Hallelujah!

But will it be enough and fast enough?

It's clear that civilized humans don't really give a shit about the planet. It's not really our fault, we aren't advanced enough and we believe in instant gratification at all costs. We'd much rather jet off to the sunny south and fuck the consequences. Of course we still want the best for our children which doesn't really make sense when we are guaranteeing them a miserable future. I really can't understand people on this one. I guess they have too much faith in technology and I have none.

But today I read how air travel costs are going through the roof. And not just in Europe or Canada but the US--that bastion of subsidizing destruction (well we love killing the planet just as much don't we--think tar sands).

Our last hope, considering that we are not going to take any meaningful action, is that we are going to hit natural limits which will prevent us destroying the planet. Oil will just become too expensive, uranium will just be too costly to extract, we just won't be able to clearcut all the trees because our chainsaws will be out of fuel.

But we gave it a good shot didn't we? Was it worth it?

Next Crisis Please

Pile another log on the fire. Today Gordon Brown, the gutless British Prime Minister (just when you thought no one would be worse than Tony Blair) warned that soaring oil prices represented: "the most worrying situation in the world". They are just touching $140 a barrel.

Ha! What about the food crisis or is that too last week? What about climate change? Hail just destroyed much of the greens on the organic farm I'm working on over the weekend, not to mention all the flooding on the Prairies. What about the resurgent Taliban breaking out their comrades from an Afghan jail? Aren't terrorists the biggest threat we face?

Unfortunately our "leaders" and states can't handle complexity. They like neat little packages and one dimensional issues. News flash, nothing is one dimensional about human society or the earth. And you can bet your bottom dollar that out leaders and their bureaucrats aren't going to learn how to handle these threats any time soon.

And really what is there to handle and control? This is all our fault. We being civilized humans. We thought we were being so smart. Didn't we realize that oil was not an infinite resource? And didn't we realize that burning all that fuel would fuck up the planet and mess up climates from pole to pole? Were we not paying attention to the fact that industrial agriculture uses more calories to grow food than you get out (not the case with small, non-industrial farms by the way)? And surely we must all recognize that we ignore injustice and starvation around the world while our waistlines expand ever outward. And we think there's no justification for "terrorists" and make ridiculous statements like "they can't stand freedom".

You reap what you sow.

We are entering a very dangerous time. Civilization is about to go down hard because it's been built on such dodgy and shortsighted foundations. The only salvation is to learn as much as you can so you're actually a useful person and would be indispensable in a future small community. No one will care pretty soon whether you can type fast, cook with saffron or research a species of tree frog in the Congo. Be useful at any cost (love, employment, family) dear reader; surely you can see the writing on the walls as clearly as anyone else? If others can't listen what else can you do but walk away?

Yet just this morning I heard a man arranging for an education fund for his young child. Hate to ruin your day but . . .

Easter Blessings

A copy of Richard Heinberg's new book, Peak Everything has arrived on our coffee table. To summarize: the 20th century was the century of abundance and the 21st will be the century of declines. And not just oil but food, human population, uranium and potable water. And not a moment too soon for this out of control death culture. It's just too bad that we aren't more responsible tenants of this earth.

We'll also hit peak greenhouse gas emissions which thereafter will decline. Hopefully we'll have avoided transforming Earth into Venus as the climate rebalances itself; technology can't do it, only time.

Since my eyes were opened, I've always dreaded climate change and the rising temperatures and crazy weather that will accompany it. Most people stupidly only see warmer temperatures in places like Canada as a positive thing. I guess I thought that somehow humans would remain unchanged by climate change, being able to resist it, and that other living things would slowly disappear being both murdered by humans and displaced by changing climates.

But climate change is like a fever to reject an unwanted illness.

Heinberg helped me to see that climate change is the earth attempting to remove or force change on a disobedient child. Change or die humans. Inshallah, there will always be life on this earth whether next to volcanic vents on the deep ocean floor or shivering in the dark winters of Antarctica. Civilized humans won't be able to resist forever and one day even after hundreds of thousands of years the earth will restore itself.

And wonderfully I managed to tie this entry to Easter. Hope you've had a good one. Remember spring is coming!

Bad News

All around the world (though it hasn't reached Canada yet for the most part), food prices are going up. The UN World Food Program doesn't have enough funding to keep up with the rising prices. As such malnutrition and starvation rates are expected to rise.

From an article in the Guardian: "The impact has been felt around the world. Food riots have broken out in Morocco, Yemen, Mexico, Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan. Pakistan has reintroduced rationing for the first time in two decades. Russia has frozen the price of milk, bread, eggs and cooking oil for six months. Thailand is also planning a freeze on food staples. After protests around Indonesia, Jakarta has increased public food subsidies. India has banned the export of rice except the high-quality basmati variety."

Since we are essentially eating oil due to the fact that all industrial farming needs oil, unfortunately there's nothing we can do about this inevitable rise. We have built such a population that it requires oil to maintain itself. Still there's a lot that could be done (though don't hold your breath):

• Divest from ethanol and move toward public transit. If you keep driving people are going to die though you're unlikely to ever see them starve.
  
• Don't waste food. How much food is thrown out by the grocery stores in your neighbourhood every day? It's a lot and most of it is perfectly good.
  
• Start a Food Not Bombs and save some of this food that would otherwise be going to waste.
• Grow your own food, support community gardens, buy local and organic food.
  

The Energy of the Future?

On his recent trip to the Middle East, French President Sarkozy exclaimed: "In 40 years from now there will be no oil left and in 100 years no more gas, nuclear power will replace those energy sources . . . It is the energy of the future."

Nuclear is certainly the fuel of the future. For one thing, the waste produced in reactors is going to be around for tens of thousands of years. That's a hell of a lot of future. Do you think that humans are really going to keep an eye on this most hideous of wastes during those long years? Or, as we usually do, are we going to forget about it and then have it come back to bite us in the ass? Only an idiot wouldn't bet on the latter.

While it's nice to hear a president speaking so candidly about the end of oil, the dream of nuclear is a nightmare for more than the waste reason outlined above. First of all, we must be pretty thick to pin all our hopes on a fuel that, much like oil, will peak and decline as well. There is only so much uranium on the earth. Once it's gone it's gone.

So essentially we are just buying a few years before we are forced to live like every other being on this earth: simply. The only true infinite (and even then . . .) source of energy is the sun which grows crops (and therefore animals like us) which provide everything humans need (food, fuel, paper, meat, clothing--sorry no computers or plastic).

If only we could learn this and change course now instead of going through the pain of climate change and then the threat of nuclear waste to end up where we should have been going in the first place. But humans are pretty stupid and shortsighted so what do you expect?

Choices

The expansion of the tar sands oil extraction in northern Alberta is one of the most under discussed issues in Canada today. It has been called the "biggest environmental crime in history". Canada is never going to reach our Kyoto obligations if the tar sands project goes ahead. Our greenhouse gas production is going to go through the roof with the energy intensive tar sands processes.

Not only that but the "project" is destroying the landscape making it look more like the moon than a vibrant healthy mix of ecosystems; that means that animals and plants won't be able to live there, try as they might. Yes, believe it or not, humans aren't the only beings on this planet and we don't have the right to displace others.

It's also poisoning the people that live there with certain First Nations communities suffering dramatic health problems by living downstream; these include cancers that rarely occur in the general population. Incidentally to those of you who might think that the government will step in when health is at risk learn about the story of Dr. John O'Connor who was sanctioned by Health Canada and Alberta Health for speaking out against the health impacts of the tar sands "development". The government isn't going to do anything to protect these communities no matter the evidence.

The tar sands also consume tons of fresh water which is contaminated during the process and has to be left in special ponds for potentially thousands of years (if they don't breach their banks and flow to the sea first). It takes five barrels of oil to produce one barrel of oil and then those barrels of oil are contaminated.

To read more about this important issue, I suggest you pick up a copy of the Dominion Paper or check it out online here.

I read these facts and I can't accept that this project has to happen. There's no reason for it and, even if there was, it's wrong. With all the evidence against it, it has to be stopped. It's like driving; all the evidence against driving means we have to ban cars forever. But as in either case, no one else sees it this way, so I guess I'm crazy.

Does this mean I have to go out and talk to people and hold their hands and try and get them to see that I'm right and that fucking Bambi has a right to live on this land? Remind them that the First Nations people in northern Alberta don't want cancer and death? Fuck that. People don't give a shit and I have to rub their faces in it so they care. Your economic development is killing everything.

So I'm faced with a choice. I can try and continue to live with a decreasing ecological footprint while the rest of the world continues to go the other direction and set an example for people as to how humans could live, with a lot less, but a future. Or I can head to Alberta and disrupt this terrible industrial death machine. One things for certain, I'm not going to continue sleepwalking and winning nothing, as I have been for the past two years. Something is going to happen.

For one special reader, I'm thinking about it. For the rest of you what are you going to do? It might be northern Alberta, or China, or Bangladesh, the Sydney tar ponds, Bhopal but eventually the death machine will make its way to you. Are you just going to stick your heads under the sand? It's so easy to do so but that doesn't mean it's right. Good luck to us all and our non-human companions on this earth.

Upside?

I just finished a really good book about the coming collapse. I recommend that you check it out. And for those of you who question my reading lists of late you'll be happy to hear that the author is the Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto. The book is The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization by Thomas Homer-Dixon.

Homer-Dixon touches on the numerous ways that our modern industrial civilization is under threat. There's climate change of course, the coming energy scarcity, asymmetric warfare, overpopulation, and the growing gap between the rich and poor in states and between states. All these "tectonic stresses" threaten the highly complex yet fragile global civilization that we have created. There is little resiliency in the structures we have created and maintained.

Collapse is natural. It happens all the time in systems. It leads to innovation and change. For instance a forest fire (which humans stupidly prevent thereby making conditions ripe for a monster fire which nothing can stop) allows for new seeds and species to take over newly cleared niches thereby restarting and slowly increasing the complexity of the forest ecosystem which will then experience another creative collapse; do we need more convincing that linearity is unnatural? We've been putting off collapse for so long and pretending that we can continue to take and take forever (insanity?) that we're due for a monumental rebalancing. The longer we wait the more painful it will be; the forest fire will burn so hot it will kill all the seeds.

He is also very critical of the hollowness of modern industrial civilization with its focus on consumption: "Our economic role in this culture of consumerism is to be little more than walking appetites that serve the function of maintaining our economy's throughput. Our psychological state is comparable to that of drug addicts needing a fix: buying things doesn't really make us happy, except perhaps for a moment after the purchase. But we do it over and over anyway"(197).

Homer-Dixon ultimately believes that collapse is unavoidable. Sooner or later it's coming down. What we need, he suggests, is to be ready to rebuild lest the forces of intolerance and violence take over. While he offers a lot of potential scenarios he explains that we must be guided by new values (that are already becoming visible): "Our values must be compatible with the exigencies of the natural world we live in and depend on. They must implicitly recognize the laws of thermodynamics, energy's role in our survival, the dangers of certain kinds of connectivity, and the nonlinear behaviour of natural systems like the climate. The endless material growth of our economies is fundamentally inconsistent with these physical facts of life. Period. End of story. And a value system that makes endless growth the primary source of our social stability and spiritual well-being will destroy us"(305).

What I liked most about this book was that it wasn't offering crazy solutions to our problems and pretending to be positive about the ingenuity of humans to subdue nature. It recognized that civilization is on a deadly and unsustainable path in its current form (can it ever be sustainable?) and has to collapse for the good of all life, including humans. It was also very accessible to those of us not familiar with panarchy for instance. It was also just plain interesting with examples from Homer-Dixon's Gore-like world traveling (are you part of the problem?).

There are so many books outlining that humanity is headed for disaster (Power Down, Collapse, Endgame, The Long Emergency, The World Without Us) but dear reader, if you want to start to learn the truth, start with The Upside of Down and then move on to Derrick Jensen.

And please if anyone tells you that humans will cope with the breakdown of the natural world at their hands tell them to go fuck themselves. We're fucked but that's a good thing.

Crash

Though this article never mentions the words once, this is pretty clear evidence of peak oil. The article states: "ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil producer, today reported a 10% drop in third-quarter profits despite the soaring price of oil. It blamed a drop in production levels, with yields falling at some of its mature oil and gas fields, and lower profit margins. "

How can you be losing money with oil at $93 a barrel? Because you're running out of the easy to reach stuff.

Almost there.

Now hopefully this civilization can collapse before some genius decides to set off a nuclear weapon. And I had better learn something useful because I don't think blogging will fill my belly.

Noose

You'd have to be both blind and stupid to not look at the proposed US missile defence shield in Eastern Europe and realize who it is meant to deter. Then add to this fact that Canada was expected to join as well (we have withdrawn for now). Other missile sites in Japan and South Korea would make the lasso complete. Yes it's Russia, the supposed loser of the Cold War.

Yet the US continues to declare, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates did today, "that the missile defence shield being proposed in central Europe is not directed at Russia."

So let's analyze some of the potential threats this shield is meant to counter:

1) Iran - If Iran were to launch a nuclear missile (still ten years off by the way) at the US, not only would it take ages to reach there but it would probably run out of gas halfway. And let's not forget that the US has bases, fighters, and naval armadas in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean not to mention Israel. If they shot a missile towards Europe, I have to believe the Europeans could take care of themselves. And most importantly, Iran would never do so because they would be a smoking radioactive crater following any such attack. Look at a globe, Iran is on the other side of the world.

2) North Korea - Why would the US need special facilities in Eastern Europe to counter North Korea? And wouldn't Russia be a little irritated that North Korea was blasting missiles across its territory? And in the end launching missiles that way is the long way to the continental US. Again though, why would North Korea dare launch a missile at the US? It would be crater #2 following Iran.

This is really all about full spectrum dominance. The US is an empire in decline and denial. The only other state in the world that calls them on it is Russia. There was only ever one superpower despite the US building up the Soviet Union to evil empire proportions. Russia continues to impress, however, in speaking bluntly about the US's imperial ambitions.

I'd like to suggest that the missile defence shield has a more dismal side. We're heading for a time of energy insecurity and climate change. The US is attempting to ensure that it can invade and conquer and dominate anyone without fear of retaliation thereby maintaining its primacy and ruling while the rest of the world rots.

Good luck US, we're on to you.

The Elephant

The more and more I think about it, there is a single issue that impacts all the topics that I discuss on this blog. If humanity (can you speak of it as a single entity and if we are even capable) is serious about dealing with global warming, saving the earth's wonderful biodiversity, reversing the pollution of the earth's water and air, halting the siege of the ozone layer, stopping the mowing down of the world's forests, slowing the depletion of the earth's oil reserves and more then this issue needs to be pushed to the top of the global agenda. And that issue is:

OVERPOPULATION

All humans need family planning in a bad way. Especially if we all want to be resource pigs like North Americans. Dare I say it but perhaps we need an international one child policy. We need to give out condoms like business cards. We need to embrace and celebrate our sexuality and put procreation and guilt on the back burner. Far from expanding them, we need to shrink our populations and fast. Instead of piling billions of dollars into elitist talking shops let's be supportive and make it simple to have a small family, or better yet no family at all.

A new child of parents with North American lifestyle aspirations is destined to take a big bite out of the world's resources and contribute to all the ills mentioned above. That child will need to eat meat three times a day and have access to out of season fruit all year round. She'll need air conditioning and heating. She'll need a new private vehicle ever few years. She'll need malls, designer clothes produced a world away, cheap Chinese imports with excessive packaging, cell phones and Ipods. Her ecological footprint will be massive. Therefore the fewer of these children the better.

But tell all this to the Pope. Or your parents, who anxiously await the next grandchild. Or the economist warning the government that a population drop will devastate the economy much like taking action on climate change. Or anyone who has had the nuclear family ideal detonated inside their skull.

Didn't you hear? I can already hear some of these people say. God gave us this earth and told us to be fruitful and multiply. We can't go against the word of God (or for the economist, the word of the market). We've always done it this way.

End of story.

But I still say we ignore overpopulation at our peril. For some interesting and rigorous research into the earth's ideal human carrying capacity by state and more relevant information check out the Optimum Population Trust.

Food or Cars?

Just reading an article about the US government's plans to develop a parallel mechanism to the Kyoto Protocol to deal with global warming. I firmly hope it goes nowhere because as bad as Kyoto is (did you know that aviation is excluded from Kyoto?) any plan developed by the Bush Administration would be a nightmare.

Anyway this article mentioned how exited the US, Brazil and other countries are in developing biofuels or biodiesel as an alternative to imported oil. Despite their glad-handing and jubilation, biodiesel is a nightmare waiting to happen.

For one it's going to make the price of food soar. This will destroy the livelihoods of poor people in Canada and beyond. Mexico is already seeing the price of their staple, corn rise in response to rich North Americans' desire to drive "sustainably". I also found an article linking a rise in beer prices in Germany to biodiesel. This is only the beginning.

Most industrial food production already relies on huge energy inputs. Currently we are essentially eating oil and taking more from the earth than we put in. To produce say 100 food calories you have to input say 1000 oil calories. This is the definition of unsustainable. So if we're going to move to biodiesel we'll need to spend most of the harvest fueling up our giant agricultural machinery.

And what will be the result. Some will drive and continue to live high on the hog while others will starve. Sounds just to me! At the same time, I recognize that the human population on earth is highly dangerous and is endangering the survival of this most perfect world. We could do with a decrease in membership.

So I find this to be a sticky situation in terms of my moral approach to this violent gamble on biodiesel. If only we could step back and choose to decrease our population in a responsible and thoughtful way instead of creating new structures that will cause intense hardship and suffering.

But that would be giving our species too much credit. And is capitalist democracy even able to make these vital choices? Does the failure of Kyoto and the primacy of the "economy" demonstrate that this is the case?

California Dreaming

Well here's another example of compartmentalized and dangerous thinking from our optimistic species. According to the delusional US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) there will be 1.4 million new planes clogging the world's skies by 2020. By 2025, we'll also have 9 billion passengers annually in the air around the world. The only problem according to the FAA will apparently be getting these passengers on board and safely to their destinations.

Was this report prepared in a total vacuum? No considerations but the economic quite blatantly. Civilization will continue indefinitely with no controls on our destructive activities. Unfortunately we can pretend to not rely on the earth but at some point you have to face facts . . . unless you're the FAA.

First no mention as usual of peak oil. Did anyone notice that elephant in the corner? What the heck are we going to make jet fuel out of if not oil? I dread a nuclear airplane but I suppose that's where we're headed. Can't wait until one of those blow up scattering radioactive debris through the stratosphere. That'll be great. I expect that elites will hold back some oil for trips to the Galapagos while the world burns. But 9 billion passengers! I don't think so. Air travel is a bad bet. Save your portfolios my dear yuppies.

And then there's climate change. Clearly there is no desire to take the tough steps to reduce our impact on our beloved home. This report might as well have just said that climate change is not a serious concern (Wow! Just had deja vu typing this). If you're ready to put 1.4 million new planes in the air and 9 billion individual trips that's essentially a big fuck you to the planet and its human and non-human inhabitants. Air travel makes your ecological footprint an asteroid strike.

But of course you'll still pay lip service to the fight against climate change and pledge to do more.

Is it time to wake up yet?

Hit the snooze button just one more time; what's ten more minutes?