Peak Oil and Climate Change: a Midsummer Night's Meditation

A lot of discussion in the Peak Oil/Climate Change community focuses on rational responses to these game-changing influences on modern societies. Along with these proposals comes much hand-wringing about how political or corporate leadership remains largely as intransigent as ever on the most pressing and most obvious of these responses, and the fact that most of them should have been implemented 30 or more years ago, or the very least, immediately. Public transportation, walkable communities, sustainable agricultural practices, renewable and reduced energy use…these are reasonable things. However, for a lot of reasons, then as now, the reasonable things didn’t happen, or haven’t happened at a scale needed to meaningfully affect the trajectory of onrushing events.

So at present it seems that with peak oil and climate change we have a collective problem without a collective response. Of course, it is true that while we may feel disappointment at failed international resolutions and the absurd theatrics of flailing governments, positive things are happening here and there. We see small victories: a city council passes a peak oil resolution, a Transition group forms, a Peak Oil conference takes place somewhere, someone starts a community garden. However, such events are mostly functioning as signs, and as every driver should be aware, an unheeded signal does not affect the motion of a motorcar. Further, it’s not clear that making the signal larger or clearer would have much effect. 

Given all of the foregoing, it is becoming increasingly clear that on the individual level at least, there is precisely no reasonable response to peak oil and climate change. This is an improv, a dance with emerging possibilities, and it is a dance within ourselves as well as between us and our changing world. What works for one person may not work at all for another. My suggestion here is that we must not take the fact that there is no reasonable response to be a cause for despair. It is simply an invitation to get in touch with something that is deeper than reason and capable of reforming it, difficult as that may be to describe in reasonable terms.

For example, much talk is devoted to the subject of the economic side of Peak Oil. Unless the petroleum-powered economy keeps expanding with the pace of money creation, money loaned into existence with interest cannot be repaid. A kind of generalized bankruptcy follows, in which inflation or deflation exhaust the symbol of money by attacking the roots of its capacity to signify. The symbolic medium that we have worked for, fought over, connived to get, stolen, and inherited loses meaning within our human experience as the system that supported it breaks down. What follows from the loss of a symbol of this centrality is the failure of culture: erosion and breakdown on all levels, from our inner lives, feelings and thought processes to shuttered factories, empty strip malls, and decaying concrete roads. The inability to pay a debt is but the beginning of a cascade of expectations breaking down, taking with them many other social forms and significances. It is also accompanied by the loss of the material capacities with which it was linked in our collective mindset through our social institutions and physical infrastructure.

The exigencies of climate change, on the other hand, are rightfully thought to be of a different order than those of the symbol system of world finance in a losing battle with emerging realities. However, whether we're experiencing the rains that don’t come or the paycheck that evaporated, on a personal level it amounts to an encounter with an abyss. Every hockey-sticking graph we’re looking at represents an abyss, but to encounter it personally is something else again. This is the thing, the thingless thing at the heart of our experience, the place where our inner chaos is drawn to the surface by the growing chaos around us. This is where our waking thoughts merge into the dream to which we awaken in our sleep. When peak oil messengers tell us to “start our collapse now,” there’s no better place to start than here, on the inside, where words break down into sounds, and the inner reverberations of those sounds reveal realities that were formerly invisible, showing us what was really inside of those words all along.

Given that our culture took the technology of combustion so far as to alter the climate of the planet in the pursuit of our dreams, it seems the poetry of burning and the power of the infinite that lies hidden in every flame should be quite familiar to us. But typically it isn’t, even as the drama plays out and we see that the very contents our minds are catching fire. This is the real “new normal,” a phrase people started hopefully intoning to come to terms with the progressive disjuncture between representation and reality. However, the expression bears the stigma of an ominously Orwellian inner contradiction.

The words of Antonin Artaud come to me now:

"Burning is a magic act . . . we must consent to burning, burning in advance and immediately, not a thing but everything that represents things for us, in order not to expose ourselves to being burnt up whole."

Reason does not fare so well under these conditions, and this is precisely the point we are heading for. We must then find our refuge in something other than reason as the culture that found such ingenious ways of tyrannizing itself and the planet with symbols and paper goes up like a trash can ablaze. This is the gift we have prepared for ourselves.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the lovers leave the city and all they know when the reality of their love comes into conflict with the abstract mandates of Athenian law. They find themselves in a wilderness where, as it turns out, the elemental forces of nature are likewise in upheaval as the fairy king and queen are estranged from one another. In the end it is not through reason that order is restored, but through the agency of madness. My sense is that this is what’s happening to us as well, but as a culture we’re so far astray that a single crazy night in the wilderness won’t be enough to set things right again.

Feelings, Art, and the Making of Movements

I recently had the privilege of seeing performances by Lucas DiGia and Walter “Soul” Lacy at the HomeGrown Local Food Summit in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Lucas brought a powerfully articulated vision of the relationship of food, culture, and society to his raps—spiced with a bit of wry humor. Walter left me stunned with his spoken word poetry and thoughtful commentary themed on social justice and redemption.

My response to these performances could be summed up in a single word: visceral. On my way home I reflected on the words of Sifu Robert Brown, under whom I studied kung fu for a number of years: “All movement starts in the dan tien.”

For those unfamiliar with the Chinese term, the dan tien is the region of the body centered just below the navel. Of course, as a novice Kung Fu student I don’t pretend to fully understand what my teacher meant, although I think I got the basic gist of it. Today it occurred to me that what is true about body movements is also true of social movements: they start with something at the feeling level, a gut-level response. It’s here we will find our motivation, our willingness to take a stand, and our desire to turn our activism into real activity. For this reason I see a lot of value in starting off the Local Food Summit with performances that evoke such a response, and I felt a great appreciation for the performers and their talents.

Of course, given that the gut and the feeling center there is so powerful, there are similarly powerful efforts made to align people’s feelings with the prevailing power structure. And it’s not hard to do. The reason is pretty simple. Here’s an example.

As shoppers we see a can of food on the shelf in the grocery. The can has a label with a design we recognize from our childhood, when our mothers may have opened a can with the same kind of label and served it to us. Now we are adults, and of course, we really want that image and design on the label of a canned food to mean it’s safe to eat and serve to our families. Discovering that “gender-bender” BPA is being used by many manufacturers in the canning process and that this hormone-like substance could affect our body systems is unsettling, to say the least. It’s even more disquieting to consider that there are corporate offices where people calculate that the risk of human reproductive cancers is an acceptable cost of doing business. Since we want to believe it’s safe, even if our reading of the research suggests it might not be, it’s easier to side with those who would have us believe it is safe.

There’s an awful tendency to forget what we’ve just read or learned about because it’s easier to convince ourselves we are safe than to really engage with the information and the feelings it provokes. However, when we separate our knowledge from our feelings in this way, we stymie our ability to act on that knowledge. Without our feelings, we will have no gut-level response. No gut-level response, no movement.

Given the way it gets embedded in us, to unplug our blind faith in industrialized food and then build food systems based on real relationships with people and the earth, we have to get over our viscerally linked loyalties to food brands and generationally engrained consumer shopping habits. The package design and other aspects of the marketed product identity of a brand of tortilla chips or bag of french fries are consumed along with the industrial food itself, and in a way these images are just as deeply assimilated. Once they’re a part of us, there’s a tendency to defend them.

As behavioral scientists are well aware, food is a powerful reinforcement. Each time a food is perceived and eaten without immediately producing ill effects, a deep conditioning happens. We see the package of processed cheese or a hamburger with a certain brand stamped on the wrapper, and we literally salivate like Pavlov’s dog. This is another way of looking at why changing dietary patterns and habits can sometimes be difficult.

One saving grace in all of this is that the human body is wiser and more ancient than any particular culture a person inhabits, and we can allow ourselves to help this wisdom make our true needs known regardless of the local customs or the prevailing personal and cultural conditioning. We can learn to listen to this wisdom and notice whether a particular food or a certain quantity of it is weakening us or strengthening us. We can connect with our gut-level responses and untangle them from the conditioned cultural overlay.  We can even re-train our conditioned responses, refurbish our food aesthetic, and create a food culture based on conscious participation rather than mindless consumption.

Doing this, however, requires that we wake up to food, to the voice of the body, and to the need for change. And to really move toward change, we must connect with our feelings. By feelings I mean both physical sensations and emotional responses: How does drinking a liter of soda make us feel, really? And, what does it emotionally feel like to have food handed to us in a paper bag through a car window?  Conversely, what feelings show up with a meal thoughtfully prepared and eaten in a social context that brings it meaning, or a plateful of potatoes grown, dug, cooked, and served with care and love? My experience is that just one such food experience can undo a lot negative conditioning as we connect with a new set of feelings. In this way it is quite possible to develop an appetite for ways of eating that really nourish us.

To make a movement, we have to connect with all of our feelings, and with our capacity to think reflectively about them. Since artists model this connection and help create a culture where it can happen, one place to start is by looking to our artists to help us make our own inner connections. This is why I’m grateful for people like Lucas DiGia and Walter Lacy, who can articulate a message and get it through to a place where I can actually feel my own truth in what they share. If we can feel it strongly enough, we can find both the motivation and the right path of action to move with it, and ultimately we may also be able to help others make connections in turn to build a larger movement.

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To learn more about Lucas DiGia's Rap for Food visit: www.facebook.com/rapforfood and rapforfood.org 
Contact poet and spoken word artist Walter "Soul" Lacy at: thesoulemcee@gmail.com

The Cultural Renaissance of Free Gooseberries and Outlaw Dandelions

I love giving plants away, and I hold that the sharing of vegetative abundance is the foundation of a sustainable culture. Every time seeds, cuttings, runners, crowns or rootlets change hands among friends and community members, powerful things can happen.

Let’s start with the miracle and freedom of the plants themselves. Soon after my wife and I purchased our first home, I surveyed the back yard and counted 70 ornamental and fruiting perennials that had come into our hands through friends. Some of these had moved with us from the rental property where they had lived for a year prior, and then new plants were added during the summer of our move. These plants were the surplus of my gardening friends, and freely given.

But there’s something more important. For example, when a start from a currant bush went in on the south side of the compost pile (it turned out to be an excellent location, by the way) suddenly a new being was inhabiting our space. I had no idea that in just a few years the shrub’s luxuriant growth would lead to an abundance of fruit, or that my daughter would suggest making currant jelly as a homeschool project. Making the jelly ultimately became an annual family ritual, and the ruby-red jars were a traditional holiday offering as the years went by.  It was but a stick with a few roots on one end when I got it. 

Nor could I have known how important the gift of three crowns of ostrich ferns would become as in succeeding years they multiplied and softened the air in the back corner of the lot beneath the trees from which eventually hung a hammock, the fronds grazing us with cool touches on summer afternoons. Likewise, how could I have guessed the cumulative overall effect of these and all the other plants in this community: the German chamomile in profuse sprays, the spring displays of primroses, or the long-lasting waist-high backdrop of biennial black-eyed Susans gracing many of our backyard gatherings?

In essence, these inscrutable earthly beings living in our back yard had rooted themselves not only in the soil, but in our lives. Their beauty and abundance both merited the care required to sustain them and motivated me to share them with others.

The depth of all this points to another powerful sphere where sharing plants adds value to life: human relationships and community. Sharing in the mystery of plants serves to remind us of the ultimately mysterious interface between us as human beings. Personally, I think it works this way: whether it’s a handful of heirloom morning glory seeds of unlimited potential or a dozen leafless raspberry canes in a bucket of dirty water that are destined soon to meet the earth again and spread in a friend’s back yard, human relationships that touch upon the plant world draw from it both the rootedness and the cosmic connections of the plants themselves.

At a certain point we may even wonder who is serving whom in this dynamic where plants, friends new and old, and happenstance encounters can combine and lead to growth on all levels. For example, at my nephew’s graduation party a few years back, I was asked by a neighbor if I’d like to visit his vegetable garden around the corner. When we got there, I noticed some mature gooseberry bushes and obtained permission to take a couple green cuttings, which I wrapped in a wet paper napkin and placed in a plastic bag.  These cuttings soon rooted, and six years later those bushes have reached enormous sizes, and their self-layered progeny are now growing in the backyards of more than a half-dozen friends. Who else, unknown to me, might ultimately also have gooseberry pies and preserves as scions of these plants are shared? What children might connect with something primal in themselves by plucking the blushing fruits on a hot summer’s day? It's impossible to know. I do know that I will remember the gardener who shared them, and that those friends of mine whose yards are bearing new fruit because of those two cuttings also now have living testimonials to our relationship that can weather the seasons along with us.

Friendships take on an expansive quality and a touch of immortality when we share plants.  

Finally, by combining the grace of the plants themselves and the magic they can bring to human relationships, sharing in this way also revives an ancient cultural narrative, creating a beachhead for life-sustaining values to emerge in a culture that lately seems hell-bent on running headlong in the other direction. Plants, after all, provide their services for free. In our culture, anything free is devalued. This is true whether we’re talking about the pure water that used to run freely on the one hand, or the flow of energy involved in parenting and childcare on the other. We do not value these things unless we start to pay for them, and if we really feel into it, the fact that we now pay for such things has already devalued them at a much more basic level.

The cultural habit of putting a price tag on everything ultimately means that we too are bought and sold, although this remains in the blind spot of a culture where commerce has become the central focus. It doesn’t have to be this way, but in a classic case of the servant becoming master, the markets that were intended to follow the needs of life and the living somehow took the reins and started driving. The term, ‘free market’ is, when we stop for a moment and think of it, an oxymoron, for the things we find in the market are seldom free, and many of the costs do not even appear on the price tags.

This is why freely giving plants just as they freely give of themselves is a paradigm-changing act. And it’s interesting to see how people inured to a market mentality sometimes respond to a gift. With everybody selling everything, gifts freely given can meet at first with misunderstanding and incomprehension. Good, then! That just shows how much they are needed. Ultimately, I suspect, the biggest gift is shifting the mindset that assumes our self-interests are achieved at the expense of others.

When operating in a balanced system, plants don’t do it that way. A dandelion that sprouts up in a vacant lot, for example, is in every way a pioneer and an entrepreneur. It’s also anarchical, however, in the sense that it pays no rent and holds no title. The dandelion is a squatter at best, a trespasser and an outlaw in the eyes of many. It claims its freedom and it holds the land, and in so doing it claims also a place for itself and its progeny in the world.

But if we look more closely we see that just as the plant has taken its place without title, it yields up a host of benefits that are likewise unfettered and untaxed. As rain patters down on the disturbed earth, the dandelion and its companions work together to blunt the impact and slow runoff. It does this for its own reasons, of course, but as a result erosion is mitigated for all. With its taproot reaching down into the subsoil and its leaves gathering the dew and falling rain, the dandelion furthers this process by channeling water deeper into the earth – again for its own use later, but this also benefits the other plants and trees that would find their water there.

That taproot also draws nutrients up from the subsoil for the dandelion’s own use, but these nutrients in turn are deposited on the topsoil as the plant loses leaves to growth and herbivorous animals. From the resources it procures in sun and soil, the dandelion plant also offers up food for nectar and pollen eaters, a healthful, tonic herb and vegetable, as well as a profusion of airborne seeds that can multiply all of these benefits as they colonize other areas.

My goal is to operate in parallel with this pattern from the human side. Being an agent for the propagation of plants can, when pursued with consciousness and care, give the living system a push in the direction it’s already seeking to go, and gently shape it to bring enhanced benefits to us as well. For example, lettuce seeds travel on airy puffs like dandelions, yet sharing my heirloom seeds with friends miles away helps to ensure that if I had a crop failure, other sources of seed might be available to begin again. Note that this is in direct opposition to the “market” strategy of withholding seed, patenting it, inserting genes to prevent it from reproducing, and otherwise making seed scarce and controlling it.  

The abundance principle also applies every time I share food plants in a world of increasing food insecurity. In a food crisis, I don’t want to be the only person in the neighborhood with fruit hanging from my trees or knowledge of how to garner calories from the soil. Real security rests on my neighbors having the resources and ability to do so as well. Thus I share liberally, and in my own self-interest…just as plants do.

How values got so out of whack that many people in our society fail to see this option is an important question, but outside the scope of this essay. For now, I would suggest that human life, like plant life, holds the possibility of expressing as a celebration and offering of abundance if we choose to participate in this way. Vegetative generosity is the foundation of an abundant life for all earth’s inhabitants, and it’s well worth sharing.

Time, Money, and the “$50 Tomato”

At the end of last summer a friend of mine was telling me about a client of his gardening business who said at one point in the price negotiations, “I hope you’re not going to sell me a $50 tomato.”

The reference, I learned later, was to a book called The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden, by William Alexander.  I haven’t read the book, but the reputed high costs of gardening are second only to “I’d love to garden but I haven’t got the time” on the list of reasons people don’t grow their own food.  Another close contender near the top of the list is something that usually comes out as, “I kill whatever I try to grow.”

Each of these arguments has merit, but only as symptoms of the underlying conditions in which they are made.  It might take a village to raise a child, but it takes a worldview and the infrastructure it generates to validate an argument.  For some time now, I’ve been trying to understand a world where it makes no sense to grow food.

My own reflections on the topic started one day when I bought a bunch of radishes at the supermarket.  Radishes, while not exactly a staple food, are arguably one of the easier food plants to grow for most people and in fact are the first crop I was successful with as a child gardener.  As an adult when I looked at the cost and the amount of pre-tax income I’d have to earn to buy the radishes, converted to time, I wondered why I would ever bother growing them.  It made no sense economically: end of story.  Plus, what if I do invest the time and effort, and fail? And that’s where gardening stops for many, many people.

But even then, I felt there was actually more to the story.  And no, I’m not going to write at length on the intrinsic value of having intimate relationships with one’s food plants, a topic I’ve explored elsewhere.  Nor is it my intent to analyze the perversity of market pricing that externalizes costs resulting from fossil fuel use, fertilizer and pesticide runoff, or the abusive working conditions of farm laborers, though this is also worthy of consideration and an important part of the picture.  Instead, what I feel is most important here is the personal time and money equation that results in part through the mechanism of perverse pricing.  It’s on this level that people’s decisions get made.  This is basically how we got to a place where it makes no sense to grow food, or where growing food came to be seen as a kind of luxury activity for the privileged.

Yet the time/money equation that had me pondering my purchase of commercial radishes is changing for many people, and with it the decisions they are making.  My view of the fundamental shift we have seen in the last few years here in the USA is that we are changing from a people who on aggregate had more money than time to a people who on aggregate have more time than money.  When a person has disposable income but little free time, this puts a premium on convenience and speed.  Here in the “developed” world, what this means is that not only do we feel there no time to grow, thresh, mill, and bake grain into bread, we often don’t feel we have time to make our own sandwiches or even to get out of our cars to get them from those who make them for us. 

No doubt there is an economy of scale in operation that makes the livelihood of, for example, a baker viable under fairly broad market conditions.  But let’s be clear about this: bread in itself is a ready-to-eat convenience food, and occupies a place along with butchered meat and apples that are grown and bagged by others on the time vs. money continuum.  

I started seeing the basic economic paradigm shift – from more money than time to more time than money – during the first stage of the most recent economic downturn in 2008-09 when in many instances one or both parents in two-income families lost a job, significantly affecting the market for child day care.  Among the home-based industries that have fallen prey to market forces, childcare is quite a big canary in the contemporary economic coal mine.  It is a prime indicator of the personal time/money decision making process, and little wonder.  Even with the increased “child care productivity” leveraged by stratified age groupings and non-biological adult-to-child ratios, when there’s no money to pay for it and a parent out of work at home, the economic incentive to outsource one’s childrearing with curb-service daycare simply evaporates.

There are many, many aspects of life that change as people get pushed out of the mainstream economy with its productivity treadmill, and families find themselves possessed of relatively more time and less money.  One of the changes is that growing food starts making sense again, if one can find a place to do it. Effective resource stewardship is another aspect.  Call me frugal, but it seems pretty wasteful to buy special bags so that yard leaves can be hauled away in the fall and then buy bagged compost trucked in from elsewhere in the spring. Left alone, the leaves will turn into compost with very little coaxing.  But this presumes a couple things: time and the willingness to use it.  The “$50 tomato” comes down in price very quickly when time is used to grow plants from seed, when developing friendships bring tools and know-how, when a little muscle and a lot of patience turn waste into compost, and, in general when human energy and clever management of time and resources supplant a product-centered, money-driven approach to problem solving.

Another change is, presuming that with less money one can still locate something to eat and strategize a way to stay out of the rain (I’m not suggesting one could live with no money at all), there’s time for the valuable work of connecting with others and educating one’s self on issues, if one has the inclination.  As we’ve seen recently, one might just set up a tent in a park on Wall Street and start asking important questions and demanding real answers from those who work and live in the towers overhead.  Yes, and I’m sure it isn’t lost on those looking down at the colorful tents and personalities that there are important political dimensions to this social shift that goes by the name of unemployment.  After all, to employ is to use.  Unemployed, unused people can definitely find ways of making themselves useful.  Unused people have time to protest, to organize, and to do all kinds of interesting things.

In day-to-day living, the shift to more time than money could mean it makes sense to turn flour into bread, cook for big groups, collectivize living and transportation arrangements, care for one’s own and other people’s children, share, trade, and barter for tools, skills, and basic necessities, read and play instruments rather than pay for entertainment, and talk with the neighbors.

For every one of these activities, the mainstream economy has a product or service that offers a shortcut that costs money.  But if we really look at carpooling, for example, what we’re seeing is people willing to give up a bit of convenience and use a little extra time to save money.  Somewhere another car sits empty to the benefit of its owner, the air we breathe, and the global climate, and to the detriment of the national GDP, which is as much a measurement of waste as of wealth in a society where the two are easily confused.

The irony is, sometimes the products and services being marketed aren’t even much of a shortcut.  Once in the thrall of a money- and product-centered mindset, we will sometimes even endure inconvenience and lower quality to participate in the illusion that the more we pay the more it’s worth, and that when money changes hands something intrinsically good is happening – the shopping culture.  And, while a lot of what we buy is needless, it seems to me that even with necessities like food, it really doesn’t take much more effort to, say, make a better, cheaper, and healthier sandwich at home than run out to buy one because one “deserves a break today.”  Granted, I sometimes gratefully take a cup of coffee from a friendly face at a cafe, but honestly, I can always brew myself a superior and cheaper cup than I can buy.  The “$50 Tomato” has its counterparts in many formerly free or inexpensive but lovely things that emerge from the market as grotesque extravagances like $3.75 cups of coffee.

In the end, an important piece of my hope for the future is that productive people are productive people, and will find ways to use time to add value to their lives directly when sidelined by the mainstream economy’s avenues for value creation.  Spending time instead of money when money is short makes sense, and as we awaken from the idolatry of commerce I see a strong possibility that Americans will paradoxically find themselves possessed of more entrepreneurial drive than ever. 

From Crushing Distance to Opening Space: A Meditation on Speed and Local Consciousness

I drove south on Interstate 75 after dinner last night to help a friend with yard work some 29 miles from my home. We’re in the last days of August here in the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere, and that only gave us a couple hours of useful daylight. However, that was no problem. With a relatively small amount of gasoline, I could use my car to cover that distance in a 40-minute drive, accomplish the tasks, and be home before my wife had fallen asleep.

But as the pavement blurred under my tires and the soft August air howled with hurricane force on the other side of the auto glass, this is the thought that occurred to me: I’m crushing distance with fossil fuel. I was suddenly filled with a sense of awe at what was really going on there, the terrific forces and amazing engineering involved in the feat, and both the exhilaration and the violent hubris of it. I’ve heard about longtime prisoners newly released, and how as car passengers they will sometimes grab the dashboard in a reflexive panic as the vehicle accelerates and the world warps around them with increasing velocity. For most of us, of course, it’s rather mundane. We forget, until we gawk at a twisted heap of metal in the ditch, what it is we’re really doing when we drive. And even then, are we really remembering, or do we just momentarily go dumb as the gears of cognitive dissonance grind in our heads?

With this revelation still fresh in my mind, and so many people in the Peak Oil / Climate Change / Transition community beating the drum of “relocalization,” I think it’s time to review the basics if we are really to awaken from the fossil fuel dream. Some friends and I were joking recently about people jetting in from all over the country to attend a relocalization conference, but underneath the humor is something even more worthy of our attention.

As we approach highway speeds in a motor vehicle, the terrain thus covered flattens out. This flattening happens in several ways, all of which are related in the subjective experience of speed. For one, the physical dimensionality of space itself is squished. The driver’s focus narrows down to a kind of tunnel vision, and the surrounding landscape becomes, in effect, the wall of the tunnel on which play images of things that progressively lose their reality in the mind of the speedy one. Second, the significance of our surroundings undergoes a parallel loss of depth as actual landscape features become mere symbols. Physical objects are actually always rich in meaning, but how could one explore that when one is passing them by at such a clip? With these two forces of compression at work, the net effect is that by crushing distance with fossil fuels, we flatten our experience of inhabiting space.

I am certain there are those who would deny this. There are also those who still argue for the educational value of television. Big picture, though, what we see in societies now several generations into watching screens is that the medium is indeed the message, and it is a physically pacifying one, incompatible in a half-dozen or more important ways with a healthy society. McLuhan’s contribution to discourse on communications media applies also to our various mediums of conveyance; the medium is the message not only for TV’s, but cars and jet aircraft as well.

Now, it’s true that we can open and experience space, and the spacious generosity of significances that flow from the living world, and still drive cars. Such reasoning does little to persuade me that the broad effects I’m seeing are not real. It’s a bit like climate change deniers who take a particular cold winter’s day as refutation of global warming. I would argue that on aggregate, the tradeoff of becoming a society inured to crushing distance with speed is a relentless pressure that flattens human experience in all its dimensions.

The grand experiment in overcoming the tyranny of locality by progressively extending our mobility with motors has landed us in but another kind of provincialism, with new fetters to replace the old, and feelings not of freedom but of frustration, servitude, impatience, and captivity seeming to predominate among motorists. And we don’t need to look to the social stratification and physical impediments that result from our collective motor mania as described by Ivan Illich to reach the conclusion that these things no longer serve their intended purposes, although these observations are persuasive enough. Nor do we have to look to the homogenization of the constructed landscape, as many other observers have noted, to conclude that for all our moving about, we Americans, in particular, seem not to wish to really go anywhere new, preferring the same predictable fast food places, stores, and motels from coast to coast.

But with these contributions to the discussion already logged and accounted for, I would narrow the focus to emphasize this: We do not really cease being drivers when we step from our vehicles. Like television, automobile travel strengthens some of the more pernicious habits of the egoic mind: positioning self as separate from the living environment, seeking to control experience by external means, and generally in many ways reaching for levers, pushing buttons, and forever seeking control. Bottom line: motor travel is addictive, and the effects of the addiction are likely to persist even if we can no longer afford to drive.

Assuming this is true, I would go further and suggest that consciousness shaped by the influence of speed may have difficulty with the very capacity that is most needful in relocalization: the ability to open space, or to put it another way, the ability to open to space, and thus actually inhabit a locality. Flatness becomes a habit of the mind, and so in every way we careen helplessly from image to image and word to word. The world becomes a magazine rack.

For Exhibit A, consider what passes for landscaping in car-centered, suburban USA: the flat expanses of green lawns extending from the street to the foundation plantings of geometrically-trimmed shrubbery, the lollipop trees set off by themselves. What is this, if not a place converted into a symbol, a symbol that moreover always seems to hover on the brink of having the last of its meaning wiped away like a film, leaving nothing at all? No wonder such places are seldom occupied by people – they are practically meaningless, flat, and devoid of experiential content. However, I suppose such designs do have the merit of offering no distractions for drivers whose endless forward plunge carries them by.

In communities with sidewalks and where pedestrian traffic is significant, by contrast, my experience is that the landscaping is almost always richer, more varied, more interesting, and more idiosyncratic in design. Space opens up in such places, and we are invited to slow down even further to appreciate it, thus coaxing yet more opening from it as we do, since as we open, things indeed open up to us. People occupy such spaces because they have meaning, and as they occupy those spaces, dimensions of significance, depths of feeling, and the richness of the physical environment grow in unison, encouraging human occupation, shared experiences, and growth.

All of which is to say something you might hear in any seminar on developing consciousness, whether the topic is Zen meditation, high-level business management, or tantric sex: slowing down matters.

Of course, it is also a little scary for many people to slow down enough to actually occupy and open space, which is perhaps an unacknowledged reason for the challenge of getting relocalizing efforts started while the current paradigm persists. One of the dimensions of experience that suffers in this cultural milieu is that of feeling and emotional depth; to slow down is to reacquaint one’s self with it. I take some comfort, however, in the knowledge that the process of rediscovering space can happen fairly quickly when circumstances slow us down, and what we will find there is likely something many people been feeling the absence of in their experience.

I used to drive a ’74 Volvo with then-new fuel injection technology, and on hot summer days sometimes the car would stall I would have to raise the hood to let the system cool off for a while before I could be on my way again. This happened once on I-94 and the rusty old vehicle happened to roll to a stop just outside my old hometown near a creek. Seeking refuge from the noise and heat of the expressway, I clambered down the embankment some distance away, sat down in the shade and cool soft grasses near the little watercourse, and looked up to see a kingfisher light upon a branch over the creek just overhead. I’d never seen one before. Although I was on my way to the wedding of a childhood friend, more than thirty years later that remains the most memorable event of the day.

So, it’s quite possible for space to start opening up for us, and very quickly, once we stop crushing distances with fuel. And fortunately, we weren’t born this way, so the path to our rehabilitation may be as simple as remembering. Children instinctively know how to open up and occupy space. As parents, we fight it, of course. Mystified by speed, our heads spinning like the wheels so often turning beneath us, we wonder why our children are so difficult to manage when they’re strapped into the car and the world goes by in an inaccessible blur. It really should be kind of obvious: as recent arrivals, children live to occupy and open space, and everything about the experience of motor travel militates against it. That the recent solution to this problem is another bad idea – mounting DVD players in the back seat to pacify the children and distract their minds – simply shows how insane our culture has become.

I have a photograph of my older daughter and niece in our back yard at about age 7. They are peering out from under a forsythia bush whose overgrown and arching branches conceal a hiding place they’ve outfitted with a kitchen and a bedroom, all made from sticks, leaves, and other yard debris, artfully arranged. The little girls had made a world in there—rich in meaning, full of feeling, and open to endless possibility. To the relocalization movement I offer this as an inspiration and a model. We don’t need to fly to a conference or drive ourselves crazy, we just need to slow down and play in our back yards.

Reskilling the Peak Oil Conversation

Talk, they say, is cheap. But not not only does this leave my phone bill unexplained, it simply isn’t true. People pay to talk and they pay to listen, and even if money is not involved in the transaction, it takes considerable effort to do either of these things.

What’s worth talking about, though? That’s the real question.

Last weekend hurricane Irene deluged the East Coast of the United States with unimaginable amounts of rain in many places, the storm killing at least a couple dozen people, cutting off power to millions, turning roads into rivers and submerging cities under feet of water. Opening my Yahoo home page, this news competed with a story – same size clickable picture – of entertainer Beyoncé showing off her “baby bump” at a recent celebrity event.

Which is important? I get to choose.

As for me, I’d been following the Irene story since she was a nameless patch of clouds far beyond the horizon in the equatorial Atlantic. Yes, I know the weather is an old man’s sport, but there are likewise those who have been watching peak oil gather, organize, and strengthen as a force to contend with since it was also far beyond the horizon of public awareness.

What puzzles me is how even now, as the economic skies darken, the wind rises, and the surf of change gets rough and dangerous, those of us pointing out to sea and describing the nature and likely effects of the approaching storm are still competing head to head with stories about, for example, the lifestyle choices and fashions of rich people whom we not know.

Is peak oil an old man’s sport, too, or – not to limit it – is it just an unpleasant topic for people of any age or gender to irritate others with?  Or is it something more serious, like perhaps the duty of those who see a real danger to share what we can, when we can, however we can, and with whoever will listen?

My sense is, it falls into the latter category. But among those who haven’t missed a meal lately, and even among those who have missed, at least, a mortgage payment, the story still isn’t getting much traction. For a long time now, this has frustrated and perplexed me.

Granted, it’s hard to connect the dots between your son or daughter’s overseas tour in the US military, the price of gasoline, the budget brouhaha, and your recent pink slip. But there’s a reason for that. The problem, as I see it, is that far too many of us have ceded our responsibility as speakers. We’re letting the media be both the starting and ending point of too many conversations, when what’s needed is for us to make the leap into generating our own conversations in our own communities about things that really matter, peak oil among them.

And yes, many of these conversations will fall flat. At least here in the US, where the scope of public discourse has been almost entirely circumscribed by our willing complicity with corporate media, the very concept of peak oil seems outlandish and absurd. Even fairly intelligent people I’ve spoken with take the tautological position that if Peak Oil were real, more people would be talking about it, and since people aren’t talking about it, it must not be real.

That pretty much kills the conversation right there, but we must not give up.

The day before Irene arrived it was pleasant in North Carolina and the winds were picking up – nothing unusual. Then the storm came, as forecast, tracking very close to the path predicted by the weather geeks with their computer models. People died. Yet, and this is the real point here, human suffering and loss in general were undoubtedly less, and probably a lot less, simply because people had started talking about the storm beforehand. And when enough people start talking, talk leads to action.

This is why I’m encouraging those who tell me, for example, that they don’t know how to make goat cheese, or sew a quilt, plant a garden, or do any of the things people in the Transition movement commonly think of as “reskilling” to go ahead and display a Green Hand sign anyway. Particularly now, when for all my efforts there are just a few actual Green Hand signs posted on trees and fence posts in the world, what’s true is that the first and probably most important contribution your sign will make in your community is a conversation about its very significance.

That’s perfectly okay, because in the end talk isn’t cheap; it’s a priceless gift. Let’s share this gift with one another and put it to good use.

For more information on the Green Hand Reskilling Initiative, visit: http://greenhandsreskilling.weebly.com/

Have you posted a Green Hand sign? Please send a photo and/or story to 2greenhands@gmail.com so I can share it with others!

Anyone in SE Michigan who would like to host a Green Hand Sign Painting Workshop, please email Clifford at 2greenhands@gmail.com

The Inner Path to Permaculture

Here as I begin my second paper of the day for a permaculture class I am taking at a Oakland University, I am feeling a bit of the strain imposed by the compressed summer semester schedule as we tackle the multidimensionality of permaculture as a design science. Yet what better time to learn about this subject than during summertime, when we can actually observe and feel the rhythm of natural systems at their most active?

In some ways, I’m grateful. The pressure of the looming end of class is motivating, and as we head into the month of August I often feel an uptick in physical energy as the days grow shorter. Perhaps in this people are no different than squirrels busily fattening up on summer bounty and stashing away the abundance of autumn seeds. Maybe I’m on the same page as my garden leeks, which right about now usually seem to suddenly realize it’s time to get busy and grow after having apparently estivated through much of the summer. We humans have historically worked extra long days to bring in the fall harvest. In the case of my permaculture class, of course, the harvest I busy myself with is a greatly enhanced vision for how to co-creatively participate in the planet’s living systems.

Still, I also feel poignantly the many opportunities I have not been able to adequately capitalize upon. On our tour of the Michigan State University Student Organic Farm, for example, I found myself lagging behind the group as we moved from feature to feature, at one point noticing a classmate lagging also, perhaps as caught up as I was in the little whirlpools of fascination that hide everywhere, getting bigger the longer one participates in them. As a gardener, I am certain I’ve learned as much by absent-mindedly ambling about as by disciplined study. Sitting down in the squash patch or watching the hogs for a half hour might have been an educational experience, but there wasn’t time.

This brings me to a number of thoughts about the deeper aspects of permaculture as a personal journey. I am currently in the last few pages of Sam Keen’s book, A Passionate Life. Keen’s basic idea in my reading is that humanity is in the midst of an erotic crisis, and the conflation of the erotic and the sexual is but one of the many symptoms of a broader cultural crisis. Keen goes back to the original meaning of eros, which to the Greeks was understood as "the prime mover of stars and acorns and the affairs of men." (p. 26)

In other words, eros moves everything, which explains why people, squirrels and leeks all tend to step it up a notch in the fall. However, by relegating our conception of the erotic only to what happens in our bedrooms, there is a tendency in our culture not to see how this same forward-leaning impulse of life moves also in our thoughts and feelings and can be tapped into to build homes, communities, and workplaces. It is easy to forget, in a culture such as the one that currently predominates, how this thing that moves us, call it what you will, also connects us to everything else that moves.

Instead, we separate, and our inner schisms ultimately manifest as an extreme capacity to compartmentalize our lives that is subsequently reflected by the structures and systems we design. Modern agricultural practices show some of the more grisly outcomes: the reproductive power of plants and animals is here commandeered and dominated in a way that would probably make even a diehard BDSM aficionado blush. In our fields, we destroy fertility. I suggest we do so because we have not adequately cared for our own, and more broadly for that thing now beyond the pale of science—perhaps we should just call it life.

Keen writes, "First love and sex, like value and fact and mind and matter, were separated. Love became a private, subjective emotion, a way of feeling about another person. Its cognitive status was denied; it was not considered a way of knowing. Modern philosophies of science rejected as sentimental nonsense Augustine’s conclusion that we can only know what we love." (p.15) Yes, that sounds like science, doesn’t it? Get rid of that fluffy-headed "love" stuff!

But we see where that takes us, right? It brings us exactly to where we are. There are those who would say that it is naive to include feelings in our ways of knowing, or deny even the possibility of connecting with the pulse of life that moves us. Some look at the state of the sciences and say and that what is needed to rectify the absence of these inner connections is a stronger code of ethics. From my perspective, there is no evidence to support the idea that external measures will support life-enhancing action in the field when the inner connections to life are lacking.

Later in the book, Keen elaborates on how we treat the earth precisely as we treat our bodies. This should come as no surprise, because the two are one and the same. The junkie and the industrialist, both under their own kinds of anesthesia, become addicted to spilling toxic substances into living streams, be they blood vessels or rivers, and the CAFO operator is in every sense, dangerously perverted.

In a way, it’s kind of an irony (and perhaps a great moral victory!) to even study permaculture, which seeks to remedy these and other problems, in a college biology department, given the extent to which science has become the handmaiden of industry and a tool for the abstract, symbol-driven world of profit expressed as monetary gain. Take a look at the people who really care about the practice of permaculture and you will see that it’s about making connections, and the deeper motives of these people must align with those of the natural systems in which they are embedded. Thus - and this is really the main insight I’m offering here - there is an important axis of permaculture practice that intersects with the art and science of arranging biological and other elements on the tableau of a given piece of land, and this other axis goes straight to the living heart of the designer.

This is hinted at when we look at the importance, for example, of the principle of observation in the permaculture design process. But what moves the designer’s eyes? What moves our thoughts, and feelings, and what brings forth remembrances that lead to sudden conceptions, ideas, and the creative upwelling of inspiration? In a very real sense, our ideas spring from the soil of our minds as the flora and fauna of that inner terrain. "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," as Dylan Thomas wrote—that too drives us.

So this is not a new idea; it’s been said and known forever, but to merely file away expressions such as we find in Thomas’s famous poem as if they were nothing more than a particular kind of intellectual trope is to entirely miss the point. What is necesary is to make that connection now, now, now, in our actual, subjective, lived experience.

This is why it’s so important when possible to follow those "little whirlpools of fascination," even if it takes a bit of time. Through them, the world looks into us as lovers, touches and dialogs with us, and moves us to its side. When we feel the ancient depth and urgency in the rise and fall of each breath that we take as part of this earth, we will know ourselves and thus also the planetary system that meets and inspires us, breath by breath, with gifts and passion.

A friend of mine once quoted, "I am the Earth walking," and to that I add we must also be Earth’s thought and feeling. This is the consciousness of unity, and as a connecting science, the practice of permaculture – which really means the creation of a sustainable, living culture for everyone – will require nothing less.

Recommended Permaculture Resources:

Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, by Toby Hemenway
Perfect for home gardeners interested in applying permaculture concepts.
Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, by Bill Mollison
A compendious investment, a classic of permaculture practice.
Edible Forest Gardens (Vols 1 & 2) by Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmeier
Permaculture theory and design made into a step-by-step process. Very comprehensive.
also visit:
http://greenhandsreskilling.weebly.com/links--books.html