We’ll all be driving one soon

I notice Ran is enthusiastically predicting the demise of the SUV but I’m not sure I share his faith in this particular prediction. In fact I’m going to leap in and mount a defence for the not-so-humble SUV.

I admit that it feels slightly strange to be doing so but it all started when I drove my uncle’s SUV - which doubled as a farm work vehicle and family car, but was lent to us one week while our old house bus was in for repairs. Because I’d just been driving a bus around the SUV didn’t feel particularly large - even if that is their most obvious feature as far as drivers of other vehicles are concerned. What I did notice though, was that obeying normal conventions like driving only on paved or carefully gravelled surfaces was no longer necessary.

Please don’t get the idea that I blundered round driving over footpaths, picket fences and old ladies’ garden patches. Nothing of the sort happened but there was this sense of freedom driving in an SUV that I didn’t normally experience in a car (and especially not in a bus). Even if I didn’t actually do it, the fact remained that there were now a lot more places that I could drive to, or over, should I want to.

This would be of no real consequence to this blog except for how it coincides with the future that regular readers of doomer, peak-everything blogs are all, by now, expecting.

From a long and interesting series of comments by a resident of Argentina we have this possible future scenario for SUV drivers.

I would have bought a 4×4, even though I live in the city. A 4×4 allows you to dive over the sidewalk or through wasteland, away from roadblocks or riots. I’ve see those that have 4×4s simply go off road, climb over a boulevard and leave while the rest of us poor car owners have to stay.

A 4×4 truck also has more mass and power in case that someone tries to cut you off or rams you with the car. It’s less likely to stop running if you hit someone or several people (in a riot situation) since it’s prepared for cross country use and the engine is much more protected.

And a little more mundane but almost guaranteed to be relevant to your life and mine; the issue of declining road standards, or for that matter driveway standards.

As councils and other road maintenance bodies find their funds drying up I’m sure we’re going to find ourselves driving down roads that consist mostly of pot-hole. Already it only takes a bad winter to make some rural roads nearly impassable to normal cars, how much worse will this be when there aren’t the funds to bring in earth moving machinery to sort it out?

And what about your driveway? If you’ve got concrete your driveway will no doubt outlast your car and you’ll probably end up smashing it to bits at some stage, so that you can enlarge your garden space. There are less permanent driveways though and even if we drive less in the future, cars will still be useful for carting large items about the place for some time - if only we can actually get from A to B.

As a New Zealander though the real clincher is the fact that in this country at least most SUV’s are diesel and almost all cars are not. They sure burn dirty at the moment but they’re going to be really nice running on the various concoctions of bio-fuels that people are going to be trying in them. I’m no expert so don’t quote me but Rudolf Diesel did intend that his engine could run on vegetable oil. I don’t believe that it is so easy to throw any old thing into a petrol vehicle. Feel free to correct me on this though if you have more than my minimal understanding of this situation

Next week; I’m coming to the defence of the suburbia!

And the week after that I’m going into bat for civilisation itself. Maybe.

THC kills cancer cells

The SETH group (Scientists Exploring Truth in Healing) are researching alternative cures for cancer - they seem to have a bit of trouble getting funding (imagine my surprise) but they are making some headway.

Using the same tests used to judge new chemotherapies, the SETH team discovered that this herbal compound kills human brain tumor cells at a concentration that is nontoxic to normal brain cells. A computerized microscope captured images of the cells every 5 minutes to compile the time-lapse videos. After 20 hours of treatment, Δ⁹-THC kills all cancer cells but leaves normal brain cells alive. Cell death is evidenced by cells shrinking to inanimate white spheres.

Here’s the link to their time lapse video.

Civilisation v Aaron

What I’d really like is to break out of the hold civilisation has over me. It’s a hold put there in my childhood by the school system. Unfortunately for me my father was a school principal in that system so I got ’schooled’ at home as well.

Dad always gets a raw deal in these pages so in the interests of fairness I should mention the strong likelihood that he is also behind my ability to stray from mainstream thinking. He always used the term ‘different’ as a compliment when describing other people and he also never sat back and let life push him around which made for a good role-model for taking charge of my life.

But back to the topic. Through whatever means available (exactly what they are doesn’t matter - only the result does) I was thoroughly domesticated. Adults always commented what a quiet and good little boy I was. My teachers always liked me and believed me to be mature because I always did what they asked. I lived for those moments of praise, which I became so good at getting and I very rarely got into trouble, so good was I at reading the minds of my teachers.

The irony is that I forgot how to read my own mind (and body).

To do something like this takes a lot of self control and I can see and sense it still in my body where it is now a near permanent feature. My shoulders are always held up high and my whole upper body is kind of rigid. I’m don’t stand out because most guys are like this but try watching one of us dance - almost nothing is happening with the upper body and only the legs are moving.

The intercostal muscles (between my ribs) are permanently stressed. Until a chiropractor friend showed me what was happening I used to get these muscle freak-outs where every time I tried to take a breath one particular intercostal muscle would give me a lot of pain - this would only last a few seconds or maybe minutes but basically I couldn’t take a proper breath until it had passed. Now I know just to rub the muscle and it relaxes.

So I don’t have to worry about that but still have the problem that if I get too tired or stressed I find it hard to get a full breath. If I focus on breathing deeply into my stomach I can sometimes get it back to normal. Unfortunately with a busy family life I often have to wait for the weekend before I can properly relax. I think what happens to me is that when the going gets tough I ignore everything else, hold on tight and just focus on the issue at hand until it is complete - and it’s the holding on tight so that other issues don’t crowd into my mental space that does it.

This is the physical issue that bugs me the most. Although there are a few others, the other problem with this is that having muscles that are permanently held tight steals a lot of my energy. I have, I think, three friends about my age who were never properly broken in as children and they are very high energy people, they have a great deal of charisma and are usually at the centre of any social activity. Perhaps not all of us are meant to be like this but I think quite a lot more are (certainly more than 3 of the people I know) and I suspect I am supposed to be this way too - I have shown the odd sign of it in the past but only when my energy levels are high and also when my confidence is up.

Speaking of confidence, the effect of being a good hunter/gatherer of praise when you’re a child is that you have no inner confidence because your self-belief comes entirely from the outside. You guys know all this of course but it has always meant that social situations are always potentially stressful for me (unless I’m with old friends). Because I’m naturally gregarious I like to be in social situations but once I’m there each interaction becomes crucial to my self-esteem. (This is less of a problem now that I’m a bit older but I suspect it’s come as a result of my rise through the social hierarchy meaning I don’t have to value the opinions of as many people any more).

Because my self esteem was always on the line I would always be second guessing myself in social situations and rarely at ease. I was of course hopeless around girls and frankly it’s a minor miracle that Karen and I ever got together. I’m even surprised she was interested. Maybe because I was 26 and getting good at my job I must have been finally starting to build a degree of internal confidence and wouldn’t have been exuding the usual desperate and dateless thing I had going back then.

The other place where the need for external validation was a problem was at work where I was totally at the mercy of my employers. In fact any situation where I was in awe of someone or they had even the slightest element of control over my life and I would become nervous and defensive. With one boss in particular I remember feeling worried whenever he was in the building (which was incredibly stressful). The scary thing about this is that although that was seven years ago and I’ve started a family and a business since then I’ve found now that I’m in a job again the problem has re-emerged - and this despite the fact that the job is way easy and the boss is a good friend of mine.

And those are just the side effects!

The actual point of me being like this is that I’m supposed to be a good servant of civilisation. Otherwise known as being a good professional. I’m supposed to be good at sacrificing everything that’s important to me as a person so that I can serve the machine better - and I’m supposed to do it without trying to rebel. Here again my father’s influence; even though I was often cautious in social situations I didn’t lack the thoughtfulness to question my role in society or the courage to leave it so I guess I wasn’t properly broken in either - they broke me at the emotional and body level but they didn’t get my mind.

The weird thing, which I just realised today, is that I make these decisions in my mind and then set about implementing them like a good professional, which is to say with total disregard for my own needs. It’s very confusing for the kids I’m sure, I give and give and then all of a sudden when I’ve got no energy left I suddenly flip over into being a grumpy old man.

I imagine some of you think this sounds completely appalling and others are thinking ‘actually that’s just like me and nearly everyone I know’ and it’s quite normal.

I guess it’s both.

Possession

I thought I’d done quite well in abandoning the materialist mindset, I don’t want for flash cars, electronic goods or plush lounge suites, nor do I desire nick nacks and concrete ornaments for the garden. However I still have one weakness in this area and it pretty much cancels out the gains I have made everywhere else.

It’s very relevant at the moment too. We’d like to buy some land but the desire to own a beautiful piece of land or one with an awesome view is kind of overwhelming. I do want to feel excited or inspired by the place we eventually buy but like everyone else I keep wanting what is out of my grasp.

Anyway, Ran has pointed out the Moneyless World blog and whileI was checking out an old post I found this paragraph which really hit the nail on the head for me.

I find that beauty is overwhelming & disheartening if I am in the wrong mind - the mind that wants to possess. Then my new Mind realizes beauty is neither created nor destroyed, but eternally goes from one form to another, and only beauty’s forms vanish, like flowers! This is when I realize that Heaven is ever at hand. But the greed mind, the mind that wants to possess & capture in picture frames, thinks that the forms are it. So the greed mind grieves when the forms pass.

The degree to which this guy has abandoned our culture makes my own attempts feel decidedly amatuerish. It’s true that we have our own path to follow but the perspective he has on our culture really shows through in the philosophy he produces. It reminds me of a quote I posted recently from Bill Mollison

I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher. But I could never teach people to be philosophers - and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

I’ve never been in danger of paying much attention to a university-taught philospher but this really does ram home how much we can learn from people who feed their mind with real-life experiences.

Peak Burn-out

It’s common among the crash watching and crash blogging fraternity to come across comments to the effect that; “yes, we’re providing all this information about how to prepare for the crash but only a small percentage of readers actually seem to be acting on it”.

My own experience of this is that a constant diet of crash-horror-news seems to wear away at me and steal my energy and my initiative. Clearly I’m not alone, here’s a recent article by Richard Heinberg addressing the issue of burn out amongst the peak oil community, and here’s the best bit:

I suspect that the burden of dire knowledge is exacerbated by the psychophysical impact of too much time on the computer and not enough outdoors. It’s an occupational hazard: those of us who are aware of the impending collision of resource depletion with population growth and climate instability have acquired whatever understanding we have through countless hours tracking trends, peering at graphs, and noting news items on glowing screens. Assuming you’re reading my words on-line right now, you might want to bookmark this page and jump for a moment to http://homenet.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/, the site of an on ongoing research project of Carnegie Mellon University that has concluded that “Greater use of the Internet is associated with increases in loneliness and symptoms of depression.”

I’ve written before about the emotional toll the internet seems to take on me so I’ll definitely be checking out that link when I get time.

Richard Heinberg’s article is good but I always find being told what I should do is not nearly so energising (which is the issue here) as being told what someone else has done,  so here’s a comment from Dan that I got a lot out of:

A year or two back, whenever I set out to do something, I always had”the crash” in the back of my head. Whenever I embarked on something that would take time, I wondered, do I have the time? Shouldn’t I be buying food or land?

In the end, it became a self-destructive habit. It just slowed me down and made me unhappy. I was telling myself everything was urgent, and then burning myself out before I started. like a dieter trying to avoid everything and then going on big chocolate binges.

I’m not doubting the possibility of a crash, but a personal development focus without worrying about global economic meltdown works better for me. I get more done, I’m happier, and I’m still aware of potential trouble up ahead. The stronger, smarter and happier I become, the more of an asset and a beacon I can be if a crash does get messy. My thinking has become much more individual-focused over the last year–it’s individuals who bring on revolutions and change lives. And it doesn’t take that many! Apparently the Enlightenment was the work of only 1000 or so people. They worked hard, shared, taught and spread their message and society quickly hit a tipping point and jumped to a social context unimaginable 10 years before.

The more I change and free me, the more potential I see in the world. Not just for avoiding a horrible crash, but for achieving so much more in all areas. I’ve started exploring this kind of potential in ch11 [of my book] and will continue to in ch12 (coming soon) of the first drafts.

Clearly my emphasis needs to be on making things right for my family life - certainly if I can get that right we’ll all be a lot stronger.

Work

Over the last three months I’ve been working for a friend of mine at his hardware store in Raglan. The store is a lot smaller than the big boxes found in larger towns and cities so there’s plenty of variety in the work but all the same I’m amazed at how much I’m enjoying it.

I guessed in advance that I would enjoy parts of it because a large part of the job involves chatting to people but I’ve also discovered a few other things that make this type of work far superior to working in an office.

As I said, chatting to customers is part of the job, but (and this seems really obvious in hindsight) if you’re doing physical work you can actually have a conversation while you do the work – who knew?

The work I used to do in an office used the same part of the brain that you need for holding a conversation which meant that any chatting was done on stolen time. That this has been a revelatory experience for me is a sign of how effective the propaganda pointing me to ‘professional work’ was.

Something I was sure would happen (and it has) is that I’d sleep better. When you do physical work, you get tired and rest but when you do mental work you get tired and lie awake all night trying to make your brain slow down. Also when you do physical work, you get fit whereas when you do mental work you just get tired and lie awake all night trying to…

So I’m sleeping better, I’m having more fun, I’m interacting with people which I enjoy, I’m out in the fresh air and I’m getting fit. These are all things the professional classes pay to do outside of work – usually at gyms, nightclubs and shopping centres – hell I can even go shopping at this job too!

This last week I’ve had a cold but I thought I’d go to work and see how I coped – again I was amazed. If I’d gone to work in an office I would have begun to feel worse and worse until my head was ready to implode but in a job where you get plenty of fresh air and your body is moving you hardly notice a mild illness. All I did was have some benign tablets to help keep my nose clear (which never used to make any difference when I was sitting at a desk) and avoided really tiring physical work. I’d always met a lot of builders who kept working when they had colds and I thought they were real hard-men but now I know their secret – it’s easy when you’re on the move and getting fresh air.

To be fair the pay is crap and this creates other pressures that we’re really struggling with, plus the kids don’t like me being out of the house for so long during the day and it takes a lot of work to collect them again when I get home but for the moment it’s nice to have a job that I actually enjoy. I can’t remember the last time that happened.

And I know some of you are thinking ‘well duh! That’s obvious’ but just remember I was subjected to some pretty powerful propaganda for most of my childhood. Mind you even I’m amazed at just how ignorant I was of these simple facts of life.

 

 

Primitivist Theology

In my last post I wondered at the lengths Ran went to in his recent essay to deal with issues of ideology and today he posted a comment which answers the question much better than my speculation did.

… the main reason I wrote the essay was to go into theoryland and get primitivists out. If you really feel like going into the woods and living on roots and berries and deer that you kill with a handmade bow, go for it! But that’s not what I see. I see people who feel that this society is deeply wrong, and on top of those valid feelings, they build what I believe is a faulty intellectual framework: that we should go primitive. Then they feel guilty that they don’t really like practicing primitive skills, and that they’d rather eat pizza and go on the internet. I’m not trying to stop anyone from going primitive. I’m trying to stop anyone from forcing anyone else to do it…

Perhaps then, it’s an invitation to come and live in the grey areas between the extremes of modern civilisation and pure primitivism. As I said in my last post if we learn to listen to our inner voice (but not to blindly obey it, of course) then we will hopefully lose the need to rely on pre-conceived ideology to guide our lives and will also feel quite comfortable with imperfectly worked-out grey areas.

Exit Ideology

I’ve just read Ran’s new essay, Beyond Civilised and Primitive, in which he spends a great deal of energy battling through a veritable thicket of ideologies. Obviously Ran feels the need to address the various views of people who will be reading his essay but what I like is how he (knowingly, I’m sure) blows himself out of the water with this paragraph:

A more reasonable move is to abandon primitive life as an ideal, or a goal, and instead just set it up as a perspective: “Hey, if I stand here, I can see that my own world, which I thought was normal, is totally insane!” Or we can set it up as a source of learning: “Look at this one thing these people did, so let’s see if we can do it too.” Then it doesn’t matter how many flaws they had. And once we give up the framework that shows a right way and a wrong way, and a clear line between them, we can use perspectives and ideas from people formerly on the “wrong” side: “Ancient Greeks went barefoot everywhere and treated their slaves with more humanity than Wal-Mart treats its workers. Medieval serfs worked fewer hours than modern Americans, and thought it was degrading to work for wages. Slum-dwellers in Mumbai spend less time and effort getting around on foot than Americans spend getting around in cars. The online file sharing community is building a gift economy.”

I’ve spent time debating with Ted, who after embracing Primitivism for a while has now turned about face and completely opposes it. I’m sure that some of the strength of his opposition comes as a result of the attack he came under from Jason Godesky when he made the shift but the point I was to make here is the same one I made to Ted when he described me as having primitive or anti-civ viewpoints. Ultimately I don’t care for the labels, nor do I want to align myself with any particular ideological box. I am much more interested in finding information that is useful to me in my life and while there is much in primitivism and anti-civ theory that I gain from I’m definitely not signing up for the whole package deal. And I am definitely not keen on packing my family up and heading off into a forest somewhere either!

The truth is I am barely interested in appearing consistent and logical, especially if it’s at the cost of creative thought and the pursuit of new and useful ideas. Conforming to conventional rules of debate is necessary if you want to convert people to your viewpoint but the only person I am trying to convert these days is myself.

I was going to write something harsh about how the need for ideology is a sign of weakness - my civilised instincts are still strong - but really I think it’s a sign that people don’t know themselves well and are using an intellectual framework to do the job that their (silenced) inner voice is supposed to do.

I’m not saying that I’ve got this problem completely sussed but here’s some real-life needs that I am aware of and which are driving most of my intellectual searching.

- I want to be able to raise my kids without doing too much psychological damage to them.

- I want to undo the psychological damage done to me during my childhood and early adulthood so that I can break free and have a fun and satisfying life (which will hopefully make the above goal easier to achieve)

- and I want to figure out how best to organise my family’s life so that we can prepare for whatever societal changes are coming up (and also so that I can work on the above two goals)

Undoubtedly I’m a mess of internal contradictions like most people but I should be able to link most of my writing back to these needs. If people like some of the ideas I discuss while doing this, then that’s great but I’ve pretty much given up trying to convert people these days. At least I hope I have.

All this is not an attempt to discredit Ran’s essay by the way. The truth is I was actually thinking of a different person when I wrote a lot of this post but (like all good essays) Ran’s has got me thinking. I’m sure his blog gets more traffic than mine and I imagine that if he doesn’t deal with differing ideologies in his essay he is probably going to come under a lot of attack - he probably will anyway :-) . And incidently, I think it’s important to argue against certain people, like the ones who want to bring-on the crash - as Ran does.

As always the best thing Ran does with his approach to predicting the future is open our minds up to the possibilities rather than close everything down to a single linear prediction like most people working in this area. Rather than freaking me out and immobilising my thoughts his writing always leaves me with hope.

-Via Idleworm recently I found this interview of Bill Mollison with this invaluable quote in which he basically challenges the conventional approach of working out an ideology and then using that to determine our real-world actions.

Alan: Doing permaculture seems to be the opposite of abstraction.

Bill: Oh, I put it another way. I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher. But I could never teach people to be philosophers - and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don’t grow their own vegetables, in fact they’re not deep ecologists - they’re my enemies.

But if you get someone who looks after himself and those around him - like Scott Nearing, or Masanobu Fukuoka - that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand. People like that don’t poison things, they don’t ruin things, they don’t lose soils, they don’t build things they can’t sustain.

These days I’m valuing my intellectual side less and less. It was developed during attempts to colonise my mind (at educational institutions) so I’m really not sure that it’s good for me at all but I also know that in it’s proper place it can be used to counter-act some bad (learned) instincts that I seem to still have.

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As for the most challenging of Ran’s new ideas, that tribal hunter gathering is not necessarily our natural state, I’d find that hard to argue with since I tend to think that humans are born with a lot of potential but are otherwise a blank slate and can therefore head in any direction from there. With a proviso however, that we are born needing (expecting?) certain conditions to enable us to reach our full potential and to lead happy, satisfying lives - and that the environment found in peaceful tribes appears to be the best that anyone has found for doing this.

Whether that actually means we are supposed to live in such a state probably depends upon your ideology - and if you don’t have an ideology you’ll probably not care either way because you’ll be more concerned with figuring out a practical means of making your life more fun.

Joe Polaischer

I’ve just received word via email that Joe Polaischer dies yesterday. Joe was a great advocate of Permaculture and preparation of energy descent. Decades before most of us worked out that sustainability was important Joe and his partner Trish were out there showing how it could be done with their work at Rainbow Valley Farm.

He was such a passionate and energetic character I find it hard to believe he could go so suddenly. He will be missed by so many.

I wrote about Joe here and here and in one of my most popular interviews on Raglan Community Radio I discussed all manner of issues relating to living lightly here.

actually, that link goes to his talk from the 2005 Ecoshow that I recorded. The radio interview is here.

The text of the email reads:

We’re sorry to have to let you know that Joe Polaischer of Rainbow
Valley farm died yesterday, at the farm.

Joe’s funeral will be on SATURDAY 16TH FEB at 2.00pm, at the Matakana
Pony Club on Matakana Valley Rd. There will be a gathering after the
burial at the Matakana Hall. Please bring a plate and a bottle.

Rest in peace Joe.

The Joy of Crash

UPDATE: Ran’s added an email comment from me about faith in politicians:

As someone from the outside I’m always amazed at how much faith US citizens put in their politicians. I mean there appear to be scores on the internet who genuinely believe that Ron Paul is going to make everything all better. I’ve yet to meet anyone in New Zealand who feels that way about any of our politicians — even though they are genuinely more representative of the people.

Just in case anyone has got the wrong idea I should point out that New Zealand is no political nirvana. True, we have proportional representation and a Green Party in parliament but we have also been screwed over by our political system in pretty fundamental ways. Really, I think that rating a political system for how well it serves the people is a bit like rating an ocean for how dry it is.

————————————————–

Great comments from Ran today:

The closer America gets to economic collapse, the more I sense viscerally that hard collapse and violent revolution would totally suck. And I think the critique of civilization begins to work against us when we move from thinking to action, because it’s too black and white. Of course, eventually, we must evolve stable societies built on autonomous action, but I think that’s going to take us thousands of years, and in the meantime, we’re going to continue to have large complex societies muddling around and making mistakes.

I’ve been feeling wary of the crash for some time, some good might come out of it but as I said in my About-page ‘we’d be bloody nuts to look forward to it’.

Frankly I’m finding family life tough enough, heaven only knows how we’ll cope with a serious crisis.