March 2006 Blog Archive
[This month's archive may be incomplete: See
blog for more recent entries.]
Thursday, March 30, 2006
I've often recommended the excellent and highly readable books
Where There Is No Doctor and Where There Is No Dentist.
You can get both of those books online
from HealthWrights. See the online
Where There Is No Doctor and the online
Where There Is No Dentist. Also available online there are
several books I've recommended before for people with disabilities
in the "undeveloped" world which would be very useful
in a collapse context.
Another useful online book is the Ship
Captain's Medical Guide. It is a manual published by the British
government for ships with no doctor on board. It discusses medical
actions people without advanced medical training can take can
take when medical attention may be significantly delayed.
All those books are in PDF format with a file for each chapter.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
My booklet Tools for Gridcrash is
about to become a full-fledged book. I've signed a contract to
publish it with Lyon's Press, an imprint of Globe
Pequot. They want to call the book Peak Oil Survival:
A Guide to Life after Gridcrash. Questions:
Why did you change the title?
Authors don't actually get to pick the title except in very unique
situations. The title is largely viewed as a marketing device
in the publishing industry. In this case I had at least some input.
That title is a compromise between me and the publisher.
Why did you decide to publish it commercially?
I didn't actually look for a publisher or submit any manuscripts.
Lyon's Press saw Tools for Gridcrash here on the website,
liked it a lot, and offered me a contract.
I accepted for a few reasons. First, I feel that it will bring
this project, and the ideas in it, to a larger audience. It will
also provide me with the income that I need so that I can work
on this project rather then spending all my time at a wage job
-- donations are a minimal source of income right now and won't
pay for the supplies I need for the upcoming series of illustrated
how-to's this summer. (Of course, donations are still needed and
welcome!) And having a book published will also make it easier
to get certain other things done for the project.
Also, since they book is ultimately very useful during an actual
gridcrash, it makes sense to have someone make lots of dead-tree
copies and strew them around homes and bookstores across the continent.
I don't have the resources to do that.
Are you selling out on us?
No. The contents of Tools for Gridcrash are available for download
now, as they have been for close to a year, and the contents of
hypothetical future books by me will continue to be shared here
as they are written. This information is important and people
should be able to access it regardless of whether they have the
money to pay for a book or not. That's why the original booklet
is still available for you to download, archive, and share.
Did anyone help with this?
Yes. I want to thank my good friend Derrick Jensen for walking
me through the process of publishing my first book. Thanks to
Anthony Arnove for taking time from his busy schedule to give
contract advice. And thank you to MM for invaluable help in distributing
Tools for Gridcrash in the meanwhile.
I also want to thank everyone who helped with the original Tools
for Gridcrash: MM, Tammy T., Melissa, Edward, Emily, Andrea,
Pig Monkey, Wabbit, Lori, Ken McWatters, Alex, Jen, and several
anonymous contributors. This would not have happened without all
of your help.
How much will it cost?
It should cost about $10 US. That means it will be slightly more
expensive then the current booklet. However, it will be slightly
longer and will be distributed through regular bookstores, meaning
that you won't have to worry about postal costs. If you want to
by a version of the original now at the cheap cost, there are
still about two dozen copies left. I'm not doing another printing
of those so if you do want any of those you should order them
before they run out.
When will it be available?
I understand that they are aiming to have it out this fall, and
I'll let you know when I know more.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Take it apart .net
is a blog about how to take various pieces of technology apart.
Pretty useful if you plan on modifying them or scavenging parts
to improvise something else.
The
oil in your oatmeal is an interesting article which examines
the oil and energy required to make your average breakfast.
The article notes that about 40% of the oil used to make an average
breakfast goes into keeping the ingredients cool ingredients and
cook and prepare it. You can reduce the amount of energy you need
to cool and cook food with some of the cheap suggestions in Tools
for Gridcrash, such as a haybox
or solar cookers, or various
methods of low-energy cooling.
If you want a more detailed examination of the energy content
in food, check out the informative article The
Oil We Eat.
Monday, March 27, 2006
Warning of a potential US invasion to control Venezuela's oil,
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said that he and his people
will kill "gringo" invaders with
bows and poison arrows. This is warning is part of a larger
Venezuelan project to create a massive
reserve army of people trained in guerilla warfare:
The oil-rich state aims to teach up to two
million volunteers, from the unemployed to office workers, shop
assistants and housewives, basic military skills such as marching
in step or shooting to kill.
If it reaches that size, the force will be
the largest civilian reserve army in the Americas, double the
size of Washington's reserves.
... Mr Chavez has been buying military hardware,
including Russian helicopters, 100,000 AK-47 rifles and Brazilian
and Spanish equipment he says Venezuela needs to defend itself.
I find it very interesting that Chavez would arm Venezuelan people
this way, since many governments would be reluctant to give a
people the skills to overthrow them.
Chavez isn't a saviour for people who care about ecology and
indigenous rights, however. He plans massive industrialization
and oil extraction, and he and his government have demonized
environmentalists and indigenous activists, going so far as
accusing them of being an anti-governmental "green Mafia"
and implying that they are counter-revolutionary puppets directed
by the CIA.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Fruits and vegetables grown today are less
nutritious than those grown fifty years ago, but apparently
organic food is better than conventional. The linked article notes
that a similar study done in 1980 also found a decline in nutrient
density compared to 1930, so this is an old and continuing trend.
It reminds me of a recent study from Scotland which showed that
modern people have less healthy diets and worse teeth than
people did six hundred years ago. And those people had worse
diets and teeth than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Ahh, the
march of progress!
The declining nutrient density could be one of the contributing
factors to the declining
cognitive skills of children we looked at a few months ago.
If the brain has serious nutrient deficiencies when it is forming
it can never quite make up for it, even with excellent nutrition
later in life.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
I've added a site search based on Scroogle
on Ran Prieur's suggestion.
It's on the lower left. Thanks to the folks who wrote in with
suggestions!
Scroggle uses the Google index, but strips out ads and anonymizes
your IP address
so that your search query doesn't get shared with Big Brother.
I've just updated all of the page titles to make the search function
more useable, but it might take a couple of days for those to
get updated on the Google index.
Shahma Smithson writes to point us to a great resource on mycorrhiza,
the symbiotic soil fungi that are essential for healthy forests
and other land. Check out the Instant
Guide to Mycorrhiza: The Connection for Functional Ecosystems
(PDF) which gives a great introduction to the subject and discusses
ways of helping mycorrhiza to restore and detoxify injured land.
There are also many other informative PDF downloads at Mycorrhiza.net's
information download page.
Researchers
warn that current temperature trends will lead to an "irreversible"
sea level rise of four to six metres (13 - 20 feet) within this
century .
That would put many major cities underwater, and displace hundreds
of millions of people. Even one metre sea level rise would
displace 100 million people in Bangladesh alone and put half
of the country -- the food growing half -- underwater. Much of
the world's farmland would either be put underwater, or made unfarmable
from the infiltration of salty seawater into the water table.
To get a better idea of the geographical impact, see this neat
and useful site combines Google Maps with NASA elevation information
to create an interactive
map that shows the coastline flooding at various sea level
changes for North America and Europe. However, remember that the
flooding may actually be worse in the long term for any given
level than shown. Historical coastlines have already eroded as
much as they are likely to in the near future, but an increase
in sea level means more erosion on those new coastlines. So many
coastlines would eventually reach further inland than a simple
elevation map would suggest.
Friday, March 24, 2006
In the recent post on the Amish and rapid
community-based disaster relief I asked "what do you
need to mount a really rapid and effective community-based response
to a disaster?" Frank Van den Bosch writes in response the
question and about building a house in one day:
When rebuilding a house there is a "floor
plan" already determined by the foundation. A new house
couldn't be built in a day without having the below grade (soil
level) work in place before hand.
Which applies metaphorically to the broader question -- you can't
mount a rapid and effective response without doing the groundwork
before hand. You need skills, tools, and a plan in place already.
I'm certain that the Amish community has their
master builders who direct the labor of others. Many may
be skilled, but a building project must be directed by someone
who understands weight bearing capacities and other essential
and specialized knowledge.
I think the key question you raise is - How
do you develop a network of people who will come together in a
crisis? How do you develop a community amidst this
dog eat dog society. [emphasis added]
That's really a crucial question, and it's one of the central
questions of this entire project. Any comments or suggestions
on that are welcome as well.
I've recently been corresponding with another In the Wake contributor
about tactics and self defense in a collapse context, and how
to build groups that will work well in that situation, too. One
of the things we discussed is the importance of getting together
a group of people now and solving problems collectively, dealing
with current crises, and doing group role-playing exercises together.
I see two important and complementary approaches. One is to try
to network with people who are also interested in collapse, in
growing their own food, in community organizing, in DIY skills
and so on. And the other is to network with your neighbours, to
make connections with the people you live near whether they've
developed those skills or not.
Frank continues:
I moved to the country 10 years ago,
and expected to find some sort of community spirit out here, but
aside from the church and the tavern, there's nothing going on.
Clannish gossip mongering is what goes on. All the
farmers buy milk, eggs, meat, and vegetables at the grocery store
even if they could grow it themselves or buy it from a neighbor.
I really do try to build some community sense
here in the sticks. I buy milk from my neighbor, and honey from
another. I buy a pig (butchered) from another neighbor every year.
I fix electrical and plumbing problems for some of the farmers,
and I hope my sap boiler will draw some of these folks closer
together, at least for a few weeks a year.
I'd love to hear what other people are trying to do to network
and build functional communities where they are.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
After South Dakota banned
abortion earlier this month, the President of the Oglala Sioux
Tribe on the Pine
Ridge Reservation has
promised to open a Planned
Parenthood:
The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on
the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, was incensed.
A former nurse and healthcare giver she was very angry that a
state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid
law against women.
"To me, it is now a question of sovereignty,"
she said to me last week. "I will personally establish a
Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries
of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota
has absolutely no jurisdiction."
Previous related post: DIY
Abortion links
I want to add an internal search engine to In the Wake. Does
anyone have any recommended favourites or good suggestions to
use for that? Please let me know.
[Site search has now been added.]
...into durable plastic sheets and other articles
This is the first in a series of illustrated In the Wake
how-to's, and also the first in a series on DIY Recycling; how
to take items to would get currently thrown away and make them
into something useful in a collapse context.
This
page tipped me off to the fact that you can iron multiple
sheets of shopping bag plastic together to make a thicker, more
durable sheet. I decided to try it immediately to see what was
possible.
Essential Materials: Shopping bags, an iron,
several sheets of paper
Helpful Materials: Needle and thread, or a sewing
machine
Time: Ten minutes (up to several hours for a
very large project)
Skills: Use an iron (optional extras: use a
sewing machine)
(Click here to
continue. The how-to contains a large number of images.)
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
I added this today to the how to contribute
section after a reader question by email:
If you want to write a how-to or instructional topic
Here's basically what I like to do when I'm writing a how-to:
1) Find existing resources like books and websites. Figure out
which of those are the most useful and applicable. Consider interviewing
"experts" on the subject.
2) Figure out the key points -- the essentials -- of a given skill
or subject and condense them into a clear and understandable document
or how-to. Use illustrations if needed. Personally I want to avoid
duplicating the work of others. If there is a perfectly good website
on the subject, I would link to that, mention anything particularly
interesting, and then move quickly to step four.
3) After looking at existing resources, is there especially interesting
information, or information that is especially relevant to the
In the Wake project? Add that the how-to.
4) Is there "missing content" or something you want to know but
can't find, or is hard to find, in the information out there currently?
Especially things that relate to a collapse context? Research
that information, answer the questions, and add that to the how-to.
5) Proofread or have the how-to proofread, and then post it to
the In the Wake website for input, comments, and suggestions.
6) Integrate or respond to the suggestions and then post-the updated
how-to.
You don't have to follow that pattern, and you can jump in at
any step and still contribute. And it's a good idea to email me
and consult during the process, to share ideas, and see if there
are other contributors who may have written material or have ideas.
Recently after a (non-Amish) house in Missouri was destroyed
by a tornado, Amish neighbours in the area rebuilt
the house in less than a day:
"I never thought we'd be rebuilding the next
day. I thought we'd be getting ready for a funeral," he said late
Tuesday afternoon. [..]
But in less than 15 hours, the Grabers were
back in a new home rebuilt on the same spot — a peaceful
valley south of Missouri 38 about 10 miles east of Marshfield
— by more than 100 men and boys from neighboring Amish homesteads
near the Grabers.
"By 2 p.m., we were mopping the floors," he
said.
Building or house or barn in less than a day is apparently a
commonplace event for Amish communities, especially after disasters.
That capability is intriguing to me, because it implies that other
communities can develop a similar ability to pool their skills
and resources after a disaster -- like a very rapid industrial
collapse in any given area. Like gridcrash. (I'm working on an
essay that will talk about gridcrash and its causes and implications
in a lot more detail.)
My question, and I'm opening this up to everyone out there, is
what do you need to do to mount a really rapid and effective
response like the one demonstrated above? And I'm not
just talking about carpentry and barn-raising. I'm also interested
in a general strategy that would apply if you were trying to quickly
set up a community-sufficiency skills-sharing centre, or a medical
clinic, or a solar-still-making workshop. I can think of a few
things:
Assemble materials at hand. The Amish can build
a house in a day, but the didn't fell trees, make windows, mill
boards, or forge metal parts all on the same day. The manufacturing
process had already taken place. In our gridcrash example we'd
also want to use materials at hand because in addition to being
more rapid, the manufacturing process would be impaired by a general
industrial disruption (meaning it would be harder to get more
parts). For example, I have a lot of bicycles and old windows
I got for free or extremely cheap. I'll fix up some of the bicycles,
and the rest I'll turn into simple machines like wheat-grinders
and windmills. And the windows will get turned into solar ovens,
solar dryers, greenhouses, coldframes, and so on.
The reason I have those particular things is because I can't
manufacture them myself, and because they are cheap right now.
I can go to a bike auction and get cheap old bikes for around
a dollar each (though they all need tune-ups). So if you are going
to have materials at hand for a gridcrash situation, you want
to a) collect materials that are important, but hard to make
or get during gridcrash, and b) get them when and where
they are cheap. Which means getting them now if you have
a place to put them.
Have skills and practice. The Amish are a hands-on
society and they already have all of the skills they need for
carpentry and the like. Having those skills and practicing them
before hand is important. At the same time, with enough unexperienced
people you may be able to teach people simple skills and have
large number of them do it. Like getting a bunch of people to
dismantle
old hard-drives to build a wind-powered generator. That's
basically a mechanization of the process, and I view it as a stop-gap
measure to be used while teaching people more skills.
Coordinate enough people to work on the project.
In the Amish example, more then one hundred people came together
at one time to build a house. They coordinated and pooled their
skills and labour. If each of them had tried to build their own
house, they would have failed miserably. Working together, one
hundred people could build one hundred houses in one hundred days.
Working separately, one hundred people probably wouldn't have
any houses in one hundred days. So having a coordinated group
that you can call together, instead of people fumbling along themselves,
seems very important.
Have a clear plan(s), have a template. When
they start building a house they have a clear idea of what it
will look like. And they can use any previous house they've built
as a template. They've got it down, and they know what to do.
Imagine if they had called one hundred people together, and then
sat around trying to design a house from scratch by committee?
They could have been there all day. In a collapse context you
don't have to and can't set up a single plan for your community.
What you can do is get together and talk about different situations,
and make plans for them. Make a set of plans, like the playbook
in (American) football. Then pick a plan when the time comes,
and make little modifications as needed.
If you have any suggestions, please email
them in.
(And a few last interesting things about the Amish in general:
They would be especially able to deal with a rapid industrial
collapse, since they make minimal use of industrial technology.
However, the Amish don't reject all technology as "evil"
as the common myth suggests. Instead they have a rather sophisticated
process for introducing or barring technology from their settlements,
which involves examining the potential impacts of the technology
on community, according to this lengthy
and informative article from Wired Magazine. Unfortunately
this process is one that seems to be universally under the control
of religious leadership rather than an inclusive community process.)
(This is the result of an emphasis on hierarchy and obedience
in Amish tradition -- an emphasis which has also resulted in the
failure of some Amish communities to intervene against particular
horrific instances of sexual abuse, as discussed in this sickening
article, "The Gentle People". Of course, there are
plenty of non-Amish instances of such horrific things happening,
too.)
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
From the Scoutmaster
blog, fire
by friction: an set of instructions for rapid fire-starting
with a bow drill from an old-time award-winning fire-starter.
Monday, March 20, 2006 (Spring Equinox)
Vintage Projects
is an online collection of vintage how-to plans dedicated to preserving
" the inspired DIY spirit of the past."
Our free project reprints cover farm machines,
the woodshop, machine shop, boats, archery and more. These vintage
plans come from a half-century ago when do-it-yourself enthusiasts
turned wood, metal and old motors into useful workhorses, functional
tools, and toys.
They've got everything from boats
and sailboats to bows
and crossbows.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
One of the issues that I work on beyond this site is food security
and food relocalization. This weekend I wrote a proposal to start
a cooperative for local organic growers in my area. I think something
like this will encourage people to participate in small-scale
organic food growing which is important for a whole lot of reasons
around collapse, sharing skills, and the failure of energy-intensive
industrial agriculture.
You can read my proposal and reasoning
here, which might be of special interest to anyone who wants
to encourage something similar in their area.
I was talking to Derrick
Jensen today about progress, and in particular about email.
In theory, email is supposed to save us work, but it ends up increasing
the amount of work we do because people expect a much more immediate
response than from a letter, because it's easier for people to
send emails then letters, and because it's generally addictive.
Derrick shared a favourite and highly relevant Jung
quote:
Reforms by advance, that is, by new methods
or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long
run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They
by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on
the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence,
like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the
tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before.
Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est -- all haste is of
the devil, as the old masters used to say.
Reforms by retrogression, on the other hand, are as a rule less
expensive and in more addition more lasting, for they return to
the simpler, tried and tested ways of the past and make the sparsest
use of newspapers, radio, television, and all supposedly time-saving
innovations.
I find it interesting and kind of funny that Jung (1875-1961)
considered newspapers and radio to be a problem, when we would
find them quaint and antiquated compared to email and broadband
internet.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Some of you may have been following the discussion at Ran
Prieur's site about declining oxygen levels in the atmosphere
from deforestation and phytoplankton die-offs in the ocean.
There's interesting discussion there about the impacts of that
on humans, but there's also an aspect that no one has brought
up yet. According to my favourite wilderness medicine book, flaming
combustion is impossible below 12% oxygen, and gasoline burning
in an enclosed "bunker" will self-extinguish when the oxygen levels
drop to 14%.
So if the oxygen levels dropped to half of what they are now campfires
wouldn't start and conventional woodstoves and furnaces wouldn't
work anymore. That means that even before healthy humans actually
start dying of hypoxia they might start freezing to death or dying
of contaminated food that they couldn't cook. There would also
be an impact on internal combustion engines, especially in airplanes
which already have limited oxygen availability at high altitudes
to start with.
You might be able to get around the problem by having combustion
take place in a pressurized chamber. Doubling the pressure would
double the amount of oxygen in a given volume of air, which is
how racecars are "turbocharged" to drive faster and
how propeller airplanes operate at high altitudes. But you can't
turbocharge a campfire, and if we get to the point where your
woodstove has to be built like a submarine and attached to a constantly
running (and energy hungry) air compressor ... well, by then we're
pretty screwed.
An IBM vice president said this week that the "era of invention"
ended
with the passing of the twentieth century, and the future
mostly holds the refinement of existing inventions rather then
the creation of new ones.
It's not a totally new idea, but it is an important one. According
to a number of observers most possible major industrial inventions
have already been invented, and the ones that haven't been will
mostly stay as fiction. (And that's not because of peak oil or
industrial collapse -- it's because they don't really work outside
of the imagination. They're dead ends for research.)
If we were living in a civilization with access to infinite amounts
of energy all this would be pretty irrelevant, since there is
plenty of room for development with existing inventions. But civilization
is on a collision course with ecological and energy collapse,
and declining invention is another nail in the coffin of the idea
of a "technofix" for civilization.
An article from the year 2000, The
Slowing Rate of Progress, is very relevant to this discussion.
It argues that more changed between 1900 and 1950 than between
1950 and 2000, and that the rate of change continues to decline
despite popular perception to the contrary. It also suggests that
economic productivity has even decreased in the last several decades.
An economic indicator called "total-factor productivity"...
... tracks how efficiently the economy uses
labor, capital, raw materials, and new technology. ... Between
1913 and 1972, it grew by an annual average of 1.08 percent. Then
between 1972 and 1995, for reasons economists are still debating,
the rate of improvement collapsed to less than one fiftieth that
of the previous era, despite a widespread adoption of computers.
[Or perhaps even because of computers?]
The article also has an interesting take on medicine with implications
for a collapse context:
Perhaps, you say, we can at least credit modern
medicine for dramatically expanding our life expectancy, even
if more and more of our extra years are wasted in traffic jams
or holding patterns. But on close examination, even the so-called
revolution in healthcare technology turns out to have had little
effect in prolonging life spans over the last half century.
To be sure, if [a couple transported from the
1950s] suffered from, say, cancer, they'd benefit from undergoing
today's chemotherapy treatments, which, while still not effective
in many cases, do allow most cancer patients to live longer than
they would have in the 1950s. Similarly, one stands a better chance
of surviving a heart attack and many other acute illnesses than
one did then. But if the couple studied up on the question, they'd
most likely be astonished and disappointed by how little they
could improve their life expectancy by fast-forwarding into our
world.
Most of the gains in life expectancy during
the 20th century came before 1950 and resulted far less from medical
advances such as penicillin than from improved nutrition, housing,
sanitation, and the increase in average living standards. These
improvements led to dramatic declines in infant mortality, which
is the overwhelming reason that average life expectancy at birth
has increased--not any significant lengthening of life span among
those lucky enough to survive childhood diseases. Indeed, the
specific role high-tech medicine has played in improving public
health is so subtle as to be hardly measurable.
In Costa Rica, total healthcare expenditures
per person come to just $226 a year, as compared with $4,187 in
the United States, according to the World Health Organization.
And there are only half as many doctors per capita as in the United
States. Yet for women, life expectancy at birt |