In the Future, everyone will have 15 minutes of anarchy.

Here we go, let's get a little perspective.

First, a mere six months ago, as I was accused of being unduly pessimistic.

http://www.commonstrike.blogspot.com/

Today--all this news from today, from one source.

This is representative of how the US is viewed around the world:

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=95498&videoChannel=1

This is why:

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=95541&videoChannel=1

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=95655&videoChannel=1

Here is the result for stupid Americans who stood by and let this all go on unchallenged:

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=95591&videoChannel=1

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=95664&videoChannel=1


This poor sucker still thinks he's relevant:

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=95600&videoChannel=1

What is "meltdown, you might ask? Here's what the US is going to look like in by next Christmas.

http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=95683&videoChannel=1

But really, it's this one

this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
not with a bang, but with a whimper

Or this one,

Into the crystal chalice flowed
The immortal essence which glowed
With ethereal flavors so sublime
The taste of wine not yet realized
So did that nectar tantalize. . .

Drink, cried she, and at that my heart leaped!
Of course the choice grim was mine.
My heart was said to be proof against such magics
And so, bravely I fled, and won the day for fleeting righteousness.
But still
On nights, cold, dark and chill
I savor naught else but a bitter regret
Of that wondrous elixir my tongue never met.

Or this one,

Some say the world will end in fire.
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Apoclypse poetry,

Since I'm on it, and Charlie Rose the other night asked some goon pretty unworthy of his time--"the black swan" goon--what Roubini, or Soros, or Shiff, or elsewise mean when they say "financial meltdown." Well, I have MY definition, but I'll leave it to the poets to describe it. . .


How about this one, by another of my favorites,

Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot
The armless amidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe
And Ralph the Lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb--
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off.

And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness, the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

and along the road to that. . .

Seems pertinent. . .take a deep breath. Maybe two, and read this out loud to someone you care about. . .


What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stoney rubbish? Son of Man
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock
(come in under the shadow of this red rock)
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at the morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you:

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The Famine of 2009

I've been thinking about this whole deal for a while, but it's time to bring it up for all friends, sailors, and kindred spirits out there.

Had an elucidating conversation this morning over far too much caffeine that made this commentary critical. Now, over Merlot, the thinking is more staid.

There are conditions forming that may create epic levels of trouble next year in the agricultural markets. We saw a little of that with rice last year, and corn, and elsewise--mostly due to bio fuel intrusion on the food chain. None of this pressure has gone away, but additional pressures are likely to be added. They are worth thinking about.

1) We have a credit crisis. We as homesteaders/seasteaders at heart and practice may be better prepared than many, and more or less uneffected by such issues, but the rest of the world is reeling. Farming in particular is in trouble.

2) Farming is in trouble especially because modern farming, globally requires credit as much as seed. The seed is proprietary in most cases, co-ops must purchase their fertilizer contracts, and they must do so on an non-arbritrary time frame. Spring wheat must go in at the right time, period, or you don't have any spring wheat. While GM and AIG dominates the news, the fact is that farmers aren't able to plant. In many cases, at all. Do your research!

3) There is a very very good chance that next summer will be the warmest ever in the history of human kind. Why? We're all cutting back on consumption, all around the world. Oil is at barely 40 bucks a barrel as a result. The ecological result is while CO2 may be lower next year, our soot production--which has kept the world almost 3C too cool--may well be much less. The result may be a sudden and severe increase in global temperatures and drought.

Do a little bit of research and get back to me. What do you think?

Ecoforming III--the key?

If you're interested in such things, you must educate yourself about terra preta.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/terra_preta/TerraPretahome.htm


Does this, or does it not seem like an ideal solution--and for those of us concerned with carbon sequestration it does that too. . .

Of course one might need a more or less unlimited source of biomass ideally suited to charcoalization. . .guava?!? Of course!

I'm attempting to kill two birds--actually several--with one big rock. Control invasives, encourage responsible agriculture--and retain forestation. . .this seems like a solution to me.

Be sure you watch this video as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzmpWR6JUZQ

Ecoforming II

So along the road to all that stuff pertaining to the last post, here's what I'm doing and what has worked well.

Obviously, when the figure of "3 acres per person" is tossed around, that doesn't really mean cropland, per se. It probably doesn't even mean crop land at all. Not that wild lands aren't productive, of course they are--more or less acting as the liver of the planet to suck up the wastes generated elsewhere and pump it down. The problem is, of course, we need "stomachs" as well as "livers," and certainly a doctor cutting out a liver to put in a stomach will kill a patient.

So, when one expands cropland at this point of human history, it must be done in a manner that allows the natural state of the land to exist more or less undisturbed. Of course, in my area, this means any sort of clearing or removal of significant trees, alien or otherwise, is simply not a sensible or responsible option. The trees are just too valuable as carbon sinks, and weather stabilizers, and lest we end up looking like Easter Island we'd do well to be very careful on that score. All, then is left as a viable food production strategy is to intercrop amidst the trees understory plants that can be selectively removed. This is labor intensive, for certain, but certainly not as much as one might think. This kind of "Ecoforming" gardening I'm working on walks the bare edge of wildcrafting plants--you mostly want your food crops to grow in an unattended natural state in a natural habitat. And, I'm happy to report, they do so very well if one chooses these species carefully.

The chief problem with farming the rainforest areas where I live is of course the mixture of rainfall and highly impermeable lava. While taro can grow in that poorly draining much not much else can. Even the native trees have a difficult time of it, and the anerobic layer of stinky poison often to be found a foot down is as rank as any in a ruined anchorage. What is generally recommended as a treatment for this kind of site is to blast and rip with a big cat, lay cinder and soil. Obviously, due to previous concerns, this is hardly a workable or responsible plan.

In poking around in the woods it didn't take me long to find the trick to finding cravases and lava tubes. They're hardly hidden. Look for the big trees. You will find stunted small growth in areas of impermable sheets of rock, but on the edge of such you'll find enourmous trees with roots deep in the cravases living almost hydroponically on the run-off. Indeed, some of the finest. To learn from that, the mucky soil isn't toxic, it's only overwet, and if drainage can be installed, it should be quite rich.

Of course draining fields is a time honored agricultural technique of which much has been written. A well drained field survives both rain and drought better than one that is not--and locally drainage seemed to be the issue. The problem here seems to be difficult at first glance, but when one realizes that one has ready-made drains about every 60 feet or so in the form of a bottomless pit--it's simply a matter of getting the water to the hole in the ground.


The solution is simple in the extreme. Your garden, the one that most everthing has died of root rot in, will have a path through it. That path will be an expression of lay of the land, and typically nicely graded, or at least as well as anything else. You will, by now, as well, have become tired, I expect, of that muddy path, and think a little rock there might be a nice idea. As well, at the edge of that path where you quit walking, is probably a pit, and it's all but certain there's a crack there just waiting to be opened up. Solutions present themselves. Mine happened to be right in the middle of the garden. I built a little bridge over it.

At this point you dig out the path, pitch the soil from the path(s) into the garden, creating raised beds, and backfill the path with large drain rock or even SD perf pipe if you felt the need or were too lazy to drag rock around, which may be sensible. The change in the productivity of the garden site will be marked, and it will not take long at all for the previously heavy soil to start becoming much much more healthy. I'd recommend planting U'ala Piko as a cover and reclamation crop, and 4 months out the whole of the site will be transformed. Plant bananas in drain rock for soil retention when you need to cap off the end of pit, if you need to, as they'll be pretty happy drinking up all that run-off.

Sustainability again. . .

I'm getting a bit of "sustainability" fatigue.

One hears so much about "sustainability" ideas today and there are so many voices out there trumping amazing new ideas and technologies and visions--I briefly visited the "Sustainability" fair in Hilo a while back as well. All in all I was struck at the characteristic that all new "Sustainability" tech seems to share. Which is, that it isn't sustainable. When you look at the issue at all, with any sort of critical eye, it all becomes very apparent. An electric car is an expensive consumer device--and is very poor way and inefficient way to burn coal. Photo voltaic systems are expensive consumer devices--but aren't sustainable until you have solar stripmining, solar transportation, and solar factories that make panels. Without subsidies, either. Sir McCartney is all out of breath flying around the world advocating vegitarianism to save greenhouse gasses. . .you would laugh at this kind of bullshit if the situation wasn't so grim. What the sustainability movement is all about, really--is trying to sustain with gimmickry a lifestyle of consumption that isn't sustainable. And frequently to earn a good enough wage selling this crap that one can keep up with the once a year eco-vacation in Bali.

I get told--Jay, you're far too negative about this sort of thing. Ease up! People say that they understand that we're not really sustainable yet, but hybrid cars are a "step in the right direction," right? Actually, I reply, no they are not! They may be smaller steps in the wrong direction than others may be--but they are still steps in the wrong direction.

If we imagine our situation in terms of dallying near a precipice, we get a better and more complete metaphor and get a better sense of our reprecussions. In a very real way we are indeed standing on a brink of climate change and wholesale collapses of ecosystems. If we were aware of the danger of the brink, and were sensible enough to stay a goodly bit away, an occasional mis-step in the wrong direction might be forgivable. At this point we are teetering on the very edge, at the slightest mistep may have dire consequences. We've made some very big misteps in the name of "sustainability"--bio-fuels would be the big one, which at this point is the single largest deforestation industry in the world. The biofuels industry was a massive step in the wrong direction, and getting worse all the time. I'm entitled, I think, to be more than a little skeptical and negative, as I'm going to get shoved over cliff with all the rest.

Someone said to me not so long ago, "Jay, you just need to realize you have a different definition of sustainability than other people." Ease up! Actually, while apparently and sadly this seems to be true to some degree--there's only one definition of sustainability, which is, to be sustainable. Everything else is unsustainable. Sustainability isn't an attitude, or a philosophy, it is a practical emperical concept. There may be a bit of fudge in the way to define it, depending on what you're trying to argue for, but what is incontestable is that there are only barely 3 acres per person on this planet, at this moment, at this level of population. It would seem to me that the only just way to quantify sustainability is to hold these 3 acres as a conceptual common trust. If you are consuming more than 3 acres worth, you are living unsustainably, and not only that, you are necesitating some one elses deprivation. World GDP divided by population is barely 3000 US dollars a year: if you are living on more than that, you are living on more than your fair share of the sum output of the world's economy. And a share of an unsustainable economy at that, mind you.

So what to do? Unfortunately except for a handful of conscious and conscientious, people what passes for ecologically sensitive is a lifestyle typically consuming between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude more than what the planet can really bear. If this is the highest level of integrity we progressive can muster, one may as well prep for a swan dive into the abyss. As far as I can see, especially since the global economic collapse with dominate all issues for the forseeable future, meaning years--a major collapse of the biosphere and a massive extinction event is at this point all but inevitable. . .



So, where to go from here?


From my perspective, again, the lifestyle that I should be living out of a concern for the ecology as well as care for humanity in general--one of strict anti-consumerism, is the one that most effectively will prepare me for the now inevitable future--as the future will be one of strict anti-consumerism by necessity. It may be cute to talk "green" in gassy terms today, but in the same way the high flying financiers have been brought low, soon enough I expect the "Trust-fund-afarian" lifestyle will be coming to an end. There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth as well. Times of affluence and ease tend to sloppy living and sloppy thinking--and we can see the results. I imagine that once the critical and attention grabbing task of feeding oneself comes to dominate one's life--there will be a great more attention to paid to real sustainability than there is at the moment. And rightly so. Living unsustainably may well mean not living at all.