A Way Down

SUBHEAD: There's a solution to global warming, energy crisis, loss of biosphere and over-population.

By Juan Wilson on 19 April 2020 for IslandBreath.org -
(https://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-way-down.html)


Image above: Up a tree? Your options are waiting to get rescued or climbing down. And I don't hear any sirens approaching. From (https://ui.uncc.edu/story/eastern-cottonwood-native-nc-tree).

My father became a practicing physician around 1950. For a while he had his office in our home in Levittown and did daily house calls and hospital visits. He delivered many babies and watched many people die. My sister, mother and I would hear details of these events at the dinner table.

I remember him using a phrase about dying that was "common knowledge" back then... "Pneumonia was the Old Peoples' Friend". That because if left untreated pneumonia causes  the patient to lapse into a state of reduced consciousness, slipping peacefully away in their sleep, thus giving a peaceful end to a period of often considerable suffering. Some would say an easy way out.

Well, the COVID-19 pandemic is having a two pronged impact on human civilization... basically ending it. It is causing a collapse of the energy, and resource consumption that is driving the destruction of the planet in the support of about seven billion too many people inhabiting the Earth today.

It's a place we have to climb down from... either voluntarily, by plan, or otherwise.

For much of my life my fear has been that the means would be a world-wide nuclear war involving untold thousands of atomic weapons being detonated in an exchange between America, Russia, China etc. Fortunately, that has not happened.

Nuclear armagedon would be much worse than the impact of COVID-19 to people and, more importantly, to all life on Earth.

Even without nuclear war we are on a track to destroy life on Earth. Our insane destruction of the biosphere in search of energy, resources and new places to "develop" have brought us in site of the end of the road for our species.... and many others.

A thinning of the heard is at hand. The reduction in human rapacity provided by the linkage of pandemic and economic collapse has cleared pollution from the skies over China. We could respond to our current predicament by abandoning "Economic Growth" as the "American Way of Life".

We could go back to small farms in local communities as it was before World War One. That was about the time we lost our connection to the land. Remember that 1919 song by Harry Fay, "How are You Going to Keep Them Down on the Farm?"

How you going to keep them down on the farm
After they've seen Paree?
How you going to keep them away from Broadway,
Jazzing around, painting the town?
How you going to keep them away from harm?
That's a mystery.
They'd wish they'd never seen a rake or plow,
So who the heck can parlez-vous a cow,
How you gonna keep them down on the farm,
After they've seen Paree?

Serious urbanization resulted from the coal and oil fueled economies that have flourished in the past century and a half. Since World War Two the mass production in automobiles fueled by cheap oil encouraged the surroundings of cities to be expanded with endless suburbs. Consumption became a stampede.

And here we are.  Sheltering in place and beginning to realize a new normal.

The only way out alive is to a more localized way of life.

It's time to climb down fro our dangerous perch to a changed landscape... to  grow food, make music!


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Ghosts of the Fourth

SUBHEAD: There’s one big advantage to living in this flyover corner of America: We're far from the Interstate Highway System.

By James Kunstler on 5 July 2019 for Kunstler.com -
(https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/ghosts-of-the-fourth/)


Image above: Ruins of the Baxter Marble Mill on the Battenkill River., later the Bartlett All-Steel Scythe Company. From original article.

Here in the Battenkill Valley in far upstate New York, the bones of the small towns are still visible while the flesh of the economy that built the towns is now long gone. The Battenkill River runs from the other side of the Vermont line across Washington County to the Hudson River.


It’s a swift, clear stream, and back-in-the-day it powered dozens of little factories along its winding way. They made men’s shirts, women’s lingerie, tea trays, ploughs, rye thrashers, boots, paper, and lots more. In a few places you can still find the ruins of these once-grand buildings.

We heard there was a good parade up in Salem, NY, ten miles northeast of here. Salem was a railroad town after 1852. It changed everything for a while. Farmers could send their potatoes and milk all the way to Boston.

Slate was abundant nearby and there was a lively commerce in it for roofing and other things. Marble came over from Vermont and was dressed into tombstone blanks, which were sent as far as the Midwest. The railroad itself employed scores of hands in the roundhouse where its locomotives were repaired. This rail connection to distant places and markets must have seemed wondrous.

The system held together for less than 100 years and now it, too, is a ghost presence, along with the factories. History has treated this corner of the country with something that feels like swift injustice. Today, we remain hostages to the automobile, with its geography-negating banality, but you can see the end of that road from here, too, and it is already subject to a very public nostalgia.


Image above: Families chatting and waiing for the parade to start in Salem NY. From original article.

The Fourth of July parade up in Salem was mostly a parade of motor vehicles: fire engines, EMT trucks, tractors, vintage 1920s flivvers, 1960s muscle cars, one classic hot-rod, and one weird Avanti, a mid-60s product of the then-floundering Studebaker Company — which, ironically, had run a wagon and carriage assembly factory in Salem around 1910, just as cars were being introduced.

The economic history of this place looks like a sequence of great works performed at enormous capital investment, and then quickly trashed for the next new thing. It must have been intoxicating at the time. I’d put the high-tide of it all at about 1900, when all the systems of manufacturing and transport were humming in synchrony.

Turns out it was an economy with a surprising purpose: to get rid of itself! And it’s stunning how gone it all is now. What replaced it is not only happening far, far away, but many items made far, far away can’t even be bought within a twenty-mile journey of any town in the county.

I pass through Salem about six or seven times a year for one reason or another. The rather grand old Main Street is usually empty of pedestrians.

Only a few of the remaining shopfronts sell useful merchandise so there is no reason to walk down the street. There are several impressive old buildings — skeletons of that ghost economy — clearly falling into terminal disrepair. Yet, on the Fourth of July, the streets were full of life, for a change.

Many (like us) had come from far-and-wide. We turned out to show love and respect (and curiosity) for whatever it is this enterprise called the USA is supposed to be now. Mostly, our national situation seems a matter of waiting for various shoes to drop.

There’s one big advantage to living in this flyover corner of America: it has received next-to-zero of the destructive suburban development overlay that has obliterated the landscape in those parts of the country that can pretend to still be booming. It is a blessing that I’m keenly aware of. We’re just too far away from the cities, and even from the Interstate Highway network.

So, when I behold the economic desolation in these little towns of the Battenkill Valley, I’m aware that, at least, we will not have to dig out from under the burden of the Big Box hell imposed on just about every other place from sea to shining sea, when that economy turns over — a process actually underway now. The K-Mart in my town, Greenwich, NY, shut down in March.

When enough of those predatory outfits are gone, someone may get a notion to sell stuff out of our empty main streets shops again. Of course, nobody’s thinking about making stuff that might be sold in those storefronts, but a sense of opportunity may arise quickly as the wind-down of Globalism — and all it implies for local places — becomes self-evident.


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Rewilding Your Lawn

SUBHEAD: Now that we've entered the Anthropocene you need to do your part in supporting the living environment.

By Amy Brady on 28 July 2018 for Orion Magazine -
(https://orionmagazine.org/2018/07/rewilding-your-lawn-in-the-anthropocene-an-interview-with-author-jeff-vandermeer/)


Image above: Photographs of a yard gone wild. From original article.

Jeff VanderMeer, award-winning author of Borne and the Southern Reach Trilogy, is also an avid environmentalist. 

As part of his desire to make outdoor spaces more habitable for birds and insects, he’s embarked on a yard rewilding project that involves letting native grasses and plants (many of them deemed “weeds” by some less-than-pleased neighbors) take over his lawn.

If you follow the author on Twitter, you may have read his amusing—and educational—anecdotes about the project. Here, we discuss the yard project in more depth, including the benefits a wild yard provides for local wildlife and what others can do to improve their own neighborhood ecosystems.

AB: What inspired you to re-wild your yard?
JV: I was the writer-in-residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York in 2016 and lived in a house with a very lively bird population. I started putting out feeders. 

Then Trump was elected president and my stress level went through the roof. We returned to our home in Florida and, to distract myself from the news, I put up a lot of bird feeders and tried to emulate the things that we’d loved about upstate New York.

We got several more birds than in the past, although I’d always been an avid birdwatcher. The feeders made me feel like I could help semi-urban wildlife and migrating birds in the moment, which was important at a time when I felt useless and worn down by the news.

I then began investigating how to make the yard more bird and bee and butterfly friendly. Given that our attempts at a “normal” lawn had always led to bare dirt, I figured nothing would grow. 

But as soon as we gave the yard over to whatever would naturally grow there, we had a great burgeoning of 
plant, insect, and animal life. We even have, ironically enough, a fair amount of grass in the yard now.

AB: What do you hope to achieve by doing this? Do you anticipate an environmental impact?
JV: I already know we’re creating a safe haven for migratory birds. We’re also helping to cement a corner of an unacknowledged greenway for raccoons and possums and other nocturnal animals, none of which have been a bother. They also eat insects and are beneficial in other ways. 

I’ve also seen more toads and frogs and in general a healthy little ecosystem quietly building up. Contrary to the generalizations people make about non-traditional yards, we’ve not seen any ticks. Either the possum eats those or they just aren’t present.

In addition, we’ve had some exciting finds, like Florida lupine growing in one part of the yard. Florida lupine is rare these days and should be encouraged.

Does all this mean much in the grand scheme of things? I don’t know. But it acknowledges that in addition to dealing with things on the macro level, you can support the environment in your own backyard by not using pesticides and, while not letting things look totally unkempt, support life rather than a mono-lawn that nothing else can thrive on.

AB: You’ve said on Twitter that your neighbors are less than thrilled. How would you sum up their response to your yard?
JV: I think it’s accurate to say that the “neighbor complaint” has become in my mind an existential threat from The Neighbor. By that I mean I feel like I need to anticipate the possible objections to what I’m doing, and thus The Neighbor is always on my mind. 

This is probably very unfair to the actual neighbor in question, which is why I keep everything very anonymous [on Twitter] and try to acknowledge that it’s the system and our assumptions at the neighborhood association and city government level that are flawed.

We also have lots of lovely neighbors, and even the neighbor who complained is not automatically not-lovely. But the system is crap. 

The fact that I can grow weeds only so long as they’re in a straight line and look like a garden—or put up a white fence around a part of the mayhem to ritualistically create a “lawn”—is hilarious and also a bit depressing to me. 

A traditional “lawn” is really about signs and symbols and status. What we’re really talking about is whether you admit life onto your property or decide to kill it off.


Image above: Photographs of a yard gone wild. From original article.

AB: What kinds of wildlife have entered your yard since starting this project?
JV: In addition to a regular polite possum and raccoon, we have many more bats out at night. We also have a wealth of birds that we didn’t have before. For example, the thrashers are out in force and very comfortable. 

We’ve had migrating grosbeaks, a first, and we have almost all of the Florida woodpeckers in our yard: downy, hairy, red bellied, flickers, and pileated. They used to be much rarer sightings. We also have a resurgence of snakes and tree frogs and toads of all kinds. 

We used to have a few skinks, pretty big ones, and now we have a lot more. And more bees. And tons of different kinds of plants—too many for me really to go into. Except, of course, the famous one, Fred the Weed, a giant wild lettuce.

Fred blew down in a storm, but is currently convalescing and plotting his return. I’m only just learning more about the plants in our yard, and some are likely invasive, but I must admit that paying attention to what’s growing in the yard has made landscapes so different for me in general. I used to think of plants as the backdrop for animals, but now I see acutely the plant life and how it’s growing. 

I feel like when we visit other people’s houses I can tell a lot about them just from the yard. I’m grateful to Jenn Benner, an Orlando friend, who helped me identify a lot of these plants.

AB: Have any of these lifeforms inspired new characters or settings in your writing?  
JV: This sense of plants being in the foreground will definitely seep into my fiction. The fact that I know individual cardinals and individual downy woodpeckers—that I can see them interacting with other individual birds—is also something that will influence my work. 

Somehow the whole world is now more alive than before, which is, to be honest, also painful, because suddenly I’m aware that even yards that seem green and healthy are actually sterile spaces. 

That’s hard to take. It’s also quite frankly hard to take when I find a vole dead in the yard, a victim of some passing cat. 

Luckily, we don’t get cats much—I chase them away and sometimes squirt them with orange juice, which they hate. In a sense, I feel very connected to this little piece of land and I feel it in my body when something goes wrong.


Image above: Photographs of a yard gone wild. From original article.

AB: Do you have any tips for readers who’d like to do something similar with their yards?
JV: I’d say let the space speak to you and really observe what’s going on. Go with the flow of what seems to grow well—don’t try too hard to push back against what nature tells you needs to happen. 

And before uprooting a plant, make sure you know what you’re doing. Early on I wound up taking out some beneficial plants and leaving some that weren’t from pure ignorance. And be aware that herbicides aren’t really any better than pesticides in many cases.

Bring in a local specialist for a consult, even if you don’t want them to do any actual landscaping. 

Finally, where possible, do leave some dead leaves around, especially in places in shade, where they’ll help form good habitats for toads and worms. These are really beneficial creatures that will only add to the richness of the place.

AB: Do you have any suggestions for people living in urban and suburban areas who want to have a positive environmental impact but who can’t let their yards grow wild?
JV: You can always do something. Even a few potted plants that your local nursery says are good for butterflies or birds can be of use. 

Even a small bird feeder can be of use, too. 

In that case, I’d learn what migratory birds pass through your area, what they tend to eat, and when they tend to appear. 

Keep in mind that birds might take as long as a month to find a new feeder and deem it safe. 

Finally, and this is controversial in some areas, keep in mind that outdoor cats do kill lots of birds. There’s no two ways about it. 

So keep your cat inside if at all possible. If your cat seems too energetic for that, all apologies, but you may need to increase your efforts in engaging and playing with your cat inside.

AB: What has been the most rewarding thing about this project?
JV: Rewilding the yard has largely saved me from situational depression, which means I can be more effective in my other, wider environmental efforts. 

Also rewarding has been the daily connection, in some form, to our environment. It is so important to our health in general to understand what it is we’re losing and what we need to save and why.

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The Cult of Driverless Cars

SUBHEAD:  Will magic, solar-powered autonomous cars allow us to continue plundering the Earth?

By Andy Singer on 7 September 2018 for Streets.mn -
(https://streets.mn/2018/09/07/driverless-cars-and-the-cult-of-technology/)


Image above: Andy Singer cartoon of a driverless car. From original article.

We constantly hear that driverless cars are just around the corner. We’re told they will revolutionize transportation and enable us to continue using our car-based transport and land-use system. If they’re made by Tesla, they’ll be powered by magic, solar-powered, super efficient batteries and we’ll all be able to keep living our hyper-mobile, hyper-consumptive lifestyles without any damage to the environment.

The only problem is we’ve been hearing about all this for the last five to ten years and there’s no evidence that it’s anything but the same old technological, capitalist utopian dreck that we’ve been hearing since General Motors debuted “Futurama” at the 1939 World’s Fair.

Technological utopianism fueled by science fiction is nothing new. If you’ve never seen it, watch Disney’s short animated film “Magic Highway” from 1958. It’s remarkably similar to this recent promotional film for an Elon Musk tubular underground transportation system in Los Angeles.

They’re both fantasies that maintain our inefficient, car-oriented transportation and land-use systems and help the Automobile Industrial Complex retain its stranglehold on our imaginations. They’re also fantasies that dovetail with corporate capitalism’s fantasy of automating the entire workforce and using technology to eliminate jobs and reduce costs.

In many ways, driverless cars have all the makings of a massive cult–the Cult of Technology. This is the idea that technology will somehow solve the problems of human greed, over-population and over-consumption of planetary resources, and therefore will also solve the related problems of climate change, waste, pollution, and species extinction. It’s an old fantasy but one we still buy into.

It preys on our laziness and gullibility and it distracts and deludes us so much that we can’t see basic realities staring us in the face.

Witness all the absurdly hyped stories about driverless cars in the media. This NBC news story is typical, gushing that “Self-driving cars will turn intersections into high-speed ballet.” Their “evidence” for this is just an animated simulation video. They’ve even got city and state governments devoting staff time and resources to “Planning for our driverless future.”

Non-profit “transit” advocacy groups like MoveMN have held seminars on it as if it’s an impending reality. Cheerleaders for driverless cars claim they will reduce traffic deaths, increase the efficiency and carrying capacity of roadways, reduce costs and revolutionize transportation.

Lots of money has poured into research and development of driverless vehicles–Waymo (Google), Volvo, Tesla, Mercedes, Uber and other companies have made and/or operated test vehicles and some sell commercially available cars with driverless features like parallel parking and glorified cruise control, or what they call “autopilot.”

Even companies like Intel are making bets on chip technology for driverless cars. With all this money and hype, you’d think that driverless vehicles will be taking over our roads in the next ten or twenty years.

But many folks, including the owner of the driverless shuttle company EasyMile and scientists at MIT and other institutions who are actually working on the technology say widespread use or deployment of driverless vehicles is a long way off and may never happen at all:

“Google often leaves the impression that, as a Google executive once wrote, the cars can ‘drive anywhere a car can legally drive.’ However, that’s true only if intricate preparations have been made beforehand, with the car’s exact route, including driveways, extensively mapped. Data from multiple passes by a special sensor vehicle must later be pored over, meter by meter, by both computers and humans. It’s vastly more effort than what’s needed for Google Maps.

…Pedestrians are detected simply as moving, column-shaped blurs of pixels—meaning …that the car wouldn’t be able to spot a police officer at the side of the road frantically waving for traffic to stop. …The car’s sensors can’t tell if a road obstacle is a rock or a crumpled piece of paper, so the car will try to drive around either. (Chris) Urmson (former director of the Google Car team) also says the car can’t detect potholes or spot an uncovered manhole if it isn’t coned off.

“There are major, unsolved, difficult issues here. We have to be careful that we don’t overhype how well it works. …I do not expect there to be taxis in Manhattan with no drivers in my lifetime.” (John Leonard, MIT Professor working on robotics navigation).

Uber’s autonomous test vehicles in Pittsburgh all have backup human operators and, in over 20,000 miles of operation, those operators have had to intervene every 0.8 miles. Then there are the crashes:

• A fatal crash of a Tesla in autopilot mode in Heibei China in January 2016
• A fatal crash of a Tesla in autopilot mode in Florida in May 2016
• A pedestrian killed in Arizona by an Uber (Volvo) in December 2017
• Another fatal crash of an auto-piloted Tesla on March 23 of this year in Mountain View, California
• Teslas in semi-autonomous mode hitting parked fire trucks in January (Los Angeles) and May of this year (in Salt Lake City)
• And, in California, the only state that requires reports on autonomous vehicle crashes, there’ve been 95 crashes as of August 31 of this year.

When you think about how few driverless cars are actually in service and that this is just one state’s statistics, that’s a lot of crashes. An early study in 2015, found self-driving cars were involved in twice as many crashes per mile as human-driven cars. You can say, “most of these were the fault of human drivers in other vehicles!”

But part of the technological challenge of driverless cars is that they have to share the road with humans.

We debate the ethics of driverless cars taking away our jobs, or debate whether people will accept them, as if they are an inevitable reality. But this debate obscures the fact that the technology itself is insanely complicated and expensive and many decades if not a lifetime away from widespread usage.

It’s one thing to make some test cars work consistently in ideal situations and another to get tens of thousands of them operating in concert with non-driverless cars, pedestrians, weather and all sorts of other variables.

A simple, fixed-guideway computerized transit system like Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), with just five lines and a maximum of 54 trains, on set schedules to set destinations, hasn’t been able to go fully driverless and, at its best, experiences failures of on-time performance of around 10%.

Magnify this error rate by thousands for tens of thousands of autonomous cars driving in a metro area with pedestrians, cyclists, animals, potholes, unexpected road work and all sorts of other variables, and you start to get a sense of how complex the engineering problem becomes when you scale it up from just a few test vehicles. I can’t always get decent cell phone reception or a transit ticket vending machine that works correctly.

Yet I’m supposed to believe techno-utopian cultists who tell me that, in twenty years, we’ll all be getting around in driverless cars? They sound like Disney’s “Magic Highway” or like they’ve been watching too many Star Wars movies.


Image above: Andy Singer cartoon of a addicts of drugs and addicts of technology. From original article.

Let’s look at some of the folks hyping this technology. No one is more prominent than Elon Musk–a guy whose companies, Tesla and SpaceX, have never been profitable.

Yet at one point, Tesla was valued at more than major motor vehicle companies like Nissan or Ford, based entirely on hype and stock speculation.

His Hyperloop company hasn’t built an actual system anywhere in the world and is more of a concept and test track than an actually viable transportation system.

His battery and solar companies are also more hype than actual profitable product.

His solar business amounts to his acquisition of the company “SolarCity” from which he laid off 20% of the workforce.

This is a guy who wants to save humanity by colonizing Mars and who sent one of his cars to orbit Mars as a publicity stunt (but missed it).

His net worth is the product of pure stock market speculation, largely based on his cult of personality. To this point, Tesla has mostly made luxury electric automobiles that resemble fancy wrist watches or smartphones–status objects for the wealthy.

If his Model 3 isn’t successful, speculators could lose a lot of money, and Tesla recently had to lay off over 500 people and plans to lay off 2,500 more or about 9% of its workforce.

Indeed some financial analysts have finally started questioning his claims and the value of his companies. While some of his companies could be successful, they also have all the makings of a classic Ponzi scheme or failed start-ups on a massive scale.

Musk companies like Hyperloop remind me of the Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) scheme–a concept that hung around for almost 40 years before being abandoned or relegated to airport people-movers.

This included Taxi 2000, a failed Minnesota company whose investors sued each other to try to recoup some of millions of dollars they foolishly invested. Indeed many PRT simulation videos resemble the ones linked to at the beginning of this post.

Ironically, the PRT concept has died out in part because it has been eclipsed by the driverless car concept.

So when someone like Elon Musk makes wild claims about driverless cars, I’m skeptical. Google spun off its driverless car project (within Alphabet) to Waymo and is just focusing on development not manufacture.

Uber has gotten out of the driverless truck business, perhaps because the backup driver intervention rate was as bad as for its cars (almost once per mile).

A driverless car is still a car. It still needs energy, at least some of it from petroleum, to be manufactured, moved and disposed of. Anywhere from 23-46% of the energy a car consumes in its lifetime is an inherent part of its manufacture and disposal.

The steel, aluminum and plastics in its body and tires, the lithium (or lead/acid) in its batteries, and the asphalt and concrete for its roadways all require fossil fuels, mining, rare-earth metals, and/or huge amounts of energy to manufacture.

Driverless cars fail to address any of this and they fail to fully address another core problem of automobiles–inefficient land use.

Proponents claim that cities of driverless cars will reduce the need for parking and more efficiently use existing roadways but this is assuming the technology is able to decrease vehicle following distances, an even tougher engineering problem.

It’s futile to argue with a fantasy but, even if driverless cars could become widespread, why would I want more technology when all I need is denser, car-free, walkable cities where jobs, goods and services are closer together?

It’s a much surer, cheaper, less resource-intensive path to environmental sustainability.

Five years ago, several people bet me cases of beer that “in ten years at least 20% of cars on the road would be driverless.” I can tell you right now, there’s gonna be an amazing party in my back yard in 2022. You’re all invited.

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Downshifter's way to RetroSuburbia

SUBHEAD: Review of book by David Holmgred on a resilient future for today's suburbanites.

By Bob Hopkins on 26 April 2018 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-04-26/my-review-of-david-holmgrens-retrosuburbia/)


Image above: Photo enactment of living in RetroSuburbia from the original article.

I am increasingly fascinated by two words I think are vital to our future, but which I see declining in the world around us, “what if?”

Navigating a way to a safe, nurturing and liveable future requires our coming together to create "what if?" spaces, places and events where we can come together with others to ask those questions.

The Transition movement, for me, has always been one of those spaces, the invitation for people to join up with others to look at their place through what if lenses.

David Holmgren’s new book is a fascinating, and intoxicating blast of "what if?" which ought to be put through every suburban letterbox in the world, although given its size I have doubts that it would fit.

I am a huge Holmgren fan. ‘Permaculture: principles and pathways beyond sustainability’ changed my life. The "what if?" at the heart of RetroSuburbia is “what if our suburbs were reimagined and repurposed to be sustainable, productive and vibrant?” Good question.

It takes his ‘permaculture flower’ at its basis, as the lens through which it looks at the possibilities of how the suburbs could be if catalysed with imagination and possibility.

Although written very much for the Australian context, there is much in its almost 600 pages to inspire suburban permaculturists anywhere.

There’s a treasury of Holmgren insight on topics from retrofitting your house, harvesting water and storing food, to setting up a food garden, managing with less than perfect urban soils, working with animals in the suburbs and maximising diversity.

You’ll find guidance on different models of living together, making decisions, creating a livelihood, reimagining your family finances, planning for disasters, ‘rearing self-reliant and resilient children’ and so much more.

While ‘Permaculture’ was a book that had so many brilliant ideas it struggled sometimes to imagine that you might need some time and space, or some nice photos even, to be able to digest them, ‘Retrosuburbia’ is a different beast.

Presented in full colour it is rich with photos, case studies from his own life and the lives of people he knows, every page drips with ideas, experience and advice with dirt beneath its nails.

A couple of years ago, David and I debated publicly his ‘Crash on Demand’ paper, where he declared that “an argument can be mounted for putting effort into precipitating that crash, the crash of the financial system”.

I disagreed, arguing that we needed to be very careful what we wish for. What I love about ‘Retrosuburbia’ is that the concerns that underpinned that paper are still present here, but beautifully couched in an utterly practical, utterly convincing vision for the suburbs.

It is the perfect riposte to anyone who says “permaculturists/Transitioners/greenies just want to take us back”.

 Although that’s always a lazy and rather pointless accusation, this book shows a way forward in which human culture, in all its aspects, can flourish. This is my vision for the future. It’s beautiful, it’s delicious, and it’s entirely possible.

You want ‘Take Back Control’? In these pages, you got it. This book will become the banner, the standard, around which people everywhere reimagine their future and then make it happen. And written on that banner? Two words. “What if?”.



Video above: Brief description of "RetroSuburbia" by David Holmgred. From (https://youtu.be/lm0eT1EMh4w).

IB Publisher's note: If you are interested in seeing a "Flip-Thru" of the pages of the book please visit the original review.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture in Hawaii 4/26/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Decolonizing with Permaculture 2/22/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Why Permaculture? 4/18/15
Ea O Ka Aina: The trouble with Permaculture 1/23/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture - Let's get real! 7/17/13
Ea O Ka Aina: What Permaculture Isn't and Is 6/10/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture - Relative Location 5/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture - Use of Space 5/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture Taking Off in Hawaii 5/29/11
Island Breath: TGI Column - The Garden of Eden 4/19/07
Island Breath: Farming vs Gardening 8/31/06
Island Breath: Permaculture in Hawaii 6/25/06

Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture 1 - Growing Zones 3/22/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture 2 - Multiple Functions 3/29/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture 3 - Relative Location 5/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture 4 - Problems into Solutions 5/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture 5 - Design Diversity 5/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture 6 - Use of Space 5/24/12

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Christmas Story

SUBHEAD: It’s a Wonderful Life presents an American scene poised to arc toward tragedy.

By James Kunstler on 25 December 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/christmas-story/)


Image above: Colorized poster art for "It's a Wonderful Life" for digital download from Apple for $10.99. From (https://itunes.apple.com/nz/movie/its-a-wonderful-life/id297250466).

(IB Editor's note: "cis" is the Latin prefix for "same side of" versus the the prefix "trans" meaning the "other side of")

These are the long, dark hours when cis-hetero white patriarchs sit by the hearth chewing over their regrets for the fading year and expectations for the year waiting to be born.

I confess, I like Christmas a lot, Hebrew that I am, perhaps the musical and sensual trappings more than the virgin birth business.

Something in my mixed Teutonic blood stirs to the paganism of blazing Yule logs, fragrant fir trees, rousing carols, and snow on snow on snow.

I hope we can keep these hearty ceremonies… that they are not banished to the same puritanical limbo where the Prairie Home Companion archives were sent to rot.

One surviving old chestnut of the season is the 1946 movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, a movie so thick with gooey holiday sentiment, it’s like bathing in egg nog.

It’s larded with messages of good-will-to-all-mankind, of course, but some of the less obvious themes — almost certainly unintended — tell the more interesting story about where America has come from in recent history and where it went.

One thing for sure: every year that goes by, the America of It’s a Wonderful Life seems utterly unlike the sordid circus we live in now.

The movie takes place in a town, called Bedford Falls, like many in my corner of the country, upstate New York, or at least the way they used to be: alive, bustling with activity, with several layers of working, middle, and commercial classes employed at real productive work making things, and a thin candy shell of “the rich,” portrayed as unambiguously greedy and wicked — but overwhelmed in numbers by all the other good-hearted townspeople.

The movie depicts an American social structure that no longer exists. It’s both democratic and firmly hierarchical — owing probably to the lingering influence of army life in the recently concluded Second World War.

Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, the head of an old-style family-owned Savings and Loan bank, a very modest institution dedicate to lending money for new homes. His competitor in town is the wicked old rich banker Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore), a swindler and thief, who wants to put George out of business.

Bedford Falls is a man’s world. The women in the movie are portrayed as taking care of the “home front” and supporting the male “troops” in the toils of small town commerce — another social holdover from the war years. This depiction of life would surely give a case of the vapors to any post-structuralist college professors who dare to watch the movie.

Now here’s one catch in the story: the main business of George Bailey’s bank is lending money to build the first post-war suburban housing development outside of town, a project called Bailey Park.

One of the pivotal scenes concerns the Martini family, immigrants, moving into their new suburban home with great sentimental fanfare.

So, what we’re witnessing in that incident is the beginning of the destructive force that will soon blight small town life (and big city life, too) all over the country. Moviegoers in 1946 probably had little intuition of the consequences.

Another catch in the story involves the plot twist in which George Bailey misplaces a large sum of money ($8,000, actually purloined by the wicked villain, Mr. Potter).

With his bank facing ruin, George contemplates suicide. He’s saved by his guardian angel, who goes on to show George what Bedford Falls would be like if he had never been born. It would be called Pottersville.

Its Main Street would be bustling with gin mills, the sidewalks full of suspiciously available young ladies, the whole scene a sordid nest of vice and wickedness.

The catch is that Pottersville would have been a much better outcome for American small towns like Bedford Falls than what actually happened.

Today, the lovely landscape of upstate New York today is dotted with small towns and even small cities that have absolutely nothing going on in them anymore, and stand in such awful desolation that you’d think a long war was fought here. Much of that is due to the activities of good-hearted suburban developers like George Bailey.

The Americans of 1946 must have had no idea where all this was headed, nor of the coming de-industrialization of the country that had won World War Two, or the massive social changes in the divisions of labor, or the annihilation of several layers of the working and middle classes, or the much greater wickedness of the generations of bankers who followed Henry Potter.

It’s a Wonderful Life presents an American scene poised to arc toward tragedy. It’s an excellent lesson in the ironies of history and especially the dangers of getting what you wished for.

Readers may agree: we’ve never seen our country in such a state of ugly division moral confusion, and intellectual disarray. A coherent consensus eludes us. Grievance, resentment, and bitterness boil and sputter everywhere.

My Christmas wish is that we might put behind us some of the more idiotic and pointless debates of the past year and get on with tasks that really matter… that will allow us to remain civilized through the hardships to come.

That’s how I roll this dark morning, here at the glowing hearth, while the Christmas day ahead, at least, offers some comforting stillness as the snow on snow on snow piles high. And so… to the presents waiting ominously under the twinkling tree.

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Kauai and Tesla are newlyweds

SUBHEAD: "The power grid of the future will require sunny skies above and energy storage below. Thanks to Tesla, Kauai has both." ... and now the corporate takeover marriage will be complete.

By Juan Wilson on 10 August 2017 for Island Breath -
(http://grist.org/climate-energy/welcome-to-paradise-batteries-now-included/)


Images above: A corporation supported by underwriting by the Federal government. An average day of energy use on Kauai, before and after Tesla’s batteries came online. In 2016, the period of highest energy demand is met mostly with fossil fuels, after the sun has set. In 2017, solar power generated during the day is stored up and used at night, shrinking the island’s fossil fuel use by as much as 1.6 million gallons a year. From Kauai Island Utility Cooperative.

Kauai is now in bed with Tesla. There is good and bad to that. Tesla is a corporation interested in space travel and autonomous technology. They have not found a way to make money manufacturing cars or spaceships - maybe because they are a thing of the past - or ought to be. Tesla now wants to be your power grid. They chose to make colorful Kauai a test case for their plans. A great public relations stunt as well as a real experiment.

You can bet their smart meters will know everything Siri and Alexa have found out in your home... and more. You can also bet that Teslaand the County through KIUC will make it increasingly difficult for individual home owners to be off the grid and on their own system.

Within our Means?
Living within our resources looks like an impossible goal. Even our best sustainability efforts are corrupted by an inability to let go of our planet crushing appetites. Our efforts to "keep it all running" on solar power cannot run the colorful display screens, the refrigerators/freezers, the microwaves, washing machines and automobiles 24/7/365.

There are not enough rare earth metals and other required resources to supply that life we had suicidally burning fossil fuels. However, solar PV power can support a modified and reduced appetite for power. particularly if the PV panels are on your roof and the batteries in the garage.

You'll stay within a reasonable energy budget or wreck your system. As Luke Evslin found out with six solar panels and a small bank of batteries. (see Ea O Ka Aina: Failing to live Off-Grid 1/3/16).

The online article at Grist Magazine reproduced below is named "Welcome to Paradise: Batteries Now Included!"... It's about Tesla and Solar City teaming up to building a game changing solar PV farm with battery storage on Kauai.

What's funny to me is on the Grist website splash-page the article is tilted "Empire of the Sun: How Tesla is powering America's first clean energy paradise." That is closer to the truth.

Nikola Tesla
Tesla Corporatiion is doing what the Edison Company was doing over a century ago... creating a monopoly for power distribution. A century ago Nikola Tesla worked for Thomas Edison as Edison attempted to make power distribution practical.

Early on, Edison recognized the limitations of DC power. It was very difficult to transmit over distances without a significant loss of energy, and the inventor turned to a 28-year-old Serbian mathematician and engineer Nikola Tesla whom he’d recently hired at Edison Machine Works to help solve the problem.

Tesla claimed that Edison even offered him significant compensation if he could design a more practical form of power transmission. Tesla accepted the challenge. With a background in mathematics that his inventor boss did not have, he set out to redesign Edison’s DC generators. The future of electric distribution, Tesla told Edison, was in alternating current—where high-voltage energy could be transmitted over long distances using lower current—miles beyond generating plants, allowing a much more efficient delivery system. Edison dismissed Tesla’s ideas as “splendid” but “utterly impractical.”

See (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/edison-vs-westinghouse-a-shocking-rivalry-102146036/#8xRjVLp0MuvbdEUk.99)

Tesla's AC scheme was rejected and after selling his related power patents to Westinghouse he became a recluse while attempting, and unable, to convince the world to transmit power through the air like radio waves.

The irony is that Tesla's scheme to transmit power would have been impossible to meter, and therefore of no use to Edison or Westinghouse interests. Tesla died a recluse feeding uncountable pigeons in his New York hotel room.

Elon Musk
It is ironic that Elon Musk invokes the "Tesla" name for his corporate interests. Free anything is the last thing on Musk's mind... unless its free money for Tesla Corporation in capitalizing and underwriting the cost of unaffordable electric cars.

KIUC was "supposed" to be a customer owned co-operative, but was really a creation to bail out the failing Kauai Electric company for a whopping $270 million.  As I've said before, we should have let Kauai Electric go bankrupt and suffered a bit and not end up saddled with unpayable debt charges added to our bills.

The Tesla-Solar City offer will be another monopolistic yoke around Kauaians necks. It will discourage solo homeowner efforts or neighborhood and community attempts to generate any power.
It will make Kauai self sufficiency less resilient as well as more brittle. Generating your own power produces a heightened awareness of limitations to power consumption.

If the Tesla-SolarCity system encourages running AC through the night and unlimited use of refrigeration and electric cars, it will be merely another crutch in enabling us to go on with business as usual. All the throw-away technology, the plastics, the imported foods, flat-screen screen hi-def entertainment and sprawling development will continue like a cancer to devour natural life on Earth.

Maybe we should be putting more effort into getting people not only "Off-The-Oil" but "Off -The-Grid". It may lead us into a cooperative, a commune, a commons, a guild, or life as a solo practitioner of a craft.

Real life is in the water, soil, the plants, the birds and bees. Not the Tesla SUV multi-tasking trip to Costco for fresh imported tropical fruit.

Of course, the efforts at the most local levels will be the most valuable. These Tesla Farms will supplant some agriculture, but worse their presence will accelerate suburban residential development.

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Batteries Now Included
SUBHEAD: In fact there is an option that there might be a monopoly on energy worse than under Kauai Island Utility Coop (KIUC) in partnership with TESLA (probably along with Amazon, Google and Ebay).

By Amelia Urry on 8 august 20-17 for Grist Magazine -
(http://grist.org/climate-energy/welcome-to-paradise-batteries-now-included/)


Images above: An industry supported by underwriting by the Federal government can afford to build a monopoly on Kauai as a test for bigger things. Centralized power distribution from free sunlight.

When people ask Luke Evslin why he decided to live off the grid, he starts with the time he almost died.

Evslin grew up on Kauai, a nub of a former volcano at the oldest end of the Hawaiian archipelago, but he was living on nearby Oahu at the time of the accident, working and competing in races with an outrigger canoe club.

The biggest race of the year is a daylong ocean crossing from the island of Moloka’i to Oahu’s Waikiki Beach, which can take between five and eight hours. Exhausted paddlers rotate out of the canoe during the race, jumping into the water to be scooped up by a waiting motorboat.

During the first switch, Evslin was getting ready to heave himself into the canoe when the motorboat struck him.

The propeller sliced across his back in five places, severing muscle and bone along his spine and pelvis, each cut a potential death blow. His teammates pulled him out of the ocean and rushed him to shore. Judging from the looks on everyone’s faces, Evslin wasn’t sure he would survive the hour-long trip to land.

“I wasn’t scared to die,” he wrote a month later from his hospital bed, “but I was sad to die. I realized how much I love our beautiful world and everyone that is a part of it … and I was sad that I’d only just noticed.”

Soon after, still recovering from his wounds, “I made the terrible choice to read Walden Pond,” Evslin recalls. He came across these famous words from Henry David Thoreau: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Evslin began dreaming of a self-sufficient life, in touch with nature and free of the careless consumption of modern society. He convinced his then-fiancee, Sokchea, to move to a rainy acre on his native Kauai, where they built an off-grid yurt powered by six solar panels and a bank of batteries.


Image above: Luke Evslin and family stand in front of their yurt on Kauai. Not exactly paradise if you have to drive to get anything - even if you're driving a Tesla. From original article.

They planned to use only their own energy, eat what they grew, and eliminate their carbon footprint. Luke even planted a few coffee trees, imagining he would keep up his caffeine habit guilt-free.

“I had this grand plan of being an example for people,” he says, “showing how easy it was going to be.”

He had good reason to think that. Bathed in Pacific sunlight year-round, Kauai has all the hallmarks of a renewable energy paradise. Others thought so, too. In 2008, the member-owned electricity cooperative set an ambitious goal to run the entire island on 50 percent renewable energy by 2023.

At the time, Kauai had no utility-scale solar at all. But by the final day of 2015, the island’s main power plant — a rusty sugar plantation-era diesel generator — shut down for the first time since firing up the 1960s. For a few hours in the middle of the afternoon, two large solar farms did the heavy lifting on the island of 65,000, and the diesel plant sat dormant.

It was a good omen. By the end of 2016, the utility was on track to hit its 50 percent renewable goal five years ahead of schedule.

This February, the co-op board voted to move the goalposts again: 70 percent renewable energy by 2030. It will probably clear that mark early, too.

But, as Evslin quickly learned, the path to a low-carbon future can be tougher than it seems. Even in Hawaii, the sun doesn’t always shine — and when it does, sometimes you end up with more power than you can use in the moment.

How to collect that solar energy, predict it, get it to the right places at the right time, save it up for a rainy day — those are the kind of challenges our massive, spread-out, and unevenly populated country faces as we make the switch to clean energy. It’s one of the reasons that Tesla is making a major investment on Kauai, hoping to get it right.

And it all comes down to a lesson that the Evslins learned the hard way: It’s not about getting off the grid. It’s about building a better one.

“I imagine that there will be a lot more failures than successes to report,” Luke Evslin wrote in the first post of a blog he started to document his life off the grid, on January 1, 2011. “But that’s the point of it.”

Evslin didn’t know just how much he would come to reconsider what counts as failure and what constitutes success. On a visit with the family this summer, I walk the property with Luke as he points out trees he had planted. He’s tailed by a handsome dog named Asher and a mismatched set of terrier mixes, Peanut and Pico. A calico cat appears and settles on the railing with a view of the yard, where ducks and wild chickens peck hopefully.

“I’ve failed at most things I’ve grown,” Luke says with a shrug. Other than the fruit trees dotting the property — supplying all the banana, papaya, breadfruit, and lychee the Evslins could want — little else has taken root. His attempts at arugula and tomatoes fell prey to the chickens, and the ducks discovered a taste for sweet potato; other crops didn’t take to the damp.

“The only real success I’ve had is taro,” Luke says. An easygoing, water-loving crop that can be regrown from its own stem, taro makes up the bulk of the calories the Evslins get from the land. Their one-year-old daughter, Finley, subsists largely on homegrown poi. For Luke and Sokchea, the grocery store remains a necessity.

Then there’s the water. Their water tank, which collects rain from the hill above the yurt, also provides a welcoming home for mosquito larvae. The tank’s lining recently sprung a leak, so the family has been living on jugs of municipal water hauled from Luke’s sister’s house.

At one time, Luke might have thought of this as a betrayal of principle; now it’s mostly just inconvenient.

But the biggest problem for Luke, like the utility that serves his island, has been the sun itself. He and Sokchea scaled back their lives to live within their solar-powered means — ditching their toaster and microwave, giving up laundry on cloudy days when their batteries wouldn’t be able to recharge. But they still have rainy weeks where they run out of power and have to run their gas-powered generator to keep the refrigerator from spoiling.

Most days, however, produced more solar power than they could use or successfully store in their batteries. If they were connected to the grid, Luke thought, that power could be used by his neighbors.

It took about a year for Luke to regret his move off the grid. “It’s not that it wasn’t what we expected,” he explains. “We wanted the difficulty of it.” But he also wanted to show people it was possible to live with a smaller carbon footprint; instead, he was burning gasoline and watching the island’s electric utility outpace him, installing solar power and cutting carbon all over the island.

“That was all happening, not because of me,” he remembers thinking, “but despite me and my efforts.”

Just after 10 a.m., the sun comes down hot on Kauai’s biggest solar field. Rows of darkly gleaming panels ripple toward a horizon of jungle-green mountaintops and whipped-cream clouds.

By high noon on the sunniest days, the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative generates 97 percent of its energy needs from a combination of three large solar fields, residential rooftop solar, biomass, and hydropower. Last year, 42 percent of the electricity used on island came from renewable sources.

In fact, Kauai is capable of generating so much energy from sunlight that any additional solar power the utility installs would likely go unused much of the time. Unlike the mainland United States, where a massive power grid connects far-flung regions, Kauai has nowhere to send the power it doesn’t use — and right now, it’s got about as much solar power in the middle of a day as it needs.

Yet even on the brightest day, the utility’s diesel-fired power plants start chugging back to full speed as the sun sets. It’s the solar version of feast or famine. And it’s why, despite all its advantages, Kauai is still a long way from complete clean-energy conversion.

That’s where the ranks of industrial, refrigerator–sized boxes lined up beside the solar field come in. Grouped together on neat concrete pads, only the occasional Tesla logo hints at what lies inside: batteries.

In March, Tesla cut the ribbon on this groundbreaking grid-scale battery installation, a key test of the viability of energy storage in making renewable energy a more reliable part of the grid. With 50,000 solar panels and 272 batteries, the combined solar-and-storage plant provides enough energy to power 4,500 homes for four hours.

If Tesla can help keep Kauai solar-powered around the clock with its batteries, then it can apply what it has learned elsewhere in the country, and around the world.

On this particular sunny day, Tesla engineers are doing some final tests before signing off on the plant. The site manager unlocks the front panel and swings the door open to reveal lithium-ion battery cells stacked like cafeteria trays.

Much of this hardware was borrowed directly from the electric cars that Elon Musk built his company on. (The coolant reservoir fastened to the door looks especially automotive.) Decades of research and development into smartphones and electric cars make lithium-ion batteries the most reliable and cheap battery on the market today.

“We designed the Tesla plant to be like a conventional power plant,” Brad Rockwell tells me. He is the head of power supply for Kauai’s utility cooperative, the one in charge of balancing supply and demand.

“I can say, ‘OK, give me 5 megawatts on the grid,’” Rockwell says. “And the plant looks around and says, ‘Am I getting any solar? What do you know, I’m getting 7 megawatts of solar — the grid only needs 5, so I’m going to give them a solid 5, and 2 will go to the battery.’”

He moves a pen across a sheet of paper to underline the shifting arithmetic. “Then when a cloud comes over and the [solar panels are] only putting out 2 megawatts, now I need 2 from the solar and 3 from the battery. And it just does that all day long.”

Rockwell is a former U.S. Navy engineer, familiar with photovoltaic and battery systems because he studied them in the early 1990s. “It turns out that most remote islands are powered like ships are,” he says. Neither can rely on copious cheap fuel, and they can’t afford to waste what power they do have.

Below are two charts of power supplied through KIUC to Kauai. Hydro-electric is in blue, burning biomass is in green, diesel generated electricity is in gray and solar PV (with battery storage in 20917) farm is in yellow.


Image above: An average day of energy use on Kauai, before and after Tesla’s batteries came online. In 2016, the period of highest energy demand is met mostly with fossil fuels, after the sun has set. Solar PV power (in yellow) without battery storage is ineffective from dinner time until breakfast the next day. From original article by From KIUC.


Images above: In 2017, solar power generated during the day is stored up and used overnight, shrinking the island’s fossil fuel use by as much as 1.6 million gallons a year. From original article by From KIUC.

Most places, including Kauai, see two big, predictable peaks in energy use every day: one in the morning, when most people are waking up and getting ready for work, and a bigger one at night, when they return home. Both of those peaks occur outside the period when most solar power can be generated.

That’s why “there’s a finite limit” to how much solar power Kauai can consume right now, Rockwell says, showing me a graph of energy use over the course of a day.

Between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on most days, Kauai nearly reaches its 100 percent renewable goal. Rockwell points out a gap of only a few megawatts between solar supply and the total electricity demand during the daytime hours, represented on the graph as a slim gray wiggle of conventional power under a heap of solar power.

“We’re already adding that much in rooftop solar every year. But,” he goes on, “if we can keep adding projects that don’t have to deliver here,” he taps the sunny yellow hill, “then we can start to erase this stuff,” he says, gesturing to the twin peaks of dark gray conventional power book-ending the day. “And that’s how we get to 100 percent renewable.”

Now that the Tesla battery plant is up and running, the utility will be able to cut 1.6 million gallons of fuel use per year. That power will come right off the top of the morning and evening peak demand. Because those peaks are also the most expensive times to generate power, Kauai’s customers should see a drop in their electric bills, too.

The co-op is already looking to its next solar-plus-storage installation, this one in partnership with the energy company AES. Announced in January, the AES plant will be about twice as big as the Tesla plant, and will supply 11 percent of the island’s annual electricity needs by the end of 2018.

By 2025 — three years ahead of their latest goal — the utility expects to get 70 percent of its annual energy from renewables, much of it stored in those battery packs for use during the evening and morning peaks.


Image above: Kauai Mayor Bernard Carvalho has been a corporate stooge for the Chemical-pesticide-GMO companies since he was elected. Now he a shill for unfettered suburban growth on Kauai tarted up with a "new" but not improved Kauai General Plan Update changing "Keep it Rural!" to "Make it Suburban!" and fueled by subsidized corporate energy monopoly.  From (http://grist.org/people/this-hawaiian-mayor-is-scoring-touchdowns-for-clean-energy/).

In June, Hawaii became the first state to formally adopt the Paris Climate Accord, in the wake of President Trump’s announcement that he planned to pull out. The mayor of Kauai, Bernard Carvalho, also threw his support behind the agreement.

“Although Kauai is a small island,” Carvalho said, “we believe it is our responsibility to take a leadership position on climate change mitigation. And we are strongly committed to staying on course to build a more sustainable and resilient future.”

But what will that future look like? It’s increasingly clear that it won’t be the off-the-grid Eden that folks like Evslin once imagined. Personal solar panels and other attempts to live the virtuous life look outdated in a place like Kauai, where the utility is committed to cutting carbon and costs at the same time.

The economies of scale are such that Kauai’s utility cooperative can install a solar-and-storage unit for about half what it would cost a family to install the same amount on a house.

Even when it comes to the island’s fossil fuel–generated power, the utility can produce more from a gallon of gasoline than someone with a $100 generator in their basement.


Image above: Ester Emery and her family have been living off grid for years in the wooded northeast of America. First they built a yurt and added solar power with four panels and two 12v batteries for $1,000. It provided much needed lighting and other light duty like charging small battery operated tools  - of course without a microwave or washing machine. They have built a bigger home from wood harvested off their property and are still off the grid. See more at (http://estheremery.com/videos/). From (https://mollygreen.com/blog/winter-in-a-yurt-with-three-children/).


This became obvious to Evslin midway through his yurt experiment: Inefficiency is the ultimate downfall of any individual effort to address climate change.

“Either you’re wasting electricity in a closed system, because it’s sunny and your batteries are full, or you don’t have enough power and you gotta run your generator,” Evslin says. “That’s not a bug in my system. That’s a feature of any off-grid system.”

These trends mean incentive programs set up to encourage homeowners to install solar panels are now out of whack. Hawaii’s public utility commission still requires Kauai’s utility to pay early solar adopters for power they generate, based on “avoided cost of fuel.” But these days, the power that’s being avoided doesn’t come from fossil fuels — it’s being provided by the island’s solar farms.

So although the utility is offsetting some panel owners’ bills for their (less efficient) solar power, the rest of the utilities’ costs (like batteries) are divided among members who don’t have access to rooftop solar power.

As the island around them goes solar, Luke and Sokchea are looking at houses — they’ve tentatively picked one out — that would put them back on the grid, and back in a community they could feel a part of. If they lived in town, they could cut down on a huge chunk of their remaining energy use by walking or biking to work, or to run errands.

Still, they both admit they are reluctant to leave the yurt. Settling onto the couch with their dogs in the evening, Finley sleeping in a crib on the other side of their single large room, Luke and Sokchea weigh the pros and cons. They could shell out several thousand dollars to the utility company to hook them up to the grid out here, sure, but they’d still be left with many unanswered questions.

What about the benefits of neighbors, a little lacking out here at the end of the road? What about walls, which might come in handy as Finley gets older? It’s still beautiful here, but it’s no longer the dream it was when they moved in.

The experience taught Luke a lot. He learned first-hand the challenges of solar power — how cheap it seems when he needs to run a fan in the middle of the day, how expensive when he’s rationing out the last watts in his batteries.

By retreating to his hideaway, Luke came to understand the power of civic participation. He’s pursuing a masters in public policy online, and it’s not hard to imagine him — wry, self-deprecating, easy to talk to — running for a seat in county government, or maybe even on the utility board.

“The solutions to all of this can’t be individual,” he says — and by “all of this,” it’s clear he’s thinking about the challenges facing society as a whole, not just Kauai, not just energy.

Walking me out past the taro patch, back across the swinging bridge that spans the creek surrounding his property, Luke points out one last thing. “It’s funny,” he says, “it was only recently I learned that Thoreau had his mom bring him food out in the woods.”

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Failing to live Off-Grid 1/3/16

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Giving the Finger to Modernity

SUBHEAD: Amish family gathers forage for the winter while a stoplight blinks commands on a four-lane highway.

By Brian Miller on 17 July 2017 for Wnged Elm Farm -
(http://www.wingedelmfarm.com/blog/2017/07/16/giving-the-finger-to-modernity/)


Image above: An Amish buggy in the farmland of America. From (http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-07-17/giving-the-finger-to-modernity/).

The mercury is already pushing the mid-80s by afternoon, and clouds are beginning to build in the west. I sit in my car in a Pennsylvania parking lot next to a mattress store, watching.

Across a field, a boy is perched on the bench seat of a hay wagon, holding the reins to a team of Belgians. Farther back stands an older boy.

He is reaching down and catching square bales as they are tossed up to him from other boys on the ground.

He already has stacked a layer three-high on the 16-foot wagon. The driver, maybe 8 to 10 years old, twitches the reins and moves the load forward every few minutes before again coming to a stop.

Up ahead, the father is driving a second team that pulls a gasoline-powered baler, spitting bales onto the ground at regular intervals as it tracks the windrows of hay.

The scene I observe is a Hieronymus Bosch painting with a twist: In the background of the tableau, the family of man and boys gathers forage for the winter.

At the forefront, a stoplight blinks commands on a four-lane highway, the center of a tortured world of strip mall architecture, where the obese and the tattooed pour onto the roads and the pavement groans under bumper-to-bumper traffic.

A boy, the same age as the ones working the field, sits in a car, screen-staring his young years away.

A man in the front passenger seat stares ahead, oblivious to any other way of living. A Chick-fil-A and an Olive Garden shoehorn the paved landscape and the fields of the family at work.

Farther down the road, back in the stream of modernity, I pass three different buggies of Amish women, all driving teams, their children aboard, moving down the highway at five to eight miles an hour.

If the journey is indeed more important than the destination, then these women and their children have learned the lesson well. They are chatting and laughing, as their fellow travelers, mere feet away, are entombed and unsmiling.

Do they ever glance at the cars and wonder, May Swenson-like:

“Those soft shapes,  shadowy inside the hard bodies — are they their guts or their brains?”

I pull into my hotel parking lot, retrieve my luggage, check in, and go up to my room. I open the curtains to glimpse the last of the day.

Across another parking lot, across a road, lies another field. In the dying evening light, another man and a team of Percherons pull a manure spreader across the pastures back to the barn.

On the seat, on either side of him, are his two sons, sharing an unheard conversation.

Standing at the window of the third floor, in isolation and sadness and cowardice, I think, we chase our lives across the decades seeking a sense of purpose.

Yet our gaze is averted from the possibilities and the wisdom gained from living slowly, at five to eight miles an hour.

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Heatwave melts Arizona

SUBHEAD: Much of the man-made landscape there is petroleum based plastic and now Climate Change is melting it.

By Tyler Durden on 26 June 2017 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-25/epic-pictures-arizonas-heatwave-everything-literally-melting)


Image above: Extreme Heat on 21 June 12017 means the temperature map of Arizona almost runs out of colors on it legend past 120º Fahrenheit. Looks a bit like the surface of Mars. From original article.

Ask any Arizonan whether their summers are more tolerable because "it's a dry heat" and you're likely to be asked to turn your oven to 150 degrees, stick your head inside for 20 minutes and report back as to whether or not the humidity within the oven ever crossed you mind. Probably not.


Image above: Yes, it is so hot that you may need oven mittens to drive around in the sun in Arizona. From original article.

Arizonans have learned to cope with the "dry heat," this summer has been particularly brutal for people living in the Southwest as temperatures have already soared to over 120 degrees in certain areas. What's worse, it's only June.


Image above: A petroleum based mailbox fails in the sun from the weight of mail made up of bills and credit card offers. Note condition of "grass" lawn about to become blowing sand. From original article.


Image above: In Tempe, Arizona a trash bin becomes trash itself due to high temperatures. Ironically, most of the trash appears to be packaging for refrigerated food that exacerbates the heat. From original article.

And while the heatwave may not be that fun for the people living through it, it does making for some amazing pictures of stuff melting.


Image above: Towards sunset the heat damage to the plastic yard fence can be surveyed in this suburban neighborhood. Looks like something out of a horror movie. From original article.

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Interview with James Kunstler

SUBHEAD: Rob Hopkins interviews Kunstler on living in a moment of unprecedented incoherence.

Interview by Rob Hopkins on 16 June 2017 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-06-16/james-howard-kunstler-living-moment-unprecedented-incoherence/)


Image above: James Kunstler in his home near the Hudson Valley of New York. From original article.

James Howard Kunstler lives in upstate New York and is the author of about 20 books, 14 novels and the rest are non-fiction.  These include The Geography of Nowhere, about the suburbanisation of America, The Long Emergency, about the energy predicament and financial predicaments of our time, and the prospects for collapse, and Too Much Magic, an update of The Long Emergency about wishful thinking and technology.  He also recently completed a four book series of novels set in the post-collapse American future under the rubric ‘World Made by Hand’. He also runs a great blog, which includes my personal favourite, ‘Eyesore of the Month’.

I wonder how you would evaluate the state of the collective imagination in the US in 2017?

That’s a very interesting question.  I would say generally it is disorderly in a manner that we have not seen before in my lifetime.  That the various places that used to be the touchstones of ideology and belief, the ideas that are circulating there are pretty much insane.

If you’re on the left, what we have in the USA is a new kind of Maoism.  Mostly seen on campus, and it’s an anti-free speech despotic movement that used to be about identity politics – that’s how it started – and the ideology of victimisation, but it has really turned into something else now completely different.

What it’s really about now is just the pleasure of coercing other people.  I think the analogue to that is exactly what happened in the cultural revolution in China in the mid 1960s, which started out supposedly as an attempt to correct the thought of people who were not conforming, but ended up really just being a matter of young people enjoying pushing other people around.  And that’s what’s happened in the USA on the left.

On the right you have Trumpism which is just a celebration of incompetence and buffoonery, all based on the idea that we’re going to make America like it used to be in 1962, and that’s not going to happen.  What’s most amazing about the whole situation is that the places where people ought to do their thinking, places like the universities, and the thinking classes in general, are absolutely AWOL, as they say in the military.

Absent without leave.  They are not on the scene.  They are not raising their voices.  They are not making sense.  We are living in a moment of unprecedented incoherence.

We always used to look to the future with optimism and hope and think the future is where we want to get to, but now people seem to want to go to the past.  It seems to be the thing somehow that the 1950s was this golden age and we have to get back to the 1950s again.  What’s changed?  Why has our view reversed and we’re looking behind us rather than forwards?

We’re suffering from the disappointment about the promises of progress and technology, and it’s not much more complicated than that.  We have reason to feel that way.  In fact I don’t believe in the techno utopia that a lot of people are trying to sell.

I do believe that the direction of where civilisation is going in the not distant future is going to be a time out from what we have thought of as progress.  And in fact that’s really what’s happening.

There’s probably a very confused reaction to the dynamic tendencies in the on-going self-creation of history.  Human societies being the emergent phenomena that they are.  In other words, history is something that is a self-informing and self-creating phenomena, or dynamic.  Where it’s taking us is for example the downscaling of a lot of the activities that we’re used to, like the way we do industry or techno industrial things, and the size and scale of the way we operate our stuff.

Namely nation states and gigantic corporations and the gigantic organisation of just about anything, whether it’s a college, university or anything.  So the trend in all of that is to disaggregate, become smaller, for the world to become a larger place again, for our activities to become finer, smaller, less complex.  The reaction to that emotionally and intellectually by people at all sides of the political spectrum has been to be fairly confused about it.  That’s my analysis of it.

If what we’re seeing is a retreat of the imagination, or people being less imaginative than they used to be, what do you think are some of the causes of that?

I wouldn’t say that they’re being less imaginative.  I would actually challenge you that that is not an accurate representation of what’s going on.  In fact it’s very imaginative.  The trouble is that a lot of the imaginative result of it is delusional thinking.  That’s why I wrote the book Too Much Magic, because we had entered an era of wishful thinking in the United Sates, and probably in the West generally after the financial dislocations of 2008.

We adopted the idea that certainly a set of technologies was going to rescue us from the problems of techno industrial civilisation and the internal contradictions of it, and the place that it was leading us.  We basically don’t want to let go of this stuff that we’ve got, and the way that we’re running it, and the universe doesn’t really want us to do that anymore.   Doesn’t want us to run our stuff the way we’re running it, and it’s a very perplexing predicament for the human race.

So for you Donald Trump is somebody who is a very imaginative person?

No, I wouldn’t say that it’s a question of imagination.  I consider Donald Trump to be a clown and a buffoon.  And a product of an election process, and a society that cannot form a coherent idea of what’s happening to it, and as a result cannot make coherent plans for what to do about it.

So we elect a guy who has a lot of really empty promises and unrealistic plans for getting through the bottlenecks that we face.  I don’t think it’s about imagination.  Human imagination is always present.  It really depends on its capacity for meeting the exigencies of our time with ideas that comport with reality.

You’ve written about the built environments that we have now, and suburbia.  What happens to a culture when the world around it, that it interacts with on a daily basis, becomes boring?  You said in your TED talk about when there are enough places that nobody cares about anymore, then just nobody cares. 

The problem is not that they’re boring.  They’re not boring.  They’re not boring at all.  In fact they’re punishing.  They take all of the attention that you’re able to muster and punish you, and make you very self-conscious of your discomfort in these places.

It’s not a matter of boredom.  These places punish your neurology.  They punish really the way that you are designed to function as a human being in space.  And I don’t mean outer space.  I mean in the world around you.

If you give a talk about suburbia and say, “What’s the matter with this?”  American audiences will always say, “Oh the trouble is it’s all the same”, and that’s not true of course because there are a lot of things in the world that are all the same.  The hill towns of Tuscany are all the same.  At least from 500 ft away.  The boulevards of Paris all look the same to the casual observer.  The problem with the American milieu is not that it’s all the same.  The trouble is that it’s all the same lousy quality.  It’s all the same bad design and bad idea.

I like to think of it this way, what people identify as the immersive ugliness of their surroundings.  When you’re sitting in a car for example, on an eight-laner in the USA, one of those commercial boulevards where the street is lined with muffler shops and Taco stands and big box stores and parking lots and other furnishings and accessories of suburbia, people regard that as ugliness.  But there’s more to it, because this immersive ugliness actually represents entropy.

It’s entropy made visible, and entropy in the physical universe is really the force behind things running down or dying or moving towards death and stasis.  That’s really the quality that’s being reflected in the environments that we create in America.  And it’s no surprise that it’s punishing to the human psyche.

You’ve been writing and speaking about this for some time.  Do you see any change in direction? 

No, there’s no change in direction.  We’re doing what we’re doing here in the USA because we’ve developed an enormous matrix of behaviors and rackets that we don’t want to give up.  We’ve learned how to do this stuff, we’ve learned how to build suburbia, we’ve learned how to live in it.  We’re not going to give it up until reality compels us to because we can’t use it anymore, and then we won’t.

There was a guy who was an economic advisor to President Nixon back in the 1960s, and he made the observation that things go on until they can’t.  And that’s really how it’s going to roll in America.  There’s this wish, among all the other wishful things, for us to point to trends that are “hopeful”.

I must add or hasten to add that I am hardly without hope.  I think there will be some very salubrious results of the reset that we face, the civilizational reset that we’re entering.  It will put us in a place that will probably be better than where we are now.  But it doesn’t involve, for me, a lot of techno narcissistic triumphant rescue remedies.  I think the things that we’re going to be returning to are going to be pretty fundamental.  Things like leading a purposeful life.

Things like knowing the people who you transact with, and being part of a real community, and making music with your friends and neighbours, and taking part in the ceremonies of human existence in a meaningful way.  Those are the things that are going to matter.  Not whether we can run our cars on batteries.

You were very high profile in the debates around Peak Oil, which people don’t seem to talk about so much now.  I wondered what your views are now on that 10 years on, whether they’ve changed, or whether you still hold by everything that was in The Long Emergency, or whether events have overtaken that analysis in any way?

I would say that the analysis has changed because there were elements of the story that people like myself perhaps didn’t see coming, misinterpreted, but on the whole I think the story is still intact.  We do face a predicament with our oil supply.  What we got wrong was how the pricing mechanisms would affect the story.

What it turns out to be about is not running out of oil, it’s about not being able to afford to get the oil out of the ground.  What we missed was the whole story of the energy return on investment and how important that was.  The fact is that you can’t run an industrial society on less than a 3:1 oil energy return on investment.

We’re now at about 17:1 in the world wide aggregate, including everything, including tar sands, shale, deep water, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, everything.  But the newer, unconventional oil has a terrible return on investment, which is running about 5:1 for shale oil.  Once you’re at that ratio, you either have to drop certain activities in your daily life, or something else is going to happen.  And the something else that happened is that we destroyed the middle class.

So instead of saying, “Oh well, at an energy return on investment of 17:1 you can’t really have commuting and suburbia, and theme park vacations and the trucking industry, and some of those have to go”, well, we didn’t actually do that, and that’s not how it worked out.  How it worked out was we just destroyed the middle class, so that all of that aggregate demand coming from the middle class is dwindling because increasingly they have no money and no income.

That of course has led to massive political problems in the West.  So it has played out differently, to answer your question.  It has played out a little differently than we imagined, and that’s probably because history is not always strictly linear, and certainly not extrapolative.

How far do we have to go down Trump’s vision of how things want to be before it becomes blatantly obvious that it doesn’t work and we try something else?

Oh I don’t think we’ll have to go more than a year or so, maybe less.  Actually I predicted in my blogs that he wouldn’t make it as President for more than a year.  That he would be removed from office one way or another.

Clearly the guy’s a buffoon, doesn’t know what he’s doing.  But the nation also doesn’t know where it’s going.  He is in fact perfectly representing the incoherence of our politics.  How we get out of that?  I don’t know.  As I said a moment ago, it’s really only a question of how disorderly our journey is going to be.  In the US is it going to be a real political breakdown?  We’ve seen them before in the USA.  It can happen.

It’s not going to happen the same that it did in 1860, but it can be pretty bad.  In my ‘World Made by Hand’ books, I was actually trying to present a fairly realistic picture of where I thought we might be going, and where we would end up.  My idea is if we’re fortunate, we’ll land in a reset economy and civilisation that is not unlike the early to mid 19^th century, if we’re lucky.  If we’re not so lucky and we make some really terrible blunders we could either go full medieval, or worse.

By the way, I’ve written in my blog that I believe that Japan is going to be the first advanced nation that goes medieval voluntarily.  And for the reason that they actually had a really lovely pre-industrial civilisation, the Edo period.  It preceded the 1850s when Japan was “opened up” by Commodore Perry of the USA.  That was a lovely civilisation.

Things don’t last for ever of course and history doesn’t repeat itself, but I think that the Japanese are very nostalgic for what they left behind and what they lost, and I think will be very glad to get back to it.  I don’t think that modernity is working out for them.  So they may be the canary in the coal mine, if Asia doesn’t go up in a vapour because of conflict with North Korea or something like that.

Heaven help us.  Jim, thank you, thank you very much.

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