Where we are now, to me, is the real dark time, the proverbial moment before the dawn. The depravity of our culture, Disney merchandise, cool ranch Doritos, and all, is something that people of the future will marvel at for centuries to come. The purity of our surrender will fascinate them. They will conclude that we looked into the abyss… and decided that we liked what we saw in there.

- James Howard Kunstler

Whatever else one thinks of how we live these days, it’s hard to not see it as temporary, historically anomalous, a peculiar blip in human experience. I’ve spent my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning whether the makings of tomorrow’s supper would be there waiting on the supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the lights would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my personal safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I don’t feel tremors of massive change in these things, as though all life’s comforts and structural certainties rested on a groaning fault line.

– Jim Kunstler in Then All At Once

I couldn’t agree more, Jim.

So many forces are arrayed against a return to the previous “normal” that we will be lucky, in another eighteen months, to still find ourselves speaking English and celebrating Christmas. What’s “out there” is a panorama of mutually reinforcing critical problems pertaining to how we live on this continent. Like the obesity, heart disease, and diabetes that plague the public, these problems are disorders of lifestyle habits and the only possible “cure” is a comprehensive revision of lifestyle.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, so I didn’t try.

I think this tendency comes from a place inside of me that thinks the future will be a different place than most of us imagine. Sure, the future is gonna be different, it has to be, but this time around, it’s gonna be different in a way that we’ve never really seen before: it will be a future of decline.

If we rewind and zoom out a little, “the future” has been that of extreme growth and expansion (population, technology, etc) for the last 150 years, since the discovery of oil. Everything in our world has changed (and continues to change) more rapidly than anything ever seen on earth before, aside from meteor strikes. Most people think of the Industrial Revolution as a period of extreme ingenuity, but I see it as a period of extreme energy influx (The Oil Revolution). All of a sudden, we had an incredibly concentrated fuel that was pouring out of the ground in copious amounts.

We’ve been riding that wave upward at an exponential rate for almost 2 centuries, and it’s just not physically possible to continue to maintain exponential growth in a finite world. At some point we’re gonna have to come down, at some point the Oil Revolution and the empires it facilitated will fail.

What stories will we tell of the days of oil and excess?

Mountain Homestead is a developing, off-grid permaculture homestead located on 365 acres of temperate rainforest in the Coquille River watershed serving as a prototype for ecological forest management based on resident stewardship. [...] Apprentices are involved in design work and management decisions, working 35 hours a week for room, board and stipend.

Our neighbours, the Cob Cottage Company (cobcottage.com) has held Natural Building workshops here since 2001, swelling the population for half the year. [...]

Permaculture guides landscape use decisions. Consultants Tom Ward and Toby Hemenway have helped design our 4 acre homestead combining drainage, erosion control, fencing, access, and gravity flow water as the framework for an evolving solar bowl/food forest. Garden, infrastructure and housing design on the main homestead are based on supporting a dozen people. Buildings are made of mostly recycled or natural materials. Systems include photovoltaics, gravity flow water, wood-fired/solar hot water, wood heat, composting latrine, and greywater biofilters.

wow, that was a mouthful, but probably the best way to just get all that out of the way. now i can spend the rest of the time talking about ME! Yeah! i’ll break it down for you.

the sweat

i arrived to the homestead on saturday night, completely unaware that the monthly “sweat” the very next day. i was invited, so i threw caution to the wind and went for it. you know that episode of LOST where Locke joins that commune and then builds a sweat lodge? it was sorta like that but much more authentic and real.

the sweat was held at Barry and Bonny’s house and was a total culture shock for me. i hadn’t been at the homestead for more than 24 hours and was thrown into a sweat lodge with about 20 other people that i didn’t know at all, and… WOW. it was a really intense experience and literally impossible to accurately explain with words.

cathedral roof

during the first week i helped put a roof onto a a new cob structure: the cathedral. it’s not really a cathedral, but they already had a building called the “courtyard” and didn’t want to confuse.

there were already rafters and such, i was just putting the first layer of “bender board” down and nailing it in. “bender board” is just a homestead term for 6-inch wide, 10 to 15 feet long pieces of cedar and fur scrap wood that can be bought really cheap. it’s really bendy (hence the name) and works well for roofs.

eco-forestry

during my second week i chipped in on the “eco-foresty” team. we spent our time out in woods falling trees, bucking them up into pieces, and dragging them out of the forest with a tractor.

it felt really weird being a logger in a place that you’d think would be against logging, but it was different. from the perspective of the homestead, a logger can have the exact same interaction with the land as does a farmer. who says that just because you cut down trees that it’s always a bad thing? who say that the forest has to disappear when you log? all people throughout history have used the resources of the earth for survival, it’s HOW we use them that is important.

deer dressing

on our way back from the mill, we noticed a roadkill deer on the side of the road that wasn’t there on our way to the mill. we pulled over, poked it a bit, and loaded it onto the trailer. it probably wasn’t much more that 2 hours old.

on the drive back to the homestead ish and i talked about what was going to happen to the deer. we figured that someone at the homestead or a friend of someone would know what to do and would come take care of it. we were wrong. no one was into it but the 2 vegans. we made a few calls for advice and grabbed the homestead copy of Foxfire.

with help from eric (another visitor) we strung it up on the tractor barn and dressed it ourselves in about 3 hours. the next day we butchered it and then the whole homestead gathered around and watched the vegans eat meat. it was pretty funny.

* * *

i could got on and on and on, but you know what they say: a picture is worth a thousand words. so click the picture of my room up there to see ALL the pictures of my trip.

during one of the smoke breaks on the patio outside, we got to talking about “the war.” in general, the boys and i just sorta tend to disagree when it comes to certain elements of politics… in general. sure, we can all agree that marijuana should be legalized (maybe for different reasons), and that it’s probably best that people not be allowed to randomly murder other people. but when it comes to Education and Feminism and Native Americans and The Treatment of Non-Human Animals and Other Life Forms and War and Peak Oil and 9/11 Truth and Government and Civilization, we probably won’t see as “eye to eye.” it’s funny. you’d think that people who disagree so much wouldn’t get along so well.

anyhoo, we were talking about “the war.” there were the usual buzz phrases being thrown around: “it was wrong to go in in the first place, sure, but we can’t just walk away” and “but it has NOTHING to do with TERRORISM. it’s all about OIL!!” and so on and so forth. but at the end of the conversation, when we were trying to wrap things up and get back to dawson’s creek, it hit me. i finally figured it out.

they way we live, the way we treat non-human animals, the way we kill people, the way we rape people, the way we pollute, the way we destroy, the way we force things to be things they aren’t, yaddy yaddy yadda…

it isn’t inevitable. all of this, it isn’t inevitable. it isn’t inevitable.

this isn’t the way things would be “as long as the situation was right.” this isn’t shakespeare that the monkeys are slamming out on old rusty typewriters. this isn’t “human nature,” and there is no forgon conclusion. the fact that humanity exists doesn’t necessitate the eventual “evolution” toward a culture of make believe.

i definitely understand that this is the way it is and that “this is the way things are.” sometimes we have to be realistic. but then something hit me. i switched places and all of a sudden i had a new mantra.

this is inevitable. this is human nature. this is the way things are.

all of a sudden i wasn’t pissed off at the world anymore. all of sudden i was thinking that it’s natural for people to create systems that don’t work for people. all of a sudden the public education system didn’t seem so bad and i was definitely going to send my kids. all of a sudden i knew that “technology” is going to save us from energy depletion. all of a sudden it sorta seemed alright that we are poisoning the very life support systems that keep us alive.

i could finally breathe a sigh of relief.

America is eating its own. The lies from the Iron Triangle are at a fevor pitch. Paulson says this is the greatest economy he has ever seen. Bush says we will have victory in Iraq. The NPC says there is nothing to worry about. Dick Cheney says he is not part of the Executive branch. The occupation of Iraq is not about oil. Conrad Black swears he is innocent. War criminal Scooter Libby is spared from the big house. Lies, lies, lies. We are a nation of liars, thieves, and warmongers. America is completely fucked.

- from a comment on Clusterfuck Nation

the power went out for about 8 hours on the Steig’s block the other night. i was on my way outside to take pictures of our dark block surrounded by city lights when the power returned. i was bummed, to say the least.

that got me thinking, of course, that eventually the lights will go out for good. whether it’s in 50 years or 1000, it’s going to happen. all the light bulbs and computers and refridgerators and TVs and cars will go lifeless and we (whoever we are when that happens) will have to live without all that stuff, again.

i’ve noticed that this possibility has become a bit more real in the past few years, and not because of some new development in peak oil news. no, it wasn’t the internet and it’s “conspiracies” that has peaked my attention again; it was hollywood, and two blockbusters to be exact: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Live Free, Die Hard.

a key component to both of these new movies is the “power going out,” followed by at least one of the characters saying something like, “we need to get these lights back on.” part (or all) of the resolution in both movies included the lights coming back on and everyone cheering and smiling.

let’s take a look back in time. when we thought there was a communist threat, they were the enemies in our movies. when we thought there was a nuclear threat, that was the danger in our movies. when we thought arabs were responsible for terrorist attacks, they were the bad guys in our movies.

but the two movies mentioned above are different. the bad guys are either from 1) outer space or 2) within our system (or a combination of both); and part (or all) of what they are trying to accomplish is to shut down our support systems. these “bad guys” represent the two-fold reality of the situation to come.

1. evil from outer space: there is a finite supply of fossil fuels, which was created millions of years ago. it may as well have been brought here by aliens. who knows exactly how much oil is left and who knows when we will truely start to feel the crunch. it’s completely out of our hands.
2. evil from inside our own system: we have become extremely addicted to a finite resource. if only we can just act responsibly and break that addiction, the casualties will be minimal. it is our own inability to change, despite the obvious need to, that will be our undoing. it’s compeletly in our hands.

and it’s these evil forces that do what we’ve collectively decided is the worst thing that can possibly happen: they shut down our system, they turn off our lights, they break our cellphones, and they “send us back to the stone ages.” AHHHH!!! NOT THE STONE AGES!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!

in this particular situation, as the evening wore on and the crowd dispersed, the conversation turned toward Peak Oil. i know it sounds like a bad idea, but this time it wasn’t my fault. i walked into the kitchen to hear drew and tyler going on about something related and i chimed in. the conversation followed a certain pattern as drew and i danced from point to point, but there seemed to be a constant deterant: tyler. as brandon says, when tyler gets drunk, he says something and then says it again louder and slower. rinse and repeat.

the basic gist of the discussion was this: tyler and drew believe that at some point in the distant future (when oil is no longer an option) something else will jump up in it’s place and start pulling some weight. tyler thinks it’s should/could be nuclear and drew thinks it will be some currently unknown fuel source. [i say all of that with the utmost attempt at objectivity and hope that i have represented their opinions accurately] in my opinion, there never has been and never will be another fuel source quite like oil. start saying your goodbyes now.

regardless of the actual outcome of the evening’s discussion (nothing but love for you Ty), i did realize one thing: i am not very familiar with nuclear energy. some say that nuclear power is the solution to our energy problems and some say it will be the death of us all. i decided to do a little research. keep in mind that this is my best effort at a simplified view of things, so i may have left out a few bits here and there. either way, this is what i have found so far.

Nuclear Energy 101

the form of nuclear power that produces energy that we are all generally familiar with is specifically nuclear fission, fuelled by Uranium-235, which is an isotope of uranium. when one of those isotopes is bombarded by a neutron it splits in two, which then produces more neutrons that then split more atoms of Uranium-235 in a chain reaction that creates a huge amount of energy. this energy is used to boil water and the steam from that water is used to turn a turbine. that’s the basic idea.

this process sounds similar to the process that occurs when a nuclear bomb is detonated, and it is. that’s why the reaction has to be controlled by a “moderator,” usually just huge amounts of sea water. the moderator makes it more difficult for the stray neutrons to find the next link in the chain and is used to keep the reaction in check or stop it all together when the fuel cells need changing. the longer a fuel cell is in use the more “clogged” it gets with “radioactive impunities” such as barium and krypton, and after about 2 years the fuel elements need replacing.

most of the used fuel cell is composed of Uranium-238, which is incredibly radioactive (if you stand close to it for a few seconds you will die) and it must be disposed of somehow. some of the used fuel cell can be re-used to extract more energy, but eventually all nuclear waste must be disposed of, and this usually means burying it in a mountain. the only problem with this solution is that it never really goes away: Uranium-238 has a half life (the amount of time it takes for half of it to decay) that is just about as old as the earth – 4.5 billion years.

Can nuclear energy save us all?

there’s much more to the process than what i’ve mentioned above: mining and milling, preparing the fuel, creating and decomissioning reactors, and the list goes on and on. each step requires immense amounts of fossil fuels, but for the sake of brevity (have i already lost that?) i’ll only go into the mining and milling.

most of the time uranium exists in small quantities all over the earth. in some places it exists in concentrations as high as 1 percent, but that is rare and is usually found at levels at or below 0.1 percent (one part per thousand). this means that every 1000 tons of rock we extract yields only 1 ton of fuel. how much fuel does it take to run a standord 1GW nuclear power plant for a year? anywhere from 150 to 200 TONS. can you imagine how much energy is required to mine 200,000 tons of rock from the earth, extract the uranium, and then process that for use in a power plant? and that’s only enough for ONE plant for ONE year!

but let’s imagine for a second that we could find and process all of the fuel necessary to run all the nuclear power plants in all the world. let’s imagine that we could replace all of our current energy consumption (including transportation) with nuclear power. how many power plants would the world need to build in the next 25 years? over 6000. and once those are built we’d have to build about another 500 each year thereafter. that is simply impossible when you consider the amount of time (about 10 years per plant), resources, and energy it takes to build ONE new plant.

but let’s forget about the rest of the world for a second. currently, about 100 active nuclear plants in the US generate about 20% of our total electricity. if this were to be expanded to even 50%, about 150 new plants would need to be constructed, operated, and fueled (~30,000 tons of it each year).

what am i trying to get at here?

what we are really talking about here is energy, and since the beginning of time humans have been finding every means possible to “harvest” it from the environment. initially that came from encouraging the growth of wild foods that we enjoyed. then came agriculture, then domestication of animals, then whale oil and coal, then oil and natural gas and nuclear. the list goes on and on. but how much energy is actually contained in oil?

it really helped me to understand it’s true power when it was put into perspective for me. imagine one hour of hard human labor (are you imagining?). the amount of energy produced during that hour is approximately 100 – 200 BTUs. keeping that in mind, it’s pretty impressive to learn that a single gallon of gasoline contains ~125,000 BTUs. do the math and you’ll realize that’s about the equivalent of 6 weeks of hard human labor. 6 WEEKS in one gallon of gasoline, which costs $3.19 currently in Seattle. if we were to make things even, we’d either by paying 1/2 cent per hour for human labor or over $1000 per gallon of gasoline. we aren’t doing either.

if you extrapolate that even further, a barrel of refined oil produces about 20 gallons of gasoline (among other by products), and the US alone uses about 20 millions barrels of it every day. thats 400 million gallons of gasoline, which is about 250 trillion hours of hard human labor EVERY SINGLE DAY just to keep the country running. does that amaze you?

oil is an amazingly cheap, dense, and convenient energy source. it is incredibly portable and abundant, and our entire system depends on it (especially for transportation). it will eventually becomes to expensive for most of us to afford, and it simply cannot be replaced.

The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.

after you read that, remind yourself that this is government report, and it was published this february. pretty spooky isn’t it? so, after reading that small excerpt i decided to do a google search and download it. i haven’t read it yet, but i wanted to include it here for you all to download as well. enjoy.

the Hirsch Report

the oil supported world that we live in is quite a bit more flimsy and subject to natural law than we have all thought (and most of us continue to think). we have built every aspect of our civilization (from transportation and housing to and food and water distribution) on one pretense: there will always be a never ending (and always increasing) supply of fossil fuels (with no real alternatives). i need you to stop and think about that for a second. our society, our culture, our entire world psychology relies exclusively on this ONE finite resource. does the scope of it settle in? did it make you realize how fragile the system truly is? did it make you sick? when i finally wrapped my mind around it, i realized how incredibly powerless we will all become without this resource. without it, we are no longer giants; we can longer maintain the hold on this world that we once had.

over the past 150 years we’ve had ample access to an ever increasing supply of oil, and with this resource we’ve developed an ever increasing supply of food. the more oil we discovered, the more food we could produce. the earth’s human population grew from 1.5 billion people to 6.5 billion people from about 1859 to present day. you need to understand this completely in order to fully grasp the enormity of the situation we are currently in. if not for oil, there would NOT be 6.5 billion people on the earth today. it is the ONLY reason why our population is so large. if you remove this resource or it becomes increasingly scarce, it is like removing our food supply. what happens to a population that becomes increasingly low on food? it is at this point that Matt Savinar predicts a mass die-off of the human race, where the “… world’s population will contract to less than 500 million within the next 50-100 years …”. unbelievable, isn’t it. sickening. in about one generation 6 billion people will die.

after you’ve cleaned up the vomit, you might say something like,”Yeah, but we’re human, and we can fix this. that CAN’T happen to us!” it is at this point that 3 examples of previous die-offs are presented to the reader: bacteria in a petri dish, reindeer on St. Matthew Island, and humans on Easter Island. all three represent populations that, given ample supply to a specific finite resource, had population explosions over a relatively short period of time followed by drastic and severe population crashes (because of resource depletion) over a much shorter period of time.

bacteria in a petri dish, aren’t exactly “comparable” to humans, but it is still a living organism, and some laws give no allowances. in either way, we’ll skip on to the next two examples, as i think they are more explicative.

the 29 reindeer that were artificially introduced to St. Matthew Island by humans in 1944, multiplied to about 6,000 in less than twenty years (1963). a mere three years later (1966), that population had crashed to 42, and the island was littered with deer carcasses. the reindeer had exhausted the one available resource that they depended on (lichen) and nature took care of the rest. but they’re deer, that can’t happen to us, right?

the human population on Easter Island had developed quite a complex society, and it’s population surged to somewhere between 7,000 – 20,000, but when the first westerners to discover the island came ashore in 1722, they found “poverty and barrenness.” the discovers were very confused, as the remaining islanders had none of the necessary technology or organizational skills that would be required to build the large statues that the island is famous for. when ask who had built the statues, the few natives that were left had completely forgotten their own history and claimed that the statues had “walked across the island.” what happened? simple, the population grew to such levels that the rate at which they were cutting down the once rich and lush forests (to perpetuate themselves) eventually became greater than the forests could replenish themselves. or you could say, they were consuming wood faster than it was being produced. lumber was the one resource responsible for the advancement of their entire civilization. within a few generations, the population crashed, and what was left had completely forgotten even simple skills like canoe building.

so where do we stand? from 1859 to present day (less than 150 years), the human population has grown from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion. this explosion, and it’s perpetuation, is completely reliant on oil. the continued extraction of oil is absolutely necessary in order to continuously expand our food production capacity. the more oil we extract, the more food we can produce, the more people that can live. when that resource becomes unavailable (by price hikes, war, weather, natural depletion, etc), the global human population is going to crash just like every other species that has encountered this problem in the past. we are NOT above this law, and at this point, there’s very little that we can do about it.

so do i just sit around on my ass? how can we prepare ourselves for such a catastrophe? there are hundreds of websites out there to help you begin the process of relying less on oil. you can start to farm some of your own food, get rid of your car, and wean yourself as much as possible from being the consumer that the corporations want you to be. it’s not going to be easy, but i really hope i don’t have to say, “I told you so.”