Friday, April 28, 2006
The Beehive
Design Collective is an amazing radical art collective out
of rural Maine. They design incredibly beautiful and intricate
murals about globalization and global justice which are frequently
used for popular education in Lating America, where the collective
distributes them for free. I have their Plan
Colombia poster on my bedroom door, and I see something new
and poignant every time I look at it. They're definitely worth
checking out, and you can view and download their work online.
Their efforts in Latin American are subsidized by the purchases
of people from wealthier countries.
This week a crocodile, apparently annoyed by the noise of a chainsaw,
leapt out of the water and grabbed
the chainsaw out a man's hands. Then the crocodile chewed
on the chainsaw until it was ruined.
It reminds me vaguely (but perhaps frighteningly) of something
that happened to me a couple of years ago. I had a job at a farm,
and on my first day I was assigned to repair an electric fence
that had been knocked down over the winter by falling tree branches.
The fence surrounded a pasture for horses, who had been running
free on adjacent lands ever since the fence had gone down.
I was working on the wire at a fencepost when I felt a weight
on my left shoulder, and looked over to see the enourmous white
head of a horse, who I had not yet met. I was a bit nervous --
I'd never worked with horses, and my great-uncle died after being
bitten by one. So I didn't move at all while she looked at me
and at the work I was doing.
After a careful inspection, she withdrew her head and I waited
a moment before turning around so I didn't startle her. But by
the time I turned around she had grabbed my bucket of fence tools
in her mouth and started running off! I guess she saw what I was
working on, and decided she didn't much fancy being fenced in.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
A German company is decorating
surveillance cameras and razor-sharp fences with cheerful
and friendly decorations to make us "happy" to look
at them:
Matthias Megyeri, founder of Sweet Dreams Security,
considers symbols of threat and fear, such as alarms and CCTV
cameras.
He then turns them into things that make people
feel happy, using bright colours and references to kitsch objects
such as teddy bears and bunny rabbits.
He told BBC World Service's Culture Shock programme
that he hopes to set a new trend of looking at things that are
designed to keep us safe [sic] in a different way. [...]
Examples of Mr Megyeri's art include padlocks
designed to look like teddy bears, heart-shaped chains, and glass
fir trees embedded in concrete, designed to replace broken bottle
shards, which are now illegal.
While they look delicate, the top of the fir
trees is very sharp, to deter people from climbing the wall.
It puts a whole new spin on the phrase "friendly
fascism".
There's a good article on the Alternative
Press Review called "Ruin,
Rubble and Race: Lessons on the Centennial of the Great San Francisco
Earthquake and Fire of 1906." It's interesting to learn
that the big fire in 1906 was made much worse by the City's deliberate
failure to put it out in some areas, much like government inaction
in New Orleans. The fire was used as an excuse to forcibly evacuate
"undesirables" like people of Asian ancestry, many of
whom were put into camps where they were "virtual prisoners".
During this time the National Guard freely looted the mostly empty
Chinatown. Several Chinese people were killed in their own homes
or stores.
It's very instructive that that governments have so consistently
ignored or worsened disasters as an excuse to control "undesirable"
populations or take control of their land and possessions.
So many people think that the government will take action to
help when (for example) the power grid starts to go out. But if
history is any lesson, those in will more likely help that failure
along in poor or dissident areas to concentrate dwindling resources
towards the already rich.
Previous related posts: Dentention
camps and strategies of control and surveillance
and ecological refugees.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
I've spent most of a somewhat exhausting day alternating between
doing some editing and writing on the expanded
book version of Tools for Gridcrash and packing /
preparing for a big move I have in a couple of days.
The good news is that the book is on schedule for a publication
date in September. The bad news is that I'm behind on correspondence
(sorry folks) and way too tired to write much analysis today,
but there are a couple of interesting sites below.
Next week I'll be back out on the farm where my partner and I
grow much of our own food and generally work to live with the
land. I'm excited! Once things calm down a bit I'll share more
about the projects we are working on out there, and make some
how-to's.
I also have a big essay about collapse and gridcrash
I hope to post here in the next couple of weeks.
And excellent and very detailed tutorial on the care
and sharpening of knives.
This site has an example of a really simple way to make platforms
out of corrugated cardboard that you could use to put your
bed on, for example. I've added it to the DIY
Recycling index.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
You may recall a piece I wrote earlier this year called "Metal
theft and industrial decomposition" in which I argue
that people will break down mass-scale industrial infrastructure
into improvised community-scale infrastructure because it will
benefit their communities, and that by sharing technical skills
we can accelerate this process.
What I've learned since then is that it's actually a really common
process in history for monolithic infrastructure to be broken
down and dismantled after it is no longer perceived as useful
and specifically after the civilization that created it has collapsed.
The famous Roman Coliseum was used
as a stone quarry for centuries, with the marble facade either
reused in other buildings or burned to make quicklime. (This went
on until 1749, when it was banned by the Pope.)
The Great
Pyramids of Egypt were also used as stone quarries by the
people who lived after the collapse of the civilization that built
them. The pyramids were covered in a polished casing of white
limestone, and this limestone (and later the softer stone cores
underneath) was stripped for construction in Cairo.
The difference between those examples and our future is that
stone weighs so much that and can only effectively be harvested
by large numbers of workers from another complex society, even
if that society is only as small as a city-state. In contrast,
much of the infrastructure we have can be repurposed easily by
small groups. You only need a few people to pull windows out of
skyscrapers and turn them into greenhouses, for example.
In the UK anger
management classes for some violent prisoners are being axed
under the justification that they can actually make prisoners
with a history of premeditated crimes more dangerous:
Home Office instructions sent to the probation
service say that anger management courses are counterproductive
and actually help violent offenders who make premeditated attacks
to manipulate the situation to their advantage. [...]
Home Office instructions say that such courses
for violent offenders who commit their crimes purposefully rather
than impulsively are now "considered wholly inappropriate".
They add that it is now thought the courses "have the potential
to equip the offender with additional control mechanisms and increase
his/her capacity to manipulate a situation to their advantage
and power".
This phenomenon is exactly why I feel so uncomfortable about
"solutions" like electing "better" politicians
or driving hydrogen cars to deal ecological or economic exploitation.
Let's say Larry Liberal, if elected, might introduce some minor
reforms and make some marginal improvement to welfare laws and
recycle more pop cans (or more realistic, he'll very slightly
slow the rate at which welfare rates are dropping or the rate
at which the industrial economy is growing). The problem is that
those reforms can mask the underlying violence built fundamentally
into the structure of mass society.
And the violent, pre meditated crimes of civilization can made
far more insidious and far more dangerous by those superficial
reforms, just like the anger management example above. (Plus,
if the ecological reforms actually magically worked somehow and
created a sustainable civilization we'd be stuck with this systemic
violence forever!)
And in addition to that, beneficial reforms granted by governments
are only temporary since civilization itself will collapse. And
as civilizations get leaner they will get meaner, meaning that
many of those reforms will be certainly be withdrawn, just like
how Bush
is currently waiving clean air reforms to make gas slightly cheaper.
If we do want to work for reforms (and I've worked for
them plenty in my life so I'm not criticizing people who want
to take that route) I think we should do that while keeping this
information in mind. We should also remember that energy and effort
we put into convincing governments to do things for us is energy
and effort that we aren't putting into sharing skills and building
the community sufficiency we'll need in the long term.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Pawn
shops are raking in the dough as gasoline prices rise because
(poor) people are pawning their possessions to get money for gas.
This leads into the subject of black markets, a topic I've been
really interested in lately. I think that as collapse progresses,
as industrial products in general get more expensive and as particular
products become harder to get, black markets will start to grow
dramatically.
I think that this business with the pawn shops is the leading
edge of that process because pawn shops are part of a pre-existing
system that moves wealth and physical items from poorer people
to richer people during economic hard times. That may seem irrelevant
now -- why would you want to go to a pawn shop if you had lots
of money? -- but if vastly increased manufacturing costs meant
that a new TV cost $10,000 middle class people would go looking
for second-hand TVs.
But pawn shops only work when for that when a) the goods you
are looking for are legal, b) you have money to buy them at pawn
shop prices and b) those goods haven't been seized by the government
because of shortages. For historical precedents on that last point
you can read about the War
Production Board, the WWII-era US agency tasked with collecting
goods in short supply (like iron, tin, paper, and used cooking
fat) and directing them into the armed forces and war industries.
I expect that the black markets will expand for two main reasons:
The first reason is because luxury or hard-to-get items will
skyrocket in cost and plummet in availability, and because essentials
may be rationed. Whenever a commodity gets really expensive it
can be cheaper to buy it underground to avoid taxes, not to mention
that stolen goods are also cheaper and they are usually sold on
the black market.
Additionally, commodities that may be in short supply (anything
from gasoline and fuel, to copper and aluminum, to electronics
or pharmaceuticals) may be co-opted and stockpiled by the state
to "ensure the orderly operation of the economy" and
to supply the police, military, and government personnel who enforce
the operation of an orderly economy. Maybe those governments will
ration the supplies out, and maybe they won't, but in either case
there is a drive for a black market to form because of shortages.
(See the Wikipedia
article on black markets for more on why that is the case.)
The second reason for black market expansion has to do not with
items in short supply, but with local anarchical economies that
threaten a centralized and hierarchal system. Community-sufficiency,
especially in marginalized or dissident groups, is a threat to
centralized control and economic activity that supports community-sufficiency
will be targeted by the state. This point can be make clear by
looking at the origin
of the term "black market," which is totally fascinating
and highly instructive:
During the 18th Century, many South Carolina
slaves were encouraged to grow their own food and often had more
than their families could eat. Black women formed a secret transportation
system to get their goods to market. This system and the markets
in Charleston where the goods were sold was called "The Black
Market". As they grew profitable, local government barred
Whites from purchasing their foodstuffs, yet many continued to
do so.
So the term black market started with food, even though now it
has connotations of guns and drugs. I think soon it will go back
to food again!
With all of the plenty of attempts in various countries to quash
and control small scale farming it seems inevitable that many
of those who value a local food supply will participate more and
more in an underground economy.
Corporate CEO's now make $430
for every $1 made by the average worker, which is up from
10:1 in 1980. Many of them make (and presumably spend) more money
in an hour than I make in an entire year. When economic collapse
starts to take hold will they try to maintain their 430:1 ratio
even as the buying power of that dollar decreases?
Sunday, April 23, 2006
We're being warned to take precautions outside this summer because
the ozone layer is still getting thinner. And even though
ozone-eating CFC's were banned in 1989, it looks like global
warming may take over for CFC's as the main cause of continuing
ozone depletion.
Of course, ultraviolet light isn't all bad since we need it to
synthesize Vitamin D in our skin. So it's rather paradoxical that
even though there is more ultraviolet light coming down than ever
Vitamin
D deficiency is reaching epidemic proportions in the industrialized
world! That's because so many people spend almost all of their
time indoors.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
I really like some of the pointers in this
summary of a permaculture course that Ran
Prieur took. I'm going to try the "organic pond sealant"
next month.
Via MM, gasoline
shortages in the Northeast United States:
Scattered gas stations from New Hampshire to
Virginia are facing temporary shortages as the industry grapples
with a transition to more ethanol-blended fuel. [...]
Another logistical complication with ethanol
is that it cannot be shipped through pipelines because water molecules
in the pipelines will stick to it, creating problems for motorists'
vehicle engines. Instead it has to be transported by truck, rail
or barge from the Midwest. The concerns about mingling various
fuel supplies is why terminal owners must scrub their tanks clean
after draining them of MTBE-blended gasoline.
This is one of those transitional problems that are likely to
occur in any attempt to convert to a "renewable" energy
source.
But the most interesting part in the story for me was this:
Empty pumps are not nearly as frequent as they
were after Hurricane Katrina, which knocked out the electricity
needed to run pipelines delivering fuel from the Gulf
Coast to the rest of the country.
It underscores one of the fundamental problems of technological
complexity as a solution to everything. When one part of the really
complex system goes down, the other parts go down in a cascading
failure. It's the same with telecommunications now. The old style
copper phone wires could carry their own power, meaning that phones
would operate without the electrical grid. But fiber optics require
electricity at both the receiving and transmitting ends, meaning
that as more and more areas switch to fibre optics the telecommunications
grid will also become more fragile. And related to that...
I came across this in an article about
centralized time systems:
A glitch in inserting a leap second, these
researchers say, could throw everything off, whether it's the
timing of an international business deal, the location that a
missile hits, or the star that the Hubble Space Telescope observes.
"A 1-second hiccup in the phasing of North American
power grids would likely cause a hemispheric blackout,"
notes Daniel Kleppner, director of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology–Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms in Cambridge,
Mass., in the March Physics Today.
There are so many weird and random things that could cause major
blackouts and gridcrash.
And it all goes back to the complexity issue. One of the things
I learned from reading Deep
Survival by Laurence Gonzales (which is a really fascinating
book that I'd recommend) is that complex technical solutions intended
to reduce the chance of an accident actually worsen the situation.
That's because the increased complexity introduces new and unpredictable
behaviours and makes the whole system more likely to fail than
it was in the first place.
Friday, April 21, 2006
I've been closely following the efforts
of indigenous peoples in Caledonia, Ontario to save some of their
land from development. They've occupied the land where houses
are scheduled to be built along with large groups of supporters,
and they've already
fought off attacks by police. The situation seems to be escalating
rapidly into one of the largest confrontations between indigenous
peoples and the Canadian government in recent decades. Already
solidarity actions are being taken by other groups, with Mohawks
seizing and blockading the passenger and freight rail lines east
of Toronto.
It's been alleged that 3000 soldiers have been placed
around the perimeter of the conflict. This wouldn't be surprising,
considering the use of large numbers of soldiers at other conflicts
between indigenous peoples and the occupational government of
Canada at Oka
and Gustafsen
Lake. In fact, at Gustafsen Lake the Canadian
government deployed landmines against indigenous protestors
-- at the same time as it was lobbying to have landmines banned
internationally!
It all reminds me of what Derrick Jensen says about all governments
being governments of occupation:
A lot of times I talk about and write about
how the government is a government of occupation, and how the
culture is a culture of occupation. Of course my American Indian
friends all ask me what took me so long to figure this one out.
What s a government of occupation do? It moves in and attempts
to extract resources and doesn't care about communities. And this
is what this culture has done from the beginning.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
I've long felt great skepticism towards hybrid vehicles as any
kind of solution to peak oil, because advocates of hybrid and
more gas-efficient vehicles often ignore the massive amounts of
energy required to create any new vehicle.
Now a study two years in the making has examined all of the energy
consumed during the manufacture, lifetime, and disposal of various
automobiles. And it has concluded that hybrid
vehicles actually consume more energy than their non-hybrid counterparts.
This is partly because of the complexity of hybrids and the inclusion
of high-tech, lightweight materials in their construction:
For example, the Honda Accord Hybrid has an
Energy Cost per Mile of $3.29 while the conventional Honda Accord
is $2.18. Put simply, over the "Dust to Dust" lifetime
of the Accord Hybrid, it will require about 50 percent more energy
than the non-hybrid version.
One of the reasons hybrids cost more than non-hybrids
is the manufacture, replacement and disposal of such items as
batteries, electric motors (in addition to the conventional engine),
lighter weight materials and complexity of the power package.
And while many consumers and environmentalists
have targeted sport utility vehicles because of their lower fuel
economy and/or perceived inefficiency as a means of transportation,
the energy cost per mile shows at least some of that disdain is
misplaced.
For example, while the industry average of
all vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2005 was $2.28 cents per mile,
the Hummer H3 (among most SUVs) was only $1.949 cents per mile.
That figure is also lower than all currently offered hybrids and
Honda Civic at $2.42 per mile.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Steven F. Scharff has retyped and contributed an old Extension
service primer on soap making, which includes a number of recipies.
There is also some interesting background information. For example,
one of the reasons that people stopped making their own soap is
that as cities grew they switched to coal instead of wood for
heating, and burning coal doesn't produce the wood ash for lye
you need to make soap.
You can read the primer here
online. (Thanks, Steven!)
There are rolling
blackouts in Texas right now because it's so hot. And
it's only April.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
According to a recent study cockroaches
are inherently democratic. They use sophisticated "chemical
and tactile" communications and have a participatory decision-making
method. The linked article also touches on how similar methods
allow many social animals to make decisions about things like
group size without actually requiring leaders.
Ran Prieur posted a link
yesterday about one
man who concluded that he gained three minutes of life for every
minute he spends walking. I decided to do the math for my
own life.
I use biking more than walking to get around, so I'm going to
compare that. Most days right now I need to travel to a site about
10 kilometres away from where I live. It takes me about 25 minutes
to bike that distance. It takes the car drivers 10 minutes to
drive the same trip ( it really takes them longer because they
then have to park their cars somewhere and walk instead of locking
up right beside the doors). So each trip I take 15 minutes longer,
and each day spend a total of 30 minutes traveling that I would
not have to if I drove a car, or about 15 "extra" hours
each month.
I spent a couple of minutes looking at insurance rates and different
car
expenses calculators, and concluded that my annual expenses
for owning an operating a car would be around $8200 (CDN) at the
barest minimum, whereas my bike costs less than $200 per year.
The difference is about $666 (oooh!) per month. Since I am saving
that money by riding my bike for an "extra" 15 hours,
I'll divide the monthly cash by the time. The math shows that
compared to my car driving counterparts, I am effectively
being paid $44 an hour to ride my bike for those
"extra" hours. And even if you ignore the extra hours
and just look at the total amount of time I spend biking I would
get paid $22 an hour. (Plus riding my bike is way more fun!)
And furthermore, this
article from the Seattle Times suggests that people who do
intense exercise several times a week live something like 3.7
years longer than they would otherwise. That's 32,500 hours.
So let's assume that when I wasn't riding my bike I just sat
at home writing things on the internet. And let's assume that
I kept this pattern for the next 40 years. If I biked all year
(which I do) I would bike 780 extra hours per year, or 31,200
hours in 40 years. That means that I would get all of the "extra"
time back from a longer lifespan.
We can also take into account that I wouldn't actually save those
$44 per hour into my bank account -- rather, I would just work
less and not "make" the money in the first place. Each
year I would save a total of $8000. Assuming I had a job that
I paid me $10 per hour, I could now work 800 fewer hours per year.
That means in our 40 year period I would save at least 32,000
hours of my life by biking (again, ignoring the time that I would
spend commuting to work, stressing over work, eating less healthy
food because I would have less time to prepare it, etc.).
So add the extra time from not working, and the extra time from
living longer, and I get two minutes back for every extra
minute I spend biking. Plus the general other benefits
of enjoying it more, being in better health, and hearing the birds
sing in the morning instead of a car radio. And people ask why
I bike so far!
Update: You can also look at this from the opposite
perspective. That is, if I decided to drive a car for that 20
minute commute every day I would lose those tens of thousands
of hours instead of gaining them. So that if I do the math for
that (63,200 hours in 40 years, or 4.3 hours per day) I would
actually lose thirteen minutes from my life for every
minute I spent driving. Which is even more compelling
and horrifying to me.
Monday, April 17, 2006
In a bit of news I find generally creepy, DARPA is working on
a way
to track "terrorists" by their smells [bad link has been fixed]:
The Pentagon's fringe science arm wants to
keep track of potential enemies-of-the-state in every way imaginable:
not just by sight, or by sound, or by their e-mail; but by their
smell, as well.
Darpa's "Unique Signature Detection Project
(formerly known as the Odortype Detection program)" aims
to sniff out genetic markers in "human emanations (urine,
sweat, etc.)" that "can be used to identify and distinguish
specific high-level-of-interest individuals within groups of enemy
troops."
"Recent experimental results" show
that chemical compounds in a mouse's "urinary" scent
produces an "odortype" that's unique to each individual
rodent, Darpa observes in its original solicitation for the project.
"Although experimental data for humans is far less quantitative,"
the agency is hoping that a similarly "genetically determined,"
"exploitable chemosignal" can be found in people, too.
[...] the agency wants to know what "the impact of non-genetic
factors (e.g., diet, stress, health, age) [have] on the signal."
That could help figure out how to "robustly extract"
the signal "from a complex and varied chemical background."
In good news, high fuel costs are forcing the Canadian military
to reduce
its presence and operations in Alert, the nothern-most permanent
settlement in the world. Let's hope this is a continuing trend
around the world in coming years. They can't keep remote military
bases operating forever, and such sites will be the first to wither
away as empire recedes.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Ales Korosec writes in to reccomend Self
Sufficientish, a great internet resource with information
on self-sufficiency topics. I've added their how
to on making sheets of newspaper into pots to the DIY
Recycling index. (Something they don't mention is that you
should never use the colour pages for mulching or general garden
use. Although black inks are often soy-based, the colour inks
sometimes contain heavy metals.)
As I side note, I'm actually trying to avoid the phrase "self-sufficiency"
in favour of "community-sufficiency". For me to be "self-sufficient"
would be very difficult, time-consuming, improbable, and generally
lonely. In contrast, if what I have to do is make sure that my
community includes people with skills and experience,
then my community-sufficiency is relatively easy, time-saving,
attainable, and much more fun and sociable.
In a town where I used to live there was a weekly food exchange,
in which each person or (or subgroup) in a large group of people
made a large batch of a particular food. Humus, bread, sprouts,
whatever. And then they would get together on every Sunday and
trade all of their foods with everyone else in the group so that
everyone had some of everything for the week. It's easy to work
on your community-sufficiency now, because you can start with
things like that!
Friday, April 14, 2006
Bob Welsh writes in about all terrain wheelchairs that might
be useful for people with disabilities in a collapse context:
I do know some folks who had very rugged "all-terrain"
wheelchairs that they used to essentially go mountain-biking.
These wheelchairs were pretty amazing. Here's a link to one such
wheelchair: http://www.titaniumarts.com/content/handcycles/press.html.
I also remember from my earlier days in a wheelchair
that the magazine addressing many mobility-related issues well
was "Sports 'n Spokes". They have a website, but most of their
info is available only in print via subscription. Here's one of
the pages with a variety of links on equipment and resources:
http://www.pvamagazines.com/resources/index.php?pub=0
Related: Transport in a collapse context Q&A.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
The Soil and Health Library
is a simply massive online collection of important, hard-to-get
and out-of-print books on soil, ecological and human health.
It's broken down into several sections. One section is the
Holistic Agriculture Library. I really like Soil
Microorganisms and Higher Plants by N.A. Krasil'nikov, which
is one of the classic old texts of soil ecology. (It's a bit dense,
but full of really important information.) There are also books
on what civilization has done to the soil, such as the oft-cited
Topsoil and Civilization.
Some of these, like Topsoil and Civilization, will bring up a
request for you to put in your email address to get a copy due
to copyright issues. If you are worried about getting spam, you
can always use a free disposable email address from a service
like Spam Gourmet.
In the health section you can also find, among many other things,
a review of and excerpts from Weston A. Price's classic study
of health in uncivilized peoples, Nutrition
and Physical Degeneration.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
This is the first in a series of reviews of books and tools.
I'll put up an index when I review couple more. If know of or
have something you'd like me to review, please email
me.
Price: US$20
Tool type: Portable hand saw (cuts wood or PVC
pipe)
Applications: Camping, cutting in tight spaces,
portable tool kits, wilderness survival situations
Manufacturer: Supreme
Products
Rating: Excellent
In this review we look at the Pocket Chainsaw and compare
it to a generic single-strand wire saw.
I first heard about this saw when a friend told me an anecdote
about a ground of wilderness medics who used it several of them
to fell enough trees to make a landing pad for a medivac helicopter.
Obviously I don't want to go around making clearcuts, but I was
fascinated with the idea of such an effective and portable saw.
Read the rest of this
review (with photographs).
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
I've found a couple of things to add to the DIY
Recycling index. Teaching
Aids at Low Cost (TALC) has some instructions online on how
to make
a fly trap out of used pop bottles for use in areas where
flies may spread infectious dangerous diseases. That's available
in PDF format
as well. They have another PDF file which outlines three
re-uses for plastic pop bottles. One is the fly trap mentioned
(with different detail), one is solar disinfection of water (which
I outlined in more detail here in
Tools for Gridcrash) and one is an asthma inhaler.
Monday, April 10, 2006
There's a very informative article in today's Salon on the
horrific international dumping of electronic waste in the "third
world" :
In Taizhou's outdoor workshops, people bang
apart the computers and toss bits of metal into brick furnaces
that look like chimneys. Split open, the electronics release a
stew of toxic materials -- among them beryllium, cadmium, lead,
mercury and flame retardants -- that can accumulate in human blood
and disrupt the body's hormonal balance. Exposed to heat or allowed
to degrade, electronics' plastics can break down into organic
pollutants that cause a host of health problems, including cancer.
Wearing no protective clothing, workers roast circuit boards in
big, uncovered woklike pans to melt plastics and collect valuable
metals. Other workers sluice open basins of acid over semiconductors
to remove their gold, tossing the waste into nearby streams. Typical
wages for this work are about $2 to $4 a day.
[...] In the southern Chinese village of Guiyu,
many of the workers who dismantle high-tech electronics live only
steps from their jobs. Their children wander over piles of burnt
wires and splash in puddles by the banks of rivers that have become
dumping grounds for discarded computer parts. The pollution has
been so severe that Guiyu's water supply has been undrinkable
since the mid-'90s. Water samples taken in 2005 found levels of
lead and other metals 400 to 600 times what international standards
consider safe.
It's a good reminder about the real cost of a highly technological
civilization.
The article also notes that many of the computers that are sent
to China and other countires for dumping don't have their hard
drives wiped, meaning that they have potentially compromising
information. I wonder if some day a Chinese group will get together
and blackmail western corporations using that found information
in revenge for making the groundwater undrinkable.
Sunday, April 9, 2006
Not terribly surprising, but there
it is in the Houston Chronicle.
Thursday, April 6, 2006
Here are 10
classic bushcraft books by Richard Graves available online.
Subjects include Ropes
& Cords, Huts
& Thatching, Campcraft,
Food
& Water, Firemaking,
Knots
& Lashings, Tracks
& Lures, Snares
& Traps, Travel
& Gear, and Time
& Direction. There are great illustrations.
Wednesday, April 5, 2006
There's a very good and very relevant article by Acornista in
the latest Earth First! Journal on how peak oil means peak opportunity
for taking down civilization:
We don’t have to panic or lose hope in
the face of this scenario. What might oil decline mean for anti-capitalist
unrest and Earth First! agitation? Be imaginative! The heightened
vulnerability of dominant institutions offers extraordinary potential
for social insurrections, ecological uprisings and tactical ecotage.
The advent of oil decline should embolden us to step up action
to stop our culture’s worst oil-enabled abuses against the
Earth, from mountaintop removal mining and forest clearcutting
to industrial agriculture, suburban sprawl and resource wars.
In order to take full advantage of this opportunity
to bring down oil-based civilization, we must work to minimize
the ability of Earth-destroying industries to adapt to fossil
fuel scarcity. This means defending wilderness and undeveloped
areas—the Arctic Wildlife Refuge; coastal and offshore marine
zones; highland hotspots like the Green River Valley and Bridger-Teton
National Forest in Wyoming, Colorado’s Roan Plateau, Montana’s
Rocky Mountain Front and the Otero Mesa in New Mexico—from
new oil and natural gas speculation and extraction. Globally,
it means doing more to collaborate with and support allies—from
Colombia to Nigeria to Iraq—who are at the frontlines of
physical struggles against neocolonialist oil exploiters and the
militaries that shield them.
But our foremost task is to fight the ultra-dirty
oil substitutes that industries are gearing up to implement. All
of these will require huge investments of capital before they
become economically viable. All will demand the creation of a
completely new infrastructure before production and delivery can
begin. Many will necessitate extensive legislative and diplomatic
attention before they can be implemented in accordance with state,
national and international law. And some depend upon significant
adaptation on the part of consumers.
Every one of these new sources of energy is
vulnerable at some crucial point. By studying the economic, political,
legal, technological and even social requirements that these new
industries will have to meet, we can proactively target them where
they are weakest and prevent them from establishing a firm foothold.
Read the whole
article here.
Tuesday, April 4, 2006
I was just working on a how-to for making grocery bags into cordage
for the DIY Recycling
index when I came across a few neat projects for using shopping
bags to crochet useful things.
This
page from Marlo's Crochet Corner gives instructions on how
to make shopping bag "yarn." You can also find instructions
on how to make a tote
bag, and elsewhere online instructions
for making sandals. (See also Learn
to Knit and Crochet.)
Monday, April 3, 2006
You may have heard second-hand reports about University of Texas
prof Eric Pianka supposedly
advocating the extermination of 90% of humanity by an ebola-like
virus, and about his speech advocating it receiving a standing
ovation from the assembled scientists.
As soon as I read the report, and the reactionary right-wing
editorials slamming him and other "leftist" academics,
I got a rather fishy feeling about the whole affair. (It reminded
me for some reason of the right-wing smear campaign against Ward
Churchill last year.) When I did a search of Google News for
"Pianka" I found a clot of angry editorials from right-wing
and christian sources (which commonly included quotations from
the Bible or links to "save a child from being aborted")
all based on the same original article by Forrest Mims. Mims makes
many claims about what Pianka said, but an actual transcript or
secondary source doesn't seem to be available.
I'm pretty skeptical of the source article. Mims puts a major
spin on his reporting, and there's nothing "neutral"
about his point of view. Mims himself is apparently a creationist
a grudge against the idea of evolution -- not exactly the best
person to report on the subject of ecology. And in the only
response by Pianka currently available, Pianka implies that
Mims is a "jealous rival" attempting to slander him
because of an award Pianka was accepting when giving his controversial
lecture.
We don't know what Pianka actually said, but I'm going to assume
that anything Mims reported is highly questionable until we hear
from another source. What we do know from his direct statements
is that he feels that the planet's ecology is being destroyed
by large numbers of humans, and that reducing human numbers is
essential for the survival of the planet.
So I'll address the issue of population reduction directly.
Deilberate population reduction for ecological reasons has two
main problems. First of all, effective and deliberate population
reduction can only be carried out through fascism or totalitarianism
by controlling the birth rate or via mass murder. That's clearly
not going to create a better world, and any "rogue scientists"
creating viruses won't necessarily have much success, partly since
viruses are prone to mutation.
But more to the point, population isn't even the main ecological
problem. Massive consumption is, which is facilitated by technology
and industrial infrastructure. By industrial civilization. People
in "third world" countries consume only a tiny fraction
of what first worlders do, and so any effort to reduce consumption
and ecological impact should be focused on reducing the number
of people living like first worlders, not on reducing global population.
As long as the industrial structure is still intact, consumption
will continue to grow until civilization collapses. If 90% of
people die and civilization is still functioning each of those
remaining people would have a greater share or resources per person,
and eventually consume more and more resources because they would
have the opportunity to do so. The remaining population would
like have better immune systems and may be more resistant to any
future plagues. And their population would continue to grow, because
they would still be an agricultural civilization. So it's not
really a long term solution of any kind.
Update: There's a discussion
of this issue over at Anthropik.
Sunday, April 2, 2006
I've created a new index for DIY
Recycling projects and instructions.
Do-it-yourself recycling is about modifying and reusing cheap
and widely available rubbish to meet our own needs.
Part of the appeal is simple waste-reduction. By modifying what
would otherwise be junk to meet my needs I can avoid buying something
else for the same purpose. Or if I have limited money, or in a
collapse context, I can make something useful I wouldn't otherwise
have. DIY recycling can use much less energy than full-blown industrial
recycling.
DIY recycling also allows us to keep materials in our own communities
instead of giving them right back to the corporate economy. Many
of us are hesitant to give a source of cheap raw materials to
an economy that isn't exactly renowned for making good, ethical
choices about what to do with those materials. As peak oil progresses,
militaries and corporations will no doubt have increasing demands
for all sorts of cheap raw materials and I'm not very inclined
to give them up once I have them in my hands.
Conventional recycling can give people a false sense of accomplishment.
Many people feel that by putting their blue box out on the curb
they are doing their part for the environment. In contrast, recycling
allows the system that is destroying the world to prolong itself,
and so it can even cause more damage in the long run. With DIY
recycling we take a greater personal level of responsibility for
our own waste, and acknowledge that recycling will not solve our
ecological problems.
DIY recycling is also an important part of deliberate industrial
decomposition, a subject I wrote about in Metal
theft and industrial decomposition.
Lastly, DIY recycling can be a highly creative, artistic, and
fulfilling practice. I find it very satisfying to solve a problem
by making junk into something useful. In addition, the products
of DIY recycling, such as the durable multyply shopping bag articles,
have the potential to be very beautiful.
I encourage you to take up DIY recycling yourself, and if you
have suggestions for projects please do write
in and let us know.
Go to the DIY Recycling
index.
If you grow your own food, or just grow plants indoors, you may
be interested in Four uses for yogurt
containers in seed-starting. It's my latest illustrated how-to,
and part of the DIY recycling
series.
Saturday, April 1, 2006
Completely incredible news from the New
York Times this morning:
President Bush made a surprise statement from
the White House lawn this morning, declaring that civilization
as we know it is about to collapse.
"I spent the last week wandering around
Mayan ruins with [Mexican President] Vincente Fox and [Canadian
Prime Minister] Steven Harper," Bush declared, "and
the irony wasn't lost on me. This civilization will collapse too,
just like them Mayans did."
Citing concerns like global warming, depleted
resources, and the highly controversial "peak oil" theory,
the President announced that "none of this will last much
longer."
"I urge the American people to give up
on civilization. The real lesson of New Orleans was that you can
not depend on your government or your civilization to take care
of you. You must meet your own needs as a community if you want
to thrive in the 21st century."
When questioned about this U-turn in public
policy, Bush explained that he had secretly felt this way all
along. "The unsustainable invasions, the callous use of resources,
the headlong plunge in increasing consumption, the constant government
corruption -- you don't think that was an accident, do you? I
was trying to get you to realize that you're better off getting
rid of civilization yourselves." He added, laughing, "Y'all
don't really think any government could seriously be that evil,
corrupt and incompetent all at the same time, do you?"
After the short press conference Bush declined
to board his presidential helicopter, and instead mounted a bicycle
piled with gear for the long trip to his Texas ranch. "Let's
all meet this same date next year at my solar-powered ranch and
hammer out some solutions. A big ol' conference, like." He
was followed by several members of the secret service also on
bicycles.
The early response from Americans has been
varied. In Texas, some local citizens are shutting down oil rigs
and placing windmills on the towers, claiming that if civilization
is going to collapse anyway there is no point in "killing
us all by burning the last of the oil."
A brief statement from the Democratic party,
however, called Bush's assertions "absurd", and claimed
that he had "failed to take into account recent advances
in renewable power generation."
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