Desolation Acres

Last week I had a long chat, while strolling along the Willamette, with an American woman who resides in Europe.  She adores being in wild nature, and Europeans have done an impressive job of reducing wild nature to a few tiny dots.  Most Europeans have never experienced healthy wildness.  This is sad.  She wants to come home.

Yesterday, the good pastor Clark dropped by my tent in Facebookland with a bottle of gin and a George Monbiot essay, Ghost Psyche.  The essay was an excerpt from his new book, Feral, which explores the notion of rewilding.  Monbiot lives in Wales, a land where most of wild nature has been erased.  In the essay, he described having strange sensations whilst carrying the warm corpse of a Chinese deer — powerful feelings from the ancient spirit of wildness that is buried somewhere in his psyche.

Most modern folks seem to be disconnected from nature, a great tragedy.  Do wordsmiths have the power to break this curse?  I sense that nature is a far better spell breaker than books.  Anyway, reading Monbiot triggered a flashback.  In the autumn of 1982, I was living in an old farmhouse about eight miles west of Kalamazoo.  The following are the words of a 30-year-old man, having an exciting experience — a sweet memory.

 

Desolation Acres

Intense, intense, intense!  These are wild times.  Desolation Acres is about to lift off and fly into a new and strange reality.  Christ!  I've barely slept in the last two days.  The powers that roam the land have come here for a gathering.  Wizards fill the sky.  Magic is everywhere.  The moon is as full as my heart.  Almost.

The leaves are just going mad in a visual hurricane of color.  The sumac is turning red, the sassafras is bright orange and yellow, as are the maples.  The apple trees are turning golden, as is the giant hickory tree, which has been here since the beginning of time.

The day is a spectral explosion, and the night is a precious moon land.  The hunter's moon.  In pagan times, it was the “blot monat” — the blood moon.  A time for slaughtering animals for winter food.

The sun has set on another day.  I sit in its afterglow.  Feathery clouds swirl on the horizon.  They alone still breathing in the sunbeams, flushed hot and pink.  Vivid gashes against a soft pale blue-purple background.  The owls are coming out for the nightly hunt.

The air is moving slowly now.  Resting.  Who?  It has the smell of cider.  The orchard behind the house was not picked this year.  Nor last.  Tons of apples lie on the ground, brown and split.  It's the death season.  All the summer's fruit rotting in the weeds.  Who?  The wisp clouds are turning purple.  Daylight makes its last stand.  It's losing too.  Dying.  Who?

Beyond the orchard is a vineyard.  It was not picked this year.  Nor last.  Its fruit is rotting.  Dying on the vine.  Who?  The leaves will soon be dropping to the ground.  Why must summer end?  Why does the fruit lie untouched?  Why am I alone tonight?  Who?  “Who?” — me, you noisy owl!

It's the death season.  Life retreats in fear.  A piercing visual scream.  It's over.  The sun grows ever weaker.  The cold nights rip and tear with sharp teeth.  Green is just a memory now.  A ghost.  Summer is dead and rotting.  King Frost blows over the land with his sharp crystal spear and his cold snowy breath.

A bug is stiffly walking across the sidewalk.  He can't outrun the winter.  He may get a hundred yards, but he'll never make it to Miami.  He'll die here.  Like everything else.  Will I?  Will death take me too?  Will I turn yellow and orange and fall to the ground?  Will I lie in the weeds, brown, split, and rotting?  Eventually.

It's an old farm.  The ground is soaked with blood and sweat, and the air is full of spirits.  The new mother with the hot babe at her breast, wheezing old ladies, plump-handed farmers.  These walls have seen many lives come and go.  Passionate love-making, the screams of childbirth, infants growing into young men and women, and by the warm hearth rests the faithful dog, Death.

It's my turn now to sit here and contemplate life.  To gaze at the stars, along with unseen thousands of other dreamers.  It's my turn to dream.  To paint the blank future with vivid fantasies.  It's my turn to be lonely tonight.  It's been my turn for loneliness for far too long.  Loners write the great painful poems, the wet-eyed ballads, they paint the wild strange pictures that you never forget.

Yesterday, I was walking through the fields looking at the leaves.  There was a rustle in the weeds and out burst a good-sized doe.  She sprinted into the woods.  As I was watching her, I heard another rustle to my right.  It was a big buck.  I'm sure he was taller than I am.  His antlers were three feet across.

I was spell bound.  My mind went into slow motion as I watched him gracefully hurdle the vine rows.  He moved in high powerful arcs with the grace and precision of a ballet dancer.  His white tail had long hair.  As he flew through the brush, it waved good-bye to me.  I watched him, entranced.  It was magic.  All that power and wildness in such flowing motion.

That beautiful creature belongs to this land much more than I do.  His descendants were here long before this farm.  Before the British.  Before the French.  Before the Indians.  Back when this land was a virgin forest.  Roving packs of hungry wolves filled the night air with loud and frightening songs.  Bears and big cats were here too.  The deer will be here after man is gone.  I admire their endurance.

The deer have been blessed with strong legs and sharp minds.  They've never been tamed.  They don't graze on chemical feeds in the farmyard.  Absolutely wild.  They live on apples, grapes, grass, moss, and whatever else they can find.  They're pure.  They live totally off the land.  This is their land.  They have always been here.  I admire their purity, I admire their beauty, I admire their strength.

As I watched this huge beauty dance through the vineyard, I had a spiritual experience.  I felt the warm holiness of this animal.  I felt as though I was sort of a half brother to him.  His wildness called to my wildness.  The deer-spirit sang to me.  My wild man heard him.  Come run with me through the fields wild man.  Chase me with sharp sticks you slow-footed furless troll.  You'll never catch me, but let's dance the dance of the hunt.

For a few moments, as I stood there watching eternal wildness, so free, so alive, so pure — my civilized man completely disappeared.  I was totally free and wild.  Sizzling emotions boiled through my body cleansing and purifying me.  I was at one with the spirit and energy of the planet.  I was the life force, and the life force was me.  The deer and I were one.  Fury and wildness.  Wotan.

Wires were crossed in my mind, and I ceased being civilized.  The wild man has an intense life energy.  Survive!  Eat or die.  Make fire or die.  Build shelter or die.  Kill or die.  Life is a tightrope walk over the gaping jaws of death.  Forever on the brink.  No beer bellies or flabby asses.  Sharp eyes, sharp ears, sharp noses, and strong.

And then I heard gunshots.  I walked to the field where the sounds had come from.  I looked around and noticed a very red bush on the north side of the opening.  I walked toward it and stopped.  I looked down in horror to see a patch of blood-smeared grass and a pile of shiny red organs and grey intestines.  Nearby was the furry white tail.

My stomach dropped.  I was furious.  What sacrilege.  Some damned idiot geek had in a moment destroyed something very sacred.  One less wild and free energy on the planet.  It wasn't even hunting season yet.  I carried the heart back to the farm.  I couldn't let it rot in the weeds.  I couldn't let it be wasted.

What a wild smell!  It filled the kitchen, it exploded in my head, it soaked into my skin like a tattoo, indelible, permanent.  I washed the heart and the sink turned bright red.  It was a big heart, bigger than my own.  I was awed.  I felt small.  A weakling.  I waited for it to cook.

The oven did not tame the smell of the wild.  I cut off a piece and put it in my mouth.  Wild.  His odor permeates my essence, his flavor fills my mouth, and his heart and I are one.  I was off again to the wilderness.  Howling, yelping, wide-eyed, fierce, and strong.  One with the wild.  One with the free.  I've eaten the heart of the Forest King.

My civilization has received a serious wound.  It was the dominant force in me, and there it sits bleeding in the corner, confused.  It doesn't understand wildness.  It never has.  Society will no longer be my home.  I can't go back.  I've been broken.  My wildness has been ripped free from deep inside.  I've felt it surging through my veins.  Electrifying me.  I've broken the mystery.  I now know the truth.  I ride on the night winds with my ancestors.  They're so happy I've returned.

Join us.

An Update from the Hermit Cave

Previously, I announced that my new book would be available in June.  Reality didn’t cooperate.  Sorry!  A neat book fell out of the sky, and I decided to review it, and add it to the collection.  So, the writing and editing are now done and final.

The good news is that the Kindle version of Sustainable or Bust successfully uploaded on July 4, and is now available globally.  The price is just $2.99.  Amazon Prime members can “borrow” the book free of charge.

You don’t need to own a Kindle to acquire and read a Kindle book.  Free software is available from Amazon to turn your Mac or PC into a Kindle.  This allows you to read on a big, bright screen — a pleasant benefit for those whose eyes have seen better days.

I also reduced the price for the Kindle version of my first book, What Is Sustainable, to $2.99. 

The paperback version is done, but there is an issue with the printer, CreateSpace.  They are using awesome new software to improve the submission process.  Unfortunately, the software is beta, and it adds two pages to my book, which screws up the page numbers in the table of contents and index.  I’m hoping for a fix this week.  Then, I click OK, they send me a proof copy, I bless it, and click Publish (probably later than this week).  I’m not going to predict how soon it will be available from non-US Amazon sites, but I don’t expect a significant delay.  The price will be $14.95.

Here’s the description:

Clearly, the “normal” way of life is the opposite of genuine sustainability, and it has an expiration date.  Any way of life that is fully in balance with the family of life must be genuinely sustainable, a healthy path with a future.  At present, too few really comprehend this concept.  It would be wise to learn, and Sustainable or Bust is a useful tool for the job.

Seven-point-something billion people can’t switch to sustainable living this afternoon, because it’s temporarily impossible.  But the collapse of industrial civilization is now in its early stages, and when it’s done, the human sphere will be much smaller, slower, and simpler.  Decades down the road, many new options will become possible, including genuine sustainability.

We could help our descendants find a more direct path to health and balance by learning about sustainability now, and sharing this wisdom with the young ones.  There’s never been a better time to hit the books and feed our minds — before the lights go out.  Nothing can change until ideas change.

My first book, What Is Sustainable, presented an introduction to genuine sustainability, with an emphasis on food.  Sustainable or Bust is a collection of 64 book reviews, and 16 rants.  It’s a gallery of thinkers, scholars, and ideas that might make “normal” minds itch and squirm.  This book is for pilgrims who are awake, alive, and weary of normal — minds hungry for outside-the-box ideas.

I don’t expect to see the end of the collapse.  What the survivors, if any, choose to do is entirely beyond my control.  I am not responsible for the decisions they make, but I am responsible for doing what I can to help them understand their history, predicament, and options.  Who are we?  Where are we from?  How did we get here?

Scarcity

For maybe two million years, our ancestors lived relatively sustainably as hunter-gatherers.  Their simple way of life utilized renewable natural resources in a low-impact manner.  This worked very well until advances in weaponry enabled the possibility of megafauna overkill, which pushed many societies into a dark new direction — overtool — an addiction to powerful technology that forced some ancestors out of balance with the family of life.

Unfortunately, it’s possible to abuse and diminish renewable natural resources, and this is not sustainable.  About 10,000 years ago, some societies shifted to agriculture, which increasingly damaged renewable resources via soil mining, forest mining, and water mining.  The agricultural way of life provided little benefit for most people, but it excelled at ecosystem destruction, swept away ancient limits to population growth, and spread like cancer, eventually eliminating most sustainable societies.

Later came the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age.  This was a sharp wrong turn, because we began using nonrenewable natural resources (NNRs).  Minerals are nonrenewable, so no form of mineral mining is sustainable, in theory.  Obviously, Indians making a few stone pipes caused insignificant harm.

Then, less than 300 years ago, the industrial way of life emerged.  It led to explosive population growth and massive ecological damage.  It was ridiculously unsustainable, because it was heavily dependent on consuming NNRs.  The rate at which it devoured mineral resources grew every decade, and has reached staggering levels today.

Imagine a society that was absolutely dependent on beer for its survival, and it had a finite supply of beer — one keg.  If they drank more and more of their nonrenewable beer every day, what would eventually happen?  They would run out of beer, and their society would collapse.

What would happen if they realized that the reserves of essential beer were shrinking, and they created a consumption ceiling that permanently capped guzzling at current rates?  Would the keg of nonrenewable beer last forever?

The problem here is the beer society’s complete dependence on the depletion of a finite nonrenewable resource.  Their politicians couldn’t eliminate depletion via laws and regulations, and their economists couldn’t fix this via money printing or borrowing.  It is simply impossible for this type of society to survive long-term.  The only possible outcome is collapse.  Societies can only be sustainable when based on using renewable resources in a low impact manner (an important idea to teach the young ones).

Christopher O. Clugston gasped when he realized this very important concept.  He fired up his computer, did a lot of research, and wrote a mind-blowing book, Scarcity — Humanity’s Final Chapter?  He identified the 89 NNRs that are essential to the existence of our industrial global society, and studied each of them.  He identified the NNRs that are now scarce, or will be scarce soon.  “By 2008, immediately prior to the Great Recession, 63 (71%) of the 89 analyzed NNRs were scarce globally.”  Scarcity means that society’s requirements for the NNR exceed the available supply that is affordable.

He found that the extraction of all NNRs in 2008 was dramatically higher than in 1900.  During this period, both the global economy, and the world population grew explosively — GDP grew 25 times larger.  To continue on the current trajectory would require enormous additional quantities of NNRs, far more than actually exist.  If the world chose to end growth, and keep the economy at current levels, it would still exhaust the remaining NNRs at a brisk rate.  Every industrial society is a dead end.

In 1900, America was essentially self-sufficient in all the NNRs it needed to whoosh away like a bottle rocket.  We grew like crazy, and temporarily became a superpower.  Things have changed.  “By 2008 America was (net) importing 68 of the 89 analyzed NNRs, including 100% of 19 NNRs.”  Importing NNRs is a further drain on our wealth.

Scarcity drives up prices.  In just the eight years between 2000 and 2008, the prices of most NNRs increased.  For example: cadmium 1,206%, chromium 266%, molybdenum 795%, oil 244%, potash 230%, sulfur 750%, thallium 202%, tungsten 239%, vanadium 547%.  Do you smell trouble?

Rising prices for resources hindered growth, and inspired corporations to move manufacturing operations to low wage nations, to cut costs.  Consequently, America shifted away from manufacturing, toward a service economy, which had less need for NNRs, and produced less real wealth.

Meanwhile, the government had kicked the teeth out of regulations that were created to prevent the financial services sector from disemboweling our economy, as they did in 1929.  This enabled America to produce less real wealth, and more imaginary wealth, which Clugston refers to as pseudo purchasing power.  This allowed us to purchase NNRs with Wall Street fairy dust — an exchange that will come to a tearful end when NNR exporters lose their faith in the value of fairy dust.  Our government is borrowing like there’s no tomorrow, generating stratospheric levels of debt that it has no intention of repaying.  It’s also printing money like crazy.

In 2008, the Great Recession fell out of the sky, rapidly vaporizing trillions of dollars of imaginary wealth.  We were blasted by a tsunami of fraud, idiotic recklessness, and pathological greed.  Clugston points out that growing NNR scarcity was a fundamental contributor to this meltdown.  He has a strong suspicion that 2008 was a major turning point in the human journey.  He wouldn’t be surprised if the industrial global society went into free-fall by 2050, probably sooner.

People who soar away in beautiful hallucinations of economic recovery have lost their connection to reality.  Looking forward, Clugston believes that the best-case scenario is little different from the worst-case.  No nation is sustainable, and all will fall, sooner or later.  World leaders will never agree to cooperate in reversing both population growth and economic growth.  “It is not clear to me that any intelligent response to our predicament exists,” sighs Clugston.  What is clear is that all paths eventually lead to sustainability, a return to the gentle use of renewable resources by a human population of a few million.  “Sustainability is inevitable.” 

Samples of Clugston’s work can be found here and here.  He predicts a painful future based on just overpopulation and NNR scarcity.  The threats of pandemic disease, nuclear disasters, and climate change catastrophes are beyond the scope of this book.  Clugston is not a geologist, but Walter Youngquist has a high opinion of this book.  Scarcity is a fire hose of mind-altering ideas.  It blows away many magical fantasies, and reveals more than a few super-inconvenient truths. 

Clugston, Christopher O., Scarcity — Humanity’s Final Chapter?, Booklocker.com, Port Charlotte, Florida, 2012.

GeoDestinies

My friend Walter Youngquist is a 92-year-old rock star — a retired geology professor and consulting geologist.  Some of his former students are now top executives in the oil industry.  His book, GeoDestinies, is an in-depth discussion of the long relationship between humankind and the mineral world.  This relationship has become increasingly abusive, as more and more people consume more and more resources.  It can’t last much longer in its current form.

Youngquist is acutely aware that we are racing down a dead end road.  For many years, he’s been trying hard to warn us.  The local paper wrote a story about one of his talks, “Dark Picture Painted by Youngquist,” which was printed December 13, 1973, 40 years ago.  Any endeavor that depends on consuming nonrenewable resources at a rapidly growing rate is on a fast path to ruin.  What could be more obvious?  Unfortunately, his honorable efforts turned him into a pariah.  He gave many talks to Chamber of Commerce groups, and he was almost never invited back.  We don’t enjoy bad news.

His core message is a sharp warning.  “My observations in some 70 countries over about 50 years of travel and work tell me that we are clearly already over the cliff.  The momentum of population growth and resource consumption is so great that a collision course with disaster is inevitable.  Large problems lie not very far ahead.”

It is widely understood that we are rapidly depleting the most precious mineral complex of all, the one that enables life on Earth: topsoil.  Sustainable societies do not need gold, diamonds, iron, or oil.  All forms of mining are the opposite of sustainable, including soil mining.  Dirt is created so slowly that, from a human perspective, it’s essentially nonrenewable.  The problems associated with soil destruction are widely understood, and widely disregarded.  Soil conservation is simply not the path to short-term wealth creation, and wealth is all that matters in this civilization.

Two hundred years ago, the world was an immense treasure chest of resources.  They seemed to be infinite.  We were certain that economic growth could continue forever.  We were wrong.  But this fantasy has deep roots, and remains alive and well to this very day.  Our highly educated ruling elites continue to be obsessed with the notion of encouraging growth by any means necessary.

The industrial production of oil began in 1859.  Since then, the quantity of new oil that was discovered every year increased until 1962.  Following this peak, new discoveries have been on a downward curve.  Each year, less new oil is found, and what we’re finding is more and more expensive to extract, hence the rising prices at the pump.  The era of cheap fossil energy is over, forever.

Meanwhile, the consumption of oil continues to grow, as more and more cars take to the road.  Most of the oil that we consume today was discovered before 1973.  Many believe that world oil production peaked in 2005.  This level of production cannot be continued for long, and it is certain to proceed into an irreversible decline.  Alternative energy sources will never be able to replace the energy we now get from fossil fuels, or even come close. 

Youngquist is one of the grandfathers who revealed the Peak Oil story to the world.  I began corresponding with him in 1996.  At that point in time, the concept of Peak Oil was a mad theory from the farthest regions of the lunatic fringe.  Almost nobody understood what you were talking about, and very few agreed.  Seventeen years later, far more people have a rudimentary understanding of the issue, and it has become acceptable for dignified people to privately discuss it on rare occasions.  What is spooky is that this learning process has resulted in almost no significant changes in our goals, values, or way of life.  (Neither has our growing understanding of climate change.)

Youngquist’s lifetime has been an era of technological miracles — radio, TV, air travel, moon landings, computers, antibiotics, and so on.  Like most people, he perceives this to be a high standard of living, one that is beneficial and desirable.  At the same time, he is acutely aware that his lifetime has been an era of ecological catastrophes.  When he was born, the world population was less than two billion.  It’s heartbreaking to observe the catastrophic effects of population more than tripling in your lifetime.  So much has been destroyed.

I wish that living the American dream was ecologically harmless, but it isn’t.  We can’t have both sustainability and technological wonders.  We have a responsibility to leave the planet in no worse shape than we found it, or better.

Youngquist clearly understands the meaning of genuine sustainability.  It means “capable of being kept going on an indefinite basis — not until the end of the week, or the end of the decade, or even the end of the next century, but indefinitely.”  He clearly understands that a sustainable population is far, far less than seven-point-something billion.  He clearly understands that the only sustainable form of energy is sunlight.  He understands that a sustainable future is inevitable, because only the sustainable can endure.  We could get there faster, causing less harm, if we made this our goal.  I wish we would. 

It would also be wise to seriously reassess the meaning of a high standard of living.  Today, this notion implies a lifestyle that has enormous costs, and causes enormous harm.  Is it an oxymoron?  Is there real value in a high standard of living that is the opposite of sustainable?  We have no easy answers.

For many thousands of years, nomads wandered across the Arabian Peninsula, never tormented by a powerful urge to extract the billions of dollars of oil stored underground.  It never occurred to them.  They had what they needed, their lives were perfectly fine, and their ecosystem enjoyed robust good health.  I sense that we will find the path to salvation on the day that we can perceive this elegant simplicity to be the genuine high standard of living.

Youngquist, Walter, GeoDestinies, National Book Company, Portland, Oregon, 1997.  A second edition is currently in process.

Introduction

Welcome to Sustainable or Bust!  This collection of rants and reviews explores facets of genuine, ecological sustainability.  In the old-fashioned sense of the word, sustainability has to do with living in a way that doesn’t diminish the ecosystem over the passage of thousands of years.  The ravens, deer, and salmon have mastered a way of life that has no need for soil mining, water mining, fish mining, forest mining.  Only humans have figured out how to break the laws of nature, and nature is not amused.

Good old-fashioned fundamentalist sustainability is largely ignored these days, because it is the opposite of our ferociously wasteful consumer society.  Genuine sustainability generates no corporate profits.  It stimulates no economic growth.  It cannot be manufactured in Bangladesh factories and sold in trendy suburban malls.  It’s a far simpler way of living, and it doesn’t piss off Big Mama Nature (an important fact to remember).

Meanwhile, mainstream society has invented a marketing gimmick that might be called sustainable everything — sustainable growth, sustainable development, sustainable cities, sustainable agriculture, sustainable forestry, and so on.  I call it ersatz sustainability, because it has nothing whatsoever to do with genuine sustainability.  It’s a fascinating experiment in magical thinking — if we call something “sustainable” enough times, then it is!  Repeat the words “clean coal” enough times, and coal burning becomes as wholesome as breast milk.

In the coming decades, intensifying climate change, combined with the end of cheap energy, and other assorted surprises, seem likely to pull the plug on the consumer way of life, as we know it.  This will force a lot of beneficial change that we refuse to pursue voluntarily, like the yucky business of sharply reducing our population, and learning to live without cars, electronic gadgets, and millions of other unessential things.

It’s impossible to return to a sustainable way of life anytime soon, because there are way too many people living way too hard.  But the cool thing about collapse is that it may give birth to a new situation in which a return to sustainability once again becomes possible — far fewer humans, and far more everything else.  By definition, all unsustainable modes of living can only be temporary, so a sustainable future is guaranteed, at some point.  Hopefully there will be more species at the victory party than just heat tolerant bacteria.

The odds that there will be human faces at the party can be improved if more people today develop a sound understanding of genuine sustainability, and share this knowledge with others.  We are less likely to repeat practices that we have learned to be fatal mistakes.  These errors are better known now than ever before, but not by the masses, yet.

If the entire global economy suddenly died today, all the lights went out, and all money became worthless, the future would be in the hands the survivors, most of whom are clueless about genuine sustainability.  They would likely regroup and resume the same fatal mistakes that we excel at today, simply because they suffer from a shortage of intelligent ideas.  Ignorance is stupid — but curable.

Nothing can change until ideas change.  At the moment, we have access to an amazing global communication system, a powerful tool for sharing ideas.  It’s actually useful for things beyond bombarding us with cat videos, tweets, and pornography.  How long will this system continue to operate, as Peak Cheap Energy keeps pressing harder on the brakes?  It would be wise to make good use of it, before it slips beneath the waves forever.

You will not find “the solution” in this book.  Only problems have solutions (i.e., a flat tire).  We’re in a predicament, a perplexing mess that can only be outgrown over time (i.e., industrial civilization).  Freeing ourselves from the madness will likely take generations.  The good news is that this may not be impossible.  History informs us that human societies are capable of making sharp turns, for better or worse.  It’s worth a try.  We have nothing to lose, right?

What you will find in this book is a gallery important thinkers, and reviews of their important writings — writers that usually fly beneath the radar of mainstream journalism and education.  They explore realms of knowledge far beyond the center ring circus of sex, sports, stock markets, and sex.  My devious plan is that by the time you make it to the far end of the gallery, you will have picked up a fair number of new and stimulating ideas along the way.

For more than 20 years, I’ve been studying the Earth Crisis.  I’ve read hundreds of books.  The ones that I’ve reviewed here are among my favorites.  Of course, a brief review is never a substitute for experiencing the entire work.  If you have the time and the desire, I recommend that you read them all.  You will see the world in a new way.  Most of these authors have written more than one book, and many of their other books are also fascinating and mind expanding.

Sustainable or Bust is a companion to my first book, What Is Sustainable, which discussed the basics of genuine sustainability.  Sustainable or Bust is a supplement, and it devotes more attention to exploring the core essence of human beings.  The earlier book does not need to be read first, but folks who like one will like both.  Genuine sustainability is an enormous subject, and it is my intent to provide useful guidebooks for those who wish to expand their understanding.

We are blessed to inhabit a fascinating era, a powerful turning point, when our famous big brains will have a splendid opportunity to demonstrate their legendary power — sink or swim.  Humankind has moved beyond Peak Cheap Energy, Peak Wooly Mammoths, and Peak Neanderthals.  We’re zipping along towards Peak Food, Peak Humans, Peak Cell Phones, and Peak Ersatz Sustainability.  Then what?

The spirits of our wild ancestors strongly recommend a hasty return to genuine sustainability, wildness and freedom, and our sacred home in the family of life.  They’re standing on the sidelines, jumping up and down, waving their arms, and shouting, “Holy <bleeping> hominids!  Watch out!  Turn on yer brains, dudes!  Snap out of it!”

Well-fed minds and clear thinking are our only hope for survival.  Clear thinking is a beautiful power that we acquire after we have liberated ourselves from the mental straightjacket of beliefs.

Enjoy!

[Sustainable or Bust will be released, in paperback and Kindle versions, in June 2013.]

Searching For Identity and Purpose

Once upon a time, Carl Jung said, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I chose to become.”  He understood his calling, the special role that was unique to his existence.  He consciously pursued it, and he spent his life on a path of powerful healing.

James Hillman was one of Jung’s apprentices.  Hillman did not believe that newborns came into this world as blank slates.  He saw infants as unique acorns, ready to spend their lives growing into unique oaks.  Every oak tree had a different form.  No two were identical.  The form of the tree was influenced by the information stored in the acorn from which it sprouted.

Hillman believed that every human acorn had unique characteristics, and a unique calling, purpose, or destiny.  Every person had a sacred obligation to understand that calling and live it.  This was why nature-based societies encouraged people to discover their calling via vision quest ceremonies.  When they found their vision, they knew their path and purpose.  This helped them avoid wasting their lives in aimless wandering.

Basil Johnston described how vision quests worked in Ojibway culture.  Once a person discovered his or her vision, they tried hard to live in accordance with it.  It was not uncommon for folks to periodically stray from their vision, or betray it, and “such a state was tantamount to non-living in which acts and conduct had no quality.”  Every year, men and women would go on a retreat, to verify that they were still living in synch with their vision, and make any needed adjustments.

Hillman believed that modern society was a train wreck because most people were clueless about their calling, and were wandering aimlessly.  Society fed the sacred acorns into a machine that crushed them, shredded them, and converted them into standard issue industrial robots and recreational shoppers — lost souls.

On a larger scale, it’s not hard to imagine that entire communities were once guided by a collective tribal vision, before agriculture arrived.  Each wild community inhabited a unique ecosystem, and its custom-tailored vision enabled it to live in balance with the land.  This vision was passed from generation to generation, across vast spans of time, and helped to keep the life of the tribe stable and secure.  The vision guiding the human community was in harmony with the vision of the community of life — they were the same.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with sincere regret that I must inform you that industrial civilization has no sacred vision to guide it; it has a terminal illness.  In ages past, as civilization obliterated countless wild tribes, the visions of those tribes were forgotten.  Because of this, our society has descended into “a non-living state, and our acts have no quality.”  We are no longer like happy tadpoles or maggots, the beautiful offspring of a healthy wild ecosystem.  We have been reduced to lonely stressed-out cogs in a global economy.

What can we do?  Is it possible to remember what was lost?  Native Americans have told me yes, it is.  If you forget your instructions, just look back toward the Creator’s fire, and you’ll remember them.  But each tribe was given different instructions by the Creator.

White folks are not like tribal Indians.  We’re mongrels, having ancestors from numerous tribes, all now disintegrated or extinct.  If I have ancestors from 476 tribes, who am I?  What are my instructions?  Where is my home?  Who are my people?

If my wild ancestors were buried in 476 different lands, and all of those ecosystems have been obliterated by centuries of civilization, what good are the ancient instructions?  The aurochs are gone, the lions are gone, the forests are gone, and the salmon have been herded into concentration camps. 

The stories, songs, and ceremonies of my wild ancestors have all been lost.  Indians disagree.  They insist that all ancient wisdom is always “accessible,” and just wink when I ask how.  This is most perplexing!  I’m hoping that contemplating a sustainable future will open new doors of perception, or old ones.

I’ve lived in nine states, and my extended family is scattered everywhere.  We have become wandering homeless people.  This year, I’m living in the Willamette Valley, on land violently stolen from the Kalapuya.  As a people, the Kalapuya had never forgotten their vision.  They celebrated their lives in a paradise of abundant life, and they knew how to live in balance with it.  It was easy.  All they had to do was to carefully follow the path of the ancestors, the ancient time-proven vision of the community.

The Kalapuya were forced out of their home by the white invaders, who had strayed far from their ancestral home, and had no vision for living in harmony.  The invaders built the city that I live in, which is insane, and is in the process of committing suicide.  It has no spiritual connection to the land, or to life.  Indeed, the entire nation is lost and insane.  This is not encouraging.

Today, the invaders’ culture is a childlike fantasy world of gadget worshippers — robot-driven electric cars, smart highways, smart grids, high-speed trains, Internet everything, windmills and solar panels, and on and on — nothing sustainable, and nothing that is necessary for a healthy and enjoyable life.

The purpose of existence is to make lots of money, by any means necessary, and spend it in a manner that continuously increases your display of personal status, as defined by the ever-changing fads of consumer society.  Stan Rowe perceived that consumers were raging narcissists, spellbound by their own image, imprisoned in an introspective cage — too much time spent before the mirror, and far too little outdoors with the family of life.

Countless millions devote their entire lives to acquiring and discarding unnecessary stuff.  Consumers have a deep longing to experience inner peace and happiness in their lives, and they believe that shopping is the sacred path.  They are trying to fill the vacuum created by their loss of wildness and freedom.  But, no matter how skillfully they shop, or how much they spend, it never works, except for fleeting post-purchase consumer orgasms, soon followed by a return to gnawing hollowness.  Trainloads of Prozac numb the pain.

I can’t get off the bus and live like a Kalapuya.  The deer, elk, and salmon are mostly gone now, replaced by endless herds of automobiles and cell phone zombies.  The land has been chopped up into thousands of parcels of private property, where my presence is not welcome.  In this reality, a sustainable way of life is impossible.

John Trudell says that we cannot have a spiritual connection to the future if we have lost the connection to our past.  It’s essential that we remember that everyone has ancestors who were tribal people — admirable folks who were solidly connected to the circle of life, and lived in harmony with it. 

We are, at root, tribal people who have been colonized.  Colonization is a component of the spiritual disease that gave birth to domestication.  It’s a mindset devoted to a mining way of life, eating up tomorrow, for no honorable purpose.  At the core of our healing process is decolonizing our minds, remembering that we are wild tribal people — human beings — not miners.

Near Term Extinction

The majority of modern society is clustered together in the hope and optimism pavilion, taking deep tokes on the bong of pleasure-filled fantasies (cough!).  At the other end of the spectrum are the Near Term Extinction (NTE) folks.  They profess absolute certainty that climate change will be the final chapter in the human story.  Our current mode of living will disintegrate by 2030, and a few scientists, like Malcolm Light, predict that all life on Earth will be extinct by 2050.  Ecology professor Guy McPherson is a primary spokesperson for NTE.

The NTE thinkers point to many genuine problems that are intensifying every day.  They describe a number of “positive feedbacks,” where one problem stimulates the worsening of other problems, accelerating the overall pace of destruction more and more.  A small disturbance can trigger a large avalanche.  They chastise the big name climate activism celebrities for failing to realize the actual risks these feedbacks, and, consequently, for preaching sermons tainted with false hope.

Rapid heating will destroy agriculture, release fabulous amounts of methane, and blindside every ecosystem on the planet.  The bright white polar ice caps are quite reflective, and bounce away a lot of incoming solar heat, but they are melting and shrinking.  Oceans may become so acidic that only jellyfish remain.

The burning of fossil fuels will fade with the demise of industry, so less incoming solar energy will be blocked by layers of pollution, speeding the warming process even more.  When the power grid dies, the pumps will quit at 440+ nuclear power plants.  So, the cooling ponds for spent fuel rods will evaporate, the rods will burn, and ionized radiation will poison the planet.  And so on.

Acknowledging these sobering ideas is necessary for those who wish to be present in reality.  It is well within the realm of possibility that their predictions will turn out to be correct — but not 100 percent certain, with a double your money back guarantee.  We’ve never destroyed a planet before, so our understanding of this sad process remains primitive.

Many members of the NTE community are highly intelligent, very well informed, and ruthlessly skeptical of every mainstream idea.  This combination of attributes does not result in a merry band of giggly bliss ninnies.  They comprehend the existence of enormous problems.  At the same time, they also comprehend that humankind is largely ignoring these problems.  It’s a heartbreaking disconnect.  The great majority of people simply fail to perceive the presence of great danger, because their lives still seem normal, today.

Extinction would neatly solve every single one of our problems, and would be a great relief for the family of life.  We were certain to go extinct at some point in the future anyway.  Uff!  But what if there are still some humans alive 100 years from now?  Humans, insects, and bacteria are exceptionally adaptable, and a portion of them may have an extended future.  Because of that possibility, I do this work.  The NTE folks shrug and label me normal (still asleep).  So be it.

I’m very happy that I’m not going to live to see the end of the collapse (I hope).  What the survivors, if any, choose to do is entirely beyond my control.  I am not responsible for the decisions they make, but I am responsible for doing what I can to help them understand their history, predicament, and options.  Nothing can change until ideas change.  So, one of the most essential occupations for those living now is to become idea mongers.  This is a path of great power, and there are Help Wanted signs all over the place.

Before we call it a day, let’s jump in our Hummer and take a quick tour of the NTE neighborhood.  Their mosque is called Nature Bats Last, Guy McPherson’s blog.  Click on the Climate Change Summary link.  You’ll learn a lot about a wide variety of subjects.  (The links below are just a tiny sample of the information available on the following issues.)

Global Warming.  Climate scientists have been doing a good job of underestimating the rate at which carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere, and raising the planet’s temperature.  New and improved models generated by the UN in 2010 predicted a rise of 5° C by 2050.  Some believe that warming of 4° to 6° C results in a dead planet, and that this could happen in a decade.

Melting Permafrost.  Melting permafrost will release enormous amounts of greenhouse gases.  There is also underwater permafrost, and it too is melting and off gassing methane.

Tundra fires.  Arctic summers are getting warmer and dryer, and the carbon-rich tundra soils readily burn when dry.  Fire actually burns up the soil, exposing the permafrost below to warmer temperatures.  On the surface of the burned land, dark ash absorbs more solar heat, melting the permafrost faster.

Peat Fires.  Warmer, dryer weather is drying out peat lands, which contain one third of the world’s soil carbon.  Peat fires are often ignited by lightning or passing wildfires, and they are difficult or impossible to extinguish.  Some burn for years, or even centuries.  In 2010 there were huge peat fires in Russia.

Ocean Acidification.  One third of carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed by the oceans, which is increasing their levels of acidity.  Plankton in the ocean provides 50 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere.  This oceanic oxygen production is now six percent less than it was 30 years ago.  Growing acidity is harmful to marine life and coral reefs.

Ionized Radiation.  There are about 440 nuclear power plants in the world, and they generate lots of radioactive waste that will be extremely toxic for a very long time.  These wastes are stored in cooling ponds, a short-term solution.  There is no long-term solution.  Extended power outages will allow the cooling ponds to evaporate, at which point the fuel rods will burn, and spew radiation to the four winds.

Oceanic Deoxygenation.  Climate change is stratifying oceanic waters, and warming the upper layers.  This will reduce the dissolved oxygen in the water, leading to the expansion of dead zones.  Some regions have experienced significant deoxygenation over the last 50 years, and many expect this problem to worsen, possibly for the next thousand years.

Atmospheric Deoxygenation.  Levels of oxygen in the atmosphere are declining.  Three hundred million years ago, the air was 30 percent oxygen.  Ancient dragonflies had four-foot wingspans.  Today it’s between 19 and 21 percent, and 12 to 17 percent in urban areas.  When it gets to 6 or 7 percent, we cannot survive.  Oxygen is consumed when carbon is burned.

Methane Catastrophe.  This report, written by Malcolm Light, is not intended for the general reader.  The first paragraph includes this jarring sentence: “This process of methane release will accelerate exponentially, release huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere and lead to the demise of all life on earth before the middle of this century.”