(This story/scenario was written as part of the preparation for the visioning exercise for Bowen In Transition, the local Bowen Island, BC chapter of the Transition Initiative, which is helping communities all over the world to prepare for the threat of energy, economic, and ecological collapse, and to transition to a post-cheap-oil, post-global-industrial-economy, post-stable-climate future. The visioning exercise is a collective collaboration to imagine how these crises will affect the local community, and what could be done now and in the near future to prepare for and adapt to these crises and increase local resilience. I’ve written this story because I think there’s a risk that those in my community may significantly underestimate the severity of the challenges the world will soon face, and hence how much work we need to do on our little (4 mile-by-5 mile, 3800 people, three miles west of Greater Vancouver) island to be ready, and to change. They will likely find my scenario too pessimistic, too dire for their liking. We’ll see I guess. I’m not prescribing solutions here, especially as the crises become more complex and start cascading into each other: This is the work that our Visioning Team, and then the Transition Working Groups, will have to do. I’ve therefore left the story unfinished, and if we want it to have a happy ending, I think we’ve got our work cut out for us.)

At first we hardly noticed the changes. The price of gasoline went up, but we were used to that. It hit $1.50 and then $2 a litre. Because of the Canadian taxes and the American subsidies, at this point Canadians started flocking across to border to buy it for only US$5.50 per gallon, $1.50 less than what we were paying in Canada.

The Americans then started the first rationing — those with Canadian licence plates were restricted to just four gallons per purchase. It was a bit ironic, considering how much oil was flowing from the accursed Alberta Tar Sands into the US. They were, in a sense, restricting us from buying back our own oil!

We had always expected that the government would just let “the market” deal with the Peak Oil problem. We were told that if there was a shortage, prices would rise, which would both reduce demand and encourage innovation to find new sources for oil, and new alternatives.

But “the market” didn’t help at all. The demand for oil proved to be inelastic, and the rise in prices hardly dinted demand at all. After all, most of us just filed our expense reports with our employers, who reimbursed us for our gasoline costs and then wrote the soaring costs off as a tax deduction. And the low price for oil in the first decade of the 21st century had so suppressed the profitability of new oil exploration, that when the prices skyrocketed all that happened was that governments, short-term thinkers to a fault, yielded to the pressure from corporations (and taxpayers) to deregulate and increase subsidies to Big Coal and Big Nuclear and indemnify them from environmental laws. The “green” alternatives — solar, wind, biothermal — turned out, as George Monbiot had warned in Heat, not to be plentiful enough, no matter what the price, to have much impact on the growing oil shortage.

So we were a bit surprised when the government, despite the howls from corporations and citizens alike, began to introduce rationing. Some of us remembered 1973 and 1979, when, due to constraints of supply from the Middle East, the refineries ran out of oil and gasoline stations, unable to get it at any price, simply shut their doors, regularly, sometimes for weeks at a time. There were long lineups for gas then, but at least we could buy it when we waited long enough, and the price wasn’t too bad either. Heating oil subsidies, back then, were increased to ensure no one froze in the winter.

The first stage of the new 21st century government rationing was a bit like that. We were restricted to how much gasoline we could buy per day, and on which days of the month we could buy it. Tax credits to compensate residents for the doubling of heating oil costs were introduced.

But this time, that wasn’t enough. This time, the drop in oil production and availability wasn’t temporary or political, it was real, an economic fact. The huge surge in Asian demand had pushed OPEC countries to force as much oil as possible out of exhausted wells, and accelerated the collapse of supply when the big wells just ran out, and the technology to find new, more expensive oil supplies proved to be both prohibitively expensive and horrifically environmentally dangerous.

The second stage of government rationing was much more severe. Rationing coupons, like those used in wars and depressions, were printed, and they applied not only to oil but also to selected high-energy-consuming products (some foods, clothing, and household products and most pharmaceuticals, electronics, furniture, appliances, and cosmetics), to all forms of transportation and energy consumption, and to all imported goods, since these required lots of oil to bring to market (NAFTA, already faltering, was an early casualty of Stage 2 rationing).

Given the fierce anti-government sentiment of the time, especially in the US, and the propensity of rich North Americans for buying their way out of (or around) inconvenient regulations, complex avoidance schemes thrived, and a huge black market for these products arose. Much of the outrage over the rationing resulted not from the rationing itself, but from the fact that governments were unable to enforce it equitably. Gasoline pumps had slow-release valves and cutoff timers installed. Thermostats had maximums and minimums set, and rations on daily energy use per household, after which energy was simply cut off for six-hour periods. Mandatory per-employee business travel limits were imposed, along with a 100% surtax on airplane travel.

But abuses abounded, and many citizens openly bragged about how they had skirted the restrictions. In impoverished areas, hidden or inaccessible to government inspectors, illegal gas pumps popped up to exploit the high prices and the desperation of big energy users, and they ignored the rations. Contractors found ways to reset and bypass thermostat restrictions. Counterfeit ration coupons were everywhere. Private airplane and jet owners “forgot” to log passenger information. And with a whisper in the right ear, almost any amount of anything could be purchased, without coupons, from the public used-goods markets that had sprung up (since used goods were exempt) — if one paid enough.

Not surprisingly, it was the poor, the ignorant, the sick, and the honest, who suffered most.

The Stage 1 rationing did not have a major impact on those of us living on Bowen Island, despite our dependence on imports from the mainland for virtually everything we needed to live. There was enough accumulated wealth on the Island to weather the storm. The distance from our Island to the mainland was so small that most of us, even those who commuted to work by car and ferry each day, were not spending all that much on gasoline anyway. And our climate meant that our heating costs, by Canadian standards, were modest and our air conditioning costs negligible.

Stage 2 was a different matter, however.

In addition to rationing all Bowen residents (and visitors) to three round-trip ferry trips per week, Stage 2 effectively doubled the price of the ferry for automobiles, while keeping pedestrian and passenger fares unchanged. It also halved the number of scheduled ferry crossings per week. This was initially cheered by Bowen’s “dark Greens”, but it outraged the 50% of Islanders who commuted daily to the mainland to work, and raised doubts, concerns, and finally protests, that Bowen would end up being abandoned by all except wealthy retirees, because working Islanders simply could not afford to live here anymore.

To our astonishment, while rising supply and drop in demand caused prices for smaller homes and lots on the Island to plummet, losing half their value in two short years, the prices of estate homes and large lots held firm — almost the opposite of what we, in our Official Community Plan, were striving to achieve. We were so small and extraordinary, and the supply of global billionaires looking for idyllic places to retire (and/or launder illegal money) was so large, that the desire for oceanfront mansions on estate lots on our little island never waned.

The businesses on Bowen, faced with an exodus of residents and soaring costs for their products, began to fold. Construction, for years the lifeblood of livelihoods on the island (and of many contractors who worked mainly on the island), came to an almost complete halt. Because so little of Bowen was arable, the soaring price of imported food could not be offset by increased local production. Owners of large (and older, energy-leaking) properties were hard hit by the energy rationing, and many had to shut off parts of their homes over the winter.

A few things helped us cope as the situation deteriorated. The tourist industry stayed healthy, since the two million residents of nearby Greater Vancouver, enjoined from long-distance travel, walked, biked, back-packed and hiked our island in ever-increasing numbers, though most were self-sufficient and bought little during their visits. Much of the smaller-sized property on the island became affordable for the first time in decades. We had sufficient water for our needs, unlike many in the world who relied on importing theirs. We were significantly more physically fit than most North Americans, which helped wean us off our cars as these became unaffordable luxuries, and we had evolved a long-standing culture of generosity. And the exceptional skill, knowledge, imagination and intelligence of Bowen natives was harnessed, largely through the Bowen In Transition initiative, to begin the task of reinventing the Island as a place that was at least somewhat self-sufficient and sustainable, and resilient to whatever was to come next.

So by the time of what would come to be called the Slow Collapse, we’d been working on our Transition programs for nearly a decade, and we had community-based initiatives underway in nine areas, being stewarded by nine very active working groups of Bowen Islanders:

• Energy working group: initiated conservation and energy re-fit programs, and large-scale wind farm and mountaintop solar array
• Food working group: established six large community gardens and a food delivery cooperative
• Transportation working group: established a community-based bus and water taxi service, and a free taxi service run by retirees
• Livelihood working group: created Enterprise Bowen, a co-op business that grew to employ 10% of the island’s workforce in twenty innovative lines of business that previously didn’t exist on the island (or in some cases at all)
• Waste and water working group: developed an on-island organics composting program, recyclables pickup service, and water conservation program
• Local finance working group: established “Invest in Bowen” program with thirty investment funds that attracted 60% of retired residents’ savings and invested them in mortgages, businesses and co-ops right on the island; initiated Bowen Bucks, a new local currency
• Building working group: initiated four co-housing developments to make housing more affordable and dense on the island; established a local recycled building materials depot
• Education working group: created a “virtual high school” (previously high school students had to take the ferry to Vancouver to continue their education after grade nine); participated in establishing the Gulf Islands University; created an Unschooling Co-op
• Youth working group: leased and managed a fleet of three small electric buses specifically for travel to youth-oriented events; developed the Apprenticeship Bowen program; participated in the BC-wide First Home program for first-time homeowners

Just as were starting to become more resilient through these and other programs, we were hit with the Ten Crises, during what came to be known as the Slow Collapse: over a period of twenty years, we had to cope with:

1. The Rotating Blackouts: A global phenomenon as oil supplies began to run low. Started with 6-hour blackouts and brownouts, but then they increased in frequency and duration, sometimes lasting three days or more.
2. The Debt Crisis and Currency Collapse: As debt-holders began to realize that borrowers, individual, corporate and governments, simply would never be able to repay their crushing debts, defaults became common, bankruptcies soared, and lenders who were unable to collect on their investments failed. When large nations started to default, some other countries stopped accepting the defaulting nations’ currencies, leading to a whole series of currency collapses.
3. The Long Deflation and the Long Depression: Prices, especially for real estate and automobiles, dropped for ten successive years, aggravating the debt crisis and plunging the world into another depression. Wages also dropped, year after year, to half what they had been a decade earlier. Unemployment soared and half of the 500 largest companies in the world folded.
4. The Bankruptcy of State and Local Governments: While many national governments teetered, their regional and municipal governments simply stopped functioning, laying off all their employees and leaving citizens to manage health, education, roads and other services themselves. On Bowen, the ferry service was shut down entirely when the province ran out of money and laid off 90% of its workers.
5. The Failed State Crises: Dozens of countries drifted into lawlessness as federal governments became incapable of operating. The two biggest were Mexico, which fell to the drug cartels after the Corn Drought, and China, which brought a charismatic leader to power in a coup after exports collapsed, fuel ran out and desertification devastated the country.
6. The Energy Riots: All over the world, but especially in the US, citizens took to the streets when oil became so scarce they had to abandon their cars and shutter their homes. Rogue operators began cutting public forests for fuel and building materials.
7. The Great Pandemics: The first major impacts of climate change were tropical diseases and pests that moved to temperate areas and wiped out factory farms, boreal forests, fish and monoculture grain crops in successive waves.
8. The Food & Pharma Riots: Areas that depended either on food imports or on oil-based fertilizers and chemicals to sustain their crops saw shelves emptied and farmlands turned to dust and abandoned. And other petrochemicals, notably pharmaceutical products, also became scarce. Angry citizens dumped their unaffordable cars in government parking lots and set them ablaze in protest. Operating food banks became the principal remaining activity of many governments.
9. The Vanishing Forests Crisis: As insect pests eradicated the boreal forests, desertification and rampant illegal logging destroyed the tropical forests. When citizens saw photos from space showing how rapidly the forests, ice caps and glaciers were disappearing, the grim reality of climate change finally sunk in. Panic, radical political movements, nihilistic religions and large-scale depression and suicide became endemic.
10. The Year of the Great Storms and Water Riots: As climate change rapidly altered the face of the land everywhere, huge shifts in ocean currents and wind patterns produced a self-reinforcing pattern of massive storms, which leveled major cities, flooded coastal areas and polluted much of the world’s remaining fresh water supply.

Although the Slow Collapse hit us hard, it would have been much worse without our Transition programs. By the time of the big blackouts, we already had a blackout contingency plan in place, and we’d even done some island-wide rehearsals, complete with simultaneous potluck barbecues in eight communities around the island. But when the blackouts got longer and more frequent, the contingency plan had to be completely revamped.

When the US began reneging on debt repayments, and its currency slid, Asian and Mideastern nations refused to accept their currency, creating a new “basket” currency as the global standard. The US dollar then plummeted, and the Canadian dollar followed. Imports from Asia largely ceased at this point, creating scarcities of many manufactured goods, but an opportunity for new domestic manufacturers to fill the void. When Asian nations outbid the US for Canada’s filthy Tar Sands oil, which had become a critical source of supply as all the major oil fields were exhausted, the US threatened military action if Canada didn’t honour the North American energy security agreement that had been part of the abandoned NAFTA. Our Bowen Bucks began to be worth more than Canadian dollars, a Gift Economy began to take hold on the island, and fortunately we were a small enough community to know who and what was, and wasn’t, credit-worthy.

The Long Deflation and the Long Depression were the inevitable result of the debt crisis and the end of cheap oil. People everywhere just stopped buying, as they waited for prices to fall further and struggled to pay off pre-deflation mortgages and huge debts with lower take-home pay. When foreigners started buying up local real estate at bargain prices, governments, including BC’s, banned non-resident purchases of property, driving prices lower still. Although we had created two hundred jobs on Bowen through our entrepreneurial co-op, now we needed to create two thousand more.

When the provincial government almost went bankrupt, it shut all “non-essential” activities, including the (essential to us) provincial ferry service. Our local transport initiatives were designed to save energy and reduce car dependence, not replace the ferry entirely. But with many of the daily commuters to the mainland laid off, volume was way down on the ferry, so finding ways to replace it entirely were not as daunting as they would have seemed before. And with such a highly-educated citizenry (many of whom were either retired or unemployed), taking over the local schools from the province wasn’t that hard either. A bigger challenge was health (there were no hospitals and few doctors on the island), and we had to scramble to initiate self-diagnosis and self-treatment facilities, a fund to encourage doctors to relocate here, and a volunteer ambulance service. Taking over our own road maintenance was also going to be a huge challenge.

When Mexico and China failed, the oceans filled with boat people and, being an island, we got our share of them. Vancouver got hundreds of thousands, and anti-immigrant sentiment there got really ugly.

Because most of our electricity came from hydroelectric power, we were not affected as badly as most by the energy scarcity, and there were no riots or people freezing to death here, or in Vancouver. And being on an island, timber poachers found our abundance of forest just too hard to get at. But with blackouts commonplace and no oil for generators or oil heaters, a disturbing amount of forest was “disappearing” and the only possible culprits were we islanders ourselves.

Likewise, with no large-scale farms, we escaped relatively unscathed from the crop and factory farm pandemics. But we were very worried about the risk of insects to our forests, as several new species of beetles had devastated much of Canada’s northern boreal forest — millions of acres of trees lost. Would three miles of ocean be enough of a barrier to keep them away from our island? And while the pandemics had (so far) few human victims, they had become so common that a panic mindset had set in, especially in port cities like Vancouver. Some of our “dark Greens” even suggested establishing the island as a permanent quarantine zone.

And while we didn’t have rioting here over food or pharmaceuticals, the skyrocketing cost of food caused great hardship for many (our Bowen food bank was helping as many as half of all residents now), and because of the shortage of prescription pain-killers, illegal substitutes were a huge black market activity, and addiction was becoming a major problem among older residents.

We were not immune to the Great Storms, either. Hundreds of homes were damaged by winds and fallen trees, and storms often left our roads impassable. Home insurance was now unavailable (all the insurance companies had closed up shop when the Great Storms resulted in claims many times greater than their reserves), so many islanders pitched in after each storm to repair structural damage or resettle the affected residents. After the great Seattle earthquake, some wondered if it made any sense to live here at all. But where else was there to go? And at least we had fresh water.

Transition was no longer a local initiative or a movement — it had become a way of life. We had thought that what we mostly had to worry about was the end of cheap energy, but we ended up facing a lot more — and more severe — crises than just energy shortages. The problem was that there was no “problem” — something that could be fixed quickly once and for all with the right “solution” — but rather a complex, lasting predicament, of cascading crises with no end in sight. We were exhausted, tired of dealing with catastrophes and threats and permanent disruptions to the way of life we loved, the way of life we had come here to enjoy.

The world had become much smaller again, as globalization abruptly ended and society once again began to revolve around local communities. And although we watched anxiously as the flood of refugees pushed the city of Vancouver, just a few minutes boat-ride away, to the breaking point, we were lucky. We had prepared. We lived in a paradise. We were small enough to be agile. We had an exceptional citizenry, with extraordinary talents, knowledge and creativity. And we had each other.

wash up before eating: photo out my kitchen window last week

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

Writing Our Own Story: Dmitri Orlov writes:

It would seem that, if you are a certain kind of popular author, a good way to ensure that the future comes to resemble your worst nightmares is to write a novel about them. This has certainly worked for Orwell, Huxley and Kafka. But there is also an alternative: compose your own fiction instead of accepting anyone else’s, then go ahead and turn it into reality. A good first step might be to write a short story… Don’t hope, don’t wish, don’t dream, but do write your own fiction and use it to create a present that works for you. Invent places for yourself and for those you care about in your stories about the future, and then go ahead and live in them.

I’m in the process of writing a story/scenario for Bowen in Transition, the Transition initiative in our local community, entitiled What Happened When the Oil Ran Out. It’s a Long Emergency story, one that depicts a crisis that doesn’t happen abruptly (like the “news” our media allege to keep us informed about), but rather emerges over a period of years. And it’s not a story of market-driven hyperinflation of oil prices, but rather a story of rationing, of oil and then all the goods and services that depend on it. It’s not a story of sacrifice or scarcity, but of relearning about sufficiency. It’s a story as old as civilization, and one that will, I believe, dominate the history of our civilization in the decades to come. It might also be my submission to Dark Mountain Issue 2.

The Death of Movements: Encouraging Divergent Approaches: One of my new favourite bloggers and fellow Dark Mountaineer, Antonio Dias riffs off of John Michael Greer’s article about dissensus – the encouragement of divergent rather than convergent approaches to deal with crisis. This is nature’s way of being prepared to adapt, and it’s also worked well historically for humans in crisis. Antonio writes:

Embracing dissensus implies a process of actively and passively looking for and accommodating to what might be the opposite of resilience: a letting go, an acceptance of the chaotic not only as the true state of our condition; but as the only source of a way past our condition. You hit what you’re aiming at. When you search for stability, or even resilience, in a time of chaotic change and a closing off of options you will get stability, the only stability left: death. Your resilience will keep you tied to this course until there is no other option. Dissensus at such times may be the only way forward…

We tend to think nostalgically of the propaganda, the mythology of movements instead of their reality. There were a few genuine mass-movements that did accomplish laudable goals, but the reality for most people was of being enveloped by the illusion of solidarity in struggle while they were being marginalized further and prepped for destruction…. Zoom out to the level of mass-extinction and global collapse and show us a movement that has had any useful impact.

It’s way past time to be nostalgic for the lack of a coherent message to coalesce a movement around. Instead of bemoaning the death of movements we need to see this as a welcome development. When the forces of Mono- – mono-everything – are joined together in a dance of death this is the time to embrace dissensus. Not as an ultimate paean to individuality, another shibboleth of modernity. Let us realize that even views, practices, and characteristics which go against everything we – in our own individuality, believe – may hold the key to a way forward. Not in any predictable, plan-able way, but within the unknowable twists and turns of evolution. This does free us from the need to lash out at opponents simply because we disagree with them, but it also imposes a new burden; the need to appreciate acceptance when things do not go our way.

Mourning for the World: Also from Antonio, an analysis of how we try to make sense, often foolishly, of events like the BP Oil Spill, and fall victim to the very human error of short-termism. Excerpt:

If we are to learn from what makes our moment unique: The conjunction of a tattoo of blows against the arrogance of hubris, coupled with a nearly global reach of information; so that we are both being hit from all sides by signs of collapse and have the knowledge that the same is occurring everywhere around the globe. These all lead to the slim chance of avoiding the exceptionalist traps that have always befallen those witnessing the fall of their city, their state, even their globe-girding empire before. High on the lists of lessons we may be the first to have the ability to take to heart is this one: Inevitable tragedy has its own timetable. It’s not ours to decide when the inevitable will befall us or even how it may come. Learning to set aside these reactions might free us to find unprecedented responses to our culminating predicament.

The list of our disillusions is long. It needs to be longer. It “should” be endless. Only then will we see that all the easy answers have already been tried and never did work. Only then might we find some way to de-rail the Juggernaut, or at least find the dignity to properly mourn for our world.

Pseudo-Activists and Faux Movements: What do 350.org, Greenpeace, WWF and the Sierra Club have in common? Keith Farnish explains that as part of the “mainstream” environmental movement, they have been co-opted by industrial civilization as passive performers of acts of modest, non-threatening, meaningless dissent, and they are now part of the problem they profess to be fighting against.

The Housing Bubble Catch-22: The NYT explains that Obama is trying to walk an impossible line between two responses to the housing crisis: (1) keep propping up prices with zero-interest mortgages and billions in advances and subsidies, or (2) let market prices fall precipitously to where the demand for houses will stabilize naturally. The problem with the first option is that it costs a fortune that is totally unaffordable, it’s unsustainable, and it isn’t working anyway. The problem with the second option is that it would (and eventually inevitably will) crash the entire US (and global) economy, causing massive foreclosures and bankrupting the entire banking industry. Get ready for big-time, long-term price deflation, coming soon to an overextended country near you.

Four Trillion Too Much US Consumer Debt: Ilargi explains that, even at today’s record low interest rates, Americans collectively have $4T more debts than they can possibly hope to sustain at current income levels, and that amount of consumer debt needs to be either repaid, and soon (in which case consumer spending, which drives the whole US economy, needs to contract by up to 30% from current levels, or forgiven (in which case the lenders will all go under). More Catch-22.

LIVING BETTER

Gamestorming: A new book by Dave Gray et al summarizes the essential qualities of a good game, the key elements of good game design, and the main types of games that lend themselves to collaborative and deliberative group activities. Recommended.

Freeconomy: A new global initiative, paralleling the Transition initiative, is trying to create community-based, pay-it-forward, skill-sharing, tool-sharing, caring, money-free economies. Thanks to Tree for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Alberta Tar Sands Pipelines Spring Another Leak: Enbridge, the Canadian company that pipes most of the toxic Tar Sands oil to the US, has been forced to close a second major pipeline when it burst, spilling thousands of gallons of oil in Illinois. A similar leak a couple of months ago spilled a comparable amount of oil into a river in Michigan. Partly in response to the leak, which an industry representative called “not unusual”, oil prices, and the price of Enbridge shares, both rose.

Afghanistan: Another Unpopular, Endless War: A clear majority of Americans want the US out of Afghanistan, now, yet Obama continues to ratchet up US involvement, and continue the torture and civil rights atrocities, in this unwinnable, miserable war. What does this tell you about democracy?

Gates Foundation in Bed With Monsanto: Cementing its “evil empire” reputation, Microsoft’s Gates Foundation, which operates tax-free as a charitable foundation in the US, has invested $23M in a venture with the corporatist scourge and global mega-polluter Monsanto. The goal: push the corporatist globalist industrial agriculture system, profitably, on unwitting and unwilling struggling nations. So much for charity. Thanks to Tree for the link. Tree also points us to a Grist article on just how energy-gulping our industrial agriculture system is.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

A very moving post from Pete McGregor, about the last days of a cat named Ming.

Danny Bhoy on the Australian Fruit Police. Falling down funny. Thanks to Bowen’s Dawn Stewart for the link.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley. A great fall story from Bonnie Stewart.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

From Steve Davis (thanks to Chris Corrigan for the link):

Once long ago, when asked by a reporter if he had a message he wanted the world to hear, Gandhi replied, “My life is my message.” Whether we like it or not, this statement is just as true for you and me today as it was for Gandhi then. Who we are and how we are is the medium through which our message travels. That medium is far richer and truer than what we say in words. 

When we present our material to a group we are facilitating or training, what we’re really presenting is ourselves. Our deepest, thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes, and aspirations come through as an unspoken wave of information that others pick up at a level usually below their conscious awareness. Yet this material influences others more powerfully than mere words. So in a very real way, you are your material, and your life is your message!

From Wendell Berry: “It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.”

elephant weeping at his daily visit to the site where a herd-mate died; from an extraordinary photo essay by roshan patel, published in the journal “the modest proposal”

Four years ago, when I was young, naive and idealistic, I wrote one of my most popular posts, called Ten Things to Do When You’re Blue. I still kinda like its facile advice, but these days, I’m more likely to feel hopeless than sad, more likely to feel as if nothing is ever enough, as if nothing really makes a difference, as if our whole human civilization is unraveling and there is nothing I or anyone can do about it. It’s a different feeling from sadness, and perhaps it needs a different, more complex set of ideas for coping with it. Here’s what I came up with to that end:

1. Give up hope: That’s right, get off the hope/despair roller coaster and realize once and for all it’s hopeless! You should have known when a US presidential candidate won an election on a platform of mere ‘hope’ that it was time to give it up. Derrick Jensen explains how and why to get Beyond Hope:
   

   The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in [Pandora's] box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line… People sometimes ask me, ‘If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?’ The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good… Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation.

   So embrace hopelessness! It’s OK! It makes sense. Read John Gray’s Straw Dogs. He, too, will tell you that it’s hopeless, that “When [the human species] is gone Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.” But that we can, should, must still be intentional, responsible, and joyful.

2. Explore your gifts and passions with someone you love: Get together with someone you love and tell each other what you really care about, what you have real passion for, and what you think really needs to be done in the world, that you think you could actually contribute to usefully, and would really enjoy doing. Then tell each other what you think each other’s gifts to the world are, the things that other person is, in your view, uniquely good at doing. I bet you’ll feel things starting to shift, in ways that are practical, and intentional, instead of just desperately, uselessly hopeful.
3. Be good to yourself: If you’ve been reading the previous points, you should now appreciate that it’s perfectly understandable, even sensible, to feel hopeless. We’re fucked, and you know it, but still you’re doing your part, taking responsibility, doing important work to mitigate or help adapt to the hopeless future we all face, right? So ease off. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Give yourself a break. Pamper yourself. Have a long hot bath by candlelight, with your favourite music playing. Go for a walk in the moonlight, or sleep under the stars. Play something, or just play around, by yourself or with those you love. Have chocolate by the fire. Celebrate the fact that you’re smart enough, informed enough, strong enough, sensitive enough, to feel utterly hopeless. You have to love that!
4. Cry (like an elephant): Research suggests that crying is a natural response to stress and grief, with enormous therapeutic value: “Tears aren’t just salt water; they contain leucine enkephalin, an endorphin that modulates pain, and hormones such as prolactin and adrenocorticotropic hormone, released at times of stress. Tears [might] be the body’s way of flushing out excess stress hormones… a safety valve.” Elephants, with exceptionally large brains and memories, visit the sites of pack-mates’ past deaths or suffering every day for years, to remember and to cry, according to research by Jeff Masson. It’s natural, it feels good, and it’s good for you. So why does our culture not want us to cry when we feel hopeless? Hmmm.
5. Listen to kids talk about what they care about: Kids are hopeless. By that I mean that, until their parents, peers and the education system brainwash them to start planning and hoping for their future, and living inside their heads, they live in the present, without hope. By listening to them we can relearn what it means to live without the need to hope, to just accept and be.
6. Learn to be “present” like wild creatures: Like young children, wild creatures don’t live in hope. They too live in the real world, in the present. They have much to teach us about the First Principles of living, hopelessly: Be generous. Value your time. Live naturally. Learn to be present, your own way — meditation, exercise, walks in the woods — whatever works for you. Hope and hopelessness are both about the future. When you are present, neither has any hold on you.
7. Talk with other hopeless people: We’re all part of the Earth organism, and it’s hopeless for all of us, so acknowledging that and starting to talk about it knowingly and honestly is the first step in making peace with our hopelessness, and with our collective grief. Perhaps it’s time to challenge the taboo in our culture that we must not admit to, or talk about, the hopelessness of our situation, and our feelings of hopelessness. You might start with someone you care about who you haven’t talked with in a long time. Right now, yeah, leave a message if you have to, and persevere. When you do converse, forget about catching up on old news or talking about future plans. Talk about what you’re doing and feeling right now. Including the feelings of hopelessness. Bring them into your present and they’ll bring you into the present in return, and out of the “hopeless” future.
8. Avoid unactionable news and “self-help” books: The media don’t have a clue, and the “news” is all about what has already happened, dumbed down, sensationalized and oversimplified to the point of meaninglessness. And skip the “good news” pap and the technophiles’ gee-whiz “future’s so bright and green I gotta wear shades” new invention news, too. It’s all designed to make you feel hopeful, so you don’t rise up and do something dangerous or appropriate to the worst of the perpetrators who have, in fact, made everything hopeless. And while you’re dispensing with hopeless reading, throw out all those so-called “self-help” books with their glib prescriptions for you how you should live. There are gazillions of them out there, clogging the aisles of bookstores everywhere. Most of their readers will tell you (even as they buy more of them, stupidly, hopefully): They don’t work! Things are the way they are for a reason. You are the way you are for a reason. Accept what is. Appreciate it. Make peace with it. It’s all good. It’s absurd to hope that some stupid book is going to change it. Donate your “self-help” money instead to those who truly embrace hopelessness, like the local homeless people, or your local food bank, or animal rescue centre, or radical activist group. And when you’re picking what to read, choose poetry and stories about the present, not nostalgic or traumatic stories about the past or cautionary tales about the future.
9. Dream: Dreams are alternate realities, and they are realities we can create and control. When you give vent to your imagination, it can manifest, ‘real-ize’ wonderful inventions — works of art, with amazing healing, communicating, inspirational and transformative power. Your dreams are clues to your gift to the world.
10. Fall in love: I have no advice at all on how to do this. All I know is that it works. It’s risky and addictive, for sure, and for most of us its most blissful effects wear off too fast. But nature has given us this wonderful state of foolish, invincible, chemical-induced grace, and it makes us immune to both hope and hopelessness.

I will resist the temptation to rant about things I think are dumb to do when you’re feeling hopeless (like praying, or asking others for help), because that would get me into arguments, and arguments on things like religion and psychiatry are worse than hopeless.

So, if you’ve read this list, I trust you are not feeling better.

After all, it is hopeless.

I‘ve recently finished reading Dark Mountain issue 1, the first publication of the global artists’ collective of the same name, of which I am a member. It’s an astonishing collection (work of 37 different authors) of appreciation and reflection on our civilization’s beginning collapse, and I recommend it without hesitation to anyone who has reached the point of understanding that our unsustainable civilization culture can’t be saved, and is trying to cope with that terrible knowledge. I am working on a submission (a work of fiction, I think) for issue 2.

And if you haven’t yet read the Dark Mountain Manifesto, which started the whole project, please, please do so.

The book begins with a wonderful poem by Rob Lewis that explains the purpose of the whole project: To encourage and enable artists to add their perspective and voice to the scientists and activists and transitioners and new-culture pioneers proclaiming our civilization mad, unsustainable and suicidal, and looking for a better way. “Meanwhile, poor scientist holds extinction | in a palm full of numbers | with nothing but data to howl with.” The artist’s role, indeed responsibility, we assert, is not only to speak out, but to do no work that does not either (a) hold a mirror to our crumbling civilization and show it as it really is (not as the corporatists, technophiles and media portray it), or (b) help us imagine a better culture, a better way to live, now or after civilization’s fall. This work is what founders and editors Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine call “finding the new stories.”

John Michael Greer’s submission to the book is a remarkable review of Robinson Jeffers’ prescient poetry and a re-cap of the environmental ‘movements’ three stages: from recreational through sentimental to apocalyptic environmentalism, all of which have fallen victim to our propensity for anthropocentrism and seeing ourselves as apart from “the environment.” Whereas climate change is a narrative on human power, he explains, peak oil is a narrative on human limitation, and hence is embarrassing to us and gets much less attention in the media, even though it will, along with economic collapse due to “peak debt”, almost certainly stagger our civilization culture well before climate change delivers the final blows.

Louis Jenkins’ lovely poem Wrong Turn begins “You missed your turn two miles back because you weren’t paying attention, daydreaming, so now you have decided to turn here, on the wrong road”, and ends “You are going to have to follow this road to whatever nowhere it leads to.” A great example of the work of holding the mirror to our civilization culture that Dark Mountain is all about.

Paul Kingsnorth’s essay confesses “I don’t have any answers, if by answers we mean political systems, better machines, means of engineering some grand shift in consciousness… What am I to do with feelings like this? Useless feelings in a world in which everything must be made useful… Feelings like this provide no “solutions”… But this is fine; the dismissal, the platitudes, the brusque moving-on of the grown-ups. It’s all fine. I withdraw, you see… I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I am leaving.” The job of the artist is not debate, but truth and imagination. There are others better suited to the debating. If there is still any purpose to debating at all.

The book includes an illuminating discussion that Anthony McCann had with Derrick Jensen, in which Jensen explains the need for a culture of resistance that recognizes that we cannot battle civilization culture on its terms (i.e. through voting, choices of consumption etc.) but rather on our own — what do we really want and how do we get there, who is the enemy, what do we have to do, and what’s stopping us?

Ran Prieur chimes in with a review of the history of previous civilizations, a refutation of the “noble savage” myth, and this insightful statement: “I think the root of civilization, and a major source of human ‘evil’, is simply that we became clever enough to extend our power beyond our empathy.” Our brains evolved, fortunately, to give us the ingenuity to adapt to and survive the ice ages, but such brains are also capable of inventing technologies, and hence weapons, prisons, and empires (all hallmarks of civilizations). This is the point John Gray makes in Straw Dogs. We cannot be other than who we are. Evolution is slow, and the sixth great extinction, which we have unwittingly unleashed, is proceeding at lightning speed.

There is much more, including a beautifully-crafted essay on the history of colonialism by Jay Griffiths, but this will give you an idea of what the book is about.

The non-fictional works in the book succeed, I think (and perhaps necessarily so at this early stage) more than most of the poetry, graphic art, and fictional works. I am impatient for issue 2 of Dark Mountain, which I hope will be much braver, more creative and edgier, without losing the coherence of the essential messages: Pay attention. This is how the world really is, right now. Learn. Prepare yourself and help prepare those you love, especially the young. Become resilient. Be generous. Imagine a better way to live, and experiment now with such imaginings, so that when civilization falls the survivors will have some useful models to go on with.

.     .     .     .     .

Last month I spent nine days at a “new culture” event, which I will tell you much more about in an upcoming post. The event was focused on personal growth and healing in community, self-sufficiently. It got me thinking about how different ‘movements’ are developing different models to cope with the beginnings of civilization’s collapse, but doing so in a completely uncoordinated and largely disconnected manner. I sketched out the diagram I’ve shown above of four such movements and the models they are pursuing:

• The Transition Movement, which is focused on helping us cope better physically in the world, as the triple crises of economic, energy and ecological collapse begin. The essence of this movement is economic generosity — sharing, cooperating, not competing.
• The New Culture Movement, which is focused on helping us cope better socially in the world, as we face endless and endemic violence, war, abuse, cruelty and suffering. The essence of this movement is emotional generosity — caring, empathizing, healing.
• Modern Activism, which is focused on helping us cope better politically in the world, as we face corporatist atrocities, inequity, lies, theft, corruption, media propaganda and the desolation of our natural world. The essence of this movement is courage — relentless, untiring battles with forces of enormous power and wealth, holding actions.
• The Dark Mountain Movement, which is focused on helping us cope better intellectually in the world, as we face an onslaught of useless and meaningless information, distortion and distraction. The essence of this movement is aesthetic and creative generosity — a willingness to hold a mirror to the world to show it as it really is, complex and nuanced and full of intractable challenges, which requires an enormous amount of attention and investigation and deep thought, and the imagination to conceive of better ways to live as our world slips deeper into monoculture, anomie, rigidity and mindless homogeneity.

I’ve drawn these four movements/models as overlapping because, obviously, they are connected: The Gift Economy and Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, for example, are rooted in the New Culture Movement but focus as well on what we can do as activists, and aspects of both Gift Economy and Work That Reconnects are taught as part of Transition Movement training programs. All four movements are also essentially community-based, bottom-up, focused on the local, the land and people and ecosystems of the specific place we love.

What is disconcerting is that there is relatively little awareness among those in the four movements of what the others are doing, and the possible synergies between the models. At the recent New Culture event I attended, for example, almost no one had even heard of the Transition Movement, and none had heard of Dark Mountain. Although most of us will be better suited to work in one or two of these Movements than the others, I believe it’s essential to build better bridges and connections between them, so that we can help and learn from each other.

.     .     .     .     .

Since I’ve read and written about Straw Dogs, and acknowledged that I believe very strongly that our civilization is in its final century, I often get asked why I still bother to write about these movements and models, or about anything at all for that matter. How, people ask me, can I live, and go on, knowing and believing that a horrific collapse is imminent (at least within my grandchildren’s lifetimes) and inevitable?

I guess my answer is that I can’t do anything else but go on. It is in my nature as a human being to do what I must, to focus on the needs (mine and of those I love) of the moment, to do what I do well, what I care about, and what I believe needs to be done. This is what all creatures, I think, do, even when they know, in their hearts, and deep in the calcium of their bones, that it will all, sooner or later, be undone. Life is joyful, and I feel a deep responsibility to future generations and to all-life-on-Earth to do what I can to learn and tell the truth, to mitigate the growing desolation of the Earth that, by my actions and inaction, I am complicit in, and to imagine and convey, as best as I can, how we might have done better, and how we might do better in the future, if we are blessed with the chance.

I think that’s best done cooperatively, collaboratively. That’s why I’m part of the Dark Mountain collective and the Transition Movement. That’s who I am, I guess, now; and what I do.

piwakawaka, photo by Pohangina Pete McGregor

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

A Caveat on Collapse: Most of my readers live (by most standards) affluent lives. I am aware that, for much or even most of the world, who are living on the periphery or entirely outside of industrial civilization, in struggling nations or in sprawling urban ghettos or in abject poverty or in the streets, homeless, the collapse of this civilization will not affect them nearly as much as we fortunate few that have benefited from it. Sometimes it’s too easy to forget this.

Ready for Rationing of Food and High-Energy Products?: Sharon Astyk reviews the history of rationing in affluent nations, and explains why it is the fairest and most palatable way of dealing with the economic, energy and ecological crises we are now beginning to face, as they worsen. She also explains how rationing flies right in the face of everything conservatives (who prefer regressive market-based “pricing” models to control demand) now believe in. I think it’s a prescription for ideological, class (and to some extent gender) war. But the alternative to rationing is much, much worse.

The Coming Scourge of Deflation: Stoneleigh at The Automatic Earth is traveling the globe explaining what chronic deflation means for the way of life in affluent and struggling nations, and why it will be the scenario during the early stages of the Long Emergency. Excerpt:

The debt deflation that is already underway will be so destructive to our lives and societies that we must be aware of what is coming in the short term and what we can do to prepare for it, instead of worrying about a possible inflationary period that may or may not follow afterwards.

[citing Don Lee in the LA Times] When deflation begins, prices fall. At first that seems like a good thing. But soon, lower prices cut into business profits, and managers begin to trim payrolls. That in turn undermines consumers’ buying power, leading to more pressure on profits, jobs and wages — as well as cutbacks in expansion and in the purchase of new plants and equipment. Also, consumers who are financially able to buy often wait for still lower prices, adding to the deflationary trend. All these factors feed on one another, setting off a downward spiral that can be as hard to escape from as a stall in an airplane.

Getting Down to Getting Along?: Vera Bradova is optimistic that there is a major movement — a “contagion” — towards resilience and sustainability afoot that, coupled with growing awareness, knowledge and appropriate technology innovation, will be enough to turn our civilization around, but only if we can learn to get along — to trust, communicate, collaborate and cooperate with each other. I hope she’s right, that that’s enough, and that that’s possible, but I sincerely doubt it. I had the same feeling in the 1960s. And look what we’ve done since then.

Preparing Emotionally for Collapse: Carolyn Baker has started a service called Transition Counseling to help people cope with the early stages of civilization’s collapse. She writes: [thanks to Don Marshall for the link]

Part of me realizes that it is only a matter of time until the lush landscape into which I have immersed my body and soul will be destroyed by climate change. In Colorado, this is already happening with the death of incalculable numbers of trees infected by the pine beetle. Another part of me is also keenly aware of the earth’s magnificent history of regenerating herself. Perhaps in a million years, the landscape in which I sit, that may be destroyed in my lifetime, will metamorphose into another lovely landscape.

Somehow, when I return from my short mountain getaways, I am buoyed; I feel some distance from my despair for the world, and I am renewed in body and soul. It is as if I have spent hours communing intimately with a dear friend. My “friend” remains in my heart. She is still up there in the mountains, and I can return to her, but more importantly, she is in my body, and I take her with me as I do the work I came here to do. Even if she is made extinct, she is within me, and her palpable sacred presence within cannot be made extinct. I am exhilarated by her effervescent, wild fecundity, and my despair recedes. I feel my wildness; industrial civilization has not killed it because my wildness inspires me to find meaning in the madness of a collapsing world.

Eighteen Theses on Sustainability: From Orion, by Eric Zencey. What the term “sustainability” really means.

Despite the Deniers, Global Warming Heats Up: Latest data from NOAA. Thanks to Andrew Campbell for the link.

The Death of the Oceans: The desolated state of the seas, a century after “Peak Fish”, is summed up by Elizabeth Kolbert.

…and The End of the Ice: Thomas Homer-Dixon observes the rapid melting of arctic glaciers and sea-ice, first hand.

Monbiot Dissects the Magical Thinking of Skyscraper Gardens: George Monbiot has once again carefully researched and debunked the latest loony thinking of the green technophiles — that we can grow gardens vertically that will somehow defy the laws of nature. Thanks to Tree for the link, and the one that follows.

US Unemployment, 2007-2010, Graphically: The geography of the Great Recession, so far.

LIVING BETTER

Culturally Responsive Education: The Who’s Teaching Whom Here blog explains how holistic Maori education differs from the institutional model used in industrial societies.

Eckhart Tolle in 10 Minutes: A great CBC interview with Tolle starts with a sum-up of his message and continues with an excellent, concise interview on Presence and living in the Now.

Compostable Packaging: Using mushroom roots and other inedible biomass instead of styrofoam. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Letting Go: A remarkable analysis by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker of the absurd attempt to keep terminally ill North Americans alive at any cost, and what that says about our attitude toward life, as much as our attitude toward death.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

The Real US Government: Glenn Greenwald reviews and expands on the recent WaPo expose of the gigantic, uncontrolled and private US government security bureaucracy that has become much more bloated and excessive since 9/11, and the degree to which now “the separation between government and corporations is non-existent”. That’s the definition of corporatism, or to use its homier name, fascism. Hendrik Hertzberg at the New Yorker also provides insight on what this run-amok security explosion means.

Immigration, the Ticking Time Bomb: As I predicted a few years ago, immigration (and visceral opposition to it) is emerging as one of the two main political issues of the second decade of this century (my other predicted issue was the right to die). The US is rounding up and deporting thousands of travelers on trains near the Canadian border who can’t produce proof of legal US status. France is expelling its Roma peoples. Everywhere xenophobia is on the rise, despite the fact that immigrants, even “illegal” ones, tend to be more peaceful, law-abiding and industrious than natives. Yet even a majority of self-proclaimed liberals over age 30 in most affluent nations approve of the draconian anti-immigrant initiatives popping up everywhere. Scary.

The Koch Brothers War on the Truth: The Koch Industries empire, the second-largest private company in the US and one of the world’s most unrepentant mega-polluters, is spending billions of their ill-gotten gains undermining environmental and climate change education and mitigation programs everywhere they threaten profits.

Will the Corporatists Let Elizabeth Warren Run the CFPB?: The brilliant and anti-corporatist author of The Two Income Trap is favoured by Obama to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But don’t bet on it.

And the Rich Get (Much) Richer: James Surowiecki notes that the top 0.1% of wage-earners in the US now earn more than the bottom 120 million American wage-earners. The power curve is getting steeper, yet Americans still seem determined to allow the ultra-rich to pay lower average percentage taxes than the average wage-earner. Shows the astonishing power of corporatist propaganda.

Defining Prosperity Down: Paul Krugman explains how governments continually lower voter expectations by distorting measures of wealth and well-being and redefining the meaning of terms until, as in Orwell’s 1984, they have no meaning at all.

tree swallow grabbing goose feather for nesting, photo by featherfolio on flickr

FUN AND INSPIRATION

More Igudesman & Joo: I linked to this talented classical music duo’s hilarious Rachmaninoff Had Big Hands before. Check out also: Alla Molto Turka, the related YouTube videos, and their website, where you can buy their DVD. Amazing.

Confidential Corporatist Briefing on Peak Oil. A rolling-on-the-floor-funny summary of Peak Oil, written as a secret briefing to corporatists on how to conceal the truth. Thanks to Sharon Astyk for the link.

Naive questions and foolish answers. Priceless. Part of the remarkable UK-based Anxiety Culture site. Sample:

Naive Question: Is food safe?

Foolish Answer: If manufacturers can’t prevent “traces of nuts” getting into food, then what other contaminants can get in? To restore public faith in the honesty of the food producers, warning labels should be extended to say: “may contain traces of nuts, rat feces, rat urine, rat parts, dead insects, live insects, human effluvia, human skin, human hair, toenails, fingernails and assorted dormant and active bacteria of known and unknown origin.”

Why teachers drink. Thanks to Cheryl for the link.

Dolphin bubbles. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Chris Hardie is discouraged and encouraged.

Greasy Coat Jam.

Sigur Ros play a huge homemade stone marimba.

The Homeless Brother I Cannot Save. An amazing first-person account of trying to track, and help, a mentally ill sibling living on the streets. By Ashley Womble.

The News That Changed Everything. Another first-person account of how the result of a medical test changed a family’s life. By Dan Shapiro.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

A new theory resolves several perplexing problems with existing theories of the universe (and no “strings” attached). But there’s a catch: The new model requires that there be no beginning or end of the universe, or time or space. To those of us who always suspected that Big Bang theory, and the search for the micro and macro limits of the universe, were just Creationism Lite, this is great news. Thanks to Ran Prieur for the link.

George Carlin’s famous 3-minute rant on The American Dream. Thanks to Colleen Wainwright for the link.

From David Foster Wallace (thanks to Sam Mills for the link):

What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit–to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff the reader’s been aware of all the time. And it’s not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It’s that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop … and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.

From James McMurtry, We Can’t Make It Here Anymore (read the whole poem!):

In Dayton, Ohio or Portland, Maine
Or a cotton gin out on the great high plains
That’s done closed down along with the school
And the hospital and the swimming pool
Dust devils dance in the noonday heat
There’s rats in the alley and trash in the street
Gang graffiti on a boxcar door
We can’t make it here anymore.

From the NYT on who we “individuals” really are:

This discovery [of "friendly" viruses in our bodies] is part of a rapidly growing interest in the microbiome — an effort to understand the diversity and complexity of the trillions of organisms living within each of us. The basic exploratory technique is broad-scale DNA sequencing of the genetic contents of the human gut. The result is a significantly different view of who we are.

We are not just the expression of an individual human genome. We are, as Dr. Gordon writes, “a genetic landscape,” a collective of genomes of hundreds of different species all working together — in ways that leave our minds mysteriously free to focus on getting our bodies to the office and wondering what’s for lunch.