Image above: Guy McPherson on goat duty in the Post Everything world of self-sufficiency. From his article.
By Guy McPherson on 16 May 2010 in Nature Bats Last -
(http://guymcpherson.com/2010/05/a-day-in-the-life-futher-adventures-at-the-mud-hut)
People keep asking me what my days are like. How do I spend a typical day?
Now that I’m retired from the academic life — or rather, now that I’ve departed the academy in disgust and despair — I no longer spend time in my swivel chair, dispensing information on the telephone or tending to the tender young psyche of an overwrought twenty-something. But there is no “typical” day, just as no two days were alike before I abandoned the hallowed halls. Nonetheless, in yet another round of egocentric, navel-gazing story-telling, here goes.
After a fitful night filled with five hours of oft-interrupted sleep, I give up the painful prone position for the slightly less painful standing one. The sun is still behind the mountains, the sky gunmetal gray on this 37-degree spring morning. I flex my fingers, marveling at their one-year transformation from thin and nimble to swollen and brittle, bend my back and neck as they compete for loudest and most frequent popping noises, and gobble a handful of aspirin to start the day.
After putting on my cleanest dirty shirt — one never knows when a neighbor might drop by, after all — I fire up the laptop, respond to a half-dozen email messages, and ignore the list of back-stretching and -strengthening exercises on the table. Maybe tomorrow, when I have more time. No, that won’t work: I have visitors tomorrow and the next day, taking a quick tour of the property to view the arrangements we’ve made. The tea has been steeping while I read and respond, and now I drink it while plowing through a breakfast of cold cereal and piece of fresh fruit as I skim the morning’s counterculture news and commentary. I peek over the computer screen as the sky turns pink, then azure, in the span of a few minutes.
Walking slowly to pick up the hay, I am reminded how pathetic was my attempt at construction on my first-ever awning. It keeps the hay dry, for now, but insufficient pitch and long-abused tin cause the roof to leak, thus prematurely rotting the boards. I carry the flake of alfalfa across the gravel driveway in a plastic “Tucson Recycles” bin, a reminder of my home city of twenty years.
I chuckle as I open the door to the goat pen, an old bed frame I found on the property. After placing the hay into the hand-made manger and filling the water buckets, I release Lillian and Ellie from the insulated goat shed I constructed. Lillian bleats anxiously, knowing she is about to get a quart of grain and relief from her full udder. Ellie, the barrel-shaped three-month-old kid, runs between and then jumps onto the straw bales in the small paddock.
Crossing the driveway, I step into the 15-year-old mobile home and check the temperature in the kitchen: 42 F, a few degrees warmer than outside. I arrange the quart jars, durable coffee filter, and funnel for easy pouring when I have a full bucket of milk, then grab the milking pail and wander back to Lillian. The aches and pains are giving way to an easy gait and appreciation for another beautifully verdant day.
I recall last week’s visitors, a gaggle of university students. After talking for hours about economic collapse, including light’s out in the empire and no water coming through the taps, I was extolling the virtues of living in a “third-world” country with rainwater harvesting and hand-dug wells. A very fit, 20-year-old woman asked for clarification about the wells: “They really dig them by hand?”
I explained that I move as much dirt in an average weekend as required to dig a 20-foot well. Tears welled up, and she turned away.
Economic collapse is fun to talk about, until it becomes personal. And for most people, the personal nature of physical labor is no fun at all.
In the goat shed, I marvel at Lillian’s calm disposition and take quick note of her condition. Her toenails need trimmed, so I’ll get Carol to help with that when she comes back from a week-long visit to the northern half of the state. I marvel, too, at my ability and willingness to tend barnyard animals. I’m feeling good about my new skills despite the criticism from beyond the property. When my parents visited a few months ago, my dad — a product of his culture, steeped in societal economic growth and individual financial success — made a point to watch and comment: “I never thought one of my kids would be reduced to milking a goat.”
Two quarts this morning, same as usual. It’s stacking up in the fridge, so I’ll have to make cheese tomorrow or the next day. I’m partial to Parmesan, but I’ll check the inventory of hard cheeses in the root cellar to make sure we have similar amounts of Parmesan, cheddar, and Monterey Jack. Chevre, mozzarella, and ricotta need to be eaten quickly, and I won’t take time to cook a decent meal based on either of the latter two during the next week.
The milk goes into the freezer for an hour as I let the ducks and chickens out of their respective houses. They’ll range free all day, the ingenious ducks spending most of their time in the irrigation ditch adjacent to the property they discovered after living here only a year. As I gather the eggs, I take note of the trees and gardens on the east end of the property, including the paw paw trees I planted earlier this week. Back in the mobile home, I wash the nine eggs before storing them in the fridge on the shelf below the milk.
I water the seedlings in the garden. The carrots and peas are just emerging, so they need a light shower twice daily. The citrus trees seem to perk up every time I shower their leaves, so I hit them every time I walk past. Continuing to the west end of the property, I give a quick spray of water to the device I constructed for producing compost tea, open the greenhouse and cold frame, check the honeyberry shrubs I planted yesterday, and briefly inspect the three-dozen fruit and nut trees in the orchard. The milk has been in the freezer for its requisite hour, so I hurry back to move the chilled jars into the fridge.
Today’s big task is construction. The still-tender ribs I broke last month working on a similar project remind me to work deliberately as I attach an awning to the cargo container in the northwest corner of the property. We’ll want to store bales of hay and straw and, when we can no longer obtain bales of either, stacks of hay from the peanuts in two large gardens. In time, peanuts will feed us and the goats, as well as improving the soil.
The frame is finished at 1:00 p.m., but only after I pummel my left thumb with a poorly aimed hammer several hundred times, walk back and forth between the stack of lumber and the new awning too many times to count, and nearly fall off the roof. I guess the ribs aren’t a sufficient reminder. I’m thirsty, hot, and tired, and it’s time for lunch and a phone call.
As I eat, I visit on the telephone for ninety minutes with somebody who follows my blog and wants advice about where to live. Earlier this week, it was career advice for a freshly minted Ph.D. and tomorrow’s caller wants to discuss a strategy for telling her parents about peak oil. I harbor no illusions of having answers for any of these callers, and I know the customary caller is wise enough to seek advice beyond mine, but I appreciate any opportunity to discuss reality and how we can respond to it. I suspect my advice is overpriced, even at no charge.
A handful of aspirin later I’m back at the awning, misguided hammer in hand. After a surprisingly smooth afternoon characterized by few bruises and no blood, I complete the awning. I’ve covered the frame with plywood, tarpaper, and tin on an afternoon with temperatures in the mid-80s. Sweating and sore, I barely have time to hand-water the large garden behind the mobile home, trying not to notice how badly the beds need weeded, before my evening encounter with Lillian. Were Carol here today, the goats would have been walked a couple times, with special attention to the abundant weeds on the east end of the property.
Distracting Ellie with a little grain in her own bucket, I close the door to the goat shed and Lillian steps up on the stanchion I built to ease the milking operation. I apply bag balm after I finish milking her, give Ellie a pat on the head, and head to the mobile home to strain the milk into two more quart jars.
Supper is the same as lunch: rice and beans left over from last night’s supper. A quick shower removes the first layer of grime before I put the goats into their lion-proof shed, lock the chickens into their skunk-proof coop, and herd the ducks into their raccoon-proof house. The setting sun sets the sky afire before unleashing the Milky Way.
One more round with the imperial screen of death allows me to catch up with a couple dozen email messages while viewing the latest dire news about the ecological collapse we’re bringing to every corner of the globe. A cup of herbal tea to wash down more aspirin, a few pages of Nietzsche in the silence of the straw-bale house, and I tumble into bed. Sleep comes slowly and poorly, as it has since the summer of 1979 when I last logged six consecutive hours of sleep. Even then, my nagging subconscious was trying to tell me something about the empire wasn’t quite right.
Sadly, it took me decades to figure out the problem. More sadly, most imperial Americans are well behind me on the learning curve.
Typical Day at the Mud Hut
SUBHEAD: A typical day in the life of Guy McPherson of Nature Bats Last.
Image above: Guy McPherson on goat duty in the Post Everything world of self-sufficiency. From his article.
By Guy McPherson on 16 May 2010 in Nature Bats Last -
(http://guymcpherson.com/2010/05/a-day-in-the-life-futher-adventures-at-the-mud-hut)
People keep asking me what my days are like. How do I spend a typical day?
Now that I’m retired from the academic life — or rather, now that I’ve departed the academy in disgust and despair — I no longer spend time in my swivel chair, dispensing information on the telephone or tending to the tender young psyche of an overwrought twenty-something. But there is no “typical” day, just as no two days were alike before I abandoned the hallowed halls. Nonetheless, in yet another round of egocentric, navel-gazing story-telling, here goes.
After a fitful night filled with five hours of oft-interrupted sleep, I give up the painful prone position for the slightly less painful standing one. The sun is still behind the mountains, the sky gunmetal gray on this 37-degree spring morning. I flex my fingers, marveling at their one-year transformation from thin and nimble to swollen and brittle, bend my back and neck as they compete for loudest and most frequent popping noises, and gobble a handful of aspirin to start the day.
After putting on my cleanest dirty shirt — one never knows when a neighbor might drop by, after all — I fire up the laptop, respond to a half-dozen email messages, and ignore the list of back-stretching and -strengthening exercises on the table. Maybe tomorrow, when I have more time. No, that won’t work: I have visitors tomorrow and the next day, taking a quick tour of the property to view the arrangements we’ve made. The tea has been steeping while I read and respond, and now I drink it while plowing through a breakfast of cold cereal and piece of fresh fruit as I skim the morning’s counterculture news and commentary. I peek over the computer screen as the sky turns pink, then azure, in the span of a few minutes.
Walking slowly to pick up the hay, I am reminded how pathetic was my attempt at construction on my first-ever awning. It keeps the hay dry, for now, but insufficient pitch and long-abused tin cause the roof to leak, thus prematurely rotting the boards. I carry the flake of alfalfa across the gravel driveway in a plastic “Tucson Recycles” bin, a reminder of my home city of twenty years.
I chuckle as I open the door to the goat pen, an old bed frame I found on the property. After placing the hay into the hand-made manger and filling the water buckets, I release Lillian and Ellie from the insulated goat shed I constructed. Lillian bleats anxiously, knowing she is about to get a quart of grain and relief from her full udder. Ellie, the barrel-shaped three-month-old kid, runs between and then jumps onto the straw bales in the small paddock.
Crossing the driveway, I step into the 15-year-old mobile home and check the temperature in the kitchen: 42 F, a few degrees warmer than outside. I arrange the quart jars, durable coffee filter, and funnel for easy pouring when I have a full bucket of milk, then grab the milking pail and wander back to Lillian. The aches and pains are giving way to an easy gait and appreciation for another beautifully verdant day.
I recall last week’s visitors, a gaggle of university students. After talking for hours about economic collapse, including light’s out in the empire and no water coming through the taps, I was extolling the virtues of living in a “third-world” country with rainwater harvesting and hand-dug wells. A very fit, 20-year-old woman asked for clarification about the wells: “They really dig them by hand?”
I explained that I move as much dirt in an average weekend as required to dig a 20-foot well. Tears welled up, and she turned away.
Economic collapse is fun to talk about, until it becomes personal. And for most people, the personal nature of physical labor is no fun at all.
In the goat shed, I marvel at Lillian’s calm disposition and take quick note of her condition. Her toenails need trimmed, so I’ll get Carol to help with that when she comes back from a week-long visit to the northern half of the state. I marvel, too, at my ability and willingness to tend barnyard animals. I’m feeling good about my new skills despite the criticism from beyond the property. When my parents visited a few months ago, my dad — a product of his culture, steeped in societal economic growth and individual financial success — made a point to watch and comment: “I never thought one of my kids would be reduced to milking a goat.”
Two quarts this morning, same as usual. It’s stacking up in the fridge, so I’ll have to make cheese tomorrow or the next day. I’m partial to Parmesan, but I’ll check the inventory of hard cheeses in the root cellar to make sure we have similar amounts of Parmesan, cheddar, and Monterey Jack. Chevre, mozzarella, and ricotta need to be eaten quickly, and I won’t take time to cook a decent meal based on either of the latter two during the next week.
The milk goes into the freezer for an hour as I let the ducks and chickens out of their respective houses. They’ll range free all day, the ingenious ducks spending most of their time in the irrigation ditch adjacent to the property they discovered after living here only a year. As I gather the eggs, I take note of the trees and gardens on the east end of the property, including the paw paw trees I planted earlier this week. Back in the mobile home, I wash the nine eggs before storing them in the fridge on the shelf below the milk.
I water the seedlings in the garden. The carrots and peas are just emerging, so they need a light shower twice daily. The citrus trees seem to perk up every time I shower their leaves, so I hit them every time I walk past. Continuing to the west end of the property, I give a quick spray of water to the device I constructed for producing compost tea, open the greenhouse and cold frame, check the honeyberry shrubs I planted yesterday, and briefly inspect the three-dozen fruit and nut trees in the orchard. The milk has been in the freezer for its requisite hour, so I hurry back to move the chilled jars into the fridge.
Today’s big task is construction. The still-tender ribs I broke last month working on a similar project remind me to work deliberately as I attach an awning to the cargo container in the northwest corner of the property. We’ll want to store bales of hay and straw and, when we can no longer obtain bales of either, stacks of hay from the peanuts in two large gardens. In time, peanuts will feed us and the goats, as well as improving the soil.
The frame is finished at 1:00 p.m., but only after I pummel my left thumb with a poorly aimed hammer several hundred times, walk back and forth between the stack of lumber and the new awning too many times to count, and nearly fall off the roof. I guess the ribs aren’t a sufficient reminder. I’m thirsty, hot, and tired, and it’s time for lunch and a phone call.
As I eat, I visit on the telephone for ninety minutes with somebody who follows my blog and wants advice about where to live. Earlier this week, it was career advice for a freshly minted Ph.D. and tomorrow’s caller wants to discuss a strategy for telling her parents about peak oil. I harbor no illusions of having answers for any of these callers, and I know the customary caller is wise enough to seek advice beyond mine, but I appreciate any opportunity to discuss reality and how we can respond to it. I suspect my advice is overpriced, even at no charge.
A handful of aspirin later I’m back at the awning, misguided hammer in hand. After a surprisingly smooth afternoon characterized by few bruises and no blood, I complete the awning. I’ve covered the frame with plywood, tarpaper, and tin on an afternoon with temperatures in the mid-80s. Sweating and sore, I barely have time to hand-water the large garden behind the mobile home, trying not to notice how badly the beds need weeded, before my evening encounter with Lillian. Were Carol here today, the goats would have been walked a couple times, with special attention to the abundant weeds on the east end of the property.
Distracting Ellie with a little grain in her own bucket, I close the door to the goat shed and Lillian steps up on the stanchion I built to ease the milking operation. I apply bag balm after I finish milking her, give Ellie a pat on the head, and head to the mobile home to strain the milk into two more quart jars.
Supper is the same as lunch: rice and beans left over from last night’s supper. A quick shower removes the first layer of grime before I put the goats into their lion-proof shed, lock the chickens into their skunk-proof coop, and herd the ducks into their raccoon-proof house. The setting sun sets the sky afire before unleashing the Milky Way.
One more round with the imperial screen of death allows me to catch up with a couple dozen email messages while viewing the latest dire news about the ecological collapse we’re bringing to every corner of the globe. A cup of herbal tea to wash down more aspirin, a few pages of Nietzsche in the silence of the straw-bale house, and I tumble into bed. Sleep comes slowly and poorly, as it has since the summer of 1979 when I last logged six consecutive hours of sleep. Even then, my nagging subconscious was trying to tell me something about the empire wasn’t quite right.
Sadly, it took me decades to figure out the problem. More sadly, most imperial Americans are well behind me on the learning curve.
Image above: Guy McPherson on goat duty in the Post Everything world of self-sufficiency. From his article.
By Guy McPherson on 16 May 2010 in Nature Bats Last -
(http://guymcpherson.com/2010/05/a-day-in-the-life-futher-adventures-at-the-mud-hut)
People keep asking me what my days are like. How do I spend a typical day?
Now that I’m retired from the academic life — or rather, now that I’ve departed the academy in disgust and despair — I no longer spend time in my swivel chair, dispensing information on the telephone or tending to the tender young psyche of an overwrought twenty-something. But there is no “typical” day, just as no two days were alike before I abandoned the hallowed halls. Nonetheless, in yet another round of egocentric, navel-gazing story-telling, here goes.
After a fitful night filled with five hours of oft-interrupted sleep, I give up the painful prone position for the slightly less painful standing one. The sun is still behind the mountains, the sky gunmetal gray on this 37-degree spring morning. I flex my fingers, marveling at their one-year transformation from thin and nimble to swollen and brittle, bend my back and neck as they compete for loudest and most frequent popping noises, and gobble a handful of aspirin to start the day.
After putting on my cleanest dirty shirt — one never knows when a neighbor might drop by, after all — I fire up the laptop, respond to a half-dozen email messages, and ignore the list of back-stretching and -strengthening exercises on the table. Maybe tomorrow, when I have more time. No, that won’t work: I have visitors tomorrow and the next day, taking a quick tour of the property to view the arrangements we’ve made. The tea has been steeping while I read and respond, and now I drink it while plowing through a breakfast of cold cereal and piece of fresh fruit as I skim the morning’s counterculture news and commentary. I peek over the computer screen as the sky turns pink, then azure, in the span of a few minutes.
Walking slowly to pick up the hay, I am reminded how pathetic was my attempt at construction on my first-ever awning. It keeps the hay dry, for now, but insufficient pitch and long-abused tin cause the roof to leak, thus prematurely rotting the boards. I carry the flake of alfalfa across the gravel driveway in a plastic “Tucson Recycles” bin, a reminder of my home city of twenty years.
I chuckle as I open the door to the goat pen, an old bed frame I found on the property. After placing the hay into the hand-made manger and filling the water buckets, I release Lillian and Ellie from the insulated goat shed I constructed. Lillian bleats anxiously, knowing she is about to get a quart of grain and relief from her full udder. Ellie, the barrel-shaped three-month-old kid, runs between and then jumps onto the straw bales in the small paddock.
Crossing the driveway, I step into the 15-year-old mobile home and check the temperature in the kitchen: 42 F, a few degrees warmer than outside. I arrange the quart jars, durable coffee filter, and funnel for easy pouring when I have a full bucket of milk, then grab the milking pail and wander back to Lillian. The aches and pains are giving way to an easy gait and appreciation for another beautifully verdant day.
I recall last week’s visitors, a gaggle of university students. After talking for hours about economic collapse, including light’s out in the empire and no water coming through the taps, I was extolling the virtues of living in a “third-world” country with rainwater harvesting and hand-dug wells. A very fit, 20-year-old woman asked for clarification about the wells: “They really dig them by hand?”
I explained that I move as much dirt in an average weekend as required to dig a 20-foot well. Tears welled up, and she turned away.
Economic collapse is fun to talk about, until it becomes personal. And for most people, the personal nature of physical labor is no fun at all.
In the goat shed, I marvel at Lillian’s calm disposition and take quick note of her condition. Her toenails need trimmed, so I’ll get Carol to help with that when she comes back from a week-long visit to the northern half of the state. I marvel, too, at my ability and willingness to tend barnyard animals. I’m feeling good about my new skills despite the criticism from beyond the property. When my parents visited a few months ago, my dad — a product of his culture, steeped in societal economic growth and individual financial success — made a point to watch and comment: “I never thought one of my kids would be reduced to milking a goat.”
Two quarts this morning, same as usual. It’s stacking up in the fridge, so I’ll have to make cheese tomorrow or the next day. I’m partial to Parmesan, but I’ll check the inventory of hard cheeses in the root cellar to make sure we have similar amounts of Parmesan, cheddar, and Monterey Jack. Chevre, mozzarella, and ricotta need to be eaten quickly, and I won’t take time to cook a decent meal based on either of the latter two during the next week.
The milk goes into the freezer for an hour as I let the ducks and chickens out of their respective houses. They’ll range free all day, the ingenious ducks spending most of their time in the irrigation ditch adjacent to the property they discovered after living here only a year. As I gather the eggs, I take note of the trees and gardens on the east end of the property, including the paw paw trees I planted earlier this week. Back in the mobile home, I wash the nine eggs before storing them in the fridge on the shelf below the milk.
I water the seedlings in the garden. The carrots and peas are just emerging, so they need a light shower twice daily. The citrus trees seem to perk up every time I shower their leaves, so I hit them every time I walk past. Continuing to the west end of the property, I give a quick spray of water to the device I constructed for producing compost tea, open the greenhouse and cold frame, check the honeyberry shrubs I planted yesterday, and briefly inspect the three-dozen fruit and nut trees in the orchard. The milk has been in the freezer for its requisite hour, so I hurry back to move the chilled jars into the fridge.
Today’s big task is construction. The still-tender ribs I broke last month working on a similar project remind me to work deliberately as I attach an awning to the cargo container in the northwest corner of the property. We’ll want to store bales of hay and straw and, when we can no longer obtain bales of either, stacks of hay from the peanuts in two large gardens. In time, peanuts will feed us and the goats, as well as improving the soil.
The frame is finished at 1:00 p.m., but only after I pummel my left thumb with a poorly aimed hammer several hundred times, walk back and forth between the stack of lumber and the new awning too many times to count, and nearly fall off the roof. I guess the ribs aren’t a sufficient reminder. I’m thirsty, hot, and tired, and it’s time for lunch and a phone call.
As I eat, I visit on the telephone for ninety minutes with somebody who follows my blog and wants advice about where to live. Earlier this week, it was career advice for a freshly minted Ph.D. and tomorrow’s caller wants to discuss a strategy for telling her parents about peak oil. I harbor no illusions of having answers for any of these callers, and I know the customary caller is wise enough to seek advice beyond mine, but I appreciate any opportunity to discuss reality and how we can respond to it. I suspect my advice is overpriced, even at no charge.
A handful of aspirin later I’m back at the awning, misguided hammer in hand. After a surprisingly smooth afternoon characterized by few bruises and no blood, I complete the awning. I’ve covered the frame with plywood, tarpaper, and tin on an afternoon with temperatures in the mid-80s. Sweating and sore, I barely have time to hand-water the large garden behind the mobile home, trying not to notice how badly the beds need weeded, before my evening encounter with Lillian. Were Carol here today, the goats would have been walked a couple times, with special attention to the abundant weeds on the east end of the property.
Distracting Ellie with a little grain in her own bucket, I close the door to the goat shed and Lillian steps up on the stanchion I built to ease the milking operation. I apply bag balm after I finish milking her, give Ellie a pat on the head, and head to the mobile home to strain the milk into two more quart jars.
Supper is the same as lunch: rice and beans left over from last night’s supper. A quick shower removes the first layer of grime before I put the goats into their lion-proof shed, lock the chickens into their skunk-proof coop, and herd the ducks into their raccoon-proof house. The setting sun sets the sky afire before unleashing the Milky Way.
One more round with the imperial screen of death allows me to catch up with a couple dozen email messages while viewing the latest dire news about the ecological collapse we’re bringing to every corner of the globe. A cup of herbal tea to wash down more aspirin, a few pages of Nietzsche in the silence of the straw-bale house, and I tumble into bed. Sleep comes slowly and poorly, as it has since the summer of 1979 when I last logged six consecutive hours of sleep. Even then, my nagging subconscious was trying to tell me something about the empire wasn’t quite right.
Sadly, it took me decades to figure out the problem. More sadly, most imperial Americans are well behind me on the learning curve.
Gorilla Encounter
SUBHEAD: Damian Aspinall's reunion, with great ape Kwibi, after five years in the jungle of Gabon.
Image above: Still from 4:00 minute video of gorilla encounter. See below.
By Staff on 21 April 2010 for AquaVitaFilms -
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ-bJFVJ2P0)
In the African jungle, conservationist Damian Aspinall searches for Kwibi, a lowland gorilla he hasn't seen for 5 years. Kwibi grew up with Damian at his Howletts Wild Animal Park in England. When he was five, he was released into the forests of Gabon, West Africa as part of conservation programme to re-introduce gorillas back into the wild. Now Kwibi's 10 years old, much bigger and stronger. Will Damian find him? Will Kwibi attack him?
Watch the whole story of the amazing UK gorillas who are making a comeback in Africa in Gorilla School on Animal Planet narrated by Kevin Spacey from 4th May 2010 at 8pm.Adopt a Gorilla School baby: http://www.aspinallfoundation.org/ado...
Video Above: Produced by Aqua Vita Films Ltd http://www.aquavitafilms.com
http://www.gorillaschool.com
.
Image above: Still from 4:00 minute video of gorilla encounter. See below.
By Staff on 21 April 2010 for AquaVitaFilms -
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ-bJFVJ2P0)
In the African jungle, conservationist Damian Aspinall searches for Kwibi, a lowland gorilla he hasn't seen for 5 years. Kwibi grew up with Damian at his Howletts Wild Animal Park in England. When he was five, he was released into the forests of Gabon, West Africa as part of conservation programme to re-introduce gorillas back into the wild. Now Kwibi's 10 years old, much bigger and stronger. Will Damian find him? Will Kwibi attack him?
Watch the whole story of the amazing UK gorillas who are making a comeback in Africa in Gorilla School on Animal Planet narrated by Kevin Spacey from 4th May 2010 at 8pm.Adopt a Gorilla School baby: http://www.aspinallfoundation.org/ado...
Video Above: Produced by Aqua Vita Films Ltd http://www.aquavitafilms.com
http://www.gorillaschool.com
.
Twang! Something Happened!
SUBHEAD: Something snapped in the world last week. The Long Emergency has now up-shifted to second gear.
Image above: The Buffalo Springfield band in Redondo Beach, California in 1966. Among them, Stephan Stills (top left) and Neil Young (bot left). From (http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2008/01/buffalo_springfield_redondo_be.html).
Image above: The Buffalo Springfield band in Redondo Beach, California in 1966. Among them, Stephan Stills (top left) and Neil Young (bot left). From (http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2008/01/buffalo_springfield_redondo_be.html).
There's something happinin' here. What it is ain't exactly clear. Theres a man with a gun over there, tellin' me I got to beware. I think it's time we stop! Children, what's that sound? Everybody look, what's goin' down. - Buffalo Springfield "Stop! Hey, what's that sound?" 1966By James Kunstler on 17 May 2010 in Kunstler.com - (http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/05/something-happened.html) Everybody in the world is broke, except for maybe Lloyd Blankfein, and he may not end up broke so much as broken -- by a political meat-grinder that is revving up to turn the world's woes and swindles into a new kind of Long Emergency sausage, to be distributed among the roiling, angry masses as a synthetic substitute for nutriment. Call it a synthetic non-collateralized political obligation.
Something snapped in the world last week and a lot of people around the world sensed it -- especially in the organs of news and opinion -- but this ominous twang was not very clearly identified. It was, in fact, the sound of the financial becoming political. The macro-swindle of a worldwide Ponzi orgy now stands revealed and the vacuum left in its place is about to suck everything familiar into it -- standards-of-living, hopes, dreams, not to mention lives. The political action will be a desperate scramble to determine who and what is able to escape getting sucked into this black hole of annihilation. It's very suddenly shaping up to become an epic in human history.
Meanwhile, a giant oil blob lies quivering in deep waters off the Gulf coast, like some awful amorphous Moby Dick full of malice waiting to sink Pequod America -- or at least the economies of five states. A few months from now, the BP corporation will wonder why it didn't go into something safe and predictable like the pants business instead of oil exploration.
They will surely question the viability of conducting future business anywhere near the USA, and the USA will enter a wilderness of soul-searching about the drill-baby-drill strategy that only a few scant weeks ago seemed to be a settled matter. Tough to have your future hoped-for energy supplies evaporate at the same time that your hopes for future prosperity get sucked into a black hole.
I've maintained for a long time that the folks down Dixie way are the the most dangerously crazy people in America and the Deepwater Horizon oil blob is not going to improve their outlook when it slops over their beaches and bayous. They'll blame Obama for it by syllogism. Anyway, they are only marginally more crazy than the rest of the folks in the USA.
Those folks are warming up for an election season that is going to send a horde of exterminating angels into the halls of congress and the governor's mansions, and before too long those merchants of retribution are going to appoint their inquisitors. It's going to be a heckuva spectacle. In retrospect, Mary Shapiro's SEC will look like the Council of Trent. You can be sure that if ten gallons of gasoline remain to be found in America a few years from now, they will power the last GMC Sierra to drag the captains of Wall Street through the sawgrass prairies of Collier County, Florida.
What has gone on in Europe the past few weeks is nothing more complicated than a waking-up to how broke they are. We're not quite there yet on this side of the Atlantic. They fired one last bazooka of wishfulness at the enveloping monster of debt and the monster laughed at them, and now they are standing in the windows of palatial edifice of the Euro Union waiting to see who will jump first.
Here in the USA, we're still dazed and confused. What for a long time had looked like a game of musical chairs is morphing into something more like a national Chinese fire drill, a pointless running around in circles in the hope that sheer motion will be an adequate substitute for conscious action. In any case, both Europe and the USA are out of bazooka ammo now. Nobody can bail out so much as another lemonade stand. From here on governments really start to crumble.
As in any time of severe turmoil, all political bets are off. There are insinuations in the press, for instance, that the communists will rise up in Greece and overthrow the elected government. That's rich, since communism was flushed down the human race's credibility toilet twenty years ago. The Greek opposition may even call themselves communists, but what on earth could they mean by that? There are no "means of production" left in a country whose economy consists solely of cab-drivers, bellboys, and waiters. There's no "wealth" to redistribute, only the pain of collective economic loss when the tourists stop landing. Elsewhere in Europe, each national house is being outfitted with a procrustean bed of austerity. The various publics are not going to like lying in them.
History being the shape-shifting demon that it is, I imagine that this time around the Brits will be the ones who elect Nazis --or something like them -- while the still-chastened Germans find themselves in the odd position of becoming Europe's moral guardian -- its sole-surviving "good parent" figure, striving to maintain some residue of collective goodwill in Europe's once-ritzy gated community. Great historical figures always arise from unexpected places -- Corsica, Kentucky. Maybe some great unifying leader even now warms a seat in a Norwegian law school.
God knows what the Europeans will make of the helter-skelter scene playing out here in the States. Perhaps some species of schadenfreude tinged with regret for the missing stream of tourists. My own guess is that there may not even be a president of the US after Mr. Obama. Rather, events will get so gnarly and disordered so fast that somebody like General Patraeus will have to step in for a while and keep the reincarnation of the Ku Klux Klan from trying to murder every non-Cracker from sea to shining sea.
Of course, once that happens, we probably don't go back. It's not Imperial Rome (release 2.0) after that, either, because even the mighty US military will be too strapped for a means of support to continue operating. Instead, it's the devolution of the US into functionally autonomous regions and states -- and even that scale of governance may be too great for the stringent economic realities of the years ahead.
There remains, of course, the very great question of what the rest of people of the world -- the non-Western world -- do as the West spins into insolvency and tribulation. The Islamists will do everything possible to make things worse, and there's a lot they can do, from restricting their oil exports (maybe cutting them off altogether) to provoking the immigrant populations of Europe into political violence to possibly setting a few nukes off in their enemy's front yard.
The Chinese will affect to referee the collapse of the West, but soon they'll be sucked into their own implosion of population overshoot and resource scarcity. India you can forget about out -- zero oil. Russia gets to kick back in glorious isolation and enjoy the methane fumes of the melting tundra. South America will heed the wise words of a forgotten 18th Century Viceroy of Mexico who explained his method of administration thusly: "Do little, and do it slowly!"
The Long Emergency has now up-shifted to second gear. Wouldn't you know it, I have to go to Europe at the end of the month. And I'm supposed to get paid in Euros -- oh, snap! .
China's Coal Bubble
SUBHEAD: Continued Chinese economic growth will push the cost of coal up and derail U.S. efforts to develop "Clean Coal".
Image above: A seemingly endless coal train winding its way through the American landscape. From (http://www.enviromedia.com/enviroblog/?tag=leaded-gasoline).
By Richard Heinberg on 4 May 2010 at RichardHeinberg.com - (http://richardheinberg.com/216-chinas-coal-bubble-and-how-it-will-deflate-u-s-efforts-to-develop-clean-coal)
The conventional wisdom in energy-and-environment circles is that:
China’s economy, which is growing at a rate of eight percent or more per year, is mostly coal powered today and will continue to be so for decades to come. Coal is cheap and abundant, and China uses far more of it than any other nation. The country is trying to develop other energy sources fast—including nuclear, solar, and wind—but these won’t be sufficient to reduce its reliance on coal. That’s one of the reasons it is important for the U.S. to develop “clean coal” technology, which China can then begin to adopt so as to reduce the horrific climate impacts of its coal-heavy energy mix.
Most of this conventional wisdom is correct, but some of it is plain wrong—so wrong, in fact, that environment-, economic-, and energy-policy wonks are constructing scenarios for the future of U.S. and world energy, and for the global economy, that bear little or no resemblance to the reality that is unfolding.
Let’s see if we can sort what’s right from what’s not, and see also if doing so can help us paint a more accurate picture of where China, and the rest of the world, are actually headed.
Runaway Train
It is true of course that China’s coal consumption is enormous and growing, and that coal is the basis of the Chinese economy, fueling over 80 percent of electricity generation. China’s coal output grew an astonishing 28.1 percent from first quarter 2009 to first quarter 2010, to over 750 million metric tons consumed in just the past three months. But this is a situation that is patently unsustainable—not just because of the carbon emissions it entails, but because China simply doesn’t have enough coal to continue growing its consumption much longer.
Start with the stats and do some simple math. China is now mining and burning over three billion tons of coal per year. If the nation’s coal consumption grows at, say, seven percent per year, that means consumption will double in ten years (its annual growth rate was actually over nine percent in one or two of the last several years, implying a doubling every eight years—but let’s be conservative and assume seven percent growth). In that case, by 2020 China would be using about six billion tons per annum.
It takes some reflection to come to terms with the enormity of these figures. In 2000, China’s coal consumption was only marginally higher than that of the U.S. Today, a decade later, it is three times U.S. consumption. (It is worth noting that the U.S. has double China’s coal reserves.)
Combine unprecedented consumption levels with furious growth rates and you quickly arrive at absurdities and impossibilities. As in, it won’t happen. The wheels will fall off the wagon first.
There Are Limits
It takes infrastructure to mine and use coal. Rails and rail wagons, plus trucks and roads, are needed to move coal from mines to power plants. Then there are the mines themselves, as well as the boilers and turbines that actually produce electricity. (In this essay we will not further consider the vital importance of coal to China’s steel industry, and the necessity of steel for manufacturing and economic growth in general.)
China is building all of these at a frenetic pace—but the relentless math of exponential growth is starting to hit home. Doubling small levels of production and consumption is relatively easy in practical terms, but, as quantities expand, the task balloons. China accomplished an amazing feat by adding almost two billion tons per year of coal production and consumption capacity and transport infrastructure during the past decade. Adding another three billion tons per year of capacity during the next decade would be—well, nearly twice as big a feat. Imagine building mining and transport infrastructure three times the size of the entire U.S. coal and rail industries in just ten years. That’s what it will take for China to maintain seven percent growth rates.
It takes other resources to consume coal; crucially, water is needed to run coal power plants. A typical 500-megawatt coal-fired power plant uses about 2.2 billion gallons of water each year to create steam for turning its turbines—enough water to support a city of 250,000 people. In recent months droughts have wracked huge sections of China, idling hydroelectric dams and stoking demand for coal. If the droughts recur and worsen (as climate-change scenarios suggest), at some point nuclear and coal power plants will be forced to shut down as well, leading to the kinds of electricity supply problems that are already plaguing Pakistan and dozens of other nations, where the lights are off for hours each day even in the largest cities.
And so, partly due to these factors, but primarily because most of the highways, shopping malls, and appliances that the Chinese people are likely to need for a while have by now already been built, China is entering a period characterized by what are called “saturation effects,” which will result in significant slowdowns in key industrial energy consuming sectors of the economy. China’s infrastructure boom that has driven so much of energy demand growth in the past decade has probably peaked, so that growth in cement and steel demand will soon taper off. While the nation’s stimulus package, representing 40 percent of GDP, has extended the party, it will play out over the next year or so and probably can’t be repeated.
But that still leaves a smoldering question: can China’s coal industry continue to supply domestic demand with even modest rates of growth going forward, declining perhaps to something more on the order of two percent per year?
If It’s Not There, You Can’t Burn It
According to the World Coal Institute, China has reserves totaling a little over 110 billion tons. That’s almost 37 years’ worth of coal at current rates of consumption (i.e., three billion tons per year). But to assume that China won’t have coal supply problems until 37 years have passed is also to assume two absurdities: that Chinese demand, production, and consumption of coal will remain constant; and that after maintaining this steady rate of extraction and consumption for 37 years, China will one day suddenly discover that its coal has run out.
In the real world, China’s demand for coal is expected to grow. Adding ten percent annual consumption growth to the forecast would yield a reserves lifetime of only 16 years. While a sustained rate of growth this high is extremely unlikely, the principle is worth keeping in mind.
Also in the real world, production profiles plotted over time assume the shape of a distorted bell curve that starts at zero and ends at zero, with a peak somewhere in between. We know this is true for coal extraction because several regions in the world have already seen a peak and substantial decline of extraction rates, while no region has so far managed to maintain a high, steady rate of production (or a growing rate of production) until reserves suddenly reached exhaustion. This means that China’s coal production will peak and begin to decline significantly sooner than reserves-to-production ratios (37 at steady rates, or 16 with ten percent annual growth) would suggest.
Could China increase its coal reserves? In principle, yes. Reserves are defined as the portion of the total coal resource base that geologists believe can be mined economically. New mining technology and higher coal prices could impact those estimates. However, the overwhelming trend globally is for reserves to be downgraded to mere resources as geologists take into account more restrictions on the amount of coal that is practically recoverable—restrictions like location, depth, seam thickness, and coal quality. It is this general trend that causes some analysts to doubt China’s official reserves figure of 187 billion tons (which is notably higher than estimates published by World Energy Council, World Coal Institute, and others): the coal is certainly there, but—like the great majority of coal elsewhere in the world—most of it is probably destined to stay right where it is.
In my 2009 book Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis, I surveyed four studies forecasting the timing of the peak of China’s coal production. At one extreme, a 2006 study by Energy Watch Group of Germany used a reserves figure of 62.2 billion tons to forecast a peak of production for 2015, with a rapid production decline commencing in 2020. At the other extreme was a 2007 study by Chinese academics Tao and Li published in Energy Policy, which used the Chinese government’s official coal reserves figure of 187 billion tons to arrive at a peaking date between 2025 and 2032.
None of these forecasts envisioned the rapid growth in Chinese coal production that has actually occurred over the past few years. This predictive failure could be interpreted in one of two ways: it suggests either that China’s coal reserves are larger than previously estimated, thus permitting a higher sustained rate of extraction; or that Chinese officials have forced extraction rates to the absolute maximum level sooner rather than later in order to support economic growth, thus hastening the production peak—which could therefore possibly occur even before the earliest forecast date (2015).
No Alternatives
Economic growth requires energy, and China needs economic growth to maintain domestic political stability and international competitiveness. If there’s not enough coal to support the nation’s energy growth, then other options must be considered.
China is developing alternative energy sources; can these be brought on line fast enough to make a difference? Let’s do some numbers. China aims to have 100 gigawatts (GW) of wind power capacity by 2020, and the nation’s leaders plan to expand installed solar capacity to 20 GW during the same period. These are truly astonishing goals, and, if China even comes close to accomplishing them, it will become the world’s renewable energy leader. But there is a problem: total Chinese electricity generation capacity is 900 GW currently; with seven percent growth, that means the nation’s electricity demand in 2020 will be something like 1800 GW. Wind and solar together would supply less than seven percent of that. The only thing likely to boost that percentage much would be a dramatic reduction in growth of energy demand to, say, two percent annually.
The situation with nuclear power is similar: China has 11 atomic power plants now and is in the process of building 20 more, with a target of 60 GW of generating capacity, or possibly more, by 2020. But this will supply only between three and five percent of total electricity demand, depending on energy demand growth rates.
The conclusion is unsettling but inescapable: China’s reliance on coal cannot be significantly reduced as long as its demand for electrical power continues to grow at anything like current rates. And even if energy demand growth tapers off and alternative energy sources come on line quickly, the country’s ability to supply enough coal domestically will still be challenged.
Imports Can’t Make Up the Difference
China has been self-sufficient in coal until recently (importing some coal but exporting just as much or more), but supply problems over the last couple of years have led to burgeoning imports and shrinking exports. If Chinese coal mines can no longer cover the nation’s demand, why not just expand imports still further to make up the difference?
China will import 150 million tons (Mt) of coal this year, twice what it imported last year. That’s not much, if we think of it as a percentage of the nation’s total coal consumption. But that 150 Mt represents over 60 percent of the total exports of Australia, the world’s top coal exporter. This means if Chinese imports double again next year—not an unrealistic scenario—China will need to import more coal than Australia can currently provide. One more doubling of import demand and China will be wanting to import 600 million tons per year, about the total amount of coal exported by all exporting nations last year.
Can Australia expand its coal production? Yes, it can and no doubt will. Likewise Indonesia and South Africa. But will any or all of these countries be able to grow exports fast enough to keep up with Chinese demand? Again, expansion will be limited by infrastructure requirements—ships, ports, trains, and rails. It takes time to build all of these. By the latter decades of the 21st century, Australia could be the world’s biggest coal producer, even though that nation’s coal reserves are smaller than those of the U.S., China, or India. (How can this be? It would simply occur as a result of the latter high-consuming nations gobbling up their own reserves so quickly and so soon; Australia has been a fairly minor producer up to this point.) But that will do China little good over the next decade or so, if its domestic coal production peaks and goes into steep decline.
China’s increasing reliance on coal imports is not good news for India, Europe, and other coal importers. India burns 500 Mt of coal per year and is facing growing problems with its domestic mining industry. The solution appears to be, unsurprisingly, to import more coal. India wants to grow its economy at seven percent annually, just as the Chinese are doing, and India’s economy is just as coal-dependent as China’s.
Until recently, coal has been a resource used mostly in the country of origin. Internationally traded coal was a fairly small percentage of the total amount consumed globally—a situation quite different from that with oil, over half of which is exported from the country of origin. However, there is an increasing trend toward the development of an integrated global coal market—and it appears that trend is about to go into overdrive.
This means that if Chinese and Indian demand for coal imports pushes up the price for export coal (as it almost certainly will, and probably quite dramatically), the result will be higher coal prices everywhere—even within nations that are self-sufficient in the resource. After all, if a coal mining company in the U.S. can get twice the price for its product by selling it abroad as opposed to selling it domestically, won’t it opt to export? Unless governments implement export curbs or domestic price caps, the international export price of coal will end up being the domestic price for countries everywhere.
Yet if coal prices go too high, that will cause demand to fall, as potential coal buyers choose other energy sources or simply do without. The result will be the same kind of volatility in coal prices as we have seen in oil prices over the past few years. That price volatility will undermine energy markets in general, and poorer nations that use coal will consistently be outbid.
Implication for the U.S.: Forget “Clean Coal”
Now: what does any of this have to do with “clean coal” technology?
Also known as Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), “clean coal” is touted as the solution to one of the biggest conundrums facing industrial civilization in the 21st century: how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus prevent catastrophic climate change, while maintaining growth in energy supplies and therefore in economic activity. Since nobody in a position of authority can seemingly figure out how to maintain economic growth while cutting coal out of the energy equation globally, and since nearly everyone assumes coal will remain cheap and abundant far into the foreseeable future, the obvious answer to the dilemma is to find a way to continue burning increasing amounts of coal while keeping the resulting CO2 from going into the atmosphere.
We know this can be done—on a small scale. All of the elements of the technology are already working in various pilot projects. Oil companies already inject carbon dioxide into oil wells to increase production. Pipelines, compressors, pumps—none of these requires quantum physics.
There are two hitches: the difficulty of scaling up such an enterprise, and its impact on electricity prices. As many analysts have pointed out, the sheer size of the proposed operation—if deployed nationally in the U.S. alone, let alone the entire world—will be mind-boggling. And the costs of all those pipelines, pumps, compressors, and new coal gasification power plants (these are needed because it’s really difficult and expensive to add CCS onto existing pulverized coal burning power plants) add up quickly and steeply. Every energy analyst agrees that this will boost the cost of electricity.
Still, the scheme might just barely work—as long as coal prices remain constant.
However, add much higher coal prices to the equation and the result is electricity costs that will significantly dampen economic growth, make other energy sources comparatively more economically viable—or both. Conclusion: “clean coal” is an idea whose time will never come.
Now, there are other reasons for assuming that U.S. coal prices will be higher in a decade or so than they are now. Official estimates of U.S. coal reserves are probably inflated, and domestic supply problems could start to appear sooner than most energy analysts are willing to admit. Moreover, America’s coal transport infrastructure could be hobbled by higher diesel prices if world oil production goes into decline soon (as increasing numbers of analysts foresee), since transport costs often account for the lion’s share of the delivered price of coal. But even if we ignore those looming systemic limits and consider only the implications of China’s growing demand for coal imports, it’s clear that U.S. coal prices can go nowhere but up. The only thing likely to keep them from doing so would be a collapse of the Chinese—and the global—economy.
China: Leading the Global Economy…Into the Ditch
Some commentators are concerned about China’s economy for reasons that have nothing to do with coal. The prime example: it would appear that Beijing has a problem with over-reliance on property development as an engine of domestic economic growth. One of those sounding the alarm on this score is hedge fund manager James Chanos, founder of Kynikos Associates Ltd.; he says China is “on a treadmill to hell,” and that the nation is “Dubai times a thousand.” He has also been quoted as saying, “They can’t afford to get off this heroin of property development. It is the only thing keeping the economic . . . numbers growing.”
A bursting of China’s property bubble could collapse the nation’s economy quickly and soon. But it is essentially a problem of money, and money is a creation of the human mind. Currencies can be reformed; banking systems can be reorganized. Such things are painful and take time, but they are certainly possible—and historic examples are numerous.
Energy is different. Without energy, nothing happens. Transport systems stall; building construction and manufacturing cease. The lights go out. You can’t make energy out of nothing and you can’t call it into existence with computer keystrokes, as bankers can do with money. Generating electrical power requires physical resources, infrastructure, and labor. And so there are natural limits to how much energy we can summon for our human purposes at any given time.
China has become a great manufacturing powerhouse largely because it was able to grow its energy supply quickly and cheaply. And so China’s contribution to the world economy is to this extent a function of China’s contribution to world energy. One significant gauge of this link is the fact that Chinese coal production represents more than double the amount of energy contributed to the world economy as compared to Saudi Arabia’s oil production (1,100 million tons of oil equivalent vs. 540 Mtoe.)
If China faces hard energy limits, that means its economy is living on borrowed time. That also means the world as a whole confronts energy and economic constraints that are harsher, and closer, than we are being told.
Forever Blowing Bubbles?
High coal prices and “clean coal” don’t mix. China’s insatiable hunger for more coal will drive up coal prices everywhere. China can’t keep up coal-powered industrial expansion for much longer, nor can the global economy accelerate without the engine of China. The evidence on these scores couldn’t be clearer: the numbers we have discussed are fairly uncontroversial, and the math of compounded steady growth is easy. Still, none of these realities has entered our public discourse. This fact in itself is really peculiar and disturbing. We are participating in a slow-motion train wreck, yet all we can manage to discuss is the quality of the food in the dining car.
Maybe this is because acknowledging the train wreck would require us to confront a slew of contradictions at the core of the entire modern industrial project. Without clean coal, there is no solution to the climate crisis—unless we are willing to contemplate giving up economic growth. But further growth may be unattainable anyway, as the world approaches fundamental resource limits. Nobody wants to think about these things, much less talk about them. Not China’s leaders, nor economists elsewhere, nor many environmentalists, nor politicians, nor journalists.
But we can’t wish these limits away. Impossible things (like unending economic growth) won’t happen just because people want them to. And awful things (like the wreck of the China train) won’t be averted just because acknowledging them makes us uncomfortable.
There are of course steps that Chinese officials—everyone, in fact—could take to make the situation better. We should be developing and deploying renewable energy as fast as possible, with a wartime mentality in terms of priority and commitment. And we should be planning for the end of growth, indeed for economic contraction. These things will be difficult, there’s no getting around it. Still, they are possible in principle. But we will fail for sure if we remain sunk in denial and do not even make the effort.
China’s economic bubble in some ways represents a microcosm of the entire industrial period—itself a relatively brief era of urbanization, fossil-fueled expansion, technological innovation, and unprecedented explosion of consumption. China has taken only two or three decades to accomplish what some other nations did over the course of a couple of centuries. This suggests that, for that country, implosion may come just as quickly.
It is all a remarkable spectacle. Sit back, watch, and marvel if you wish. But know one thing: unless we collectively wake up, engage the brakes on this runaway train (and here I am speaking not just of China), and start discussing how we will adjust to the end of economic growth as we have known and defined it, none of this will end well. .Albania's Concrete Mushrooms
SUBHEAD: Talk about recycling. The old Soviet era military bunker system in Albania is being transformed into civilian architecture.
Image above: A concrete bunker in Albania with a drop-dead gorgeous view. From GreenDiary.com
By Lloyd Altar on 14 May 2010 in TreeHugger.org -
(http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/750000-albanian-bunkers-converted.php)
Albania's Enver Hoxha ruled from 1945 to 1985 and towards the end made North Korea's Kim Jong-il look normal. Being a bit paranoid, he constructed an extraordinary three quarters of a million mushroom-shaped bunkers. That presents a lot of opportunity for creative repurposing and reuse.
Image above: A concrete bunker hotel room in Albania with a drop-dead gorgeous view. From GreenDiary.com
By Desh on 22 October 2010 in GreenDiary.com -
(http://www.greendiary.com/entry/video-concrete-mushrooms-project-transforms-deserted-bunkers-into-eco-hostels)
Two Albanian graduate students of Politecneco di Milano, Elian Stefa and Gyler Mydyti, under the guidance of architect Stefano Boeri, hit upon an idea to convert the deserted bunkers across Albania into appreciable tourist destinations. The transformation will allow trekkers a shelter in the shape of these hostels, dubbed as Concrete Mushrooms. Other possible transformations include info points, kiosks, gift shops and cafes.
Well, while it will promote eco-tourism, it lets the dwellers peep into the glorious past of Albania. Thus, the project involving the rejuvenation of 750,000 abandoned concrete bunkers aims to preserve the Albanian history via these memoirs.
Video above: Concrete Mushrooms Preview - Albania's 750,000 inherited bunkers. From (http://vimeo.com/6710102)
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Image above: A concrete bunker in Albania with a drop-dead gorgeous view. From GreenDiary.com
By Lloyd Altar on 14 May 2010 in TreeHugger.org -
(http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/750000-albanian-bunkers-converted.php)
Albania's Enver Hoxha ruled from 1945 to 1985 and towards the end made North Korea's Kim Jong-il look normal. Being a bit paranoid, he constructed an extraordinary three quarters of a million mushroom-shaped bunkers. That presents a lot of opportunity for creative repurposing and reuse.
Fabrizio Gallanti of Abitare shows some of the more interesting ones; some have been turned into restaurants, used for making wine, and even a sustainable eco-resort.
There is even a non-profit organization dedicated to their preservation and adaptation - Concrete Mushrooms.
The purpose of Concrete Mushrooms is to understand and develop the bunkers as assets for Albania. The founding principles of the project are: 1. A critical approach to these bunkers as symbols of xenophobia in order to invert their meaning and change then into symbols of hospitality. 2. The preservation of the bunkers in terms of their link to the memory of an important period of the Albanian history. 3. The recognition of the bunkers as a resource instead of as a burden. 4. The promotion of a sustainable eco-touristic sector in Albania.
Image above: A concrete bunker hotel room in Albania with a drop-dead gorgeous view. From GreenDiary.com
By Desh on 22 October 2010 in GreenDiary.com -
(http://www.greendiary.com/entry/video-concrete-mushrooms-project-transforms-deserted-bunkers-into-eco-hostels)
Two Albanian graduate students of Politecneco di Milano, Elian Stefa and Gyler Mydyti, under the guidance of architect Stefano Boeri, hit upon an idea to convert the deserted bunkers across Albania into appreciable tourist destinations. The transformation will allow trekkers a shelter in the shape of these hostels, dubbed as Concrete Mushrooms. Other possible transformations include info points, kiosks, gift shops and cafes.
Well, while it will promote eco-tourism, it lets the dwellers peep into the glorious past of Albania. Thus, the project involving the rejuvenation of 750,000 abandoned concrete bunkers aims to preserve the Albanian history via these memoirs.
Video above: Concrete Mushrooms Preview - Albania's 750,000 inherited bunkers. From (http://vimeo.com/6710102)
.
Hawaii Congressional Seat
SUBHEAD: With Abercrombie gone, will a new antiwar voice from Hawaii elected? Don't count on it!
Image above: The moderately progressive Neil Abercrombie gave up congressional seat to run for governor. From (http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/1129-Are-you-a-natrual-born-citizen-).
By Jon Letman on 14 May 2010 in TruthOut.org -
(http://www.truthout.org/a-new-antiwar-voice-from-hawaii-dont-count-on-it59487)
In a week, voters in Hawaii's First Congressional District will select the woman or man who will replace former Democratic Congressman Neil Abercrombie, who stepped down in February to run for governor. Over two decades representing Hawaii's urban center, Abercrombie was given a ranking of 67/100 ("pretty darned progressive") by Irregular Times. He was rated a "hardcore liberal" by the ontheissues.org web site, in part, for a voting record that often opposed the use of American military force in other countries.
Image above: The moderately progressive Neil Abercrombie gave up congressional seat to run for governor. From (http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/1129-Are-you-a-natrual-born-citizen-).
By Jon Letman on 14 May 2010 in TruthOut.org -
(http://www.truthout.org/a-new-antiwar-voice-from-hawaii-dont-count-on-it59487)
In a week, voters in Hawaii's First Congressional District will select the woman or man who will replace former Democratic Congressman Neil Abercrombie, who stepped down in February to run for governor. Over two decades representing Hawaii's urban center, Abercrombie was given a ranking of 67/100 ("pretty darned progressive") by Irregular Times. He was rated a "hardcore liberal" by the ontheissues.org web site, in part, for a voting record that often opposed the use of American military force in other countries. Abercrombie voted for a ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees; against Bush's Iraq war surge; and in favor of withdrawing most US troops from Iraq by April 2008.
But Abercrombie's seat (one of only two Hawaii holds) sits empty, leaving Abercrombie's own colleague, former Congressman Ed Case (Hawaii Second District 2002-2007), to battle against fellow Democrat Colleen Hanabusa, president of Hawaii's State Senate and Republican candidate Honolulu City Councilman Charles Djou.
Besides Case, Hanabusa and Djou, there are 11 other candidates running in this special election, but they are effectively shut out of the discussion simply by virtue of not having the money or media attention required to win an election. Nobody is talking about GOP candidate Charles "Googie" Collins or Democrat Rev. Vinny Browne.
Instead, all eyes are focused on the three-way split among the two dueling Democrats and Djou, a snappy, young father of three with good posture and a Colgate smile, who is reportedly leading the race in a poll taken last week showing Djou with 36 percent support over Case (28 percent) and Hanabusa (22 percent).
There continues to be much talk of behind-the-scenes wrangling and a desire for one of the Democrats (fingers point mostly at Hanabusa) to step aside and prevent Djou from winning the seat in Obama's home district. However, no such luck. Earlier last week, Hanabusa held a news conference to say she's in this until the end and she's in it to win.
The glare from what most certainly was Djou's Waikiki-wide smile just off camera was almost blinding.
Barring salacious revelations, grave missteps or a surprise withdrawal by any of the candidates in the final days before all mail-in ballots must be returned (this election is mail-in only), there is little reason to expect any significant change in their respective positions. If Case and Hanabusa do split the vote, they will ensure Hawaii's next member of Congress will be Charles Kong Djou, a lawyer, captain in the US Army Reserve and former campaign co-chair for Rudi Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign.
In half a century of statehood, Hawaii has had only two Republican members of Congress and two Republican governors. Should Djou win, it will be touted as a major victory for the GOP. Just imagine Sean Hannity gloating that voters in Obama's home town elected a Republican.
Concern in Washington is so high that the president himself has recorded a robo-call phone message asking for "a Democrat that will support [my] agenda in Congress." The message describes the special election as "crucial for [us] to continue pushing forward our agenda of change."
But when it comes to Obama's war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with his marked increase in the use of predator drone attacks inside Pakistan, he needn't worry about who wins this election. Democrat or Republican, he is likely going to get anything he wants from Hawaii's next Congressman or woman.
Ed Case, who fancies himself a "moderate, independent" Democrat, is still remembered for not pushing for a withdrawal from Iraq and not opposing military action in Afghanistan. Case once famously (and many say needlessly) said that had he been in Congress in October 2002, he probably would have voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq.
In a recent telephone interview, Case said he believed "the great majority of Americans of all parties" support Obama on his decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I think if you asked ten Americans 'how's Obama doing in Iraq and Afghanistan?' you'd probably get to about eight that in one way, shape, or form supported his decisions there," Case said.
He called Obama's foreign policy "very moderate and balanced," saying that far-right hawks and far-left doves might find disappointment in Obama's policies, but that he believed that represents a "distinct minority in the political spectrum of our country."
On the question of whether Obama's foreign policies are consistent with Hawaii Democratic Party platform, which calls for supporting "a fair and just foreign policy that promotes peace," Case said, "I believe his policies do, in fact, implement our platform."
In other words, Obama can expect to get pretty much whatever he asks for in support of foreign occupation, wars or predator drones from Case.
Likewise, Colleen Hanabusa, the "liberal" among the three candidates, wrote on her web site, "I support President Obama's decision to send over 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to assist existing forces in stabilizing the region ... The sobering reality is that 9/11 did occur, and it could very well happen again. We need take all reasonable actions necessary to ensure that it doesn't happen again."
Where have we heard that kind of talk before?
Even Djou, the sharp, young Republican who graduated in the same class as Obama's sister from the same prestigious school Obama attended (Punahou School), praises Obama's foreign policy with regards to Iraq and Afghanistan. In a phone interview Djou said, "I do think the president has taken the right approach in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama administration policies today look very different from Senator Obama policy calls during the 2008 campaign."
Djou was initially concerned about how Obama would approach national security, but has been pleased largely because, as he put it, "President Obama is ignoring the advice of Senator Obama."
Asked to grade Obama on Iraq and Afghanistan, Djou said he'd give the president a "B."
Not bad for the opposition party, eh?
And while Djou criticizes Obama on fiscal responsibility (he gives Obama a "D" grade), he, like his two leading Democratic opponents, shows no indication that fiscal responsibility extends to reducing, or even limiting the mind-boggling amount of money the United States spends on waging wars, occupying countries, developing and maintaining its nuclear arsenal or operating over 700 military bases around the world including "enduring temporary" bases in Japan, where nearly 47,000 US soldiers remain 65 years after the end of World War II. With the US having already spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000,000,000,000 (one-trillion) on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers killed and wounded and our own country bankrupt and rapidly unraveling, it appears highly unlikely that Hawaii's next Congressman or woman will be anything more than another compliant body, ready to roll over, sit up pretty or play dead the next time Obama (or any other president) snaps his fingers demanding more money for war.
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Djou thinks race over
SUBHEAD: The Republican seeking Neil Abecrombie's US Congressional seat is claiming the race is "pretty much over".
Image above: Charles Djou's closeup fro Huffington Post article.
By AP Staff on 14 May 2010 in Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/21/hawaii-special-election-2_n_546702.html)
Republican Charles Djou is claiming the race for Hawaii's vacant congressional seat is "pretty much over."
Djou made the comment in today's edition of The Hill, a newspaper in Washington D.C.
Campaign manager Dylan Nonaka explained Djou's statement Thursday. Nonaka says that most of the ballots that are likely to be returned in the all-mail special election have been turned in. He also cites voter polls showing Djou with a healthy lead.
About 317,300 ballots were mailed out, of which about 38 percent had been returned as of today.
But Democrat Ed Case responded that many more ballots are outstanding. He describes Djou's comments as "stampeding the voters."
Democratic candidate Colleen Hanabusa also fired back at Djou for appearing to prematurely declare victory.
Here's an excerpt from an e-mail the Hanabusa camp sent to supporters Thursday night on the matter:
Funny how there’s still over a week left for voters to speak, but a lot of people want to tell you what the outcome is.
Let’s make this clear: Charles Djou and Ed Case don’t get to decide who wins this election. You do.
The only poll that counts is the one that is going on right now, the one where you get to cast your ballot for the person you think will best represent you in Washington.
This election doesn’t belong to Charles Djou. Ed Case, the DCCC, or Right Wing special interest groups. It belongs to the voters of Hawaii. You have the real stake in who represents you in Washington.
Image above: Charles Djou's closeup fro Huffington Post article.
By AP Staff on 14 May 2010 in Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/21/hawaii-special-election-2_n_546702.html)
Republican Charles Djou is claiming the race for Hawaii's vacant congressional seat is "pretty much over."
Djou made the comment in today's edition of The Hill, a newspaper in Washington D.C.
Campaign manager Dylan Nonaka explained Djou's statement Thursday. Nonaka says that most of the ballots that are likely to be returned in the all-mail special election have been turned in. He also cites voter polls showing Djou with a healthy lead.
About 317,300 ballots were mailed out, of which about 38 percent had been returned as of today.
But Democrat Ed Case responded that many more ballots are outstanding. He describes Djou's comments as "stampeding the voters."
Democratic candidate Colleen Hanabusa also fired back at Djou for appearing to prematurely declare victory.
Here's an excerpt from an e-mail the Hanabusa camp sent to supporters Thursday night on the matter:
Funny how there’s still over a week left for voters to speak, but a lot of people want to tell you what the outcome is.
Let’s make this clear: Charles Djou and Ed Case don’t get to decide who wins this election. You do.
The only poll that counts is the one that is going on right now, the one where you get to cast your ballot for the person you think will best represent you in Washington.
This election doesn’t belong to Charles Djou. Ed Case, the DCCC, or Right Wing special interest groups. It belongs to the voters of Hawaii. You have the real stake in who represents you in Washington.
Lepeuli Access Appeal Denied
SOURCE: Hope Kallai (lokahipath2@live.com)
SUBHEAD: Appeal of Paradise Ranch Conservation District Use Application to limit beach access is denied by BLNR.
Image above: BLNR meeting. Right to left - Ron Agor (Kauai Rep.) & Laura Theilen (Chair) listen to testimony. From (http://thehawaiiindependent.com/hawaiiloa/read/blnr-grants-permission-to-u.s.-army-for-live-firing-exercises-and-land-for-/).
[Editor's note: Kauai BLNR representative Ron Agor was instrumental in convincing board that cutting off Lepeuli Beach access was alright.]
By Hope Kallai on 14 May 2010 -
The appeal of Paradise Ranch’s Conservation District Use Application (CDUA) in Lepeuli has been denied on the basis that Chairperson Thielen’s decision was not Arbitrary and Capricious. In a packed and sometimes raucous Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR) meeting in Honolulu yesterday, the BLNR upheld Thielen’s approval of the permit.
Auntie Linda and Uncle David Sproat and their daughter Kapua Sproat, attorneys and community members, Councilperson Lani Kawahara and Senator Gary Hooser and several Kanaka Maoli (actually present to testify on other matters!) presented documentation and heartfelt remembrances of the Alaloa and Lepeuli fishing/gathering trips and the importance of this lateral beach access.
Councilperson stressed to the Board that the county right of way is not accessible, even after 7 months of discussion, and that the steep as-in-use now trail is not safe. The respect of the iwi kupuna re-burial of 3 individuals by the State Historic Preservation Division (SHPD) into the now permitted commercial cattle operation in the Conservation District was questioned with “would you want cows shitting on your grandmother’s graves or on the soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery?”
After meeting in Executive Session, the BLNR voted the appeal denied, adding that they did have serious questions about the permit. The BLNR suggested a 60 day period to re-visit the permit application to consider if there were any misrepresentations, errors, omissions or inaccuracies.
If they do find errors, omissions, inaccuracies or misrepresentations, they recommended revoking the permit (without prejudice) adding that if the applicant chooses to re-apply it must be a BLNR decision not a Departmental decision made by the chairperson with a Public Hearing (hopefully on Kauai). The overwhelming preponderance of evidence and community concern merit the revoking of this permit and if reconsidered, the community deserves a chance to be heard through the Public Hearing process.
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Image above: BLNR meeting. Right to left - Ron Agor (Kauai Rep.) & Laura Theilen (Chair) listen to testimony. From (http://thehawaiiindependent.com/hawaiiloa/read/blnr-grants-permission-to-u.s.-army-for-live-firing-exercises-and-land-for-/).
[Editor's note: Kauai BLNR representative Ron Agor was instrumental in convincing board that cutting off Lepeuli Beach access was alright.]
By Hope Kallai on 14 May 2010 -
The appeal of Paradise Ranch’s Conservation District Use Application (CDUA) in Lepeuli has been denied on the basis that Chairperson Thielen’s decision was not Arbitrary and Capricious. In a packed and sometimes raucous Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR) meeting in Honolulu yesterday, the BLNR upheld Thielen’s approval of the permit.
Auntie Linda and Uncle David Sproat and their daughter Kapua Sproat, attorneys and community members, Councilperson Lani Kawahara and Senator Gary Hooser and several Kanaka Maoli (actually present to testify on other matters!) presented documentation and heartfelt remembrances of the Alaloa and Lepeuli fishing/gathering trips and the importance of this lateral beach access.
Councilperson stressed to the Board that the county right of way is not accessible, even after 7 months of discussion, and that the steep as-in-use now trail is not safe. The respect of the iwi kupuna re-burial of 3 individuals by the State Historic Preservation Division (SHPD) into the now permitted commercial cattle operation in the Conservation District was questioned with “would you want cows shitting on your grandmother’s graves or on the soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery?”
After meeting in Executive Session, the BLNR voted the appeal denied, adding that they did have serious questions about the permit. The BLNR suggested a 60 day period to re-visit the permit application to consider if there were any misrepresentations, errors, omissions or inaccuracies.
If they do find errors, omissions, inaccuracies or misrepresentations, they recommended revoking the permit (without prejudice) adding that if the applicant chooses to re-apply it must be a BLNR decision not a Departmental decision made by the chairperson with a Public Hearing (hopefully on Kauai). The overwhelming preponderance of evidence and community concern merit the revoking of this permit and if reconsidered, the community deserves a chance to be heard through the Public Hearing process.
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Aliens Among Us
SUBHEAD: Should we find a second form of life right here on our doorstep, we could be confident that life is a truly cosmic phenomenon.
Image above: Illustration by David Sandlin for New York Times article.
By Paul Davies on 13 May 2010 in the New York Times -
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/opinion/14davies.html)
For centuries, speculation about the existence of life elsewhere in the universe was the preserve of philosophers and theologians. Then, 50 years ago last month, the question entered the scientific sphere when a young American astronomer named Frank Drake began sweeping the skies with a radio telescope in hopes of picking up a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization.
Initially, his quest was considered somewhat eccentric. But now the pendulum of scientific opinion has swung to the point where even a scientist of the stature of Stephen Hawking is speculating that aliens exist in other parts of our galaxy.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is predicated on the assumption, widely held today, that life would emerge readily on Earth-like planets. Given that there could be upward of a billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone, this assumption suggests that the universe should be teeming with life.
But the notion of life as a cosmic imperative is not backed up by hard evidence. In fact, the mechanism of life’s origin remains shrouded in mystery. So how can we test the idea that the transition from nonlife to life is simple enough to happen repeatedly? The most obvious and straightforward way is to search for a second form of life on Earth. No planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so if the path to life is easy, then life should have started up many times over right here.
Searching for alternative life on Earth might seem misconceived, because there is excellent evidence that every kind of life so far studied evolved from a common ancestor that lived billions of years ago. Yet most of the life that exists on Earth has never been properly classified. The vast majority of species are microbes, invisible to the naked eye, and scientists have analyzed only a tiny fraction of them. For all we know, there could be microbes with other ancestral origins living literally under our noses — or even inside our noses — constituting a sort of shadow biosphere, containing life, but not as we know it.
The denizens of the hidden “alien” biosphere — let’s call them Life 2.0 — might employ radically different biochemical processes than the life we know and love. Microbiologists could easily have overlooked their existence, because their methods are focused on the biochemistry of standard life. Obviously, if you go looking for A, you will find A and not B.
One way to go about tracking down Life 2.0 is to make educated guesses about what its biochemistry might be like. Alternative microbes might, for example, have different chemical elements. One shrewd suggestion, made by Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the United States Geological Survey, is that phosphorus — crucial to life as we know it — could be replaced by arsenic. She and her colleague Ron Oremland are dredging bugs from arsenic-contaminated Mono Lake in California in search of arsenic life.
Other researchers are focusing on the handedness of molecules. In standard life, the key amino acids are always left-handed, and the sugars are right-handed. Scientists are not sure why standard life has made this particular choice; nonliving chemical mixtures tend to contain equal amounts of both left- and right-handed molecules.
If life started again, perhaps it would select different handedness for its key molecules. Should a shadow biosphere of “mirror microbes” exist, the organisms could be identified by culturing microbial samples in “mirror soup” — a cocktail of nutrients with the handedness reversed, available from commercial suppliers. Standard life would find the soup unpalatable, but mirror life would thrive on it. Some experiments along these lines are being carried out at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville. Ala.
Life 2.0 would be easier to identify if it inhabited distinct niches beyond the reach of regular life. Microbes are known to dwell in the superheated water around volcanic vents in the deep ocean, for example. Others survive extremes of cold, salinity, acidity or radiation. Yet all these so-called extremophiles that have been investigated to date are the same life as you and me. Regular life is clearly very hardy and adaptable, and can tolerate amazingly harsh conditions. Nevertheless, there will be limits. If Life 2.0 has a different chemical constitution, it may lurk in pockets at even more extreme temperatures or higher levels of radiation.
An argument often given for why Earth couldn’t host another form of life is that once the life we know became established, it would have eliminated any competition through natural selection. But if another form of life were confined to its own niche, there would be little direct competition with regular life. And, in any case, natural selection doesn’t always mean winner-takes-all. Some years ago it was discovered that simple microbes actually belong to two very distinct domains — bacteria and archaea. Genetically, these groups differ from each other as much as they differ from humans. Yet they have peacefully co-existed in overlapping habitats for billions of years.
If my theory turns out to be correct, it will have sweeping consequences. Should we find a second form of life right here on our doorstep, we could be confident that life is a truly cosmic phenomenon. If so, there may well be sentient beings somewhere in the galaxy wondering, as do we, if they are not alone in the universe.
KKCR & Storybook Theatre
SOURCE: Brad Parsons (mauibrad@hotmail.com)
SUBHEAD: Please tune-in to KKCR at 10am Saturday for the premier of a show from the Storybook Theatre.
Image above: The outdoor stage venue in The Peace Garden of the Storybook Theatre in Hanapepe, Kauai. Photo by Juan Wilson.
By Jerry Brockhurst on 14 May 2010 at KKCR -
It gives me great pleasure to announce that our 3rd Remote Broadcast site is launching! I visited Storybook Theatre in Hanapepe this week and we successfully performed a test broadcast, so....
Beginning TOMORROW, Saturday, May 15, we will be broadcasting a new show designed for children and the whole family - titled "The Children's Count", from 10AM - 11AM every Saturday. This show will be hosted by Mark Jeffers and engineered by Paul Moody. Big Mahalos to Paul for helping put together and test the system and for agreeing to be the on-going engineer.
Please tune-in at 10AM tomorrow, and join me in welcoming Mark, his new show, and Storybook Theatre to the KKCR ohana!
CONTACT:
Jerry Brocklehurst (gm@kkcr.org)
General Manager
KKCR Kauai Community Radio
www.kkcr.org
office phone: (808) 826-7774
office hours: M - F 10:00 am - 4:00 pm.
Mark Jeffers (director@storybook.org)
Executive Director
The Storybook Theatre of Hawaii
www.storybook.org
office phone: (808) 335-0712
office hours: T - F 10:00 am - 4:00 pm.
.
Image above: The outdoor stage venue in The Peace Garden of the Storybook Theatre in Hanapepe, Kauai. Photo by Juan Wilson.
By Jerry Brockhurst on 14 May 2010 at KKCR -
It gives me great pleasure to announce that our 3rd Remote Broadcast site is launching! I visited Storybook Theatre in Hanapepe this week and we successfully performed a test broadcast, so....
Beginning TOMORROW, Saturday, May 15, we will be broadcasting a new show designed for children and the whole family - titled "The Children's Count", from 10AM - 11AM every Saturday. This show will be hosted by Mark Jeffers and engineered by Paul Moody. Big Mahalos to Paul for helping put together and test the system and for agreeing to be the on-going engineer.
Please tune-in at 10AM tomorrow, and join me in welcoming Mark, his new show, and Storybook Theatre to the KKCR ohana!
CONTACT:
Jerry Brocklehurst (gm@kkcr.org)
General Manager
KKCR Kauai Community Radio
www.kkcr.org
office phone: (808) 826-7774
office hours: M - F 10:00 am - 4:00 pm.
Mark Jeffers (director@storybook.org)
Executive Director
The Storybook Theatre of Hawaii
www.storybook.org
office phone: (808) 335-0712
office hours: T - F 10:00 am - 4:00 pm.
.
Kauai Seed & Plant Exchange
SOURCE: kenneth Taylor (taylork021@Hawaii.rr.com)
SUBHEAD: Bring plants - Get plants. All seeds and plants will be given freely or traded. Admission is free.
Image above: Labeled starter plants ready for exchange for another.
WHAT:
5th Biannual Community Seed and Plant Exchange All seeds and plants will be given freely or traded. WHEN: May 23rd, 2010 from 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm
WHERE:
All Saints Gymnasium in Kapaa
AGENDA:
Check-in of plant material begins at 1:00 pm.
The seed and plant exchange will follow a group blessing
Dr. Valenzuela will start his presentation at 4:30 pm.
CONTACT:
To find out more please call (808) 652-4118
SPONSOR:
This event is a joint production of Regenerations Botanical Garden, Kauai Community Seed Bank & Library, GMO Free Kauai, and Hawaii SEED.
There will be education tables, films, live music and food, along with Kaua`i grown seeds and plants from around the island. This event features a keynote presentation by University of Hawaii Crop Specialist Dr. Hector Valenzuela entitled “Ecological Agriculture and Local Food and Seed Systems in Hawaii”. His areas expertise include agroecology and field trial research, composting and organic amendments, and no-till farming.
In his role as Science Advisor for Hawaii SEED, Dr. Valenzuela works to educate the public about the risks posed by genetically engineered organisms. He recently co-produced the “Hua ka Hua” Public Seed Symposium on Hawai`i Island. Live music will spotlight local favorites Malama Pono Alstars and Aroshn.
People bringing plant material to share will fill out a label that identifies type of plant, favorable growing conditions, and if they wish, their contact information. Those bringing seeds and plants are requested to bring pre-cleaned, pest-free, GMO free and non-invasive material. Everyone is encouraged to attend: even if you have no plants or seeds to give away, there will be plenty to learn and receive.
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Image above: Labeled starter plants ready for exchange for another.
WHAT:
5th Biannual Community Seed and Plant Exchange All seeds and plants will be given freely or traded. WHEN: May 23rd, 2010 from 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm
WHERE:
All Saints Gymnasium in Kapaa
AGENDA:
Check-in of plant material begins at 1:00 pm.
The seed and plant exchange will follow a group blessing
Dr. Valenzuela will start his presentation at 4:30 pm.
CONTACT:
To find out more please call (808) 652-4118
SPONSOR:
This event is a joint production of Regenerations Botanical Garden, Kauai Community Seed Bank & Library, GMO Free Kauai, and Hawaii SEED.
There will be education tables, films, live music and food, along with Kaua`i grown seeds and plants from around the island. This event features a keynote presentation by University of Hawaii Crop Specialist Dr. Hector Valenzuela entitled “Ecological Agriculture and Local Food and Seed Systems in Hawaii”. His areas expertise include agroecology and field trial research, composting and organic amendments, and no-till farming.
In his role as Science Advisor for Hawaii SEED, Dr. Valenzuela works to educate the public about the risks posed by genetically engineered organisms. He recently co-produced the “Hua ka Hua” Public Seed Symposium on Hawai`i Island. Live music will spotlight local favorites Malama Pono Alstars and Aroshn.
People bringing plant material to share will fill out a label that identifies type of plant, favorable growing conditions, and if they wish, their contact information. Those bringing seeds and plants are requested to bring pre-cleaned, pest-free, GMO free and non-invasive material. Everyone is encouraged to attend: even if you have no plants or seeds to give away, there will be plenty to learn and receive.
.
After Money
SUBHEAD: Any step toward the production of goods for one’s own use, with one’s own resources is a step toward the world emerging after money.
Image above: Bartering at the Kuin Floating Market in Banjarmasin, Indonesia. From (http://www.modishblog.com/biztips/2009/03/tricks-of-the-trade-barter-as-marketing-during-the-recession.html).
By John Michael Greer on 12 May 2010 in Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/05/after-money.html)
The discussion of the risks of complexity in the last few posts here on The Archdruid Report dealt in large part with abstract concepts, though the news headlines did me the favor of providing some very good examples of those concepts in action. Still, it’s time to review some of the practical implications of the ideas presented here, and in the process, begin wrapping up the discussion of economics that has been central to this blog’s project over the last year and a half.
The news headlines once again have something to contribute. I think most of my readers will be aware that the economic troubles afflicting Europe came within an ace of causing a major financial meltdown last week. The EU, with billions in backing from major central banks around the globe, managed to stave off collapse for now, but it’s important to realize that the rescue package so hastily cobbled together will actually make things worse in the not-very-long run.
Like the rest of the industrial world, the EU is drowning in excess debt; the response of the EU’s leadership is to issue even more debt, so they can prop up one round of unpayable debts with another. They’re in good company; Japan has been doing this continuously since its 1990 stock market and real estate collapse, and the US has responded to its current economic nosedive in exactly the same way.
It’s harsh but not, I think, unfair to characterize this strategy as trying to put out a house fire by throwing buckets of gasoline onto the blaze. Still, a complex history and an even more complex set of misunderstandings feeds this particular folly. Nobody in Europe has forgotten what happened the last time a major depression was allowed to run its course unchecked by government manipulation, and every European nation has its neofascist fringe parties who are eager to play their assigned roles in a remake of that ghastly drama.
That’s the subtext behind the EU-wide effort to talk tough about austerity while doing as little as possible to make it happen, and the even wider effort to game the global financial system so that Europe and America can continue to consume more than they produce, and spend more than they take in, for at least a little longer.
There was a time, to be sure, when this wasn’t as daft an idea as it has now become. During the 350 years of the industrial age, a good fraction of Europe did consume more than it produced, by the simple expedient of owning most of the rest of the world and exploiting it for their own economic benefit. As late as 1914, the vast majority of the world’s land surface was either ruled directly from a European capital, occupied by people of European descent, or dominated by European powers through some form of radically unequal treaty relationship.
The accelerating drawdown of fossil fuels throughout that era shifted the process into overdrive, allowing the minority of the Earth’s population who lived in Europe or the more privileged nations of the European diaspora – the United States first among them – not only to adopt what were, by the standards of all other human societies, extravagantly lavish lifestyles, but to be able to expect that those lifestyles would become even more lavish in the future.
I don’t think more than a tiny fraction of the people of the industrial world has yet begun to deal with the hard fact that those days are over. European domination of the globe came apart explosively in the four brutal decades between 1914, when the First World War broke out, and 1954, when the fall of French Indochina put a period on the age of European empire.
The United States, which inherited what was left of Europe’s imperial role, never achieved the level of global dominance that European nations took for granted until 1914 – compare the British Empire, which directly ruled a quarter of the Earth’s land surface, with the hole-and-corner arrangements that allow America to maintain garrisons in other people’s countries around the world. Now the second and arguably more important source of Euro-American wealth and power – the exploitation of half a billion years of prehistoric sunlight in the form of fossil fuels – has peaked and entered on its own decline, with consequences that bid fair to be at least as drastic as those that followed the shattering of the Pax Europa in 1914.
To make sense of all this, it’s important to recall a distinction made here several times in the past, between the primary, secondary, and tertiary economies. The primary economy is the natural world, which produces around 3/4 of all economic value used by human beings. The secondary economy is the production of goods and services from natural resources by human labor. The tertiary economy is the production and exchange of money – a term that includes everything that has value only because it can be exchanged for the products of the primary and secondary economies, and thus embraces everything from gold coins to the most vaporous products of today’s financial engineering.
The big question of conventional economics is the fit between the secondary and tertiary economies. It’s not at all hard for these to get out of step with each other, and the resulting mismatch can cause serious problems. When there’s more money in circulation than there are goods and services for the money to buy, you get inflation; when the mismatch goes the other way, you get deflation; when the mechanisms that provide credit to business enterprises gum up, for any number of reasons, you get a credit crunch and recession, and so on. In extreme cases, which used to happen fairly often until the aftermath of the Great Depression pointed out what the cost could be, several of these mismatches could hit at once, leaving both the secondary and tertiary economies crippled for years at a time.
This is the sort of thing that conventional economic policy is meant to confront, by fiddling with the tertiary economy to bring it back into balance with the secondary economy. The reason why the industrial world hasn’t had a really major depression since the end of the 1930s, in turn, is that the methods cobbled together by governments to fiddle with the tertiary economy work tolerably well.
It’s become popular in recent years to insist that the unfettered free market is uniquely able to manage economic affairs in the best possible way, but such claims fly in the face of all the evidence of history. The late 19th century, for example, when the free market was as unfettered as it’s possible for a market to get, saw catastrophic booms and busts sweep through the industrial world with brutal regularity, causing massive disruption to economies around the world. Those who think this is a better state of affairs than the muted ebbs and flows of the second half of the twentieth century should try living in a Depression-era tarpaper shack on a dollar a day for a week or two.
Image above: The Pig's Pub in Norfork, England, barters with its customer's to trade produce for beer. From (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2557630/Pub-introduces-bartering-for-pints-to-beat-credit-crisis.html).
The problem we face now is that the arrangements evolved over the last century or so only address the relationship between the secondary and tertiary economies. The primary economy of nature, the base of the entire structure, is ignored by most contemporary economics, and has essentially no place in the economic policy of today’s industrial nations. The assumption hardwired into nearly all modern thought is that the economic contributions of the primary economy will always be there so long as the secondary and tertiary economy are working as they should.
This may just be the Achilles’ heel of the entire structure, because it means that mismatches between the primary economy and the other two economies not only won’t be addressed – they won’t even be noticed.
This, I suspect, is what underlies the rising curve of economic volatility of the last decade or so: we have reached the point where the primary economy of nature will no longer support the standards of living most people in the industrial world expect. Our politicians and economists are trying to deal with the resulting crises as though they were purely a product of mismatches between the secondary and tertiary economies. Since such measures don’t address the real driving forces behind the crises, they fail, or at best stave off trouble for a short time, at the expense of making it worse later on.
The signals warning us that we have overshot the capacity of the primary economy are all around us. The peaking of world conventional oil production in 2005 is only one of these. The dieoff of honeybees is another, on a different scale; whatever its cause, it serves notice that something has gone very wrong with one of the natural systems on which human production of goods and services depends. There are many others. It’s easy to dismiss any of them individually as irrelevancies, but every one of them has an economic cost, and every one of them serves notice that the natural systems that make human economic activity possible are cracking under the strain we’ve placed on them.
That prospect is daunting enough. There’s another side to our predicament, though, because the only tools governments have available these days to deal with economic trouble are ways of fiddling with the tertiary economy. When those tools don’t work – and these days, increasingly, they don’t – the only option policy makers can think of is to do more of the same, following what’s been called the “lottle” principle – “if a little doesn’t work, maybe a lot’ll do the trick.”
The insidious result is that the tertiary economy of money is moving ever further out of step with the secondary economy of goods and services, yielding a second helping of economic trouble on top of the one already dished out by the damaged primary economy. Flooding the markets with cheap credit may be a workable strategy when a credit crunch has hamstrung the secondary economy; when what’s hitting the secondary economy is the unrecognized costs of ecological overshoot, though, flooding the markets with cheap credit simply accelerates economic imbalances that are already battering economies around the world.
One interesting feature of this sort of two-sided crisis is that it’s not a unique experience. Most of the past civilizations that overshot the ecological systems that supported them, and crashed to ruin as a result, backed themselves into a similar corner. I’ve mentioned here several times the way that the classic Lowland Maya tried to respond to the failure of their agricultural system by accelerating the building programs central to their religious and political lives.
Their pyramids of stone served the same purpose as our pyramids of debt: they systematized the distribution of labor and material wealth in a way that supported the social structure of the Lowland Mayan city-states and the ahauob or “divine kings” who ruled them. Yet building more pyramids was not an effective response to topsoil loss; in fact, it worsened the situation considerably by using up labor that might have gone into alternative means of food production.
An even better example, because a closer parallel to the present instance, is the twilight of the Roman world. Ancient Rome had a sophisticated economic system in which credit and government stimulus programs played an important role. Roman money, though, was based strictly on precious metals, and the economic expansion of the late Republic and early Empire was made possible only because Roman armies systematically looted the wealth of most of the known world.
More fatal still was the shift that replaced a sustainable village agriculture across most of the Roman world with huge slave-worked latifundiae, the industrial farms of their day, which were treated as cash cows by absentee owners and, in due time, were milked dry. The primary economy cracked as topsoil loss caused Roman agriculture to fail; attempts by emperors to remedy the situation failed in turn, and the Roman government was reduced to debasing the coinage in an attempt to meet a rising spiral of military costs driven by civil wars and barbarian invasions. This made a bad situation worse, gutting the Roman economy and making the collapse of the Empire that much more inevitable.
It’s interesting to note the aftermath. In the wake of Rome’s fall, lending money at interest – a normal business practice throughout the Roman world – came to a dead stop for centuries. Christianity and Islam, the majority religions across what had been the Empire’s territory, defined it as a deadly sin.
More, money itself came to play an extremely limited role in large parts of the former Empire. Across Europe in the early Middle Ages, it was common for people to go from one year to the next without so much as handling a coin. What replaced it was the use of labor as the basic medium of exchange. That was the foundation of the feudal system, from top to bottom: from the peasant who held his small plot of farmland by providing a fixed number of days of labor each year in the local baron’s fields, to the baron who held his fief by providing his overlord with military service, the entire system was a network of personal relationships backed by exchanges of labor for land.
It’s common in contemporary economic history to see this as a giant step backward, but there’s good reason to think it was nothing of the kind. The tertiary economy of the late Roman world had become a corrupt, metastatic mess; the new economy of feudal Europe responded to this by erasing the tertiary economy as far as possible, banishing economic abstractions, and producing a system that was very hard to game – deliberately failing to meet one’s feudal obligations was the one unforgivable crime in medieval society, and generally risked the prompt and heavily armed arrival of one’s liege lord and all his other vassals.
The thought of Goldman Sachs executives having to defend themselves in hand-to-hand combat against a medieval army may raise smiles today, a thousand years ago, that’s the way penalties for default were most commonly assessed.
What makes this even more worth noting is that very similar systems emerged in the wake of collapses of other civilizations. The implosion of Heian Japan in the tenth century, to name only one example, gave rise to a feudal system so closely parallel to the European model that it’s possible to translate much of the technical language of Japanese bushido precisely into the equivalent jargon of European chivalry, and vice versa.
More broadly, when complex civilizations fall apart, one of the standard results is the replacement of complex tertiary economies with radically simplified systems that do away with abstractions such as money, and replace them with concrete economics of land and labor.
There’s a lesson here, and it can be applied to the present situation. As the rising spiral of economic trouble continues, we can expect drastic volatility in the value and availability of money – and here again, remember that this term refers to any form of wealth that only has value because it can be exchanged for something else. Any economic activity that is solely a means of bringing in money will be held hostage to the vagaries of the tertiary economy, whether those express themselves through inflation, credit collapse, or what have you.
Any economic activity that produces goods and services directly for the use of the producer, and his or her family and community, will be much less drastically affected by these vagaries. If you depend on your salary to buy vegetables, for example, how much you can eat depends on the value of money at any given moment; if you grow your own vegetables, using your own kitchen and garden scraps to fertilize the soil and saving your own seed, you have much more direct control over your vegetable supply.
Most people won’t have the option of separating themselves completely from the money economy for many years to come; as long as today’s governments continue to function, they will demand money for taxes, and money will continue to be the gateway resource for many goods and services, including some that will be very difficult to do without.
Still, there’s no reason why distancing oneself from the tertiary economy has to be an all-or-nothing thing. Any step toward the direct production of goods and services for one’s own use, with one’s own labor, using resources under one’s own direct control, is a step toward the world that will emerge after money; it’s also a safety cushion against the disintegration of the money economy going on around us – a point I’ll discuss in more detail, by way of a concrete example, in next week’s post.
.
Image above: Bartering at the Kuin Floating Market in Banjarmasin, Indonesia. From (http://www.modishblog.com/biztips/2009/03/tricks-of-the-trade-barter-as-marketing-during-the-recession.html).
By John Michael Greer on 12 May 2010 in Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/05/after-money.html)
The discussion of the risks of complexity in the last few posts here on The Archdruid Report dealt in large part with abstract concepts, though the news headlines did me the favor of providing some very good examples of those concepts in action. Still, it’s time to review some of the practical implications of the ideas presented here, and in the process, begin wrapping up the discussion of economics that has been central to this blog’s project over the last year and a half.
The news headlines once again have something to contribute. I think most of my readers will be aware that the economic troubles afflicting Europe came within an ace of causing a major financial meltdown last week. The EU, with billions in backing from major central banks around the globe, managed to stave off collapse for now, but it’s important to realize that the rescue package so hastily cobbled together will actually make things worse in the not-very-long run.
Like the rest of the industrial world, the EU is drowning in excess debt; the response of the EU’s leadership is to issue even more debt, so they can prop up one round of unpayable debts with another. They’re in good company; Japan has been doing this continuously since its 1990 stock market and real estate collapse, and the US has responded to its current economic nosedive in exactly the same way.
It’s harsh but not, I think, unfair to characterize this strategy as trying to put out a house fire by throwing buckets of gasoline onto the blaze. Still, a complex history and an even more complex set of misunderstandings feeds this particular folly. Nobody in Europe has forgotten what happened the last time a major depression was allowed to run its course unchecked by government manipulation, and every European nation has its neofascist fringe parties who are eager to play their assigned roles in a remake of that ghastly drama.
That’s the subtext behind the EU-wide effort to talk tough about austerity while doing as little as possible to make it happen, and the even wider effort to game the global financial system so that Europe and America can continue to consume more than they produce, and spend more than they take in, for at least a little longer.
There was a time, to be sure, when this wasn’t as daft an idea as it has now become. During the 350 years of the industrial age, a good fraction of Europe did consume more than it produced, by the simple expedient of owning most of the rest of the world and exploiting it for their own economic benefit. As late as 1914, the vast majority of the world’s land surface was either ruled directly from a European capital, occupied by people of European descent, or dominated by European powers through some form of radically unequal treaty relationship.
The accelerating drawdown of fossil fuels throughout that era shifted the process into overdrive, allowing the minority of the Earth’s population who lived in Europe or the more privileged nations of the European diaspora – the United States first among them – not only to adopt what were, by the standards of all other human societies, extravagantly lavish lifestyles, but to be able to expect that those lifestyles would become even more lavish in the future.
I don’t think more than a tiny fraction of the people of the industrial world has yet begun to deal with the hard fact that those days are over. European domination of the globe came apart explosively in the four brutal decades between 1914, when the First World War broke out, and 1954, when the fall of French Indochina put a period on the age of European empire.
The United States, which inherited what was left of Europe’s imperial role, never achieved the level of global dominance that European nations took for granted until 1914 – compare the British Empire, which directly ruled a quarter of the Earth’s land surface, with the hole-and-corner arrangements that allow America to maintain garrisons in other people’s countries around the world. Now the second and arguably more important source of Euro-American wealth and power – the exploitation of half a billion years of prehistoric sunlight in the form of fossil fuels – has peaked and entered on its own decline, with consequences that bid fair to be at least as drastic as those that followed the shattering of the Pax Europa in 1914.
To make sense of all this, it’s important to recall a distinction made here several times in the past, between the primary, secondary, and tertiary economies. The primary economy is the natural world, which produces around 3/4 of all economic value used by human beings. The secondary economy is the production of goods and services from natural resources by human labor. The tertiary economy is the production and exchange of money – a term that includes everything that has value only because it can be exchanged for the products of the primary and secondary economies, and thus embraces everything from gold coins to the most vaporous products of today’s financial engineering.
The big question of conventional economics is the fit between the secondary and tertiary economies. It’s not at all hard for these to get out of step with each other, and the resulting mismatch can cause serious problems. When there’s more money in circulation than there are goods and services for the money to buy, you get inflation; when the mismatch goes the other way, you get deflation; when the mechanisms that provide credit to business enterprises gum up, for any number of reasons, you get a credit crunch and recession, and so on. In extreme cases, which used to happen fairly often until the aftermath of the Great Depression pointed out what the cost could be, several of these mismatches could hit at once, leaving both the secondary and tertiary economies crippled for years at a time.
This is the sort of thing that conventional economic policy is meant to confront, by fiddling with the tertiary economy to bring it back into balance with the secondary economy. The reason why the industrial world hasn’t had a really major depression since the end of the 1930s, in turn, is that the methods cobbled together by governments to fiddle with the tertiary economy work tolerably well.
It’s become popular in recent years to insist that the unfettered free market is uniquely able to manage economic affairs in the best possible way, but such claims fly in the face of all the evidence of history. The late 19th century, for example, when the free market was as unfettered as it’s possible for a market to get, saw catastrophic booms and busts sweep through the industrial world with brutal regularity, causing massive disruption to economies around the world. Those who think this is a better state of affairs than the muted ebbs and flows of the second half of the twentieth century should try living in a Depression-era tarpaper shack on a dollar a day for a week or two.
Image above: The Pig's Pub in Norfork, England, barters with its customer's to trade produce for beer. From (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2557630/Pub-introduces-bartering-for-pints-to-beat-credit-crisis.html).
The problem we face now is that the arrangements evolved over the last century or so only address the relationship between the secondary and tertiary economies. The primary economy of nature, the base of the entire structure, is ignored by most contemporary economics, and has essentially no place in the economic policy of today’s industrial nations. The assumption hardwired into nearly all modern thought is that the economic contributions of the primary economy will always be there so long as the secondary and tertiary economy are working as they should.
This may just be the Achilles’ heel of the entire structure, because it means that mismatches between the primary economy and the other two economies not only won’t be addressed – they won’t even be noticed.
This, I suspect, is what underlies the rising curve of economic volatility of the last decade or so: we have reached the point where the primary economy of nature will no longer support the standards of living most people in the industrial world expect. Our politicians and economists are trying to deal with the resulting crises as though they were purely a product of mismatches between the secondary and tertiary economies. Since such measures don’t address the real driving forces behind the crises, they fail, or at best stave off trouble for a short time, at the expense of making it worse later on.
The signals warning us that we have overshot the capacity of the primary economy are all around us. The peaking of world conventional oil production in 2005 is only one of these. The dieoff of honeybees is another, on a different scale; whatever its cause, it serves notice that something has gone very wrong with one of the natural systems on which human production of goods and services depends. There are many others. It’s easy to dismiss any of them individually as irrelevancies, but every one of them has an economic cost, and every one of them serves notice that the natural systems that make human economic activity possible are cracking under the strain we’ve placed on them.
That prospect is daunting enough. There’s another side to our predicament, though, because the only tools governments have available these days to deal with economic trouble are ways of fiddling with the tertiary economy. When those tools don’t work – and these days, increasingly, they don’t – the only option policy makers can think of is to do more of the same, following what’s been called the “lottle” principle – “if a little doesn’t work, maybe a lot’ll do the trick.”
The insidious result is that the tertiary economy of money is moving ever further out of step with the secondary economy of goods and services, yielding a second helping of economic trouble on top of the one already dished out by the damaged primary economy. Flooding the markets with cheap credit may be a workable strategy when a credit crunch has hamstrung the secondary economy; when what’s hitting the secondary economy is the unrecognized costs of ecological overshoot, though, flooding the markets with cheap credit simply accelerates economic imbalances that are already battering economies around the world.
One interesting feature of this sort of two-sided crisis is that it’s not a unique experience. Most of the past civilizations that overshot the ecological systems that supported them, and crashed to ruin as a result, backed themselves into a similar corner. I’ve mentioned here several times the way that the classic Lowland Maya tried to respond to the failure of their agricultural system by accelerating the building programs central to their religious and political lives.
Their pyramids of stone served the same purpose as our pyramids of debt: they systematized the distribution of labor and material wealth in a way that supported the social structure of the Lowland Mayan city-states and the ahauob or “divine kings” who ruled them. Yet building more pyramids was not an effective response to topsoil loss; in fact, it worsened the situation considerably by using up labor that might have gone into alternative means of food production.
An even better example, because a closer parallel to the present instance, is the twilight of the Roman world. Ancient Rome had a sophisticated economic system in which credit and government stimulus programs played an important role. Roman money, though, was based strictly on precious metals, and the economic expansion of the late Republic and early Empire was made possible only because Roman armies systematically looted the wealth of most of the known world.
More fatal still was the shift that replaced a sustainable village agriculture across most of the Roman world with huge slave-worked latifundiae, the industrial farms of their day, which were treated as cash cows by absentee owners and, in due time, were milked dry. The primary economy cracked as topsoil loss caused Roman agriculture to fail; attempts by emperors to remedy the situation failed in turn, and the Roman government was reduced to debasing the coinage in an attempt to meet a rising spiral of military costs driven by civil wars and barbarian invasions. This made a bad situation worse, gutting the Roman economy and making the collapse of the Empire that much more inevitable.
It’s interesting to note the aftermath. In the wake of Rome’s fall, lending money at interest – a normal business practice throughout the Roman world – came to a dead stop for centuries. Christianity and Islam, the majority religions across what had been the Empire’s territory, defined it as a deadly sin.
More, money itself came to play an extremely limited role in large parts of the former Empire. Across Europe in the early Middle Ages, it was common for people to go from one year to the next without so much as handling a coin. What replaced it was the use of labor as the basic medium of exchange. That was the foundation of the feudal system, from top to bottom: from the peasant who held his small plot of farmland by providing a fixed number of days of labor each year in the local baron’s fields, to the baron who held his fief by providing his overlord with military service, the entire system was a network of personal relationships backed by exchanges of labor for land.
It’s common in contemporary economic history to see this as a giant step backward, but there’s good reason to think it was nothing of the kind. The tertiary economy of the late Roman world had become a corrupt, metastatic mess; the new economy of feudal Europe responded to this by erasing the tertiary economy as far as possible, banishing economic abstractions, and producing a system that was very hard to game – deliberately failing to meet one’s feudal obligations was the one unforgivable crime in medieval society, and generally risked the prompt and heavily armed arrival of one’s liege lord and all his other vassals.
The thought of Goldman Sachs executives having to defend themselves in hand-to-hand combat against a medieval army may raise smiles today, a thousand years ago, that’s the way penalties for default were most commonly assessed.
What makes this even more worth noting is that very similar systems emerged in the wake of collapses of other civilizations. The implosion of Heian Japan in the tenth century, to name only one example, gave rise to a feudal system so closely parallel to the European model that it’s possible to translate much of the technical language of Japanese bushido precisely into the equivalent jargon of European chivalry, and vice versa.
More broadly, when complex civilizations fall apart, one of the standard results is the replacement of complex tertiary economies with radically simplified systems that do away with abstractions such as money, and replace them with concrete economics of land and labor.
There’s a lesson here, and it can be applied to the present situation. As the rising spiral of economic trouble continues, we can expect drastic volatility in the value and availability of money – and here again, remember that this term refers to any form of wealth that only has value because it can be exchanged for something else. Any economic activity that is solely a means of bringing in money will be held hostage to the vagaries of the tertiary economy, whether those express themselves through inflation, credit collapse, or what have you.
Any economic activity that produces goods and services directly for the use of the producer, and his or her family and community, will be much less drastically affected by these vagaries. If you depend on your salary to buy vegetables, for example, how much you can eat depends on the value of money at any given moment; if you grow your own vegetables, using your own kitchen and garden scraps to fertilize the soil and saving your own seed, you have much more direct control over your vegetable supply.
Most people won’t have the option of separating themselves completely from the money economy for many years to come; as long as today’s governments continue to function, they will demand money for taxes, and money will continue to be the gateway resource for many goods and services, including some that will be very difficult to do without.
Still, there’s no reason why distancing oneself from the tertiary economy has to be an all-or-nothing thing. Any step toward the direct production of goods and services for one’s own use, with one’s own labor, using resources under one’s own direct control, is a step toward the world that will emerge after money; it’s also a safety cushion against the disintegration of the money economy going on around us – a point I’ll discuss in more detail, by way of a concrete example, in next week’s post.
.
Gulf Spill 70,000 barrels a day
SUBHEAD: A mechanical engineering professor who studied the video of the leak estimates the flow to be 70,000 barrels a day — 14 times BP's estimate.
Image above: Illustration, By Dan Swenson, of underwater situation at BP disaster. Source - USCG, NOAA, BP, Trasnocean. From (http://blog.skytruth.org/2010/04/gulf-oil-spill-6-million-gallons-per.html).
By Bettina Boxall on 14 May 2010 in Los Angeles Times -
(http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill-measure-20100514,0,1541851.story)
A video released by BP this week has underscored questions about the rate at which oil is spewing from a broken pipe on the Gulf of Mexico seabed.
BP and government officials have pegged the leak resulting from the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster at 5,000 barrels a day, or about 200,000 gallons. But a scientist who analyzed the video of the gushing pipe said Thursday the oil flow appeared to be much greater.
"I spent a couple of hours this afternoon analyzing the video, and the number I get is 70,000 barrels a day coming out of that pipe," said Steve Wereley, a Purdue University mechanical engineering professor.
Video above: "Crater Plume Gassing". Underwater footage of BP geyser of crude oil. From (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5hFPI4Y93U).
Wereley, who has written a book on flow measurement, said his figure was an estimate that could be off by plus or minus 20%.
"BP has said you can't measure this. I agree you can't measure [the flow] to a very high degree of precision," he added. "But that doesn't mean you can't get a good estimate. This estimate, I think, is much better than the 5,000 barrels a day they have previously been floating."
In response to Wereley's estimate, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said late Thursday that he would launch a formal inquiry into the matter.
"I am concerned that an underestimation of the oil spill's flow may be impeding the ability to solve the leak and handle the management of the disaster," said Markey, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Wereley arrived at the number by comparing individual frames of the video and tracking how fast a swirl of spewing oil moved from one frame to another. He then calculated the flow based on the size of the pipe.
He conducted the exercise after National Public Radio called him and asked whether the flow could be measured. The network reported Wereley's results Thursday.
BP spokeswoman Rebecca Bernhard said the company is standing by the 5,000-barrel figure. "We look at the fact that it's coming out of the riser [pipe] in several ways. We look at it from satellite imagery, overflight observations and on-the-water observations."
She said none of the methods were exact. "We said that from the beginning."
Last week BP officials told members of Congress in closed-door briefings that the spill could amount to 60,000 barrels a day in a worst-case scenario.
Gulf Spill Worse Than Estimated Video above: "Lowering the Cofferdam". BP's failed attempt at a quick fix. From (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JTM2QyAfCI) By Richard Harris on 14 May 2010 on NPR - (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126809525) There's at least 10 times as much oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico than official estimates suggest, according to an exclusive NPR analysis. At NPR's request, experts analyzed video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil. BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that. Steven Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the sea-floor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry. A computer program simply tracks particles, and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day. The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent. Given that uncertainty, the amount of material spewing from the pipe could range from 56,000 barrels to 84,000 barrels a day. It is important to note that it's not all oil. The short video BP released starts out with a shot of methane, but at the end it seems to be mostly oil. "There's potentially some fluctuation back and forth between methane and oil," Wereley said. But assuming that the lion's share of the material coming out the pipe is oil, Wereley's calculations show that the official estimates are too low. "We're talking more than a factor of 10 difference between what I calculate and the number that's being thrown around," he said. At least two other calculations support him. Timothy Crone, an associate research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, used another well-accepted method to calculate fluid flows. Crone says the flow is at least 50,000 barrels a day. Eugene Chaing, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, got a similar answer just using pencil and paper. Without even having a sense of scale from the BP video, he correctly deduced that the diameter of the pipe was about 20 inches. And though his calculation is less precise than Wereley's, it is in the same ballpark. "I would peg it at around 20,000 to 100,000 barrels per day," he says. Chiang calls the current estimate of 5,000 barrels a day "almost certainly incorrect." Given this flow rate, it seems this is a spill of unprecedented proportions in U.S. waters. "It would just take a few days, at most a week, for it to exceed the Exxon Valdez's record," Chiang said. BP disputed these figures. "We've said all along that there's no way to estimate the flow coming out of the pipe accurately," said Bill Salvin, a BP spokesman. Instead, BP prefers to rely on measurements of oil on the sea surface made by the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Those are also contentious. Salvin also says these analyses should not assume that the oil is spewing from the 21-inch pipe, called a riser, shown in the video. "The drill pipe, from which the oil is rising, is actually a 9-inch pipe that rests within the riser," Slavin said. But Werleley says that fact doesn't skew his calculation. And though scientists say they hope that BP will eventually release more video and information so they can refine their estimates, what they have now is good enough. "It's possible to get a pretty decent number by looking at the video," Wereley said. This new, much larger number suggests that capturing — and cleaning up — this oil may be a much bigger challenge than anyone has let on. .
Image above: Illustration, By Dan Swenson, of underwater situation at BP disaster. Source - USCG, NOAA, BP, Trasnocean. From (http://blog.skytruth.org/2010/04/gulf-oil-spill-6-million-gallons-per.html).
By Bettina Boxall on 14 May 2010 in Los Angeles Times -
(http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill-measure-20100514,0,1541851.story)
A video released by BP this week has underscored questions about the rate at which oil is spewing from a broken pipe on the Gulf of Mexico seabed.
BP and government officials have pegged the leak resulting from the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster at 5,000 barrels a day, or about 200,000 gallons. But a scientist who analyzed the video of the gushing pipe said Thursday the oil flow appeared to be much greater.
"I spent a couple of hours this afternoon analyzing the video, and the number I get is 70,000 barrels a day coming out of that pipe," said Steve Wereley, a Purdue University mechanical engineering professor.
Video above: "Crater Plume Gassing". Underwater footage of BP geyser of crude oil. From (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5hFPI4Y93U).
Wereley, who has written a book on flow measurement, said his figure was an estimate that could be off by plus or minus 20%.
"BP has said you can't measure this. I agree you can't measure [the flow] to a very high degree of precision," he added. "But that doesn't mean you can't get a good estimate. This estimate, I think, is much better than the 5,000 barrels a day they have previously been floating."
In response to Wereley's estimate, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said late Thursday that he would launch a formal inquiry into the matter.
"I am concerned that an underestimation of the oil spill's flow may be impeding the ability to solve the leak and handle the management of the disaster," said Markey, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Wereley arrived at the number by comparing individual frames of the video and tracking how fast a swirl of spewing oil moved from one frame to another. He then calculated the flow based on the size of the pipe.
He conducted the exercise after National Public Radio called him and asked whether the flow could be measured. The network reported Wereley's results Thursday.
BP spokeswoman Rebecca Bernhard said the company is standing by the 5,000-barrel figure. "We look at the fact that it's coming out of the riser [pipe] in several ways. We look at it from satellite imagery, overflight observations and on-the-water observations."
She said none of the methods were exact. "We said that from the beginning."
Last week BP officials told members of Congress in closed-door briefings that the spill could amount to 60,000 barrels a day in a worst-case scenario.
Gulf Spill Worse Than Estimated Video above: "Lowering the Cofferdam". BP's failed attempt at a quick fix. From (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JTM2QyAfCI) By Richard Harris on 14 May 2010 on NPR - (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126809525) There's at least 10 times as much oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico than official estimates suggest, according to an exclusive NPR analysis. At NPR's request, experts analyzed video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil. BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that. Steven Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the sea-floor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry. A computer program simply tracks particles, and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day. The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent. Given that uncertainty, the amount of material spewing from the pipe could range from 56,000 barrels to 84,000 barrels a day. It is important to note that it's not all oil. The short video BP released starts out with a shot of methane, but at the end it seems to be mostly oil. "There's potentially some fluctuation back and forth between methane and oil," Wereley said. But assuming that the lion's share of the material coming out the pipe is oil, Wereley's calculations show that the official estimates are too low. "We're talking more than a factor of 10 difference between what I calculate and the number that's being thrown around," he said. At least two other calculations support him. Timothy Crone, an associate research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, used another well-accepted method to calculate fluid flows. Crone says the flow is at least 50,000 barrels a day. Eugene Chaing, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, got a similar answer just using pencil and paper. Without even having a sense of scale from the BP video, he correctly deduced that the diameter of the pipe was about 20 inches. And though his calculation is less precise than Wereley's, it is in the same ballpark. "I would peg it at around 20,000 to 100,000 barrels per day," he says. Chiang calls the current estimate of 5,000 barrels a day "almost certainly incorrect." Given this flow rate, it seems this is a spill of unprecedented proportions in U.S. waters. "It would just take a few days, at most a week, for it to exceed the Exxon Valdez's record," Chiang said. BP disputed these figures. "We've said all along that there's no way to estimate the flow coming out of the pipe accurately," said Bill Salvin, a BP spokesman. Instead, BP prefers to rely on measurements of oil on the sea surface made by the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Those are also contentious. Salvin also says these analyses should not assume that the oil is spewing from the 21-inch pipe, called a riser, shown in the video. "The drill pipe, from which the oil is rising, is actually a 9-inch pipe that rests within the riser," Slavin said. But Werleley says that fact doesn't skew his calculation. And though scientists say they hope that BP will eventually release more video and information so they can refine their estimates, what they have now is good enough. "It's possible to get a pretty decent number by looking at the video," Wereley said. This new, much larger number suggests that capturing — and cleaning up — this oil may be a much bigger challenge than anyone has let on. .
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