What Am I Doing Part 2: Ecological Perspective

All life requires energy to survive
All life requires energy to survive. We expend the energy in our body to find food which we can consume to produce more energy, and so on. Most animals expend their bodily energy to catch their food directly, but modern humans living in industrial civilization expend their energy to get money to buy food. These are quite different!

Industrial Civilization Humans compared to other animals
Non-humans live nose-to-nose with their ecosystems and live in a 'mutually regenerative' relationship with that ecosystem, meaning that species in stable ecosystems help each other get by even if one species generally eats the other. For example, rabbits will help spread the plants they like to eat. That is, each plant wants its baby plants to spread to new places, and the rabbit does that, and eats some of them in return - everyone wins, and this can be 'sustainable' indefinitely.[0]

"Civilized" humans' primary source of energy is fossil fuels dug up from the ground. We don't eat fossil fuels obviously, but we require them to enable the mining, transportation, manufacturing, war-making, and industrial agriculture that enables our civilization. We can't have a mutually nurturing relationship with these energy sources: they're dead, for one thing, and they're non-renewable so there's no way we can create more. But the energy sources are so rich that we've totally revamped our society over the last ~250 years to depend on them for our food, water, livelihoods, culture, etc. Imagine living without a vehicle, phone, computer, or other technology for a year, and only interacting with businesses that also don't use those: impossible, unless you can live with the land. 

We're extremely dependent on these 'dead' (fossil fuel) energy sources, and so society has largely ignored the health of the ecosystems that still live around us. Thus, these ecosystems are rapidly dying off worldwide due to pollution, habitat loss from over-development, and climate change. In fact, we're in a 'mass extinction' - a scale of species loss just as significant as when the dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago.[1] Unfortunately, once the fossil fuels run out or become unaffordable, it'll be hard to return to the way of life of our ancestors - the forests and oceans won't be as rich with life as before.

How should we respond?
I believe the decision is pretty clear: since fossil fuels will be unavailable after they run out[2], and since we'll return to being dependent on healthy ecosystems, we must throw all our efforts to making those ecosystems healthy again before we run out of fossil fuels and before we do further damage. I'll write about my plan to support this in my own life in another essay.

References
[0] Obviously there are parasites and other species not in a mutual relationship with the life they depend on or consume. It's not that every species evolved this 'wisdom'; these are the life relationships we should copy if we want to live sustainably.

[1] http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/elements_of_biodiversity/extinction_crisis/

[2] Note that 'run out of fossil fuels' is an oversimpification - there may fuel in the ground that is uneconomical to retrieve, but either way we won't be able to use fossil fuels to run our civilization after some point.

What Am I Doing Part 1: Energy Perspective

Understanding the big picture of industrial civilization - it's all about the energy
We've heard that our lifestyles are unsustainable, but what does that mean? Humans used to depend only on functioning ecosystems to survive: energy from the sun would allow plants to grow, animals would eat the plants, other animals would eat those, and so on with humans at the top of the chain. Humans, by eating plants and animals, thus lived only on the energy from the sun as it arrived. We couldn't consume much more energy than arrived from the sun and moved through ecosystems in a given year.

Modern industrial civilization, in addition to the yearly sunshine, depends heavily on coal, oil, and natural gas for energy. These fuel sources are plants and animals that died millions of years ago and were compressed inside the earth over eons. They're basically a one-time energy gift from the past - they represent energy from the sun trapped millions of years ago. Once we use it up, or use up the easy-to-get energy, we'll have to go back to using only what we get from the sun each year, like people did centuries ago.

But won't we invent alternative energy technologies to solve our problems?
Humans invent technologies that let us access energy sources, but we can't 'create' energy - we only get to use what's there already. New technologies allow us to access energy sources we couldn't reach in the past, but they don't necessarily make the energy sources feasible to use. For example, a century ago, oil fields were so rich and easy to access that we could invest the energy of 1 barrel of oil to extract 100 barrels - a 100x return on investment! Fracking has been estimated at between 2-10x return, meaning it takes the energy equivalent of 1 barrel of oil to get 2-10 barrels out, depending on the geology. This huge difference makes sense - humans, like all animals, go for the easiest-to-gather energy/food sources first, and we're now left with the dregs, and using even these energy sources up as fast as we can.

So what do we do?
We must recognize that the universe gave humanity an amazing gift - unbelievable physical resources (oil, coal, copper, etc) that let us create a civilization that allowed millions to live more comfortable lives in some ways than royalty of 500 years earlier. But those resources are running out, and we will either adapt proactively or reactively - that is, with foresight before shortages occur, or chaotically afterwards. If we act with foresight, we can choose to retain the scientific and cultural discoveries of modern civilization while learning to live without modern energy sources. I intend to do that!

What do you depend on?

When I want friends and new acquaintances to see the value in what I'm doing, I ask them a few questions:

1. What do you depend on for your way of life?
2. How healthy are those dependencies?
3. Are you able to maintain their health, or are you helpless to protect the things you depend on?

Most people understand their financial dependencies, but have no idea what dependencies they have beyond earning an income, and certainly no idea about their health.


It's a good exercise though - try answering the questions. If it helps, try to rephrase the first one: what dependencies does our society have for its collective way of life?

If you're interested in discussing, feel free to email me!

The Mass Extinction Continues

It's news stories like this (among others) that motivate me to change how I live.

From Global Wildlife Populations Down By Half Since 1970:

The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, the World Wildlife Fund said on Tuesday. - See more at: http://news.asiaone.com/news/science-and-tech/global-wildlife-populations-down-half-1970#sthash.gXEutOOU.dpuf

The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, the World Wildlife Fund said on Tuesday.

...

The main reasons for declining populations were the loss of natural habitats, exploitation through hunting or fishing, and climate change. - See more at: http://news.asiaone.com/news/science-and-tech/global-wildlife-populations-down-half-1970#sthash.gXEutOOU.dpufThe main reasons for declining populations were the loss of natural habitats, exploitation through hunting or fishing, and climate change.

The main reasons for declining populations were the loss of natural habitats, exploitation through hunting or fishing, and climate change.

I spoke with a man who lives deep in California's drought about how bad it's gotten there and how he was cutting back on watering his garden to help.

Later in the conversation, he said he was considering selling some unused, undeveloped land he had. He didn't need the money, but was tired of paying property taxes on it and hoped he could sell it to someone who'd build another gas station or something. I brought up the contradiction that land development (the paving of the land with asphalt, construction, plus all the mining, manufacturing, transportation and other work that goes into enabling the development) would contribute far more to the drought than any reduction in watering his garden.

He gave a nervous chuckle and didn't seem to know what to think. Pretty soon he mentioned the local sports team and we resumed a more normal conversation.

The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, the World Wildlife Fund said on Tuesday. - See more at: http://news.asiaone.com/news/science-and-tech/global-wildlife-populations-down-half-1970#sthash.gXEutOOU.dpufThe world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, the World Wildlife Fund said on Tuesday. - See more at: http://news.asiaone.com/news/science-and-tech/global-wildlife-populations-down-half-1970#sthash.gXEutOOU.dpuf

The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, the World Wildlife Fund said on Tuesday. - See more at: http://news.asiaone.com/news/science-and-tech/global-wildlife-populations-down-half-1970#sthash.gXEutOOU.dpuf

The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, the World Wildlife Fund said on Tuesday. - See more at: http://news.asiaone.com/news/science-and-tech/global-wildlife-populations-down-half-1970#sthash.gXEutOOU.d

The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, the World Wildlife Fund said on Tuesday. - See more at: http://news.asiaone.com/news/science-and-tech/global-wildlife-populations-down-half-1970#sthash.gXEutOOU.dpuf

The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, the World Wildlife Fund said on Tuesday. - See more at: http://news.asiaone.com/news/science-and-tech/global-wildlife-populations-down-half-1970#sthash.gXEutOOU.dpuf

The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, the World Wildlife Fund said on Tuesday. - See more at: http://news.asiaone.com/news/science-and-tech/global-wildlife-populations-down-half-1970#sthash.gXEutOOU.dp

The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, the World Wildlife Fund said on Tuesday. - See more at: http://news.asiaone.com/news/science-and-tech/global-wildlife-populations-down-half-1970#sthash.gXEutOOU.dpuf

The world populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles fell overall by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010, far faster than previously thought, the World Wildlife Fund said on Tuesday. - See more at: http://news.asiaone.com/news/science-and-tech/global-wildlife-populations-down-half-1970#sthash.gXEutOOU.dpuf

Thinking Effectively About Culture

I've really struggled to talk to a lot of my friends and family about our culture in an effective way, and that's made it hard to convey why I want to create or be part of something different.  One or just a few conversations are not much time to discuss such rich topics. I needed a lot of quiet time for introspection and reflection before I even began to really change how I felt, and I had to read lots of essays or parts of books repeatedly.

I've also struggled with what kind of writings or interviews to share with interested friends - most people have limits on how many deeply held beliefs they're willing to challenge at one time, and I'm just happy when that limit is above 0.

One author I've followed, Ian Welsh, has written a lot on culture and power, including how power is manifested in finance, war, propaganda, and so on. He just collected several short essays together that summarize pretty well what I believe, so I'm sharing them here. Of course, there's lots of interesting stuff not covered, but I thought it was worth sharing. If you read them, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts whether you agree or not (especially if not). A few other resources are at the bottom.

From ianwelsh.net:

I will be starting a new series on technology and its effect on society.  Before I do so I want to take readers through some of my previous writing on ideology and character, and how they help form the societies we live in.  Taking the time to read these articles (a short book’s worth), should vastly improve your understanding of the world and the articles to come.  It should be worth your time even if you read the articles when they were published, as at the time they lacked both context and commentary, and were not collated to be read together so that the connections were obvious.

Baseline Predictions for the Next 60 Years

While not an article about ideology, this is an article about where our current ideology and character are going to take us: to the brink of disaster and possibly beyond, while continuing to impoverish and disempower larger and larger segments of the human race.  This might be a slightly optimistic piece: there’s some reason to believe our actions in the world’s oceans could destroy the oxygen cycle, and if so, events will be much, much worse.
What an Ideology Is, and Why We Need a New One
Too many people think ideologies are some airy-fairy nonsense and that they are pragmatic men and women operating on common sense and facts.  Such people are amongst the greatest of all fools: our entire society is based on interlocking ideologies; the primary of which are neo-liberalism, capitalism, human rights and socialism.  It is not obvious, nor was it obvious to most societies that have ever existed, for example, that food should be distributed based on money; nor that ideas could be property.  How we organize things; our particular ideas about markets, their role and who should lead us, are ideological.  If we want to change society, we need to be able to control markets so they aren’t producing a world that makes us sick, unhappy, and, in increasing numbers, dead.
How to Create a Viable Ideology
We may look at current trends and realize that if we don’t reverse them, and reverse them fast, billions will suffer or die; but creating an ideology which can reverse them requires us to understand what makes an ideology viable and powerful.  An ideology which does not create believers willing to die; and to kill, on its behalf, will lose to those that do.  An ideology which cannot prevent people from selling out; from betraying, will definitely lose in the current world, where there is so much money available at the top to simply buy out (for billions) those who create something new, so that something new can be turned into nothing but a monetization scheme.
Our Theory of Human Nature Predicts Our Policies
The ideas of an ideology determine how our society is run, and of those ideas, none is more important than what we think human nature is.
A Theory of Human Nature Suited to Prosperity and Freedom
If we are trying to create a prosperous, free world, our policies must be based in a theory of human nature that is both true enough and which leads to policies which create widespread affluence and human freedom.
Character Is Destiny
Ideology and character are intertwined.  Character determines what we do and what we don’t do, and how we do it.  The character of large numbers of people determines the destinies of nations and of the world itself.  If we want to make the world better (or worse), we must change our own character.  Those who fail to understand how character arises will never change the world except accidentally.
How Everyday Life Creates Our Character
and, as noted, our destiny.  I always laugh at radicals who want more schooling, because schooling is where people learn to sit down, shut up, give the approved answers and do what they’re told.  Working life, as an adult, continues this process of learned powerlessness and acquiescence and even in our consumptive and political lives we continue the trend: choosing from choices offered to us, rather than producing what we actually need.
How Everyday Life Creates Sociopathic Corporate Leaders
Those who lead our corporations control most of our lives, even more than the government, because they set the terms by which we live, die, and can afford the good things in life. Our daily life is prescribed by them, from how we work to what we eat, to what we entertain ourselves with.  We need, therefore, to understand the character traits our leaders are chosen for, and how that choosing works.  If we can’t learn to create and choose better leaders, we will never have a better world.
The Difference Between Ethics and Morals
If we want an ideology that tells us how to create a better world, and people with the character to create that world, we must understand what sort of people they should be.  Key to doing this is the understanding of how they treat other people: the people they know, and more importantly, the people they don’t.
The Fundamental Feedback Loop for a Better World
The shortest article on this list, this is also one of the most important and speaks directly to how money directs behaviour and to matters of choosing our leaders.
Living in a Rich Society
It’s been so long since parts of the West were truly prosperous that people forget what it’s like, and forget that it creates a different type of person than a scarcity society.
Late 19th and Early 20th Century Intellectual Roots
Lived experience creates character, character feeds into ideology. It’s worth looking at how various themes of the Victorian era were created by those who lived through that time and the time that came before.
What Confucius Teaches Those Who Want a Better World
Amongst those who have created powerful ideologies Confucius is in the first rank, Confucianism having been the most important ideology of the most populous and advanced region of the world for most of the last two thousand or more years.  Confucius was very aware of what he was trying to do, had a theory of human nature, and a theory of character and we would be fools not to learn from him.

A few other writings I've enjoyed recently:

• A Tale Rewritten: An essay by John Michael Greer where he rewrites Tolkien's Lord of the Rings as if Frodo had turned down the journey to destroy the ring, as an analogy for our society's collective failure to deal with the systemic challenges to our way of life. Pretty incisive.
• Sex at Dawn: A book describing how sex is treated very differently in many other cultures around the world and in the distant past; Specifically: it's not just about pleasure or procreation, but also about creating large numbers of intense social bonds. It demonstrates that polyamory is actually the most natural human condition, and that this is really effective in rearing emotionally healthy children when you have group or community child rearing. It's also effective in group decision making, as people tend to look after the group rather than themselves when they have so many and such deep emotional/sexual ties with others. There are so many upsides to changing how we think of marriage and child rearing - the book and conversations with new friends from Earthaven have really changed how I think about the kind of family I want to have, how I want to relate to my lover, and much more.

I included Sex at Dawn in the list because I think it's important to show what alternatives to our culture could look like - we're not just stuck trying to make small changes to the culture we have; if we rethink enough, we can live much more happily, healthfully, and securely - secure from violence, hunger, loneliness, 'lesser of two evils' thinking, and more. Be wary: a friend of mine gave the book to a married couple, and one partner loved it and the other felt very threatened. It challenges a lot of ideas at once. If you're the sort of person who finds this exhilarating, I definitely recommend the book!

There's more to what I'm working to understand than just this cultural change: it's also important that we learn to relate to the natural environment, to the things we physically depend on for our way of life, in a healthier way. But this 'healthy culture' thread is a major component, so I hope you find these essays worth your time.

Greening the Desert with Permaculture

A few weeks ago, I spoke with a family member about poor soil management practices I was seeing in central California. He didn't seem to appreciate how much better we could do, so I wrote this letter in response.

Hey [family member],

I've been thinking about our conversation a week or two ago, where I mentioned all the poor land management practices out here and you responded that this area, Bakersfield California, used to be a desert and so would always quickly return to that without constant upkeep by humans.

Figuring out how to permanently reverse decertification has actually been something I've been studying these past few months - it's a major application of permaculture techniques and principles in highly arid areas around the world, especially ones with miserable soil quality and a history of overgrazing, toxification, and other misuse by humans.

[Just to be clear - permaculture is about much more than food production or land reclamation, but I'll just be describing that aspect here.]

Just as humans have permanently degraded large areas of once-fertile land, such as the 'fertile crescent' of Iraq that unconscious cultures turned into desert a few millennia ago and which hasn't yet recovered, we can do the opposite too when we learn to work with nature. Here are some pretty cool examples from around the world -

Greening the Desert in Jordan


This is the first of 4 videos about Geoff Lawton in Jordan right near the Dead Sea. As he describes, their soil is incredibly dry and salty. He describes how with competent water catchment and planting techniques, he and his team continually surprised the local farmers and agriculture academics, successfully growing food where they thought it was impossible!

I studied precisely the techniques he discusses, though with plants appropriate to western North Carolina.

Here's Lawton's website.

Greening the Desert in Saudi Arabia


The Al Baydha project in Saudi Arabia is reclaiming land where it doesn't rain for a long time and, when it does, it flash-floods and none of the water is retained. This happens when the soil becomes very compacted and doesn't soak in water, and when there are no or few plants or fungi to hold the water - the water just runs quickly over the ground, as it does with asphalt. This project is younger than the Jordan one, but they've still made great progress in slowing down the water when it rains, allowing them to trap it and use it to begin planting trees and re-green the area.

It turns out trees encourage rain fall - I was shocked to learn this! And so one of this project's goals is to increase rain fall in the area, not just to capture more of what comes down.

Greening the desert in New Mexico
This article's author, Dan Smith, met with the leaders of both the Jordan and Saudi Arabia projects and discusses how similar New Mexico's situation is to there's. When he describes the impact humans have had in the US, it makes the desert seem like less of a 'force of nature' and something that humans can really affect, for good or ill:

"A secondary reason for the situation [intense wildfires] is that the entire ecology of New Mexico has been abused and degraded for hundreds of years, and on arguably a larger scale than most US states, leaving it vulnerable to the weather shocks of climate change and drought. These days, many worry about the so-called mega drought, which seems always on the horizon. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the environment of the southwest United States and New Mexico was systematically raped and pillaged, but the abuse began in many respects before the mining or deforestation that occurred later. It began with the importation of European cattle and sheep in the 16th century and 17th century under Spanish colonial rule."

He uses the same landscaping, water-trapping, and other techniques as those used in Jordan and Saudi Arabia and is seeing good results!

Managing water flow on a small scale

Before and After Pictures from Around the World
This article contains many more examples, but here are some pictures from it that show the impact permaculture-thinking can have:

One person's yard in Massachussetts:

2004

2011

The Loess Plateau in China:

 

1995

2009

1995

2009

1995

2009

Follow this link to the original article for more examples from Niger, Ethiopia, Australia, and others.

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I hope this shows the value of what I'm studying - desertification, water pollution, and habitat destruction don't have to be permanent. Permaculture thinking has another crucial advantage - creating these natural human habitats allows humans to live happily with sufficient clean food, water, housing, and tools without fossil fuel use. We don't need industrial mining, agriculture, and manufacturing to live happily.

I talk to a lot of people who don't like fracking, coal mining, and other damaging industrial practices, but few people are willing to live without the energy and products they provide. Permaculture projects like these above are what will truly allow us to transition to a sustainable way of life and end fracking forever - or live happily after the fracking bubble collapses and energy prices and food prices spike. 

Love,
Will

PS One other clarification - when I mention 'permanent' ecosystems here, I mean that the ecosystems we foster will be able to persevere without intensive human help by some future date.

Earthaven's Guiding Principles

Earthaven's guiding principles are pretty special and worth sharing here to show that Earthaven is not just a bunch of people living in the woods - they're part of a movement.

Statements of Principle in the Council Hall
The Council Hall is the central public meeting space at Earthaven. We host several regular public events here, including potluck dinners, farmer's markets, dances, yoga, and others.

Earthaven's Council Hall

Every other Sunday, the governing body meets inside the Council Hall. All the chairs are moved into a circle in the middle of the room. Signs stating Earthaven's goals/ideals are permanently posted in a circle around the roof of the main room as a constant reminder to the governing body of what they're all here for.