In the Wake: January 2006 Blog Archive

CNN Money has an article reporting an effort to predict the impact of various world events on oil prices:

Hermitage Capital's Bill Browder, has outlined six scenarios that could take oil up to a downright terrifying $262 a barrel. [...]

To come up with some likely scenarios in the event of an international crisis, his team performed what's known as a regression analysis, extrapolating the numbers from past oil shocks and then using them to calculate what might happen when the supply from an oil-producing country was cut off in six different situations. The fall of the House of Saud seems the most far-fetched of the six possibilities, and it's the one that generates that $262 a barrel.

More realistic -- and therefore more chilling -- would be the scenario where Iran declares an oil embargo a la OPEC in 1973, which Browder thinks could cause oil to double to $131 a barrel. Other outcomes include an embargo by Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez ($111 a barrel), civil war in Nigeria ($98 a barrel), unrest and violence in Algeria ($79 a barrel) and major attacks on infrastructure by the insurgency in Iraq ($88 a barrel).

I think their numbers are misleadingly precise based on their method of guessing. There is also a certain amount of fearmongering going on, like in the opening line, "Be afraid. Be very afraid." But it's still an interesting set of scenarios.

I think one of the reasons that kids are apparently getting dumber (see post below) is that so much of their time is taken up with school, TV, and video games and diversions that inhibit their ability to creatively play on their own and with other people.

To help encourage creative play, Toys from Trash is a great site about improvising kids' toys from things that would otherwise be thrown away. I think it's really neat because projects like this require you to actually understand how things work (instead of just snapping together a Lego set that is designed to make only one thing).

Many of the projects hear are also fun for adults, and even help build useful improvisation skills for a collapse context. For example, the simple handpump, simple generator, and the button wheel car. There aren't step-by-step instructions for every toy, but making something based on an incomplete picture is also a pretty handy ability.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Basic cognitive skills are on the decline according to a recent study in the UK. This blows a "gaping hole" in the commonly held idea that people in "developed" countries are getting smarter and smarter, sometimes called the Flynn effect. According to the article:

Far from getting cleverer, our 11-year-olds are, in fact, less “intelligent” than their counterparts of 30 years ago. Or so say a team who are among Britain’s most respected education researchers.

After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King’s College London confidently declares: “The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years’ worth in the past two decades.” [...]

In the easiest question, children are asked to watch as water is poured up to the brim of a tall, thin container. From there the water is tipped into a small fat glass. The tall vessel is refilled. Do both beakers now hold the same amount of water? “It’s frightening how many children now get this simple question wrong,” says scientist Denise Ginsburg, Shayer’s wife and another of the research team.

In other words, many of the questions in the study's test involve the basic skills that would allow someone to, for example, improvise a water pump out of available materials.

In 1976 a third of boys and a quarter of girls scored highly in the tests overall; by 2004, the figures had plummeted to just 6% of boys and 5% of girls. These children were on average two to three years behind those who were tested in the mid-1990s.

“It is shocking,” says Adey. “The general cognitive foundation of 11 and 12-year-olds has taken a big dip. There has been a continuous decline in the last 30 years and it is carrying on now.” [...]

But what exactly is being lost? Is it really general intelligence or simply a specific understanding of scientific concepts such as volume and density? Both, say the researchers. The tests reveal both general intelligence — “higher level brain functions” — and a knowledge that is “the bedrock of science and maths” says Ginsburg. In fact it’s nothing less than the ability of children to handle new, difficult ideas. [...]

Ginsburg says parents too can do their bit. “When did children stop playing with mud, plasticine and Meccano and start playing with Xboxes and computer games?” she asks.

Children don't need to be taught basic facts about the behaviour of the physical world as the article suggests. They learn themselves when given the opportunity. When I interviewed psychologist Chellis Glendinning she told me that the "human psyche is ... built to mirror the environment. We were built to mirror the sky, and the wind, and the seasons, and then to relate to them in their language."

Our minds build a model of the world around us based on what we perceive consciously and unconsciously. So if our experience of the world is based on television or video games, we will expect the world to follow those same rules. If we play an arcade game then we learn that success is attained by performing rapid repetitive actions to accumulate imaginary abstract points (like money!). If we play a 3D shoot-em-up game we learn that progress is made by moving along a set path in a world that gives the illusion of having many choices, and by shooting any character we come into conflict with along the way.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

I'm working on a few other projects, but I'll be back to regular posting on Monday.

I didn't like a lot of the analogy in this recent article on Live Science, though unfortunately I don't have time to write about that right now even though the subject is interesting. I think that the monkey "police" sound more like discussion group moderators than cops. Hopefully someone else will take this and run with it:

Not having guns or nightsticks, they leverage their group seniority, craft intimidating reputations and count on good voter turnout.

Take the primate police out of a group, as researchers did, and the rest get more violent and aggressive. Interaction between cliques drops significantly.

"It's not just that violence goes up, but a whole range of behavior involving a whole range of individuals suddenly disappears," said David Krakauer of the Santa Fe Institute. "It's like saying you take police out of human society, and all of a sudden people stop going to the opera, or something more important."

The study, detailed in today's issue of the journal Nature, also uncovered a complex monkey "voting" system for appointing the peacekeepers. [...]

Once elected, police monkeys earn certain rights and responsibilities, one of which is to peacefully settles conflicts. They usually do this by stepping between combatants or chasing bad monkeys away. Very rarely do they need to dish out a whooping, but their actions are always respected by the group.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

The SolarAid is a hearing aid designed and built by Godisa Technologies, a Botswana company founded to make low-cost hearing aids for the developing world. The SolarAid system combines a small hearing aid and a lightweight solar charger; Godisa developed the first No. 13 rechargeable button battery for the system. Godisa is Africa's only hearing aid manufacturer, and the only one in the world making hearing aids specifically for the sub-Saharan Africa environment.

The SolarAid, including the solar charger and an extra pair of batteries, sells for less than $100, and is built to last at least two to three years. But, as low cost as that is, Godisa wants to do even better: they want to make the design free to everyone -- essentially, to go open source -- if the Botswana government will let them.

Though large-scale industrial technology will never be sustainable whatever good purpose it is used for, it's obvious that creative folks can build a lot of adaptive technology for people with disabilities based on the electronics that are already floating around and readily available.

Monday, January 23, 2006

ENERGY usage in Victoria surged 45 per cent above normal weekend levels yesterday, as air-conditioners were switched on to cope with the heatwave.

Forecasts of more hot weather this week, and power shortages yesterday in South Australia, have raised the spectre of blackouts in Victoria. [...]

And of course much of Australia's electricity comes from coal. So climate change leads to increased energy consumption which leads to more climate change and more consumption until it reaches a breaking point, and collapses.

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Despite having vast oil supplies, Iraq has been unable to supply its own gasoline and refined oil products due to refinery damage (caused during the invasion) and persistent attacks on oil infrastructure by insurgents. Iraq responded by importing gasoline and refined oil. Now it owes more than a billion dollars and oil exporters in Turkey have agreed to stop sending refined oil products to Iraq. Demand for gas in Baghdad recently increased by 30% because of the increased use of neighbourhood generators. Constant attacks on electrical infrastructure and limited availability of fuel for larger diesel generators means that electricity delivery in urban areas is unreliable and drastically reduced.

As Peak Oil progresses and oil becomes less available and more expensive it will become increasingly attractive and effective for "insurgents" of various stripes to target electrical and oil infrastructure.

Some very creative folks have come up with a way to modify a disposible camera to make an "RFID Zapper" which will permanently disable RFID chips. They write:

We have to expect to be surrounded by RFID-Tags almost everywhere within the near future, and they will serve many different purposes. The benefits and risks of this technology and it's use are already being discussed. However, there will be atempts to use RFID-Tags to establish constant surveiliance and to further threaten and compromise the privacy of customers (and citizens and even non-citizens, when gouvernments start to use RFID-Tags like the german gouvernment already did).
To defend yourself against such measures, you might want a small, simple and relatively appealing gadget to permanently deactivate RFID-Tags around you, e.g., to deactivate RFID-Tags in recently bought clothes or books without damaging those.

Their complete plans aren't up yet but will be soon, apparently. For more on RFIDs, see SpyChips.com and the RFID article from Wikipedia.

A couple of people reading my article Deconstructing 'Urban vs. Rural Sustainability' seemed to conclude that I'm absolutely and universally opposed to living in cities or suburbs during collapse. That's not the case. My concern was debunking the idea that rural places were doomed to "blow away like dust," not to say that all cities or suburbs are a horrible place to be in collapse. I think that many of them will be, eventually, but that isn't the point of this article. I actually do work to create and maintain community gardens in cities and I think there are definitely some compelling reasons to consider living in cities and suburbs during collapse -- although many of my reasons for doing so are somewhat different then Hemenway's. I'm working on an essay now that will explore some of those reasons and look at the urban/rural/wilderness continuum in a collapse context.

Satuday, January 21, 2006

Friday, January 20, 2006

Suppose you could erase bad memories from your mind. Suppose, as in a recent movie, your brain could be wiped clean of sad and traumatic thoughts.

That is science fiction. But real-world scientists are working on the next best thing. They have been testing a pill that, when given after a traumatic event like rape, may make the resulting memories less painful and intense.

Will it work? It is too soon to say. Still, it is not far-fetched to think that this drug someday might be passed out along with blankets and food at emergency shelters after disasters like the tsunami or Hurricane Katrina.

I can't help but think that at best such a pill would be a band-aid solution, and at worst an excuse to justify further trauma. It also brings to mind the study of epigenetics which suggests that the experiences of your ancestors will be passed down to you via DNA for many generations -- regardless of how many pills you take.

Wow, I can't find any enthusiasm myself for this "miracle drug/pill". My first thoughts were of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and the slogan "A gramme is better than a damn" referring to the mantra that folks should take they're allocation of Soma (drug) rather than be unhappy.

“SOMA - A drug that both tranquilizes and intoxicates without hangovers or side effects. It provides citizens of the Utopia with escape from self and surroundings. The word comes from the Sanskrit language of ancient India. It means both an intoxicating drink used in the old Vedic religious rituals there and the plant from whose juice the drink was made- a plant whose true identity we don't know.” From Barron's Booknotes.

If this drug becomes a reality, then of course it will make it much more acceptable to torture or abuse people because “there’s a ready cure!” It’s for this same reason that I hope medical science does not come up with a cure for cancer; because if they do, then that’ll give those in power the go-ahead to pollute even more excessively than they do now – with no danger of causing deaths (for rich humans anyway).

I can see this pill being carried by all “authorities” (police, soldiers, judges, school principals, prison guards, etc.) so that they can “erase” any negative effects of their actions.

Sure, there will be some cases where people are truly helped by this drug, but as Jerry Mander indicates in “In the Absence of the Sacred - The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations” (great book BTW): a technology shouldn’t be evaluated solely on it’s benefits, but rather on the balance between benefits and risk/costs, and also on how much the technology benefits you relative to benefiting others (especially your “enemies”). If you are benefit a little while others benefit a lot means it’s a net loss for you (from the competitive point of view).

I kept thinking about my ex, D, whose family had a small farm in the Virginia mountains. And the Depression was a great big NOTHING for the area.
D's family raised dairy and beef cows, entirely on grass, no inputs needed. They were fine during the Depression, as were their neighbors. They had a creek, a smoke house, a cold cellar, fresh milk and cheese and beef and eggs and fish plus vegetables, walnuts, apples... But they didn't have a mortgage and owed nothing to any banks, cash only for everything.

In this case the problem wasn't a distance from civilization. Rather in other cases the problem was proximity to civilization, and the accompanying dependence on the city (mortgages, and the like) which caused problems for farmers.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

For one, I'm going to continue the question and answer series, but I'm going to slow the pace slightly to three a week instead of once a day so that I can continue them sustainably on my current schedule. After I finish the first ten questions, I'm going to go back and integrate the various reader comments I've gotten into the answers. Then I'll continue with the series, but I'm also working on:

11) I'm not sure if this is more appropriate for a q&a or a section of the booklet, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on post-collapse survival in a winter environment. These days, we have fancy clothes, indoor heating, and what not. We may perhaps venture outside for a short ski or somesuch, but are nowhere near suited for long-term winter survival. I went to a free Snow Camping 101 class today at my local REI that went over the basics of making igloos, quinzhees, dugloos, and snow caves, but I'd love to see more. Also inherit in winter survival is, of course, producing and storing food.

11.5) Clothing, I think, is an important part of this question. With our current mass produce, mass consume society, even if collapse came tomorrow the survivors of our generation and perhaps even the next would have enough "technical" clothing to survive (assuming retail centers and factories didn't implode), but this obviously isn't sustainable. Seven generations from now, post-collapse children will still need to live through harsh winter conditions. Hopefully by then, humanity will have reclaimed the practice of growing cotton and weaving it into clothing (something I know nothing about), but I can't see that being enough. I'd
love to see a discussion of using animal skin, foliage, etc for not only additional clothing layers, but for blankets and added insulation in shelter walls.

12) What does Collapse hold for those of us with prescription glasses? Stockpiling is of course a wise idea, but not sustainable. Will those of us who rely on glasses (or have any disabilities that require dependence on products of civilization) be eventually wiped out? Collapse will favor those without, but will it destroy us? Is this simply the sad truth of "survival of the fittest"? (Do you believe in survival of the fittest?)

13) This question leads into another -- do you think, post-collapse, we will form social groups or live individually? Obviously having some sort of tribe to care for the disabled and elderly would be a great help.

14) And now for a more broad, perhaps philosophical, question: Do you trust emotion or reason for survival? Decisions often have to be made in a fraction of a second, not leaving enough time for much thought. Do you think one should trust the gut feeling or what logic/preparedness/training tell us?

A Korean government-backed agency is working on police and army robots to be in action within 5 years, according to The Korean Times:

By the 2010s, Korea is expecting to see robots assisting police and the military, patrolling the neighborhoods and going on recon missions on the battlefield. ...

"If the robots prove to be viable technically and commercially, we will be able to begin developing them late next year,'' said Lee Ho-gil, head of the center.

When completed, the outdoor security robots will be able to make their night watch rounds and even chase criminals, according to Lee.

The government also seeks to build combat robots. They will take the shape of a dog or a horse, with six or eight legs or wheels.

In my recent article Deconstructing "Rural vs. Urban Sustainability I made reference to people moving into the country from the city during the Depression. Here is the text for my source of that from William R. Catton's Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change:

The fiscal collapse had an even more important implication than this for our ecological understanding of the human predicament. That implication appears in the generalized Depression that followed. Consider the farm population in America. Like almost everyone else, farm families were compelled, by the repercussions of bank failures and the ramifications of general panic, to cut their consumer expenditures. Farmers also often had to allow their land, their buildings, and their equipment to deteriorate for lack of money to pay for maintenance and repairs. Many farms were encumbered by mortgages—mortgages which were foreclosed by banks that now desperately needed the payments farmers could not afford to make. (Bank failures were even more common in rural regions than in major cities.) In spite of all these difficulties, however, the farm population in America ceased declining (as it had been doing) and increased between 1929 and 1933 by more than a million. The long-term trend of movement out of farm niches and into urban niches was reversed during the Great Depression.

Niches everywhere were being constricted by the Depression. However, the urbanizing trend that had been occurring as a result of industrial growth in the cities and from elimination of farm niches by mechanization of agriculture was disrupted by this economic breakdown. At the heart of the reversal was a simple fact: the nature of' farming in the 1930s was still such that, whatever else they had to give up, there was still truth in the cliche that "the farm family can always eat." Other (non-flood-producing) occupational groups that now had to fall back (like the farmers) on carrying capacities of reduced scope could find themselves in much more dire straits.

If we read it rightly, then, we can see the differential impact of the Depression upon farm versus non-farm populations as a cogent indicator of the dependence of the total population on previously achieved enlargements of the scope of application of' Liebig's law With breakdown of the mechanisms of exchange, various segments of a modern nation had to revert as best they could to living on carrying capacities again limited by locally least abundant resources, rather than extended by access to less scarce resources from elsewhere. Although scope reduction hurt everyone, rural folk had local resources to fall back upon; urban people, in contrast, had so detached themselves as to have almost ceased to recognize the indispensability of those resources. For reasons we shall examine in a moment, economic hard times hit the farms sooner than they hit the cities, but in the final scope-reducing crunch the farmers turned out to have an advantage sufficient to interrupt a clear trend of urbanization.

Related to the copper story from yesterday, it's worth noting that there may only be 12-25 years of silver left based on current usage and extraction patterns. Which is even less then oil. Silver is commonly used in luxury applications, but is very important for the manufacture of computer and other electronic devices. There is also a shortage of tungsten which is used to make incandescent lightbulb filaments (though those are falling out of use anyway for fluorescents), but tungsten also has various other industrial and aerospace applications.

It is true that many of these metals could be substituted for in the event of shortages, but the substitutes would be imperfect and cause additional strain on industrial civilization as it faces declining energy supplies and increasingly ecological and climate collapses.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Copper is used in everything from automobiles to ordnance. Copper allows electricity to be generated, transported and conducted to the various outlets in a modern home. Copper is also relatively scarce compared to other metals like iron or aluminum that make up a good portion of the earth itself. So copper serves as an excellent metallic bellwether for potential future resource scarcity, according to a group of researchers who compiled data on its extraction, use, recycling and discard to estimate whether there is enough copper available to make a developed standard of living available to all the world's people. The short answer is: no.

I was actually surprised to learn that people in the US use 238 kilograms (525 pounds) per capita of copper.

After reading Q&A #1 Lierre Keith (who I've interviewed before) writes in to comment on teeth. She writes:

"As for dentistry, our collective teeth problems are caused by agricultural foods and especially industrial foods. Hunter-gatherers typically have long, strong bones, well-formed faces and jaws, teeth that fit, and no tooth decay. The moment people start doing agriculture, they shrink, their bones get brittle and tooth decay becomes a fact of life. Enter industrial foods (denatured grains, white sugar, vegetable oil) and you've got epidemics of degenerative diseases and tooth decay. We all accept it as normal because it's everywhere around us, but our real birthright is perfect health. Another way to say this is, we have paleolithic bodies but we feed them neolithic foods and expect them to function? I've known people who switched from the typical American diet (white sugar, white flour, polyunsaturated oil, factory-fed animal products) to a diet based on traditional principles (raw animal fats, lots of meat and bones from pasture-rasied animals, a diet that's rich in minerals and the fats we need to absorb them) and had their teeth remineralize! Cavities stopped decaying and sealed over. So it can be done. Anyone whose intrigued should read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price, or go to the website http://www.westonaprice.org."

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

I've had a quadrupling of site traffic since the weekend and a corresponding increase in email. I'm trying to catch up on it, so please don't be offended if I don't respond right away. All of the email has been constructive and thoughtful, so thank you.

8) Condoms?

I have two answers. One is stock up while you can. However, latex condoms expire, and petroleum based consumables are only going to get harder to get, and eventually latex condoms will probably be difficult to get. Latex production is certainly not sustainable, though that obviously doesn't stop latex from being made now.

So the other answer is that you can make your own, but not out of latex. Some of the first condoms were made (and some still are made) out of animal intestines -- specifically sheep intestines. Sheep intestines are just effective against pregnancy as latex condoms. Unfortunately, the sheep intestines have tiny pores which means that some small infectious organisms, especially viruses like HIV, can move through. So sheep intestine is not sufficiently effective against sexually transmitted infections (STIs). (Sources: Association of Reproductive Health Professionals condom page, Healthwise encyclopedia.)

Monday, January 16, 2006

7) Pipe tobacco! And Beer and Wine! What's life without some of the niceties?

I'll look briefly at tobacco, then discuss fermentation and distillation of alcohol, various uses of alcohol, and other kinds of food fermentation.

To start with, tobacco is an easy one. Although it isn't an essential, you can grow your own tobacco in most of North America. Plenty of online sources offer information about growing tobacco at home including the University of Florida Extension Service.You can order seeds from companies like Plantation House and The GreenWeb (though I'm not specifically recommending those sources) but if you can find seed from someone in your area it will be more suited to your climate and more likely to thrive. In general I can't really recommend tobacco as a priority since it is generally detrimental to your health, especially your lungs and teeth.

Wine and beer, and other alcohols, are actually quite easy to make and the alcohol has applications beyond drinking.

Radio4All is a grassroots project to share radical and activist radio programs via the internet. One of the shows I really like is Matt Soltys's "Healing the Earth," which has some great audio interviews with Derrick Jensen, George Draffan, Julian Darley and many others.

The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive, according to James Lovelock, the scientist and green guru who conceived the idea of Gaia - the Earth which keeps itself fit for life. [Emphasis mine.] [...]

Over the coming decades soaring temperatures will mean agriculture may become unviable over huge areas of the world where people are already poor and hungry; water supplies for millions or even billions may fail. Rising sea levels will destroy substantial coastal areas in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, at the very moment when their populations are mushrooming. Numberless environmental refugees will overwhelm the capacity of any agency, or indeed any country, to cope, while modern urban infrastructure will face devastation from powerful extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans last summer. [...]

And in today's Independent he writes: "We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of [CO2] emissions. The worst will happen ..."

It's pretty horrible to hear, but I think he may be right about what will happen if fossil fuel burning continues unhalted. The upside is that is enough people deliberately disable the fossil fuel infrastructure in their region a runaway greenhouse effect could still be avoided (although the window for that may be less than ten years long).

One of the most striking ideas in his book is that of "a guidebook for global warming survivors" aimed at the humans who would still be struggling to exist after a total societal collapse.

Hey, that's a great idea! Like some kind of manual for outliving civilization...

Saturday, January 14, 2006

When Urban vs. Rural Sustainability by Toby Hemenway started making the rounds on the internet a year ago, I thought that the article had a lot of shortcomings. But I was too busy illustrating Tools for Gridcrash to craft a response. Now, after conferring with a third generation organic family farmer for further insights into rural life, I'm going to share some of my thoughts and responses. --Aric McBay

Overall, the main point of Hemenway's article seems to be that if a major industrial crash occurred "the cities may be unpleasant," but that "the countryside may be far worse off." I'm certainly willing to engage in a discussion about that point, but in this case I think that Hemenway's arguments are based on a projection of his own personal and anecdotal experiences with country living on society at large, and on some serious misconceptions about the sustainability of the modern city. If his article was only a series of anecdotes about his own experiences with living in the country and the city, I wouldn't bother to respond to it. But I feel obligated to because many people don't seem to be seriously questioning the premises that lead him to suggest city in general is a better place to be in a hard crash.

Friday, January 13, 2006

6) How do I live if my work skills are too specialised and high-tech dependent?

First of all, consider how your current skills and specialization apply to a collapse context. If you are an electrical engineer you can scavenge parts and build windmills, bicycle generators, high-efficiency lights, and other tools that will be invaluable to many communities. If you are a mechanic you can dismantle cars and repurpose their components to make useful devices. If you are a microbiologist you can focus on water filtration, building the health of the soil and its organisms, and using bioremediation to deal with toxins and polluted land. If you are a librarian you can archive relevant information and books and make them accessible for use in your community.

Once you've identified how current specialization applies you can work on further developing those particular areas, by learning more and practicing those skills. So if you know about electronics in general, but don't know how to make a small low RPM generator, learn now and practice.

However, it's still a good idea to diversify your skill set to include skills like gardening, purifying water, preserving and storing food, building community, raising chickens, building a composting toilet, cooking without gas or electricity, making decisions as a group, foraging for food, getting around without cars, and first aid and wound care. Those kinds of non-industrial skills are useful for everyone in a collapse context.

So build on your current specialized skills while developing new and generalized ones. But remember that whatever skills you learn should be part of the broader context of your community. Look at the skills that the other people in your community have and try to develop skills that are complementary to them.

About 300 million Chinese drink unsafe water tainted by chemicals and other contaminants according to a new report from the Chinese government. A leading government official said the greatest non-drought threat to China's water resources, is chemical pollutants and other harmful substances that contaminate drinking supplies for 190 million people.

A recent nationwide survey found that about 90% of China's cities have polluted ground water, while millions of rural Chinese face risks from naturally occurring contaminants like arsenic and excess fluorine.

The report follows a massive chemical spill in northeastern China which dumped 100 tons of benzene and other carcinogenic chemicals into the Songhua River following an explosion at a petrochemical plant. Initially local officials tried to cover up the toxic spill which eventually forced shutoff of water in the major city of Harbin and later flowed into Russian territory.

"Disease is the bullet killing frogs, but climate change is pulling the trigger," said Pounds, lead study author and resident scientist at Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve.

"Global warming is wreaking havoc on amphibians and will cause staggering losses of biodiversity if we don't do something fast."

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Wind powered transport:

In terms of efficiency of transport the sailboat can exceeds even the bicycle, since in favourable winds the sailor requires only a minimal effort to travel. Sailboats can also be made out of available non-industrial materials (and also remnant resources) as they have been for countless millennia. A modern fiberglass or aluminum sailboat hull will also last for a long time, but there are countless designs for sailboats you can build yourself. See the links for homebuilt boats above, and also look at the very simple Firebug sailboat.

Hot on the heels of yesterday's text on transportation by foot, Claude Duhamel writes in with a great suggestion I didn't mention: barefooting. He points us to the Society for Barefoot Living, which has an amazing number of articles on the subject.

I go barefoot in the woods whenever I can, and it's great. Even in rather chilly weather a layer of reasonably dry leaves on the forest floor can make your toes surprisingly warm.

There are times and places obviously when you wouldn't want to or couldn't go barefoot. For example, if I was in an area where where I thought certain parasites (like hookworm and schistosomiasis) were present I would wear shoes since those parasites can enter the human body through the soles of the feet.

The Anthropik Network is overflowing with great essays and writings about civilization and collapse. Jason Godesky has just posted a new essay there which supports the basic premises of this project, that collapse is inevitable -- and also that it has a very bright side:

In collapse, all the rules reverse themselves. Sustainabilty becomes not only feasible, but advantageous. Small, egalitarian groups out-compete large, hierarchical ones. Human nature becomes adaptive, rather than something we must suppress. That process is the inevitable end of any civilization, because nothing can grow forever and without limit in a finite universe. Moreover, that process will begin sooner, rather than later. It has already begun, and in all likelihood, most of us alive today will live to see its completion.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

We can look at various categories of transport based on the source of energy. So let us look at combustion engines, human powered transport, wind powered transport, non-human animal powered transport, and electrical vehicles.

When I first started writing In the Wake I sketched out a short list of criteria by which tools, technologies and approaches could be judged to see if they were consistent with the goals of the project. I wrote:

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

I almost saved this for the Q&A answer on medical supplies, but I decided to post it today instead:

[Researchers] selected three Labrador retrievers and two Portuguese water dogs with no previous training, and over several weeks trained them using breath samples that had been exhaled into tubes by cancer patients. [...]

The dogs correctly detected 99% of the lung cancer samples, and made a mistake with only 1% of the healthy controls. With breast cancer, they correctly detected 88% of the positive samples, and made a mistake on only 2% of the controls. [source]

Bob Welsh writes in about his experiences with nonviolent communication (see Q&A discussion below):

I'm certainly not an expert in this NVC field, but I recently took a workshop series in "Compassionate Communication" - taught by a certified trainer with the Center for Nonviolent Communication (Marshall Rosenberg's org).

Info: http://www.empathy-conexus.com/

Resources: http://gorjohn.hypermart.net/resources.htm

There were a couple of encouraging aspects of this workshop that I was
surprised and pleased to see:

I came away from this workshop with more tools to address and defuse difficult situations in a nonviolent fashion - but without having an absolute ban (as many pacifists would argue) applied to violence of any sort (i.e. self-defense).

Monday, January 9, 2006

As usual, I'll break this question down into several parts to make it easier to deal with. So I'll look at methods of communication based on radio, visual, auditory, and cable transmission, as well as the physical movement of messages.

For various methods mentioned below a knowledge of Morse code is very handy. (See this online applet which will translate text to Morse code and even play it back to you as audio.)

Another useful skill is a working knowledge of cryptography so that you can hide and encrypt messages that you do send. Even a simple cipher, a method of rearranging or substituting words or letters in a pre-arranged way that the receiver understands, can make your communications less vulnerable to evesdropping. Prearranged code words or signals can also help.

Here is some more supplementary information for the issues discussion in Q&A #3, security issues. For resources on Nonviolent Communication, Sharai Mustatia seconds the suggestion for the book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Compassion by Marshall B. Rosenberg. She also points us to good resources at NonviolentCommunication.com. Lastly, she recommends The Mediator's Handbook by Jennifer E. Beer and Eileen Stief (developed by Friends Conflict Resolution Programs). Sharai adds:

I use this book every time I am called upon for conflict support and mediation. It is a very useful tool. I have adapted some of the examples to suit less formal settings for mediation. I also combine some of what is in the mediator's handbook with some of what is in the NVC book.

Both books have proven to be invaluable to me. Especially since I have been able to use them to build my reputation as a trustworthy resource person during crisis or conflict.

My particular interest is that concensus is all very well when there is plenty of time allocated to the process; what happens when a group needs to make decisions fast?

One other model is the Zapatista method of organising - roles within the group are rotated incredibly often, once a week.Whilst initially being quite time consuming as people have to familiarise new roles and experiences they are also claiming it is a wonderful and practical way to teach people *real* politics. (see related information on the Zapatistas)

Another strategy comes from pirates of around the 17th Century, since many historical pirate groups were much more revolutionary than most people realise. On pirate ships it was a common practice for the captain to be elected by direct democracy. Additionally, in many cases the captain was only actually in command during battle. The rest of the time the coordination of shipboard logistics was coordinated by others (like the quartermaster) and the captain did the same work as the rest of the crew. If, after a battle or at any other point, the crew became disatisfied with their captain they could simply recall their current captain and elect a new one.

After existing for more than 400 million years, the coelacanth has been pushed to the brink of extinction in a matter of years by deep sea trawlers.

Sunday, January 8, 2006

I had to spend much of today travelling, so today I'm going to supplement some of my previous answers from the Q&A series and post the next full answer tomorrow.

In Q&A #1 (toothpastes and powders, soaps and shampoos, and razors) I posted a link to a recipe for making soap using soapwort. However, MM reports that soapwort plants have become quite rare in the wild. So unless you have a supply of soapwort that does not deplete the wild population, please try to use other recipes for soap.

I also mentioned originally making stick toothbrushes or "chew sticks" out of pencil-sized twigs from trees like cedar with anti-septic properties. It turns out that Oak and Sassafras have also been commonly used to make chew sticks historically.

In addition, I came across a recipe for toothpaste which requires no baking soda or glycerine, and was apparently used by some indigenous people in north america. The recipe is simple: combine the powdered new bark of an oak (especially black oak, Quercus velutina) with the bark of a black alder (Alnus glutinosa) and add bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica) and wild ginger (Asarum canadense) to form a paste, and use as usual.

Lastly, I want to note that as the intake of sugary, processed foods decreases people in general will probably have fewer problems with tooth decay and cavities so long as they practice basic dental hygiene.

I've also started to get some suggestions for Q&A #3 (Security issues), which I'll post tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone who sent in their thoughts and suggestions, more input is always welcome.

Saturday, January 7, 2006

3) How do I protect them from the unprepared and desperate have-nots if I don't already have a fort-knox style bunker? (Security issues)

This is a really big issue, and I'm going to post this answer as a rough starting point to encourage discussion, and then edit and expand it significantly based on some of the further contributions and comments I get. It is also a subject that people are often uncomfortable or afraid to talk about, perhaps partly because of worries about sounding like or being associated with "survivalist right-wing gun-nut" types. But it's very important to talk about simply because security is one of the scariest issues around collapse, and we aren't going to get anywhere by avoiding unpleasant topics of conversation.

When talking about security in a collapse context we have to look a continuum of possible aggressors. Some of them may indeed be the unprepared and unorganized people that you mention in your question. There will also be mid-level organized aggressors like gangs, organized crime, or similar groups of people who band together for self-defense and to take from the wider community. The most organized group will be corporations, governments, and pseudogovernments, which claim to be entitled to commandeer and appropriate just about anything, even continents.

Thursday, January 5, 2006

Here is the second answer in the question and answer series (see the completed answers at inthewake.org/questions.html). If you have suggestions for answers or questions, please let me know.

There will be no answer tomorrow (Friday) because I have a bunch of garden planning and seed-organizing to do. The next one will be posted on Saturday.

2) How do I get access to hard-to-find objects, materials and ingredients? (i.e., saffron, oranges, pipe-tobacco, light bulbs, batteries, electronic parts, solar panel parts, ammunition for guns. Basically, anything that still requires industrial techniques.)

I'm going to answer this question in two parts. Firstly, since there is definitely too much instructional material required cover each item individually, but I'll look the items in terms of several categories. And then secondly I'll suggest a number of strategies that you can adopt for dealing with those possible shortages.

So let me break down some items into different categories.
(read the full post)

Wednesday, January 4, 2006

The oceans are emptying. In a single generation, once thriving populations of deep sea fish have been driven to the brink of extinction by expanding fisheries, researchers say today. [...]

"We expected to see declines, but we didn't expect such severe declines," said Jennifer Devine, a PhD student who led the study at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada. "If nothing changes, we could be facing barren oceans ..." [...]

The scientists reviewed trawler logs for records of five deep sea by-catch species - the roundnose grenadier, onion-eye grenadier, blue hake, spiny eel and spinytail skate. All are slow growing, reaching more than a metre long and living to 60 years. They found that levels of all the fish plummeted by 87%-98% over the 17 years, a rate that will see a decline over the next three generations of 99%-100%. Records for roundnose grenadier and onion-eye grenadier from 1995 to 2003 show those species have collapsed by 99.6% and 93.3% in 26 years.

The upside is that with any luck a reduced availability of oil and the eventually collapse of the industrial infrastructure may prevent many species from becoming completely extinct.

Here is the first answer in the question and answer series I mentioned earlier today. All of the completed answers will be posted at inthewake.org/questions.html. If you have suggestions for answers or questions, please let me know.

1) What do I do for toothpaste? I don't know how to make it. Shampoo? Glycerine soap? Goodness--razors!

Toothpaste (and more): Basic dental care (including brushing) is an extremely important preventative health measure. This is especially the case if your access to professional dental care might be limited. Toothpaste in particular is important because makes brushing more effective and more pleasurable.

A basic toothpaste can be made by combining baking soda, flavourings (like essential oils or herbs), glycerine and salt. Baking soda and salt are very mild abrasives and will help remove the plaque and bits of food on your teeth and around your gums that would contribute to decay, irritation and cavities. Some recipes use clay powder for this purpose. Historically all kinds of abrasives have been used, including pulverised brick and crushed sand (which are probably too abrasive).
(read the full post)

In the Wake reader Frank has written in with a set of questions he has about how to deal with problems in day-to-day living during collapse. I'll be responding to his questions one by one in a series over the next week and a bit:

1) What do I do for toothpaste? I don't know how to make it. Shampoo? Glycerine soap? Goodness--razors!

2) How do I get access to hard-to-find objects, materials and ingredients?

3) How do I protect them from the unprepared and desperate have-nots if I don't already have a fort-knox style bunker? (Security issues)

4) How will I manage long-distance communication?

5) How will I transport myself if my car is toast because it's gas-based?

6) How do I live if my work skills are too specialised and high-tech dependent?

7) Pipe tobacco! And Beer and Wine! What's life without some of the niceties?

8) Condoms?

9) Whoops. Medical supplies.

10) A good library will be indispensable too. Can you do dentistry, remove an appendix, midwife or care for the dead?

If you have suggestions for answers to these questions, or if you have questions yourself, please email me.

Tuesday, January 3, 2006

This is what Peak Oil looks like: Russia shuts off natural gas to Ukraine, Ukraine threatens to tap pipelines

Last week a price dispute between Russia and Ukraine caused significant reductions in the supply of natural gas to countries in Europe which recieve gas via Ukraine, including Serbia, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Slovakia, France, Italy and Germany (source). Now Russia has said it will stop selling the Ukraine natural gas altogether, which does not look promising.

Ukrainian officials have said they have enough gas reserves to ease the impact of the crisis on household consumers through the winter. However, experts believe a shutdown could devastate Ukraine's natural gas-reliant metals and chemicals industries in a matter of days if no resolution is reached.

The dispute has caused an increase in oil prices.

"Freak weather sees tragedy open 2006"

The Scotsman reports:

AT LEAST five people were killed and ten more were feared trapped last night after the roof of a skating rink in the Bavarian Alps collapsed after heavy snowfall, as extreme weather around the world marked the first days of 2006. [...]

Snowslides have killed seven people in the French Alps in the past few days.

Meanwhile, excessive heat has caused wildfires across the US prairie states of Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. In Texas yesterday, scores of homes were destroyed and two small towns burned to the ground.

Other fires across the drought-stricken region burned thousands of acres in Oklahoma and New Mexico, forcing hundreds of people to be evacuated. Officials warned that the dry, windy weather and extreme fire danger would continue. [...]

Asia also suffered badly from the climatic extremes. In central Indonesia, flash floods swept away hundreds of houses and schools early yesterday, killing at least 34 people.

Villages were inundated when overnight rains triggered a landslide on a hill in Panti, a sub-district of the East Java province, causing a river to break its banks. Many people sought shelter from the surging waters in mosques and boarding schools. "So far 34 people have been confirmed dead," said Burhanudin, an official in Panti. "At least 30 others have been injured."

In Pakistan, heavy snow and rain brought more misery to Kashmiri earthquake survivors, halting relief work, bringing landslides down on roads and flooding tents.

GMO crops create "Superweed" in Britain

The Guardian reports:

Modified genes from crops in a GM crop trial have transferred into local wild plants, creating a form of herbicide-resistant "superweed", the Guardian can reveal.

The cross-fertilisation between GM oilseed rape, a brassica, and a distantly related plant, charlock, had been discounted as virtually impossible by scientists with the environment department. It was found during a follow up to the government's three-year trials of GM crops which ended two years ago.

The new form of charlock was growing among many others in a field which had been used to grow GM rape. When scientists treated it with lethal herbicide it showed no ill-effects.

Unlike the results of the original trials, which were the subject of large-scale press briefings from scientists, the discovery of hybrid plants that could cause a serious problem to farmers has not been announced.

The scientists also collected seeds from other weeds in the oilseed rape field and grew them in the laboratory. They found that two - both wild turnips - were herbicide resistant.

This is exactly the sort of thing that anti-GMO activists have been warning about for a long time, and it is completely predictable.

The main question for me is what the exact result will be. In an ideal world, more and more farmers will see the light and shift to more organic methods. But I think what we will actually see as "superweeds" start to spread is that companies like Monsanto (which owns the patents to pesticide resistant food crops and manufactures the pesticides used on them) will simply use this occurance to their advantage, and start selling new and more toxic pesticides to try to kill the superweeds.

January 2006 Blog Archive

Tuesday, January 31, 2006