Sharon Astyk's Depletion and Abundance

I recently treated myself (all self-Santa like) to a copy of Sharon Astyk's recently published book Depletion and Abundance. I've been following her blog for over a year now and had been looking forward to getting my paws on a copy. I was wondering if anyone reading this has either read the Astyk book or (better!) is in the middle of reading it? If so, I'd be interested in discussing some of it over the next few weeks. I'm only 30 pages in, at this point, but am already liking what she has to say about the devaluation of work that's been deemed part of the private sphere -- work that until very recently was defined as "women's work" that was completed in and around the home, and that mostly revolved around one's family. I hope to get through the rest of it over the next week and a half while on vacation.

I'd picked up an additional copy of it for an old-fashioned doomer friend, hoping to be able to discuss it with him, but he's discounted the relevance of a woman's voice in the Peak Oil awareness / preparation movement, asserting that the Trinity of Heinberg, Ruppert and Savinar hold all of the answers that he -- or anyone -- should need.


(Listening to: Charles Mingus' Self-Portrait in Three Colors)

Sharon Astyk's Predictions for 2009

In 2007, Sharon Astyk figured that the economy would tank this year, as well as that the term "Peak Oil" would become commonly known and mainstream. She also asserted that Hillary Clinton would not be the next president of the United States. She was right. This year, what she foresees is bleak. It seems that the only light at the end of the tunnel involves our really making an effort to brace ourselves -- to learn skills, to prepare for shortages of supplies and services and for shortages of money in the face of rising unemployment.

Here's what she had to say about her predictions for 2008 (and how they turned out), as well as what she thinks we have in store for 2009. It isn't astrology, folks. And it doesn't have a happy Hollywood ending.

Once the Post-Election Giddiness Subsides

I've found myself regularly checking out the Breaking News section of Matt Savinar's Peak Oil: Life After the Oil Crash website. A thin Savinar book -- The Oil Age Is Over, a gift from a friend -- had been my harsh intro to Peak Oil a couple of years ago. He's regarded as a hardcore "doomer" -- i.e. he not only believes that we're running out of oil, but that life as we know it now is going to change so drastically as this progresses that most of us can't even envision how great an impact it will have on the things we take for granted today.

Over the past couple of months, the stories about what's going on with the US economy (as well as the global economy) have been pouring in and out of there -- and they're almost all from ordinary mainstream sources ranging from the NY Times to the Wall Street Journal. He's basically compiling what's out on the wire already, bringing it all together. And when you see all of those articles together, it certainly leaves a stronger impression. Things aren't good in the US. At all. And while a large segment of the US population may have breathed a collective sigh of relief when the geography-challenged moose-hunting momma didn't become their next Vice President, the truth seems to be that all history-making socio-cultural wows aside, this big "change" that's supposed to happen in Washington is just going to be the perpetuation of a government run by the same handful (albeit shuffled) of Washington insiders who've been drifting in and out of there for years.

So, what now? Oil prices have been going back down after a huge drop in consumer demand, so after a flurry of interest in Peak Oil over this past summer, the topic seems to have been banished to a back shelf in somebody's tool shed. Obama was just elected, so all of this tension and anxiety over recent goings on at Wall Street seem to have been forgotten, when the truth is that things are just starting to rock and roll there. Consumers are spending less (not such a bad thing, in my opinion -- although spending and incurring debt is what props up the US economy). Now there are more and more stories about the rate of unemployment spiking -- perhaps more so than people realize or the government is willing to admit.

This whole bailout thing -- it's now turning into a smorgasbord for credit card companies, auto manufacturers who are having a hard time pushing their gas guzzlers on the public, and others who want a turn at the cookie jar. Heck, American Express just got reclassified as a bank so that it could access more funding from the government. How cool is that?

I'm just wondering how long it's going to take for the post-election afterglow to fade. I hope it's sooner than later.

Richard Heinberg and What We Call Food

Richard Heinberg's November Museletter is out. He discusses the need to take a proactive approach towards agriculture to both avoid a food crisis as fossil fuels diminish, as well as to lessen its impact upon the environment -- particularly, to reverse agriculture's contribution to climate change. The way to do this, he says, is to start removing fossil fuels from what he calls "the food system" now instead of doing it when we've no other option. He cites a United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP)'s report on the viability of small-scale organic agriculture in terms of its production equaling that of industrial agriculture and then proceeds to map out this incredible plan, examining all components of the food system, from soil and seed, to labour and distribution. He explains why genetically modified crops, so reliant on transportation and chemicals, will be useless in a world with diminishing oil supplies.

Heinberg discusses the need to shift to natural unprocessed foods and asserts that a "shift toward a less meat-centered diet should also be encouraged, because a meat-based diet is substantially more energy intensive than one that is plant-based". It's funny how although Heinberg has been a vegetarian himself for many, many years, he's so rarely addressed the issue of meat eating and how so much more fossil fuel reliant it is than a vegetarian (or better -- a vegan) diet.

I emailed my friend J. about it. He's an almost-vegan and he introduced me to Heinberg's work a few years ago. J. pointed out that Heinberg is likely aware that bringing up vegetarianism would alienate a large percentage of the population. I don't buy that, though. Heinberg's not afraid to advocate cutting back on our energy consumption, growing our own food in whatever garden space we can muster up, focusing on changing how we view community -- why on earth would he be cowed by fears of following his own assertions about lessening meat consumption to their logical (and optimal) conclusions? The article reminded me of the only reference I've read Heinberg really make to vegetarianism -- his own, as well as with regards to others.

It was a talk Heinberg gave for the Twenty-sixth E. F. Shumacher Lecture in 2006. Actually, the reference happened in the Q&A bit that happened after the talk, when Heinberg was asked why he wasn't addressing how much grain goes towards raising animals for food, and was asked what his stance was on eating lower on the food chain, he responded:

As a thirty-five-year vegetarian I’m a little biased. Yes, meat production is obviously extremely energy intensive and more so in this country than in many other places. [...] Over the past thirty-five years I have found that from a health standpoint many people don’t do well on a completely vegan or vegetarian diet, and I think we have to be realistic and take account of that. I also think, however, that we would be much healthier if we ate much less meat; that would help our collective survival prospects enormously as we go through this transition.

Many people don't do well on a completely vegan or vegetarian diet?? So why this perpetuation of this myth that vegetarianism and veganism aren't healthy? Where does Heinberg get this supposed "data", which sounds especially weird coming from someone who claims he's been a vegetarian for thirty-five years. It was disappointing when I'd first read it, and is still disappointing to read today, after reading Heinberg's weighing of the energy-intensiveness of plant-based vs. meat-based diets.

Jim Kunstler's Take on the State of the World

This is the kind of fiasco that brings down governments, propels societies into revolutions, and starts wars. In a few months, America will be full of angry economic losers. We're not the same nation that crowded around the old radio consoles for Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats. Back then, we were mostly a highly-disciplined, regimented, industrial society full of citizens who mostly did what they were told to do, and mostly trusted in authority. Today we're a nation of tattooed barbarian "consumers" with no impulse control, a swollen sense of entitlement, ruled by a set of authorities ranging from one G.W. Bush to the grifter-billionaire pantheon of Wall Street CEOs -- now heading into secret bunkers with their stashes of krugerrands, freeze-dried veal Milanese, and private security squads armed with XM-8 carbines.

I go along with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's idea -- read "The Black Swan" -- that nobody really knows anything. We construct our narratives to try and explain circumstances that are unraveling non-linearly before us, and some narratives are more plausible than others, depending on your vantage point. There are infinite narratives. This is nothing more than my narrative.

Read the rest of his post "The Nausea Express" here.


(via J.)

Bush on climate change and peak oil

This is as close to flipping the world the bird as it gets:

"Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter!"

And as if the price of oil isn't high enough:

Bush gives Israel tentative thumbs up to make preparations to strike Iran.

High oil prices and their impact on the US and Canada this month

Air Canada has cut more than 600 flight attendant jobs across the country and intends to cut up to 2000 in total. In the US, Northwest Airlines has slashed 2500 jobs and bumped up ticket and bag fees.

SUV and full-size pickup truck sales in the US are down almost 50% from what they were a year ago.

US schools are scaling back or cutting services because of fuel costs. More students will be walking farther when classes resume in September. More schools are shifting to four day weeks, and cutting bus trips for non-competitive extracurricular activities.

New England governors met recently to call on the federal government for more home heating assistance.

Peak Oil gardening-oriented discussion forums?

If anyone's aware of some good (and active) organic (or biointensive, even) gardening discussion forums on any peak oil oriented sites and wants to share a link, I'd be grateful.

Charting rising fuel prices in Canada and how it's hitting home

National Resources Canada has been charting the increasing cost of gas, diesel, propane and furnace oil across Canada. I checked out some averages for my province and got a bad case of the shakes. It seems that for all the rolling around on my bike I do, that I'm still in for a possible short-term wallop soon, thanks to the current situation with oil.

In June of last year, furnace oil was around $0.90 per litre. By January, it was hovering at around $0.97. That meant, in January, that a half tank of oil (which lasts me roughly a little less than two months in the dead of winter with the thermostat between 10 and 12 C / 50-53.6 F) cost around $485 or so, with taxes. Right now, furnace oil is selling at around $1.33 per litre -- a 28% increase. So, if last winter it cost roughly $970 to heat my apartment (not factoring in the bit of oil left over from the previous year or the increase in my electricity bill from using a space heater when company was over or on colder nights), that means that a repeat of the same weather, a similar thermostat setting, etc. this year would cost around $1242 at today's prices, give or take a handful of bucks. And the price of furnace oil is still spiking. It's gone up 7% just in the past month.

I'd hoped to hang on to my apartment until late fall to be able to squeeze whatever I can out of my garden, but it's starting to look a little dire. If it's going up an average of 7% a month, that means a half tank of oil will cost double what it did in January by this October. Looks like it's time to start looking for new digs. I had a feeling last winter that this was coming, but hadn't realized that the increase in cost would be so drastic so quickly.

Peak oil in the news

It's funny how just two years ago, I was barely familiar with the theory of peak oil. I'd heard it brought up in a few online vegetarian communities, but no more than that. Even now, many of my friends think it's an extremist and paranoid outlook, since we were born into cheap oil and can't imagine life without it. As my peak oil aware friend J. used to say: ''They just can't hear it.''

Now it seems to be talked about everywhere -- from YouTube videos on building kitchen gardens and sustainable communities, to websites devoted to personal health in a post-carbon world or to basic skills development. What's become most telling, however, is the large number and diversity of articles about it now in mainstream media. Here's a recent AP article, for instance, on the spike in people choosing to homestead or to learn to live off the land in the face of the coming energy crisis. And it seems that everyone wants to talk to Richard Heinberg these days.

There are articles everywhere about supply and demand issues and the uncertainty of what's left as worldwide consumption continues to increase. Even the Wall Street Journal recently published an article about well-respected energy watchdog the International Energy Agency (IEA)'s recent predictions that supplies may be lower than previously thought. IEA plans to release a report sometime in November detailing its assessment of the world's top 400 oil fields.

I recently kick-started a local peak oil discussion group here in my small city and am hoping to get the word out about it over the next few weeks. I've mentioned it to a few friends, and although some feel strongly about issues like global warming, I think they classify peak oil with things like 9/11 conspiracy theories. Hopefully, I'll be able to dig some like-minded folks up out of their root cellars so that we can trade off some skills and knowledge.

Peak Oil Overview -- March 2008 from The Oil Drum

The Oil Drum has a great concise piece on oil production available on its site right now. It's also available in .pdf format or in Power Point for presentations. It covers the US history of oil, world history of oil, as well as the most recent data showing the current (and projected) state of affairs in terms of supply / production. It also addresses some of the current myths being circulated about how the Alberta oil sands (aka tar sands), Alaskan Wildlife National Refuge or biofuels will turn things around. It's a must-read, especially for anyone new to the idea of Peak Oil.

Peak Oil and being single -- some ramblings

I've been doing some Googling on Peak Oil and being single. Most articles about Peak Oil (particularly those envisioning a more extreme state of affairs once oil runs out, where society as we know it alters significantly and desperation and chaos set in as food and transportation costs skyrocket) focus on the paramount need for a return to small communities. We're already seeing the impact that $130+ a barrel oil is having on food and transportation costs now; even conservative experts seem hard-pressed to predict anything other than that these costs will continue to soar. Smaller communities producing their own food in a sustainable manner can knock out the increasingly more and more expensive middle step of needing this or that item shipped across (or from out of) the country, thus significantly lowering the cost of food. With individuals learning the sorts of skills that were necessary before cheap fossil fuels enabled us to opt to replace things rather than repair them, and then coming together to share these skills with each other (or to share the products of their respective skills), these communities can be brought closer to a sort of self-sufficiency.

In larger urban centers, many people are coming together to talk about skills acquisition and about transition towns, or relocalization in general. In more rural areas, some folks already have a head start, growing kitchen gardens or living a more basic life where consumerism isn't necessarily as rampant. Then you have these grey areas, these smaller urban centers or larger towns, where ''rural'' means an hour or two's drive into the country, and where finding like-minded people in your own backyard who won't look absolutely incredulous when you mention that oil is running out is like trying to find a dolphin in a goldfish pond. Establishing a Peak Oil group when living in a not-so-populated area starts to feel like a hopeless endeavour and hopping on a farm to learn about growing things can turn into a time-consuming and expensive ordeal unless you have your own motorized vehicle. Books can only take you so far when it comes to learning, so what to do? And what on earth to do if while in the middle of trying to work around these obstacles, you also happen to be unsatisfactorily single? If it's well-nigh impossible to establish a Peak Oil group in a large town, can you imagine finding a Peak Oil aware partner?

I've read about the difficulty that people have impressing the impact of the developing economic crisis on their spouses and family members to try to get them involved. I have a hard enough time when my SUV driving friends affectionately call me a nut for spending most of my time reading about nutrition, herbs, foraging , alternative energy and low-tech skills; however, I can just imagine the small talk over coffee on a first date.

''So where do you see yourself in the next few years?''
''Well, I'm thinking about ditching my things and resettling into an intentional community.''
''Oh...''
''Yep.''
''So, ah... Hmm. Why?''
''We're running out of oil and the economy is going belly up. We've left our food supply in the hands of agri-bullies who've already brought us some of the most toxic man-made substances ever created yet claim their new mostly under-tested frankenfoods are safe, and we need to reclaim our right to control what we consume. Plus, who doesn't want to live a more meaningful life?''
''Er... sure.... Waitress? Cheque please?''

It seems that it would be a lot easier to be in a relationship and to transition into a less fossil-fuel reliant existence than to attempt to do so while head-butting one's way into the dating game. Instead of jumping as a single entity into a community of many, or stumbling about feeling a little lost sometimes, you'd have a cohort to share the challenges. Technology is such that you can reach out to connect with other like-minded individuals over the internet, but these sorts of exchanges are tricky. Also, almost anyone who's ever taken a go at internet dating will gladly share with you their horror stories, or at the very least, will share their tales of heartache and unwanted surprises. And besides, I surely don't remember the last time I saw ''biointensive gardening'' show up on any man's list of interests on a dating site.

Things to think about...

Peak Oil, The Disposable Society and Exchanging Skills

I was speaking to a friend a few weeks ago about wanting to start up a local group to trade off skills -- the kinds of practical abilities these last few generations have more or less lost, thanks to plentiful and cheap energy having enabled (and accelerated) our consumerism. We're a disposable society, and I mean that in every sense of the expression. On one hand, long after we wipe ourselves out, life on this planet will keep on going on. On the other hand, we're also disposable in the sense that cheap oil has allowed us to evolve into wasteful creatures, to the point where we no longer even know where the hell to put all of our garbage.

A friend of mine frequently points out how our city is constantly littered with disposable Tim Horton's coffee cups, for instance. We leave our homes in the morning, spend minutes idling at a drive-through for a cup of coffee in a paper cup with a plastic top, which inevitably ends up on the ground or in a garbage can. For someone with a mean caffeine habit, investing in a travel mug and brewing a pot at home in the morning would pay for itself in a month. You can even buy a container of Tim Horton's coffee to make yourself (I say this in response to some Tim's addicts who insist that they like the specific taste of their coffee). What's the fascination with having something to throw away?

The ridiculousness of it all struck me yesterday as I popped into the local supermarket to discover a new entry in the ''cheap plastics 'r' us'' book of wastefulness. In the produce section, I discovered small clear plastic containers, each holding smaller plastic bags with what looked like prewashed and cut fruit. For instance, one baggie contained 3-4 grapes in a smaller baggie, and then a couple of orange segments in a second baggie. Fruit -- something sold loose and with its own skin, wrapped in plastic baggies inside bigger plastic baggies inside a plastic container, undoubtedly carried home in a plastic bag. I don't get it. It's obviously not about convenience since I could peel an orange faster than it would take me to cut open all of that plastic.

When I was a kid, I remember reading old Little House on the Prairie books with wonder at the lengthy descriptions of how food was grown or gathered, and preserved. Things were dried, or salted, or pickled in those Tupperware-free days. I grew up in a home where pies were made from scratch -- from strawberries we picked ourselves, with a family that engaged in the annual fiddlehead picking ritual so popular in the Maritimes and Maine. Once a year, my mother and some of my older cousins would head out to a relative's farm or large garden and load up pillowcases with string beans and then bring them home, where she and my grandmother would spend an afternoon sorting through them and snapping off their ends to prepare them for canning.

Even with that, though, I still remember leaving home for my first year of university and not even knowing how to do anything but open a can or follow the simple instructions on the side of a box. I made Kraft Dinner and ate Mr. Noodles. I had frozen pizza and Campbell's Soup. I jumped into consumerism head-first because I could. It wasn't until years later, when I became a vegetarian and became mindful of the foods I ate, that I actually learned to cook whole foods; it wasn't until I had my first garden that I learned how to preserve herbs and vegetables. These were skills I should have and could have learned from my mother and grandmother, but at the time, there was no sense of a need for them to be passed on to me. After all, a strawberry pie could be bought frozen at the supermarket, where canned or frozen string beans were also plentiful.

So oil's running out. Cheap plastic and cheap energy are running out. Consumerism is convenient for us for now, but at the price of leaving us dependent on cheap plastic and cheap energy instead of learning hands on how to prepare and preserve things ourselves. And it's not just about food. Which brings me back to the original idea I mentioned in this post. Since consumerism has led to a breakdown in the traditional passing on of skills that enable a certain amount of self-sufficiency (and that certainly lead to a less disposable lifestyle), it seems to me that the best way to go about remedying this is to find others who have some sort of expertise in this or that area (composting, knitting, bicycle repair, foraging, wine making -- heck, even darning socks) and to trade off these skills with each other in some sort of informal but organized manner. Anyone in my area interested?

Women in a post-carbon world

Just a few articles I thought I'd share...

Carolyn Baker wrote an article a few years back examining women and (quite interestingly) the feminine principle in relation to Peak Oil -- more specifically, as a part of life after the crash. In it, she raised issues that would mainly impact women in a post-carbon world (e.g. access to contraception and reproductive health-care) and questioned the fact that more women weren't (aren't?) involved in the Peak Oil movement. By exploring the "feminine principle", Baker refers to "nurturance, acceptance, generativity, eroticism, warmth, generosity, openness, introspection" and how these things contrast with the damage we've done to the ecosystem and how it's brought us to where we are today with global warming and Peak Oil. (Baker's website can be found here.)

Sharon Astyk wrote a piece that same year called "Peak Oil is a Women's Issue" that addressed the current vulnerability of women living in what's essentially a man's world (i.e. wage disparity, high percentage of women taking on solo childrearing, et al.) and what this could entail in a society in the midst of (or following) economic collapse. She also addressed the non-involvement of women in the Peak Oil movement, writing about her experience at a conference for The Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) and the ridiculously misogynistic old boy's school mentality which she encountered there. Astyk described it as "the habit of people in power of being powerful, and thus, not thinking very much about less powerful people". Astyk raised concerns that in a post-Peak world, women's access to education, health care and social programs -- three things that are often the first to suffer cuts in hard economic times -- could contribute to furthering the poverty and vulnerability of women, and that this would all tie into the population issue which will be of foremost concern in harder times as resources become more scarce.

Sharon Astyk's list of 100 Things You Can Do To Prepare Yourself for Peak Oil

Sharon Astyk is a writer and subsistence farmer in rural upstate New York. I've been seeing her name pop up on various Peak Oil and organic farming websites, discussing everything from relocalisation and self-sufficiency, to the future of agriculture in a post-carbon world. I recently found a list she created of 100 things a person can do to prepare themselves for life after the crash on The Organic Consumers Association's website. Her original list is broken down according to seasons on her own website. The Organic Consumers Association, however, featured it broken down into general areas of interest (e.g. home, garden, clothing, etc.) in two separate articles, here and here. Some of the tips are things that could be incorporated into the daily lives of anyone just wanting to lighten their load on the environment, or lower their cost of living. Some of the tips take it further and bring up scenarios that you'd never think of having to deal with, but that will definitely become issues as oil becomes scarce. They're worth a read.

Richard Heinberg on the future of agriculture

In this 2006 address to the E. F. Schumacher Society, Richard Heinberg talked about peak oil's impact on agriculture (an incredibly highly fossil fuel reliant and mechanized system right now) and on the food supply. We live in an age of abundance -- of ridiculous excess, thanks to the oil age. As the cost of oil continues to rise as its quantities diminish, the effects will go well beyond how frequently we choose to visit the gas pump.

Folks like these have the right idea.

Peak Oil, Peak Coal, and Beyond

This is an interview with award-winning vegetarian author, educator, lecturer and Peak Oil expert Richard Heinberg, posted to YouTube by the folks at Peak Moment Television.

Their half-hour long episodes -- Conversations -- focus on local food production, renewable energy, transportation alternatives, what businesses or government can and should be doing, as well as what individuals can do to prepare for life after the oil age. They're hosted by Global Public Media and YouTube and where available, can be seen on community access television.

The description provided on YouTube for this particular episode:

Peak Moment 63: Hot topics from Richard Heinberg: record-high U.S. fuel prices; the ethanol big-business boondoggle; coal projected to peak about a hundred years early (around 2020); what the climate change discussion is missing; and the benefits of "going local".

I love his musical intro!

Cinema Politica Presents "The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

As part of it's weekly Friday Night Docs series, Cinema Politica Fredericton is presenting The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil this Friday, February 8, at 7 pm. From the documentary's official site:

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Cuba's economy went into a tailspin. With imports of oil cut by more than half – and food by 80 percent – people were desperate. This film tells of the hardships and struggles as well as the community and creativity of the Cuban people during this difficult time. Cubans share how they transitioned from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens. It is an unusual look into the Cuban culture during this economic crisis, which they call "The Special Period." The film opens with a short history of Peak Oil, a term for the time in our history when world oil production will reach its all-time peak and begin to decline forever. Cuba, the only country that has faced such a crisis – the massive reduction of fossil fuels – is an example of options and hope.

Global Public Media has an excellent article on the documentary and the changes in Cuba that are examined in it.

Want some context? Here's a short article by Colin J. Campbell, founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas, that provides an overview of the peak oil issue, and of its significance.

For even more information about peak oil, check out this two part interview with Richard Heinberg:

The Richard Heinberg Interview Part - 1

The Richard Heinberg Interview Part - 2

Richard Heinberg and Technology

An American friend of mine introduced me to the ideas and significance of Richard Heinberg a little over a year ago. At the time, I'd heard of Hubbert's Peak Oil theory, but it was sorta at the edges of my radar at best, and certainly overshadowed by concerns like global warming and its associated environmental issues. I picked up a copy of Heinberg's Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, and I spent the next several months reading nearly everything about Peak Oil I could get my hands on via the internet. These days, even some of the more conservative experts and the most mainstream authorities are making public statements about the coming of the permanent decline of fossil fuels. It seems, though, that as long as people are able to afford to keep filling their gas tanks at the fuel pump, that the general public is transfixed by this notion that the planet's oil supply are endless and that life as we've known it during the oil age will continue. Or that, at least, there'll be easy solutions "just in time" so that our rate of consumption need never be affected.

In this month's MuseLetter, his monthly essay on energy, civilization and economics, Heinberg's re-issued an eight year old essay of his on the future of technology. Rather than being dated, it still holds water. Lots. It's definitely worth a read if you have an interest in the impact of runaway advances in biotechnology. He's a lucid writer, and probably one of today's most important voices.