But this brief post is not about my conference presentation. It’s about my visit to Chicago.

As long as I’m flying in and out of Chicago, I would like to interact with one or more audiences beyond the conference. I will extend my trip by a day to interact with your group if you’ll pay for my lodging on the night of Tuesday, 28 September and also buy me supper that night. It doesn’t matter how large the group or how nice the digs.

I’ll sleep in your guest bedroom and dine at your table if you’ll find people interested in my message. If you’re interested, please post a comment below or send me an email message at grm@ag.arizona.edu. If more than one person responds — which seems unlikely — we’ll work out something.

I am flexible about the details. If you prefer a seminar presentation, find me a room and an audience. If you prefer an informal meal with a dozen of your friends, make the reservation. If you prefer to discuss the details about a durable set of living arrangements on your property, set aside time to talk and provide transportation to the site.

This is a limited-time offer, not available in any store. I will make airline reservations for this trip within the next two weeks. If you’re interested in hosting me in or near the windy city, please respond promptly.

I’d like to visit with you on your property, to discuss your ability to thrive in light of the ongoing collapses in the industrial economy and the environment. I will focus on a durable set of living arrangements. Fees vary, depending primarily on three factors:

1. Location. No offense to my Phoenician readers, but I’ve been to Phoenix, and I’m not excited about the prospect of returning, at least for no pay. I’ve not been to Ecuador so I’ll visit there if you’ll simply pay my expenses.

2. Civility. After a career in academia, I’ve spent far too much time working with jerks. I prefer people who appreciate what I have to offer, and who are kind. Here’s a model, but you need not be a saint to qualify. And you might need to put up with me not being a saint.

3. Seriousness. During the last year, about a hundred people have visited the mud hut to see what we’ve done as they prepare to develop a durable set of living arrangements. Considerably more people have sent email messages seeking advice. I have responded to each visitor and to each message with free, detailed advice because these people clearly are serious. On the other hand, I have little tolerance for people who are in denial about the ongoing collapse of the industrial economy or ongoing global climate change. If you’re serious about changing your life, I’m serious about helping you.

In any case, I’ll charge considerably less than Matt Savinar, Chris Martenson, Matt Simmons, or the handful of other people offering consulting services. Far be it for me to disparage these energy-literate folks, and perhaps you get what you pay for. Maybe my commitment to a life of service will provide little service to you. But unlike most of the consultants I know and know about, along with my partners at the property I’ve actually developed a durable set of living arrangements, paying particular attention to water, food, body temperature, and community. I know what it takes — down to the details — as well as how to prioritize and avoid costly mistakes.

The notion of economic collapse has gone mainstream. Renowned trends forecaster Gerald Celente claims this is “much bigger” than economic collapse as he predicts“food riots, tax protests, farmer rebellions, student revolts, squatter dig-ins, homeless uprisings, tent cities, ghost malls, general strikes, bossnappings, kidnappings, industrial saboteurs, gang warfare, mob rule, terror” in 2012. In light of the accelerating decline in American Empire as well as the world’s industrial economy, please let me know if you’d like practical advice as you navigate the stormy seas ahead.

Feel free to spread the word, and contact me if you’re interested. You can reach me via email at grm@ag.arizona.edu, leave me a message at 520.621.5389 (for the short time I still have an office on campus), and Skype me at guy_mcpherson (though the connection is cumbersome). Alternatively, additional contact information for me is displayed here. I’m always willing to talk on the telephone if you’ll pay for the call, but we’ll have to arrange a date and time to talk because I’m rarely in the vicinity of the telephone at the mud hut.

If you’ve visited the mud hut or communicated with me via other means, feel free to leave a testimonial in the form of a comment. Not that I’m fishing for compliments, you understand. That would be unseemly.

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This post, and the underlying idea, were inspired by my friend Cindy Winkelman, an idea-generating phenomenon.

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Next-day update: Please have patience as I deal with an overflowing email in-box. I’m headed out of town for a couple days, but I will respond to each message within a week. Thanks.

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Based on recent comments in this space, and also in my email in-box, I am compelled to provide an updated overview of my proposed agenda in light of the ongoing collapse of the world’s industrial economy. There’s nothing new here, but plenty of people don’t have the time to read what I’ve written in the past so, in spasms of foolish ignorance, they keep asking me to stop driving my car (trust me, I’d love to … and I go for weeks at a time without doing so) or cease speaking and writing about economic collapse because it is not happening (and, in a related issue, there’s an invisible man in the sky who loves us and wants us to be happy).

The other primary topic of conversation, real and virtual, begins with “Okay, but what can I do?” As if I’ve ignored that particular question. “No, but I mean me. Here in Phoenix. With no money and no spare time.”

Sigh. If you’re unwilling to change, you’ll simply have to let change happen to you. And Bill Clinton was correct about this issue: People like change in general, but not in particular. Nobody who is unwilling to change is liable to appreciate the change headed their way.

If you’re willing to change, perhaps you’ll seek ideas and inspiration from sources other than me. Perhaps you’ll test your courage, creativity, and compassion. You’re going to need those attributes soon enough anyway, so you might as well drag them out now.

I think the ongoing economic collapse is driven by declining energy supply at the world level: We passed the world peak of conventional crude oil in 2005. Considering the primacy of oil to the industrial economy and therefore to our way of living, it’s no surprise the industrial economy is unraveling. Fortunately, it’s taking disaster capitalism with it, albeit far too slowly to suit me.

My hope, of course, is completion of the economic collapse in time to save the remaining fragments of the world’s biological diversity and perhaps even habitat for our own species. Call me a dreamer. Recognizing that it’s generally a waste of time to try to convince people we’re headed for economic disaster and therefore environmental nirvana, that, regardless, is my mission.

I have no interest in trying to save civilization, which is irredeemable and omnicidal. But I am interested in extending the lives of the relatively few people in the industrialized world willing to make substantive changes in their lives. Sadly, that leaves out nearly everybody with whom I converse or correspond.

Conservation is irrelevant at this point and, with respect to materials that are too cheap to meter, conservation probably has always been irrelevant. That’s the crux of Jevons’ paradox. Although Jevons’ paradox assumes free markets, and all markets are manipulated, it is not at all clear to me that relaxing the free-market assumption would have a significant influence on the global outcome of energy markets. Furthermore, if you’re really a believer in free markets and lack of governmental interference in those markets, then oil is the premier example of a global free market.

Many people are concerned we’ll respond to Jevons’ paradox with hedonism. As if we’re not already there.

If you think individual conservation efforts scale up to society, consider an incomplete but still stunning overview of the statistics on energy use. For example, the energy in a million barrels of crude oil — the amount gushing in the Gulf of Mexico every ten days or so — will supply your house with power for the next 81,000 years or so but will keep cars on U.S. highways for about four hours. So, at some level we’re all BP (those of you cheering for the industrial economy have company from J.P. Morgan Chase on the BP issue — the spill and cleanup apparently will enhance GDP, at least in the short run). More pragmatically, though, we each bear about as much responsibility for BP’s incompetence and recklessness as we bear for causing planetary ice to melt, the financial success of Wal-Mart, and the microfauna in belly of the nearest polar bear. As much as the media and politicians would like you to feel responsible and guilty, you should feel neither.

I regularly promote the idea of hastening economic collapse. If you’re not on board with that idea, but you still see the huge neon signs pointing us in that direction, perhaps you can be convinced to pursue a modicum of self reliance.

Photo credit: Getty images

The notion of self reliance, long discarded in a nation where we enslave others to do our drudgery, is about to make a profound comeback. When the new Dark Age gets under way, people who are willing to do useful things with their hands and minds will be welcome additions in any community. The contemporary idea of American-style independence is, in Orwellian fashion, the exact opposite of independence. To secure our food, water, and body temperature, we have become wholly dependent on a large-scale system (the industrial economy). This is the diametric opposite of self reliance, and it’s long past time to focus on self reliance within the context of the interdependence of people in communities. We need each other, but we do not need the industrial economy.

How do you provide service to your community? What preparations should you make to thrive during the post-carbon era, and to help your community thrive, too?

I have written at length about the preparations I’ve made, with a focus on water, food, body temperature, human community, and living a life of service (in this case, four out of five gets you the equivalent of a cake with no flour). Securing these elements has been done by humans for about two million years in the absence of the industrial economy. Only recently have we become dependent on a system that is making us crazy and killing us. I suggest we get out of this system. If that cannot be done in your specific location — and I’m thinking about places such as Tucson, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Los Angeles, California — I strongly suggest changing locations. The other obvious alternative is to re-arrange the deck chairs as the cruise ship of empire takes on even more water. There are many approaches to be pursued on this front, including recycling, joining a CSA, riding the bus, and volunteering in the local literacy movement. These are noble causes, but they won’t save you or your community. And if you don’t save yourself, you won’t be able to help anybody else.

People often ask me how they can make the kinds of changes I’ve made, without actually making those changes themselves. That is, how can they turn their lives upside-down without actually changing a thing? They blame lack of finances (which, as I’ve pointed out with my own example, can be overcome by joining others in a community-based effort). They blame an unwillingness to leave the apex of empire, the large city they occupy (i.e., they do not agree with my view that industrial economy is inherently immoral). They blame the marauding hordes certain to find them if they get out of the city (i.e., they use any and every excuse to avoid taking action). Comfortable with the immorality of their lives, unwilling to forgo empire in exchange for the difficulty of self reliance, brainwashed by culture to keep pursuing this particular version of culture, they are hopelessly trapped in a hapless situation. Although I recognize the power of culture and the lack of free will for human animals, I’m beginning to lose sympathy.

Empires don’t break up, they break down. And American Empire is obviously breaking down, with abundant evidence to be found in the striking absence of any appeal to the common good from governments at any level. There has been no semblance of morality emanating from the fascists running the corporations, and therefore the country, since at least 1980. I don’t expect a vast outpouring of empathy and compassion any time soon. Faux compassion, of course. But the real deal? I hardly think so.

Digital art courtesy of Hock on the Behance Network

Although some insist a slow descent is likely, I have yet to understand how that can possibly work. Feel free to fill me in. Do we dim the lights one percent annually so that, in one hundred years, the electricity goes out without our noticing? Do we reduce our extraction of finite materials a few percent each year, even as the human population grows by more than 200,000 people daily, until we simply, peacefully, stop using everything needed to maintain the industrial economy? Do we slowly, painlessly, with no suffering at all, reduce the human population to a viable number? What is that number? A billion? Fewer?

All these outcomes seem quite unlikely to me. I think we’re so committed to unlimited, exponential growth on a finite planet that we’ll do whatever it takes to delude ourselves into believing that impossibility. If that means we have to destroy everybody and everything so we can have ice cream and cookies every night, that’s exactly what we’ll do. We’re an industrialized world of overfed clowns and we think others are laughing with us instead of at us. In short, I need somebody to show me another way. I’m eager to learn how we can prevent unimaginable suffering and catastrophic die-off on a finite planet. Sans miracles, of course.

Looking back, and relying on a plethora of economic metrics, it’s evident we’ve experienced a lost decade. So we can trace the economic decay to 2000 or so. It’s easy enough to can go back further, tracing the imperial decline to 1979 with the Carter doctrine. Or 1956 with the Interstate Highway System. Or the late 1940s with the federal government’s promotion of suburbia. Or 1789 with the unrelenting thirst for empire at all costs exhibited by the founding fathers. With respect to any of these temporal benchmarks, the decay clearly has accelerated in recent years and months.

From the day I predicted the new Dark Age would begin by the end of 2012, the criticism has been continuous. Most critics, citing no evidence and no understanding of peak oil and its economic consequences, claim we’ll surely adjust and adapt and generally demonstrate our big-brained brilliance with a long descent into peace, prosperity, and infinite good times. Adding balance in a mainstream media kind of way, the occasional critic optimistically — without recognizing the optimism — claims the Dark Age will begin well before 2012. We should be so lucky.

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This essay is permalinked at The Gable Grey, Counter Currents, Rebel News, and Island Breath, and it gets a shout out at Unconventional Ideas and it is discussed at the LATOC Forum.

The financial sector has been largely nationalized, with the U.S. taxpayer on the hook for trillions of dollars of bad loans made by big banks. Back in February 2009 our national debt was a mere $10.5 trillion, but it already exceeded the value of all the currency in the world and all the gold ever mined. Those were the good old days. Now our national debt exceeds $13 trillion (with more than $8 trillion still hidden from view), and the empire will go down like a tub full of gold bricks if we stop fanning the flames by slowing the printing press.

By running the printing presses at full speed, we are inflating the most massive bubble yet. We’ve seen how those bubbles pan out for the industrial economy. If we build them, the pin-pricks will come. Can we create another financial crisis? Of course. After all, a smoke-and-mirrors economic recovery is no protection against a crash in the equities markets. The peak in industrial economic growth is already here, with about ten thousand swords out there vying for attention to burst the bubbles of Treasuries, the U.S. big banks, China’s economic growth, the re-inflated housing market, and a renewed credit crisis. Oh, and of course the interaction between these myriad factors. In summary, the countdown is well under way for completion of the ongoing U.S. economic collapse, and there’s simply no way to soften the blow when we plunge to the bottom of the economic heap. The U.S. has the world’s biggest industrial economy, and the bigger they are, … well, you know.

The one-size-fits-all solution of printing money is leading inevitably to hyperinflation, even as the U.S. money supply dwindles. Think Zimbabwe, but with U.S. dollars. And the U.S. dollar is still the world’s reserve currency. All signs still point to a major crash in stock markets (see here and here, too, among a kajillion other sites). At this point in the post-peak oil era, it’s clear to anybody paying the slightest attention we’re headed for full spectrum collapse.

How will it end, and when? It seems completion of the U.S. economic collapse will follow on the heels of Europe, which is cheering for its own demise even as all the PIIGS drown in a sea of debt. This is supremely good news, of course, for the dozen or so people who care about non-industrial cultures and the living planet: Our little reign of terror is just about over. We’re an empty garbage can, playing power games enabled by the hologram-like appearance of power.

I’ve no doubt the empire will fail to go silently into the night. Instead, we’ll take out individuals and countries with every lethal weapon in our power, including weapons most of us don’t even know about and people we don’t care about. Iran apocalypse? Could be — talk about mutually assured destruction — and soon. How soon?

Your guess is as good as mine. But is it as good as the 25 leading trends forecasters, who agree that 2010 could be the year? Hedge funder Hugh Hendry provides a concise summary: “I would recommend you panic.”

As much as I appreciation the concision of Hendry’s recommendation, I would recommend you prepare and celebrate. I’ve been recommending the former for several years, while pointing out the good news associated with economic collapse. I have more company now than I’ve had for a while: Economic collapse has gone mainstream, and the occasional worthwhile ecologist is joining Daniel Quinn and Derrick Jensen in recognizing and spreading the good news.

Even as the gusher in the Gulf gets much worse by the day (thus diverting our attention from BP’s other large spill), even as Barack Obama tries to use the disaster to push his ill-founded political agenda, even as the cozy relationship between BP and the Obama administration becomes clear, so too do U.S. political policies keep steering straight at the iceberg of economic and environmental collapse. As the industrial economy stumbles along, the world’s biological diversity continues to suffer even as we peer into the abyss of extinction for many of the world’s species (including, ultimately, our own).

Where should you be when economic collapse comes to your house? Michael Ruppert and his protégé Rice Farmer suggest staying where you’re most comfortable. Much as I appreciate their efforts to inform and engage economic collapse, this advice seems immoral and short-sighted to me. First, it’s the comfort of city living that got us into this civilized mess to begin with, and it’s exactly this comfort that requires obedience at home and oppression abroad. Second, today’s comfortable urban existence might not be so damned comfortable when the lights go out and the water stops coming out the taps. Rice Farmer points out that people in rural areas will “have to cope with hordes of desperate, starving city people who try to steal our food. Unless you are in a really remote location, expect hungry visitors.”

Good point. But why do you think those “hordes of desperate, starving city people” are bound to be desperate and starving? Why do you think they’ll be leaving the cities in hordes? I’d guess it’ll be because they’ll become suddenly and profoundly uncomfortable when the grocery stores run out of food and the water stops coming out the taps. If you think you’ll be comfortable surrounded by a few thousand desperate, starving city people when TSHTF in your backyard, by all means stay in your comfort zone. On the other hand, if you don’t think that’s going to work out well for you, I’d recommend skedaddling out of the city before the real rush gets under way. When will that be?

In this case, “better late than never” is the wrong answer. The time to dig a well is not when you’re thirsty. The time to plant a garden is not when you’re hungry. The time for securing your water and food is now, before the industrial economy burns itself out. You and I didn’t start the fire of empire. But we’re about to see it extinguished.

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This essay is permalinked at Island Breath.

Now that I’m retired from the academic life — or rather, now that I’ve departed the academy in disgust and despair — I no longer spend time in my swivel chair, dispensing information on the telephone or tending to the tender young psyche of an overwrought twenty-something. But there is no “typical” day, just as no two days were alike before I abandoned the hallowed halls. Nonetheless, in yet another round of egocentric, navel-gazing story-telling, here goes.

After a fitful night filled with five hours of oft-interrupted sleep, I give up the painful prone position for the slightly less painful standing one. The sun is still behind the mountains, the sky gunmetal gray on this 37-degree spring morning. I flex my fingers, marveling at their one-year transformation from thin and nimble to swollen and brittle, bend my back and neck as they compete for loudest and most frequent popping noises, and gobble a handful of aspirin to start the day.

After putting on my cleanest dirty shirt — one never knows when a neighbor might drop by, after all — I fire up the laptop, respond to a half-dozen email messages, and ignore the list of back-stretching and -strengthening exercises on the table. Maybe tomorrow, when I have more time. No, that won’t work: I have visitors tomorrow and the next day, taking a quick tour of the property to view the arrangements we’ve made. The tea has been steeping while I read and respond, and now I drink it while plowing through a breakfast of cold cereal and piece of fresh fruit as I skim the morning’s counterculture news and commentary. I peek over the computer screen as the sky turns pink, then azure, in the span of a few minutes.

Walking slowly to pick up the hay, I am reminded how pathetic was my attempt at construction on my first-ever awning. It keeps the hay dry, for now, but insufficient pitch and long-abused tin cause the roof to leak, thus prematurely rotting the boards. I carry the flake of alfalfa across the gravel driveway in a plastic “Tucson Recycles” bin, a reminder of my home city of twenty years.

I chuckle as I open the door to the goat pen, an old bed frame I found on the property. After placing the hay into the hand-made manger and filling the water buckets, I release Lillian and Ellie from the insulated goat shed I constructed. Lillian bleats anxiously, knowing she is about to get a quart of grain and relief from her full udder. Ellie, the barrel-shaped three-month-old kid, runs between and then jumps onto the straw bales in the small paddock.

Crossing the driveway, I step into the 15-year-old mobile home and check the temperature in the kitchen: 42 F, a few degrees warmer than outside. I arrange the quart jars, durable coffee filter, and funnel for easy pouring when I have a full bucket of milk, then grab the milking pail and wander back to Lillian. The aches and pains are giving way to an easy gait and appreciation for another beautifully verdant day.

I recall last week’s visitors, a gaggle of university students. After talking for hours about economic collapse, including light’s out in the empire and no water coming through the taps, I was extolling the virtues of living in a “third-world” country with rainwater harvesting and hand-dug wells. A very fit, 20-year-old woman asked for clarification about the wells: “They really dig them by hand?”

I explained that I move as much dirt in an average weekend as required to dig a 20-foot well. Tears welled up, and she turned away.

Economic collapse is fun to talk about, until it becomes personal. And for most people, the personal nature of physical labor is no fun at all.

In the goat shed, I marvel at Lillian’s calm disposition and take quick note of her condition. Her toenails need trimmed, so I’ll get Carol to help with that when she comes back from a week-long visit to the northern half of the state. I marvel, too, at my ability and willingness to tend barnyard animals. I’m feeling good about my new skills despite the criticism from beyond the property. When my parents visited a few months ago, my dad — a product of his culture, steeped in societal economic growth and individual financial success — made a point to watch and comment: “I never thought one of my kids would be reduced to milking a goat.”

Two quarts this morning, same as usual. It’s stacking up in the fridge, so I’ll have to make cheese tomorrow or the next day. I’m partial to Parmesan, but I’ll check the inventory of hard cheeses in the root cellar to make sure we have similar amounts of Parmesan, cheddar, and Monterey Jack. Chevre, mozzarella, and ricotta need to be eaten quickly, and I won’t take time to cook a decent meal based on either of the latter two during the next week.

The milk goes into the freezer for an hour as I let the ducks and chickens out of their respective houses. They’ll range free all day, the ingenious ducks spending most of their time in the irrigation ditch adjacent to the property they discovered after living here only a year. As I gather the eggs, I take note of the trees and gardens on the east end of the property, including the paw paw trees I planted earlier this week. Back in the mobile home, I wash the nine eggs before storing them in the fridge on the shelf below the milk.

I water the seedlings in the garden. The carrots and peas are just emerging, so they need a light shower twice daily. The citrus trees seem to perk up every time I shower their leaves, so I hit them every time I walk past. Continuing to the west end of the property, I give a quick spray of water to the device I constructed for producing compost tea, open the greenhouse and cold frame, check the honeyberry shrubs I planted yesterday, and briefly inspect the three-dozen fruit and nut trees in the orchard. The milk has been in the freezer for its requisite hour, so I hurry back to move the chilled jars into the fridge.

Today’s big task is construction. The still-tender ribs I broke last month working on a similar project remind me to work deliberately as I attach an awning to the cargo container in the northwest corner of the property. We’ll want to store bales of hay and straw and, when we can no longer obtain bales of either, stacks of hay from the peanuts in two large gardens. In time, peanuts will feed us and the goats, as well as improving the soil.

The frame is finished at 1:00 p.m., but only after I pummel my left thumb with a poorly aimed hammer several hundred times, walk back and forth between the stack of lumber and the new awning too many times to count, and nearly fall off the roof. I guess the ribs aren’t a sufficient reminder. I’m thirsty, hot, and tired, and it’s time for lunch and a phone call.

As I eat, I visit on the telephone for ninety minutes with somebody who follows my blog and wants advice about where to live. Earlier this week, it was career advice for a freshly minted Ph.D. and tomorrow’s caller wants to discuss a strategy for telling her parents about peak oil. I harbor no illusions of having answers for any of these callers, and I know the customary caller is wise enough to seek advice beyond mine, but I appreciate any opportunity to discuss reality and how we can respond to it. I suspect my advice is overpriced, even at no charge.

A handful of aspirin later I’m back at the awning, misguided hammer in hand. After a surprisingly smooth afternoon characterized by few bruises and no blood, I complete the awning. I’ve covered the frame with plywood, tarpaper, and tin on an afternoon with temperatures in the mid-80s. Sweating and sore, I barely have time to hand-water the large garden behind the mobile home, trying not to notice how badly the beds need weeded, before my evening encounter with Lillian. Were Carol here today, the goats would have been walked a couple times, with special attention to the abundant weeds on the east end of the property.

Distracting Ellie with a little grain in her own bucket, I close the door to the goat shed and Lillian steps up on the stanchion I built to ease the milking operation. I apply bag balm after I finish milking her, give Ellie a pat on the head, and head to the mobile home to strain the milk into two more quart jars.

Supper is the same as lunch: rice and beans left over from last night’s supper. A quick shower removes the first layer of grime before I put the goats into their lion-proof shed, lock the chickens into their skunk-proof coop, and herd the ducks into their raccoon-proof house. The setting sun sets the sky afire before unleashing the Milky Way.

One more round with the imperial screen of death allows me to catch up with a couple dozen email messages while viewing the latest dire news about the ecological collapse we’re bringing to every corner of the globe. A cup of herbal tea to wash down more aspirin, a few pages of Nietzsche in the silence of the straw-bale house, and I tumble into bed. Sleep comes slowly and poorly, as it has since the summer of 1979 when I last logged six consecutive hours of sleep. Even then, my nagging subconscious was trying to tell me something about the empire wasn’t quite right.

Sadly, it took me decades to figure out the problem. More sadly, most imperial Americans are well behind me on the learning curve.

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This essay is permalinked at Energy Bulletin and Island Breath.

Indulge me this moment of vanity as I contemplate what I’ll leave behind. As usual, any number can play. What’s your legacy?

All of us reading this blog leave behind a depleted world. The world has no money and the emperor has no clothes, according to news anchor Brian Williams. As we peer into the abyss of chaos, the world we are leaving future generations largely lacks potable surface water, abundant edible food, materials for constructing shelter, and soils for growing fibers. The stunning richness of species that greeted the industrial age has been replaced by a living planet barely hanging by a thread. As Derrick Jensen wrote in Endgame, forests greet us and deserts dog our heels.

At least we’re leaving compost. I’ve come to appreciate compost quite a bit since I’ve launched my new career as organic gardener.

I’ve no doubt I’ll be there in a few short years, corpse to compost, along with most other Americans. It is difficult for me to foresee a situation in which I would survive the completion of the ongoing collapse. Unlike most industrial humans, though, I will gladly make the ultimate sacrifice in exchange for bringing the industrial economy to its overdue close.

With respect to the living planet, I’ve placed my picket-pin in this small valley in the southwestern United States, former home to the Apache warrior Geronimo. Like a Cheyenne Dog Soldier, I’ve staked my terrain and will defend it from further insults. This untamed river must remain wild, forever protected from industrial abuses and therefore able to support human life as we enter the post-industrial Stone Age. I’ve not yet achieved the expertise of one of my neighbors, who has spent the last couple decades sleeping outside, making fire with a fire bow, foraging wild foods, and drinking from the river. I doubt I will, either.

To ease the transition to the next Stone Age, we have created a durable set of living arrangements that will long outlast occupants of this property. Our infrastructure includes a house, hand pump, root cellars, and cooking devices that should persist at least a century, and probably much longer. I’ve little doubt these devices will outlast humans in this region, considering the dire nature of global — and therefore regional and local — climatic changes.

And then there’s the big stuff, difficult to measure though it is. What about ideals? What about our sense of humanity? We strive to illustrate a style of living, unique to this time and place, that keeps us close to the land and close to our neighbors. Will it persist beyond my own generation? Obviously, I’d like to think so. But there’s a problem with leaving a legacy: We don’t know what it is or how long it will persist.

This issue reminds me of teaching. One never knows if the messages will be received, or in what form.

For example, I taught my dog to whistle. She never did learn to whistle. But I taught with all my heart.

Will my legacy resemble my dog’s ability whistle? Or will I get lucky and leave something durable and useful? Besides the compost, I mean.

At some point, we simply lost track of the importance of communities, human and otherwise. Along the way to becoming a nation of multitasking, Twittering, Facebook “friends” we abandoned the ability to connect meaningfully, viscerally, individually. If we are to thrive during the post-carbon era, we’ll need to create groups of straight-talking, look-’em-in-the-eye, mean-what-you-say, say-what-you-mean, self-reliant, individuals who are not afraid to ask for help from the neighbors and who, when asked, readily offer assistance.

I know you hate those stories that start with, “When I was a kid, ….” But here goes, regardless. I grew up in a tiny, backwoods, red-neck logging town. By the time I was 18 years old, I’d seen more bar fights than first-run movies. I knew that when a man was driving home after getting whipped in a bar fight, and the man who beat him up drove drunkenly into a ditch on the way home, the guy who got pummeled had no choice but to stop and give a hand to the guy who whipped him. If the whippee didn’t stop to help, and anybody in town found out, he’d be better off driving to the next state than hanging around. Helping neighbors in need was not optional. The benighted community of my youth was a worthless pile of crap. But to me and my neighbors, it was our worthless pile of crap, and an outsider who threatened people in our town would have been better off bobbing for apples in a bucket of piranhas. The people who lived in that town, like the ones who still live there, are shoulder-to-the-wheel, down-to-earth folks who care about their community.

For a diametrically opposed perspective, see contemporary suburbia. Our self-proclaimed independence is a bad joke made possible only by cheap energy. As we leave cheap energy in our wake, it becomes increasingly clear the joke’s on us.

As Dmitry Orlov points out with his usual brilliant wit, communities arise organically. Despite the multi-million dollar efforts of countless scientists at Biosphere II, for example, the resulting collection of communities is a pale and pathetic imitation of the naturally occurring ecosystems they are designed to replicate. As with ecological communities, we know little about human communities and what makes them “work.” Nonetheless, we fill tomes about both kinds of communities. Along the way, a few people, including the always-thoughtful Dan Allen, think before they write. How refreshing is that?

Were I still a self-respecting, objective scientist reluctant to express an opinion or make a forecast, I’d stop with those two endorsements wrapped around a nod to ignorance. Actually, I would proceed to write a grant proposal explaining how I would overcome our collective ignorance for a few hundred grand and 50% overhead. Instead of taking either rational route, it’s onward, through the fog.

Although communities are self-organizing, we are able to nurture them and therefore influence species composition. We can plant trees and pull weeds. We can add water and compost. In fact, we do all these things, and we call the result a garden. As I’ve pointed out in prior posts, scale matters: I’m a huge fan of gardens, for reasons that run from healthy food to healthy psyches, but I detest farms. The former characterize Eden, the latter civilization.

As with ecological communities, I think we can and should nurture our human communities, recognizing and encouraging positive elements and weeding out negative ones. We may not be capable of building communities, but we can work with the ones we’ve got to the betterment of individuals who contribute to the common good. And, as with ecological communities, our ability to nurture human communities will vary. Every community is unique, and will require a unique set of approaches.

Too corny? Maybe. But I’m in the fine company of Plato, Aristotle, and Dan Allen, so I’ll run with it.

As I’ve indicated previously, as recently as my latest post, location is everything. Try nurturing community in the suburban wasteland filling most American cities, and you’ll run smack into the horrifically omnivorous maw of culture. If the most visible portion of every house is the garage, good luck organizing the neighbors into building community gardens fed by harvested rainwater and humanure. If it works in the short run, be sure to keep tabs on all the unprepared, self-indulgent free riders you’ll need to feed and water in the longer run.

I was, and am, quite concerned about my late arrival to the region surrounding the mud hut. As I’ve indicated before, I am quite fortunate to have found a like-minded couple of people who were willing to share their property. Financially, my wife and I could not have pulled this off ourselves. In addition, it would have been unwise from an interpersonal perspective. But our partners have lived in this area for nearly a decade, and they’ve worked hard during that time to develop strong relations with the neighbors. At some level, we’re the free riders I warned about in the previous paragraph. At another level, though, we came to the community with a strong endorsement and a built-in set of human ties.

Thus, my first recommendation: Community starts at home. If you can find somebody who is willing to take you in, I propose pooling resources. Given the increasing poverty in a nation addicted to the stock markets, this counter-cultural notion — which goes against the American cultural ideal of “independence” — is starting to make a lot of sense. I suspect we’ll see a lot more collaboration and a lot less ego-laden, look-at-me-and-my-mansion competition in the years ahead.

After establishing a home-based beachhead, the remainder involves common sense and little else. This ain’t rocket surgery, after all. Make yourself valuable by finding a niche. Provide a service, or set of services, integral to the daily lives of your neighbors. What do they do?

They drink water. So find a way to extract, purify, and deliver water when municipal power is no longer available.

They eat. So find a way to produce healthy food at a smaller scale than the big-box grocery store. Grow chickens, ducks, and goats. Make yogurt, butter, and cheese. And then develop a means of preparing the food without fossil fuels. Think drying racks, sun ovens, and firewood.

They wear clothes. So stock up on needles and strong thread, and sell your skills as a tailor, or even a mender.

They sleep. Make ’em blankets. Or, if you have the requisite skills, beds and other furniture.

Can you care for animals, including human animals? They have tender psyches and bodies that were not designed for the rigors to which they’re about to be subjected. They need therapy, just like the rest of us, and they’ll soon need a lot more. Can you provide it, at a finer scale than the current model, and for barter? Are you a medical herbalist? Can you become one?

They need respite from the drudgery of labor. Already, everything is amazing and nobody is happy. Imagine what our lives will be like when we can’t take our annual summer driving vacation, much less the once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe or the Caribbean. Can you spin a yarn or play a tune? I recommend traveling minstrel as an occupation about to make a serious comeback.

They want educated people, and some of them want educated children. If you can write a coherent paragraph and perform long division, you’ll be in constant demand in a world without hand calculators. If you can teach children to perform these miracles, get set to launch your career as a post-carbon teacher.

They have sex. Never mind the world’s oldest profession: The potential for midwives and childcare should be obvious.

I could go on, but the point should be clear by now. As we leave the Age of Entitlement and transition into the Age of Consequences, everybody will need to make a contribution to their community. Those who are unwilling or unable to make a contribution will not be welcome. If you value living in a particular place, think about tight-knit Stone Age communities or contemporary Amish communities. The worst possible fate for an individual is to be shunned, because that means you’ll need to find your own way in a large, unknown world.

So, what about me, and my adopted community? What specific steps have I taken, along with my partners at this property?

We barter, and we’re ratcheting up the barter at every opportunity. These efforts are welcome in a valley filled with self-reliant, life-loving economic doomers. We provide plenty of eggs (chicken and duck) and milk, and in return we have received various kinds of food (fruits, vegetables, and the most wondrous imaginable bread), heirloom seeds and bulbs, a large iron triangle for announcing dinner is ready at the outdoor kitchen, a full clean-and-trim job on our goats’ hooves, and other goods and services too numerous to list (and, in my case, too varied and numerous to remember).

On the personal front, I am working hard to befriend members of my community. I’ve joined an effort to reintroduce river otters into the nearby river, and worked shoulder-to-shoulder on constructing government-mandated otter pods for their release (the pods are large boxes built from plywood and construction lumber). I join a gang of locals at the nearest café for coffee every Tuesday morning (and I don’t drink coffee). I substitute teach at the local K-12 school (“today we’re learning about entropy”). I partake of potlucks and dance parties, as well as more formal annual events such as craft fairs. I’m extremely introverted, so each of these social gatherings is painful. As Nietzsche pointed out, what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Perhaps it’ll make my community stronger, too.

In the not-so-distant future, we intend to provide a much broader array of services to our community. We can extract water from the ground via solar pump and hand pump. In addition to the daily overload of eggs and milk, we’re making and aging plenty of hard cheeses. We’ve stored some luxurious food and drink that will age well (and I don’t even drink alcohol). We can grind grains. We have the capacity to cook food via sun oven, Earth oven (orno), and wood-fired cook stove. We have solar-powered electricity and an assortment of power tools to aid with minor construction projects. This entire infrastructure is designed not merely for our survival, but also for the survival of others in our community. We thrive when our community thrives. We suffer when our community suffers.

I’m certain I’m missing many things. But any number can play, so please help me out. What can we stock for barter? What’s small, inexpensive, and easy to store, yet useful? What other skills should we learn in anticipation of a contracting economy and therefore an enlarging world? What other services can we provide, within the constraints of a small piece of land and little remaining money?

And what about you? How are you preparing for a life of service in the Age of Consequences?

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This essay is permalinked at Island Breath, Sustainable Tucson, and Energy Bulletin (with photos and minor editing).

I think we’re nearing the end of the line for both classically American storage facilities, and that it’s time to start making the recently proverbial other arrangements. Even business leaders recognize the irrationality of not preparing for peak oil and its economic implications, but there are many other reasons for growing your own, including purging the high-fructose corn syrup and other industrial toxins from your grocery list. This post describes our systems for producing and processing food at the mud hut.

Production

Perennial plants are much easier to work with than their annual cousins. After the perennials are established, there is no need to weed, and watering is a breeze. Fertilizer is still necessary, and woody plants need the occasional pruning. But in general, I prefer the lazy nature of perennial plants over the back-straining events of tending a garden.

The mud hut has gardens, not farms. After all, Eden was a garden, not a farm. The difference is primarily one of scale. We have no interest in developing an empire, although we’ll barter with neighbors.

Our perennial plants include about three dozen fruit and nut trees, including cherries, apples, pears, peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, pluots, pecans, and Asian pears (i.e., Asian apples). We have a fig, a pomegranate, and several citrus trees. Trees are fertilized with humanure from the composting toilets I mentioned a few days ago.

Unprotected citrus will not survive the cold winters here, so we have four dwarf varieties growing in a greenhouse (lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit). The greenhouse is filled with 55-gallon drums brimming with water, which keeps nighttime temperatures about 25 F warmer inside than out.

At two years of age, the citrus are already bursting out the greenhouse, so I am building a partially subterranean straw-bale greenhouse to ameliorate temperatures and give the citrus trees room to grow. It should also allow production of tomatoes year around. When the new greenhouse is finished, we will use the existing greenhouse to grow greens in the winter, start peppers and tomatoes in early spring, and dry various fruits and vegetables during the summer.

In addition to the trees, we have several varieties of fruiting shrubbery: raspberries, blackberries, table grapes, kiwis, blueberries, and native rose (for tea). Blueberries thrive in acidic soils, so we amended their beds heavily with compost made from pine trees. Non-shrubby perennials include asparagus, horseradish, artichokes, and rhubarb. All plants are protected from pocket gophers with hardware cloth. Roots of woody plants are protected by the three-foot cone of hardware cloth around the roots, and herbaceous perennials and all annual plants are planted into beds surrounded by a “basket” of hardware cloth, as I described early last year.

Because the honeybees of the world, and especially those in North America, are suffering from colony collapse disorder, we have our own bee box. We aren’t not particularly interested in their honey. We just want reliable pollinators.

We have two cold frames (also known as hot boxes). They produce abundant greens during the winter, and we will use them for summer vegetables, too. I didn’t slant the roof enough to allow sufficient light, so I cut gaps in the front of the cold frames, covered the gaps with plexiglass, and added shiny insulation on the inside walls of the cold frames. And I was wise enough to leave a few bags of concrete mix outside during a rainstorm; these serve as counter-weights for the extremely heavy windows comprising the roofs of the cold frames (shown below without the new gaps in front or the insulation).

In addition to the gopher-proof beds, we have two large areas protected only from large animals such as javelina. We grow large quantities of potatoes in these areas and, starting this year, Valencia peanuts. We simply give up some of the plants to the greedy mouths of the omnipresent pocket gophers (last year we lost 3% of the potato plants). We will eat the goobers and feed the aboveground portion of the plants to the goats.

We have two adult females and a kid housed in a fully insulated shed. They spend their days lounging in a nice paddock, and they provide about a gallon of milk each day in addition to considerable entertainment. We drink the extremely high-fat milk, make yogurt, and we’ve been trying our hand at a few different kinds of cheese, so far including soft chevre, Colby, cheddar, Monterey Jack, and Parmesan. The aging process precludes grand proclamations of success, so far.

Fowl include eight Khaki Campbell ducks and ten chickens. The six duck hens produce, on average, five eggs each day. They require no special accommodations besides a poultry-netting subfloor beneath their house to keep the skunks from digging for supper. The ducks spend most of their time in the nearby irrigation ditch, so they are easy to keep and inexpensive to feed. We’re transitioning to Red Star chickens, which are weather-hardy and reliable layers. We have successfully incubated eggs and kept birds alive through the adult stage. We installed into the chicken coop a corrugated roofing tin subfloor that slopes away from the entry door, into a gutter, and then into a drain pipe that empties into a shallow basin the chicken excrement (i.e., fertilizer). So far, this arrangement has been more trouble than it’s worth. In total, we produce a dozen eggs each day, which gives us plenty of barter material for our neighbors who prefer humanely treated, free-range, healthy fowl.

Storage

A deep-chest freezer holds a wide variety of foods with considerable convenience. We can a lot of the harvest and stack the jars in the pantry. Finally, we store much of the bounty in three root cellars, one dry and two humid (because no combination of apples, onions, and potatoes should be stored together, according to the books and articles we’ve read). The dry cellar is a cargo container surrounded by cinder-block walls and buried beneath a couple feet of soil. The humid cellars are relatively simple holes in the ground, marginally protected from critters with hardware cloth, pressure-treated lumber, and snap traps.

When I write “simple,” I mean conceptually. Digging the holes and constructing the cellars has been anything but simple for my old, worn-out bones.

Processing

We have an outdoor kitchen complete with dining area, wood-fired cook stove, two double sinks, plenty of scavenged counter tops, orno (Earth oven), and a hand-cranked mill. General sloth forced me to add a motor from an evaporative-cooling fan to power the mill.

While we have grid-tied electricity, we continue to use the electric oven in the mobile home, particularly during the winter months. We have a microwave oven in the off-grid, straw-bale house, too. We often ignore these newfangled electric-powered ovens and the two ovens in the outdoor kitchen, opting instead for cooking with the power of direct sunlight.

When we started this endeavor, about two years ago, I could barely distinguish between a screwdriver and a zucchini. And that tells you all you need to know about my construction skills as well as my gardening skills. As I’ve pointed out many times before, if I can do this, I can hardly imagine somebody who can’t. But you’d better get cracking. The time to plant a garden is not when you’re hungry.

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This essay is permalinked at Energy Bulletin, Island Breath, and Boulder County’s Eat Local! Resource Guide and Directory.

At the mud hut, our goal is not merely survival. We intend to thrive during the post-carbon era. We relish the opportunity to see the living planet make a comeback from the oppression of industry. With thriving in mind, this initial essay lays out the assumptions and caveats associated with the post-carbon living arrangements I will describe in future posts.

In a dose of wishful thinking symptomatic of American society, I will treat clean air as an entitlement that will last forever. Reality suggests otherwise: Nuclear winter, a likely outcome at the endpoint of the ongoing economic collapse, threatens every species on Earth, including the wise humans, Homo sapiens sapiens.

I’ll not be writing about the myth of sustainability, as I’ve done before, choosing instead to focus on durability. Sustainability implies we can sustain, essentially forever. Reality indicates we slip out of the void, take a few blinks, and disappear back into the void. This reality applies at all levels, from individual beings through societies and species. If we’re special, we’re only as special as yeast and cockroaches. Maybe less so. The extremely short existence of the genus Homo should serve as sufficient evidence: Humans have been hanging around about two million years, or about 0.04% of the existence of Earth, a young planet in one of an infinite number of universes.

If that’s not enough evidence for you, briefly consider the Laws of Thermodynamics. They’re laws, not suggestions. The much-detested Second Law really pokes a hole in the notion of sustainability.

Given the transient nature of our existence and the pesky Second Law, I believe we should invest in a durable set of living arrangements, as I’ve indicated previously. It’s clearly too late to secure the elements of survival for 310 million Americans, much less 6.8 billion people on Earth. We are too far into ecological overshoot and too far along the industrial treadmill to keep the current game going or to invest in a more sane set of arrangements. As a result, it seems we’ll keep trundling along the patently unsustainable path of economic growth until we can’t. At that point, the industrial age will end rather abruptly, much to the surprise of industrialist humans, most of whom are selectively deaf to the roar of the runaway train as it screams over the cliff of empire.

Developing a durable set of living arrangements is a site-specific enterprise. In many tropical regions, a person would have a difficult time starving to death because food grows on trees. Securing water is similarly easy, at least in the humid tropics. On the other hand, boreal regions are characterized by short growing seasons, cold weather, and frozen ground (hence frozen water pipes). But there’s plenty of wood for heat.

Between the extremes of the tropics and the tundra, the mud hut still faces environmental challenges at 1,400 m elevation. Water is scarce throughout the deserts of southwestern North America, food is difficult to secure, and maintaining body temperature at 37 C is difficult because the climate is hot, dry, and trending hotter and drier, potentially lethally so. And just when I thought cold weather wouldn’t pose a problem, a water pipe froze eighteen inches belowground. In my next essay, I’ll provide details about that incident, which suggests the importance of getting an early start on creating a new life. It takes a while to figure out the seasons, and the neighbors.

If we can make it work here, I’m fairly certain you can make it work in just about any rural area. I don’t think cities have much of a chance in our near-term future — inhabitants of the apex of empire will suffer mightily when the empire completes its fall — but small communities might serve as lifeboats through economic collapse and global climate change.

Here at the mud hut, we have developed a comprehensive set of living arrangements focused on the cardinal four elements of survival within a warm-temperate region of the southwestern United States. Summer high temperatures exceed 40 C every year, and winter brings low temperatures below -10 C for several weeks. Diurnal temperature swings routinely exceed 25 C. Soils are cobbly, well-drained, unsorted alluvium in serious need of organic matter. Water is shallow — less than 10 meters below the soil surface — because we live with one-half mile of a perennial river. The human community is eclectic, but generally tolerant and perhaps even accepting of alternative lifestyles.

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This essay is permalinked at Island Breath.

The editors at Energy Bulletin, reflecting contemporary culture, clearly do not understand sustainability. At every level, from the individual through the culture and even through the species, ours is a transient existence. We should be focused on developing a durable set of living arrangements in the few blinks we have between trips from and to the void. We should not waste our time chasing the impossibility of sustainability, regardless of corporate green-washing to the contrary.

But enough about that particular pet peeve. If you follow the headline’s link, you’ll land at a set of five articles excerpted from longer articles by five authors. Each article discusses the prospects of surviving in the post-carbon era.

As you can imagine, that takes me to yet another pet peeve. We should be developing a set of living arrangements focused on thriving, not merely surviving. If I believed the future was truly Hobbesian, I’d simply save a bullet for myself.

Well, maybe two. I’ve never been a very good shot.

And finally, the focus of the headline, as well as the tone of the articles, ignores a central tenet of this blog: morality. The focus on survival at the expense of consideration of the immorality of cities is not surprising. Imperialists are loath to consider the morality of empires, so our national conversation rarely turns to morality beyond the hand-wringing of what to do with a person for an individual act. The larger and considerably more important issue of how industrial culture destroys people from every non-industrial culture as well as the living planet simply escapes the attention of Faux News (the most-trusted network in the U.S., according to this poll). Cities are the very apex of imperial living, and they function only by extracting resources from surrounding areas in exchange for various forms of waste. But cities are embedded within, and emblematic of, industrial culture, which apparently is beyond our ability to discuss. As should be clear, reasons to abandon cities extend far beyond survival, as I’ve described repeatedly (recent examples can be found here, here, here, here, and here).

Maybe I’m just peevish today.

Toby Hemenway is the most adamant defender of city living. Writing in 2005, he concluded that we’re in for a long descent. But, as became clear at least five times during 2008 and 2009, industrial culture can reach its overdue close quite abruptly. Simply because it didn’t happen yet — saved by unprecedented illegal actions by the federal government — doesn’t mean it cannot happen. Peter Goodchild posts the definitive warning with this line: “Those who expect to get by with ‘victory gardens’ are unaware of the arithmetic involved.”

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This post is permalinked at Island Breath.