Kerrplunk

I’ve just returned to the Bay Area from my trip to Florida by train, and I can report that while the US passenger rail system is, in the words of one Russian visitor whose acquaintance I made on the trip, “primitive” in comparison to that of other countries, it beats flying by miles.

Taking the train will not get you to your destination as fast as flying, at least if you’re traveling across the continent, as I was. On the other hand, that extra time is time to get valuable work done. For staying connected while traveling by train, I bought an inexpensive mobile broadband device with a monthly, no-contract plan, and had sufficient internet connection to get work done and stay in touch with friends and family. I had time and space to get up and move around. The food was excellent, and when I didn’t want to pay slightly high prices for dining car meals, I ate some of the healthy food I was able to bring aboard with me. I took two large carry-on bags and two personal items and checked three bags, and I paid no extra fees for any of my baggage. Security procedures were unobtrusive and did not threaten my health or personal privacy. All the train staff have been friendly and responsive. Train travelers are also on the whole a pleasant group of people, and I talked with a number of interesting people, some of whom have become valued friends and business connections.

I purchased a sleeper car for two nights of the trip to Florida. But on the way back, I decided to try traveling in coach the whole way. I’m glad I did—I actually had a fine experience traveling in coach. When I had a neighbor in the seat next to me, I simply slept in the sightseeing lounge with earplugs and a blindfold, and when I didn’t, I found stretching out diagonally across two seats almost as comfortable as a bed. For comfort, even first-class airline seats can’t match the roominess of coach seats on a train, and being able to move freely about the train for the entire journey is a real benefit for me. If you do choose to get a sleeper, your meals are paid for and you have access to showers on the train. It’s worth getting a sleeper if you absolutely need to lie flat to sleep, or if you really want full privacy.

On a train, you see the country in a way you can’t from the window of a plane. Not only do you have the experience of traveling through the landscape rather than looking at it like a Google satellite photo, but you can get out at stations across the country and take photos, take a smoke break if you’re a smoker, or just stretch your legs and do yoga. We also had historical guides traveling with us who described the history of the land as we traveled over the Sierra Nevada range.

Traveling by air is truly unsustainable. We simply can’t support a nation of business and leisure travelers dependent on consuming the shocking amounts of our limited fossil fuel energy required to lift a metal box thirty five thousand feet into the air and propel it across the country in a few hours. Passenger trains are usually much more efficient, even though our outdated trains tend to depend on diesel, and they could be lower impact and more pleasant still if some of the money we spend subsidizing our dying system of air travel and keeping up an unnecessarily cumbersome highway system were only redirected to modernizing our trains. More and more workers will no doubt use telecommuting for business instead of flying to meetings, and more and more travelers should try taking the train.

A year ago this New Year’s Day, I had no idea where I would be in another two months.

After a year of dreaming about quitting my perfectly good office job and saying goodbye to my great boss just so I could immerse myself completely in the study of permaculture and sustainable food production, I’d finally realized that nothing ever happens tomorrow, it can only happen today. I talked with my boss and won her support, and made my today come sooner than I thought possible. I tightened my belt and saved enough money to give myself a safety net, and started sending out applications to all the internship programs I had wistfully researched before. I found a permaculture design certificate course that I could afford to take while wrapping up my work. On New Year’s, the deadline I’d set (and already extended twice) to transition out of my job breathed down my neck—but I still hadn’t settled on my ideal internship site. It wasn’t until February, when I visited Emerald Earth, that I would realize I’d found my place.

I spent seven months at Emerald Earth, a community focused on natural building training and permaculture, and learned so much about growing food, caring for animals, and tending the wild. I couldn’t wait for the next step. At the Hoes Down hosted by Full Belly Farm in October I was still wondering where my new knowledge would take me next.

It was there I met Nate. Our immediate connection was exciting, but I didn’t then imagine that just a few short months later we’d be building a solid business plan and embarking on a land search.

This past New Year’s Day, I realized I had brought myself full circle. Again, I don’t know where precisely I’ll be located in the next couple of months—but this time, I know I’ll be working for my farm. Our farm.

Uncertainty is always a bit stressful. But it’s also a time of wonderful mystery. The next few years could look like anything from here. I can make a few predictions with confidence—it will be a lot of hard work, the rewards will be 100% worth it, and it will be a bigger adventure than any I’ve undertaken yet.

The Progress Energy Foundation, nuclear power renewable energy advocates, have sponsored a little flash game targeted to general audiences designed to raise awareness of renewable energy development. It’s called Energize. I just played it a couple of times to see what the messages are, and I’m not thrilled about what I’ve found.

Any game has player-dependent and player-independent variables. In this game, the player controls how many power plants are built, what kind of energy they use, and where they’re located, as well as any purchased “upgrades” for the different energy technologies. The player-independent variables are the speed of development, power demand, space used by plants, and how fast your funds replenish. Energy technologies offered are fossil fuels, biofuels, solar, wind, and nuclear plants. Upgrades include cheaper solar cells, batteries for wind farms, cleaner fossil fuels, cleaner biofuels, and nuclear “education” so people aren’t afraid to live near a nuclear power plant. You win if you can last a round without people giving up and leaving because they don’t have enough power. You’re scored on how unhappy your customers were because they couldn’t use all the energy they wanted.

There are several problems with the messaging of this game. First, while sunlight and wind are limited resources—the wind dies down and the sun sets—fossil fuels, biofuels, and radioactive material are unlimited as far as this game is concerned—fossil fuels never run out, they just pollute (unless you’ve bought the “clean coal” upgrade). A biofuel plant does take up more space than the others, but it doesn’t push up the price of food, the feedstock doesn’t appear to be shipped in from off the game board, and none of the feedstocks turn out to be basically a hoax. Uranium is apparently plentiful and cheap, and the supply is secure. Nuclear power plants are more expensive, but don’t take any more time to come on line or funds for maintenance than does a wind plant. And in this world, fears of nuclear insecurity are baseless and easily dismissed by throwing money at an educational campaign. Nuclear power doesn’t need an upgrade—other than its PR problem, in the world of this flash game, it’s the perfect fuel. I’m not completely convinced that nuclear power doesn’t have a place in fighting climate change, but this game makes it look far too simple.

The other problems I have with this game have to do with its player-independent variables. Any strategy that replaces fossil fuels with renewable fuels necessarily must reduce energy consumption. The energy return on energy invested is just lower for wind, solar, and biofuels than it is for releasing the concentrated energy built up over millions of years in oil, coal, natural gas, and radioactive materials. The only clean power technology that offers a chance of overcoming peak energy, preventing global climate disaster, and preserving human culture is to decrease our energy use. That means taking obvious energy efficiency measures (not an option in this game), but it also means putting the brakes on runaway development. We can do that intelligently, or the economy and the environment will do it for us. This game doesn’t offer any reflection on ways to manage the pace of development; new buildings appear and the lights go on whether there is the capacity to support them or not. Indeed, that’s the whole point—development is the master we all must serve.

There’s a “secret” energy technology that you can unlock if you play this game at the museum that sponsors it. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s energy efficiency measures. Or, given how in touch with reality this game is, it might be cold fusion.

I have a confession to make—I’ve been keeping something under my hat.

Back in October—which seems like a hundred years ago, as well as thousands of miles away—Emerald Earth had a booth at the Hoes Down at Full Belly Farm. We sold baked goods and bike blended smoothies to raise a little bit more money towards the new common house project. It was my first time at the Hoes Down and I had a great time, whether at the booth or at one of my brief forays out. On one such foray, I bought the aforementioned hat, a brown felted Robin-Hoodesque number that I’m very fond of and wear everywhere. On another I struck up a conversation with a person who told me of a dream.

It was a dream that sounded familiar—starting an educational ecofarm somewhere within reach of the San Francisco Bay Area. It was my dream too, I admitted, while adding that I always seemed to have a deficit of either time or money to make this project happen.

Nate—my new friend’s name was Nate—said, “Well, I happen to have a little of both right now; what I need is partners.”

So I said “Let’s talk.” We traded numbers and email addresses and began an exchange of long, detailed emails envisioning big and exciting things, sharing a little bit about our lives, and getting to know each other and our plans.

Last month, while I was in San Francisco, we met and took an excursion into Sonoma County to look at a piece of land. The car ride gave us more time to share and vision and plan, and though the piece of land wasn’t the one, the trip was important because with it we cemented our friendship and solidified a desire to work together.

Since then, we’ve been hammering out details of a business plan, gathering additional people who are interested in joining us, and continuing our land search, now with California FarmLink. Nate’s applied for grants and traveled to Copenhagen to investigate the folk school model, and I’ve put together a wee website to share to let people know what we’re working on.

And it’s really sinking in—I feel committed to doing this. We’re going to have a farm. In spring of 2011.

Leaving Emerald Earth meant leaving behind connections with people who had become good friends, co-workers and co-livers, communitarians I’d sung songs with before very nearly every lunch and dinner for almost seven months. It’s natural to have a hard time with that, and in my case, I suppose having a hard time meant that I started withdrawing in my last month. There was less work going on in the garden and more happening at the new common house site, and other community members were ready to transition into their winter meetings and reflection. I spent a lot more time cooking and cleaning, and I sublimated the stress of leaving a place I had begun to think of as home into compulsive logistical preparations and obsessive attempts to bring into focus a future I couldn’t visualize clearly.

When my father visited the Bay Area in August, I spent some time with him there, and after I introduced him to farmer’s markets and good food, he made some noise about having me come put in a garden in their suburban Florida back yard. I replied “Sure, Dad, if you’re serious about wanting to grow food, you just let me know and I’ll come set it up for you.” Well, he’s still going to farmer’s markets—he actually researched where to find them in their town, and started bringing back produce for my mom to reluctantly cook (she’d rather grill a steak than a zuke). There’s a lot left to improve there, but it’s a measurable lifestyle change, one I took as indication of seriousness. So here I am on a train to Florida, with a suburban vegetable garden starter design in mind.

I planned a little over two weeks in San Francisco to connect with my lover of four years, whom I’d been away from barring a few lovely visits all summer. My plan to go to Florida for the winter was another strain for us, and a reminder that our different lifestyles make it difficult to live close to each other. I want to live rurally and produce food for myself and my loved ones. He’s rooted in the city. We each love one another too much to demand that the other sacrifice their way of life. And we’re each too wise or too cynical to believe that one other person will ever be everything to us. I’m letting go and holding on at the same time, and that’s difficult and sometimes painful, but worth it.

Just before getting into town, I heard about an amazing course, a permaculture teacher training at Hayes Valley Farm, that coincided with the dates I would be in the city. It meant having less time with my Beloved, but I felt strongly enough about it to do it anyway, and for many reasons, I’m glad I did. I spent two weekends in intense sessions with fellow students and our instructors—recent graduates of Geoff Lawton’s program at the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia, who had designed this teacher training with his help and approval—designing curriculum, workshopping teaching technique, and discussing the neurological and permacultural principles of learning. It felt like my Museum Education degree and my desire to find humanity’s ecological niche were finally coming together. And I wrote students at my alma mater in Florida to connect with them about facilitating a group project in permaculture—not quite a PDC; I felt I’d need to do quite a lot more work before I’d be ready for that; but it follows the course structure somewhat, so it would be good preparation. Well, some folks expressed interest! So I’ll be facilitating the group, provided we can find a faculty sponsor, which should be possible.

Last night was my last night of the teacher training course, and my last night with my lover, and my last night in San Francisco. After participating on a panel discussing the future of permaculture education in the Bay Area, our teachers surprised us—well, me anyway—with certificates for the course stamped with their logo and that of the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia, with Geoff’s approval, certifying us as permaculture teachers. I’m a little blown away.

Early this morning I got to the train station to take Amtrak across the country—Bay Area to Chicago, Chicago to DC, DC to Orlando—for my first long train trip. It’s only been a few hours in, and I can’t tell you how glad I am to be on a train and not on a plane. Everyone here has been friendly, courteous, and calm. There’s no intrusive security screening and no frenetic rushing around a giant airport. I’m still sealed into a metal box, but as I cruise along at a sane speed at ground level, I can look out the window and enjoy passing trees, clouds, lakes, towns, and humans, who often wave at us. I’ve seen a hawk stooping on a rodent that was trying to pick its way across a fallow field, with no cover, and I’ve seen enormous flocks of coots scooting across the waters of the marsh, with their black feathers and white bills. I’ve seen dense forests and high chaparral country, beautiful Donner Lake and the remnants of collapsing industrial society. I brought a cooler full of organic, sustainable food, so I can feel I’m eating the way I want to be eating, although since I got a sleeper for the first leg of the trip, meals are free until Chicago. I can walk around, and tonight I hope to go to the observation car and do some skywatching through the Utah desert. All this and it’s less harmful than flying.

I’m excited to see family and old friends, and excited about the chance to spread permaculture knowledge in my natal watershed. And I’m sad, because I’m leaving so much of value to me behind. I’m looking forward to discovering where this path is taking me, I’m glad to be going forward, and at the same time I want someday soon to find myself back in San Francisco with the love and community I have there.

Sustainability — Of systems, practices, processes, or cultures, that which can be continued indefinitely without destroying the foundation of its own existence. Antonym: suicide.

Resilience — adj. Of systems, practices, processes, or cultures, the ability to adapt creatively to a changing environment or context without destroying the foundation of its own existence. Antonym: suicide.

Sustainability and resilience are fundamentally linked.

Sustainability, the current watchword of contemporary environmental consciousness, is unfortunately now devalued and diluted in much the same way that “green,” “natural,” “eco-friendly,” and “organic” have been. When a word moves into popular awareness, and from there into the marketer’s toolbox, its meaning must change, because marketers depend on words meaning one thing in the mind of the public and another to the corporation using them. “Sustainable” is now used as a tag for “if you are of a particular age, race, income, and education level, chances are you will want to buy this thing rather than some competing thing.” No one aware of the effects of burning oil on our climate, or in possession of even a vague sense that the supply of oil is limited, can long delude themselves that buying a new hybrid car is “sustainable” by any honest definition. And like “unique” and “pregnant,” sustainable is one of those words that has no comparative; something is either sustainable or it isn’t. You can’t be a little bit pregnant and you can’t be more or less sustainable.

Unfortunately, one of the things we’re discovering is that often continuing an existing system, practice, process, or culture takes far less energy and material resources than creating a new system, practice, process, or culture, or substantially changing the old one to fit a new context. We are entering an age of decreasingly available energy, due to the decline of fossil fuels and reduction in availability of the renewable energy resources that so far still depend on fossil fuels to be produced. That is, there is less oil and coal available, that which is available is becoming more and more energy-intensive to extract, and demand is still rising. The renewable energy technologies all still depend on concentrated fossil fuels—we can’t make very many solar panels in solar powered plants, and building wind turbines depends on mining metals and producing plastics, processes that cannot be powered by wind turbines. As oil declines, we will see a decline in the availability of all forms of energy. We’ll have less and less ability to completely retool our systems—whether we’re talking about our transportation infrastructure or our economy or our food production or even our customs of communicating with each other—because the energy to do so just won’t be there.

The context we live in now is one of rapid change. For our systems to be sustainable, they must be able to adapt well to change—whether we’re able to anticipate our future needs or not. We won’t be able to overhaul our systems once those needs become apparent.

Likewise, a resilient system must also be a sustainable one. If a system cannot be continued indefinitely without destroying the basis of its own continuation, then the eventuality of that destruction is a change it is unlikely to be able to adapt to.

(I’m appropriating the title of this post from the masturbation fantasy that was The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison.)

The good news about everything that is unsustainable is that, by definition, no matter what we do, it will eventually stop.

On the face of it, this can sound terrifying and depressing. At least it did for me. My lifestyle, like that of most people who spend time on the internet reading blogs like this, is really comfortable. I have ready access not only to nutritious food but to a variety of nutritious food that was beyond my parents’ conception when they were my age, and still regularly boggles them. I have the option to have a doctor treat my illnesses. I can jump on a bus and then a train and be in the next city pretty much any time I feel like it. I can either walk down the street and pay someone to make machines make a cup of tea for me, from tea grown in a region where human people are still doing the painstaking work of tending, harvesting, and processing tea plants, or I can make natural gas pumped out of the earth at great expense heat water so I can make tea “myself”—as if PG&E, the natural gas mining and refining industry, and the US federal government were not all helping me, let alone the same far away tea-picking laborers—at a cost of pennies. I really like tea. Not only tea, but chocolate. When the unsustainable stops, who will bring us chocolate? This is no idle question, but points directly to the obstacles standing between us and making changes before we are forced to.

Lierre Keith, here:

I think the biggest reason otherwise radical people don’t want to face the necessity of ending industrial civilization is privilege. We’re the ones reaping the benefits. We’ve sold out the rest of life on earth for convenience, creature comforts, and cheap consumer goods, and it’s appalling. … And what’s been frustrating to me for twenty-five years is conversations with people who agree, who know the planet is dying, who’ve done civil disobedience, who’ve wept over the destruction. And when I say, “We’re going to have to learn to live without electricity, without cars,” they say, “But I like the convenience. I like having a car. I like air conditioning.” I don’t know what to do with these people. That was worth destroying the planet? Their hesitation isn’t even about real survival needs like food. Nobody has once said to me, “But what will I eat?”

Recently I got onto a bus to get to the next city, as I am privileged to do in relative convenience and comfort, a ride that often takes about 45 minutes on the bus and then the light rail. On this day, the bus had been late, and I was anxious to make an appointment. Since I usually leave a little extra time for contingencies, I thought I might still make it, but it would be close. As the bus continued along its route, I learned from the conversations of the people around me why it had been late—there was a marathon I hadn’t paid much attention to that had closed the center of the city; the light rail station was inaccessible, as was much of the bus route. My anxiety increased; how would I make my appointment on time? I felt an enormous amount of frustration with the bus driver, with the marathon organizers, with the city, with the transit administration. As the driver came upon roadblock after roadblock (about which, through some snafu, she’d been given incorrect information) I began to feel empathy with her. Here she was doing a hard job under difficult circumstances. Not only had she been hugely inconvenienced and given the wrong instructions, it was already the day when the bus routes were being changed so she was driving a new route for the first time to begin with, she was driving an eight ton vehicle in traffic with other drivers similarly confused and frustrated, and to top it off her passengers were angry at her, too. As she made a decision and we turned off the route altogether, I accepted that I was not going to make my appointment on time, or indeed at all, and I let go of that stress and worry. I realized how privileged I was to live in a world where for a tenth of my gross hourly wage I can get on a bus and let someone else drive me to where I need to be, and at what cost to other people, human and otherwise. As soon as I accepted that being late was not under my control, the factors that actually are under my control came to light—I could at least choose not to cause myself further suffering by fighting needlessly or being in denial about my situation.

The reason I tell this story is to point out the process of shifting my emotional state from an ineffective and painful one to an effective and comfortable one began with acceptance, proceeded through compassion for others, and resulted in a more pleasant journey. The realization that there was no way at all to make my appointment on time actually freed me from a lot of distress. It is not hard to be patient. It is hard to be impatient. It is not hard to learn to live a new kind of life. It is hard to be dependent on a way of life that is no longer possible.

I know one person who is really and truly physically dependent on the continuation of civilization as we know it. He depends on a respirator to breathe. The respirator runs on electricity provided by a battery that must frequently be swapped for a fresh one and recharged. The idea that he should entrust his survival to daylight-only solar photovoltaics, to intermittent wind power, or even to microhydro, probably seems frightening to many people. The idea that he must currently entrust his survival to the dwindling availability of oil and coal from war-torn regions and fragile ecosystems and the brittle, outdated electrical grid is even more unsettling. I haven’t reconciled my objections to the use of oil and coal electricity and the existence of the outdated grid with my love for him and gladness that he is still alive and in the world. I don’t feel I need to. His life is in constant danger, whether from a storm or an earthquake or a passing cold virus or from a general decrease in available electricity. A just society would prioritize his need over my desire to refresh my Facebook feed every five minutes. Anyone who is about to use my friend and others like him as a reason to be outraged with me for saying that we must cut our electricity use to drastic lows must confront the fact that they are being hypocritical—why not simply be outraged that so many people are allowed to simply waste as much electricity as we can afford to buy, given the fact that it is heavily subsidized by the government, when its use to support the lives of people who are disabled and ill is clearly so much more important? Still, the thought of creating a change in society that will create more difficulty and inconvenience for people who, more than anything else, are disabled by society’s lack of care for them is a troubling one. But societies without access to industrial resources have cared for their disabled and ill for thousands of years. And in some but not all cases we know that industrial society is actually causing disability and illness. Given that our consumption of oil, gas, and coal is unsustainable, meaning that it will stop, and we don’t have the ability to foresee accurately when this will occur, doesn’t it make sense as a way of supporting all people who are dependent on this infrastructure to a greater or lesser degree to make plans now for when it begins to fail?

Once we have accepted that our lives as we know them are dependent on a fragile infrastructure that is going away more rapidly than we’d like to believe, once we have accepted the need for change, then we have only to answer the question: How are we to do this? How are we to prevent avoidable suffering for ourselves and fellow beings?

• First, waiting until the infrastructure collapses by itself to take action will increase suffering. We know this. If we do not work to create some alternative to grid power for my friend, when the grid goes down, he’ll die. If we do not work to establish resilient local food networks for our communities, when global food distribution is disrupted, we will go hungry. If we do not radically change our civilization, when we are unable to sustain it in the face of the environmental devastation we’ve wrought, we will all suffer and many of us will die. Some of this suffering may be unavoidable. But planning in advance can help prevent much of this suffering.
• Second, we have the knowledge and skills we need available to us right now to do what we need to do. We do not need to wait on the uncertainties of technological innovations that may or may not be forthcoming. We do not need to wait on the discovery of oil and gas reserves that may not be there. We do not need to wait on the development of such contradictions in terms as “clean coal” and “safe nuclear.” We have had this knowledge and skill for thousands of years, and we can improve upon it in ways that do not disrupt the living networks we depend on for our sustenance.
• Third, there are networks of people who are eager and willing to share these skills and their own resources in the service of the planet. None of them are perfect. None of them are offering you a 2500 sq. ft. country manor, an IRA, an HMO, or a luxury car. Most are not offering a full-time job with benefits. What they are offering is networks of community support and the opportunity to share and have enough. If you imagine and envision a new way of life for yourself that you think is sustainable and resilient, and you aren’t finding a way to create that for yourself alone, I guarantee that there is someone out there who has a similar vision or will cosign yours that you can work with. The trick is getting in touch with them, and getting over our brokennesses enough to be able to work together.
• Fourth, these other ways of life are not miserable existences of drudgery and pain. That’s fear talking. Oh, they can be if you like. If your life now is a miserable existence of drudgery and pain, you’re sure to bring that with you, until you heal it or change it somehow. If you are going to perpetually resent grinding grain by hand to make flour, there are other options—a wind or water mill to grind grain, for instance, or having someone in the community who likes that work do it in trade for some of the grain or other necessary staples. Or don’t eat it—it’s often healthier not to, anyway. There are lots of other starchy staples you can substitute for wheat bread—a big barrel of potatoes, for instance, or a patch of quinoa. We need to get beyond judging our fair share of work based on the 40hr standard, that’s all—some of us will be working less, others more, at any given time, based on our strengths and what there is to do. You can probably expect to have more free time, and more community to enjoy that free time with.

What do you need to be able to make the changes we’ll all need to make to survive, now, before it gets too hard? Is the future unbearable for you without chocolate? Experiment with bay nuts or whatever your local equivalent is. Is the thought of being without health insurance—the well-intentioned Obama plan notwithstanding—unbearable for you? Start talking to your local providers and see who occasionally does work on trade, or would be open to the idea. Can you not imagine life without the internet? Try getting into ham radio. Are you physically dependent on electricity for getting around or for your urgent medical needs? Trade skills with an off-grid alternative energy technician.

The good news is that while there are real problems and challenges to changing your lifestyle, they can all be dealt with. They are all less severe than the problems that inhere in our current industrial civilization. Some of them are harder to answer than “where am I going to get my chocolate?!” but they are all less frightening than the end of the planet’s ability to support life.

Let’s use the comments to talk about some of our personal roadblocks and their potential solutions.

I’ve just seen this article in The Nation about the behavior of environmental lobbyist groups, including the Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy. I’m currently reading Confessions of an Eco-Warrior by Dave Forman, who spent a long time in the conservation lobby before breaking away to co-found Earth First!, and it’s an eerie echo.

The good news is that more people describe themselves as caring about the environment than ever in US history.

The bad news is that this self-description is for most of us all but meaningless in practical terms.

It comes with a host of other attributes. You can expect someone who “cares about the environment” to choose paper or plastic or reusable or recycled shopping bags to bring home their unnecessarily packaged, industrially produced, organic labeled groceries because of some environmental justification or other. With regards to groceries, though, the thing to do to save the planet is to stop buying them. With few exceptions, anything you can get on a grocery store shelf depends on oil and casts a huge shadow of devastation across former wildlands turned over to industrial agriculture. Industrial organics differ primarily in what chemicals they are using to destroy biodiversity and the health of the soil. You can expect someone who “cares about the environment” to only drive when they really don’t feel like walking or biking, to have a bicycle—probably a nice new carbon fiber model that will break down in a few years and end up in a landfill—and perhaps a nice new hybrid car that uses less gas and more lithium in its production. But you can’t expect them to change their lifestyles and communities so that no one has to drive anywhere, in a new Prius or otherwise. You can expect them to have thought about energy efficiency when they purchased their 2,500 sq. ft. house or decided to furnish their rental apartment with flimsy IKEA furniture that, though made from FSC lumber, will be unusable in three years and need to be entirely replaced. You can’t expect them to defy building codes, although defiance of building codes is assuredly what it would take to make sure one’s home does not contribute to deforestation and climate change. You can expect them to care, in a distant way, about supporting “green” companies with their money, but you can’t expect them to refuse to support capitalism at all.

There are a plethora of lifestyle options these days for living green and feeling good. The problem is almost all of them are the wrong ones. The planet doesn’t care if your Earthbound Farms carrot was grown without chemical pesticides and fertilizers, because it was grown in a greenhouse in the middle of the high desert, with water trucked in from thousands of miles away. The planet doesn’t care if 30% of your three new shirts are made of recycled polyester, or if your bath towels are made from rayon that comes from bamboo. The planet doesn’t care if you use fluorescent lights. The planet doesn’t care about humanity’s “we’re trying” when it hears “we’re dying” from every other species of the life it supports.

Something that irritates me, that falls into the category of minor, unimportant irritations, is when people say things like “more unique.” “Unique” is not a comparable adjective. It describes a binary state. Everyone who knows me knows I’m not a big fan of binaries, but something is either unique—the only one of its kind—or it isn’t. If you’re saying something is “more unique” than another thing, what you’re actually saying is it’s “more special,” and frankly “more special” is meaningless.

Similarly, there is no such thing as “more sustainable.” A practice is either sustainable—meaning it can be continued indefinitely within the physical limits of life on this planet—or it cannot. If it cannot be continued indefinitely within those physical limits, it is a form of slow suicide. How fast or how slow is a matter of debate. How sustainable is not a meaningful topic for discussion. Sustainable or not sustainable; there is no how.

Reach out and pick up the nearest material object to your hand. For me, it’s this laptop. Do a quick embodied energy assessment. Embodied energy is the amount of energy that it took to get the materials, process them, produce them, assemble them, package and transport the finished product, sell the product, transport it to the user, operate the product throughout its lifetime, and dispose of the product when its useful life is over. This MacBook is a reassembled one. My mother, who is extremely gifted at this sort of thing, buys broken Apple computers and reassembles the parts until they work. She taught herself to do this. I think she’s really cool. It means I’ve got a Mac with a slightly less egregiously bad energy footprint than many another computer out there. It doesn’t make it sustainable. My mother can only do this because there’s an industry based on sucking irreplaceable minerals out of the earth, processing them into identical parts, assembling them into machines that work for just a few years, and selling them for gobs of money to enrich CEOs and stockholders. She can only do this because there is not yet a similar profit margin in slightly less irresponsible disposal of the broken machines. Clearly this can not go on. Silicon is pretty plentiful, but much of this computer is made from oil and rare metals. The massive energy expenditure required to make each of these parts makes sense only in an economy that benefits from extremely concentrated energy sources. To make computers without fossil fuel inputs would first require a massive input of fossil fuels to create a huge solar array, enormous wind farm, rebuild the electric grid, make an entirely new kind of factory, grow GMO plants on fossil fertilizers just to process into plastic, and so forth. We know that we are reaching the end of plentiful concentrated fossil energy. Take a look at the object you’ve picked up. Is it something you would have without cheap oil? Everything around me that I can see got to be how it is and where it is because of cheap oil. Even, for example, my bamboo cutting board, and the raisins wrapped in a plastic bag on my dresser. I can also see a bag of handspun yarn—but it’s been washed with chemical soaps and dyed with chemical dyes, all of which chemicals involved fossil fuels in their production. There is not one thing in this room that is not in some way dependent on resources that will not be replenished for millions of years. My computer has lasted me about three years so far. I hope it’ll last another two. It took millions of years to make the oil that went into this object that will be useless within five years. We are never getting that energy back.

So out of all of the things you can see that are dependent on fossil fuels, what do you think you will still be able to have when fossil fuels are scarce and expensive?

The only way we can be comfortable living a lifestyle that cannot last out our own lifetimes, let alone that of the next generation or the next, is because we’ve been acculturated not to think about the future. From fear of dying and taboos about talking about death, to suppressing information about dwindling global reserves of fossil energy, our culture cannot bear to face change. Rather than think about how our lifestyles must drastically change in the years and decades to come, we would prefer to think of ways to continue what we are doing now, only with a “more sustainable” gloss. We can keep shopping if we shop green. We can keep ourselves distanced from the production of our food so long as we at least make sure to eat organic. We can use and waste a new computer every two years, so long as we send the batteries off to be recycled. These practices are comforting—but comforting the way when you were five it might have made you feel better to think that Woofles had gone to a special Dog Summer Camp where he could play all day instead of learning that people die and we have to live our lives without them after they’re gone. That is to say they are comforting lies.

The “green” movement depends on the theory that our basic way of life can be tweaked until it’s “more sustainable” and then it will somehow be “sustainable enough.” But what’s actually happening is that what we are calling sustainability is slightly slower suicide.

If we’re really to practice a way of life that can continue, we have to build a society that is founded on the most basic physical constraints. The laws of physics apply: You cannot have an economy based on perpetual growth. Human ingenuity may be unlimited, but that doesn’t translate into real wealth being unlimited. Capitalism is based on perpetual growth—when the capitalist economy can no longer grow, it collapses. We’ve been looking at the beginnings of one such collapse since 2007. There are no examples of sustainable steady-state capitalist societies. So a real sustainable way of living is incompatible with capitalism.

There’s worse news yet for the green movement. If all we do is become sustainable—somehow make it so that human activities do no further harm to the ecology, but don’t help it, either—we’re still screwed. We’ve damaged our ecology enough at this point that it won’t simply return gracefully to a state of balance. More than simply not doing any more harm, we have to make sure our ways of life revolve around restoring the nutrients we’ve drained from the earth, cleaning up the pollution we’ve already spewed, sequestering carbon we’ve already released. If we are to sustain life on this planet for the coming generations, these are our first economic priorities—not how to make our existing products green and sell new green products to the new green consumers.

There is some good news—some really great news, actually—for all of us who care about the environment, though. More on that next post.

I just finished reading A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen, for the first time, although it was first published in 2000. I bought it this morning at a used bookstore and, I’m embarrassed to say, read it straight through in one sitting, like a starvation victim bolting through a heaping plateful of food. I read that way often. The last book I read, a couple of days ago, was Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora, and I managed to space it out over four days—but only because it’s a nine hundred page field guide. I even skimmed many of the less interesting mushroom entries. Derrick Jensen’s book is entirely different, though. I simply couldn’t put it down, as much as I often wanted to. And if Arora is remarkable for making it fun to read entry after entry of thick description of often microscopically distinguishable fungi, Jensen is remarkable for making it impossible to look away from his eloquent description of some of the very worst things, the most objectively horrific things, and allowing me to come out the other side of that experience changed, affirmed, anguished, but not depressed—activated.

It’s a strange experience to read something that tells me nothing that is new to me, rather confirms my own experiences of reality, and feel turned inside out.

There are spaces where I differ with Jensen. He uses the word ‘violence’ where perhaps I would use ‘aggression’ and the word ‘aggression’ where perhaps I would use ‘violence.’ His understanding of sex differs a bit from mine, which is not surprising—what is remarkable is instead that our understandings of sex and the body are so similar, he as far as I know a heterosexual non-transgender man who experienced sexual abuse as a child and I a queer transgender man with no such history. Unlike him, I’m not yet sure that the search for solutions is futile, though like him I’ve come to agree that the solutions we have so far heard proposed are at best inadequate and at worst as destructive as the problems they attempt to solve.

Like Leonard Cohen, I’m longing, praying, to have an appropriate response to these things I see and perceive and understand around me and within me now; their awesome beauty and incredible anguish. It’s not coming yet, not in words; it’s coming in sensations and desires to do certain things and be certain places and participate in certain processes, and not other things, places, processes. There is a change creeping over the land, and it’s not going to be like my new age friends think it will be, and it’s not going to be like the bunker full of ammo people think it will be, and it sure as hell is not going to be like I think it will be, so what is the point of trying to rise to meet it instead of sheltering under the nearest cardboard folding table? Just, I think, to try to rise to meet it. I don’t know if there are salmon on the other side. I hope so. I don’t know if there are humans on the other side. I hope so. If there are, I know we’ll all be changed by the passage. I hope the change is one that makes continuing the destruction we’ve systematized impossible forever.

I’m no longer in a position to frown sanctimoniously at environmentalists who talk blithely of necessary reductions in population in terms of numbers of humans and percentage of decrease. I can only argue passionately that the peoples who have not caused this destruction must not be allowed, as they are presently being allowed, to bear the burden of that decrease. If they are we will have no human teachers from whom to learn how to live. And while Jensen offers us the possibility of learning from animal teachers, from plant teachers, from the land itself, even from the stars—which to me offers incredible hope where many other readers have detected only despair—I think we need our human teachers. We learn how to learn from the humans in our lives. By their example we learn how to relate to the animals, the plants, the land. By their example we learn whether birds, rocks, and trees should be regarded as persons with something to teach us, or resources from which to profit. There is no reason to attempt to listen to a resource.

It’s too easy, and unworthy, to dismiss Jensen as a doomer. What he’s saying is nothing new. The facts are thoroughly substantiated. In this book, he doesn’t even really delve into the realities of peak oil and climate change. He speaks of the extinction of the salmon, but takes it as a given that his readers will realize that their destruction means the destruction of the forests that the salmon have for millions of years fertilized with their bodies, bringing back upstream the nutrients that the rivers continuously wash into the oceans. Our current culture, predicated as it is on the assumption that the living beings on which the fate of the world rests are resources to be traded for cash as quickly as possible, is unsustainable. That’s a long word that means ‘fatal.’ Our culture is fatal. Consumption is a terminal disease. We cannot sustain life based on an exchange of life for dollars. We will run out of life long before we run out of dollars. This is simple truth; it is because it is vitally important to the continuance of our way of life, our culture, that we not understand this truth that it sounds to us like the gloomydoomy prognostications of some deluded cassandra.

What gives hope is the reminder that there are other alternatives. That they are as close to us as our own heartbeat. That they are within our reach, although not without what seems to us now a tremendous sacrifice. It is a terrible leap of faith to trust that might be anything on the other side worth sacrificing for; that it is greater than what we must give up is as true as it is hard to believe.

Jensen’s ultimate message is not about a particular simple solution. It is clearest when he says essentially that if we love enough, we will do what is right not because it is right, or because we are obligated, or because our lives depend on it, but because we cannot do otherwise. That if we listen hard enough to the land—not to humans shouting simple solutions in our ears, not to PETA or the organic feedlot people, not to the biofuels people or the solar people, not to T. Boone Pickens or to Derrick Jensen, but to the land and the animal, plant, and mineral people that make it up—we will know what it is that we must do. But first we must listen, and in order to listen we must love.