Kerrplunk

This is the long version of my response to today’s prompt on Advise the Advisor, which is about innovation:

Innovation doesn’t just happen in the world of the Internet. The biggest need for American innovation exists in some of the very oldest industries.

Food security is my biggest present concern. With industrial agriculture threatened by climate change, fossil fuel decline, and its own unsustainable practices, Americans are seeking sustainable, low-cost solutions they can be personally involved in. Innovative solutions include yard-sharing programs that connect apartment-dwellers with time to garden with homeowners who have the space to plant vegetables, urban farmers who use organic intensive cultivation techniques to grow thousands of pounds of food in a small lot, and peri-urban farms who offer their sustainably-grown produce direct to nearby city consumers through CSA subscriptions.

But the problem is still immense. America has too few farmers, and the farmers we have are on average past retirement age. Current regulations reinforce the unsustainable practices that are leading us to the edge of destruction. And government is making the problem worse, with regulations that favor big agribusiness and make it harder for local producers to reach consumers. We spend too much taxpayer money subsidizing the unsustainable practices of the past—funding cheap, inedible corn that makes livestock sick, gives our children diabetes, and rips nutrients out of the soil so they must be replaced with tons of fossil fuel-based fertilizer.

In their book A Nation of Farmers, Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton state we need fifty to a hundred million new small farmers by the end of this decade to pick up where our retiring generation of farmers is leaving off and ensure our food future. These new farmers will need to be using new practices rooted in low-input, diverse farm ecosystems that minimize the use of fossil fuels. They will need to raise not just one crop, but many, carefully chosen so that the waste products of one crop support the others. They will need to be farming in urban and suburban landscapes as much as rural ones. They’ll need support from the government, investing money into strengthening our food system and providing sustainable and rewarding livelihoods for more Americans. And they’ll need a change in our regulations to make it easier and more affordable for small producers to produce and distribute safe food to more Americans. For example, rather than tough restrictions on milk sales that assume everyone selling milk is operating an industrial-scale confinement dairy factory, we need flexible rules that address the actual risks of contamination at different scales of production. By making these changes in the way we support new, innovative models of farming, we’ll enable creative, hardworking Americans to build rewarding livelihoods solving America’s food security challenges.

GMO crops are not a good solution to our food crisis. GMO crops are generally engineered not to produce viable seed. In order to replant crops, farmers have to buy their seed again and again every year from the same biotech company. If there is a problem with that company—and their reliance on fossil fuel energy and unproven technology, as well as government subsidies, make it a certainty that there will be a problem at some point in the future—then all the farmers who rely on that company for seed will have nothing to plant, nothing to grow, and nothing to feed America. Just like in any investment, we need a diversified portfolio. So legislation that makes it impossible to protect organic agriculture from GMO contamination threatens the future of America’s food supply—regardless of whether eating GMO crops poses a threat to the health of Americans. We can’t afford to become reliant on this technology, not when the fundamental resource needed for its production—fossil fuels—is threatened. For this reason I believe the recent deregulation of GMO alfalfa is a terrible mistake—one that hinders the ability of American farmers to explore other innovative, diversified solutions to our agricultural sustainability problems.

I ask the White House to join me in supporting small farmers experimenting with innovative new models of food security. Support Americans engaged in such exciting new projects as the Dervaes family farm, a 1/10th acre plot in Pasadena that produces more than THREE TONS of food per year, with no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides. Support trials of permaculture methods, farming systems that use the natural interactions of plant and animal species to return fertility to the soil without the addition of chemical fertilizers, that control pests with their natural predators rather than with chemical poisons, and that produce an abundance of food on less land by growing different crops together in ways that sustainably increase productivity. Support efforts like those of The Land Institute to breed perennial wheat, so that we can minimize tillage and protect the fertility of American soil.

What do you have to say to the White House today?

I plan to do this every week, for every new prompt. Let’s see how long I can keep it up—and how long it takes me to get through. Will you join me?

With all the snowstorms blanketing much of the US right now, I feel a bit guilty that I’m still visiting family in Florida, where I grew up and where it is a cool 72ºF/22ºC outside.  On top of that I’m hearing that in the Southwest, natural gas shortages are leaving many homes without heat. (One Twitterer complains that President Obama caused the shortage by blocking drilling for natural gas and oil; I think this person misses the point that the shortage is caused by the unaccustomed cold weather shutting down refining and distribution facilities.)

We can’t rely on fossil fuels for long—natural gas peak production may be a few years further off than the crude oil peak, which by all reasonable accounts is either here or imminent. With all the attention the generation of electricity gets in the media—and there’s no denying solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, and wind turbine electricity sells pageviews—one of the most crucial problems we will have to face in our transition off fossil fuels is heating our homes.

It is becoming more and more apparent to everyone with the sense and knowledge to see it that global warming climate change weirding doesn’t mean six fewer months of winter. It means more severe weather all around—worse storms, worse droughts, worse snows, and worse summers. So planning for heating our homes is still going to be a major challenge. We need solutions that will keep us as warm as we need to be, without making the pollution and climate change problems worse. And surprisingly I think a big part of that is going to be firewood.

But we’ll need to manage our firewood in ways that don’t just sustain the status quo but actually help regenerate the land we’re part of. And a big part of this, I believe, is going to be establishing coppice systems.

Coppice is the practice of cutting trees so that they resprout from the stumps. Famously, Europeans and Native Americans have practiced coppice silviculture for firewood, basketry, and building materials. Willow is an especially favored species for basketry and certain types of building—the wattle and daub houses of ancient Britain come to mind. But willow makes lousy firewood. So what species coppice well and make good firewood?

Alder, ash, and black locust are all good coppice trees, resprouting easily from stumps and growing quickly. Ash is very good firewood. Reports differ on alder and black locust, and I suspect the efficiency of one’s stove will have a lot to do with how completely these woods combust (on which more later). One species I’d like to highlight, especially for people in the southwestern US right now, is Parkinsonia aculeata, also known as horsebean, jerusalem thorn, and blue palo verde, among other common names.

What’s good about this tree? Well, for one thing, it’s drought tolerant. The effects of global climate change on local rainfall patterns is not yet known, but it’s possible that areas that already get very little rainfall will get even less, and some areas with moderate rainfall will become drier while others will become much wetter. For the desert southwest and arid parts of California, Parkinsonia aculeata could be very useful. It is partly cold hardy, tolerating temperatures down to 18ºF/-7ºC. It is also leguminous, with the potential to restore nitrogen to the soil, although I believe this has not been studied in this particular plant. And when cut it regrows from the stump. It is also good bee forage, attracting pollinators with its bright yellow flowers. Its main drawback is that it can be invasive—because it propagates readily from seed or from cuttings, it’s hard to control. Arid environments help to control its reproduction from seed; it shouldn’t be planted in areas where there is more water than it needs. And here’s where another benefit of this plant comes in handy—it makes excellent goat browse. Livestock eat its leaves and seed-containing pods, and the fresh pods have a sweet edible pulp.

How might you manage this plant, given its tendency to become invasive in areas where it gets more water than it needs?

Well, first, I’d avoid planting Parkinsonia aculeata in moist meadows, streambanks, or near ponds or irrigation. Dry upland slopes are a better place. Second, cut it back on a regular basis for wood, and don’t plant more than you can use. Don’t leave fresh cuttings lying around on top of fertile soil. Finally, graze goats through the planting on a rotating basis so they can browse back new growth and seedlings and eat some of the edible seed pods. Pigs might also enjoy the pods and would probably disturb the ground under established trees to discourage new seedlings, but be careful they don’t rip up the roots of the established trees you’re coppicing.

It’s also important to get back to wood stoves that can efficiently and cleanly burn small-diameter firewood. If we aggravate our air pollution woes with particulates from incomplete burning, we’ll make our situation much worse. If we exacerbate the problem of carbon release by burning up existing trees and releasing their carbon without planting enough new trees to store the carbon we’re releasing and then some, we’ll make our situation much worse.

We’re running out of the carbon trust fund we’ve inherited in the form of fossil fuels, and we need a wise plan to help us live within our ecological means.

Via Ran Prieur, I’ve been directed to this post by Professor Nassim Taleb introducing the concept of “antifragility”—the property of systems to flourish in circumstances of disorder. In summary, it suggests that the opposite of fragility, the tendency to collapse due to change or disorder, is not robustness, or the resistance to collapsing due to change or disorder. It is antifragility—the tendency to benefit from change and disorder, to thrive and improve in health when circumstances vary wildly.

Taleb’s examples are not necessarily the most compelling to me—he suggests that in Greek mythology, an example of fragility is the Sword of Damocles, robustness is the Phoenix, and antifragility is the Hydra. Directed research, he says, is fragile, but doesn’t say why; opportunistic research is robust, but stochastic tinkering is antifragile. Some examples seem to be based on nothing more than the author’s simple prejudice (“Ways of thinking: Fragile—Modernity, Robust—Medieval Europe, Antifragile—Ancient Mediterranean.” What does this even mean?) Most familiar to my thinking process is his representation of modern industrial society as fragile, ancient settlements (I’m imagining the cities of Harappa as an example, which lasted virtually unchanged for 500 years before disappearing with no sign of catastrophic collapse) as robust, and the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle as antifragile. Let’s talk about this example a little bit.

It is common to think of our industrial lifestyle as permanent, compared to past civilizations (which by definition don’t exist anymore) and nomadic hunting and gathering peoples (most of whom have been either wiped out or forced into some stable mode of participation with global industrialism). But this is a fallacy. We have been a global industrial society for perhaps 200 years. Rome, as a Republic and an Empire, which is everyone’s favorite example of how civilizations collapse, lasted 900 years, with a sharp transition in the middle from a constitutional republic to an expansive principate. Hunting and gathering were humanity’s main means of subsistence from the appearance of humanity (let’s say 1.8 million years ago) until at least 10,000 years ago, when agriculture began gradually to take over in most parts of the world. But the lifestyle itself persists even into the industrial era. Even if we manage to sustain industrialism for another 200 years in the face of the end of accessible fossil fuels, global climate change, and the failure of our economic systems to distribute necessary goods and services in a sustainable and resilient way, we can’t consider the experiment a success in terms of longevity as compared even to the Roman civilization, let alone to the hunter-gatherer model. Global industrialism depends on high energy expenditures and infinite growth, two conditions that simply cannot be maintained for long. The jury is simply still out on whether we will be able to make this system robust enough to withstand the conditions of the immediate future.

But in another sense we could describe the modern system as one that has emerged specifically to take advantage of conditions of abrupt change. The cascade of scientific development and industrial invention that resulted from the discovery and exploitation of concentrated fossil fuels could be seen as itself an example of antifragility—a creative, immediately useful adaptation to changing conditions. The speed of social change made possible by the exploitation of fossil energy has enabled us to capitalize on environmental changes in ways we never had available to us before. And yet it makes us fragile to an environmental change that we foresee, but at the moment have no idea how to respond to—the unavailability of those selfsame fuels. So it’s possible that fragility and antifragility are not opposites at all, but characteristics a system can possess in varying measures, and only with respect to certain conditions. A system might be antifragile with respect to climate change but fragile with respect to habitat loss. A system that simply changes dramatically and somewhat randomly in response to external change, with no particular care for whether that change is adaptive or destructive, would seem to have a high potential for both fragility and antifragility.

Perhaps the clearest example of antifragility is one that I do not see in Taleb’s table—evolution.

When living systems are disturbed by outside change, individuals expressing variations that offer greater survival and reproductive potential to the changed conditions survive and reproduce, and those that do not may die out or fail to pass on their genetic contributions. On the whole evolution appears to respond more rapidly in conditions characterized by environmental change and disorder. When environmental conditions are stable over long periods of time, selective pressure likewise changes little. Less pressure-driven random mutations that survive longer due to relatively constant conditions could have a detrimental effect on the species as a whole. The resilience of living systems depends on changing conditions.

But environmental change, to produce beneficial effects on living systems, has to occur within the constraints of what the system is able to tolerate without collapse. If changes come too quickly or are too extreme or sweeping, populations tend not to last long enough to evolve adaptation.

Dr. Taleb introduces an interesting concept—antifragility, fluxophilia, whatever you want to call it. But I think his characterization of it as the opposite of fragility perhaps oversimplifies the very complex reactions of creatively adapting systems to change. If we understand better the conditions that promote creative adaptation to change, we can use that to promote the development of more antifragile or fluxophilic human systems. I believe in a changing environment, this would promote greater resilience. What characteristics promote fluxophilia? How do emergent systems develop and strengthen this property?

I would suggest that they are process driven rather than rules driven. An example of what I’m calling “rules driven” is the common model of disaster preparedness—decide what potential changes you are likely to face, come up with a policy to respond to it, test the policy in a controlled simulation scenario, and then enforce adherence to the policy. An example of a process driven alternative might be the Superstruct game/modeling process advanced by the Institute for the Future. (FD: My friend works for this organization; she’s the one with purple hair.) In this game, the public at large was invited to imagine a future of upheaval and drastic—even disastrous—change. IFTF game developers offered general scenarios for the public to respond to, but the details were largely left to the imagination. Over 6800 people registered as participants, though undoubtedly some of them (FD: like myself) probably did little to contribute to the scenarios. However, among them, they created around 1000 stories about these future scenarios, which IFTF researchers have been mining for information about how people are likely to react to real change and using as a springboard to research the responses most likely to be productive.

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.

Because I have everything to live for.

Because I love nature—the feel of the warm sun and cool breeze, the miracle of green growing things, the softness of little sheep muzzles and ears, the taste of a strawberry seconds from the plant, the sacred intimacy of eating meat which had a name and a full life of joy and the pleasure of sweet pastures, the deep ocean, the dark forest, the sky at night full of stars the city never knows, the free-flying birds who have never tasted pesticides on their meal of bugs and worms, the owls at night in watchful care over the gardens full of tasty voles.

Because I love humans—art, late night talking, the hands skillful at building in straw and clay, the hands skillful in caressing, the lips trembling with tenderness, the prayers to broken stone and living earth and overpowering sky, imagination and play, the passion of the activists, the wild limbs outflung in the dance of Pan, the quiet words in the face of violence.

Because today I fed a yak from the palm of my hand.

Because the oil our whole society depends on is ending, and I don’t know what my life will be like, or the lives of my sister’s children, and I am afraid.

Because the planet is getting hotter, on average, and this means that in every place there will be stranger and stranger weather, and rising sea levels, and food shortages, and spreading disease; because all that I love is out of balance and edging further toward disaster, and I am afraid.

Because I like chocolate and bananas and the Internet and going out to eat and the ease of money, and I cling to these things even though I don’t love them as much as the cool moss and the flowing stream and the leaping salmon and watchful owl.

Because it is increasingly clear to me that I cannot have the fripperies of industrial civilization and global capitalism and also still have redwood trees, wolves, owls, bats, and the night sky untouched by electric light for miles in every direction.

Because I have everything I need right here.

Because a life some might call poverty is not so frightening as watching everything I depend on be ripped away from me, and so I will make a life in which everything I need is right here.

In the soil below me. In the sun above me. In the rain that falls.

Because the rewards and the risks all push me in the same direction. Because the love is a greater force than the inertia.

Because I love my family, my friends, the human people I know, and I want us all to be happy and free from suffering. Because I want all beings to be happy, to know peace, to be free from suffering.

And because it seems the only way to make that happen is to live a life where enough is enough. And because this is for me a far better way to live.

After several rainy and changeable days, yesterday dawned bright and windy. Emerald Earth fairly vibrated with intense excitement and joy. I think even the animals were feeling it. The newly divided flock of chickenlets—older adolescents in a coop near the grown hens, “preteens” stretching their nubby wings in a less-cramped brooder coop and finally getting their share of the greens and grit—peeped more excitedly than usual, or was it just me? Beltane is here, and summer, according to the old seasonal wheel, has begun. And for the first time the internet shows me a forecast of five consecutive days of clear, fine weather.

But the human people were excited for another reason. Cass and Mika, two of the residents here, were getting handfasted at the Beltane ritual, and preparations had been under way for weeks.

Beltane is a holiday I have a lot of personal angst with in the pagan calendar. As celebrated by most modern pagans, and presumably by the ancients, it’s the most explicitly hetero of the eight festivals. Basically, given a hole and a pole, straight people get all gendered about it, and frankly that annoys me a bit. But I couldn’t really get annoyed when Mika and Cass were wearing each other’s clothes for their own handfasting that day—Mika had loaned Cass a very pretty velvet dress, and she had loaned him a pair of white pants. On the other hand, maybe my residual angst was sublimated into the terrible allergy attack I had all day.

The ceremony was lovely and moving. In a meadow under the blue sky and deep green redwoods, Cass and Mika solemnized their vows before the community—although solemn it was not, with Mika pranking Cass with groucho glasses and a disintegrating beaded necklace. Afterward we had cake made by Lisa that was really superb, a carob cake sweetened with honey, layered with strawberries, and topped with a goat milk butter and chevre citrus icing. And ginger beer that Cass and I worked on that magically fermented in just five days. Our may pole dance turned out pretty neat, actually, given that three-year old Garnet acted as Agent of the Weird. And we greeted the Guardian of the North Altar—a silver tarantula who had taken residence under the north altar stump for the winter. She is exquisitely beautiful. When they found her a few days before, her lair had been flooded, and she was hibernating safely in a cocoon of golden bubbles. When I saw her, her home had dried out, and she seemed active, healthy, and happy.

I’ve been working yesterday and today drying some seaweed for Andrew, who brought back a few bags of really nice nori. I hope it’ll be perfectly dry by tonight. Andrew is at the Buckeye Gathering this weekend, which sounds like a really good time.

We’ve seen a doe by the pond a couple of times as we sat outside eating, once at dinner a few days back and again at lunch today. So far she is the biggest wild person I have seen here, but there are also ravens, hawks, raccoons, and wild turkeys, and we’re all under warning not to jog alone at dawn or dusk in case there is a mountain lion who gets the idea that we are running away from her. No one has seen evidence of a mountain lion in the valley yet this year, though, and judging by how placidly the doe munched grasses a few hundred yards from us (including Cathy’s dog), she seemed pretty calm about the prospect.

Today the younger chickenlets were let out of their coop into the chicken run we fixed up for them on Wednesday. They seemed bewildered but happy to run and scratch in a bigger space. I’ve heard one or more of them making the most horrible screeching noises of pain and anguish, but I couldn’t tell who it was or what was hurting it—until I heard the noise a few more times and identified it positively as the squawk of a juvenile chicken practicing to become a rooster. I don’t blame him—my voice is stuck in the adolescent male range, and I can’t sing for crap either!

I’m thinking about my friends and family in the Gulf Coast states. It sounds like this oil drilling disaster is affecting your habitat big time. It hurts my heart to think of how the ecosystems are affected there. I remember growing up we used to bring in seahorses and other critters for our aquaria just seining in the grasses with nets, and how even over the couple of years we were doing that it seemed like the seagrass kingdoms were dwindling to nothing. The Gulf Dead Zone seems set to expand to take in that entire body of water. We use fossil fuels here. Seems like someone is driving into town at least twice or three times a week, and propane runs a couple of our hot water heaters, and in rainy weather sometimes we run the generator to charge up our batteries, and that costs in gasoline and environmental devastation. We try to use local goods, but we bought this last batch of chicks from McMurray Hatchery by mail. The goats need hay to supplement their forage, and the local stuff is expensive and conventionally grown. This life, however much more satisfying it is for me, isn’t pure. But it feels like a step in the right direction. We need a lot more of these steps, though. Fast. Because we can’t afford any more of this petroleum nightmare.

Do you know now they’re talking about burning it—setting square miles of ocean on fire—because that would be less damaging than letting it reach the shore?

Tomorrow is a milking day for me. I enjoy spending time with the goats, but I almost enjoy the chickenlets more. They’re messy, smelly, poopy critters, and they’re a real joy to watch as they explore, learn, and grow. And they certainly don’t make the kind of mess we human people are making.

(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.