Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

It is our duty as men and women to behave as though limits to our ability do not exist. We are collaborators in creation of the Universe.


                                                                                 Pierre Teilhard

Teilhard was a French Jesuit and paleontologist, born in 1881. He participated in the discovery of Peking Man, Homo erectus, in China in 1923.

Teilhard was the author of several books, reconciling evolution and Christianity, his masterwork being The Phenomenon of Man. When the Vatican and his Jesuit superiors forbade him from publishing, Father Teilhard was faithful to his vow of obedience. After his death in 1955, friends published his work.

To Teilhard, Christ is the personality of the Universe, and evolution is a process of convergence and complexification. We are drawn toward union with each other, and an ultimate union with God, which he called the Omega Point.

E. F. Schumacher

Today, a person has to be wealthy to enjoy this simple thing, this very great luxury (to have hands and brain productively engaged): he has to be able to afford space and good tools; he has to be lucky enough to find a good teacher and plenty of time to learn and practice. He has to be rich enough not to need a job; for the number of jobs that would be satisfactory in these respects is very small indeed.


                                                                   E. F. Schumacher


It took me thirty-plus years to get around to reading Small Is Beautiful, the book that made E. F. Schumacher famous. I figured it must be smarmy, new-age something-or-other, but an economist-engineer I interviewed told me Schumacher was tough.

Schumacher was a German economist, born in 1911, who rejected the Third Reich, and fled to England. He became the British Coal Board's chief economist, and went on to consult with developing economies and the Carter White House.

If you get only two things out of Small Is Beautiful, they should be that modern commerce's abundance is based on capital, not income, and that "the chance to work is the greatest of all needs, and even poorly paid and relatively unproductive work is better than idleness."

Howard Odum

A whole generation of citizens thought that the carrying capacity of the earth was proportional to the amount of land under cultivation and that higher efficiencies in using the energy of the sun had arrived. This is a sad hoax, for industrial man no longe eats potatoes made from solar energy, now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.

                                                                                                      Howard Odum

I got two ideas from Howard Odum, an ecologist and member of the World War II generation who died in 2002.

If an energy source -- be it fossil fuel, nuclear, or solar -- produces a calorie of energy, that calorie isn't its yield, because of all the energy costs of obtaining, transporting, storing and using it. The yield is what it makes, minus what it takes to get it.

Embodied energy is the energy available to us, or that we can use to obtain other energy in some resource: oil, the sun, wind, gravity, manure, water, and so on.

Drawings Of The Bergstrom Kids

I expected these drawings to take about eight hours. These are the Bergstrom kids, grand niece and nephews of a friend from one of my drawing groups, Gillian, Ike, Gary, and Mikey. Instead it surprised me that I couldn't get the proportions right. Working from snapshots seems like a separate skill from drawing live models, and I unknowingly seem to have come to rely on the proportions and landmarks of adult faces. And I just couldn't catch the perspective of Mikey's far eye. The stakes were higher than usual, because I was drawing pictures of a stranger's beloved children. Freaked me out, and took half a year.

These are great kids, bright and polite. I especially enjoyed meeting Gillian, who is a fearless and outgoing baby. I am enormously pleased to get them off my easel!

Richard Heinberg, Short Version

I forgot to put on my hat the Saturday of the big wet snowstorm, and walked to South High for the Neighborhood Sustainability Networking Fair, “Building Resilient Communities: Preparing Together for an Changed World.” I was thinking I wouldn’t mind if the world waited a couple of years to change, but I do have ideas about how I’d like it to be, so I went looking for allies.

Alliance for Sustainability organized the event: vendor displays (energy conservation, gardening, electric cars, environmental justice, local food), topical and neighborhood discussions, and keynote speaker Richard Heinberg. Heinberg is a journalist, Senior Fellow at the  Post Carbon Institute, and author of The Party’s Over and other books about scarce oil and its economic consequences. His talk gave the day its subtitle, “Preparing Together for a Changed World.”

Heinberg’s a sturdy sixty-year old with spectacles and wispy sandy hair. He spoke for about an hour, with slides of diagrams and pictures to dramatize his remarks.

We’re living at a critical moment in history. Heinberg’s case runs something like this: The US and the world have a debt that we can never retire. The housing bubble that burst in 2008 was four times as large as any before. The bail out cost in the trillions, compared to The Vietnam War’s $600 some billion price tag. US productivity has nearly doubled since 1975, but household income has stayed flat, with households compensating with debt. All this debt assumes growth, but the end of oil, with no adequate alternatives ready, assures us there will be no more growth. Heinberg quoted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, that the economy is resetting to a lower level of spending and consuming. (I would refer skeptics to Saul Griffith, who has calculated that the world would need an area the size of Australia, “Renewistan,” devoted to alternatives, including nuclear, to replace all but a fifth or sixth of our current fossil fuel use.)

Heinberg says it is up to us to invent a new normal, imagining how we’d like to see the world in 2050 (I’ll be 101), and filling in the steps from here to there. He had a list of areas to work on. We need to emphasize what is positive: community, satisfaction from honest work, intergenerational solidarity, cooperation, free time, happiness, artistry, and beauty in the built environment. We need to reduce spending and consumption, grow our own food, get to know our neighbors, and imagine the best-case scenario. This crisis is our opportunity.

Our communities need resilience:

    * Redundancy in critical systems, in other words different ways and places to get what we need, and to get around, so we can endure loss of one or some parts;
    * Dispersed system control points, meaning, I think, that commerce and government get spread around, not eliminated;
    * Dispersed inventories: no more big-box bargains, but more work and less vulnerability to disaster;
    * Balanced feedback loops, for instance concentrated wealth would not be able to organize to further concentrate.

Yeah, but, like the widower said at the funeral, what am I gonna do tonight? We need conservation and activism. There’s no excuse not to insulate our houses. Neighborhoods can afford what individuals can’t, so we can share expensive tools. We can relearn the skills that got our parents and grandparents through the Great Depression and war rationing, gardening, canning,
different kinds of repair. Walk, ride bikes, get away from the fastest and cheapest. Pay attention to the block clubs. Get to know Corcoran GROWS. Buy locally, Tom said, in his WalMart jeans and sweatshirt, sipping a cup of Colombian coffee.

In the medium term, we need better rail, cellphone and GPS facilitated ride sharing, local food processing, some way of getting people and businesses into idle buildings, local currencies, and neighborhood economic laboratories, which could also be sites for car sharing, credit union, job center, and clinic.

After Richard Heinberg’s presentation, came the topical breakout sessions, then we met with people from our neighborhoods.

I chose local food because of our household’s almond business. That was a useful choice. Community Table Cooperative was soliciting ideas from local food processors, and I got to brainstorm about how that organization could help us thrive. There was a hazel nut grower from Lake City in my group, and it was good to exchange names with him, since we’ve talked about using local hazels in addition to Californian almonds. (Another member of my group -- somebody I think I recognized from way back in my weatherization days -- told me I should realize that I’m an elder, and I said “Speak for yourself, brother.” I think the world is finally catching up with me.)

The neighborhood session was less immediately profitable, but sitting down and sharing ideas about what we’d like to see in Corcoran forty years from now was fun. I think we made progress.

Joan, Kit, And Stony

Richard Heinberg Notes, 9/16

Richard Heinberg: “Preparing Together for a Changed World”

Richard Heinberg was keynote speaker for November 13’s Transition Towns and Neighborhood Sustainability Fair, sponsored by Alliance for Sustainability, and at South High. Heinberg is a journalist, Senior Fellow at the  Post Carbon Institute, and author of The Party’s Over and other books about scarce oil and its economic consequences.His talk was titled “Preparing Together for a Changed World.”

Heinberg’s a sturdy sixty-year old with spectacles and whispy sandy hair. He spoke for about an hour, with slides of graphs and photos to dramatize his remarks.

2008’s economic crash is ongoing. The housing bubble was four times as big as any previous bubbles, and when it collapsed, $50 trillion dollars disappeared. We’re not in a recovery. Parodying commentators who speculate about the shape of the recovery, Heinberg said we are in an “L-shaped” recovery. “It is up to us to invent a new normal.”

Heinberg said that the total cost of the bailout is $8.5 trillion. I’m sure this number is somehow meaningful, but SourceWatch says government and the Fed together disbursed $4.86 trillion, with a maximum at-risk of $13.86 trillion, and $1.93 trillion outstanding as of September.Sorry to make your eyes glaze, but I wanted to be scrupulous, since I’m with Heinberg.

It’s big money. World War II cost us $3.2 trillion, and Vietnam came in at a bargain $670 billion. To give us perspective, Heinberg included a series of graphics, with a trillion dollars being what looked like a football field coverd by warehouse pallets of bundled hundred dollar bills.

Productivity has increased steadily, with household income keeping pace until 1975. Since then productivity has nearly doubled, but household income has remained flat. We’ve increased household debt since then, but we’re about maxed out, and people can’t buy stuff if they don’t have money. Heinberg quoted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, that the economy is resetting to a lower level of spending and consuming.

Economic theory depends on the belief that the economy will grow. Heinberg had a number of graphs illustrating spending and consumption, all of which were J-shaped. Until the mid or late nineteenth century everything sloped up gradually. Then every trend Heinberg graphed spiked. This is when we invented our economic theories, assuming that the volcano of wealth would continue. Compund interest, fractional reserve banking, and debt leverage require growth for monetary health.

We built a growth economy because of easy energy. In 1850, 65% of work was done by animals, 15% by people, and 20% by fuel. The first oil well, near Titusville, PA, was drilled in 1856. After 1865, human and animal work began to be replaced by fuel. Since 1970, virtually all work is done by fuel.

Heinberg referenced Shell geologist, and MIT and UCLA professor, M. K. Hubbert, who predicted peaks and decline in oil discovery and production for the United States and the world. So far, Hubbert has proved prescient. The US has already seen both peaks, and the world saw a discovery peak in 1964, with the production peak probably now, give or take five years.

We pumped the easiest oil first. Heinberg illustrated this with side-by-side photos of a nineteenth century oil well, looking like a set for Gunsmoke, and a deep water oil platform. Deep water oil and tar sand oil are marginal sources, it takes large fractions of the energy they yield to go get them.

Charles Schlumberger, the World Bank’s principal air transport specialist believes there will be a gradual disappearance of commercial aviation. No more body scans. Peak oil means peak food, because agriculture now has a seven-to-one calorie ratio: seven calories inot the tractor, semi, etc., and one into your mouth.

Conventional wisdom has it that when the price of oil makes it unavailable, a competitor will replace it. We are “searching for a miracle.” There is no credible alternative energy scenario that makes up for a loss of fossil fuels. We have choices between planning the life we want post-oil and responding to crisis. Either scenario can be top-down from government, or bottom up grass-roots organizing. How do the grass roots design post-oil life? Conservation and activism; envision 2050, then “backcast” the way to get there. We need to shoot for a mix of fuels that can continue and a partly (which parts?) de-industrialized economy for 2075. “We need to be driven by vision, not crisis.”

Our communities need resilience:

    * Redundancy in critical systems;
    * Dispersed system control points;
    * Dispersed inventories;
    * Balanced feedback loops;

Co-operative power: “Neighborhoods can afford what individuals can’t;”

Rail;

Cellphone- and GPS-facilitated ride-sharing;

Local food processing;

Organized squatting: some way of getting people and businesses into idle buildings;

Behavior change away from cheapest and fastest;

Neighborhood watches;

Bicycle transport;

Community currencies;

Transition towns, the movement of which Corcoran GROWS is part;

Community economic laboratories: One-stop for car share, food co-op, credit union, job center, free clinic, etc.

We need to emphasize what is positive, community, satisfaction from honest work, intergenerational solidarity, cooperation, free time, happiness, artistry, and beauty in the built environment. We need to reduce spending and consumption, grow our own food, get to know our neighbors, and imagine the best-case scenario. This crisis is our opportunity.

After Richard Heinberg’s presentation, there were break-out sessions about transition towns, solar heat and power, electric vehicles, how to enjoy more and spend less, local food, and more, including youth groups. Late in the afternoon, we met with people from our neighborhoods.

I chose local food because of our household almond business. It was useful because Community Table Coperative was soliciting ideas from local food processors, and I got to brainstorm about how that organization could help us thrive. There was a hazel nut grower from Lake City in my group, and it was good to exchange names with him, since we’ve talked about baking local hazels in addition to California almonds.

The neighborhood session was less immediately profitable, but sitting down and sharing ideas about what we’d like to see in Corcoran forty years from now was fun. I think we made progress.

Liberatianism: Greatest Idea Of The Nineteenth Century

Maybe a little too tendentious. Since the captions are there: Drivers don't know what they're doing, and when they do -- and the cops aren't around -- they cheat.

Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons makes a case against libertarianism that deserves attention: Eventually a society of individuals who -- even marginally -- rationally maximize their own benefits exceeds carrying capacity.

The Morning After The Night Before

Error doesn't need to be acknowledged, but it must be corrected.
                                                                        Dee Hock, Visa creator

Before, I was giving sixty-forty odds that civilization would crash, and ninety-ten that the US economy would. Now it's eighty-twenty, and near certainty.

Portrait of Donna

Donna, from Monday night. I modeled during the second to hours, so this is it. I made two false starts, confused by the sweater opening. The scallops finally misfired, but the shape is right. After the two dud beginnings, I started looking around to see if any of my colleagues was in possession of a simple Ticonderoga #2. No such luck, and I had to suck it up and draw the thing directly.

Modeling, I put Jonathan Richman's Action Packed on Lisa's Colwell's sound system, and had to leave it behind so everybody could put it on their thingummies.