In this essay, I briefly describe the horrors of the current interconnected, globalized, planet-destroying house of cards. Then I articulate another way, which is not difficult to do: It would pose quite a challenge to come up with a worse way, and we have several models from which to choose. I will focus on two such models, agrarian anarchy and the post-industrial Stone Age.

What’s wrong?

Detailing all that is wrong with the industrial economy would require libraries full of books. The cryptic version includes, at a minimum, the following: (1) an industrial economy at the apex of western civilization, a set of living arrangements that transfers financial wealth from the poor to the wealthy; (2) human-population overshoot on an overcrowded planet; (3) runaway climate change on an overheated planet; and (4) wholesale destruction of the living planet. The latter brings an extinction rate of a few hundred species each day, along with destruction of potable water and living soil.

In short, as I wrote in the leading journal in my discipline, “the modern world essentially requires one to live immorally. There is no doubt that a society that enslaves, tortures, and kills people and abuses the lands and waters needed for the survival of our species and others is immoral, yet these actions are produced with stunning efficiency by the world’s industrial economy, as epitomized by American empire. Most people know that Big Energy poisons our water, Big Ag controls our food supply, Big Pharma controls the behavior of our children, Wall Street controls the flow of money, Big Ad controls the messages we receive every day, and the criminally rich get richer through exploitation of an immoral system. This is how America works. And, through it all, we think we live moral lives in the land of the free.”

It should be clear that the industrial economy is making us sick, mentally and physically, and also greatly reducing habitat for our species on Earth. As a result, I’m a big fan of terminating this set of living arrangements — that is, I’m a fan of terminating industrialized civilization — and replacing it with a more sane and durable set of living arrangements.

Alternatives

Alternatives abound, and generally rest along a continuum ranging from the current system to the post-industrial Stone Age. I will consider three points along the continuum: (1) the current system, which must be replaced if we are to persist as a species beyond a few decades, (2) agrarian anarchy, and (3) the post-industrial Stone Age.

The current system: industrial economy

The contemporary version of civilization is creating a dire set of predicaments: human-population overshoot, climate chaos, and an unparalleled extinction crisis. It is the primary problem we face. As such, I think it’s time to leave it behind before it leaves us. Considering the ongoing, accelerating collapse of the industrial economy and the virtual absence of national- or international-level discussion about mitigation, I strongly suspect our society is headed for the post-industrial Stone Age within a matter of years, not decades. But communities and the individuals comprising communities have the option of choosing between agrarian anarchy and the post-industrial Stone Age.

Agrarian anarchy

Anarchy assumes the absence of direct or coercive government as a political ideal, while proposing cooperative and voluntary association between individuals and groups as the principal mode for organizing society. This close-to-nature, close-to-our-neighbors approach was the Jeffersonian ideal for the United States, as evidenced by Monticello and the occasional one-liner from Thomas Jefferson. It was also the model promoted by Henry David Thoreau and, more recently, radical thinkers such as Wendell Berry (farmer, writer), Noam Chomsky (linguist, philosopher), Howard Zinn (recently deceased historian), and Tucson-based iconoclastic author Edward Abbey.

Consider, for example, a few well-known lines from Thomas Jefferson: (1) “The result of our experiment will be, that man may be trusted to govern themselves without a master”; (2) I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it”; and (3) “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” Although Jefferson did not call himself an anarchist, his words and ideals indicate he strongly supported the rights and role of individuals, as well as a small government that minimally oversaw the citizenry. The Greco-Latin roots of anarchy suggest the absence of a ruler, which seems like a good idea to me.

Like Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau idealized an agricultural society that was close to nature. Thoreau was a staunch defender of agrarian anarchy, and he focused even more closely on the individual than did Jefferson: “That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” To my knowledge, no state governments believe we’ve yet reached that point.

Fast forward to the late twentieth century, and we find several other philosophers defending agrarian anarchy. Perhaps the best known examples are Wendell Berry, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn, but the clearest voice for agrarian anarchy came from Edward Abbey in the years before he died in 1989: (1) “Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners”; (2) “Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others”; and (3) “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

In my dreams, industrialized nations are headed for agrarian anarchy. Many countries have been there for years and can show us the way, if only we allow them. If a region never acquired ready access to cheap fossil fuels, agrarian anarchy was an obvious approach. How else but a strong sense of self-reliance and dependence on neighbors to grow and distribute all food locally? How else but reliance on those same traits to secure the water supply, and protect it from the insults of industry? How else to develop a human community dominated by mutual respect and mutual trust? Contrary to our current set of living arrangements, no currency is needed: barter fills the bill. Better yet, a gift economy is well-suited to agrarian anarchy.

Post-industrial Stone Age

The first two million years of the human experience, and the first few hundred thousand years for our own species, was spent with relatively small communities living close to the land that supported them. These humans knew each other and they knew the plants and animals with which they shared the area. They had minimal impact on the lands and waters that supported them. These humans spent a few hours each week doing what we call “work,” making sure the members of the community were well-hydrated, well-fed, and warm. This was a durable set of living arrangements, as characterized by its longevity and minimal impact on Earth.

We arrogantly and disparagingly refer to this time as the Stone Age.

The first civilization arose a few thousand years ago. Civilization is characterized by cities. In other words, civilization is defined by by human populations too large to be supported in the local area. Cities require use of clear air, clean water, and healthy food from adjacent wildlands, as well as materials to ensure body temperature is maintained at about 37 C. In exchange, cities export dirty air, polluted water, and garbage to outlying areas. Most civilized people think this is a wonderful exchange, although it is unsustainable by definition because there are limits on nature’s abundance.

The current version of civilization, the world’s industrial economy, is the least sustainable model to date, in part because it requires growth for its survival: Civilizations, like organisms, grow or die. This finite planet cannot support infinite growth.

The world’s industrial economy mainlines ready supplies of inexpensive crude oil. The lifeblood of western civilization, cheap oil infuses our daily lives. Petroleum products transport us easily and conveniently, thus allowing for exchange of materials and ideas. Without inexpensive crude oil to deliver water, food, and building materials, the world’s industrial economy declines.

Each of the six worldwide economic recessions since 1972 was preceded by a spike in the price of crude oil, and the days of cheap oil are behind us. At the global level, peak extraction of crude oil occurred in May 2005. A modest decline in available crude oil, coupled with increased industrialization in lesser-developed countries such as China, India, and Brazil, indicates further spikes in the price of oil lie in our future. That the world has nearly a trillion barrels of crude oil remaining to exploit hardly matters: The price of oil is key to growth of the industrial economy. There is little doubt that future spikes in the price of oil will prove sufficient to terminate the industrial economy, taking us on a one-way trip to the post-industrial Stone Age. Already, expensive oil is overwhelming the ability of central banks and central governments to provide the illusion of economic growth by printing fiat currency. As nearly occurred in 2008 in the wake of oil priced at $147.27 per barrel, western civilization faces an abrupt termination in the face of expensive crude oil.

It is unclear what the future holds. I suspect completion of the ongoing collapse of the industrial economy will engender short-term but large-scale mortality of humans. Shortly thereafter, all “renewable” energy systems will fail because they depend heavily on maintenance and support from oil-driven industries. The batteries associated with most home-based PV solar and wind-energy systems have a life of a decade or so. When collapse of the industrial economy is complete and is followed by inability to generate electricity via “renewable” systems, it seems humans will be forced to live — yet again — close to our neighbors and close to the natural systems that allow for our survival. That is, we’ll be immersed in the post-industrial Stone Age, albeit with plenty of technology that was not present during the Neolithic period. The simplest of these technologies, including knives and jars, will be readily usable for a long time. The more complex technologies, especially those relying on electricity, will fade quickly from our memories.

An economy based on gift exchange

The current version of the industrial economy has most people obsessed with the tertiary economy (symbolic, green pieces of paper and magnetized particles on hard drives). A few thoughtful individuals focus instead on the secondary economy (the items we use in our daily lives), which rests firmly on the foundational but rarely contemplated primary economy. The primary economy is comprised of the raw materials we use to survive, and perhaps even thrive. Faith in the symbols characterizing the tertiary economy will be lost when people recognize there are too few items of use (secondary economy) and too few underlying materials (primary economy). One result will be a profound loss of power in the symbols.

An economy based on exchange of gifts worked for the first two million years of the human experience and, due to collapse of the industrial economy certain to result from ongoing decline of fossil-fuel energy, we’re headed toward a similar set of circumstances. We would do well to allow history to serve as a guide to our fossil-fuel-free future. Our current monetary system is based on faith in symbols and it appears to give us something for nothing. Instead, it steals our sense of community.

People with an abundance of paper wealth have no need to build their human community. Their wealth allows them to buy goods and services, so they need not know the names of the people providing the services. Ditto for the names of the plants, animals, soils, and water providing the services on which we depend for our survival.

On the other hand, financially poor people depend heavily on their neighbors. The rural poor recognize that those neighbors include non-humans as well as humans. True community is woven from gifts, and the gifts come from the lands and waters that support us, as well as from our human neighbors.

A personal example

I had the brass ring. And I let it go. My parents were lifelong educators. So are my only brother and my only sister. Among them, only I reached the pinnacle of the educational world: I was a tenured full professor by the age of 40. I walked away from that life, which I loved, an act that made most people think I’d lost my mind. I walked away after trying to change the morally bankrupt system in which we are immersed when I realized the system was changing me, and not for the better.

I let go of the brass ring after I realized the first step toward destroying this irredeemably corrupt system is to leave it. Because I was born into captivity and assimilated into the normalcy bias of a world gone bonkers, I left later than I should have, and long after I realized the immorality of the system. A large part of this delay resulted from my inability to identify where and how to leave the system. I had come to see the industrial economy at the apex of western civilization as a horrific system but, because it was the only system I ever knew, I didn’t know how to escape it. Finally, after several years of thought and a few aborted attempts to reach escape velocity, my wife and I developed a set of living arrangements on a small property with another small family where we try to model agrarian anarchy.

When I finally tossed aside the brass ring, I worked cooperatively with others to develop to transition toward a gift economy embedded in agrarian anarchy. I live in a small, sparsely populated valley where gifts are the rule, not the exception. I share a small property with a small family of humans, as well as goats, ducks, chickens, and gardens. We have attempted, and continue to attempt, to develop a durable set of living arrangements with particular attention to securing potable water, healthy food, appropriate body temperature, and a decent human community. Living in agrarian anarchy in a human community at the edge of empire, I’ve taken responsibility for myself and my neighbors, human and otherwise.

This way of living is far superior to my former life. I drink pure water extracted from a local well with PV solar and hand pumps. I eat healthy, whole foods, much of which is grown on this property. I burn no fossil fuels during my daily life in a well-insulated, off-grid home. I know my neighbors, human and otherwise, and they know me.

Finally, very late in an unexamined life, I came to see the horrors of the way we live, and I let go. Please join me.
___________________

I’m sorry about that annoying “sociable” nonsense. It came with an update, and I cannot get rid of it. To make it go away temporarily, click the small triangle on the far left immediately above the word “Sociable.” You’ll need to do this every time the page loads, unfortunately.
___________________

This essay is scheduled to appear as a chapter in a book. The book will be published in Spanish, if the publisher wins the race against time.
___________________

In anticipation of my scheduled trip to western Michigan, I am featured in local print media:

Walking away from empire, Kristine Morris for Grand Traverse Insider, 31 January 2012
___________________

This essay is permalinked at Counter Currents, Island Breath, and Speaking Truth to Power.

Business for agriculture is roaring. Roughly 70 million tons of apples are produced every year, competing with the production of some of the largest tech products. Many companies are taking advantage of the growing sustainable energy industry, which adds pressure to local and small businesses. This unique graphic helps illustrate the comparison on how an apple stacks up against Apple.

Created by: MBA Online
______________________

With a passion for creative design and social media, Peter Kim is getting involved in the way information is presented, delivered, and received. Education, technology and the combination of both are subjects he follows closely. Follow Peter on Twitter.

1.
For most of my life, I’ve been a teacher of rhetoric, which means that I’ve taught writers how to take difficult or unpopular ideas and get them across to people who don’t want to think about them. Usually those people were my students, and the most difficult and unpopular idea I tried to get across to them was that they needed to learn rhetoric.

Many of them thought they already knew rhetoric. They’d gotten As in high school English classes by having strong but conventional opinions. They thought they came to college knowing what would get them another A on the two-page essays I assigned in composition classes.

So a lot of papers began, “You shouldn’t have twenty-nine cosmetic surgeries to turn yourself into a six-foot Barbie Doll because …” or “We shouldn’t have a draft because America is a free country and you’re not free if you have to go into the Army …” or “Women shouldn’t work once they have children because my mother quit her career once she had my brothers and me and she’s happy just being a Mom.”

I would scribble Ds or Fs on these papers, which made my office hours occasions for tears or anger. “What do you want me to say?” was the most common question, as if I was teaching catechism and all they had to do was memorize dogma. Others, more sophisticated, assumed that I was the kind of liberal academic that right-wing radio commentators railed against, and turned in perfectly written but completely dishonest papers that advocated transfers of wealth from rich to poor, North to South, former slave-owners to former slaves, and so on. More Ds and Fs.

For a high school student used to getting As, one F paper is a catastrophe. Two or more are identity-destroying events. In the case of a sincere effort by a bright high school student to manipulate a college teacher, an F threatens the foundations of the universe.

Six weeks into a semester, when I walked into the classroom and wrote, “How to Get an A in this Class” on the whiteboard, I had the survivors’ attention. Here’s the gist of what I wrote below that heading:

–Stop giving a shit about your grades.

–Any paragraph longer than four or five sentences will piss off your audience and they’ll go away. If they can’t go away because reading your writing is their job, they’ll give you a D or an F.

“Is there anyone who can’t understand any of this?” I would ask.

The next set of papers would be better. It’s amazing what people can come up with if you give them permission to look around themselves and to record what they see.

I tried to keep my students entertained. “Given the current state of the world,” I would say, “it’s likely that we’ll all die on the same day. The difference between us will be that I’ve seen the Doors and Led Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane in concert.”

2.
I recently threatened the foundations of my entire universe. I wrote a credo, a statement detailing why I write. It’s something I have asked my advanced writing students to do, but it’s a dangerous thing because when a lot of people sit down to discover the reasons why they want to be a writer, they can’t find any.

In spite of the fact that one of my books is a why-to-write book, I still got into credo trouble. Here are some troubling excerpts:

“I’ve had a crisis of faith about my teaching and writing career—fortunately I’m not in the middle of that career — and have come up hard against the questions I should have answered years ago: Why not just mess around with words and tell funny little stories to make people happy? Surely there’s another vampire novel that needs to be written — why not make pots of money with your God-given talent?

So I’m exploring the end of this world as I see it. I don’t know if anyone will read my writing in a hundred years, or if anyone will be able to read in a hundred years. I don’t even know if anyone will be alive in a hundred years, unless it’s bacteria hanging out in hydrothermal reservoirs a mile beneath the surface of the earth. But if bacteria can read, I’d like them to understand that in the last few decades of human existence, one of those humans looked around himself, observed carefully and thought about what he observed, and wrote down the results of that thinking — dark existential jokes, mostly, which I’m pretty sure deep-biosphere bacteria prefer above all other forms of humor. Other than the jokes, there’s a certain last will and testament quality to what I’m writing, not because I’m planning on dying anytime soon, but because there’s a lot to elegize these days.”

That’s part of what I wrote in an honest attempt to be honest with myself. Where I got in trouble was with the grief end of things. I ended by saying, “There’s plenty to write about in this world, especially if you can keep existentially funny and honestly grief-stricken about it.”

I think that if I had been in a writing class as an eighteen-year-old, and the professor had written Existentially Funny and Honestly Grief-Stricken on the board, and told me I had to adhere to that standard, I would have run out of the classroom there and then. I would have gone skiing instead.

3.
A full professorship is a guaranteed income for life, and a job you can define to your liking. It also includes the ability to wear tweed without looking like a character actor in a British TV series, the obsequious questions of local reporters when they need an interview about holiday gift books, the deep attention of first-year students determined to discover the wellsprings of your vanity — all these things were mine, and more. But I gave it up in return for ten years of health insurance for Julie and me and a new title: Writer-at-Large, which sounds good but mostly means that I’m out of the College’s hair. The number of complaining students in the academic dean’s office — outraged that their professor has just told them they’ll never see Jim Morrison in concert — has gone down since I left the campus.

Still, I retain some personal connections with the College, and one of them is a friendship with the ski-team coach, and he invited me to ski with the team as they trained at the Sun Valley Resort last week. Sun Valley is one of the oldest and most luxurious of American ski resorts. But its managers have lately become aware that their wealthy geriatric customers represent a high-mortality demographic, and they’re making an effort to provide their luxurious facilities — and this year, expensive artificial snow — to various college and high-school ski teams, in the hope that these young people will become future paying customers. I got to go along as the future paying customers’ unofficial assistant coach.

I wasn’t much of a coach. For the past twenty years I’ve been on loose-fitting backcountry ski equipment — the kind where you put skins on the bottom of your skis and hike to the top of the mountain before removing the skins and skiing down — and ski racers ski on rigid precision equipment that befits a sport where winners and losers are separated by hundredths of a second. The students were suspicious of my skis, boots, and bindings when they weren’t being suspicious of an old white-haired guy who showed up to help set up the course and replace the gates when they knocked them down.

When I got on the gondola to ride to the top of the mountain, service people in Sun Valley Company livery took my skis from me, put them in the external ski racks, and ushered me to my seat. At the top, they took a look at me, saw someone who looked a lot like one of their paying customers, took my skis from the rack, handed them to me, and asked if I needed help putting them on.

Somewhere in the middle of my second gondola ride, I realized that if the people who run the world spend much of their time at ski resorts, it’s going to be a long time before they realize there’s anything wrong with the world economy. They’ll be a couple of hundred feet off the ground in a gondola when the electricity goes out, and only eight hours later, when nobody has come to rescue them, will they realize that the only bubble left is the one they’re marooned in.

I trusted Western Civilization and its electricity enough to keep riding the gondola for a few days. When a high-speed lift takes you to the top of a mountain, and that mountain is covered with artificial snow groomed to machine tolerances, you get a lot of skiing in. You can, for brief moments, head downhill in wide fast turns, indulging yourself in cultural fictions, imagining yourself as a downhill racer in the Winter Olympics, at least until your old legs give out halfway down the mountain.

In the evenings, in a condo, eating with ski team, I was able to ask them things I was curious about: what they planned to do six months after they graduated and how they were paying for college. They were paying for college with loans, or their parents were. They didn’t know what they were going to be doing after college. They hadn’t thought about it. They said the question scared them.

Besides skiing, these student-athletes spent the week on the Olympic-size ice rinks, at the bowling alley, and in the giant heated pool adjacent to the Lodge. They slept in luxurious condominiums and watched TV, as befitted future paying customers, and I couldn’t help but imagine that in their secret hearts, each of those young people did know what they were doing after college. They saw themselves in twenty or thirty years, as honored and aging champions with ski-racer children just like themselves. Having aged well, they would be skiing through long sunny days, competing in masters’ races, drinking fine wines and eating in high-end restaurants, and going back to great, cathedral-like homes and sleeping the sleep of the just before getting up and doing it all over again. Right now Sun Valley is full of people whose lives are proving such a dream is possible.

And yet, that’s not going to happen for these student-athletes. The lifestyle they aspire to has already outlived its safe-to-eat date, even if they somehow came up with the price of admission after paying off their college loans.

In the world they will graduate into, newspapers tap the phones of bereaved families. Financial services companies manipulate governments when they’re not running those governments. Even if they don’t believe in global warming, they can see that we’re destroying what’s left of a wild and beautiful world in our haste to turn it all into habitat for humanity. Seven billion of us are crowding the planet, and anyone with a pocket calculator can figure out that we haven’t got the room or the resources or the climate stability to do what we’ve been doing for yet another generation. That’s been true for several generations now.

What are you going to do after graduation? The question scares the shit out of me, and I’m sixty-one years old.

4.
As a professor of rhetoric, I necessarily became a student of narcissism, which for simplicity’s sake I define as not knowing where your boundaries end and the rest of the world begins.

Writing itself is a narcissistic attempt to expand your boundaries, a demand that people stop what they’re doing and pay attention to you, with a subtext that you know something they don’t and they need to know it. Done properly, you respect the humanity of your readers, giving them the kind of personhood normally reserved strictly for yourself. Psychologists will give you an A for this sort of thing, conferring upon it the title of Healthy Narcissism.

Healthy or not, most people are resistant to being told something that they need to know if it impinges on what they expect their life to be.

I told my students that there were too many people on the planet, but as far as I know, that didn’t cause anyone not to make babies. I told them that the planet’s atmosphere was a chaotic system, and when you change the composition of a chaotic system, the future loses any connection to the past, but that didn’t stop them from preparing for jobs in the oil industry. I told them that without a way to redistribute wealth, capital would accumulate in stagnant pools that would eventually destroy whole countries’ economic systems, but that didn’t keep them from going deeper into debt to pay for college and from signing up for thirty-year mortgages a year into their first job.

After being ignored on life-and-death matters, I began to look at good old Unhealthy Narcissism, which is more common than the healthy kind. It comes about when you don’t respect the separate existence of other people. Instead you see them as personal extensions. The self, however poverty-stricken and shabby it might be, becomes the world.

The eighteen-year-olds in my classes tended to see their classmates and their professors as character actors in the plays they were starring in. Professors had their costumes and their dialects and their quirky ways, but were not really part of the action unless we violated their assumptions about their world-selves by giving them bad grades.

Unhealthy narcissism becomes a learning disability. In its extreme form, it becomes indistinguishable from psychopathic character disorder, whose victims see other people only as victims. That in itself is bad enough, but the hopes and dreams my students expressed — the ones that they so happily subsumed other human beings into — were so shoddy, so tacky, so utterly predictable, that they reduced the world to a third-rate traveling vaudeville show’s stage set, one that no longer had any pretensions to suspending the disbelief of any but the most credulous of audiences.

Occasionally one of my students would wake to the artifice of the low-grade work of imagination they were starring in. When they spoke from that instant of consciousness, here’s what they would say: “I’ve spent my life studying so I can get good grades so I can get into a good college so I can get into a good grad school so I can get a good job and have a good career and have a good marriage and good kids and graduate to a good retirement community until I’m taken to a good nursing home to die in the midst of morphine hallucinations.”

“Only if your good college loans are paid off,” I would tell them.

5.
But most students never woke up, and they defended the stage sets of their dreams in the face of all contradictory evidence. That’s the trouble with narcissism: start seeing the world as an extension of yourself, and the world becomes fragile, friable, temporary, able to be wounded by your wounds, and extinguished by your physical or philosophical death.

6.
Bertrand Russell’s Philosophically Dead Rooster speaks:
“Every day my farmer comes with food and water. He’s a good guy, who has my best interests in mind. He cleans up my coop, makes sure I have a goodly supply of hens, protects me from the foxes I occasionally glimpse on the other side of the wire, and does all these things out of gratitude for my glorious crowing that serves to start his day.”

Bertrand Russell points out that one day the farmer comes to the coop with an axe, and that’s the day when the rooster needs a less narcissistic view of how the world works.

7.
A confession:

I was born in Sun Valley. My father was a hard-rock miner in a lead-silver mine fifteen miles away, and the Sun Valley Resort, then the property of Union Pacific Railroad, had the best hospital in the county. It helped that my mother worked as a nurse there.

When I was six, my father got a job driving a ski bus at the resort, and after school I would ride with him. I’d help him clean the bus at the end of his shift. On weekends, because I was an employee dependent, I would ski free.
My skis and ski poles and boots were second-hand, and I received no instruction, but by the time I was in high school I was an expert skier.

At age seventeen I was hired as a Sun Valley ski patrolman, and I began to take people with broken legs and torn knees and lacerated flesh down to ambulances and would ride with them in the ambulance to the hospital emergency room. I became used to treating trauma victims and talking with them, and saw that people in shock often believe that they’re seeing things clearly for the first time in their lives.

I became an even better skier. Ski reps gave me state-of-the-art equipment. I could dance through a field of moguls, touching down on every second or third one. I took some horrendous falls but was never seriously injured. Paying customers would cheer me on from the lifts, and I tended to ski under the lifts. I was part of the Sun Valley experience, an example of what the paying customers could do if they only had the time.

When I was twenty-two, fresh out of college, I became the mountain manager for Sun Valley’s bunny hill and entered into Sun Valley Company’s executive training program.

I attended management meetings with the president and vice-presidents of the company, and was introduced to the operative metaphor of all ski managers, which was that operating a ski mountain was a form of animal husbandry. At night, the fields would be groomed for a new crop of skiers. Equipment had to be maintained, fresh feed had to be brought to the mountain restaurants, injured livestock had to be carted away, stock driveways had to be maintained, and predators — people sneaking onto the lifts without tickets or skiing too fast — had to be eliminated.

It was not the first time I had heard people referred to as unthinking grazers — some of the poorer skiers were even referred to as vegetables — but I was shocked by this callousness in what was supposed to be the hospitality business. However, the metaphor worked in that it allowed for the efficient and impersonal pushing of large numbers of people through an industrial process, one that depended on them sliding down steep slopes with boards clamped to their feet and calling it play.

It was play for me, as was much of my life off the slopes. There are worse things than to be an athletic twenty-two year old with a well-paying job at a world-class ski resort during the year the United States pumped more oil than anytime before or since. Unlimited wealth was in the air. Old people gave me money just to ski with them on my days off. The great-grandchildren of the financiers in American History books became my après-ski companions, and they didn’t seem to resent either my skiing ability or my relative poverty.

But unconscious narcissism wears thin, no matter how happy it is in the moment. Before long, I began to see my life as a tedious slideshow of other people’s vacations. At the end of that season, I quit my job as mountain manager, backed out of the executive training program, and asked for my old job back as a ski patrolman.

But when I got back in the patrol shack, the people I worked with treated me with contempt. I had rejected a step up in the system, and they saw me as a slacker, or crazy, or a subversive — all three, really. I lasted another season and then found a job as a teacher, where the system was more complicated, the steps up more numerous, and the work a little less like animal husbandry.

But not that much less. It has not escaped my notice that I tend to quit jobs when I start glimpsing the shimmering outlines of the dehumanizing bioindustrial structure that I’ve been succeeding in. Just as I learn the system and gain the ability to suck more people into it, I chicken out, in Bertrand Russell’s terms. In the terms of the people still in the system, I go insane and fly the coop.

8.
I live in a country whose highest court has given corporations the kind of personhood people normally reserve for themselves. It’s the least narcissistic thing our high jurists have ever done, and yet they’ve done it from within the bubble of their own narcissism. Go figure.

But our Supreme Court is right. Corporations are persons. They want to feed, grow, live, and be entertained. Occasionally they want to die. More occasionally they go criminally insane. Like most people, they operate according to their reptile brains, which is to say that most of their actions reflect an unhealthy, other-destroying compulsion that they’re not even aware of.

Corporations inevitably treat other organisms — even their CEOs — as livestock or feedstock. Corporations treat the world as uncleared acreage to be turned into a giant farm, and render their employees into genetically-modified organisms.

A year ago, in Hanoi, visiting the Palace of Literature, I ran into another American tourist, one working for Monsanto in Beijing. He told me that the project he was working on was simple. Monsanto had taken on the job of producing as much food in the next fifty years as all of humankind has produced in the last seven thousand. “If we don’t,” he said, “people will starve.” He sounded happy and proud and a little frightened. I had the impression that he was channeling another entity, and that he wasn’t quite big enough for the job.

One of my more dismal realizations is that corporations have figured out that they need to be people, but they have no need for humans to be people.

9.
Since corporations are so much bigger than humans, it’s possible to feed off their excretions, like a little sweat-bee, snug and warm in an adipose fold, going along for a ride that would never be possible if you had to proceed under your own power.

Every summer a symphony orchestra assembles in Sun Valley, and plays at a huge copper-roofed travertine amphitheater built expressly for its performances. Sun Valley Symphony musicians are drawn from the municipal symphonies all over the planet. This summer Julie and I drove down to hear them perform Tchaikovsky’s speedy Opus 35 in D major.

Vadim Gluzman, one of the world’s best violinists, did the honors, playing the 1690 Stradivarius that had belonged to Tchaikovsky’s mentor. It was the instrument the work had been written for.

We were on the lawn above the amphitheater with a picnic and a bottle of good red wine, but during the last two movements I walked to the top row of seats, knelt down, and watched Gluzman through binoculars.

I gave up on any ambitions to play the violin. I knew that David Oistrakh’s performance of the concerto in Stalingrad in 1942 was supposed to have turned the tide of the Second World War, but realized that the grim circumstances forever denied Oistrakh and his audience the warmth and humanity and forgiveness that Gluzman brought to the work.

Cultural critics have suggested that Tchaikovsky’s concerto is a high point of Western Civilization. If so, Gluzman’s performance kicked Western Civilization to a new peak, at least for twenty minutes in North America in the early part of the 21st century.

It was a warm and sunny afternoon, and as happy and awed people came streaming out of the amphitheater, Julie and I stayed in our lawn chairs. We were in no hurry to leave. Sun Valley policemen were directing concert traffic. It would take a half-hour to clear, and we still had some chocolate left.

I began to think how odd it was that I had been born here, in 1950, and was still here. I always had thought I’d make it further in life.

Then I thought to myself that there were worse places to end up than a geographically gated community, listening to an orchestra put together from the world’s best musicians. There were worse times to have spent a life than 1950-2012, and worse places to have spent it than under the high clear skies of central Idaho.

Then I started thinking other odd things. For one, I noticed that many of the couples attending the concert consisted of well-preserved and purposeful women leading confused old men to and from their seats. It’s what happens when you pair beautiful young women with older men, and then add two or three decades. My mind jumped ahead to hanging up my skis, the bypass operation, and the moment when the buttons on the cell phone become too many and too complicated.

My mind went further, into the amphitheater. Travertine blocks affect me like a drug. Even small doses make me think of the Romantic follies built on English estates in the 19th century.

But I was gazing into a travertine overdose. Vivid hallucination replaced my senses. I saw, in the Pavilion’s skeletal steel superstructure, a time when thieves had stripped the roof of its copper. The dressing rooms on either side of the stage had been turned into holding pens for the unwilling stars of blood rituals.

I realized it was a facility designed for a time when civilization will be dust.

I suddenly wanted the Sun Valley Symphony to arrange a midnight performance of Carmina Burana, with the Pavilion lit by flickering, smoking torches, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir prescribed high-dose amphetamines for the occasion, and human sacrifices during the finale to ensure that biodiesel will be cheap and plentiful during the coming potato harvest.

The amphitheater was empty. Julie got a purposeful look on her face and said it was time to go, and it took a moment to understand that she wasn’t talking about my earthly existence. I took our wine bottle to the recycling bin, and we walked back to our old car, sitting by itself in the parking lot.

10.
How do you get through to people who don’t want to hear what you have to say? You don’t, mostly. Our lives don’t prepare us to understand the experience of others, and to others, our acute consciousness of the world makes us look like babbling shock victims.

People married for decades look at each other, and if one of them wakes up, they each gaze into the eyes of a stranger. Hopes and dreams, in retrospect, turn out to be about something else entirely. Only with great effort and care can we attain the language to tell our stories to other people, and even then they might not like what we tell them.

In an infinite universe, we each occupy but a point. It’s not much, but it’s our point, and we possess it entirely, and it us. We’re stuck in it, and it traps us in the center of all we can experience, no matter how fast and how far we flee.

What is your energy descent plan?

To develop personal, family and community energy descent plans, we need to have an idea of the overall context. The overall context is very hard to sort out, because there is no continuous curve to extrapolate. We have to look to what has been done in history, and what that history might imply in our currently developing situation, but also what the limits to our conjecture may be. Right now, global food supply is largely sustained through oil-powered “green revolution” technology. In the US, we spend 9 calories of petrochemical energy per food calorie which we consume. In Bangladesh, about 1/2 calorie of human and animal energy goes into producing each calorie of food energy consumed. The petro-energy has meant that we get by with very little human and animal energy. In our equation, it is treated as negligible. A lot of the energy devoted to the calories we eat comes from our cars, refrigerators and cooking devices. Also, we are wasteful of this energetically expensive food. If you throw out half of what you cook, after leaving it sitting in the fridge, you doubly worsen your calorific efficiency. There is at least some low-hanging fruit.

Most people in the world, including Europeans and Japanese, eat much more locally than Americans do, and eat much less industrially processed, preserved “food”. Currently, we have options about what to eat. In “wartime” we won’t. The options we choose today will be more established and available in “wartime”, as a result. We can shape the future by what we choose now. However, that will be only a small factor in the process. It will shape us more than it will our outside-world.

Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed, looks at historical examples of societies that thrived and grew by exploiting local resources, failed to adapt any other survival strategies, exhausted the essential resources, and underwent catastrophic collapse.

It appears that we humans are not able to turn away from a working strategy, as long as it is working in the short term. Therefore, we keep finding ourselves in positions of having to scramble in very bad situations. War seems to be one of our main adaptive mechanisms in these times. War can be on a small scale, or a large scale. What group is so small as to be immune from dividing and fighting? Research shows that no group over 200 humans can really resist the tendency to splinter, without outside supports/structures and lots of effort. It is easier with less than 100. It has to do with how many meaningful personal relationships one human can have. At some point, you choose between a meaningful relationship, and something happening to a relative stranger, whether “right” or “wrong.”

By the 20th century, Europe had seen something like 2000 years of organized warfare, had culturally acclimatized to it, and was also sick of it, but was still governed by ruling elites, whether in monarchy, banking, industry or elected governments. Local communities had various self-sufficiency and protective traditions, involving local food and trading. People really could “live without money” in those settings. That is now foreign to us, and has largely been replaced by the State social-welfare apparatus in Europe (sort of like making a trade with a 2-year-old, when you want to take away the pacifier). Still, it exists more in Europe than in the US, which is a completely monetized economy, and has made the next step, to the use of electronic, centrally processed instruments, such as credit cards. There is no local defense in the use of credit cards. This electronic money is ideal for banking and government elites. Cash, of any sort, is much better for small groups, and barter, or trading favors is the traditional human defense from conquering armies and despots. It is just too much bother to send armies in to take every little thing, unless you must face a choice between the army starving and the farmers starving.

If we look at Asia, and specifically China, there were also thousands of years of social adaptions to warlords and kings, and these were deeply affected by WW-2 and the sweep of “communism” across China and Cambodia. This destroyed much of the local culture wherever it went. Ancient patterns in small farming communities have been deeply changed. There were profound efforts at every level to break down the old system into something which could be centrally commanded. Youth brigades were used to break down the ancient, adaptive patterns.

Radio and telephone, and eventually the internet, allowed instant communication across vast distance. Initially, these technologies served the elite, but there is now a moment where the information flows laterally, from anyone and to anyone else, without hierarchical control. We have a new tool, and perhaps only for a short while, to devise our coping strategies for the next wartime. When the wars begin, we will likely lose our connections to each other, except the local ones.

The next wartime will come as a species-specific adaptive strategy to the sudden drastic and comprehensive change. Economic changes are the usual prelude to wars.

Our species has exceeded the sustainable carrying capacity of this planet. You may disagree. At least it is close, and estimates are that human population will peak around 2050, based on current trends. Based on the Kissinger Report, from 1974, when we first felt the bite of oil shortage, there is a lot of focus among the elites on the tractability of a social group. A social group is less tractable, when it has a rapidly growing population, with lots of young people, and not enough resources to provide good prospects for them to advance within the system. Kissinger’s report pointed out that countries like this would be hard to get necessary mineral resources (oil) out of. He proposed making contraception widely available, and socially acceptable, for reasons that would serve the interests of families and communities, and would be propounded by local rulers, with the US and other powers playing an invisible hand. This invisible hand has now been played for about 40 years, and we can all look around and see where there is population growth vs population slowing, stability or decrease.

The elites are going to like the stable areas and be untrusting of the areas where there is rapid population growth and instability of large, young, hungry populations. The elites are not all on the same page, by any means. What they see as desirable in populations under their control, and under the control of other elites, will be similar, but there are obvious clashes when choosing which tractable groups should get the limited resources. The intractable groups just get treated very badly, all around.

We can see that a lot of control mechanisms are in play in the oil places of the Middle East. There are wars and repressive dictators, plus lots of intrigues, support for rivals, support for destabilization in general. Even before the Kissinger Report there has been another policy for the “great powers” to manage the flow of natural resources out of a poor region: “Crisis Management,” as described in Asaf Siniver’s book, Nixon, Kissinger, and U.S. Foreign Policy Making.

Siniver’s book details the development of foreign policy under Nixon and Kissinger, focusing on tools of management within the context of crisis. Such crises were certainly created by the US in Chile, with backing for all the economic attacks and coup that led to the overthrow of Salvador Allende, and the bloodbath under Pinochet. The use of drug receipts from Golden Triangle opium and heroin trade, to fund the “secret wars” in Laos and Cambodia, were also products of the Nixon/Kissinger “Crisis Management” approach.

Since then, the creation of crisis has been an integral part of US Foreign Policy, always hidden, but always suspected. (With so much institutional experience, it would be surprising if this did not arise on the home front, wouldn’t it? 9/11? Weaponized anthrax? Letting New Orleans go feral after Katrina, just to see what happened?)

We see crisis and natural resources coinciding in Africa a lot. Libya is a recent example, but also Sudan/Darfur, which has oil and uranium desired by China and the US. Basically, a region is thrown into local civil war, and both sides are pressed into negotiating for outside support, just to survive. The outside-support demands access to natural resources at a low price, and the two factions compete for the support. Sometimes the two sides seek support from rivals, such as the US and China, as is the case in Sudan/Darfur. As long as there is local crisis, the terms for extraction of resources are less important to the local people, or local warlords, than their survival, and ultimate victory.

To sum up our current situation:

We have all the technological benefits of the past 250 years of steam- and oil-powered industrial society, science and vast population expansion.

We have developed an economic system, predicated on growth, which collapses without growth.
The growth has stopped, due to oil production being stagnant since 2005.

The economic system has been urged along with increasingly big promises of future profit, which are now becoming unsupportable, even in theory.

Every reset of an economic system, or social order, up until now, has involved violent conflict as an essential part of the change.

15,000,000 people died in WW1, 66,000,000 people died in WW2. Those were days of more adequate resources, smaller populations, more localized in scope, and with lesser technology for mass killing.

The ruling elite everywhere want adequate resources to drive their power bases, hard-working and obedient populations to command, and for the losses to be borne by their enemies, foreign and domestic. These goals dictate some large groups lose out, but not that any large groups must actually succeed.

The risk of all groups losing out is a huge and seriously likely threat, which must somewhat moderate the warlike behavior of elites initially. We have seen “manageable” wars in regions where there is oil, and/or strategic interest. (This is from the viewpoint of the superpowers, not the local dead people.)

Global capitalism and central banking had their own agendas, which guided and partly controlled WW1 and WW2. The confinement of these wars, and the marshaling of forces against relative non-participants and fall-guys allowed for global banking to thrive, while real economies were subsumed, forced out, or just looted.

The cooperation within global banking rose to a peak in the past decade, but is now strained by the failure of the inherent requisites of the exponentially-growing monetary system. Banking could be in stable growth, with a bright future in every other war, but not now. Banking is weak at every level, needing outside support from politicians, and changes of all the rules. It cannot be stable until it has a system which it can exploit through stagnation and collapse. Gold Standard looks like that system. Time is short. Choices are limited. Trust is evaporating. Got any other ideas?

Don’t think a gold system will be safer for ordinary people, like us. In the “Long Depression” of the late 1800s there was vast looting by bankers, much harsher than in the inflationary regime we have grown up with. Therefore, any massive wars proceeding before change of the global monetary regime will tend to take bankers as casualties. That would be a fundamental systemic change. Banking/finance as a utility, rather than as an extractive mechanism, enriching elites at the expense of the “real economy” would bring a big increase in total system efficiency. It would also displace a very large class of wealthy and powerful parasites, who got that way by being clever, and know how to fight for position. This change is being delayed. Roosevelt wanted finance as a utility, and got some moves in that direction. Those have all been undone in the past 3 decades.

So, on the one hand, we have the biggest financial collapse and the biggest resource collapse ever, and on a truly global scale. On the other hand we have massive information and historical perspective, pointing to the dangers of extinction, and death for all participants, and smart guys to point this all out. The smart guys are not all just plotting sides this time, but looking at the real risk of total GAME OVER for all participants. Where does that leave us when choosing paths, and changing paths, and seeing changes in types of dangers coming up next?

1) Financial threats are here now and will continue for the foreseeable future

Loss of income is big. Consider your career. Are there other things you can start doing on the side? We need to take steps to develop local non-monetary systems to meet needs. This is hard in an urban setting. Food must be grown. We can take initial steps to get more intimate with local food, and discover what we can and can’t do in this regard. Loss of buying power of money, loss of electronic money, theft by big and small thieves are all other issues.

Redefinition of money is both a threat and an opportunity. It has to come. Don’t advertise your position. Hedge your bets. Hedge in non-monetary assets as much as possible. They are harder to take.

Think about how to position yourself and your community in a pared-back economy, more like the 1950s. Feed stores are necessary, Nieman Marcus is not. Are you necessary? Are you contributing through an organization which can survive? what shocks can it survive? What shocks will kill it? What alternatives do you have?

2) Security threats come from loss of support, and from the desperate actions of those who have lost their own supports and through the actions of tyrants, promising to protect you from the uncontrolled desperados, or to protect the gated communities from YOU

In the first case, look to support and diversify your own production, especially into areas that require less “support from above” and more lateral supports.

In the second case, look to your location and community. How will your neighborhood fare if many lose employment and electricity and gasoline? Can you bolster it? Should you relocate? Is there a community, of which you are a more dedicated member, which you can find a way to link with in more ways? Spiritual communities may have deeper bonds than many.

In the third case, we should all shy away from any person or organization, which is oppressive to “others” as a way to “protect” us. It ain’t believable. It always hurts everybody. Back off. Don’t confront. See it coming and shy away ASAP.

3) War and the effects of wartime are things we have been sheltered from, but we still hold responsibility, to the degree that we fail to resist

Karma comes in when we benefit from the killing, robbing and enslavement of others. Our own ability to judge where the threats of war are coming from, and how we should best resist or flee, will be clouded, to the degree that we have let war proceed for our own selfish interests in the past. We all share the guilt of this dynamic to varying degrees, and we should examine it closely, in order to be as free as possible from distortions within our own minds.

It looks like BIG WAR is coming sometime after the collapse gets underway. It has always come before. It is uncertain. What year would you have gotten out of Germany, between the wars? Where would you have gone (if you could)? Even knowing all that you know, it seems almost impossible to sort out.

In closing, I need to say that we think of ourselves individually, but that is not how we survive. We survive in groups, cooperative groups. There is a cult of the individual, and many mythical “great men” in history, used as examples. They were only great based upon their particular positions within certain societies, at certain times, and could have just flopped in another place and time. Please be a good, supportive, contributing, honest and insightful member of your social groups. All your friends and relatives need your help.
_________________

John Day, MD is a middle-aged white male doctor living in Austin, Texas, who grew up on military bases during the Vietnam War, in a Marine Corps family. Dad retired and the family moved to a cattle ranch in Bandera, Texas for a couple of years, with Mom’s parents (John had to raise a very sad calf for Ag class), then to Japan, where Dad liked how people were so polite to him. High school in Japan in the 1970s was a trip. Working in a hospital kitchen, while at UT Austin for college, gradually morphed into a career in medicine, mostly public health work. This has included Navajo Reservation, rural Texas “country doc”, State psychiatric hospitals, community clinics, Family Medicine, Residency faculty, an OB/GYN Fellowship, and 3 stints working in rural Hawaii for a few months at a time.

John and Jenny got married when he was in med school, went trekking around Annapurna a few years later, and swore to take this kids around the world for a year, when they had kids. They had Holly, Steve, Jim and Amber in 4 years. When they became teenagers, the family sold the house to bike tour and backpack through Europe, Asia and Oceana in 2005-2006. The kids are all in college or med school and Steve survived the appendicitis he got in Cambodia. The surgery in Thailand went really well, all things considered. Jim is a bike mechanic, Holly has a 3rd degree black belt in Kung fu, and Amber bike-delivers sandwiches. All the kids are fine. Don’t ask questions.

John drinks Japanese green tea, Hawaiian coffee, and rides his fixed-gear bicycle to work. He sits and meditates with Buddhists from the Lubbock area on Sundays, sometimes listening to a visiting Tibetan Lama. He is a vegetarian, because animals don’t really want him to eat them, and he has other choices. He still cops out and eats eggs and cheese, but feels energetically darkened by the whole sordid process. He is confused, deeply confused, and definitely not anybody who you should take advice from. He has long hair, thinning around the crown, tied back, out of the way.

I appreciate Gonzo’s anthropocentric perspective on humanity, but he was late to the party of loneliness. Early American conservationist and philosopher Aldo Leopold pointed out in his final book (published in 1949, after Leopold’s untimely death), “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”

A world of wounds because an ecologist can see what we’re doing to the living planet. Alone because so few people give a damn. Awakening to life means awakening to all parts of life, including the realization and acceptance of our own mortality. But dying pales in comparison to the insults we are visiting on Earth.

Hovering in full view from my window is one minor example of the world’s wounds. It’s the story of how the (North American) West was lost. It begins when silver and gold are discovered in the area, at which point the mining company buys all the nearby water rights and the associated land (considerable water is needed to extract ore from rock). As with all states in the western U.S., the state constitution declares that water must be used in an agriculturally productive capacity. So the mining company, interested only in getting the water to the mine, leases the land to a cattle company. Thus is the local river emptied into two irrigation ditches to grow feed for livestock. The water not consumed by pasture (and then cows) is captured a few miles downstream in an ugly reservoir designed specifically for the purpose. The the water is then pumped a couple thousand feet uphill and a few tens of miles horizontally, across a major mountain range to the site of the ore. In summary, the single most destructive force in the history of the West (livestock) is subsidized by a disinterested citizenry and the entirety of nature in the name of financial profit for the second-most destructive force in the history of the West (mining). This arrangement is but a minor example of the system known as civilization, but it reveals the “gold mine” of two industries, cattle and mining: the owners get the gold and the rest of us get the shaft. With these industries, as with civilization, the goal is to transfer financial wealth from the poor to the wealthy. Destroying every aspect of the living planet is merely collateral damage, as there’s a lot of money in planetary destruction. By the way, the specific strategy in this local area is working as brilliantly as the general approach of civilization. We’ve never visited so much horror on the living planet, and we’ve never cared less about it.

If I seem morose, it’s because I’m growing tired of my tireless crusade. I suspect regular readers are, too. As much as I’ve tried to infuse humor and optimism into my writing, the news is no longer so damned funny or optimistic.

Although I’ve rarely looked to others for my own happiness, I’ve equally rarely looked to others for consolation or support. But it’s time for me to step away and trust others to take on the impossible tasks we face. I’m inviting others to take up the torch as I assume a role that is more witness than warrior.

I’m not dead yet, but I need to breathe. I’ve been trying to be everything possible to everybody, and it’s not working. Not for me, not for the people I know, and certainly not for the living planet. My optimism about our ability to save the living planet and thus habitat for humans on Earth is waning, and no wonder. Consider this article, which echoes my thoughts and writings from the last decade: “Abrupt climate change will feel like a comet impacting earth. We’re going to discover a different planet. Another earth. One we won’t like anymore. One not worth living on.” And, as usual, climate-change models underestimate the damage we’re doing. Or consider this list of the doom we brought to Earth in the last year alone, which illustrates how profoundly screwed we are and, simultaneously, how little the citizens of this country care what we’ve done and what we’re doing.

I invite others to step forward, particularly from generations other than mine. My generation has put our entire species behind the biggest 8-Ball in history. Even if future generations — few though they may be — fail catastrophically, they’ll still do a better job than we did. How could they not? After all, my generation has failed, and it continues to fail to a degree not previously dreamed possible in planetary history. We fucked the future without offering so much as a kiss.

I’ll continue to post now and then, notably when I’m particularly irritated or ecstatic, or when I’m scheduled to deliver a presentation. I’ll continue to speak to anybody who’ll listen and a lot of people who won’t, as long as a venue is available. And I’ll gladly entertain guest essays, especially from people younger or more hopeful than me. My days of writing frequently for this space are nearing an end, in part because I’ve little left to say on the central issues we face. What I have left to say comes from my heart, not my data-addled brain, as can be detected in my recent writing. I’ll still contribute a data-driven monthly column for Transition Voice (this month’s piece is here).

I’ve explained the moral imperative behind terminating the industrial economy through the lenses of human-population overshoot, climate chaos, environmental destruction, and collapse of the industrial economy. I’ve repeatedly explained that it’s possible and even desirable to live outside the absurdity of the main stream. I’ve demonstrated how to do so, with cooperation as a key ingredient. I’ve opened this space to myriad voices, including those with which I don’t agree. In short, my work here is nearing its end.

I’ve not decided where I’ll be in the coming weeks and months. But I’ve got books to read and hikes to take. I’ve got beautiful places to go and beautiful people to see, before the places are destroyed and the people are gone. And I’ve got a lot of mourning yet to do.

I don’t know where I’ll be when collapse is complete, and I don’t much care, because I’m afraid to move and I’m afraid to stay. Working with others, I’ve helped build an impressively durable set of living arrangements at the mud hut. We have six sources of water, we grow a huge amount of the food we eat, the house is off-grid and astonishing, and the human community is remarkable. So, like the civilized, industrialized human being I am, I’m afraid of change, fearful to cash in my chips. But I’m afraid to stay, too. The thought of continuing to stare, alone, at the world of wounds, causes the terror to rise in me. Afraid to let go of nature’s bounty, as if it’s mine to hold. Afraid what I’m missing by holding onto comfort.

Catch-22, anybody?

_______________

If you want to keep up with the news that escapes the mainstream media, I encourage a daily visit to Counter Currents, Rice Farmer, End of Empire News, Zero Hedge, and Business Insider (no, really). Each of these websites gives too little space to the living planet, and the latter two focus on finances to the virtual exclusion of relevant issues beyond collapse of the industrial economy. In other words, they reflect this insane culture to only a slightly less degree than more mainstream websites.
_____________

This essay is permalinked at Island Breath.

Since the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City and around the US and the globe, there has been a constancy of criticism coming from the entrenched establishment and its would-be supporters. It’s easy enough to ignore the banality and mindlessness of the critiques coming from this camp—critiques aimed at the supposèd lack of direction amongst Occupiers, or their supposed lack of employment, or their supposed lack of hygiene.

What is frustrating is the sideline coaching from non-participants who think themselves far too clever to get involved, but who nonetheless feel they know the exact direction and focus that the movement must take. It surprises me that Occupy Wall Street’s original impetus somehow slides over, under, and around the attention of those who proclaim to know what would be best for it. It surprises me more when Occupy participants miss the obvious reality of what I believe their movement is, so I will say it plainly here: Occupy Wall Street and its sister protests around the world are a cultural resistance.

It is forgivable to observe the name “Occupy Wall Street,” to see that the original protesters planted themselves as close to the heart of the financial death cult as the enforcement arm of the state would allow, and to arrive at the conclusion that all Occupy efforts are a reaction to monetary malfeasance, both public and private. However, it is clear with even a cursory study of the class demographics and ideological spectrum present that Occupy Movement groups are resisting a broader cultural meme—of which the recent fiduciary debauchery on Wall Street and in Washington is but one outgrowth.

Occupy protests have targeted everything from Goldman Sachs and Bank of America’s recent abundance of criminality, to homelessness, the degradation of the environment, the corporate influence in politics, the toxicity of the food supply, foreign wars, domestic repression, foreclosures, Wal-Mart, big Pharma, etc, ad nauseam. This plethora of targets, this seemingly endless hit list, is not as the critics smugly proclaim: a lack of focus or meandering of thought. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of the greater cultural malaise.

The challenge of focus for Occupy protests is not necessarily one of targets or tactics. Though strategic maneuvering of their members to the pinch points and bottle necks of the dominant culture is a conversation of constant necessity, more pressing is the discovery of the poisonous heart of the dominant culture. What is the common thread which grafts together the banks, the oil companies, the degradation of the planet’s ecosystems, the drugging of children, the indefinite detention of “terror suspects,” and the imprisonment of non-violent drug possessors?

To me, it seems clear that the dominant culture is a culture of domination. The dominant culture, the culture of industrial civilization — our culture — is a culture that rests on a foundation of violence, exploitation, slavery, and brutality. In the privileged West, it is harder to see this than in, say, the Niger Delta, the Brazilian rain forests, or in the sweatshops of Asia. To be sure, the barbarity of our culture is present domestically, but as most modern, “civilized” people have lost connectivity with the natural world, they likely don’t see their city, suburb, or local shopping mall as an exploitation of the land. Further, they take little notice of the flowers, the salamanders, the moths, or any of the over two hundred species which go extinct every day on Earth, including those who forever exit their own communities. Somehow, the exported violence of the tar sands mining operations in Alberta Canada, the Pacific or Atlantic garbage “islands,” or the petroleum wastes of Azerbaijan or newly liberated Iraq remain invisible to those who benefit from these graveyards the most.

Perhaps you don’t see the congruity between environmental destruction and the revolving door that exists between government and finance. Perhaps you don’t see ours as a culture of domination, of violence, of exploitation. Let’s look at it another way.

This culture is one in which it is not only acceptable, but celebrated, to destroy life for profit. Indeed, the only way to profit, the only way to generate material “wealth,” is by killing. A tree doesn’t become lumber unless you cut it down. Cows don’t become McBurger filling until they have been executed (and of course, tortured). Even humans don’t become laborers until they have been enclosed into a capitalist marketplace, off of and separate from the land, where they must choose between labor and starvation.

Thus there is a price tag hung around the neck of every living thing. Since the only laudable goal according to cultural dogma is the accumulation of excess capital, it is axiomatic that this culture will cut down more trees every year, drag more and bigger nets across the ocean floor every year, lay more concrete every year, burn more petroleum every year, in a never ending quest to convert the living planet into the abstract object of our insane festishizations: money.

Though it may be a bit heavy for some, it must be stated; capitalism is reaching its endgame. The growth requirement which capitalism has built into itself is now colliding headlong with the limits of the natural world, which provides all of the raw stock required by industry. Like an organism undergoing ketosis, the system is beginning to devour itself for sustenance. Governments create imaginary capital to patch over privately created black holes of debt, while financial institutions feast on the accumulated “wealth” of the poorer strata of western society by mechanisms like foreclosure, stagnant wages, increasing tuition, increasing interest payments, layoffs, and every other conceivable and now commonplace “austerity measure.”

It is this amalgam of symptoms of collapse that the people of the “first” world are now experiencing. Of course, these first-worlders have lived on the backs of exploited peoples, animals, and land bases for generations, all too happy to consume to their heart’s content in a drunken orgy of self-righteous hedonism. (In their defense, the masters of capital did scar these people at birth with the brand of consumption, bombarding them day and night with self defeating advertisements and a ceaseless campaign of pro-authoritarian, anti-life propaganda.)

This monstrous architecture has not only built into an impossible growth requirement, but also a series of premises concerning the validity of hierarchy. This is a culture of domination. Our culture regularly promotes and lauds the violence committed by armies and police against civilians. It regularly promotes and lauds violence committed by men against women and children. It regularly promotes and lauds the violence committed by humans against animals, against plants, against water, soil, and air. This culture reviles any violence in the reverse direction. Violence may not flow up the hierarchy without being met by immense over-pressures of force. Those at the top and their mercenary defenders will not allow their status to be questioned, let alone challenged. Hence, we witness the unfounded violence so far committed against Occupy protesters, despite their near uniform docile behavior.

Now that the maw of imperial capitalism is fixing itself upon the white people of the first world, now that a future of more luxury and entitlement is not a guarantee, there is a revelation to the true nature of the culture appearing to those willing to see it. The chant “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” rings of this dawning truth.

The system isn’t here for you—you are here for it. You are to turn your cog, move your little piece of the machine, keep it marching, keep it killing, and the moment you become a net drain on the architecture of this society, you find your place in the cast iron furnace next to the felled redwood, the poisoned aquifer, and the Bangladeshi slave. You will be chewed up and spit out like the expendable component that you are. It’s no longer just the exotic foreigners in some far away land who are getting in the way of profit, now it is you. Now it’s your family, your co-workers, your town that stands between a corporation and black ink on the bottom line.

This is the intellectual hurdle before the Occupy Movement. Do they dare shine a light on the built-in flaws of capitalism? Do they dare indict long held “self evident truths,” and stand united behind the idea that another world truly is possible? Themselves organized in an egalitarian, horizontal fashion, making decisions by consensus and demanding respect for all participants—do Occupy Movements dare recognize their anarchism, and move forward with stolid conviction that it is not merely a handful of nasty players they are fighting, not merely a corrupt electoral process, but toxic imaginings of power and right in the minds of the masters, and indeed, in the minds of all men born into the belly of this twisted device?

At the moment, many Occupy groups and members will hold up their hands and soften their voices to meekly proclaim, “Now, I’m not against capitalism or rich people,” instead hiding behind a desire for “financial fairness.” The problem is that one cannot, with full education on the topic, simultaneously believe in capitalism and financial fairness. Volumes on this issue have been written by men smarter and more articulate than myself, so I will spare the reader an extrapolation on this topic, hopefully sufficing to say that the logic of capitalism dictates that were one man capable of accumulating the capital to do so, he could buy all of the land in the world. Any logic that leads to that conclusion is not logic at all, and must be abandoned by all sane people.

If the Occupy Movement, fearful of public opinion, fearful of poll numbers and the manufactured and implanted concerns of fence-sitters, decides not to move forward and proudly adopt that theirs is truly a rejection of the dominant culture, it will stagnate. As this culture has made a mess of all of its participants psychologically and emotionally, it is folly to fear the misguided notions of non-participating members of the culture, especially at such an early stage of our collective activism.

On the other hand, if the Occupy Movement recognizes its true heart, embraces its foundational disdain for the culture at large, and follows through with whatever manifests from that heartbreak and that need, it has a chance to do something incredible: to inspire. To inspire true revolt in the hearts of all people. To inspire an outpouring of collective sympathy, a great sigh from a worldwide population subjugated for lifetimes upon lifetimes. The Occupy Protest Movement and all of its congruent revolutions around the world have in their hands, if they have the courage to use it, the ability to inspire one last flare up of human fire, human beauty, and human love amidst the hastening emotional sterility of the world. It is from these sentiments, from this rage and awe burning in our guts that freedom, peace, and communion are born.

Yet at this moment, a brave new world dawns. The empires of the world are increasing the scale of their violence as they scrape and claw for dominion of the remaining global hydrocarbon reserves, and capitalist institutions, including nations themselves, cannibalize one and other for survival. A shadow of tyranny and fascism is creeping forth, extinguishing the last remnants of freedom people have, and in this dark hour, I implore the Occupy protesters, of which I am a dedicated one: bring light, in what is otherwise a truly blackened future without us.
___________

John Duffy is an artist, activist, and voice of the Grow Food, Raise Hell podcast. He currently resides in Austin, Texas.

As regular readers know by now, I’m a lifelong educator. In fact, the most common insult hurled my way by anonymous online commentators is “lifelong academic.”

Ouch. That hurts.

In the hallowed halls, ego is everything. Indeed, it’s difficult for me to imagine a profession that selects, to a greater extent than academia, for a huge ego. Shepherding a single refereed journal article through the process of publication builds more callus tissue than swinging a pick and shovel for two years. Multiply by dozens of articles, hundreds of public presentations, and a handful of books, and you can begin to understand why the average academic has an ego slightly larger than hell and half of Asia.

Thirty months into a new life devoid of regular interaction with inmates and honors students, I’m having the sort of identity crisis described by Dmitry Orlov in his excellent book, Reinventing Collapse. According to Orlov, middle-aged men — specifically those aged 45 to 55, nicely bracketing the age I departed the ivory tower (49) and my current age (51) — experienced the highest rate of mortality as the Soviet Union collapsed. The two most common causes: suicide and suicide by alcohol. I doubt I’ll go either route, but it’s easy to understand why Family Providers would experience suicidal depression when their ability to provide for their families slips away like a cat-burglar in the dead of night.

The issue of identity (i.e., ego) is far worse in the United States than the situation described by Orlov in the Soviet Union. As becomes apparent this time of year, when casual conversation is on the menu during every seasonal festivity, our identities are completely bundled with how we earn money. What do you think people mean when they ask, “What do you do?” In every case with which I’m familiar, they are inquiring how I earn money.

Knowing where the entire enterprise of generating cash is headed, I tell people I’m a sharecropper and organic gardener. Oh, and by the way, that right hand of mine, the one you just shook, milked two goats this morning. Then I ask people what they love.

I can suck the air out of room — any room, regardless of size or number of people present — in a matter of seconds.

I’m a sharecropper, organic gardener, and milker of goats, as well as a democrat, a republican, a liberal, a conservative, a radical, an idealist, a pragmatist, a teacher, a mentor, a scientist, a writer, a skeptic, a scholar, a cheese-maker, a son, a brother, a husband, a lover, and a human animal. I’m comfortable with my beliefs and personal philosophy. I’ve thought deeply about my tiny place in this enormous universe, and I’ve come to value humility over hubris. And still I’m having an identity crisis. A crisis of confidence. An ego-crushing moment. The longer the industrial economy lasts, the more my identify is pummeled, along with my hope for the living planet. Every day under the rule of Athena drives me further into despair. It’s as if my ego were a proxy for the planetary rate of extinction.

Considering the effort I’ve put into defining myself and my place in the universe, I can only imagine the difficulty ahead for the typical American drone. He values his imperial role and fails to recognize the empire for what it is. He gets his news from the television and affiliated media outlets and fails to recognize that form of propaganda for what it is. His sense of entitlement is exceeded only by his ignorance of the role nature plays in his survival. And yet, he’s ahead of me.

After all, unlike the American drone, I’m clueless about what to do. I’ve invested heavily in a reasonably sane set of living arrangements, only to have nature call me further down her path. I’m attempting to serve as a witness, and occasionally a warrior, as the living planet tries to survive the insults of industry. I’m trying to show another — hence, contrarian — way, for a world gone mad. And in return, I’m unappreciated as never before in memory (including even my final decade at the university as viewed through the lens of my dean and department head).

I recognize the necessity of total revolution, but I don’t yet see it. The wisdom of activist spiritual teacher Vimala Thakar surfaces in my mind: “In a time when the survival of the human race is in question, to continue with the status quo is to cooperate with insanity, to contribute to chaos. When darkness engulfs the spirit of the people, it is urgent for concerned people to awaken, to rise to revolution.”

Obviously, Thakar was an optimist. I love her inclusive approach. And although darkness has engulfed the spirit of the people, I fail to see the awakening at a scale relevant to the task at hand. Impatience grows within me.

With the exception of plunging into the wild or continuing to serve as an unappreciated model immersed in agrarian anarchy, my options are limited. I’m too old to die young, and it’s very late to start anew. Returning to the civilized life of an educator has limited appeal and prospects that are even more limited, considering the general perspective on my sanity (or lack thereof). And then there’s the moral imperative I feel, well expressed by social reformer and statesman Frederick Douglass: “I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”

Where does this lead? In my case, to utter confusion. As was recently pointed out to me by somebody a little older than me, and a lot a wiser, “in the end it doesn’t matter who you’re with if you can’t unlock the contents of your own skull.”

Which takes us right back to me and my self-indulgence. What to do, in the limited time left at my disposal? The temporal limitations come in two forms: (1) I’m too old to die young (and also too poor to start anew) and (2) the industrial era is nearing its end. Without fuel at the filling stations and water coming out the taps, paid positions at small, selective, liberal-arts colleges will be hard to come by (and meaningless). The day is coming far sooner than most people think. With luck, the forthcoming Lehman-on-steroids moment will make the decision on my behalf, and soon. If this latter statement reveals my cowardice, then it also indicates the extreme nature of my indecision.

_______________

This essay is permalinked at Island Breath and, stunningly, Energy Bulletin.

The world is experiencing the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression. So why is oil hovering around $100/bbl? And as a gold investor, why should you care about oil?

Some might point to developments in the Middle East as the reason for high oil prices. However, I believe the root cause of current Middle East angst is the steady depletion of easily accessible oil and, consequently, government revenues needed to quell the population. Everything that is happening across the Middle East — citizen revolts, government crack downs, production disruptions and oil price inflation — tells me the world may have crossed the point of peak oil.

I don’t think the world will run out of oil anytime soon. However, based on the advice of expert geologists, I do believe that a) the world is running out of inexpensive oil and b) global demand is pressuring oil prices.

Given these pre-conditions, it is my view that the world has entered a new boom-bust cycle driven by oil prices. Oscillating oil prices — as opposed to credit cycles — will repeatedly stimulate and crash the highly levered global economy. Governments have not recognized this new cycle, and as part of a fruitless effort to retain control over deteriorating real growth and rising unemployment central banks will print more and more money, risking a hyperinflationary depression (stagflation at best). The only respite for many investors is gold.

The 2008 Financial Crisis was the First of Many

During the last thirty years debt has spread like a cancer throughout the developed world. Today’s consumption was financed by tomorrow’s higher revenues, creating a vicious cycle between growth and the need for debt. This system worked as long as growth needed to repay expanding credit could be subsidized by inexpensive energy.

Unfortunately, rising oil prices have stealthily and persistently chipped away at the foundation of our heavily indebted financial system. Ultimately, in 2008, oil prices and total debt passed the threshold beyond which the economy could not operate, and the financial system came crashing down. With collapsing demand, oil prices fell.

Many mistakenly point to sub-prime mortgages and CDSs as the cause of the 2008 crisis — I believe they were merely the transmission mechanisms. In reality, rising oil prices eroded the weakest links in the increasingly levered global economic system.

Enter the Central Banks

As we’ve witnessed repeatedly since Richard Nixon suspended dollar convertibility into gold, the Federal Reserve solves all economic problems with the monetary cure-all. Either by using the proverbial helicopter or the Treasury as an intermediary, central banks have repeatedly pumped liquidity into the economy and bought bad debts from the private sector. This effectively transfers the bad debt to the taxpayer by way of liability and currency debasement. In addition, fiscal policy (which is often the hand maiden of monetary policy) adds additional public sector debt in the name of stimulus. In whole, debt burdens and money supply rise. Of course, all this is done under the assumption that the economy will somehow be able to repay these new debts through future growth.

In the new boom-bust cycle driven by oil prices, the central banks are unknowingly impotent. As the economy crashes, they print money to stimulate economic activity, but it is short-lived and inflationary. More stimulative is the lower oil prices caused by the crash. However, any renewed growth and inflation sends oil prices back up towards another threshold, once again breaking the weakest links of the economy…and the default-bailout-growth cycle repeats.

Right now, oil price inflation is most noticeable when we fill up our gas tanks. But as high oil prices become pervasive throughout the economy the destruction of aggregate wealth will intensify. This will increase the number of weak links throughout the economy. It will also increase the sensitivity of those weak links to higher oil prices — another vicious cycle.

Consequently, as the default-bailout-growth cycle repeats and rising oil prices become more omnipresent, periods of economic growth become weaker, and periods of economic bust more frequent and persistent. Eventually, as the cycle repeats, the sharp economic contrasts of boom and bust blend together becoming a permanent shade of economic grey.

Saved by Gold

As they did in 2008, central banks will print money to bail out collapsing financial infrastructure and support a growing mass of unemployed. While each cycle may begin as a deflationary shock, causing gold prices to decline, the eventual monetary response will destroy currencies and send gold prices soaring. This has already started to happen.

Unless high ROI replacement energy sources are found, over the long-run this cycle could turn into a hyperinflationary depression, as central banks naïvely fight a losing battle. Savings could be wiped out as the value of paper currency plummets, and in the new boom-bust cycle one of the few ways to protect wealth over the long run may be to own gold.
___________

Mark Motive is the publisher and chief author for www.planbeconomics.com, a contrarian source for economic and market insights. Contact him at mark@planbeconomics.com.