Balanced on the Equinox

SUBHEAD: We are  between two worlds - the darkness and the light - it is only through shadows that we can discern.

By Juan Wilson on 21 March 2019 for Island Breath -
(https://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2019/03/balanced-on-equinox.html)


Image above: A humming bird and honey bees drinking from a backyard fountain. From (https://imgur.com/gallery/2KD9o).

This website, IslandBreath.org, has been reporting on the negative impacts of human behavior in regards to the living world we inhabit. This includes phenomena like global warming, increased atmospheric carbon, rising oceans, over development, desertification, environmental collapse, extinctions, etc.

Some would say we have focused on negativity, or as some call it "doomster porn". I admit we are guilty as charged. We were hoping that we could turn the rudder of our "ship of fools" just a few degrees away from our courseof crashing on the rocks. We were 50 years too late to that party.

The Club of Rome (see https://www.clubofrome.org/) convened in 1970 to survey the future and laid out our options for surviving calamity. Some who read the grasped it's implications. Most ignored the implication.

Some were ahead of the curve and abandoned modernity early.

One was  Ted Kaczynski who quit as a professor of math at UC Berkley to live in a cabin the woods... and go mad -  fighting "The System" by becoming the "Unibomber"and using terrorism to solve the problems he percieved (see http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2018/11/times-up-cease-and-desist.html).
Another way to go was the approach of Albert Bates who went off with a bunch of hippies to start the "The Farm" in Tennessee.

"In 1971, a caravan of 80 school buses and assorted other vehicles carrying 320 hippie idealists landed on a cattle farm in central Tennessee. They had a mission. The banner on their band bus read 'Out to Save the World!'"

The Farm still operated as a self sustained community.

"Today The Farm is home to a little over 200 people living on 3 square miles of forested highland with four generations of families and friends."For more see (see http://www.thefarm.org).

My point is that it is better to try and build a better place to live for as many living creatures near you as possible than to "fight the system" - and as it usually goes - either beat The System then become its replacement or to be beaten by it and lose everything.

Somewhere between the cracks you may be able to avoid The System and build a place for yourself that is under the radar and rich and green.

Then, if you're lucky, you might entice the wildness of Nature to be a partner in enriching the lives of those around you.

Here on Kauai, in Hawaii, we have been lucky enough to entice some forest around us and welcomed the bees, and hornets, and wasps, and moths, and butterflies and worms and grubs and chickens and mina birds, and parrots, and egrets et cetera, et cetera. In other words, the birds and the bees. The more the merrier as we hurtle towards our fate.

In fine arts chiaroscuro is the discipline of controlling light and dark to achieve an effect. Without light there is nothing to see, and without some darkness there is no shape or form. 

We are all in the business of painting our surroundings to achieve the reality we hope to live in. This moment in time, a solar equinox, is a time to focus on what we may actually accomplish with what is at hand. 

Visualize it and make it happen.   


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Going through a real collapse

SUBHEAD: When the "Shit Hits the Fan" can you be prepared for a period without civilization?

By Daisy Luther on 17 January 2018 for the Organic Prepper -
(https://www.theorganicprepper.com/selco-who-survives-who-dies-shtf/)


Image above: A Serbian paramilitary kicks the dead body of a woman in Bosnia in 1992. Photo by Ron Haviv. From (http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/capturing-the-image-of-ethnic-cleansing-in-bosnia-01-19-2017).

[IB Publisher's note: This article by Daisy Luther is from an interview with "Selco", a survivor of a brutal military occupation during the Balkan War in the early 1990s. For months civilians died of thirst, starvation and sniper fire in European towns. Selco is not a native English speaker and we have corrected some language.]

Did you ever wonder about the differences in how people behave in a crisis? Why some people survive and some people die? Are there characteristics that we can nurture now in good times that could help see us through bad times?

I have talked with Selco previously about who lives and who doesn’t in a long-term emergency, and a great determiner is a flexible mindset. In this interview, we go deeper into who can withstand the stress of a SHTF (Shit Hits the Fan) event and who crumbles. Today he shares his insights from the Balkan War.

Luther: What were the worst mental stresses during the situation in Bosnia that are probably common in many long-term scenarios?

Selco: Obviously, it was a situation when violence was very widely used and in a random way, often without any logic. So people lived n very poor conditions under constant physical threat.

Of most importance were mental stresses. This part of survival is in my opinion very important and commonly overlooked in the prepper community.

It is a huge topic, but we can touch on some of this in the article. I researched it a lot. A few factors were important, and will be important in any future collapse event:

#1) Loss of control
If you are living a normal average life with your family, you have a job, the kids go to school and can eat their favorite foods, and when someone is sick you go to the physician.

There are police to help if there are problems, there is law and order, everybody knows their place more or less.

You feel that you are in control of your life and lives of your family.

And then one day all that is gone. You find yourself in the world where very often things of life and death are a matter of pure coincidence or chance. For example, is there going to rain that day for enough water?

People had a very hard time of dealing with it. You can be prepared very well to some extent, but also you need to be prepared that for a number of things that you are simply not in control anymore.

#2) Hopelessness
Hopelessness is the big word when it comes to survival, and from my experience, it is hard to beat it.

A survival event that lasts for few days, even a week or two, is like a camping trip, something like people go together, share food, help, there are nights spent next to lamps, violence is possible but not widespread because people see that event is going to last only for week or two.

Some people will take a chance and do violence or steal, but the majority are going to keep it together to the end of SHTF.

Events that last for month or two are harder, more violence and a harder time, but still, people see that everything is going to go back to normal.

When you are thrown into an event that looks like (or you think ) it is going to be a permanent or very prolonged condition, rules change.

From one side you have people that are not going to be so nice and helpful to each other simply because they see this is going last and they will be forced to fight for resources; and from the other side you are going to have hopelessness.

Most humans need to see cause in order to operate in the proper way, or in other words, in hard conditions people need to see ‘light“ no matter how far it is, otherwise, you might just mentally “surrender“ because it is hopeless to push on.

#3) Re-setting of the values
In normal life, you might be a lawyer or clerk, or teacher, or famous writer and then one day the world collapses (let say because of an EMP- Electro-Magnetic Pulse- weapon).

In a few weeks you find out that you are living in the world where you are valuable if you can quickly and efficiently chop wood, or pickle vegetables, repair weapons, devise a setup to charge a car battery, or simply shoot a rifle effectively.

I am not saying a teacher or writer is useless in SHTF, but values are “re-set“. If you do not have any immediate useful skills you’ll be forced to learn one. You may be forced to understand that the values (knowledge and skills) that you had prior collapse simply may not be valuable anymore.

People had problems with this new “value system“.

#4) Responsibility
People have responsibilities in normal times taking care of their families. Those responsibilities are still there when there is a serious collapse but because the "System" is out, all help is out too.

For example, you are responsible for your old mother who has high blood pressure problem but there is no doctor anymore and there is no medicine. There is no help for your kid who has special needs, for example.

You realize that everything is up to you.

Some people simply could not take that. People could not watch their sick child because they could not help them.

Some people would simply “surrender" or leave everything.

#5) Bending the rules
Most interesting is actually how people would (or would not) bend the rules that they had prior to the collapse.

A majority of us live by some mental and moral rules. They tell us what is right and what is wrong.

It is wrong to steal, it is wrong to harm people. It is right to take care of sick and elderly.

When the SHTF you’ll be in a position to “bend“ these rules, simply because you’ll be faced with lot of tough decisions and choices.

For example is it right to steal from others if that means my child will not be hungry or die from an infection?

Is it OK to harm other people because of that? How are you going mentally live with that?

I am not advocating anything here, and I cannot give you suggestions but be sure that you’ll have to bend the rules, and that you will be be faced with tough decisions.

It is up to you how much you are going to bend or break them.

All of the factors mentioned above are examples, and usually, you meet all of them more or less, and in combinations.

Luther: What kind of person tended to do better when everything went belly up?

Selco: First, we need to formulate a definition of “person who tended to do better when everything went belly up.”

I know people who were powerful in that time: maybe because they had manpower, or a role in the black market. For example, they’d sell baby formula to people (sometimes mixed with plaster), or they simply robbed people.

When war stopped they ended up very powerful and they are still (years after) very powerful.

But they are not my definition of normal people.

We are talking now about ordinary folks, and I use the term “small circle“ when describing how to live in those times.

You need to mentally adapt to the fact that you will have to overcome some serious problems, but what is more important you need to adapt to the fact that some of the problems cannot be solved, some people will not survive, and you still will have to move on.

That small circle is your family or your group, and while the world outside is falling apart that does not mean your family needs to fall apart. You will just have to adapt to the new world.

Many people survived hard times, some of them by doing bad things. Other survived but fell apart when they found themselves back in normal times.

One thing about who did mentally good in those times is that people who had support from other people (family, friends) in that time did good.

It is very hard to be alone during events like that, especially if it is prolonged, of course, because obvious reasons, for example security reasons (guarding home), or simply resources gathering.

But when it comes to the mental aspect you need to have support from trusted people (just like they are going need that support from you) otherwise resetting your values is much harder.

Hopelessness will kick down. Simply bending the rules too much may change you in a way that, in the end, turns yours into something that is more animal than human.

Luther: Do you remember any stories you can tell about specific people who thrived?

 Selco: Ordinary folks usually did not thrive. We all dragged ourselves through that way-too-long period feeling lucky if we were alive, with all parts of our body intact, and with families alive.

Everything else was day by day.

I remember this guy, I’ll call him Ed here, he was the man with information.

You need to know that there was a complete information blackout, and even if you could somewhere find a radio most of the stuff that you heard on it was pure propaganda junk.

When you find yourself cut off from real information, all that you are going have is a whole bunch of rumors and misinformation, and only then you realize how much people are used to having information.

I cannot even remember what kind of ridiculous information I have heard in those times, and I believed much of it because I needed to believe in something.

I have heard (and believed) probably 100 times that peace is coming in 3 days, or a new big UN convoy with food for everybody coming to the city tomorrow, big enemy movements there.

People need to know. It is human nature.

And during very hard times people are simply ready to believe in a lot of things that look like clear nonsense in normal times.

Note: Have a means to communicate with other people, CB, radio, satellite phone, ham radio. To hear correct information, it is valuable for many reasons - including mental health.

Ed was the guy who spread rumors, information, and news; and people would give him food for that information.

I believe we all deep in ourselves knew that it is probably just rumor, but “Ed said yesterday“ was some kind of information, something to talk about, something to hope for.

Ed survived alone whole event (pretty rare) thanks to the fact that “he had information.”

Luther: What kind of person suffered the most?

Selco: Survival is about being able to adapt to new things, and those new things are bad mostly.

There are many factors here that are influencing how you gonna mentally cope with collapse. A few of those are:

• how prepared you are (how much food, water, medicines in stock)
• how many usable skills you have? (natural remedies knowledge, gardening, technical skills, fighting skills…)
• how dependent you are on the system? (you are living in city apartment building or in a small rural community)
• what kind of group (or family) you have around you, what kind of skills those people have, how close and trusted are those people?

These are just a few examples. Even if you have all of the above you still need to have mental strength.

Or in other words, you may be perfectly prepared survivalist when SHTF just to find that you are simply falling apart mentally.

In my case (I am talking about people who were not preppers at all) people who suffered most were people who failed to recognize the new rules.

We had (in that time, in my family), a college professor, a man that was pretty important in normal times. Students were kinda trembling when they used to see him.

When SHTF he mentally fell apart and become useless because he felt that suddenly he become nobody, completely unimportant.

Every scum with a rifle was more important than him.

It is not about that we could not find a use for him, it is about fact that he was “plugged-in" so heavily in the system and when that system was gone he felt there was no sense to anything.

He did not want to try to be useful in any other ways.

One definition would be that people who are “plugged-in" or depended too much on the system had worst time when system disappeared (SHTF).

Luther: What are some things that can help a person who is having a difficult time during a crisis?

 Selco: I mentioned that you need to have support from other people, but also you need to have peace of mind.

It is easier said then it is done, but yes, faith and religion, or kind of spiritual-mental order helps a lot.

I cannot say that religious people had less hard times, but I am sure that religious people went more peacefully through that hard time because it helps you to make sense of everything.

Personally, I had a kind of “philosophy“ during that time. It went something like “I’ll do whatever I can, and the rest is not in my hands anyway.“

Over the times it grew into “It will be whatever it has to be.“ It worked for me at that time.

It sounds simple, but this philosophy helped me through some of the hardest periods because I understood that I can do only do so much. There were so many things that were way out of my control, and way random. If I worried too much about it I might lose my mind.

It worked for me then, but remember that I was not prepared. Preppers today are more prepared, and by combining that prepping with peace of mind, it makes even more sense.

Remember that you need to find sense in life when SHTF. You need to have reasons to push on and on.

God, faith, kids, love… you need to have some reason and to stick to it.

It can be things like teaching others about herbs, or food growing.

If you do not have good reasons you either end up dead because you stop caring, or simply you turn to an animal just following the most primitive instincts.

Luther: What are the things that made people feel better and helped recapture some normalcy?

 Selco: I have to say that drugs and heavy alcohol drinking were in use very much, but not as a mean to recapture normalcy, it was more to get lost – to forget reality.

You need to have a “vent“ - it is different for different people. As I said, for a lot of people it was alcohol or drugs, for me it did not do the complete job and often it was dangerous to get “lost“ in times like that.

It was very usual to see people smoking marijuana, people who never even heard of it prior the SHTF.

For me, two things were like “charging my mental batteries“ – music and reading.

Music was rare, and it was actually if you stumble on someone who plays guitar, reading was more available, and for me, it was like I was still there but I had escaped to a better place while reading or listening music.

In some bad situations I did find myself singing songs, maybe I looked retarded in that moment because of that, but actually it helped.

When you are dirty, hungry, insecure, frightened and worried for your family, and when all that goes for months, you need something that going to make you feel fine for some time, not to forget all troubles (like with heavy drinking or drugs maybe) but more like to push all worries aside for a bit.

Note: do not mix alcohol abuse with fact that it is a great idea to store alcohol for SHTF. Have alcohol for a trade, or drink, but do not try to solve heavy times with alcohol abuse, it does not work.

Small snacks, like candies, are precious things as a mental help.

Check today what kind of small things comfort you when you are down or having problems, and count on that when the SHTF. Those small things will probably comfort you ten times more then.

Luther: Are there specific personality traits that we can focus on now which would help us through a situation like this? 

Selco A sense of humor! In that time, for me, a friend with a good sense of humor was worth some rifles or and a pile of MREs.

A good sense of humor is an important survival skill and often overlooked. I am not joking.

And storytelling.

We had in our family old man who was guerilla fighter during WW2, and he combined both of these qualities.

In hard times, when we were more or less desperate he would tell us stories of his fighting in WW2 – how they fled from the Nazis, how they starved, how they froze in the woods.

And over the time it helped. 

For example, one of us would comment “Oh, there is only one can of food today for 5 of us" and then he would say “Oh, you wimps, it is piece of cake, during the WW2 in the German encirclement I ate my shoe for a week.“

And for whatever hard time in our SHTF, he would have a story of “Oh, you wimps, during the WW2 I…“
Over time it became partly a joke, but also partly a serious thing.

Even between each other, when we saw it is a hard situation, we would joke “Shit, this is bad, we are in serious trouble now, call grandpa with one of his “oh, you wimps, during the WW2“ stories.

That old guy knew exactly what kind of mental relief we needed – joking and storytelling how someone else had hard times and how he managed to survive.

He had a sense of humor, a gift for storytelling, and he had spirit.

Thanks to him I grew the habit of using humor in hard situations.

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The Archipelago of Hope

SUBHEAD: The “complete rebirth on the land” becomes a real option for all communities facing climate change.

By Nich Triolo on 28 November 2017 for Orion Magazine -
(https://orionmagazine.org/2017/11/eight-questions-author-gleb-raygorodetsky-archipelago-hope/)


Image above: On sacred Ukok Plateau, Maria Amanchina, a traditional Altai shaman and healer, lights a pipe to send her prayers with the smoke to the Sky, the Land, and the Spirit of Altai. From original article.

To celebrate the recent launch of an important and relevant new book, The Archipelago of Hope, I reached out to its author, Gleb Raygorodetsky, to learn more.

Born and raised in a small village on the Bering Sea coast of Kamchatka Peninsula, USSR, Gleb immigrated to the United States in 1988. He made his way from New York City to Fairbanks, Alaska, where he continued his studies in wildlife biology.

Since then, Gleb has traversed the Americas, from Canada’s Beaufort Sea to the Brazilian Amazon, from the Andes to the shores of Lake Superior, living with Indigenous peoples as diverse as Aleut fur seal hunters, Amazonian Caboclos pirarucu fishermen, and the Gwich’in caribou hunters.

After earning his PhD in ecology, evolution and environmental biology, he continued working with Indigenous groups around the world. Gleb has written and contributed to books and scientific articles on Indigenous issues, traditional knowledge, and conservation in both English and Russian.

He wrote Gwich’in Words about the Land—a book on the Indigenous ecological knowledge of Gwich’in people in the Northwest Territories. He has also written popular articles on Indigenous and environmental issues for various magazines.

Gleb is a co-founder of Conversations with the Earth (CWE)—an Indigenous-led multimedia initiative that amplifies Indigenous voices in the discourse on climate change.

1) Your recent book is called The Archipelago of Hope. Can you give us a synopsis on what the book is about and how the word “archipelago” made it into the title? 

The Indigenous communities and their traditional territories are the islands of biocultural diversity in the ever-rising sea of development and urbanization. The Archipelago of Hope takes readers on a journey to explore the inextricable links between Indigenous cultures and their lands, and how they form the foundation for climate change resilience around the world.

Indigenous peoples have a millennia-long track record of maintaining intimate relationships with the natural world, which has nourished their communities and sustained their cultures. This is the track record that they have maintained despite formidable odds, including multiple “izations”—colonization, Christianization, sedentarization, and globalization.

What makes Indigenous communities indispensible in the search for climate change solutions is that their ancestral territories are the “living laboratories,” where the traditional practices and understanding of nature meet modern technology and scientific insights, generating new knowledge critical for developing relevant climate change responses.

2) You are an expert in the field of “biocultural diversity” conservation. Can you define this field and tell us how you entered into this sort of work?

In recent years, a number of integrative disciplines—systems science, resilience science, ecosystem health, ethnoecology, deep ecology, Gaia Theory, and others—have sought ways to advance our understanding of the relationships between people and nature, incorporating insights from both the biological and social sciences as well as Indigenous knowledge.

Various organizations working on biodiversity conservation, cultural preservation, and sustainable development are increasingly relying on such holistic approaches in their work. Out of all these approaches, biocultural diversity has particularly resonated with me.

Biocultural diversity is a product of millennia of coevolutionary relationships between humans and their surroundings, when people rely on their environment for survival while adapting to and modifying it.


Image above: Inside a Nenets herders’ traditional tent, Gosha Khudi is taking a break from his daily chores and checks text messages on his cell phone. A young reindeer doe, a survivor of the 2013–2014 “rain-on-snow” extreme weather event, hides from mosquitos. From original article.

3) Can you explain Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), and how it’s being used (or not) when making important climate and environmental policy today? 

TEK is the cumulative body of knowledge, practices, and beliefs about the relationships between people, other living beings, and their environment, handed down through generations through oral and hands-on transmission.

It provides valid and practical information about various ecological processes including, for example, daily movements of animals, their seasonal distribution, and multi-year changes in abundance.

TEK-based monitoring allows for timely detection of environmental changes, and development of appropriate community responses that help maintain the integrity of local social-ecological systems.

Until recently, TEK has been largely ignored, but increasingly it has been recognized for its important contributions to such fields as wildlife conservation, land use planning, environmental monitoring, and human wellbeing.

New emerging frameworks, such as Multiple Evidence Based approach, creates a platform for an equitable knowledge co-production. By focusing on the complementarity of diverse knowledge systems based on both Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems, this leads to better decision-making on multiple scales. 


4) What are some takeaway lessons you learned while immersed in Indigenous communities to discuss such global challenges as climate change?

All of the Indigenous peoples featured in the book are intimately aware of the web of relationships that sustains them and their traditional territories.

The interdependence of animate and inanimate, spiritual and physical, past and future, rights and responsibilities, traditional knowledge and science, are fundamentally important for sustaining our planet’s biocultural diversity.

Despite everything the modern world has thrown at them, the Indigenous peoples I profiled have found ways to persevere and even thrive, by keeping their links to the land and other living beings.

What makes these Indigenous communities resilient is that their stewardship of the land is based on Respect, Reciprocity, and Reverence (3Rs) to each other, their neighbors, and the Earth.

Traditional territories of Indigenous peoples continue to support the majority of the earth’s remaining biological and cultural diversity, intact forests, undammed rivers, and ecosystem services, which are fundamental for regulating the climate.

Recognizing Indigenous peoples’ inherent rights to fulfill the responsibilities of looking after their traditional territories—the obligations they inherited from their ancestors—is a prerequisite for sustaining the resilience of these places.

5) What’s next?

My hope is that The Archipelago of Hope becomes more than just words on paper, that it turns into flagstones on a road to healing, reconciliation, and positive transformation.

I am working with my long-term partners to create outreach program and a community-focused traveling exhibition program that would enable Indigenous community members to share their own stories with one another, their neighbors, decision-makers, and the broader global community.

We are also establishing “The Archipelago of Hope Indigenous Resilience Fund,” so that any profits earned from the book sales, as well as any donations to the projects profiled in the book, can go directly to the relevant communities, their representative organizations, or their partners.

So that eventually, in the words of my friend and teacher Tero Mustonen, the “complete rebirth on the land” becomes a real option for all communities facing climate change.



Video above: Promotional video for "Archipelago of Hope: Wisdom and Resilience from the Edge of Climate Change". From original article (https://youtu.be/yx0WbK5pDdg).

Visit the Official Website.
Explore Facebook, and Twitter.
Listen to WNYC Studios feature.
Read an excerpt from the book at Cultural Survival.
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Can we live without progress?

SUBHEAD: Living without the hope of progress didn't stop the ancient Greeks from creating great art and philosophy.

By Kurt Cobb on 2 July 2017 for Resource Insight -
(http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2017/07/can-we-live-without-progress.html)


Image above: Painting by Raphael of "The School of Athens" done in for Vatican 1509-1511. The most obvious characters are in the center, Plato and his student Aristotle, founding figures of Western philosophy. From (http://study.com/academy/lesson/the-school-of-athens-by-raphael-description-figures-analysis.html).

[IB Publisher's note: The question works better upside down. "Can we live with progress?" The answer appears to be "No!" It's been our excuse to chew op the world. Remember General Electic. The corporation that devised and built Fukushima Daiichi and put the reactors almost at sea level and the placed backup generators in the basement? Their adage delivered on TV by Ronald Reagan was "Progress is our most important product".]

To a person alive today it is hard to fathom that the ancient Greeks regarded themselves as living in an age of decline.

These are the people who gave us the philosophers Socrates and Plato, the playwrights Sophocles and Euripides, the mathematician Pythagoras, the scientist and polymath Archimedes, and the first person to formulate atomic theory, Democritus.

These are the people who designed and built the Parthenon and created the sculpture we so admire today in our museums. And yet, the ancient Greeks believed that the Golden Age, a period of unprecedented peace, prosperity, and cultural achievement, already lay deep in the past.

A friend recently asked if we who are alive today could bear to live in such an age. Our modern lives are premised on the idea that tomorrow will not only be different, but also better. He said this attitude has made us inattentive. We feel we don't have to pay attention to the details of life because we know their destination in advance, namely, progress.

In the sciences we speak of progress--greater knowledge, better instruments, new investigatory techniques, more comprehensive theories. But we rarely speak of progress in the arts. We tend to believe that art changes, while science advances. We do not think of James Joyce's novels as new and improved versions of Thomas Hardy's. We simply say that they are different.

Can we imagine an existence in which tomorrow may be different from yesterday, but may not necessarily represent an advance? Can we imagine a whole lifetime of such days? And, perhaps the most vexing question of all: Is it possible that we have actually been living in such a world without knowing it?

This question, of course, begets another one: What do we mean by progress? Generally speaking, we are offered the following metrics: more people living longer, healthier lives and enjoying greater material prosperity year after year (that is, ever increasing per capita consumption).

We may also be told that our knowledge of the natural and social worlds is growing rapidly and that this knowledge is part of the reason for our prosperity.

When speaking of progress, we tend to leave out the side effects--some of them very dangerous--such as climate change, toxic pollution, soil erosion, fisheries collapse, species extinction, and myriad other ongoing environmental cataclysms that have the potential to destroy our civilization.

To contain our anxiety we tell ourselves that this is the price of progress. The politicians ask,"Which would you rather save, your jobs or some obscure species of fish?" Of course, the predicament we face is not so easily dismissed.

Another friend pointed out the disconnect between the United Nations' recent announcement that world population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050, up from 7.5 billion today, while the organization also warns of the devastating consequences of climate change for world food supplies in the future.

Might not billions die of malnutrition and hunger before 2050 arrives as climate change continues to move faster than we have previously estimated?

And yet, the news is filled with predictions of fantastic leaps forward in artificial intelligence, robotics, and biotechnology without reference to the dangers we face--both from these fields themselves and from our environmental problems--that could put an end to and even reverse what we call progress.

One of the world's most prominent climate scientists, Tim Garrett, believes that our economic system simply cannot bring about the emissions reductions needed to stop climate change. Economic activity and carbon emissions are too closely linked.

This is just another way of saying that the idea of progress is embedded in the social and economic system, and that we cannot attack carbon emissions without attacking the idea of progress itself. Here is the question Garrett is really posing: If the progress we've made since the beginning of industrial civilization only leads to a complete reversal of all our supposed gains in the long run, can we really call what is happening progress?

And so, we must ask: Could we live in a world in which the idea of progress is abandoned?

Could we stand the thought that tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that might feel endlessly the same, our personal power neither increasing nor diminishing--or worse yet, possibly diminishing somewhat over time.

Living without the hope of progress didn't stop the ancient Greeks from creating art, architecture, literature and philosophy that we still admire and learn from today. Could humans once again learn to value change without demanding that it be progress? In truth, our fate depends on the answer to that question.

 • Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He has been a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and is author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude.

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The compost pile that changed NYC

SUBHEAD: We can’t forget that we can also make big change ourselves by starting small and local.

By Colin Beavan on 8 April 2017 for Yes Magazine -
(http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/It%20Started%20With%20One%20Brave%20Compost%20Pile%2C%20An%20Entire%20City%20Was%20Inspired%20to%20Change-20170415)


Image above: Compost piles like Kate Zadir’s popped up in other communities all around New York City. Photo by Cribb Visuals. From original article.

One thing that has bothered me a lot since the election is the idea in the air that we cannot change things while the current administration is in office. There is a pernicious idea that the government is so strong that nothing can be fixed or changed without first fixing or changing it.

Of course, we must work to change the government, but we must also not lose sight of the fact that we can change things in many ways—at the community, city, and state levels—and that each of us remains capable of making the world a better place, even as the presidential administration works against us.

To remind ourselves of this fact, I wanted to retell a story from my book How To Be Alive: A Guide To The Kind Of Happiness That Helps The World. It is the story of my friend Kate Zidar who, in the early 2000s, was one of many New York City residents who refused to wait for a change of government in order to get what they wanted for their communities—in this instance, a composting program to manage food waste.

Instead of waiting for a change in government policy, Kate started her own community compost pile in a corner of a city park. Compost piles like hers popped up in other communities all around the city. In 2013, seeing the benefits of these compost piles, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s government finally announced that it would move toward a citywide curbside compost program.

Here is what Kate says about her story:

Back in the early 2000s, I was volunteering in a community garden in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn’s McCarren Park, and my focus became soil toxicity. There was a lot of dioxin and lead in the soil because of fallout over the years from a nearby incinerator. I wanted to replace the top layer of soil so we could grow food safely. 

Also, trucks carrying food waste and other trash in the solid waste management system screwed up the air quality in the area. So it made sense to both create good topsoil and divert food scraps from the waste stream by starting a community compost pile. 

In McCarren Park, there was a part of a dog run that was not used, so I “annexed” it. I wrote a letter to the parks commissioner including a map showing the location of my new compost pile—I also sent a flower bulb, hoping that would get his attention—and asked for permission. He never wrote back, but I kept a copy of my letter and I told anyone who tried to interfere that the parks commissioner knew about the compost pile. 

In addition, I used really heavy 55 gallon plastic drums to house the compost system. They could not be moved easily. My idea was to make it so the work involved in shutting the compost system down would be greater than whatever problem park workers seemed to feel it caused. 

At first it was just me hauling my kitchen scraps to the barrels. But passing foot traffic soon attracted random people dropping off their food scraps, too. Before long, a woman named Jo Micek started to help. She was a community organizer, and she knew how to raise funds. Pretty quickly, the compost pile was being run by a “dirty dozen.” (Get it?) 

Not long after that, there were more than 100 families dropping off their food scraps every week, and the compost project turned into a collective, not just run by me. Meanwhile, the compost went back into the community garden, home gardeners took it home, and eventually even the park workers began to use it around the park. 

Why didn’t we begin by going to the city government and asking them to start a compost pile for us?

Everyone who works in community gardens knows that the gardens start essentially by squatting on an abandoned, unused piece of land. You don’t start by working with the government—but by working with your community for improvements everyone wants. When you try to work with the city agencies, they stonewall the idea because they have a whole range of missions and obligations to consider. But you have only one: your garden or compost pile. 

I didn’t want to use my energy dealing with the bureaucracy. I wanted to compost. Plus, I knew the project would actually represent a community improvement. I didn’t want to ask for permission. I could always later ask for forgiveness. Ultimately, there was no way the parks department could stop it because it became so popular with the local community. 

This is one way to bring about broader city or social change. You don’t ask the government to do it. Instead, you gather with other citizens and you demonstrate to the government that it is needed, is wanted, and works. That is why New York is adopting curbside composting now. Because so many communities like ours demonstrated that composting is needed, is wanted, and works. 

Meanwhile, the personal benefits to me were the people I met and the friends I made. Also, I figured it out on my own. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I started it and saw it through. I developed my own system of doing something. Once you do that in one area of your life, then you can do it in all areas. It made me less uncomfortable with not knowing how to start.

Here is the moral of this story for me: We can, through our own lifestyles and our participation in communities and local and state governments, still initiate positive change. We don’t have to settle only for resisting negative change.


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Why I'm Hopeful

SUBHEAD: Readers often ask for a post on something hopeful, as doom-and-gloom gets tiresome.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 26 December 2016 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec16/why-hopeful12-16.html)


Image above: Reverend Billy, drenched in crude oil, followed by the Stop Shopping Choir work their way through a New York mall. From (http://www.give2wbai.org/product_p/oc0928.htm).

Why am I hopeful? the Status Quo is devolving, and a better way of living lies just beyond the corrupt, wasteful, ruinous consumerist debt/financial tyranny we now inhabit.
 
Readers often ask me to post something hopeful, and I understand why: doom-and-gloom gets tiresome.

Human beings need hope just as they need oxygen, and the destruction of the Status Quo via over-reach and internal contradictions doesn't leave much to be happy about.

The most hopeful thing in my mind is that the Status Quo is devolving from its internal contradictions and excesses. It is a perverse, intensely destructive system with horrific incentives for predation, exploitation, fraud and complicity and few disincentives.

A more human world lies just beyond the edge of the Status Quo.

I know many smart, well-informed people expect the worst once the Status Quo (the Savior State and its corporatocracy partners) devolves, and there is abundant evidence of the ugliness of human nature under duress.

But we should temper this Id ugliness with the stronger impulses of community and compassion. If greed and rapaciousness were the dominant forces within human nature, then the species would have either died out at its own hand or been limited to small savage populations kept in check by the predation of neighboring groups, none of which could expand much because inner conflict would limit their ability to grow.

The remarkable success of humanity as a species is not simply the result of a big brain, opposable thumbs, year-round sex, innovation or even language; it is also the result of social and cultural associations that act as a "network" for storing knowledge and good will--what we call technical and social capital.

I have devoted significant portions of my books to an explanation of how community and self-reliance have atrophied under the relentless expansion of the dominant Savior State.

The social capital and "return on investment" earned from investing time and energy in community and other social networks has been replaced by a check from the Savior State--a transfer payment that surely beats the troublesome work of investing in community in terms of risk and return.

The net result of the Savior State dominating society and the economy is the rise of a pathological mindset of entitlement and resentment--the two are simply two sides of the same coin. You cannot separate them.

Once self-reliance has been lost, so too has self-confidence been lost, and the Savior State dependent--individual and corporation alike--soon distrusts their ability to function in an open market.

This is a truly sad, self-destructive state of affairs, and deeply, tragically ironic. The calls for "help" quickly lead to dependence on the Savior State, and that dependence quickly breeds complicity and silence in the face of repression and predation by the State and its corporate partners.

In a very real sense, citizens relinquish their citizenship along with their self-reliance and self-worth once they accept dependence on the State.

I often mention that the U.S. has much to learn from so-called Third World countries that are poorer in resources and credit. In many of these countries, the government is the police, the school and the infrastructure of roadways and energy. Many of these countries are systemically corrupt, and the State is the engine of enforcing that corruption.

Rather than something to be embraced and lobbied, involvement with the State is something to be avoided as a risk. In everyday life, people rarely encounter the government except in law enforcement or schooling.

As a result, people depend on their social capital and community for sustenance, support, work and connections.

This is not altruism, it is mutually beneficial.

Once a community dissolves into atomized individuals who each get a payment from the Central State, then they no longer need each other. Rather, other dependents on the State are viewed as competitors for the State's resources.

These atomized, isolated individuals have a perverse relationship with the State and what remains of the community around them: lacking the self-worth earned from work or engagement/investment in a community, then their only outlet for self-identity is consumption: what they wear, eat, drink, etc. as consumers.

This dependence on the State also serves the State's goal, which is a passive, compliant populace of dependents, and distracted, passive workers who pay their taxes. Thus dependence on the State and a hollow consumerism are ontologically bound: one feeds the other.
 
The era of debt-based consumption as the engine of "growth" and "prosperity" is coming to an end. Adding debt via credit no longer creates growth; it actually takes away from the economy by expanding debt service (interest payments).

The vast majority of developed-world people have had the basics of life since the late 1960s -- transport, food, shelter and utilities. The "growth" since then depended on cheap, abundant oil and a consumerist mentality in which one constantly re-defines and renews one's identity not from social investments in others or the shared community but from consumption.

This potential to re-humanize our economy is why I am hopeful.

 

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Wishful thinking fails in 2016

SUBHEAD: If we collectively choose wishful thinking, catastrophic consequences are guaranteed.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 15 February 2016 for Of Two Minds -
(http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/2016-year-wishful-thinking-fails.html)


Image above: Table top puzzle illuztration of the Titanic about to hit the ice. From (https://www.puzzle-offensive.de/Puzzle/10080-Titanic-2002322.html).

Wishful thinking has been an integral driver of the "recovery" 2009-2015: aset bubbles aren't bubbles, central bank policies are brilliantly successful, unemployment has dropped to levels of full employment, and so on.

The problems with wishful thinking that I describe in my book A Radically Beneficial World are becoming more apparent by the day:

1. Elite/Technocrat self-confirmation: Those in the top technocrat/financial layer of the economy look at their own success and think since the status quo is working great for me and my peers, it's working for everyone.
2. This wishful thinking reinforces the positive bias of status quo institutions run by the technocrat caste and state apparatchiks: the mainstream financial media, government agencies, etc.
3. Wishful thinking appears less risky that gambling on new ideas that might not pay off; wishful thinking is thus viewed by those benefiting from the status quo as the safe bet.
4. When we face difficult problems, wishful thinking is counter-productive because it doesn’t generate solutions. Wishful thinking satisfies our preference for low-risk comfort, but it doesn’t solve problems.

If you’re running a real enterprise, i.e. one that will bankrupt you if you fail to solve problems, wishful thinking is catastrophic. There are few guarantees in life, but wishful thinking guarantees failure.

Consider a short list of conventional economic/financial beliefs that are shot through with wishful thinking:

• China will manage to slowly depreciate its currency without upsetting the apple carts of global growth and capital flows (never mind that China's leadership has no history of managing such a transition.)
• Unemployment in the U.S. is less than 5%, a rate that signals full employment and a robust, durable job market (never mind the number of full-time jobs that can support a household remains anemic.)
• Global stock markets will work off the few spots of overvaluation and soon return to across-the-board expansion.
• Stagnating revenues and profits are a temporary spot of bother that will vanish once consumers reap the benefits of lower energy prices.
• If global growth tanks, central banks will rescue the global economy with negative interest rates that punish savers so severely households and enterprises will spend every dime of cash they have.
• This surge of spending will grow borrowing, revenues, profits, etc. and best of all, fire up inflation--the ultimate goal of Keynesian economists (and don't forget "we're all Keynesians now".)
• -- The race to devalue currencies to boost exports, i.e. the race to the bottom, is an excellent, surefire strategy for reinvigorating global growth (never mind everyone can't devalue their currency at the same time.)

The world faces a simple choice: do we continue to depend on wishful thinking, or do we actually start trying to solve problems? It's one or the other; there are no half-measure solutions. As Yoda might say, "either do or do not--there is no try."

If we collectively choose wishful thinking, catastrophic consequences are guaranteed.
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To save Future live in Present

SUBHEAD: “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” because, if not at hand, it is nowhere.

By Wendell Barry on 23 March 2015 for Yes Magazine -
(http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/together-with-earth/wendell-berry-climate-change-future-present)


Image above: Turning around from the 13th and Webster intersection where the Ameritrade Park sign is, you will see the third largest mural in the nation. The gigantic painting of Omaha's past, present, and future covers the east side of the Energy Systems Building. From (http://www.beepbeep.org/4delos/archives/2010/06/meg-saligmans-fertile-ground.html).

This excerpt consists of two numbered parts. The first was written in 2013 and the second in 2014.

I. [2013]

So far as I am concerned, the future has no narrative. The future does not exist until it has become the past. To a very limited extent, prediction has worked. The sun, so far, has set and risen as we have expected it to do. And the world, I suppose, will predictably end, but all of its predicted deadlines, so far, have been wrong.

The End of Something—history, the novel, Christianity, the human race, the world—has long been an irresistible subject. Many of the things predicted to end have so far continued, evidently to the embarrassment of none of the predictors.

The future has been equally, and relatedly, an irresistible subject. How can so many people of certified intelligence have written so many pages on a subject about which nobody knows anything? Perhaps we need a book— in case we don’t already have one—on the end of the future.

None of us knows the future. Fairly predictably, we are going to be surprised by it. That is why “Take...no thought for the morrow...” is such excellent advice. Taking thought for the morrow is, fairly predictably, a waste of time.

I have noticed, for example, that most of the bad possibilities I have worried about have never happened.

And so I have taken care to worry about all the bad possibilities. I could think of, in order to keep them from happening. Some of my scientific friends will call this a superstition, but if I did not forestall so many calamities, who did?

However, after so much good work, even I must concede that by taking thought for the morrow we have invested, and wasted, a lot of effort in preparing for morrows that never came. Also by taking thought for the morrow we repeatedly burden today with undoing the damage and waste of false expectations—and so delaying our confrontation with the actuality that today has brought.

The question, of course, will come: If we take no thought for the morrow, how will we be prepared for the morrow?
I am not an accredited interpreter of Scripture, but taking thought for the morrow is a waste of time, I believe, because all we can do to prepare rightly for tomorrow is to do the right thing today.

The passage continues: “for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” The evil of the day, as we know, enters into it from the past. And so the first right thing we must do today is to take thought of our history. We must act daily as critics of history so as to prevent, so far as we can, the evils of yesterday from infecting today.

Another right thing we must do today is to appreciate the day itself and all that is good in it. This also is sound biblical advice, but good sense and good manners tell us the same. To fail to enjoy the good things that are enjoyable is impoverishing and ungrateful.

The one other right thing we must do today is to provide against want. Here the difference between “prediction” and “provision” is crucial.

To predict is to foretell, as if we know what is going to happen. Prediction often applies to unprecedented events: human-caused climate change, the end of the world, etc. Prediction is “futurology.”

To provide, literally, is to see ahead. But in common usage it is to look ahead. Our ordinary, daily understanding seems to have accepted long ago that our capacity to see ahead is feeble. The sense of “provision” and “providing” comes from the past, and is informed by precedent.

Provision informs us that on a critical day—St. Patrick’s Day, or in a certain phase of the moon, or when the time has come and the ground is ready—the right thing to do is plant potatoes. We don’t do this because we have predicted a bountiful harvest; history warns us against that.

We plant potatoes because history informs us that hunger is possible, and we must do what we can to provide against it. We know from the past only that, if we plant potatoes today, the harvest might be bountiful, but we can’t be sure, and so provision requires us to think today also of a diversity of food crops.

What we must not do in our efforts of provision is to waste or permanently destroy anything of value. History informs us that the things we waste or destroy today may be needed on the morrow. This obviously prohibits the “creative destruction” of the industrialists and industrial economists, who think that evil is permissible today for the sake of greater good tomorrow. There is no rational argument for compromise with soil erosion or toxic pollution.

For me—and most people are like me in this respect—“climate change” is an issue of faith; I must either trust or distrust the scientific experts who predict the future of the climate. I know from my experience, from the memories of my elders, from certain features of my home landscape, from reading history, that over the last 150 years or so the weather has changed and is changing. I know without doubt that to change is the nature of weather.

Just so, I know from as many reasons that the alleged causes of climate change—waste and pollution—are wrong. The right thing to do today, as always, is to stop, or start stopping, our habit of wasting and poisoning the good and beautiful things of the world, which once were called “divine gifts” and now are called “natural resources.”

I always suppose that experts may be wrong. But even if they are wrong about the alleged human causes of climate change, we have nothing to lose, and much to gain, by trusting them.

Even so, we are not dummies, and we can see that for all of us to stop, or start stopping, our waste and destruction today would be difficult. And so we chase our thoughts off into the morrow where we can resign ourselves to “the end of life as we know it” and come to rest, or start devising heroic methods and technologies for coping with a changed climate. The technologies will help, if not us, then the corporations that will sell them to us at a profit.

I have let the preceding paragraph rest for two days to see if I think it is fair. I think it is fair. As evidence, I will mention only that, while the theme of climate change grows ever more famous and fearful, land abuse is growing worse, noticed by almost nobody.

A steady stream of poisons is flowing from our croplands into the air and water. The land itself continues to flow or blow away, and in some places erosion is getting worse. High grain prices are now pushing soybeans and corn onto more and more sloping land, and “no-till” technology does not prevent erosion on continuously cropped grainfields.

Climate change, supposedly, is recent. It is apocalyptic, “big news,” and the certified smart people all are talking about it, thinking about it, getting ready to deal with it in the future.

Land abuse, by contrast, is ancient as well as contemporary. There is nothing futurological about it. It has been happening a long time, it is still happening, and it is getting worse. Most people have not heard of it. Most people would not know it if they saw it.

The laws for conservation of land in use were set forth by Sir Albert Howard in the middle of the last century. They were nature’s laws, he said, and he was right. Those laws are the basis of the 50-Year Farm Bill, which outlines a program of work that can be started now, which would help with climate change, but which needs to be done anyhow.

Millions of environmentalists and wilderness preservers are dependably worried about climate change. But they are not conversant with nature’s laws, they know and care nothing about land use, and they have never heard of Albert Howard or the 50-Year Farm Bill.

II. [2014]

If we understand that Nature can be an economic asset, a help and ally, to those who obey her laws, then we can see that she can help us now. There is work to do now that will make us her friends, and we will worry less about the future. We can begin backing out of the future into the present, where we are alive, where we belong. To the extent that we have moved out of the future, we also have moved out of “the environment” into the actual places where we actually are living.

If, on the contrary, we have our minds set in the future, where we are sure that climate change is going to play hell with the environment, we have entered into a convergence of abstractions that makes it difficult to think or do anything in particular. If we think the future damage of climate change to the environment is a big problem only solvable by a big solution, then thinking or doing something in particular becomes more difficult, perhaps impossible.

It is true that changes in governmental policy, if the changes were made according to the right principles, would have to be rated as big solutions. Such big solutions surely would help, and a number of times I have tramped the streets to promote them, but just as surely they would fail if not accompanied by small solutions.

And here we come to the reassuring difference between changes in policy and changes in principle. The needed policy changes, though addressed to present evils, wait upon the future, and so are presently nonexistent. But changes in principle can be made now, by so few as just one of us.

Changes in principle, carried into practice, are necessarily small changes made at home by one of us or a few of us. Innumerable small solutions emerge as the changed principles are adapted to unique lives in unique small places. Such small solutions do not wait upon the future. Insofar as they are possible now, exist now, are actual and exemplary now, they give hope. Hope, I concede, is for the future.

Our nature seems to require us to hope that our life and the world’s life will continue into the future. Even so, the future offers no validation of this hope. That validation is to be found only in the knowledge, the history, the good work, and the good examples that are now at hand.

There is in fact much at hand and in reach that is good, useful, encouraging, and full of promise, although we seem less and less inclined to attend to or value what is at hand. We are always ready to set aside our present life, even our present happiness, to peruse the menu of future exterminations. If the future is threatened by the present, which it undoubtedly is, then the present is more threatened, and often is annihilated, by the future.

“Oh, oh, oh,” cry the funerary experts, looking ahead through their black veils. “Life as we know it soon will end. If the governments don’t stop us, we’re going to destroy the world. The time is coming when we will have to do something to save the world. The time is coming when it will be too late to save the world. Oh, oh, oh.” If that is the way our minds are afflicted, we and our world are dead already.

The present is going by and we are not in it. Maybe when the present is past, we will enjoy sitting in dark rooms and looking at pictures of it, even as the present keeps arriving in our absence.

Or maybe we could give up saving the world and start to live savingly in it. If using less energy would be a good idea for the future, that is because it is a good idea. The government could enforce such a saving by rationing fuels, citing the many good reasons, as it did during World War II.

If the government should do something so sensible, I would respect it much more than I do. But to wish for good sense from the government only displaces good sense into the future, where it is of no use to anybody and is soon overcome by prophesies of doom.

On the contrary, so few as just one of us can save energy right now by self-control, careful thought, and remembering the lost virtue of frugality. Spending less, burning less, traveling less may be a relief. A cooler, slower life may make us happier, more present to ourselves, and to others who need us to be present.

Because of such rewards, a large problem may be effectively addressed by the many small solutions that, after all, are necessary, no matter what the government might do. The government might even do the right thing at last by imitating the people.

In this essay and elsewhere, I have advocated for the 50-Year Farm Bill, another big solution I am doing my best to promote, but not because it will be good in or for the future. I am for it because it is good now, according to present understanding of present needs. I know that it is good now because its principles are now satisfactorily practiced by many (though not nearly enough) farmers.

Only the present good is good. It is the presence of good—good work, good thoughts, good acts, good places—by which we know that the present does not have to be a nightmare of the future. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” because, if not at hand, it is nowhere.







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Wendell Barry speaks out

SUBHEAD: An interview with Wendell Barry on direct action, and the "Resettling" of the American countryside.


Wendell Barry interview with Bill Moyers on 17 October 2013 in Yes -
(http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/mad-farmer-wendell-berry-gets-madder-in-defense-of-earth)


Image above: From ().

Wendell Berry, a quiet and humble man, has become an outspoken advocate for revolution. He urges immediate action as he mourns how America has turned its back on the land and rejected Jeffersonian principles of respect for the environment and sustainable agriculture.

Berry warns, “People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped; by influence, by power, by us.”

In a rare television interview, this visionary, author – and farmer – discusses a sensible, but no-compromise plan to save the Earth.


Wendell Berry on His Hopes for Humanity from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
Video above: Invterview of Wendell Barry by Bill Moyers. From (http://vimeo.com/76120469)

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