Sunday, August 30, 2009

Peak Oil Advice by Greer


This essay by Greer is worthy of reposting in this place. For me as a 71 yo, life is a rewarding to see what happens. For a young person, aware of this climate ,just venturing into this world with nothing but grey clouds on the horizon it is an ominous sensation.  

My personal view is best approach uses flexibility rather than launching into an imagined world that may never reveal itself. Creating options for yourself that can be exercised when the time is right is what I have done, although embarking on a path limits the ability to retrace some of these choices.

A clip from his essay - go here for rest of this

Published Apr 8 2009 by The Archdruid Report, Archived Apr 9 2009
Peak Oil Advice from German Poets


by John Michael Greer


Fairly often, during the three years or so since these essays first started trying to map out the topography of the deindustrial future ahead of us, people have responded with a straightforward question: what do you think we should do about it? Even when it’s posed rhetorically, as it so often is, this question strikes me as a good sign.


It’s one thing, after all, to treat the twilight of the industrial age as an abstract possibility, or a dumping ground for Utopian or apocalyptic fantasies, as so often happens these days. It’s quite another to grapple with it as a reality that can be expected to shape the rest of our lives. Those who make the subtle transition from one to the other tolerably often find themselves confronted with some form of the same message the German poet Rainier Maria Rilke received from the statue of Apollo: Du musst dein Leben aendern, “you must change your life.”


Still, figuring out exactly what sort of change is needed is a more complex matter. As often as not the people who ask for my suggestions are at that second stage of the process, sure that they have to take action but far from sure what they ought to do. Last week’s Archdruid Report fielded a question from a reader who has reached that point in his confrontation with the future looming up before us. To judge by the recent contents of my inbox, it’s a fairly common place to be just now, and this week’s essay will try to respond to it, not just for the people who asked it directly, but also for others who may be facing the same issues just now.


It’s probably necessary to make a few points to begin with. These will be familiar to longtime readers of this blog, but they remain effectively absent from our collective conversation around the future, outside a narrow slice of the peak oil movement, and thus bear repeating.


First, it’s crucial to remember that our predicament is anything but unique. The fantasy that today’s industrial societies are destiny’s darlings, and therefore exempt from the common fate of civilizations, needs to be set aside; so does the equally misleading fantasy that today’s industrial societies is the worst of all possible worlds and are getting the cataclysmic fate they deserve. The societies of the industrial world are human cultures, no better or worse than most; for a variety of reasons, they happened to stumble onto the reserves of stored carbon hidden in the Earth, and used most of them in three centuries of reckless exploitation; now, having overshot their resource base like so many other societies, their following the familiar trajectory of decline and fall. Letting go of the delusion of our own uniqueness enables us to learn from the past, and also makes it easier to set aside some of the unproductive cultural narratives that hamstring so many attempts to respond to our predicament.


Second, one of the lessons the past offers is that the fall of civilizations is a slow, uneven process. None of us are going to wake up one morning a few weeks, or months, or years from now and find ourselves living in the Dark Ages, much less the Stone Age. Thus trying to leap in a single bound to some imagined future is unlikely to work very well; rather, the most effective strategy will be a matter of muddling through, trying to deal with each stage of the descent as it comes into sight, and being prepared to make plenty of midcourse corrections. Flexibility will be more useful than ideology, and making do will be an essential survival skill.


Third, another of the lessons offered by the past is that the long road down is not going to be easy. Like every human society in every age, the future ahead of us will have opportunities for happiness and achievement, of course, and there will doubtless be significant gains to set in the balance against the inevitable losses, especially for those who long for simpler lives at a slower pace. Still, the losses will be terrible; it’s crucial not to sugar-coat them, despite the very real temptation to do so, or to ignore the immense human tragedy that is an inevitable part of the slow death of any civilization.


Fourth, the harsh dimensions of the future can be mitigated, and the positive aspects fostered, by preparations and actions that are well within the reach of individuals, families, and communities. Not all declines and falls are created equal; in many failed civilizations of the past, a relatively small number of people willing to commit themselves to constructive action have made a huge difference in the outcome, and not only in the short term. The same option is wide open today; the one question is whether there will be those willing to take up the challenge.


Fifth, we can only guess at many of the details of the future ahead of us. Drawing up detailed plans for the future may be a source of comfort in the face of a relentlessly unpredictable future, but that same unpredictability makes any plan, no matter how clever or popular, a dubious source of guidance at best. Nor is consensus a useful guide; one further lesson of history is that in every age, the consensus view of the future is consistently wrong. Instead, the deliberate cultivation of diverse and even conflicting approaches by groups and individuals maximizes the likelihood that the broadest possible toolkit will reach the waiting hands of the future.


These points, and especially the last, make it a waste of time to offer some fixed list of steps that those who want to change their lives ought to do. (In fact, making or following such a list is one thing that those who want to change their lives may well find it better not to do.) What’s needed is not a list but a template for taking those first basic steps. Any template will do, but the one suggested here is likely as good as any.


It’s simple enough, really: learn one thing, give up one thing, save one thing.




Thursday, August 20, 2009

Wearing Nettles

Transition to a post peak, sustainable future will include wiser uses of our forest tracts adjacent to populated areas. Nettle harvest and weaving  = A future 'cottage industry'?


A clip from: Second Skin - Why wearing nettles is the next big thing


Moral fibres

Unlike hemp, the nettle is a perennial, which means that it can be propagated vegetatively, rather than just sown from seed. After six weeks in the greenhouse, cuttings are transplanted to the field. There is no crop in the first year as the plants need to establish themselves but afterwards the plants can be havested year after year. The yield in the second year is between 1.5 and 2.5 metric tonnes per hectare. By the third and fourth year the harvest could amount to 4 tonnes, or 4,000 kilos. It takes about 40 kilos to provide enough material for one shirt, so a hectare of nettles could in its third year of production provide fibre for 100 shirts - as well as a great quantity of byproducts, including sugar, starch, protein and ethyl alcohol, not forgetting leaves to eat as a vegetable in fancy restaurants - and at home - or for use as a tea.

At night, after watching particularly gloomy stories on the evening news about climate change or failing energy supplies, I cheer myself up by imagining that the future won't be all bad if we can only get our act together and start cultivating more nettles. On my allotment, to my neighbour's dismay, I've started to do that.

Transition Stroud's textile group recently held a workshop on nettle fibre. Somebody brought in some long-stemmed nettles, and everybody set about trying to extract fibre.

'The ones that were most successful had the thickest, woody stems," Emily Smith told me afterwards. "We just bashed them. Every so often up the stem you find a ring, where the leaves were, and then bash those rings and split it lengthways with a knife and open it out and pull out the hard inside. Then peel off the fibres in bundles and then pull them apart. You can get quite long fibres. We twisted them together and they formed a cord. We twisted various lengths, from very fine - less than 1mm thick, for sewing - to very thick. It was really strong. Even the individual fibres we couldn't break.'

Nettle fabric, experts report, is good quality because the fibres can be long: anything above 1 3/8 inch is equal to the best Egyptian cotton.
Nettle can be dyed and bleached in the same way as cotton, and when mercerized (given a lustre by submerging in a strong alkali solution) is only slightly inferior to silk. It has been considered much superior to cotton for velvet and plush. In fact nettle fabric can be such good stuff that, as a publicity stunt, Harwood and his colleagues at de Montfort had a load of nettle turned into a bikini. You can still 
see the pictures on the internet.

Inspired by this unusual outfit I have decided to use my power as a consumer to encourage material manufacturers to make more of nettle. After a long search, I found nettle fibre and nettle yarn from a
supplier in France - local enough, for the time being - and I used it to knit a toy animal for Nancy. I also found what appears to be the only material made in Britain with nettle as a component: a sturdy
nettle-wool blend from Camira Fabrics in Yorkshire. It was tremendously thick, designed for use in furniture, but I remembered Vivienne Westwood urging people to make clothes out of curtains, and decided that this didn't matter. Anyway, it can't fail to be better than using cabbage leaves.

John-Paul Flintoff is the author of 
Through The Eye Of A Needle: The true story of a man who went searching for meaning and ended up making his Y-fronts (Permanent Publications, 2009, £7.95) www.flintoff.org

Local, sustainable clothing

Clothes can be made out of all kinds of materials but traditionally they've been woven or knitted using yarns made from animal hair or plant fibres (or stitched using leather). Several of the big suppliers have started to produce yarns produced in the UK, and specialists will sell you more unusual ones - including (from the animal world) angora and alpaca and (from the vegetable kingdom) nettle and hemp.