[papabear]

http://energybulletin.net/42299.html


Sharing the Harvest
A Citizen's Guide to Community Supported Agriculture
Elizabeth Henderson with Robyn Van En, Chelsea Green
In this new highly revised and expanded edition of a Chelsea Green classic, authors Henderson and Van En provide new insight into making Community Supported Agriculture not only a viable economic model, but the right choice for food lovers and farmers alike.

From the Foreword by nutritionist and writer Joan Dye Gussow:

Across this country, a movement is spreading that acknowledge a long-ignored reality: Most of what we pay for our food goes to companies that transport, process, and market what comes off the farm, not to farmers themselves. The people who actually grow food don't get paid enough to keep on doing it. And so, from Maine to California, some farmers are being supported by voluntary communities of eaters organized to pay growers directly for what they produce. Bypassing the supermarket, the middlemen, and the international transportation system, these folks are getting fresh local produce in season, at reasonable prices. This is a book about eater communities who are buying what their local farmers grow, and this system is called - appropriately - Community Supported Agriculture [CSA].

... [The book] is a guide, and it is instructive, but it is far more than either of those, and it is surely not dull. It is, in fact, aa delight ot read, since the woman who finally brought it together [Elizabeth Henderson], after the original authort [Robyn Van En] succumbed to an unacceptably early eath, is a strong and gifted writer.

(27 Sept 2008 - book release date)
Major revision of a classic book on CSAs. Amazon entry with book excerpts.

In 1970, Wendell Berry wrote:

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening.

Nowadays, Berry might say that joining a CSA is as just as important.

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http://www.bigboxswindle.com/The Big Box Swindle

In less than two decades, large retail chains have become the most powerful corporations in America. In this deft and revealing book, Stacy Mitchell illustrates how mega-retailers are fueling many of our most pressing problems, from the shrinking middle class to rising pollution and diminished civic engagement—and she shows how a growing number of communities and independent businesses are effectively fighting back.

Mitchell traces the dramatic growth of mega-retailers —from big boxes like Wal-Mart and Home Depot to chains like Starbucks and Old Navy—and the precipitous decline of independent businesses. Drawing on examples from virtually every state in the country, she unearths the extraordinary impact of these stores and the big-box mentality on everything from soaring gasoline consumption to rising poverty rates, failing family farms, and declining voting levels. Along the way, Mitchell exposes the shocking role government policy has played in the expansion of mega-retailers and builds a compelling case that communities composed of many small, locally owned businesses are healthier and more prosperous than those dominated by a few large chains.

More than a critique, Big-Box Swindle provides an invigorating account of how some communities have successfully countered the spread of big boxes and rebuilt their local economies. Since 2000, over 200 big-box development projects have been halted by groups of ordinary citizens, and scores of towns and cities have adopted laws that favor small-scale, local business development which limit the proliferation of chains. From cutting-edge land-use policies to innovative cooperative small-business initiatives, Mitchell offers communities concrete strategies that can stave off mega-retailers and create a more prosperous and sustainable future.

The New Rules Project
The Hometown Advantage
Institute for Self-Reliance

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine...amp;oref=slogin

April 20, 2008
The Way We Live Now
Why Bother?
By MICHAEL POLLAN

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

But the drop-in-the-bucket issue is not the only problem lurking behind the “why bother” question. Let’s say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

A sense of personal virtue, you might suggest, somewhat sheepishly. But what good is that when virtue itself is quickly becoming a term of derision? And not just on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal or on the lips of the vice president, who famously dismissed energy conservation as a “sign of personal virtue.” No, even in the pages of The New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet “virtuous,” when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue — a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue — became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment — buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore — should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.

And even if in the face of this derision I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint? According to one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might actually emit more carbon than driving. A handful of studies have recently suggested that in certain cases under certain conditions, produce from places as far away as New Zealand might account for less carbon than comparable domestic products. True, at least one of these studies was co-written by a representative of agribusiness interests in (surprise!) New Zealand, but even so, they make you wonder. If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I’ve got to consider not only “food miles” but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I’ll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out.

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?

I do.

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives — the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the “split between what we think and what we do.” For Berry, the “why bother” question came down to a moral imperative: “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”

For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is “specialization,” which he regards as the “disease of the modern character.” Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: we’re producers (of one thing) at work, consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.

As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

Of course, what made this sort of specialization possible in the first place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out — up to and including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors — your community — to suddenly loom so much larger in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.

Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

The “cheap-energy mind,” as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions — carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for.

But while some such grand scheme may well be necessary, it’s doubtful that it will be sufficient or that it will be politically sustainable before we’ve demonstrated to ourselves that change is possible. Merely to give, to spend, even to vote, is not to do, and there is so much that needs to be done — without further delay. In the judgment of James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who began sounding the alarm on global warming 20 years ago, we have only 10 years left to start cutting — not just slowing — the amount of carbon we’re emitting or face a “different planet.” Hansen said this more than two years ago, however; two years have gone by, and nothing of consequence has been done. So: eight years left to go and a great deal left to do.

Which brings us back to the “why bother” question and how we might better answer it. The reasons not to bother are many and compelling, at least to the cheap-energy mind. But let me offer a few admittedly tentative reasons that we might put on the other side of the scale:

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.

All of this could, theoretically, happen. What I’m describing (imagining would probably be more accurate) is a process of viral social change, and change of this kind, which is nonlinear, is never something anyone can plan or predict or count on. Who knows, maybe the virus will reach all the way to Chongqing and infect my Chinese evil twin. Or not. Maybe going green will prove a passing fad and will lose steam after a few years, just as it did in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House.

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the case of the environmental crisis? Havel himself has suggested that people begin to “conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever and be answerable for its condition one day.” Fair enough, but let me propose a slightly less abstract and daunting wager. The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this: determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week, abstain completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.

But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It’s estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.

Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch — CO2-free and dollar-free. This is the most-local food you can possibly eat (not to mention the freshest, tastiest and most nutritious), with a carbon footprint so faint that even the New Zealand lamb council dares not challenge it. And while we’re counting carbon, consider too your compost pile, which shrinks the heap of garbage your household needs trucked away even as it feeds your vegetables and sequesters carbon in your soil. What else? Well, you will probably notice that you’re getting a pretty good workout there in your garden, burning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.) Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time (and energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment.

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

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Slow Food International: http://www.slowfood.com/

Our philosophy

We believe that everyone has a fundamental right to pleasure and consequently the responsibility to protect the heritage of food, tradition and culture that make this pleasure possible. Our movement is founded upon this concept of eco-gastronomy – a recognition of the strong connections between plate and planet.

Slow Food is good, clean and fair food. We believe that the food we eat should taste good; that it should be produced in a clean way that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health; and that food producers should receive fair compensation for their work.

We consider ourselves co-producers, not consumers, because by being informed about how our food is produced and actively supporting those who produce it, we become a part of and a partner in the production process.

[papabear]

http://lakis.typepad.com/city_of_the_futur...everything.html

Why Everything You Think You Know About Modern Society is Wrong (and Why it Matters When Thinking About Peak Oil)

Over the past two hundred years, certain vested interests in the industrialized world have promoted a particular narrative about the nature of technology, development, economics and modern society. Eventually that narrative became so widely accepted that today it is virtually impossible to have an economic or political discussion outside its frame of reference. The pervasiveness of this narrative is, I have increasingly come to believe, one of the main reasons many people have difficulty accepting the reality and imminence of peak oil.

It is also the main reason proposed “solutions” to the problem—from the liberal “subsidize alternative fuels” approach to the conservative conviction that we should “let the market sort it out”—are so misguided. More surprisingly, I believe the dependency and learned helplessness this narrative engenders is a major cause of the fatalistic despair many so-called peak oil “doomers” feel.

What is this narrative? It’s impossible to summarize without resorting to caricature, but that’s how most people know it anyway. The story goes something like this:

Before about two hundred and fifty years ago, the vast majority of human beings lived lives that were, in Hobbes’ words, “nasty, brutish and short.” But in the late 18th century, a series of innovations arose in Britain—paradigmatically represented by James Watt’s steam engine—that, dramatically increased that country’s wealth through mechanization, automation, centralization and vast economies of scale. Industrialization eventually spread to the United States, Continental Europe and eventually the world.

There was a cost to this revolution, however; conditions in the new factories (“dark satanic mills” as Blake called them) were atrocious. Child labor was rampant, working hours were excruciating and worker housing was cramped and diseased. These conditions (best illustrated in the work of Dickens or later in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle) were so bad that over time, the government passed laws to protect workers and regulate the workplace. In early 20th century America this trend was encapsulated in the Progressive movement, which itself gave rise to modern liberalism through FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s and later Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 60s.

For liberals, the “safety net” these programs provided, along with a host of consumer protection and other laws, served as a check on the ravages of the kind of “unfettered capitalism” which arose in the 19th century.

For conservatives, “unfettered” was the good thing about 19th century capitalism. However poor factory working conditions were, they argued, they must have been better than life in the countryside, or the workers would have never come to work. (The same argument is made today in defense of third-world sweatshops). In the end, the rising tide of free market prosperity lifts all boats, (though it may lift some more than others); it’s taxes and legislation that drain the economy and actually impoverish everyone.

Both sides implicitly agree that presently existing capitalism is best described as a free market system which is, for better or worse, checked by government regulations.

The major problem with this description, as author Kevin Carson convincingly argues in two recent books, is that it’s totally false. Modern day capitalism is manifestly not a free market, but a system created and sustained by massive central government interventions in the economy. As such, not only would it not thrive in the absence of government intervention, it would collapse without it.

Carson, a self-described Free Market Anti-Capitalist of the Mutualist tradition, has earned a reputation for himself in both anarchist and libertarian circles by attacking liberalism, conservatism and what he calls “vulgar libertarianism,”—which, he argues, has lost all connection to libertarianism’s true, radical origins and has become little more than a shill for corporate hegemony.

In his two books, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, and Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective (a work in progress) Carson describes in detail how, far from being the antagonist of presently existing capitalism, government was from the beginning the instrument of its triumph. The examples he gives are too numerous recount, but a few illustrations give a general picture.

To begin with, how did factory owners in the British Industrial Revolution find such a compliant proletariat to work in such abysmal conditions? At least part of the reason can be found in the passage of the Acts of Enclosure, a series of laws in which traditional peasant lands were “enclosed” and deeded to private owners, essentially depriving countless villagers of their traditional lands. These acts were direct successors to feudal expropriations in which ruling classes simply claimed lands that were already occupied by peasants and forced them to pay rent on it.

Combined with laws that restricted freedom of movement—which Carson compares to the internal passport systems of the Soviet Union or apartheid South Africa in the 20th century—the Acts of Enclosure created the very conditions in the underclass that made the Industrial Revolution possible in its historic form.

In other words, the Industrial Revolution arose as much from state action as it did from any technological advance or supposed gain in efficiency. In the absence of such actions, it is entirely possible that many production innovations could have been applied at the level of the artisan/craftsman—and history would have taken an entirely different path.

Later, in the United States, massive state intervention created the conditions necessary to create the “robber-baron” era in the second half of the 19th century, through the control and manipulation of the money system, patents, tariff barriers and transportation subsidies.

As for the 20th century, the symbiotic relationship of corporation and government is even more obvious—though it goes strangely unnoticed by many people. Examples include the military industrial complex, the widespread subsidizing of transportation and communication, the for-profit corporate benefits of government pharmaceutical and other research, tax breaks and incentives for favored industries, the myriad direct and indirect subsidies of suburban sprawl, agricultural subsidies, etc.

In the absence of such overwhelming intervention, what would the economies of industrialized nations look like? It’s hard to say exactly, but Carson makes a strong case that far from looking like the current system on steroids, they would evolve toward something a lot like the model advocates of relocalization promote: human-scaled, diverse, egalitarian, community focused and local.

To those of us brought up to believe the corporate-state narrative, this is a counter-intuitive argument to say the least. But Carson and others provide good evidence to support it.

For example, one of the main myths of corporate-state narrative is that of unlimited efficiencies of scale. Big is good; bigger is better. Just think of the “always low prices” of the biggest goliath of all, Walmart.

But apart from many other interventions, Walmart couldn’t exist in its present form without the Interstate Highway System—built, maintained and paid for by the American public. If giant corporations were forced to internalize costs that they typically pass onto consumers, there is no way they could compete against smaller-scale, more local enterprises.

As Carson sums up:

In conclusion: If we strip away all the starting assumptions of the technocratic apologists for unlimited economy of scale, and counterpose certain working hypotheses of our own, we come up with this rival model of economic organization: In a decentralized economy without subsidized transportation infrastructure, it is generally more economical to make short production runs for local markets, using multiple-purpose machinery. Given limited demand for any particular product, these short production runs are likely to be in response to demand-pull, with production being shifted to other goods when the current demand is met. Absent the push model of creating demand for predetermined outputs, product design is more likely to be for durability and ease of repair, rather than planned obsolescence. Demand is likely to be further reduced by greater reliance on community repair and recycling centers, with even the remachining of parts being more economical in some cases than the purchase of a new product. Product innovation, in a demand-pull economy, is also more likely to come about in the small shop or skunk works, with design organized on a peer-production basis.”

If Carson’s analysis is correct, I believe at least two broad conclusions can be drawn that have relevance to the issue of peak oil.

First, the widespread belief that our large-scale, energy-intensive economy is the most efficient possible is false—even given the availability of cheap energy.

Therefore—technocratic admonitions to the contrary—it is not necessarily the case that a decrease in the size of the economy (as a decline in available energy implies) must lead to a dieoff, or even a dramatic decline in standard of living (depending on how one defines “standard of living”). The only thing that would make a dieoff inevitable would be government action (malicious or well-meaning) that further distorts markets or is punitive to small-scale enterprises. Unfortunately, as the situation with corn-based ethanol proves, non-intervention is anything but a foregone conclusion.

As surprising a conclusion as it is for someone who has always been a liberal, it seems increasingly apparent to me that the most important political action citizens can take on peak oil is not to support government-sponsored “Manhattan Project” energy programs but to resist state interventions that could complicate the inevitable process of relocalizing.

As for the specifics of these politics, I’ll discuss some of them in a later post.

[xalliebeex]

If there's ever a candidate as wise and honest as Ron Paul on the economy,
federal reserve, and foreign policy.... you can count on the general american pop.
to NOT vote for him

[papabear]

http://energybulletin.net/44566.html

Published on 21 May 2008 by ASPO-USA / EnergyBulletin.
Our phony economy

by Dave Cohen

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http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/3990
Human Scale
By Kirkpatrick Sale

Size matters. And "progress", as it translates into sprawl, congestion, resource depletion, overpopulation, the decline of communities and the rise of corporate rule, is quite literally killing us. In his landmark work Human Scale, Kirkpatrick Sale details the crises facing modern society and offers real solutions, laying out ways that we can take control of every facet of our lives by building institutions, workplaces and communities that are sustainable, ecologically balanced, and responsive to the needs of the individual. As relevant today as when it was first published in 1980, this remarkable book provides a fascinating perspective on the last quarter-century of "growth" and anticipates by decades the current movement towards relocalization in response to the end of cheap oil.

Human Scale has been made available through New Catalyst Books. New Catalyst Books is an imprint of New Society Publishers, aimed at providing readers with access to a wider range of books dealing with sustainability issues by bringing books back into print that have enduring value in the field. For more information on New Catalyst Books click here.
About the Contributor(s)

Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of a dozen books, including After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy and Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. One of the pioneers of the bioregional movement, he was named by Utne Reader as one of 100 living visionaries. He is currently the Director of the Middlebury Institute — a think-tank for the study of separation, secession, and self-determination.

[papabear]

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2970
Making Other Arrangements
Dressing Locally
by Michelle Nijhuis
Published in the May/June 2008 issue of Orion magazine


PAONIA, COLORADO—You’ve probably tried eating locally. What about dressing locally? In my small town in western Colorado, gardeners abound, but seamstresses and tailors are endangered species, made scarce by $9.99 imported t-shirts. Yet local clothes are still grown and raised in the town’s cavernous old livery, where my friend Elisabeth Delehaunty runs her sewing machine and hoards her vast collection of fabric. Shelves twelve feet high burst with stacks of folded tweeds and florals and stripes, a colorful profusion of thrift-store blankets, sweaters, jackets, t-shirts, and castoff yardage. (Will she ever run out? “It could happen,” she whispers in mock terror. “It could.")

Beth and her three employees make up Elisabethan, a company dedicated to both locally made and recycled fashion. Beth learned to sew from her mother, and in high school, she made most of her own clothes, including a prom dress. Years later, when she pieced soft scraps of old jeans into a hooded pullover, she realized that a few well-placed snips and stitches could give used clothes an entirely new life. “I made a conscious decision to try not to buy any more [new] fabric,” she says. “There’s just too much out there already swirling around.”

In her Colorado studio, old clothes are demolished, then reconstructed into colorful piecework scarves, skirts, tops, and sometimes even boxer shorts; leftover scraps turn into infant caps and coin purses. No fashion rule is sacred, as stripes are appliquéd on paisley prints, and slices of men’s dress shirts are paired with polka dots.

The work isn’t easy. While traditional clothes manufacturers can cut many layers of fabric at once, Beth and her employees must cut each piece individually, circumventing holes and stains and allowing for the irregular shapes and sizes. (The extra labor means her t-shirts sell for considerably more than $9.99.) And with skilled stitchers becoming rarer and rarer, Beth has trouble finding help.

But the satisfaction of making—and wearing—resurrected clothes keeps the livery filled with fabric and ideas. “Men’s suit pants,” Beth muses, contemplating her mannequin. “You could make some great skirts with suit pants.”

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http://www.energybulletin.net/node/45813
Peak toil
Frank Lee, Peak Oil Blues
Peak toil: A fable of the future?

It’s happening in Belgium, Scotland, and Spain, in India, South Korea, Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Italy, Portugal, Greece, France…


What might we expect from the average working-class American, as economics in this country continue to worsen? Will they organize in labor unions or protest as isolated individuals expressing their individual sense of hopelessness and despair? Will it be sparked by some “organized” movement, or from some shift in their internal emotional reality? Frank Lee gives his future fantasy version of what he sees could be coming, and folks, it isn’t pretty…Kathy McMahon

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Digging In
Wendell Berry On Small Farms, Local Wisdom, And The Folly Of Greed
by Jeff Fearnside

pdf

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http://www.counterpunch.org/nader07172008.html
Another Bail Out for the Financial Elites
D.C. Socialists Save Crashing Capitalists

By RALPH NADER

Here they go again! Financial capitalism is crashing. So the lights are on late in Washington’s Federal Reserve, SEC and Treasury Department trying to figure out how socialism (your tax dollars and credits) can once again bail out these big time gamblers with our money.

Every cycle of casino capitalism that heads for, or goes over, the bankruptcy cliffs gets larger and larger. This year’s collapse towers over the bailout of the Savings and Loan banks in the 1980s.

This unfolding cycle of the Washington to Wall Street gravy train is not based on a huge spike in interest rates that tanked so many thrift institutions nearly twenty years ago. It is based on unbridled greed by the bosses of these big commercial banks, investment banks, brokerage giants and those two goliaths—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“Unbridled” because the financial institutions got themselves unregulated during the reign of Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Rubin skipped out of town to become a wildly overpaid official with Citigroup—the leading lobbyist for his disastrous, so called Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999.

Fannie and Freddie have been deeply unregulated for decades which allowed their capital ratios to be lower—far lower—than even investment banks like Morgan Stanley. With that long-time implicit guarantee by the federal government, these two secondary marketers for home mortgages became more and more reckless so as to raise the corporate profits that their top executives need to skyrocket their personal compensation packages!

In 1991, lawyer Tom Stanton warned about the risks and non-regulation of Fannie and Freddie in his prophetic book—A State of Risk (Harper Business).

A decade ago, our banking specialists warned about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) under assessing its member banks thus leaving its reserves at the risk of being perilously low when needed. Today, these reserves are very much needed and perilously low.

Combined with the limitless greed, unbridled corporate power can wreak havoc with our entire economy. As it is doing now. The domino effect is underway.

So the Bush boys and the Congressional leaders, so to speak, are busy reassuring the investors that they will in some way make things stable. This time, however, they seem to be offering too little too late and the investors aren’t buying.

The stocks of the banks keep plunging down anywhere from seventy to ninety percent from their last year’s high.

The nation’s largest savings bank—Washington Mutual—closed at under $4.00 per share down from over $40 last year.

Again and again, year after year, the CEOs and the patsy federal agency heads have lied to the people about the financial status of these corporations. There is no credibility left and therefore no confidence. Over three trillion dollars is sitting in disbelief on the sidelines. Trillions of dollars have been looted or lost in the meantime, draining worker pension funds, mutual funds and the savings of small investors.

None of this had to happen. Regulation against conflicts of interest and hyper risk taking could have stopped it, including preventing the housing mortgage crisis. Empowering investor-owners could have headed it off. But Washington-based right wing corporate funded think tanks and the banking lobbies battered down the regulatory guards and the federal cops.

So now only the American taxpayers and their creditworthiness inside a deficit-ridden government and a debt-loaded Federal Reserve stand in the way of a far bigger financial collapse than the stock market crash of 1929. Will it be done smartly this time around?

Reckless, self-enriching capitalists get on your knees and thank the rescuing Washington socialists, for without them, you would surely be in chains.

Ralph Nader is running for president as an independent.

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Reviving the Household Economy

Part One: The World Outside the Market

Part Two: The Decline and Fall of Home Economics

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Closing the 'Collapse Gap': the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US
by Dmitry Orlov

[Avex]

The Health Care Crisis and What to Do About It
By Paul Krugman, Robin Wells
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18802

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Fannie, Freddie, Subsistence Farming and You
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book
We talked here quite a bit recently about what we might do to make money after our new normal begins to emerge, and John Michael Greer, whose new book _The Long Descent_ was one of the best books I’ve read this year, has offered his own take on the future job market. I agree with nearly everything he says - nearly everything. And churlish as it is to disagree with someone on the smallest point, who you agree with on every large particular, I’m going to take the time to meditate on at least one of his observations that I don’t quite agree with, because it is something that I think quite does matter in our future...

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FAUSTIAN ECONOMICS: HELL HATH NO LIMITS, By Wendell Berry

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http://www.energybulletin.net/node/46583
Survival 101: They don't teach that in most colleges, and there's a dilemma
by Carl Etnier

Can a young person risk going to college these days? That's a question nagging me after reading Zachary Nowak's "Crash Course: Preparing for Peak Oil." Nowak urges us to apply home-insurance reasoning to a future with less energy. Homeowners generally think the likelihood of their house burning down is tiny, but they pay thousands of dollars to have the resources for rebuilding in case it is destroyed by fire.

Similarly, Nowak exhorts his readers to prepare for severe impacts of peak oil. Not just the end of cheap oil, but the end of oil in any meaningful quantities. We now eat food and use goods from all over the world; prepare for a world in which the ships stop steaming and the trucks stop rolling.

How dependent are we on global trade? Consider the buttons on your shirts. According to a National Public Radio report, 60 percent of the world's buttons are manufactured in a single Chinese city, Qiaotou. At a more fundamental level, around 95 percent of what we eat in Vermont is shipped in from out of state.

While Nowak doesn't argue that rapid collapse of long-distance trade is the most likely future scenario, he says it's possible. If it comes to pass, we will need a lot of skills that aren't taught on the soccer fields of suburbia.

If you're 18 and college-bound, you may be skilled at computers and driving a car; know how to take the second derivative of a quadratic equation in calculus and have learned about electron orbits in chemistry; and may be able to discuss Shakespeare and "To Kill a Mockingbird" intelligently. But do you know how to kill and dress a chicken, or find and prepare wild edible plants in every season, or keep a goat healthy so it produces milk and meat?

According to "Crash Course," other skills needed for an oil crash include finding a safe piece of land to live on, building or renovating buildings that incorporate renewable energy and local water sources, staying well and healing yourself when sick.

If an oil crash lies ahead, it's not clear how much time is left before the discomfort of $4-a-gallon gasoline and $5-a-gallon heating oil gives way to liquid fuels being unavailable at any price. Once the dynamics of a crash are in place, small events can lead to rapid changes. Look at the last century's descent into the Great Depression, the outbreak of two world wars or the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Most college studies don't teach skills needed to survive in a post-crash world. And for most people, going to college means going into debt. Is it wise to use precious time and money turning in homework assignments and writing term papers when there's so much to learn about how to survive in case grocery stores close down before you graduate?

Nowak spent four years in college studying subjects not requiring any dirt under his fingernails: history and modern foreign languages. I interviewed him on one of my radio shows recently and asked him whether he'd recommend college today. Now 31, he said, "College, in my mind, is a big question mark. I'm not sure I'd decide to go if I were 18 years old."

To those who decide to go to college, he said, "At least use your free time to learn some practical skills. It's not hard now. Colleges are pretty neat places with a lot of opportunities. Learn how to can (food), learn how to use an ax, learn more about horticulture and forest gardening. I think those are great things to learn about. There are some majors that might accommodate that. Environmental science might be one of them."

As Nowak points out, the choice is not black and white, not one of going to college and preparing for life in an energy-rich world versus moving into the countryside and immediately trying to live off the land. Colleges like Sterling College in Craftsbury Common teach sustainable agriculture. Students learn to plow with draft horses, design a greenhouse for long-season production in snowy Vermont and pump water with solar panels. Vermont Technical College has a sustainability program, and there are numerous other examples in this state alone.

It's also possible to study a college field designed for an energy-rich world and tailor the studies to an energy-poor future. In engineering, for example, there are people like Massachusetts Institute of Technology senior lecturer Amy Smith, who teaches low-tech design. (One of her prime design rules for her students is, "Try living for a week on $2 a day." It encourages creativity.) In nursing or medicine, complementary studies include clinical herbalism, massage therapy, advanced nutrition and other approaches that don't rely on industrial medicine.

Students can use their summers - or take a year off before college or during college - to work on a farm, learn to install solar hot water heaters or work with a local forester.

Of course, many of the most useful skills for surviving a crash are rarely explicitly taught and difficult to pick up from books. Sharon Astyk, whose reading of the peak oil tea leaves led her to quit a doctoral program in literature to homestead with her family in upstate New York, has compiled a list of skills that she calls, tongue in cheek, "Everything you need to know, in order." The top three are "how not to panic," "how to learn things - and how to teach them" and "how to get along with everyone else."

Though it is written for survival in individual emergencies, Laurence Gonzales' book "Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why," also emphasizes skills that are not directly teachable. Gonzales describes a "survivor's frame of mind," which includes such habits as paying attention to what is really happening (as opposed to what you expect to find), not hurrying and being humble.

What about possible missed opportunities from forgoing college, if the transition to a low-energy world is smooth, rather than a crash, or still decades in the future?

Interesting professional opportunities are available (if not abundant) even for those without typical credentials or education. Vermont Supreme Court Justice Marilyn Skoglund never went to law school. Samuel R. Delaney dropped out of college after a semester or two and went on to write best-selling science fiction books and to teach literature in colleges, including at least one Ivy League university. George Lisi, the naturalist at Wisdom of the Herbs School in Woodbury, is a self-described "junior high school dropout" who has received grant funding for bird research and taught at Community College of Vermont.

There's also the option of going to college later, after some years spent learning practical skills. That's a path my wife has followed.

When I first met her, Diana was 19 and an evangelical college dropout. She'd realized during her sophomore year that she was in college with no particular plan, and she decided she was wasting time and money. She quit school to learn farming through a series of apprenticeships and told every college student she met how happy she was with her decision.

After some years, however, she had identified a body of knowledge she thought would make her a better farmer, so she completed a degree in sustainable agriculture. (After years of farming, she's now on a different career path and, many graduate courses later, has just become a registered nurse.)

Like Nowak, I don't know what I would do if I were 18 again. When I left high school in 1981, the back-to-the-land movement was full of people who were trying to carve out a niche to survive a crash. I went to college and even got an advanced degree, and so far no crash has occurred. In the meantime, some of the back-to-the-landers have taught me skills I didn't learn in college, and they have kept local economies and rural skills alive. I'm grateful for that.

In 2008, we're closer to some sort of energy transition than when I graduated from high school. For today's 18-year-old or 70-year-old, skills learned now could have survival value in a relatively short time.

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Building an Anti-Economy
by Chris Carlsson

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The Effluent Society
by John Michael Greer