I have been oscillating, spiritually, since I became Peak Oil aware. Before this tumult, I concentrated, wholeheartedly, on trying to spread a message of love and compassion. On being a good person. My spiritual questing was informed largely by Quakerism and Buddhism – paths that advocate kindness, pacifism and even-temperedness. Despite a being deeply flawed individual, I would meditate on directing ‘metta’ – loving kindness – to all sentient beings as far as I was able.
In 2005, I was hit by a freight-train of awareness that my heart could not assuage. Simultaneously, I felt rage swell in my core as I beheld the realpoliltik – the malfeasance and insanity of the globalist agenda. The evil promulgated by the lies and prevarications of the corporatists ever permeated my being. As I bore witness to the modus operandi of our fear-based death culture, it felt like a tapeworm was inching its way through my soul.
I left the Society of Friends’ (Quaker) Sunday meditations as I felt increasingly unable to subscribe to their pacifist ideal. I read Derrick Jensen and Ward Churchill and tasted a metallic truth therein. Lady anarchy was a way forward of sorts, yet there was little spiritual consolation to be had within her dictates as somewhere, deep down, my heart had been utterly broken. Literally smashed into smithereens by the sheer insidiousness of the Bilderberger Group, PNAC, the Trilateral Commission and the many other power-wielding cabals, big and small, that value power over virtue, death over life.
This is not the world I want. I cannot help but mourn this every single day. Every time I catch an ugly sound bite from the mouth of a far-right (so-called) ‘Christian’ regarding the poor, the illegal immigrant or the homosexual, I spiritually fragment a little more. Simultaneously, the thing that I am becoming, the individual stocking up on 00 buckshot, ossifies and hardens.
I was reminded of this disconnect from my former incense-burning self, trenchantly, just last week. My son brought home the words to the song that he is to sing on Wednesday as part of his kindergarten’s Christmas concert. When I heard him sing, I felt the pull of that entire world-view that had been evanescing, leeching from my soul. It goes:
“It’s about peace. It is about joy.
It’s about every girl and boy.
It’s about family. It’s about caring.
It’s about people giving and sharing.
It’s about peace, it’s about joy.
It’s about love.”
Surely this is what Christmas should be about, not about the dopamine hit from the purchase of useless gewgaws. Moreover, I wish I could better temper my fatalism with the sentiment enshrined in the above song. Surely, as Buddha maintained, there must be a middle way. While I do not wish to collapse into mawkish sentimentality, there has to be more to life than merely steeling oneself to deal with marauding Mutant Biker Zombies.
I am a doomer, yet, it seems, I also have this big human heart. Furthermore, in the final analysis, it seems as though it will not completely go away.
One January in Paris, I held a well-wrapped bag of Brie outside my third-floor window.
Street lamps shone on deep green leaves as snow melted in the cool air. I wound my window closed, holding the edge of the bag until it was firmly secured in the protective corner of the outer pane.
With hundreds of students and only one kitchen, leaving food in the communal fridge was like giving it away.
Four years later, in my new apartment in Toronto, I stood in front of what sounded like a fridge with bronchitis. I started to view it less as a useful appliance than as an unneeded annoyance.
In what felt like a radical decision, I unplugged my fridge.
The soft quiet that followed was my immediate reward. My shoulders relaxed slightly and I remembered the ease of my time in Europe, anticipating Toronto’s local markets and eating simply. I mused that living more lightly on the earth would mean feeling lighter myself.
Canadians are among the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world, and it’s no accident that our lives often have a high degree of small but cumulative stresses that will only intensify if we fail to shift to simpler ways as resources dwindle in the future.
We overdo life, and then escape to places with a lower consumption rate for our vacations, trying to regain some sense of balance. We need to find ways to weave rhythms compelling us to slow down into the fabric of life here – be it a regular siesta, a two-hour meal with friends or regular trips to the market to buy fresh fruits and vegetables.
Our conveniences have isolated us from nature and its cycles. It’s easy enough to choose to unplug, get rid of our frosty steel, acknowledging that to be human is to be connected with our true source of life, the earth.
After disconnecting my fridge, I found myself in new conversations with my family. I learned more about my father’s family grocery store. His father and neighbours had built a barn and insulated it with sawdust. A man sold them huge chunks of ice that he had cut from the river each winter and brought back with horse and cart.
Stored in their barn, the ice lasted all year, and they used it to keep the meat cold in the store that served Guelph’s Little Italy. I was amazed that with absolutely no power other than a horse and strong arms, they were able to maintain a grocery that fed the neighbourhood.
Surprisingly little of our food needs refrigeration. Cups of herbs or red chard kept in water are a cheerful reminder of the passage of time and will keep you alert to their metamorphoses.
Lighter veggies such as basil or lettuce last two to three days, depending on your kitchen temperature. All hardier vegetables last for a week, while yams, squash, onions and potatoes can last months.
Cheese and butter will last in a zip-lock bag in cold water. This is a tip I got from a German acquaintance who also lived without a fridge.
I now have an indoor herb garden that supplies me with fresh herbs and teas. There’s nothing more invigorating than the smell of fresh mint upon coming home.
I realized elatedly after turning off my fridge that somehow I had equated it with the natural life of my food. But produce has its own cycles and never knew the inside of a crisper until about 50 years ago.
Seeing my food arranged on the counter makes me feel blessed and keeps me aware of what I need to eat. When I want something that really should be kept cold, I grab it at a shop, tossing it into my bag or pocket like a regular Huckleberry Finn.
You gain a feeling of freedom from buying just what you need.
One of the biggest drawbacks can by summed up by my friend Albert’s question: “But what about ice cream?” An ecologist, Albert decided to accompany me on this journey – in his own way. Indeed, what about cold beer?
Albert’s solution was to use his unheated mud room in winter and to buy a very small, ecologically sound fridge for the summer.
I chose a cooler and snow in winter, and the Annex sherbet stand in summer.
Room-temperature beverages are less shocking to our system, but when entertaining I buy crushed ice to chill whatever I’ll be serving. In the cold months I use fresh snow.
In winter, I stored some ginger-carrot soup by putting a small pot into a larger soup pot filled with pure snow and wrapping it in a wool blanket. What a great feeling when it worked! Using ingenuity rather than energy makes everyday life an adventure seldom experienced any more.
In the past, leftovers were like guests that had worn out their welcome. Post-fridge, I take fresh leftovers to share with my neighbour Bradley. When I had a bad cold, he heard me coughing through the walls, called and offered to buy me some oranges. In an unsocial condo setting, we forged a true bond.
It’s now been over two years since I used a fridge.
This article was originally published in NOW , Toronto, 2008.
I can’t help but feel frustrated when I read Newsweek articles like that one below that only go as far as advocating a Business As Usual (BAU) or a Technofix just-in-time-to-save-our-asses solution (In religious jargon – False Messianic promise) to Climate Change and Peak Oil.
By Philip Be’er VPOE
In his Hierarchy of Needs, Abraham Maslow laid out in a graphic format, what human beings need to thrive http://www.businessballs.com/maslow.htm
Try to find the need for nuclear, fossil or even “low carbon” energy sources, for cars or of any other kind of mechanised transportation in the pyramid and you’ll see that they simply play no role in what human beings require to be healthy, wealthy and happy.
According to Professor Abraham Maslow, we do need Clean Air, Food, Water, Sleep and Shelter to survive. When we also get our safety and security needs met this creates a stable environment conducive to developing socially and emotionally. When we set up our societies in ways that allow us to have our Esteem Needs met, then we also have a shot at realising our personal potential.
Crude Oil, drywall, IPods and mechanised things play no part in getting our basic needs met. Yet, without these things we have the opportunity to experience Peak Experiences. Wow!
Within our lifetimes, we will all be confronted with the challenge of getting our most basic needs met and I believe that our attention will shift from How do I download the video that I’m “dying to watch”?, to How do I grow enough food so that I do not have to “watch my children dying”?
I advocate for us to ignore the distractions of how to electrify the automotive fleet, how to keep the factories running and how to prevent an economic collapse (after it’s already happened, no less), and focus immediately on disseminating knowledge and training related to urban gardening, rebuilding resilient local economies that allow people to trade skills and goods at the face-to-face level, upgrading our homes so that they will keep us warm and dry for years to come without the addition of any kinds of fuels, harvesting water at a local level and learning to manage human and animal wastes.
Sharon Begley and I agree on one thing, “The Clock is Ticking”
Philip
We Can’t Get There From Here
Political will and a price on CO2 won’t be enough to bring about low-carbon energy sources.
Sharon Begley
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Mar 23, 2009
By all means, swap out your regular light bulbs for compact fluorescents, take the bus, weatherize your home and install solar panels on your roof. Oh, heck, go crazy: tell your senators to give the nuclear industry everything it wants so it starts building reactors again. But while you’re doing all that to reduce the world’s energy use and cut emissions of greenhouse gases, keep this in mind: even if we scale up existing technologies to mind-bending levels, such as finishing one nuclear plant every other day for the next 40 years, we’ll still fall short of how much low-carbon energy will be needed to keep atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide below what scientists now recognize as the point of no return.
As the world gets closer to a consensus that we need to slash CO2 emissions, a debate is raging over whether we can achieve the required cuts by scaling up existing technologies or whether we need “transformational” scientific breakthroughs. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the causes, magnitude and impacts of global warming, said in 2007 that “currently available” technologies and those on the cusp of commercialization can bring enough zero-carbon energy online to avoid catastrophic climate change. And I regularly get reports from renewable-energy and environmental groups arguing that off-the-shelf technologies, fully deployed, can get us there. In the opposite corner is the Department of Energy, which in December concluded that we need breakthroughs in physics and chemistry that are “beyond our present reach” to, for instance, triple the efficiency of solar panels; DOE secretary Steven Chu has said we need Nobel caliber breakthroughs.
That is also the view of energy chemist Nate Lewis of the California Institute of Technology. “It’s not true that all the technologies are available and we just need the political will to deploy them,” he says. “My concern, and that of most scientists working on energy, is that we are not anywhere close to where we need to be. We are too focused on cutting emissions 20 percent by 2020—but you can always shave 20 percent off” through, say, efficiency and conservation. By focusing on easy, near-term cuts, we may miss the boat on what’s needed by 2050, when CO2 emissions will have to be 80 percent below today’s to keep atmospheric levels no higher than 450 parts per million. (We’re now at 386 ppm, compared with 280 before the Industrial Revolution.) That’s 80 percent less emissions from much greater use of energy.
Lewis’s numbers show the enormous challenge we face. The world used 14 trillion watts (14 terawatts) of power in 2006. Assuming minimal population growth (to 9 billion people), slow economic growth (1.6 percent a year, practically recession level) and—this is key—unprecedented energy efficiency (improvements of 500 percent relative to current U.S. levels, worldwide), it will use 28 terawatts in 2050. (In a business-as-usual scenario, we would need 45 terawatts.) Simple physics shows that in order to keep CO2 to 450 ppm, 26.5 of those terawatts must be zero-carbon. That’s a lot of solar, wind, hydro, biofuels and nuclear, especially since renewables kicked in a measly 0.2 terawatts in 2006 and nuclear provided 0.9 terawatts. Are you a fan of nuclear? To get 10 terawatts, less than half of what we’ll need in 2050, Lewis calculates, we’d have to build 10,000 reactors, or one every other day starting now. Do you like wind? If you use every single breeze that blows on land, you’ll get 10 or 15 terawatts. Since it’s impossible to capture all the wind, a more realistic number is 3 terawatts, or 1 million state-of-the art turbines, and even that requires storing the energy—something we don’t know how to do—for when the wind doesn’t blow. Solar? To get 10 terawatts by 2050, Lewis calculates, we’d need to cover 1 million roofs with panels every day from now until then. “It would take an army,” he says. Obama promised green jobs, but still.
Hence the need for Nobel-caliber discoveries. Lewis’s research is on artificial photosynthesis, in which a material (to be determined, thus the research) absorbs sunlight and water and produces hydrogen for fuel but zero CO2. “If we could figure out how to make and deploy such a system, the capacity would be essentially infinite,” he says. Another need is for transmission lines that don’t leak 80 percent of what they carry, says physicist David Pines of the University of California, Davis. “The technology is not remotely there,” he says. “We’re going to have to discover yet another family of superconductors [which do not lose current] that are easily made into wires” and that work at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, a coolant.
Prospects stink for discovering what we need to discover, especially when you consider that to get the right energy mix in 2050, given how long it takes to capitalize and deploy new technologies, we need breakthroughs soon, not in 2049. Yet despite the pressing need, DOE spent a pitiful $2 billion to $3 billion on nondefense, basic energy R&D last year, less than one fifth what we spent in the 1970s and 1980s. A new report from the Brookings Institution calls for $20 billion to $30 billion a year and—to improve the odds of success—revamping the nation’s energy labs, which today are “too far removed from the marketplace to produce the kind of transformational research we need for new energy technologies,” says Brookings’s Mark Muro. The clock is ticking.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/189293
The first organizer of the Vancouver Peak Oil Citizens Group, Max – a highly like-able young permaculturist and eco-activist – renounced the post allegedly, because he foresaw our powering-down and transitional efforts going to s***. I remember hearing this information from my predecessor, Steve. I was told that he was off, ‘walking the land,’ trying to find out ‘where it is at.’ As I began to Contemplate Max’s life-path, I also began to question more of my own plans for the future. Put it this way, if I am to use the folks at LATOC as a yardstick, I am woefully unprepared, ripe for the die-off. A secure home with crate-loads of ammo is the de rigeur minimum – or so the message boards would have us believe.
I have about a month’s worth of food and some basic emergency supplies. The usual suspects: the fresh, bottled water, the excess propane, the Katadyn water filters and purification tablets. Oh, and next years’ seeds are in cold storage.
And when I plan it comes down to this: I plan to plant more beans next year. I will double the potato plot to make room for some early and mid-season varieties. Other than that I plan to to take a last trip to the Old Country – preferably before my Grandmother dies and before the civilian air-fleet is permanently grounded.
I find it so hard to make contingency plans for my existence when I am so bloody caught up in living that self-same existence. And, despite being the son of a farmer, I am also a former quasi-urbane metro-sexual. I am the product of the eighties and the British Education combined – probably not what you would call true survivor material. To this end, I hope it is not all Mad Max hair-do’s and pointy sticks anytime too soon!
Ultimately, wheresoever I am now, is exactly where I am connecting with my landbase. Presently that is Burnaby. Often I project into ‘A Long Emergency’ scenario. Often, during walking meditation along the perimeter of my immediate landbase, a voice will percolate upwardly through my being:
“The H.Y. Louie Distribution Warehouse is the best place for food reconnaissance raids (as it is hidden.) The war zone will be on the other side of Lougheed, about the Costco loading bay. Yes, that is where the gun-fire will be…”
Knowing your immediate landbase ensures your best ability to survive.
While a significant number of my fellow activists are eye-balling Nelson as a agrarian utopia, I pose the question: Can the Kootenay landbase accommodate a post-postmodern diaspora of this kind? I fear it may not be able. Moreover, how will the indigenous population feel about any prospective exodus?
If it all goes to hell-in-a handbasket, I will evanesce into the woods like the best of you. Until that time I am going to more intimately connect with my locale. I am going to find the mythical spot where the best blackberries grow on the borders of Lake City; where the most reliable natural water-source is in late August.
I will prove to you that chantrelles grow here. Once I find them.
I find myself trying to take account of a lot of different scenarios, ranging from a “soft landing” — where oil depletes gradually and price rises are the biggest problem we have to deal with — to a crash with both sturm and drang. In the soft landing scenario, I’d hope to stay in North Vancouver and help relocalize it into a fairly self-sufficient neighborhood, bearing in mind that that still requires preserving farmload to grow food for the whole metro area and so on. That’s why I’m eager to get the Peak Oil task force going, get the city council and the provincial government on board, and make Vancouver the first city in Canada to officially prepare for what’s coming. But I’m also thinking about what to do in a more severe scenario — I’d still need a village around me — but maybe somewhere farther from the city, like Nelson, or the Sunshine Coast? That kind of scenario brings with it a million questions: How do I make a living? What about family, here and elsewhere? Where are my best friends? How do I convince lots of people with Really Useful Skills to come live next to me and teach me everything I don’t know? No real answers yet, but I’m hoping 2008 will bring much more clarity. I’ll update this post when I know more.
Plans A, B & C are all in various stages of research and development:
Plan A – Stay in Vancouver – Plan A
- Continue to develop guerrilla and community gardens
- Create a non-profit to facilitate the creation of city sponsored community gardens
- Start an urban permaculture school to train low-income, disadvantaged, at risk populations alongside anyone interested in the subject
- Work with the city to create urban farms employing people who have graduated from the urban permaculture school
Plan B – Ecovillage in BC
- Looking at property in Lillooet with plenty of sun, long growing season and access to fresh water
- Work with city of Lillooet to create a methane digester facility for composting municipal food stuffs while generating electricity and fertilizer
- Purchase diesel vehicle and get a Plant Drive kit so I can run on used veggie oil, dino diesel and biodiesel
- Start building a huge garden & orchard – enough to be self-sufficient with a surplus to sell/trade
- Begin keeping livestock for meat and dairy
- Continue developing soap making skills
- Start a permaculture school within the next five years
- Continue to create micro-enterprise focused on relocalizing our economy
Plan C – Head for the Hills
- Retreat to Manitoulin Island – work with friends and family to build self-sufficient infrastructure there