Our Pueblo

The Future According to Luz

2011-06-15T21:21:00.011-04:00

Introducing my new graphic novel series for pre-teens about resilience, relocalization, and reconnecting with nature!

For some years now I have been working on a comic called "Luz: Girl of the Knowing", originally a weekly webcomic strip on Transmission-X. It's evolved since then into a full-length story about a 12-year-old girl who comes to realize that her consumer-crazy, fossil-energy intensive world around her is crumbling -- and she chooses to take the chance to bring her community together in becoming more self-sufficient and sustainable.

This series begins with book one, Lu z Se es The Light, published by KidsCan Press, serving as an introduction to Luz and her friends, and to peak oil and energy descent. Subsequent books in the series will shed light on the urgent situations around: water shortages; retooling transporation in the face of peak oil; food production and preservation; health and shelter in a post-petroleum world; and an array of step-by-step reskilling activities such as making compost, xeriscaping, creating a natural greywater filtration system, and many more.

I invite you to pick up a copy of the book, read it and share it, even review it!, and help get the cultural transformation started so we can sever our dependence on cheap oil and start healing our toxic relationship with nature!

Farms for the Future

2011-06-11T22:00:00.001-04:00

Here is a lovely introduction by Rebecca Hosking. An excellent 48 minute video which explains permaculture but also discusses issues of peak oil and transitioning to a more sustainable way of life...

MOBY - An Inner City Community Garden Project

2011-06-09T11:05:00.005-04:00

This video is direct from Peak Moment TV, a site full of inspiring examples of people and communities changing their world to be more sustainable and resilient. Here, a Vancouver, B.C., neighborhood is building community while transforming an abandoned lot in a crack neighborhood into a flourishing community garden. Jason O’Brien and folks of all ages create a garden space out of what used to be an abandoned garbage dump frequented by crystal meth users. Watch the video to find out the whole story and see the beautiful work-in-progress...

David Korten on Radical Abundance

2011-06-03T11:34:00.003-04:00

"We are burning down our house to keep warm, and fanning the flames to make it burn faster." - David Korten

Recipe Gardens

2011-05-10T15:57:00.005-04:00

I don't know if someone's had this idea before (probably!) but I was just making hummus and babaganoush and looked at all the ingredients, and thought, wouldn't these all be growable in a personal garden? And hey, what if gardens were grouped by recipe? Here's what mine would look like...

Babaganoush and Hummus Garden
(ingredients: chinese eggplants, chickpeas, olive oil, tahini, garlic, lemon, pepper, parsley, paprika, all pureed together to a smooth paste)

~ Chinese Eggplants
~ Chickpeas
~ Olive Tree (or sunflowers in my zone)
~ Sesame Plant
~ Garlic
~ Lemon Tree (or lemon balm herb in my zone)
~ Black Pepper
~ Parsley
~ Paprika Pepper

Hmm... what other awesome recipe gardens could we build?

Bruschetta Garden
(ingredients: finely diced plum tomatoes, chopped basil, olive oil, minced garlic)

~ Plum Tomatoes
~ Basil
~ Olive Tree (or sunflowers in my zone)
~ Garlic

Pesto Garden
(ingredients: basil, walnuts or hemp seeds, garlic, olive oil)

~ Basil
~ Walnut Tree or Hemp Plants
~ Garlic
~ Olive Tree (or sunflowers in my zone)

Herb Tea Garden

~ Peppermint
~ Chamomile
~ Nettle
~ Milk Thistle
~ Dandelion
~ Lavender
~ Ginger
~ Raspberry Leaf
~ Sage
~ Lemon Balm

Our predicament in a nutshell

2011-02-17T21:20:00.004-05:00

Have you heard of Peak Moment Television? Well worth checking out, it's an online library of videos interviewing laypersons who are doing what they can to become resilient communities.

This video, as it's described on the website, shares half an hour where "William Stewart reflects on the shadow side of the fossil fuel bonanza, which enabled hyper-individualism and mobility that have shredded our connections to community and place, along with increased violence and dysfunction. Likening our oil-dependent culture to an addict who must first bottom out, he suggests there may be a silken lining after collapse: the possibility of more communal and connected ways of life. The text William reads at the end is “Handy tips on how to behave at the death of the world” by Anne Herbert.”

Watch the video here

Desperation = Devastation

2011-02-09T11:08:00.005-05:00

This recent UK Guardian article on what peak oilers have known for a while now brings to light that Saudi Arabia has in reserves much less untapped oil than originally believed, and that it will reach its highest output (ie. peak oil) as early as 2012 and at likely by 2020.

Although this article focuses on gas prices and the wikileaks sources, my personal reaction to this news is fear. Not fear of life with less or no fossil fuels, but fear of corporations and governments taking drastic actions to try to find more and more oil to keep up with demand now that the global oil giant is on its knees. We can already see the damage these superpowers have wreaked on the environment (oil spills, tar sands, irreversable toxic pollution) and on people (waging war on countries or locking them into debt in order to control those countries' oil sources). But these abominations have been done in a financial climate of plenty, with seemingly endless possibilities in growth, power and energy. What kind of drastic, desperate and deadly actions will the governments and corporations in power think of now that peak oil is clearly and publicly in view?

That's why I'm worried. They're capable of anything. Which is why it's so important that every individual -- and family, community, city, country -- actively wean ourselves from oil and significantly use less and less, so demand drops off before supply. This might be the best way to show those in oil power that searching for new sources is not necessary, and instead industry needs to focus on renewable and sustainable energy sources.

I realize it sounds vague to say "wean ourselves from oil". What does it mean? A hundred different things. The most direct ways which comes to my mind include the easiest steps:

~ stop driving
~ minimize buying stuff
~ buy local (food, clothes, supplies)

Bigger actions are things like no air travel, changing our job situations to be working from home or within non-driving distance, retrofitting our homes to use minimal energy... Just please let's do more than just change our lightbulbs.

photo from Treehugger

Info and Inspiration at Peak Moment Television

2011-01-12T10:36:00.002-05:00

Looks like we can use our love of TV to our advantage while preparing for life after oil.

Here is a website that is an invaluable online resource bursting with hours and hours of video where experts and laypeople alike are interviewed about how they are becoming self-reliant and locally resilient in the face of changing times.

But don't take my word for it, go check out this great program. Click "conversations" to browse their extensive video library:

http://www.peakmoment.tv/

Home Sweet Home, Someday

2011-01-12T10:20:00.008-05:00

Although we still live in a little rental property, I still think we would thrive in a home of our own. I have goals that are best achieved in a property that I can manipulate as much as I want. Here are some of the things I can't wait to do to my future home.

GREYWATER!
Move our laundry facilities to a second floor room facing the vegetable garden. This way we can construct a clothesline out the window over the yard, but also we can create a greywater filtration system with piping flowing from the washing machine down to a pond filter (anyone got a spare clawfoot tub?) and then out to irrigate the whole garden. In addition to a rain catchment system.

FOOD PRODUCTION!
Grow food, preserve food, make food, share food, all the while learning intensive permaculture methods for growing a food forest. And to top it off, wouldn't it be out of this world to convert a sunny room into a year-round greenhouse?

CHICKENS!
Oh yes, I would love to have chickens! Since I stopped being vegan, and having a child, what could be more amazing than to go out into our yard together to gather eggs in the mornings and tend to our little flock?

In my heart I would love to buy a property with one or two other families so we can minimize environmental impact while maximizing mortgage payments (must be debt-free). But it is challenging to get on the exact same page with other individuals, and even with members of my own family. Might be best, in our case, to buy a small house and befriend all our neighbours to try and unify our space to be mutually beneficial. Fingers crossed we don't get nightmare neighbours.

Alas, I'm still renting, on a second floor with no yard or insulation or green waste recycling facilities. Change, thank goodness, is inevitable.

Divide and Be Conquered

2011-01-12T10:17:00.006-05:00

It's becoming clear that running for the hills in a crisis will not save us. We can't survive in isolation, neither in body nor in our hearts. As communities we need to act together, as difficult as it is to imagine doing so in any valuable way.

But that's not what I'm thinking about in terms of being conquered in dividing. We as a civilization have specialized in dividing all resources, splitting everything from atoms and molecules to cities and races.

We know that it is best to consume a whole foods diet -- whole grains, specifically. But instead we split the grains and take only the sweetest parts (the sugars in corn, the white flour in wheat kernels), and give the rest to our livestock. Then we only eat the parts of the livestock we like best (the plumpest chicken parts and meatiest cow parts), then grind up the rest and feed it back to those same herbivorous animals. We take land and divide the city from the country -- but keep spreading the city to take over the country, forcing us to import food from farther away, and pushing wildlife to farther reaches of the land. For that matter, we even take oil from underground and redistribute it in noxious form into the atmosphere and oceans.

Might it not be best to keep things in their whole forms? Eat the whole grain, fibre and all. Eat the whole chicken, organs and all. Keep people and land together. Leave the oil in the ground.

We know the old 3 R's...

2010-04-06T21:05:00.005-04:00

Let's get on with the NEW 3 R's:

Start
RETRAINING!

Get
RELOCALIZED!

Become
RESILIENT!

To be told to reduce waste, reuse materials and recycle garbage is indicatively insulting to humans. These things are beyond obvious, and yet we need campaigns to tell us to do so and we still don't embody these rules for existing sustainably with the rest of nature.

And so, we've brought ourselves to the point where we can no longer continue our modern way of life which ignores not only these basic guidelines, but which has wreaked enough havoc on humanity, its spirituality, its connection with nature, and the environment itself, to need to re-focus our labour and energies to fixing the problem and re-learning to live harmoniously with what gives us life.

Hence, our new 3 R's. My plea to we who work in offices, malls, stores, highway construction, aviation, or any area of commerce reaching its inevitable end -- think ahead to what your community will need to provide for itself and go learn those skills. We need to refill ourselves now with the knowledge long lost to our recent generations to prevent panic when the time comes that we truly need to know how to provide and survive.

Michael Rupert

2009-12-27T22:09:00.005-05:00

I haven't decided whether "Collapse" is a documentary of doom or hope, but either way I hope that everyone views this video that interviews Michael Rupert as he speaks passionately about the deluded human condition in this modern consumer world with respect to money, government, energy and survival...

COLLAPSE

Pre-Apocalypse?

2009-10-21T11:30:00.006-04:00

I think a lot about the post-apocalypse... not that I think what's coming is an apocalypse. The changes to come will be major and completely life-altering on a personal and a global scale, of which in the end we as a planet are greatly in need. We all know of the damage we're doing environmentally to the globe, and many of us know the societal damage we're also doing with the exploitation of third world countries. And then a few of us realize the spiritual implications of our destructively consumptive habits these past few generations.

Anyway, while keeping the future in mind, and while remembering and learning from the past, maybe we should still try to focus on the present a little bit. On this "pre-apocalyptic" era. What better position could we be in? We know where we are, where we came from, and where we're going, so we could do what we want with the now! With where we are right now.

We can make now a time of change and of rooting into nature and enriching our spirits and creating community. We can now unplug our TVs and go outside and have a fire in the park and collect leaf compost for our gardens and support our local organic veggie market and go have tea and cake with our parents or friends. It's not about changing to fuel efficient light bulbs as it is to turn stuff off in the first place. Taking a sponge bath instead of a long hot shower. Walking to a neighbour's instead of driving to the box mall. Well, you get the idea.

Things To Look Forward To With Peak Oil, #6

2009-08-23T11:36:00.004-04:00

USELESS JOBS -> VALUABLE UNPAID WORK -> ENLIGHTENMENT

I'll venture to say that most of the work we do in the "developed" nations is valueless, if not directly or indirectly destructive to the health and welfare of our world and its people. Now, take down corporations that promote consumerism at all costs and we lose millions of office jobs and manufacturing jobs and transportation jobs and jobs that are not essential to our well-being and that of our Earth. Instead we will have time to do and need to do volunteer work, raise our children, care for our elderly, grow food and store food and share food, care for our land and its fauna, talk with one another, educate ourselves and each other, share stories, think about our role on this planet and the meaning of life and become conscious beings with awakened hearts.

Meaningful work on the eve of the big change

2009-08-17T10:07:00.003-04:00

Here is part of a letter I wrote to the good folks at Community Solutions about doing/finding meaningful, helpful employment for artists like myself:

I am an illustrator and graphic designer, and my husband is an illustrator and graphic novelist. For income we work on what most people in our field would be thrilled to work on -- books and magazines for children and adults with numerous publishers, and we're able to make a decent living at it. (However we still can't afford to buy a house or go on vacations.) I find it more and more frustrating and dissatisfying to be working on materials that, in the end, perpetuate our socially and environmentally destructive culture. What kind of work can we possibly do with our skills that will not only provide us with a living wage, but also assist in the transformation our community desperately needs?

I wonder if our earnings need to come from citizens as taxpayers (ie. by working for the government) or from citizens as consumers (ie. by working for corporations); doubting there is much work for artists in government circles, would it be ethical to make people have to buy our goods in order for us to earn a living, or does this perpetuate the consumer cycle that is the big problem in the first place? I think of all the new boutiques and online shopping venues that sell artists' creations without the middleman, but in the end the products sold are just more energy- and resource-intensive junk, albeit beautifully and creatively hand-made. I'm currently working on a comic book about a girl preparing for peak oil, which is very satisfying work, and am hoping that if it gets published I can not only earn a little income from it, but that it helps to plant the seed of change in people's minds.

As an aside, I also find that our economic system does not support a healthy low standard of living (I believe that a low standard of living is ideal, as long as it meets basic needs and affords plenty of time for family and personal development). A quarter of our income goes to taxes, another quarter to rent, and another quarter to childcare, and what's left is supposed to take care of all other expenses and savings. Not only is this unreasonable, but it seems to force employees (including freelance artists like myself) to continue corporate work in order to pay enough to cover all these costs. I'm sure you can sense my intense frustration about this through my e-mail. My apologies if this is inappropriate. But what can we do? Do we all just put our talents away to start farming, or open a neighbourhood herbal tea shop-slash-bookstore?

That is an exaggeration, of course, but is the essence of my question about what kind of paid work individuals of varying skills can do while engaging wholeheartedly in Plan C.

I'm very much looking forward to hearing what they suggest.

Becoming non-possessive

2009-08-05T20:54:00.007-04:00

There's something about science fiction novels written by women. I love works by Octavia Butler, and just finished reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, a sci-fi story of a man raised in a communalist/anarchist utopia and the contrasts with its capitalist/archist neighbouring planet. As much as the man's home planet is idealized, it is also painted as complex, bleak, hard, imperfect, and contradictory. Anyhow, I'd like to share my favourite passages...

"A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well -- this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole."

"The means are the end. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!"

"You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."

"No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."

Thank goodness for the internet

2009-04-26T18:03:00.003-04:00

Reflecting on the skills we need to survive and thrive in a post-oil world, it becomes obvious that we lack so many living skills that used to be passed on from generation to generation. They're all but forgotten in the developed world now, thanks to so much of our livelihood being made in office buildings and shops and on computers, instead of using our hands and heads to make what we need to live day to day and year to year.

I think that when resources begin to dwindle due to gas shortages, most of us will be caught completely off-guard, and scramble and panic and feel at a desperate loss of what to do, how to feed ourselves and keep warm and safe. This is why it's a good thing almost all our information comes from the internet. Not only are there a lot of excellent sources for everything from post-oil survival to homesteading, growing food in the city, collecting and purifying water, and even home-made recycled oil car engine refurbishing, the internet is the quickest way to find and share this info.

I used to think that a post-petroleum world meant no electricity along with no gas-powered transportation and energy, but I'm thinking now that there's more awareness and interest in oil-free energy, so it's becoming increasingly more plausible that even if auto transportation dwindles to almost nothing, computers will likely continue to hum away, especially as they become more efficient requiring less electricity and possibly even just powered by some solar cells. Maybe the sun will in the end help power the sharing of skills and info we need to live sustainably as it also sheds light on how quickly our current way of life is coming to an end.

Home Grown

2009-03-22T16:43:00.003-04:00

Though it's been an age since I've posted on this blog since becoming a new mother, surviving and thriving in this city in a post-oil reality is still constantly on my mind. In fact, even more intrinsically since it's my daughter's future that matters to me most.

So I was delighted to see that in this week's NOW magazine (Toronto's weekly news and entertainment rag), the "ecoholic" focus was all about growing food at "home", ie. in the city. Below are all the great articles that they printed which I'd like to share with all my non-Toronto friends and readers:

The Future of Farming in Toronto
Making Use of the City's Wasted Spaces
The Right Tools
Can You Dig It? What to do about toxic soil
Home Grown, Introduction to planting at home
and
Gardens to Fight the Recession

Things To Look Forward To With Peak Oil, #5

2008-08-28T17:06:00.002-04:00

GETTING FIT & EATING HEALTHFULLY

This post will likely have some critics -- then again, it might get some sounds of agreement, as well. I apologize if this sounds shallow in any way, because I know that habits, health and fitness are largely a matter of choice. Nonetheless, this is what I think: the end of petroleum will naturally mean being more physically active, and eating in a way that is better for our bodies.

Yes, I look forward to the day when I'll be more self-mobile, walking and biking exclusively, instead of taking the car because I'm in a hurry to get somewhere or haven't figured out how to haul a large load of groceries effectively. To when I'll not be sitting in front of the computer 8 hours a day, and instead be toiling outside to produce my own food and raise some chickens, rabbits and sheep.

Eating healthfully will be a natural byproduct of (relative) food scarcity. Sure, the first few years might be enormously challenging, and we'll "starve" compared to our excessive over-indulgent eating habits at present. But I have much faith in the abundance of permaculture practices applied to growing and raising food in small spaces, even urban settings, and hopefully in large, reclaimed public spaces in neighbourhoods for farm-scale production. Eating healthfully will be inevitable when there's no more fast food, processed "food", imported out-of-season produce, mercury-laden fish and pesticide-coated fruits and vegetables. We'll eat less, we'll eat seasonally, and we'll eat naturally.

Happily there is, of course, time to make the transition now. In a year or two, I'll have a home which I'll own and start to convert into the self-sufficient mini-eco-village I dream of, and begin the toiling and growing and making and working. And my 13-year-old car will likely be dead by then, too.

Struggling with moral purity?

2008-08-01T16:08:00.004-04:00

Give up the struggle. Let it go. Throw it away.

After reading an interview with Derrick Jensen in Briarpatch magazine, it all became crystal clear to me. It's irrelevant whether a vegetarian is wearing leather shoes, or peak oiler owns a car. Why should the person's integrity get questioned when the point is that we're fighting a good fight, that needs to be fought?

I got the best quote from the editor of the magazine, which he got from CrimethInc:

"Purity is the opposite of integrity--the cruelest thing you can do to a person is make her ashamed of her own complexity."

Things To Look Forward To With Peak Oil, #4

2008-07-16T09:08:00.003-04:00

COOLER CITIES IN THE SUMMER

When I leave the city to hang out at my country cabin, it is always noticeably cooler out there, by at least 5 degrees if not 10. The city is an incubator in the summer, with a blanket of smog hovering above us, trapping in the heat produced by the million cars and trucks (and factories and construction sites and industry...) always on the go. As vehicles retire permanently, the smog trap will (hopefully) cease to form, and the main source of heat (and pollution) will also be quieted. Ahhhhh. Of course, the concrete and buildings and glass towers will be a heat sink forever, but time might also allow green growth to slowly cover these thermal surfaces and turn into a cooling source of moisture and shade. Can you imagine it?

Winters will also change. Temperatures will drop for the same reason as above for summertime, which will mean the return of actual snow. It might even stay white longer. Our lake will be thankful for not being fed salt and brine, too.

The upside of biofuels

2008-06-16T11:03:00.007-04:00

In my recent post "Ethanol will not save us", I summarized what I thought to be the many disadvantages with ethanol as fuel production. I still think this is true, though have found out about a few endeavours that make biofuels as a byproduct of fuel production, as opposed to a crop that replaces fuel (and hence food) production.

Greg Herriott of Hempola (Oilseed Works Inc.) founded the company in 1995 after several years of research and development in the field of industrial hemp. The company went on to invent hemp flour and launch its Omega 3 salad dressings in 1999. Around 2000, the company began to see a steady increase in demand for its hemp flour resulting in an over-supply of hemp oil. Herriott then developed and launched in 2001, its all-natural wood finish to bolster oil sales. Next, the work on its bio-fuel project began. Today, Oilseed Works Inc., is actively marketing its Flour Power program to farmer groups, commercial bakeries and developing countries. The basis of Flour Power is the sustainable cultivation and conversion of each harvest into a combination of food and fuel - primarily flour and bio-diesel. Cellulose material from these harvests also holds excellent potential as a feed stock for ethynol production.

And EverPURE: a pioneering, farmer-based, biodiesel co-op for Ontario, is a branch of the Everdale Environmental Learning Centre, one of the most innovative environmental agriculture centres in Ontario. Everdale houses a bio-fuel co-op that turns food waste into fuel. It is a defining principle of Everdale's work on biofuels that they are made entirely from recycled food by-products, thus avoiding a fuel-versus-food conflict on scarce farmland.

The Peace of Wild Things

2008-05-16T17:55:00.003-04:00

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

—WENDELL BERRY

Thanks to my new friend Bonita Ford for sending me this wonderful and timely poem about feeling the bigger picture.

Ethanol will not save us

2008-04-28T16:21:00.006-04:00

This is what I'm hearing in the news:

A growing proportion of American farmland -- about 20% -- is now being used for growing crops to produce ethanol. This is taking food away from people, to be replaced with food for machines. It is raising the price of food because there is less room and fewer farmers to produce it. It is costing Mexicans and latinos in the southwestern US twice as much to buy their staple food, corn, to the point of being unaffordable to millions. And that it would take 100% of the existing corn production in the US right now to produce a mere 12% of the fuel needed. Ethanol is also an energy-intensive substance, taking almost as much energy to produce as is produced from it, with only a net energy gain of 25%.

And information that's not in the news but can be easily found is about the environmental impact of producing corn. This monocrop requires chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce, as well as enormous amounts of water. And right now the United States are experiencing record levels of drought and water shortage. Corn crops can quickly render a farmland infertile after a generation or less. Just like fossil fuels, ethanol is a short-sighted solution with permanent consequences that affect the livelihood of people and the health of the environment.

Articles:
USA Today
New York Times
New York Sun

Things To Look Forward To With Peak Oil, #3

2008-04-25T08:57:00.005-04:00

THE END OF CORPORATE INDUSTRY

Corporations rule the world, and they're the ones driving the destruction of our ecosystems -- from industrialized agriculture to computer technology corporations -- using up clean water, clearing land for production, strip mining for raw materials, and even abusing third world labour and environmental health to maximize profit. Begone corporate pigs, I will enjoy watching you shrivel as petroleum becomes scarce or causes your products to become unaffordable. I know, this means the economy will take a huge hit. But so it goes with the artificial comforts of global capitalism. And consumers (who ultimately fund corporations) are evidently being much too slow at making the choice to STOP BUYING STUFF. The discipline will soon enough be hoisted upon all of us.

Dear Earth

2008-04-22T09:37:00.001-04:00

From Amadea Morningstar's book "Ayurvedic Cooking for Westerners"...

Thich Nhat Hanh, the internationally respected Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, wrote recently in Love In Action (©1993) "Our Earth, our green beautiful Earth is in danger, and all of us know it. Yet we act as if our daily lives have nothing to do with the situation of the world." We imagine we are unimportant. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is our emissions from our cars eroding the ozone layer up there.

It is our inappropriate consumption which feeds unscrupulous corporations. Without it, their power cannot continue to accumulate and degrade the biosphere. What we do matters. Where will you put your weight? How do you want to live? In a way that will help save the planet and its inhabitants, or in a way which will continue to destroy it?

Things To Look Forward To With Peak Oil, #2

2008-04-20T17:35:00.003-04:00

RECONNECT WITH THE SOIL AND THE SEASONS

I love soil, and air and sun and rain. But I'm almost never out in it, especially in proportion to how much time I spend at the computer each and every day (even weekends!). When peak oil establishes itself and we need to turn our parklands and empty spaces into farming plots, I will enjoy toiling side-by-side with friends, family and neighbours as we plant our seeds, tend to our crops, and reap the harvest. Best of all will be experiencing the seasons and moon cycles as they come, as much as I'm sure winters will be cold and hard here in Canada. Depending, of course, on how much effect global warming will have (25C in mid-April is pretty alarming, but may indicate a longer growing season for us in the north, but more droughts for the south).

Things To Look Forward To With Peak Oil, #1

2008-04-20T17:28:00.002-04:00

READ ALL THE BOOKS I'VE BEEN MEANING TO GET TO

I don't often buy new books, and love buying second-hand books, but inevitably in my enthusiasm when I do buy books, they end up in a "must read" pile that almost never gets visited. I forget they're there most of the time! And at the end of a long day, especially in winter when it's dark by 5 and too cold to go out, I admit I like to flake out in front of the TV for a few hours. Even though I love reading! So, although my efforts are always to power off and enjoy a non-electric passtime like reading, or knitting, etc, I think a lack of electricity will help sharpen my focus -- and discipline.

And I know I'll love digging into those books that are gathering dust waiting for me!

For The Future

2008-02-20T13:07:00.011-05:00

Well here is an answer to an earlier debate about deconstructing civilization:

For The Future, an organization that encourages a process of reassessment and revisioning of our way of life at every level of American society. The members of this organization aim to inform the public, and to stimulate dialog about how to handle the transition to a stable, sustainable way of life. For example, they work on creating a lush food forest and teaches permaculture to promote local food security, and help people heal their relationship with nature, noting that many problems are rooted in this disconnection.

The Initiative for Sustainable Small Cities

Permanently increasing oil prices and, at some point, the inability to obtain fossil fuels at any price will make much of our urban landscape more or less untenable. Politics and the economy will become more locally-organized, and some localities will adapt better than others. Since peak oil has to do with the amount of energy available to run virtually every system important to civilization, every sector of local society, economy, and culture will be affected in one way or another.

For The Future is located in a potentially viable small city, Santa Barbara. We are reaching out to organize discussions with police and fire departments, planning boards, local government, the Chamber of Commerce, and various other organizations. Our purpose is A) to communicate the reality of the implications of peak oil; and B) to explore alternative local forms of transportation, fuel and food production, housing, and employment. Our emphasis is on “new urbanism,” featuring denser development and multiuse zoning, rehabilitation of existing older neighborhoods, encouragement of locally-owned businesses and farms, expansion of public transportation, and other adaptive choices that can make a relatively pleasant and prosperous way of life possible even in the absence of cheap energy.

Book review: Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn

2008-02-01T10:35:00.001-05:00

Somebody recommended to me that I read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I'm glad I did.

This is a fiction novel with the premise of an intelligent gorilla trying to teach a human about how it came to be that our species is destroying our life-giving planet. Despite several little holes in the arguments here and there, the story is very good at helping the human (and us, the readers) try to think completely differently about humans as animals vs. humans as rulers of the world. Questions are asked such as, when did humans, during the course of our evolution, change from being a part of nature just like apes and slugs and fish, to manipulators of the natural world? And why? But most crucial is, can we undo the destruction we've wreaked on our planet? I'll give away the answer: the only way is to once again be a part of nature's cycle submitting to what the land gives us, and relinquish our self-imposed role of warriors against natural forces.

The thesis is that we humans have taken on a god-like role over the "natural world" thinking we can control it to our benefit, when the truth is, the world is not ours to control. And our attempts to do so yield the results we see today: famine in third world countries, climate change, extinction of species, melting of glaciers, pollution of air, water and soil, over-population, wars, depression, unfulfilment, addiction...

As with the thesis of David Korten's The Great Turning, the glimmer of hope is that perhaps our role as the human race is to see what our acts of ignorance and arrogance can do, learn from our erroneous ways, and spark a re-birth as a more enlightened family with a vision of harmony and humility on Earth.

Here is a blog post by Steven McEvoy reviewing books "that will change your life", including Ishmael.

Crude oil has hit $100/barrel

2008-01-06T11:42:00.001-05:00

I thought it would take longer to reach this number, say another year or so, but here it is.

It's the dead of winter in the northern hemisphere, so my brain really starts to hurt as I think about how to heat my home (a rented apartment) using less energy, and how to eat local seasonal food at this time of year. I know one day we'll have little choice in these matters, but they are the most basic of life's necessities. Food and shelter. Let alone transportation or the rest of globalized industry that chugs along as if life desperately depended on it.

I'm going to go out on a limb, here. I believe the origin of all modern problems in our world is civilization. It seems that as soon as villages become larger, organized civilizations, it's the beginning of the end, from depleting land in over-producing food, greed and heirarchies, to wars and conquests, pollution, species extinctions, and of course peak oil.

If that's what I think the root of the problem is, then it goes that I believe the answer is in the deconstruction of civilization. A return to a village mentality. Sustainable communities based on nature, the seasons, and love and respect for oneself, one another, and one's life source.

Our task as humans may not be infinite technological advancement, but rather to foster an awakened discipline for infinite harmony.

Kindling

2007-10-26T16:52:00.000-04:00

Just a simple photo of a stack of kindling up at my off-grid cabin in the country. It's so nice to just gather fallen branches from around the land, and breaking them into kindling for a fire to warm our stove on chilly autumn nights.

While we were driving...

2007-10-23T08:37:00.000-04:00

...oil was peaking.

The Energy Watch Group, who reports to the German Parliament, just released a study stating that the Peak in Oil production was 2006 and we can expect 3-7% declines annually from here on out with half of current global supply being erased by 2030.

Read the article here.

My eco-vision (edited)

2007-10-06T10:19:00.000-04:00

Thanks to a recommendation by my friend Jenny at Grassroots, The Toronto Star wrote a little article about my green aspirations. You can read it on their website or see below:

Click to enlarge

I might also add a few personal points. Such as, the general belief is that if everybody does a little something, it will make a difference. But it's not what everyone is doing, or who's actions are inspiring people. Forget about others. Tap into what kind of relationship you want to foster with nature, with the essence of life and what gives us life. I don't wonder whether I can make a difference or not. I just know that I can't, with a clear conscience, remain asleep and hence be part of the problem.

How to survive, and thrive, in the city post-oil

2007-09-24T13:10:00.000-04:00

You may not know this about me, but for several years I've been gathering knowledge for how to survive in my city after petroleum is long gone and electricity, plumbing, food supplies, etc, become unreliable. I've been preparing by compiling an urban survival guide for Toronto, but it can be applied to any city or town that has come to rely entirely on imported sustenance but must soon become self-reliant and sustainable. Consider it permaculture on a metropolitan scale.

This kind of information should be free for the taking, so I've been posting my findings here, on:

The Post-Oil Survival Guide for City Dwelling

Baby steps: weaning off of plastic

2007-09-13T10:25:00.000-04:00

I spoke recently to a friend who mentioned she has no plastic tupperware or storage containers in her kitchen. As simple as this sounds, it really struck me, since every kitchen I know has and relies heavily on plastic containers. I found it refreshing and an obvious, easy step towards becoming less petroleum-dependent, and of course makes our home environment more natural.

I usually store leftovers in nice bowls with a plate on top of it, but also have a soft spot for vintage "refrigeratorware" for it's fun design and fresh colours, as well as the harking back to simpler times (as in, with less technology and consumption, even though the 50's and 60's were on a massive upswing, poor ignorant souls).

Non-plastic materials like glass, metals and wood are still earth's body, that needs to get collected and processed and shipped, all of which use up resources. So we should be very picky about what we buy new, and for everything else, start hunting around at second-hand stores, yard sales, and your family's basements and attics!

We have to think about buying used goods whenever possible (as such, Value Village has become my new department store), even if we're tempted by Debbie Travis' new line of old-fashioned style drinking glasses and whatever. Using new materials for making things we either don't need or can get second-hand is, in my opinion, criminal. The exception is with highly renewable resources like straw, bamboo and hemp. For example, I needed a butter dish, and found a great old cutie at Value Village. But, I also needed a bike basket for my handlebars, and instead of getting a new metal-wire basket, I went to Chinatown and got a wicker one which will have as long a life, but can be composted when it's beyond repair. (The basket on the back is an old milk crate, my beloved hatchback trunk!)

I've also bought a supply of reuseable mesh produce bags. I take these with me to the grocery store and pop my fruits and veggies in there instead of the thin plastic dispenser bags which end up in landfills. Yes, I bought these new as I had no time to make my own, but a few of my friends are actually trying to crochet their own mesh bags, bless them! My mother spent one summer sewing up cotton shopping bags too, which have been my only grocery carriers for years now.

I hope one day plastic will be very hard to find in my home (actually, I'm sure that will eventually be the case whether I work at it or not)!

Wise words of Fukuokasan

2007-06-03T10:58:00.000-04:00

Fast rather than slow, more rather than less -- this flashy "development" is linked directly to society's impending collapse. It has only served to separate man from nature. Humanity must stop indulging the desire for material possessions and personal gain and move instead toward spiritual awareness.

from The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka

Peak Oil comic now available!

2007-05-23T08:44:00.004-04:00

Fresh and hot off the presses, I've just completed my first comic book, which happens to be about Peak Oil. No coincidence, it took a subject I am passionate about to finally delve into this fantastic visual storytelling medium.

Centered on three characters, our short story (28 pages) describes George, a boy, who discovers an old dinosaur bone buried in his farm land. Upon digging it out, it transforms into an incredibly selfless and powerful helper that, in one eventful day, goes from tilling George's fields to building him an entire city. Needless to say, by the end of the day the "old bone" expires, and the boy is left having to face his actions and decide what to do. His tender mother, Naida, suffers consequences of this sudden manifestation. The all-knowing grandfather, Sol, gives them both words of wisdom and helps guide George through his now-altered life path.

If you'd like a copy of this book, send me an e-mail!
Cost is $5 Canadian, plus shipping as follows:
$2 within Canada, $3 to USA, $4 International.

For a sneak peak of a few pages, go to my art blog.

Must get back to positive thinking...

2007-05-19T12:07:00.000-04:00

Originally I developed this blog to point out all the great things happening around the world in response to peak oil, in light of all the negative, terrifying, doomsday talk that is increasing everywhere.

Somewhere along the line I got sucked into focusing on the negative and feeling compelled to share my spite for the current global situation and the people responsible. My opinions may not be popular but, although we should all be sharing our beliefs, I don't think I'm contributing much by flogging dead horses.

It may be time to get back to opening my eyes, ears and heart once again to the hope and positivity demonstrated in bright little pockets all around us.

In an era of extremes -- extreme consumption, extreme self-centeredness, extreme politics -- we need to make the extreme choice of living simply, rooted in love.

Kauai thinks ahead and plans for life after oil

2007-03-30T10:56:00.000-04:00

Picture a beautiful, tropical island that's been ravaged by centuries of colonizing and imposed modernization, topped off with a heavy dose of tourism. Now picture that tourism has ground to a halt, and American powers are maimed at last.

Kauai is this island, and a group of its forward-thinking citizens -- The Hawaii 2050 Sustainability Task Force -- has proposed a plan to make this Hawaiian island completely oil-independent within 43 years. Looking at oil shortages, a caving-in of the import/export and tourism-based economy, plus drastic changes in food sources, this proposal recognizes the harsh realities of the near future but has a "happy ending" by looking at permaculture and permanent culture as solutions. Bravo!

To read more about Kauai's quest for post-oil sustainability,
see Juan Wilson's page.

A Crude Awakening stronger than java

2007-03-10T08:10:00.000-05:00

Just like watching An Inconvenient Truth didn't really provide new information or a fresh perspective on a crisis some of us are perfectly aware of, A Crude Awakening simply spelled out the horrors of the oil industry in this tiny plip of history that is our life. If you're reading this blog post then you know as well as I that our current existence is an artificial, petroleum-based one that cannot be maintained. Simply put, demand is increasing and supply is dwindling. And I'm thrilled about it.

A Crude Awakening did an excellent job of summarizing the birth of the oil industry and the blind faith everyone had in its endless supply, and how it spurred an unprecedented advancement of development, travel, manufacturing and lifestyle. It was horrifying to see the graveyards of oil rigs in Venezuela's waters and Azerbaijan's fields, but it was an important image to see the future of all oil plants. The movie beautifully spelled out the connections between oil and war, government, the stock market, and made no apologies of the grim future of oil-dependent nations -- and that the future is now. Peak Oil may well have been in 2005. Or it might be in 10 years. No matter, it's been too late to start to try planning alternative energies to fully replace petrol for at least a decade already.

It's easy to feel hopeless once you have the facts of this harsh reality, as we might with the global warming crisis. But that doesn't really do much good. If you have thoughts on how we can react now to prepare for the oil crash, feel free to post your ideas. Meanwhile I think it would be best to spread the word, encourage people to wean themselves off of all things oil-based, and learn skills that will help in a time of revolutionary crisis.

My beef with eco-gifts

2007-02-27T12:28:00.000-05:00

So many examples out there of green economy initiatives, or fair-trade goods, are based on gifts -- it's driving me mental!

Last fall at the Washington, DC, Green Festival, I was expecting to find some great, innovative companies and organizations thinking in new ways to help convert our over-consuming, eco-destructive North American culture into a conscientious and sustainable one. There were a few of these, but the majority seemed to be of the Ten Thousand Villages variety. In other words, selling imported crafts from third world countries with weak and unstable economies.

I understand that the whole point of this kind of industry is to help people from these impoverished nations to make a better living by handmaking beautiful things and have a quality of life with more opportunities and a higher income. This is honourable, but is fundamentally flawed in so many ways. Allow me to count the ways...

1) This industry perpetuates an export economy which diverts these third world citizens' energy away from building up their own sustainable habitat, to feeding an artificial market thousands of miles away. It's just a prettier version of globalization that makes us western consumers feel good about how we spend our money, but globalization it still is. Local economy is the only way for all countries to save ourselves.

2) How do these beautiful crafts get to us buyers in the first place? Just like the billions of dollars' worth of goods exported from China each year, a huge part of the problem with all export-based industries is the amount of fuel energy needed to transport consumables from halfway around the world. Although the embodied energy of the handicrafts may be lower because these goods are made by hand and with local, renewable materials, all the oil it carries from shipping is an invisible, deplorable waste of resources that, of course, just ends up in our atmosphere.

3) Gifts. Why is our society so addicted to buying gifts? How many cushion covers, letter writing sets, toys, purses, fruit bowls, candle holders, shawls, earrings and cute little boxes do we need? Our holidays and celebrations have been coopted by our relentlessly capitalist mentality to become opportunities to buy, instead of a time to simply celebrate the true essence of the occasion.

In all, the benefits to the people in the third world making these handicrafts is a short-sighted one that might seem to boost their economy in the short term, but due to the dependence on an external purchasing power, they will never be emancipated from the cycle of an export economy. And all the downfalls with this eco-gift market that make us feel so unique with the quaint splash of imported culture we purchased to accessorize our lives, are that they perpetuate our brain-numbing addiction to consumption while helping to pollute our world thanks to need to ship internationally. The answer isn't to initiate middle-man import companies that makes us feel like we're saving helpless people. The answer isn't to throw money at them (however creatively or artistically it may be motivated), but to release any dominion we have over other nations so they can flourish in their own way. What dominion, you may ask? How about the World Bank and IMF, for starters.

James Kunstler has spoken

2007-02-09T13:43:00.001-05:00

You know how when you tell people the looming devastation with oil extraction peaking any minute, they get defensive and cynically demand a magic solution pill?

James Kunstler gets this all the time and has posted on his blog, Clusterfuck Nation, some tangible "solutions" that boil down to a change of perspective:

~ start thinking beyond the car: "green" cars are going to kill us just the same as gas-powered ones in the end, so get over it and ditch the car

~ small-scale, local farming need to replace the Monsantos of the world

~ small business and local economies need to replace the Wal-Marts of the world and even internet shopping

~ forget cheap imported goods and start making our consumer needs nationally

~ return to living in villages, towns, and rebuild a productive rural landscape

~ mass shipping and transportation have to switch from trucks and planes to ships and electric trains

~ canned entertainment depends on energy, switch to live arts performances

~ reorganize the education system

~ reorganize the medical system

~ local heroism is needed: do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, build a social infrastructure of voluntary associations, organize local institutions for care of the helpless, get into local politics to induce change

In conclusion: put down your iPods and get busy.

Read the whole detailed piece on his post called The Agenda Restated.

Kudos to the 100-Mile Diet

2007-01-07T14:58:00.000-05:00

Vancouverites Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon discovered that each ingredient in a typical North American meal must travel at least 1,500 miles to get to your plate. One day in 2005, this couple decided to challenge this unsettling statistic and try to live for 1 year on food and drink sourced within 100 miles of their home.

Check out their website, The 100 Mile Diet to read more about their awesome experiment.

Here's an idea -- ask local fruit and vegetable stores to stock 100-mile produce. Or open a shop in your neighbourhood with 100-mile foods. Alisa and James' suggestion? Plan a single meal with friends or family where everyone prepares a dish using local, totally 100-mile ingredients!

The petroleum connection:
A study in Iowa found that a regional diet consumed 17 times less oil and gas than a typical diet based on food shipped across the country. The ingredients for a typical British meal, sourced locally, traveled 66 times fewer “food miles.” Or we can just keep burning those fossil fuels and learn to live with global climate change, the fiercest hurricane seasons in history, wars over resources…

Post-Oil New Year's Resolutions!

2006-12-28T09:35:00.000-05:00

Visiting the Archdruid Report blog I came across an excellent list of things we could do to prepare for Peak Oil. There are a million of these lists out there, but this one strikes the right chord...

1. Replace your incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs
2. Retrofit your home or apartment for energy conservation
3. Cut back on your gasoline consumption
4. Plant an organic vegetable garden
5. Compost your food waste
6. Take up a handicraft
7. Adopt an "obsolete" technology
8. Take charge of your own health care
9. Help build your local community
10. Explore your spirituality

Such simple, personal changes that seem so natural it's crazy we have to spell it out for ourselves. I am coming to think the majority of us need a crisis to make us change our ways for the better.

Happy New Year (aka Circumcision Day)!

The aim: Relocalization

2006-12-17T14:19:00.000-05:00

Relocalization is a strategy that has developed in response to the environmental, social, political and economic ramifications of global over-reliance on cheap energy. Climate change, the erosion of community, wars for oil-rich land and the instability of the global economic system have resulted from our dependence on cheap non-renewable fossil fuel energy.

Relocalization is a strategy, which aims to build societies based on the local production of food, energy and goods, and the local development of currency, governance and culture. The main goals of Relocalization are to increase community energy security, to strengthen local economies, and to dramatically improve environmental conditions and social equity. The aim of Relocalization is to develop exemplary community actions that can be used locally and as working models for other communities when the effects of energy decline become more intense.

Relocalization is the re-claiming of our socio-cultural and economic systems so that each locality operates well within its regional ecological boundaries. Relocalization is a strategy that moves one step further than the strategy of Localization, which primarily aims to increase the local production of goods and services in order to fight the detrimental effects of globalization. Relocalization supports the production of local goods and services while also making a firm commitment to reducing consumption and improving environmental and social conditions. In this way, communities begin to develop a greater degree of economic self-reliance and stronger sense of community.

From the Post Carbon Institute website.

EcoVillage at Ithaca

2006-12-17T11:51:00.000-05:00

The Green Festival in Washington this year opened my eyes to an important concept: ecovillages. These intentional communities based on sustainability are mostly rural and set apart from the general population. But there do exist urban ecovillages where clusters of homes or neighbourhoods have their residents come together to support each other and work towards ecological sustainability in their housing set-up. I think these models are of utmost importance because, being urban, they can help us redesign existing cities to be earth-friendly and community-based.

Supporting material online is close to non-existent for urban or city-based ecovillages, though I have found an example of a suburban ecovillage in Ithaca, NY. Suburban examples are also important because, let's face it, a huge portion of a city's population dwells in the suburbs. They need to be reformed as much as the cities do!

More ecovillage info to come as I find it. If anyone has links or info, I'd greatly appreciate knowing about it -- thanks!

The Road Back to Nature

2006-11-25T22:41:00.000-05:00

I want to share an excerpt of Masanobu Fukuoka, the founder of "natural farming", from his 1987 book, The Road Back to Nature: Regaining the Paradise Lost...

"...People will object, "But what about cars? What about this and what about that?" Yet if they were prepared to reject the sort of lifestyle where everyone runs around in cars and were willing instead to enjoy life in a mountain retreat, all the absolute necessities are right there at one's feet. One could enjoy a spiritually elevated life without the least privation or inconvenience. Ideally, this would take the form of small, self-reliant communities. All matters would be taken care of right on the family farm. The home, the community, and the country--all products of the nature in that region--would be fully capable of self-sufficiency and self-reliance. When this happens, then all the people of the world will at last be able to join hands in a position of equality."

What an eloquent visionary. I am learning that it is the spiritual disharmony between people and nature that has led to the condition of the environment today and our complete dependence on petroleum and energy for an anti-natural lifestyle that we find imperative for survival and happiness. This whole era, these past hundred or two hundred years, are but a blip in all of existence in all of the universe -- and we find it so important to cling to this falsehood we've created. We as nations are deluded and lost, and need to find ourselves again as a loving, respectful, and humble part nature.

Information about Masanobu Fukuoka on Wikipedia.

Washington Green Festival

2006-10-16T20:23:00.000-04:00

October 14 & 15, 2006

Friends, it's all about peace. Peace in our hearts that extends to how we treat ourselves, each other, and all life, from the huge smallness of microcosms to the small universe that is our solar system. Everything before, between, and beyond, is love.

Pledge TO Green asks polititians to green up

2006-10-03T09:31:00.000-04:00

City Hall Candidates Invited to Support Toronto’s Official Environmental Plan

TORONTO: Six years ago Toronto’s Environmental Plan was officially adopted by City Hall. Today candidates are being urged to ramp up that commitment and Pledge TO Green. Post Carbon Toronto and the East Toronto Climate Action Group along with EvolutionGreen invite all candidates to pledge their support on Saturday, October 14, from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the City Hall Council Chambers. Presentations start at 12 p.m. sharp and the pledge signing by the candidates will be just after 1:30 p.m.

"Toronto's Environmental Plan was officially adopted and subsequently orphaned. Today is past time to take this plan off the back shelf and put it on the front burner."- Post Carbon Toronto

This event was developed by Post Carbon Toronto and the East Toronto Climate Action Group. Pledge TO Green will feature speeches by Green Party Canada leader Elizabeth May, Ontario MPP Peter Tabuns, and the always impressive Greg Allen, Richard Gilbert, Keith Stewart, Franz Hartmann, Deborah Fields and Kevin Mercer. The speeches will address the key aspects of the Environmental Plan and urge candidates to formally “take the pledge”.

Candidates will Pledge TO Green on the day by signing a large pledge card that states their intention to work towards the full implementation of the Environmental Plan and to attend an accountability session within six months of the city's first budget.

"Sustainability isn't just warm and fuzzy it's the way we are going to make it. We've got a great plan and now we need to put it into action."- East Toronto Action Group

The Environmental Plan is comprehensive, covering land use, water and air quality, green economics, sustainable transportation, energy and emissions.

PLEDGE TO GREEN

Pledge TO Green is a FREE event open to everyone taking place Saturday, October 14 from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Presentations start at 12 p.m. sharp and the pledge signing by the candidates will be just after 1:30 p.m.

Post Carbon Toronto is a group of Toronto citizens working together to transition Toronto and its bio-region into sustainable, low energy communities.

The East Toronto Climate Action Group is a group of citizens who are interested in issues relating to climate change as it impacts the City and particularly East Toronto.

EvolutionGreen is a company dedicated to green economics in the home realty market.

The many organizations partnering with us represent a broad cross section of Toronto's profit and not for profit sectors.

The "3-Liter House" project

2006-09-29T09:49:00.000-04:00

In the winter, the largest source of energy use is in heating buildings, and it seems inevitable that it's simply necessary to pour massive amounts of heat into homes and offices to just not freeze when it's a blustering 20 below outside. But a few companies have found that the secret to super high energy efficiency with heating is super high insulation! The beauty is that the methods used are applied to existing buildings.

"Not your typical apartment building: The 3-liter-house in Ludwigshafen has set a record in conserving energy. Over the past winter, the tenants did not even need three liters of heating oil equivalent per square meter of floor area per year for heating. Therefore an older building that has been refurbished with respect to energy consumption conserves energy to a greater extent than a new low-energy house, and is much more efficient than an unrenovated older building, which consumes 20 liters per square meter per year. The secret to the 3-liter-house: special thermal insulation using Neopor® and other BASF building materials, as well as sophisticated building technologies."

From the BASF website.

The People of Sparks, sequel to The City of Ember

2006-09-14T09:49:00.000-04:00

Jeanne DuPrau does not disappoint with her sequel to her first book about a people surviving after a great disaster (see previous post). In The People of Sparks, we follow the trials of the Ember people as they try to learn what is needed to build a new, civilized life from scratch. All they have is the clothes on their backs and memories of life with electricity when they meet the people of Sparks, a newly established village in the middle of an enormous expanse of nothingness (just fields and fields of wild grass). Witness the small population trying not to repeat the mistakes of generations leading up to the great disaster, by instead embracing the strangers and agreeing to help them, despite having little trust or knowledge of them.

Throughout the novel, we see a mini re-enactment of human behaviour that can lead to war: resentment, ignorance, fear and anger, leading to ever-mounting acts of vengeance... and people do end up getting hurt. Jeanne instills the story with a great sense of pacifist wisdom, making intelligent parallels for young readers to understand human nature and the difficult necessity of always trying to make the right choice of peace and compassion.

Post-peak oil survivalists out there (like me!) will love the homesteader life demonstrated in this second book. Trucks are pulled by oxen, living near a water source is essential, and electricity is nothing more than a fabled memory of generations ago. Hardship is not excluded in the tales of this pioneer way of life (hunger, illness, hard work), but oh the delicious descriptions of how the herbal doctor concocts her natural medicine and tends to her special garden, or the foods and preserves prepared and cook every day (like apricot cornbread and blackberry jam), or the communal toiling of the land and woodstoves for cooking and candles for light. Let it all boil down in the end, in our lifetime some decades from now, to a reconnection with the earth and the elements so individuals can come together as a loving, integral part of this great organism that is life on earth.

In praise of The City of Ember

2006-08-29T21:37:00.000-04:00

I hate calling children's books "delightful", but Jeanne DuPrau's lovely first book was just that. The City of Ember is a rich, adventurous and engaging novel about surviving centuries after an unknown disaster, but with dwindling supplies and energy. I interpret it as a mirror of our times, as there are characters expecting to be "saved", others pillaging what little is available, a generally ignorant population, and a brave few who seek to find and expose the truth and, ultimately, try to save the people from doom.

The setting is a quaint town, though engulfed by darkness twenty-four hours a day, and lit with floodlights that turn off "at night". Everything is reused and recycled a thousand times over, and the only foods are vegetables (grown in greenhouses). Jeanne's tone in her writing is very friendly and thoughtful. When nature as we know it makes an appearance, the night sky and silver moon was described with such beauty that it brought tears to my eyes... the changing colours of the sunrise described with the fresh eyes of someone alien to the incredible lusciousness and fragrance of fresh air and flowing grasses.

Despite the post-apocalyptic theme, I really loved and admired how the author was able to share the immense sense of beauty in nature without denegrating society, since the beauty was also plainly obvious in the characters' love for people and life, and their sanguine connection with their family.

In keeping with the theme of my blog, the hope that I find communicated in this novel is that of love for your fellow human, and a reminder for us right now to look at the glory of all that is natural with fresh eyes, so that its beauty never fades from our hearts.

"Agraria", a Post-Peak Oil Community in Ohio

2006-08-24T10:48:00.000-04:00

As you read this post, "Agraria" is in development, a site in Yellow Springs, Ohio, designed to be an innovative Low-energy Use, Small, Sustainable Community. Their low-energy goal is to consume one-fourth of the current average energy used per capita. A sustainable community can operate, to the extent possible, without inputs (particularly of fossil fuels) and outputs (such as trash and sewage), but also of other earth-friendly materials. Capital-s "Small" is used to describe this community as it is a designation based on the founding principle that smallness itself is a value for positive social organization. In the form of Community, Agraria will be a way of living together also based on the principles that a cooperative way of life to be preferable to current competitive ways of living.

Planned to be an attractive low-energy community, Agraria will serve as a model for similar development across the country as a direct response to Peak Oil. The organic gardens, low-energy building techniques and other aspects of the neighborhood-community design will be strong educational tools and even sources of income for some of the neighborhood's residents. It will take into account all aspects of American living that need to be re-thought, including home building specifications, sewage and waste, food production, and transportation, all the way using the lowest possible amounts of (often renewable) energy.

Probably the three most significant aspects of the current American, consumer-oriented, high-energy-use lifestyle are:

- large homes
- large, low-mileage automobiles
- and fossil-fuel-based, long-distance food supplies.

Agraria addresses these directly, in innovative ways that inevitably promote human and ecological health. This is a great example of the alternate to suburbia, historically known quite simply as... villages.

Read the whole Community Solution article.

Big, big, BIG quantities of oil

2006-08-10T23:00:00.000-04:00

I am part of an Oil Awareness MeetUp group here in Toronto, and one of the people there, Jeff Berg, has written an excellent and interesting article (with some mind-blowing facts) about how ridiculously enormous the numbers are around oil imports, use, and human-labour equivalents of the work oil accomplishes. It is called When Confronting Problems of Scale and appears in the campaign blog of Elizabeth May, candidate for the Green Party (David Suzuki gives her the thumbs-up!), Executive Director of Sierra Club of Canada and an Officer of the Order of Canada. (Pretty good credentials!) Here is an excerpt from Jeff's article:

"The U.S. imports far more oil than any other country uses! 14 Mmb/d. (Mmb/d: Million barrels per day) In fact no country uses even half of what the U.S. imports. In order to get to the U.S. number you have to add up the consumption of Australia, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Spain, the U.K., Italy, Mexico, France, and Canada. Did I mention this is just what the U.S. imports? i.e. That which makes it highly vulnerable. Aka. What, if it was denied, would cause its economy to drop like it was shot through the brain stem.

When you look at total U.S. consumption, about 20 million barrels a day, then what you are talking about is a sum that is greater than what is consumed by 194 countries combined! That’s right more than what is consumed by 194 countries of this our world, planet earth, the third rock from the sun. To put it another way, because redundancy is impossible with such a fact, the U.S. consumes more than the sum of every country in the world outside of the top 20....

...America is also consuming 23 Trillion cubic feet of natural gas per year. (1% is LNG) That’s right trillion and 23 of them. That’s a 23 followed by 12 zeros or what looks like this: 23,000,000,000,000 This is the equivalent of another 11.19 million barrels of oil daily. And then of course there is the 1.112 billion tons of coal which is equivalent to about 10.9 Mmb/d...."

Yeah. It's utterly insane.

Permanent black-out

2006-07-25T16:30:00.000-04:00

My drawing of a possible future in our city without electricity -- a hopeful vision of calm in lieu of chaos.

Embodied Energy info helps us make smarter choices

2006-07-22T10:29:00.000-04:00

To understand how much energy we truly consume, it's necessary to include embodied energy in our consumption considerations. Embodied energy (EE) plus operating energy equals the total energy cost of an object or material. EE is a calculation of the amount of energy required in all phases of the production of a material or product (its energy cost). This includes extraction and refinement of raw materials, transportation, manufacturing, installation, and disposal.

This chart provides some basic information to help us start to understand EE. Shown here is the embodied energy in a variety of materials measured in both millions of joules per kilogram and millions of joules per cubic meter. We can see that some materials cost less energy than others -- straw bale is a more energy-efficient material for building than brick, and linoleum is too costly compared to lumber. Perhaps it's no surprise that the most natural and unprocessed materials -- straw bale and lumber -- are the most energy-efficient in their lifetime of EE, as well as being healthier to live in, renewable, and biodegradable.

Sourced from a Community Solution newsletter publication (March 2006).

Inconvenient Truth needs inconvenient solutions

2006-07-10T15:54:00.000-04:00

I am a supporter of Al Gore's environmental wake-up call that is the movie An Inconvenient Truth. It spells out the actual global situation with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, melting glaciers, a coming ice age, a coming meltdown, everything with cold hard facts and figures. I am very glad there is a movie out there telling it like it is and not being afraid to say we're in trouble.

Getting past the obvious, let's focus on the movie's "solutions". I'll sum it up: buy environmentally friendy stuff. Oh, and use less energy.

This is my beef with the movie, that despite the 2 hours of spelling out the problem, the answers boil down to buying hybrid cars and energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs. Buy, buy, buy. The great American solution to all its problems, no matter how "green" the politician seems to be. (Didn't Bush Jr. say we should shop a lot to help the economy post-9-11?)

In my opinion, shopping is a great solution if you're among the minority middle- to owning-class with greatest choice (and let's not delve into the myth of the "trickle-down" theory) who wants to feel good about saving the planet with their wallets. Besides, green energy can only fix part of the problem -- if Americans' use of energy were to be maintained at the current levels after oil runs out, and say we were to use our saviour ethanol to replace fuel, it would take two-thirds of U.S. farmland devoted exclusively to corn crops in order to satisfy the demand.

One of the main reasons we're in this mess is because of the global capitalist economy that drives most countries to manufacture goods that contribute to global warming through its production, on top of the lies pushed on us by first-world countries that "bigger is better", "grow or die", that everyone wants to live the American dream and own all the luxuries in life, perpetuating this destructive cycle of production and consumption to a frantic pace.

The "inconvenient solution" is to completely ditch globalism and switch to local economies -- this only allows for so much wallet power. This would mean no more cheap goods from China, or GAP clothes made in Indonesia, or imported coffee, sugar and chocolate off the broken backs of exploited workers. The point is to change the way we think and live, in order to consume in the most thoughtful, responsible and self-sustaining way possible. It's about eliminating all jobs that are destructive to the planet, creating egalitarian workforces that build our local economies to be self-sustaining, and retrofit all polluting systems to clean ones.

The reason that, despite this, I am a supporter of Gore's movie, is that the general public still lives in a haze of numb denial and could use a dose of reality, and when it's packaged in the form of comfortably-seated consumable entertainment, it's the most palatable means of delivering the information.

Here is an excellent review of An Inconvenient Truth in the context of true causes of environmental destruction on a governmental/capitalist ("organized crime") level.

An entire country going oil-free within 15 years

2006-07-08T22:32:00.000-04:00

Guess which country plans to eliminate nuclear energy and replace fossil fuels with biofuels, wind energy and wave power by 2020. Here's a hint: it's in Europe.

A city that already gets 26 per cent of its energy from renewable sources. Where many homes are heated by wood-fired boilers, geothermal energy, or waste heat (compost), and whose citizens are encouraged to drive non-gas-powered vehicles by offering exemptions from tolls and parking fees.

The answer? Sweden!

Read the Yes! article.

EcoHood in Arizona

2006-07-07T14:09:00.000-04:00

In a 2-block neighbourhood in Prescott, Arizona, a small group of locals turned this low-income community into an urban ecovillage. This "EcoHood" uses greywater systems, rainwater cisterns, has 5 organic gardens, heirloom fruit trees and a bunch of chickens.

The central figure in the growth and development of this neighbourhood sustainability initiative is Andrew Millison, a college instructor, landscape contractor and permaculture activist. He and his community installed the permaculture systems, but also initiated a neighbourly sharing of information, tools, skills and materials.

The EcoHood has inspired investors to develop self-sustaining permaculture communities for affordable housing in Phoenix, so the word is spreading. Millison says, "the concept is about bringing traditionally rural values like self-reliance, respect for the land, and community, into the city." Right on, hombre.

Read more about it in this article that was printed in Yes! magazine (issue 38).

This is Our Pueblo

2006-07-07T13:33:00.000-04:00

Our collective consciousness is beginning to awaken to the burdens our modern civilization is placing on nature and on whole populations. Peak oil is here, and together with global warming, severe ecosystem damage, and a potential great economic depression, our globe can expect to see some massively tumultuous times in the near future, certainly in our lifetime.

David Korten writes about us having an opportunity to turn this crisis era into "A Great Turning", a time to embrace the higher potential of our human nature, turn crisis into opportunity, and learn to live in creative partnership with one another and Earth. This is exactly what I need to hear these days, to hear that it is within our capacity to turn this trainwreck around and band together as a community, instead of succumb to mass denial and ignorance and eventual self-destruction.

I call this blog Our Pueblo because, translated from spanish to mean our town, our village, or our people, it is people and communities that will spark change from the ground up. We have little hope of a global leader taking the reins to engage our world and "save us" with brilliant strength and uncorrupted intelligence, so it may be up to us, the people, the pueblo, to show the way by sharing information, and proving we can do what's needed.

The posts in this blog will be examples of resilience, solidarity, hope and positive action by communities large and small.