use the same defense. Ah, well, to borrow a line from the Crucible, “God damns (punishes) all liars.” (By the way, the Good Book says something similar in Revelation 22:15.)

Adjusting My Own Oxygen Mask

To those who are followers of this blog, I must apologize for not posting very much recently. A number of momentous events have taken place over the last few months, but I've been too busy to pay much notice to them. Yet these events, combined with my own busy-ness, have gotten me thinking about how much attention I personally need to devote to preparing myself and my neighborhood for the times now upon us.

During the last few months, the International Energy Agency confirmed that the world has passed the all-time peak in conventional oil production. (Indeed, the latest edition of the IEA World Energy Outlook put the peak date in 2006 – a statement which confirms the mention of 2006 as peak year according to the German Energy Watch Group's 2007 Oil Report.) This last November, there were mid-term elections in the United States – elections which greatly expanded the power and prerogatives of the rich, yet were a disaster for people interested in prudent preparations for the future and the preservation of the common good. During the last few months, the burgeoning American police state has continued to grow, with “get tough on crime” initiatives being approved in a few more states, leading inevitably to a need to build more prisons sometime in the future. During the last few months, some very well-respected bloggers have suggested that it may be time for decent, thinking folk to get out of the U.S. while they still can and relocate to another country.

Meanwhile, I've been working two jobs: first, as a practicing engineer for a small design firm, and second, as an adjunct engineering instructor. I decided to try holding two jobs because of my experiences last year and early this year with my previous firm, which was hit significantly by our ongoing economic crisis. Those were unsettling times, as I was home a lot and worried about having nothing to fall back on in the event that I was laid off. I decided on teaching as a second occupational path because I believe that a highly valuable talent in the years to come will be the ability to teach complex skills – especially to adults.

When I joined the firm at which I now work, I asked to be employed part-time, in anticipation of teaching during the summer term. I had been working on a reduced schedule at my previous firm as well, and the part-time experience was a bit of an eye-opener. I saw that by being debt-free and working part-time, I was able to devote more energy toward learning skills of self-sufficiency and forging neighborhood connections. This kind of time is a valuable resource, and it seems that it is now also an endangered resource.

I am thinking just now of an interview of Jeff Vail that I recently heard on the C-Realm podcast. In that interview, Jeff described the concept of “surge capacity” as that portion of a total system which is underutilized, and which is therefore available to meet an emergency. As he put it, “...if you have the ability to get by on a fraction of what you are capable of, you're in a lot better situation...” He then envisioned “an ideal, resilient, high surge capacity, domestic economy” consisting of a “husband and wife...both working in the 'traditional economy' 10 hours a week each,” and dividing up the remainder of their time between community-focused organization and production and domestic production. The point is that by limiting their involvement and reliance on the 'traditional', official economy, the members of this ideal household would have time to focus on building other strengths and resources in order to make themselves more resilient.

The catch, of course, is that the dominant, official economy does its best to forbid mere “partial” reliance on it. If you're going to rely on it at all, the only terms on which it permits such reliance are full, unrestrained reliance. (Just as one can't be “only a little bit” addicted to heroin.) So everything that ordinary people need is now becoming more and more expensive, and indebtedness becomes more and more the prevailing lifestyle. Even if one manages to stay out of debt, many employers of degreed professionals are starting to eliminate part-time work from their offerings. Scan Craigslist or Monster.com, and you will see lots of ads with phrases like “Motivated self-starter needed for a fast-paced environment in a dynamic growth-oriented company. Must be able to prioritize, multitask and manage stress. This is a full-time, 40+ hour/week position. Extensive travel required.”

Being employed under those conditions leaves very little time for things outside of work, such as building a resilient life and community. And that's fine, I suppose; as long as a man thinks he will never need alternative arrangements, he need not fret over the fact that he has no time to build alternatives and safety nets. Right now, business is booming for several of the local design firms in our area, so it would be easy to believe that one could continue to rely on the official economy for a long time to come.

But I've been reading the signs, and to me they continue to say, “Disaster ahead.” I keep seeing articles, blog posts and analyses by very intelligent people who track the fragility and poor prognosis of the official economy, both in the U.S. and globally, as well as the fragility of American society. Allowing myself to become a 40+ hour/week worker bee seems to me like trying to fight for the best deck chair on the Titanic.

I want to keep working part-time, so that I can continue to have time to devote to building personal and neighborhood resilience. Some of the resilience-building I want to do will take a significant amount of time each week. But I am getting squeezed right now by the demands of my job, and I feel like I'm regarded as a bit of an inconvenient oddity for not wanting to work full time.

I don't know yet what I'm going to do about my situation, but I'll keep you all posted as things progress. And over the next few weeks, I will be writing about some personal experiences I have recently had and steps I am taking to build a resilient life.

An Election Eve "Amen"

Update - 24 November 2023: Having examined the writings and worldview of many members of the Peak Oil/Collapse crowd which flourished from the middle of the first decade of the 21st century until 2016, I find that I must withdraw my agreement with many of the statements made by these people.  First, they all tended to predict that a zombie apocalypse was right around the corner - in many cases, only months away.  Ran Prieur (cited below) was one such writer.  Obviously, the zombie apocalypse has not come, and is not likely to be triggered by the decline of worldwide petroleum production.  As anyone can see, the use of renewable sources of electric energy has greatly expanded, with the result that prices of transportation fuel have begun to fall - even though supply remains tight.

The other problem with the prepper/collapse crowd is that so many of these people have turned out to be aligned with the Global Far Right and the aspirations of people such as Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.  One of the tactics of choice in which these people have engaged over the years is to try to convince us that in the United States, there is almost no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans as political agents.  While I'd be the first to admit that the Democratic Party is guilty of many failings, I am absolutely certain that the Democratic Party is not trying to create an American autocracy under a leader who is a criminal and malignant narcissist.  I also know that the Democratic Party is not threatening to build concentration camps in order to lock up immigrants and political prisoners on American soil.  And I know that the Democratic Party is not trying to bring back the days in which Mexican migrant children were forcibly ripped away from their parents and thrown into detention centers by U.S. Border Patrol agents.  In other words, I do not see the Democratic Party as the agent of an attempted revival and expansion of white supremacy.  On the other hand, the Republicans are guilty of all these things.  So I am retracting my original words written for this post.  The retracted words are indicated by strikeout text.  If I find any other posts which contain words which could potentially be seized upon and misused by the Global Far Right, I will post this disclaimer and retraction in those posts also.

I'm grading papers this weekend, so I may not have time for any kind of lengthy post. (I can't wait to get my life back to myself again!) But in taking a short break from grading (also known as goofing off), I came across a priceless gem from the website of Ran Prieur. Mr. Prieur is among the writers and thinkers whose work I read from time to time, although I must say that I don't agree with everything he says. (Some days, I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.)

I did, however, greatly enjoy the following quote:

"So we have an American election in a few days. A common argument against voting is that it trains you to think that working within the system is the best or only way to make a better world. My answer is: could you set the bar for yourself any lower? That's like not watching any commercials because then you won't be able to stop yourself from buying the product. If you don't think you can vote while keeping a healthy mental distance, now would be an excellent time to learn. Your vote is not a precious flower to be given only to the one you love; it is a cold tactical decision, and collectively, it does make a difference.

"You are in a giant building that's on fire. The Democratic party is saying, 'Yes, there was a small fire, but it's mostly under control now. We spent eleven cents on squirt guns and a trillion dollars building some higher floors. Remain calm and go about your business.'

"The Republican party is saying, 'You are in a giant building that's on FIRE! Those people are to blame, and those people, and those people! KILL them! Kill them ALL!! And to put out the fire, we will use gasoline, and white phosphorus! YEEEEEE-HAAAAAAA!!!!'

"Now, if you are trying to get safely out of the building, who would you rather have in charge?"

Amen.

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.