Sunday Open Thread – January 21, 2007

Places to See

What I’m planning on writing about soon:

  • The Role of Art and Artists in Social Change: Tomorrow, I think.
  • Experience-Based Decision Making: It seems an obvious choice, until you understand why the alternatives hold sway.
  • Finding & Working With Others to Save the World: Ways to enable billions to sync with us, on their own terms, in their own context, developing their own plan of action, and then connect and collaborate in powerful ways, in experiments and in creating and refining working models in their own self-selected communities, so that they no longer need the systems that are destroying our world.
  • Intentional Community: Related to the above, how a stewardship model might come into effect, evolving to replace the ownership model.
  • How to Be Good (to Yourself): 10 ways to make the struggle happier and more fulfilling.
  • MRSA and Prion Diseases: A greater threat than Poultry Flu?
  • What’s Holding Us Back.


What I’m thinking about:


Finding My Way Home: When I was young I loved to travel. Now, not so much. I’m no longer interested in seeing places as a tourist. There isn’t a city on the planet I have any interest in visiting. Where I live now, on a protected wetland, is as close to a natural home I have ever found, but it is far from wilderness. Wildlands still call to me, not for the photo opportunity but for the possibility that they might be where I was really meant to live, my real home. The ten that interest me most are shown on the map above: Aotearoa, Niugini, Congo, the Alps, the Scandinavian Coast, Kamchatka, Gwaii Haanas, Sonora-Hisatsinom, Amazonia, and Patagonia. Some of these areas are wilderness, and some of them are areas where people could live comfortably without shelter, the way we used to live before civilization, and the way we will have to live when civilization ends. None of them is both – such places aregone and will not return for a long time.

What are you thinking about?

This entry was posted in Collapse Watch. Bookmark the permalink.

11 Responses to Sunday Open Thread – January 21, 2007

  1. David Parkinson says:

    Excitement… I was offered the job of food security coordinator (6 hrs/wk) here (Powell River). So now 6 hours weekly of my time will be defrayed, allowing me to spend lots of time learning to grow food, trying to start up community gardens, develop better food production, processing, storage, & distribution mechanisms here in town. It’s going to be a year in the Gift Economy for me… I’m very happy about the opportunity, even though I’ll be just barely making enough to scrape by.

  2. Evan says:

    I’ve been on a rant about why Americans would use precious resources to heat/cool their stuff in self-storage units and why anybody would dream up this idea to begin with. It really torks me off. Does anyone else think this is crazy, too?

  3. Pearl says:

    What’s holding us back? Recipricating huggers.;)Experienced based decision making sounds good.

  4. Pearl says:

    re: heat/cool stored stuff. I suppose in different humidities wood and paper degrades so climate control would maintain.

  5. janet says:

    I’m with you Evan. That’s just the tip of the iceberg in what Americans do to tork me off. Another good one is. They water their highways, sidewalks and streets! Now don’t get me started.

  6. Ken says:

    Haven’t people always lived in some kind of “shelter”, even if its composed of straw and mud, adobe, or something else?Calearth.org SuperAdobe construction is quite interesting, though it requires some lime or cement for the “super” portion of superadobe. Tested and approved for the highest earthquake zone in California. Portland cement requires a significant energy input into the kiln used to make it, and unless one has lime locally, there’s be some transportation requirements.I’ve walked around inside the several different plans on their site in Hesperia, CA, (about 1/1/2 hours driving distance from my home) — very interesting construction methodology. I actually kind of love the dwellings and the structural concept which is much different from standardized building methods typically used in the U.S.They may be preferable in warm, desert climates over colder ones. Check out their ‘Emergency Shelters’.

  7. Evan says:

    Janet:That’s okay, fire away. I’m American born and raised and I still don’t understand “us”. What is this need to have more and then Store it. It’s crazy. I’m convinced that we could save a ton of energy if we eliminated climate controlled storage and close all businesses early on Saturday and all day on Sunday. The Germans do this and people are not rioting in the streets. I proposed this to our mayor’s office and they politely told me it wouldn’t work. It used to work about 20 years ago. Everything was closed on Sunday and people found other things to do. Okay, so that’s a different rant.

  8. Graham says:

    I had a long discussion with my son on the topic of wild places to live where you can live without shelter and we came to the conclusion that there are still, indeed, such places. How about Big Bend National Park in Texas — it’s 800,000 acres of wilderness with surrounding wild lands and climate varying with altitude. Graham

  9. Noah says:

    You mentioned in this post what will happen to civilization in the end. I think a lot about this matter, and I think the best possible outcome would be for civilization to continue indefinitely, but be reformed. If it ends, there will surely be environmental disasters of large proportions. They might take a long time to healbtw—I am Graham’s son.

  10. Evan says:

    Graham:We spend a lot of time in Big Bend and it has its extremes in temperatures. You would want some type of shelter. There is a woman in West Texas that teaches people to make very simple dwellings with adobe, and to me that makes the most sense. It’s very environmentally friendly, comes from the immediate area, simple and very beautiful. We dream of living in that area some day. Evan

  11. Jeff says:

    I’m thinking about lowering the GVWR for which one needs a commercial driver license to 7500lbs.

Comments are closed.