Double Digit Unemployment Finally Hits Home

Well, I was expecting this to happen ever since I notified my employers that I needed to move back to the east coast. So my employment with this company was tenuous at best. Losing all my motivation certainly didn't hurt either. Now it's time to answer the question: "What do you want to do with your life????"

Alex Steffens anti-TT article and its reverberations

This is turning into a pattern, of picking apart Transition.

I think the reason I have trouble fitting into Transition is I am a pessimist by nature, so any attempt to step up to the plate and lead people is going to come from a vantage point of doom and gloom, whereas Transition tries to take lemons and turn them into lemonade. But to do that, there needs to be some agreement that the lemons in fact exist, which I don't see in my town.

Assuming there is agreement, though, the image I always think of is Robin Williams in Jacob the Liar.



The concept is yes, the future will suck compared to what came before, but rather than focusing on what's lost, and getting trapped in a tunnel of despair, to try to emphasize the positive, which I guess is the bonding that tends to happen during a crisis, or getting off the sofa like the blobs in Wall-E. But let's face it, they got off the sofa to clean up a hell of a mess.



So I can totally understand how people would not be able to process the dichotomy between a pessimistic future scenario in which all attempts to technofix our way back to happy days again are doomed to fail, but we're supposed to ride down energy descent as if it's Splash Mountain in Disneyland.



This is what leads to terms like sacred demise. It becomes in essence an eschatology, infused with religiosity. In order to deal with grief, we need to impose meaning. Why must we suffer? To bring balance to Gaia. So this is kind of the Peter Schiff approach towards ecology whereas technofix would be the bailout approach.

Which future scenario we track through and at which pace it occurs, time will tell. Until then, the battle will rage on between the various factions. The cornies, the technofixers, the earth stewards, and the lone survivalists.

Each faction will feel justified in pointing fingers at the other.

Oh, those silly TTers, that they thought they could ward off zombies and warlords by holding hands and planting nut trees in public places.

Oh, those silly survivalists, who only think of themselves, misanthropes all of them.

Oh, those silly technofixers who won't let go of BAU, who think innovation is a form of energy.

Oh, those silly cornies who think we can drill-baby-drill our way into infinite paradise.

And so it goes.

I find myself somewhere inbetween the survivalist camp and the TT camp. I'm not survivalist enough to write off the rest of humanity, and I'm not optimistic enough about what TT can accomplish given what evil lurks in the hearts of men, especially desperate men. So it's hard for me to step up, start shaking hands, smiling, and spreading the gospel of Transition as the answer to our troubles. I just don't know of anything better so by default I must endorse it.

A Personal Transition

Back during the oil runup of 2007-2008 was when my doom-o-meter, so to speak, hit a fever pitch. This culminated in my move back to Massachusetts as a way to avoid becoming trapped in southern california with very expensive plane trips back and forth for me and my family.

Even though oil prices receded, my doom-o-meter never really got back to where it was in, let's say, 2006. I was certainly concerned in 2005-2006, but it just wasn't as much of an obsession. I had it well compartmentalized in order for me to remain functional as an individual, as a father, and as a cog in BAU.

I think that it's very important to maintain a sense of self as you navigate through doom. I feel that the last two years of my life has been spent mostly in a deer-in-the-headlights haze and it's an emotional dead-end.



The dilemma of "preps" is that constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop is just not healthy. Whether or not the anxiety is justified, one needs to, like I said, compartmentalize things and maintain a life. As more and more time goes by, I have begun to develop regrets about how I've spent my time.

In the early days of being a peaker, I was a workout junkie, and I think that was the best thing for me to do to shake off the stress hormones. But from 2006-2008 I slowly fell off the wagon on my diet and workout regimen, and for the last year I've all but decided to be Jabba the Hutt, despite the garden.

So I've decided that it's totally putting the cart before the horse to present myself as a public figure, an activist if you will, if I don't have my shit together. And I really feel like I don't. It was a lot easier for me to drive to Vermont and sit in a room for two days than it would have been to lose 30 pounds at the gym. And since my search for initiators here has struck out anyway, and I'm stuck here for the foreseeable future, it's time to focus on myself again. So I just joined a gym, and I'm making a resolution to severely curtail the time I spend stressing out on news and screwing around in forums in favor of other hobbies, some doom-related, and others not.

There's nothing that's gonna happen that I haven't already hypothesized a zillion times. Running scenarios over and over again like WOPR in Wargames isn't going to do me any good.



If I'm ready, I'm ready. If I'm not, I'll fly by the seat of my pants like the vast majority of other people. But between now and then I have a million things that I wanted to get done in life that have nothing to do with doom that I've put aside for far too long. So it's time to get back to the bucket list.

What's Missing

Rob Hopkins has illustrated what was missing from the meeting I went to in his post of this TED talk.

Can I Play?

I've blogged everywhere else about it, so I guess I'll take my case here in anonymous-land.

I went to a local environmental meeting that was coordinated by the League of Women Voters. I'd say about 300 people were there. I had to go with my daughter which is, um, awkward. Anyway, after the long presentation by the eco-architect, riffing on themes I've heard a million times before, but never mentioning the words "peak oil" or even "McMansion", I left, feeling positively confused.

But it was worse than confused. I felt useless. The contrast between me valiantly putting up the fliers and having nobody show up and this was positively humiliating.

The two groups that are operating in my town seem to be private little cliques. Sure, I'm "affiliated" with them, but I'm not really a contributor. It's little more than being on mailing list I guess.

I've had one rebuffed attempt to meet with one group, and another where I was a little more indirect in how things are planned, I didn't get the welcome mat the way I was hoping.

So I just have this feeling of being socially inept, of demographically not fitting in even with the green crowd. They exude the attitude that they have things under control and all the positions of power are filled, thank you very much. Now if I wanted to do some volunteer grunt work, I can, but the actual agenda is set in some private meeting that nobody is invited to.

This is of course totally different from what Transition is supposed to do with the open spaces thing. Unleashing the collective genius of the community. As hackneyed as that term is, I still prefer a more roundtable approach than the top-down approach of selected experts dictating what we should do.

But it is what it is...

And I think about what my skills are. I am just not good in an environment where I have to meet a lot of strangers one after the other, have a brief interchange, and then move on.

"Oh, hi. Have you heard of peak oil? I hope you have a taste for long pork. By the way: the end is nigh."

I'm Gil Sanford in a room full of Chris's. Sure, they are environmentally minded Chris's, but Chris's nonetheless, with their McMansions with the colonnades and the european SUVs.



So there is this huge gap between being a red-piller and being able to drop the red pill on other people. And to do that with my daughter in tow??? Good luck. If there is anything that will make you pull your punches, it's that.

So I wonder, what the hell am I going to accomplish with these limitations?

Not a lot, I think. Not a heck of a lot.

Sounds kind of tragic to me...

Doomstead Jukebox: Wond'ring Again by Jethro Tull

There's the stillness of death on a deathly unliving sea,
and the motor car magical world long since ceased to be,
when the Eve-bitten apple returned to destroy the tree.
Incestuous ancestry's charabanc ride,
spawning new millions throws the world on its side.
Supporting their far-flung illusion, the national curse,
and those with no sandwiches please get off the bus.

The excrement bubbles,
the century's slime decays
and the brainwashing government lackeys
would have us say
it's under control and we'll soon be on our way
to a grand year for babies and quiz panel games
of the hot hungry millions you'll be sure to remain.

The natural resources are dwindling and no one grows old,
and those with no homes to go to, please dig yourself holes.

We wandered through quiet lands, felt the first breath of snow.
Searched for the last pigeon, slate grey I've been told.
Stumbled on a daffodil which she crushed in the rush, heard it sigh,
and left it to die.
At once felt remorse and were touched by the loss of our own,
held its poor broken head in her hands,
dropped soft tears in the snow,
and it's only the taking that makes you what you are.

Wond'ring aloud will a son one day be born
to share in our infancy
in the child's path we've worn.
In the aging seclusion of this earth that our birth did surprise
we'll open his eyes.

More Acorn Talk

Nice article except for this quip:

If a tree can bear thousands of acorns in a season, as many do, eating a few pounds won’t make much difference. Is this the attitude that wiped out passenger pigeons, once famous for their migration?

I guess I'm in my usually bitchy mood here.

Who needs permaculture, right? Let's leave the acorns to nature and rely on big ag instead. Just look at how the vast fields of wheat and corn have transformed what used to be the primordial plains of america. I don't understand the sentiment of not bending a single blade of grass in what we construe as the wilderness at a time when we're well on our way to killing the planet and ourselves in the process. We're a part of the natural world and shouldn't be overly paranoid and guilt-ridden about consumption. There's too many of us and there isn't much we can do about that other than commit suicide. So perfect is the enemy of good here.

When I look at the long-term future, I see no way any region with oak trees will avoid a massive die off if not to fully exploit acorns. If the squirrels go hungry, so be it. Somehow I think they'll get by, as they've made it this far despite human interference. How many species are going extinct each year as it is without us touching acorns? But no. We have to weep and mourn for harvesting some acorns. Heck, I'd say the vast majority of acorns in my neighborhood are being ground into powder by passing cars and sinking into the lawns. The wildlife can't come close to harvesting them all. They are a completely wasted bounty. Perhaps the only function they serve is to act like leaf-drop in sending organic matter into the soil, complete with tannic acid to further acidify it.

Post-peak what's more likely is the oak trees will get chopped down for firewood for heating and cooking. So from that perspective, popularizing the harvesting of acorns would be an act of proactive conservation.