Kerrplunk

Every so often I find it productive to leave a blog completely fallow for several months–or a couple of years–and then come back to it, possibly because I’m afraid regular posting might gain me an audience that I would feel an obligation to. It has probably been long enough that most people have wandered off by now.

I am presently living in a cooperative household in the SF Bay Area, where I’ve been building an earth oven, keeping a tiny flocklet of urban chickens, and growing vegetables. Our next door neighbor is a character with stories as long as your arm about his rough past and world travels, an unbelievable 30% of which may be true. I am engaging with a permaculture course, observing and interacting and hopefully strengthening my teaching repertoire slightly, and I am an interpretive naturalist at an ecological learning center. My living situation is virtually perfect except that it’s a little more expensive than I’d like, and my work situation is virtually perfect except that it doesn’t make me quite enough to live on. This is normal for these times, a situation which quite a lot of people are justifiably angry about. That just anger can be harnessed toward some beautiful productivity, but insofar as it is directed towards reforming the present broken system, it will not change overnight that which people are angry about.

I aspire to be part of the 100%, I told my friend—the 100% with enough healthy food to eat, enough clean water for drinking and bathing, safe enough places to live, and enough access to decent health care. I see that our system is designed not to deliver that. My earlier dream was to be part of building alternative systems that would allow people to gradually withdraw their support from the broken system so that it could collapse relatively painlessly. Now I believe that until the old system collapses, the majority of people will not cut themselves loose from it. I’m throwing in with those who call themselves the 99% in hopes that doing so will help to model potential new systems and allow the old to crumble with as little suffering as possible. But these are going to be uneasy times for most of us.

In the midst of this, permaculture offers what Sharon Astyk (after Pat Meadows) has called the theory of anyway: Whether or not oil is peaking, economy is collapsing, climate is warming, wouldn’t you rather be growing food and having fun with your neighbors, spending less money and more time, wasting less and having more? Would you rather dwell on scare-city or a-bun-dance? If we would rather be living this way anyway, what’s stopping us?

Yesterday, I was working at a desk job in a small non-profit organization in Berkeley. It happens to be a synagogue of the denomination of Judaism I affectionately refer to as “woo-Jew.” The services are uplifting, celebratory, mystical, and sometimes (at least from the perspective of more traditional Jews) sorta silly, and the community is very dear to me. Behind the scenes, though, it operates pretty much like any other understaffed non-profit organization.

When I’m half of the administrative staff, I can’t afford to have my mind elsewhere. But for awhile now I’ve been having trouble focusing. Halfway through an email, I’ll find myself thinking about goats. Registering a new member, I drift off into daydreams about pickling asparagus. Looking over a newsletter for errors, I’m start worrying about climate change and vanishing forests. My heart hasn’t been in the office, and neither has my head, and the automaton at my desk isn’t being the effective worker I was a couple of years ago. I’m overdue for a change, and I need to be doing something I really believe in.

For the past two months I’ve been in an urban permaculture course offered by the SF Permaculture Guild. Two days ago, I got an email accepting me to a work trade program at Emerald Earth. I’ll be departing Berkeley in the second week of April to live in this small earth-centered community in Boonville, California, learning to look after their gardens and livestock, and maybe a bit about natural building. I turn 30 in about a week.

This is Kerrplunk—a blog about what can happen to a comfortable life when it really sinks in that “unsustainable lifestyle” doesn’t mean “carefree” but “slow suicide.” This is where I’ll talk about rolling down the energy descent slope and, hopefully, coming to rest in a patch of green. I’ll talk about resilience, climate change preparedness, understanding peak oil for non-bunker-dwellers, how to design your own total permaculture lifestyle, and what we can learn from practicing “original skills”: those that early humans would have used to survive and thrive. I’ll talk about simple living from a pagan/woo-Jew perspective, and what it’s like for me to be an anti-consumerist, eco-obsessed queer person. I’ll post photos and hopefully video from the land and its many inhabitants, human people as well as other people. And I hope my experiences will offer me a preview of what my life might be like as fossil fuels decline and the global climate weirds.

Welcome.