Great Ad for "The Heirloom"

Duncan Crary of the Kunstlercast has, despite a ravaged throat, produced a pitch perfect ad for "The Heirloom." Of course, the Kunstlercast is a must visit site regardless of my literary ambitions. Every week Duncan and James Howard Kunstler, of "The Long Emergency" fame, get together to talk about the topic du jour and interview guests about the ongoing collapse of the industrial world. The show is lighthearted despite its weighty topic and has more laughs than moments of pathos. Between Duncan's interesting asides coming from a different generation and Jim's often hilarious wit bombs, the show is over all too soon, making one itch for the next episode.

The banner ad on the site looks great as well. I'm not sure what all I need do to get this book in front of people, but I'm doing everything that seems reasonable. Everyone I've met, except one crotchety old judge, has loved it, even the literary types seem to not hate it. I hope you will too.

But, of course, the irony lies in the collapse of civilization making an ephemeral project such as a novel about the collapse of civilization a seeming race against time. If you believe the fast crash crowd, then this is a silly gesture, and the energy spent writing would be better spent building a farmstead. If you believe the slow, economic stair-step crash scenario, then anyone still in the business of writing (or any venture) would face a steadily deteriorating audience, both in number and in physical, spiritual, economic, and mental health.

I must imagine that all of the peak oil prognosticators, pundits, and commentators, not to mention authors, both non-fiction and fiction, have at some point thought of the deep and troubling irony of both working within the system to get their voices heard, to build up their brand identity, to sell themselves and their products, and working to get out of a system that they may see in a range of lights from evil but doomed to awesome but doomed. Obviously, I am facing that right now.

For those who are on the "industrial society is evil but doomed end" of the spectrum, such as myself, the mere thought of all the paper needed to publish books, the metal that goes into the printers, the electricity consumed, the entire knock-on chain of industrial cause and effect, makes me cringe and fret that my little book is the anti-christ, that no one needs to read anything that light! Everyone should immediately buy a copy of "One Straw Revolution," or "Endgame."(Does Derrick Jensen wrestle with the same demons? Ruh-roh, I introduced a meta-irony loop by mentioning his book, "Endgame!")

What about books made of electricity? Unfortunately, these involve computers and all their rare earth metals, the plastics, hell, the aluminum for the Mac, the energy and the misery of the labor force. The ebook hardly seems a lesser evil.

What to do? I could opt for the cynicism du jour, both lamenting the state of the world and making knowing snarky asides. I could weep, wail, and gnash. I could take up arms. I could even fill out petitions and spend time with protestors.

But, after much thought, I've decided I will write and paint. These two things are what I do best and most enjoy. If any of my work inspires or impels someone to action or to a better understanding of the crisis, then I consider myself as having a life well spent.

For the enjoyment of anyone who has not seen my paintings, here is one from my upcoming show.

Thanks, and enjoy the book.

Immediate Results

Before civilization began its march out of the fertile crescent on its one-way mission of planetary destruction, humans lived seeking immediate satisfaction: food to eat, security of life, and social contact of the moment. Depending upon who you ask, that pre-civilization period lasted anywhere from 2.5 million years to 250,000 years--a very long period in any event. Whereas, agricultural/industrial civilization is a pinprick on the hide of history.

We still seek the immediate, but it is often the irrelevant, non-real side of life. That impulse to simply do what is available, no matter future consequences, is hard wired into our thinking, even if that means hurting the planet and thus ourselves.

But, hard-wired or no, we need to short-circuit that brain pattern, or we are in for a very short but hard trip to collapse. Some argue that it is inevitable, and others believe that the techno-fairy will tap its magic wand on our monstrous, pointy-headed society, magically taking us to that "NEXT BIG THING."

Oh, foolish people.

That "next big thing" is a pipe dream and a recipe for further destruction. Let's say we invent that mother of all techno-masturbatory dreams--fusion. What then? If we listen to the techno-philes, it is "Game over, we win." According to them, it means we get to keep going with business as usual.

Hmm. So, that means we will continue to pave the planet, cut down the forests, destroy the topsoil, use up the fresh water resources, and rape the oceans, except we can do it really fast now that we have all that cheap energy. Energy, free or not, does not mean the planet suddenly becomes an infinite supplier of all other resources. The cupboard will run out. Meanwhile, the population continues to grow. When we hit that next great wall of crisis that is all the worse due to the business as usual viagra effect of fusion, the number of people who will die due to a collapse doubles, triples, or perhaps quadruples. Oh my. So, it seems that encouraging business as usual is tantamount to encouraging a larger die-off. Would that be a war crime in the war to save the planet? How even more monstrous would we have thought Hitler if it came to light that his plans included breeding more Jews, Gypsies, and other "undesirables" in order to kill even more of them? What if he kept those people in large camps, called "cities" where they would build the machinery of their own future destruction?

Whew.

Immediate results. This is not a bad thing if framed correctly by a reality that comports with that outlook. In other words, we want the good kind of immediate result: the satisfaction of planting a crop correctly, knowing that later in the season food will be available; cleaning up the rivers, knowing that years, if not decades from now, everyone will be able to drink from that river; encouraging ecosystems not only for their ability to share with us, but their ability to share with all. The results we seek will accrue to the next generation, and the next, and the next, and even maybe to the current generation. The result does not have to be an immediate tangible payout. It can be a payout in pride and satisfaction knowing that your acts are contributing to the future, to the seventh generation.

Do not wait for someone to tell you to do this or that. Just take the future by the hand and do what's next. Plant that native nut or fruit tree. Find a neglected spot that will support your life addition and plant it. If we all did this once a day, a week, or month, the world would fill up with life that then goes onto to provide more habitat and life, and it all grows exponentially until we live on a planet where we don't grow food, food grows.

We need this. While it would be fun to kidnap some environmental terrorist from the corporate world and make them pay somehow for their depredations, that act would only eliminate one small cog soon to be replaced by another. Now, I am not saying we should not fight the corporations in all ways possible (see Endgame by Derrick Jensen), but along the way, please attempt to add to the world every chance possible.

The de-engineering of civilization is also important, and I'll cover that soon.

Getting the Message Out

In an extraordinary rebuff of the planet destroyers, the graduating students of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA sought an alternative to Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil and noted war criminal in the battle to save the planet, as a commencement speaker. After negotiations with the school, the students brought in Richard Heinberg to speak directly after Tillerson. Heinberg is a Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

This move is all the more interesting as WPI is a leading engineering and technology school. When one of the premier Planet Killer Universities finds itself in the odd position of its students rising up and demanding that a prophet of civilizational collapse speak at their commencement, you have to wonder what will happen next? Cats and dogs sleeping together? G. W. Bush admitting he was not only wrong but should be prosecuted for war crimes? That Newt Gingrich doesn't sound like an amphibian dental disease?

This all begs the question: what does this mean? Do these students understand the technological trap we've fallen into six thousand years ago and now see the light and wish to return to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, or will they continue the destruction of the planet but with a lesser technology, a smattering of smart grids, recycling, and french fry grease to power itsy-bitsy cars? While I applaud their audacity in the face of their indoctrination at the hands of a tech school, I find it hard to believe that they are willing to give up the planet-wrecking cudgel of technology.

In the brilliant, forward-looking minds of these young engineers and scientists, I suspect that they see not the elimination of killer tech but a "refinement," a subtle series of adjustments that will allow business as usual to proceed but with a seemingly sustainable engine of "new" technology to power our lifestyles. Among the many technologies I would imagine they see continuing would include the computer. For them, the computer represents a "smart" use of energy, something that is part of the solution, rather than one of the world's most pernicious problems. But it must be eliminated, or rather, it will suffer slow death, compared to its meteoric rise as the grid collapses in small gradations. Without server farms sucking down the equivalent of a Seattle's worth of electricity, the computer becomes a stand alone curiosity, no longer attached to the huge web of pseudo information that has come to supplant true experience. Another point of refinement will be the automobile. While it is not fair to paint all of these graduates with the same brush, I will bet that there is a gradation of autophilia in their hearts that will manifest itself in the form of various "super" cars that will get increasingly great mileage.

But that is exactly the problem. The resources must still be mined and moved and shaped and assembled, all of which requires energy. The destruction goes on albeit with a sweet veneer of techno-green. If you play out the formula to its natural and inevitable end, we end up at the same place--planetary destruction. Like the spiderweb cracks that race across your windshield when a rock thrown up by a truck smacks it, the web of necessary precursors reach back and forward into time. Need plastics? Where do we get them? Oil? Natural Gas? Do we use corn fed plastics? How do we plant the corn? By hand? Harvest? By hand? No. Machines. Lots of machines. Do the machines magically appear or are they made? Does it cost energy to make them? What do we make them out of? Metal? We have to mine the metal. That takes large machinery. It must be made. We need metal machines that melt and refine the metal. Machines to shape the metal, from ingots to sheets to wire. We need roads to deliver the metal. That means asphalt and concrete. That takes oil and plenty of energy. In other words, we need a pre-existing oil-based manufacturing base in order to build the "alternative" future. And, we need constant maintenance of the base.

Chicken and egg, my friend.

So, these wonderful baby engineers and scientists are all chomping at the bit to fix the technology problem with more technology. Yea!

So, while I appreciate the press coverage and the thought that enough students at a Planet Destroyer University got together to demand that this rather radical person in the form of Richard Heinberg be present to offer up a breath of truth, I cannot help but feel that people out there will think that these students have an alternative version of the tech problem that works better, and that is a problem.

Because it will not. The truth is we are part of a brief spike in technology and population, a tiny thin micro spike in the two million year history of humanity that will completely be forgotten in another micro spike. This aberration is at its peak.

We need the message to change, but we risk offering business as usual when what is needed is a clean break. Bless you Richard Heinberg and the students of WPI for telling us part of the truth. Let us hope that the rest leaks out.