Convenience - The Core of The Problem

From the documentary "Fresh" - "I used to have a Pakistani room mate at college, and he said to me one day 'George, there is only one thing Americans are afraid of.' to which I responded 'What's that?' and he said 'Inconvenience!' " George Naylor, Corn Belt Farmer

On almost every level the Pakistani room mate was right. Look at any supermarket. 90% of the stuff on the shelves is packaged the way it is for convenience - but that convenience costs us. The very existence of that store is a matter of convenience. - and THAT costs us. I live near a town of 7,687 people (plus or minus 13 on any given day). It has TWO grocery stores either of which is capable of feeding that many people but one has higher priced, better quality goods and the other has lower priced, and in most cases, lower quality goods and they probably split the town's population between them... if we don't account for the fact that many in the town travel routinely outside the town at distances that give them access to other markets entirely. So, 1/3 of the shopping gets done somewhere else, 1/3 gets done at store #1, 1/3 gets done at store #2. HUGE amounts of convenience thinking driving that profile.

One of the things we need to accept is that most of the "convenience" availability drives extra material extraction from the natural world (it was expedient when the process got started and nobody has complained so it continues) and massive uses of energy, most derived from fossil fuels (coal, oil, or gas). When I talk about We The People needing to re-assume responsibility for EVERY joule of energy that is expended on our behalf every day, this convenience function is the big chunk of what I mean when I say that. Our egregious consumption of energy is almost entirely about convenience. Gas in your two or three cars? Much more convenient than hitching up two or three horses to go to town and several other places. Faster, more comfortable, safer, more weather resistant, nicer ride - more convenient.

Turning on the lights? Much easier and cleaner and more convenient than filling the oil lamp with kerosene, trimming the wick, lighting it (make sure you protect your ceilings from the column of heat from that chimney if it's wall mounted). Pushing a button on the food processor? Much easier, cleaner, less work than hand chopping or mincing the ingredients for supper... if your cooking "from scratch"! Maybe not - just reach into that freezer and take out some pot pies, frozen vegetables, and cook a couple of potatoes in the microwave - all relying on electricity piped through your walls to convenient outlets.

Americans are awash in functions of convenience, so much so, that it's almost impossible to escape - unless you simply move out of it entirely, into a space that was not occupied by the convenience culture before. It can be done. It's either that "move out" or engage the level of rigor and discipline to not use and avoid all the mechanisms of convenience that surround our every moment... or move out into unformed space and create your own "inconvenient" personally energy responsible space.

Its up to us to solve this problem. Its about our consumption - our excessive consumption. If we don't change that, then we are headed for the scrap heap to join every other species that has ever lived... and gone extinct. The biggest reason for extinction is habitat loss. We are on the verge of losing ours too.

You've Only Got Two Things To Worry About!

You have TWO primary concerns with abrupt climate change - 1) how you manage your survival zone (aka Goldilocks Zone - where all the conditions are "just right") as the prevailing conditions change - permanently as far as you're concerned., and 2) how you manage the survival zone of your food supply (which is more delicate and sensitive than yours is).

Stable climate is the absolute foundation of our social processes and system. It is what limits our risks to a range that make "extreme events" both rare and profitable to insure against. What we have previously thought of as extreme events are going to become the norm, affecting everything about our way of life in western civilization (which as a substantial side note, isn't sustainable as it is and becomes positively volatile under abrupt climate change). We are already moving into this period of time and far too little is being done to prepare for or mitigate the risks.

Radical departures from stable conditions usually result in loss of habitat. Most extinction, throughout the history of life on Earth, has been caused by “loss of habitat”. The effect of climate change on all elements of life is completely dependent upon each lifeform’s available habitat. For most lifeforms that occupy the solid surface of the planet a relatively stable climate is a necessity to maintain habitat. Any sustained departure from the required stable condition must either be overcome by changing external factors (adaptation), by changes to the actual lifeforms or their life functions (evolution), or the loss of habitat results in death (extinction).

Your Goldilocks Zone is comprised of the range of internal temperatures that we must maintain to stay alive, as well as the availability of air (aka correct level of oxygen), water, functional food, protection from the elements, and rest to sustain a meaningful life. To be specific that means 5 critical factors. These factors define the human Goldilocks Zone
        1. Oxygen - People can begin to experience brain damage after as few as five minutes without oxygen. For humans and many animals to sustain normal functions, the percentage of oxygen in the breathing environment must be within a relatively small range. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, determined the optimal breathing range to be between 19.5 and 23.5 percent oxygen in air.

• Several things may prevent you from getting the oxygen you need. Environmental risks such as high altitude, dense smoke, or carbon monoxide can prevent you from getting enough oxygen.
• Some medical issues may prevent your body from receiving oxygen like cardiac arrest, stroke, drowning and others.
• Without a consistent supply of oxygen, you can experience a condition called cerebral hypoxia which affects our brains.
• At levels at or below 17 percent, your mental abilities become impaired.
• When levels drop to 16 percent or below, noticeable changes to your behavior will occur
• Levels under 14 percent will cause extreme exhaustion from physical activity.
• Once levels drop below 10 percent, you may become very nauseous or lose consciousness.
• Humans won't survive with levels at 6 percent or lower. After 10 minutes without oxygen, the brain damage can be so severe that most people will die.
• Higher-than-normal oxygen levels in air aren't as harmful to life, however there is an increased fire or explosion risk. 
• With extremely high concentrations of oxygen in the breathing zone, humans can experience harmful side effects. 
• Very high levels of oxygen causes oxidizing free radicals. These free radicals will attack the tissues and cells of the body and cause muscle twitching. 
• The effects from short exposure can usually be reversed, however lengthy exposure can cause death.

        2. Water - Other than the air we breathe (and it's approximately 21% oxygen), water is the most essential component for human survival. The body’s functional chemicals are dissolved and transported in water, and the chemical reactions of life take place in water.

• It is estimated that an average person cannot survive for more than 3-4 days without water. The daily requirement is about 3 liters (approx. 3.2 quarts). Ideal drinking, sanitation, and hygiene needs can be met with approx. 50 liters (13.2 gallons)/day
• During hot weather it is recommended that the average person consume more, if available, to replace the amount lost due to sweating, respiration and excretion to maintain a balance of body fluids. In moderate climates you may be able to get by on less.
• When the hydration balance is unable to be maintained the body will start to go through the dehydration process.
• A 2.5 percent loss in water volume in a person leads to a 25 percent reduction in blood volume. This means the blood gets thicker and the heart has to work harder to pump nutrients throughout the body.
• This lower blood volume also reduces flow to the extremities, leading to numbness in the fingers and toes.
• The thicker blood also has a harder time making its way through the small capillaries in the brain. The lack of oxygen to parts of the brain can make it impossible to concentrate or focus for any period of time.
• The length of time one can survive without water depends on activity level and environmental temperature. Higher activity will invariably reduce life span, as will higher temperatures.
• With no water, the maximum length of time a person can survive is 10 days. Starting at 80 degrees Fahrenheit life expectancy is reduced to 9 days. With every five-degree increase in temperature, the life span decreases a day.

        3. Food - sustenance, a source of biological "fuel", or what we call food, is the next most important factor after oxygen and water.

• A body that does not have food can survive for quite a long time by subsisting on the fat reserves in the body and the glycogen reserves in the liver and, eventually, the proteins in the muscles.
• The first two to three days without food, the body will depend solely on the fat reserves to run the muscles of the body. These fatty acids can’t cross the blood-brain barrier. The body can survive for as much as two weeks without intake of energy rich foods (fats & carbohydrates) 
• The brain relies on the glycogen reserves to send glucose to the brain. After day three, the liver begins to synthesize ketones (short strand fatty acids) that can cross the blood-brain barrier. The ketone stage can last for up to two weeks.
• Once the fat reserves are used up, the body will begin breaking down the musculature into proteins that can be converted into amino acids that are then transformed into glucose. Muscles break down quickly, within one week.
• Once this process has completed there is no other internal source of energy and the body dies. Signs of starvation include apathy, listlessness, withdrawal, changes in hair color, flaky skin, and massive edema in the abdomen and lower limbs, all of which lead to a higher chance of infection.
• Most individuals who experience starvation don’t die directly from it. Most die due to infectious diseases that attack the body as it consumes its own defenses.

        4. Shelter (Protection From temp and moisture extremes… or the frequently cited "elements") - A shelter that helps to keep your body at a constant temperature and stable water content - temperature and humidity being the key components of climate - is also a necessity. This could include appropriate clothing.

• When a person is exposed to "the elements", water and temperature loss is increased.
• Cold temperatures and high winds can strip away valuable moisture as quickly as high temperatures can cause sweat related loss.
• A shelter should consist of a place to make fire to create heat as well as protection from the wind and rain.
• Without the ability to keep a constant temperature and hydration, a person runs the risk of hypothermia or heat stroke.
• A person’s normal temperature in 98.7 degrees Fahrenheit. If the core temperature drops to 91.4, a body will go unconscious. At 86.0 degrees, the body loses the ability to control internal temperature. At 82.4 degrees, there is complete muscle failure.
• On the other end of the spectrum, a temperature of 107.6 degrees results in a breakdown of the central nervous system. At slightly over 111 degrees, the brain overheats and causes death.
• Extreme temperature fluctuations can cause hallucinations and illogical behavior, which can cause a person to fail to take the proper steps to keep himself alive.

        5. Rest/Sleep - For a long time sleep was not considered a basic human need. Studies on sleep deprivation helped to change this in the 20th century. In terms of human need, sleep is one of the five most important elements.

• Sleep deprivation can cause a myriad of problems ranging from decreased body temperature to cognitive impairment and hallucination.
• Although the mechanisms of sleep are not well understood, the problems associated with lack of sleep are.
• Headaches can begin as soon as 24 hours after missing sleep.
• 72 hours in, memory is impaired and temporal and spatial distortion start to occur. 
• After 96 hours without sleep, cognition is markedly impaired.
• After 144 hours, hallucinations ensue and there is a considerable loss of attention and manual dexterity.
• The longer a person goes without sleep the less coherent thought patterns become.
• This lack of clear thinking can be detrimental on its own, if coupled with a lack in any of the other basic needs areas it could be life threatening.

With minor variation, these same requirements exist for EVERY form of carbon-based life on Earth, except that for most OTHER lifeforms, the specificity is much more limited and intolerant. You do the math... If you need specific numbers I have them. Ask and ye shall receive...

Think about it! Be prepared! Keep your powder dry and your candles lit!

The Smokemaster

Lifeboat Time (comprised largely of a John Michael Greer blog post from 2007)

While David Wasdell was busy formulating the detailed view of what was wrong and how it could affect things, which he presented in Nov 2007 @ Westminster, another person who was clued in to the realities, by the name of John Michael Greer, wrote a cogent blog post that was well worth much greater public attention than it got. His post, "Lifeboat Time" is MUCH more relevant now than it was then, and it was spot on then... BUT it has been taken down in it's original location (The Archdruid Report, linked below, is no longer active) and is now promised for an as yet unidentified future date of hard copy publication. With that in mind, I make it available here, for your consideration.

Lifeboat time

by John Michael Greer, originally published by The Archdruid Report  | Nov 29, 2007 

"One of the more notable news stories of the last week concerned the fate of M/S Explorer, a cruise ship built for polar seas that turned out to be not quite up to the rigors of the job. Before dawn on November 23, while cruising just north of the Antarctic peninsula, she rammed into submerged sea ice, leaving a fist-sized hole in the hull and water coming in faster than her pumps could handle. Fifteen hours later the Explorer was on the bottom of the sea.

Fortunately the captain had the great good sense to order an evacuation well in advance. Even more fortunately, everyone knew what to do, and did it without quibbling. Crew and passengers abandoned all their possessions except the clothes they wore, donned survival suits, climbed into lifeboats, and spent five cold hours watching the Explorer fill up with water and heel over until another ship came to pick them up. Later the same day they were safe at a Chilean coast guard base on the South Shetland Islands, waiting for a plane ride home.

I thought of that story this morning while surveying the latest round of debates about peak oil, global warming, the imploding debt bubble, and half a dozen other symptoms of the unfolding crisis of industrial society now under way. By this point there are few metaphors for crisis more hackneyed than the fatal conjunction of ship and iceberg, but the comparison retains its usefulness because it throws the issues surrounding crisis management into high relief. When the hull’s pierced and water’s rising below decks, the window of opportunity for effective action is brief, and if the water can’t be stopped very soon, it’s lifeboat time.

By almost any imaginable standard, that time has arrived for the industrial world. Debates about whether world petroleum production will peak before 2030 or not miss a point obvious to anybody who’s looked at the figures: world petroleum production peaked in November 2005 at some 86 million barrels of oil a day, and has been declining slowly ever since. So far the gap has been filled with tar sands, natural gas liquids, and other unconventional liquids, all of which cost more than ordinary petroleum in terms of money and energy input alike, and none of which can be produced at anything like the rate needed to supply the world’s rising energy demand. As depletion of existing oil fields accelerates, the struggle to prop up the current production plateau promises to become a losing battle against geological reality.

Meanwhile the carbon dioxide generated by the 84 million barrels a day we’re currently pumping and burning, along with equally unimaginable volumes of coal and natural gas, drives changes in climate that only a handful of oil company flacks and free-market fundamentalists still insist aren’t happening. Worried scientists report from Greenland and West Antarctica that for the first time since measurements began, liquid water is pooling under both these huge continental glaciers – the likely precursor to an ice sheet collapse that could put sea levels up 50 to 60 feet worldwide within our lifetimes.

In related news, Atlanta may just be on the verge of edging out New Orleans as the poster child for climate catastrophe. Unless the crippling years-long drought over the southeast United States gives way to heavy rains very soon, Atlanta will run completely out of drinking water sometime in the new year. The city government has had to explain to worried citizens that they are out of options, and there aren’t enough tanker trucks in all of Dixie to meet the daily water needs of a big city. Nobody is willing to talk about what will happen once the last muddy dregs in the Georgia reservoirs are pumped dry, and the drinking fountains, toilet tanks, and fire hydrants of greater metropolitan Atlanta have nothing to fill them but dust.

As Macchiavelli commented in a different context, though, people care more about their finances than their lives, and even the Atlanta papers have seen the drought shoved off the front page now and then by the latest round of implosions in the world of high finance. For those of my readers who haven’t been keeping score, banks and financial firms around the world spent most of the last decade handing out mortgages to anybody with a pulse, packaging up the right to profit from those mortgages into what may just be the most misnamed “securities” in the history of financial markets, and selling them to investors around the world.

On this noticeably unsteady foundation rose the biggest speculative bubble in recorded history, as would-be real estate moguls borrowed dizzying sums to buy up property they were convinced could only go up in value, while investors whose passion for profit blinded them to the risk of loss snapped up a torrent of exotic financial products whose connection to any significant source of value can be safely described as imaginary. All this hallucinated wealth, though, depended on the theory that people with no income, job, or assets could and would pay their mortgage bills on time, and when this didn’t happen, the whole tower of cards began coming apart. Some of the world’s largest banks have already taken billions of dollars in losses, and nobody is even pretending that the economic carnage is over yet.

Connect the dots and the picture that emerges will be familiar to those of my readers who have taken the time to struggle through the academic prose of How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse. One of the central points of that paper is that the decline and fall of a civilization unfolds in a series of crises separated by incomplete recoveries. The point is not an original one; Arnold Toynbee discussed the same rhythm of breakdown and respite most of a century earlier in his magisterial A Study of History. If that same pattern will shape the fate of our own civilization – and it’s hard to think of a reason why it should not – the second wave of crisis in the decline and fall of the industrial world may be breaking over our heads right now.

No, that wasn’t a misprint. Historians of the future will likely put the peak of modern industrial civilization between 1850 and 1900, when the huge colonial empires of the Euro-American world hit the zenith of their global reach. The first wave in the decline of our civilization lasted from 1929 to 1945, and was followed by a classic partial recovery in which public extravagance masked the disintegration of the imperial periphery. Compare the unsteady, hole-and-corner American economic empire of today with the British Empire’s outright dominion over half the world in 1900, say, and it’s hard to miss the signs of decline.

Today we may well be facing the beginning of the next wave. One advantage this concept offers is the realization that the experience of our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations may offer a useful perspective on what’s coming. In the summer of 1929, nobody I know of predicted the imminent arrival of unparalleled economic disaster, followed by the rise of fascism and the outbreak of the bloodiest war in human history. Such things seemed to be stowed safely away in the distant past. From today’s perspective, though, it may not be unreasonable to suggest that something not unlike the bitter experiences of 1929-1945 – different in detail, surely, but equivalent in scale – may be in the offing.

If that’s likely – and I believe it is – we’re in much the same situation as the passengers of M/V Explorer were last Friday, but with an unwelcome difference. No alarm has been sounded, no order to evacuate announced over the p/a system. The captain and half the crew insist that nothing is wrong, while the other half of the crew insist that everything will be all right if they can only replace the current captain with another of their own choosing. The only warning being given comes from a handful of passengers who took the time to glance down into the hold and saw the water rising there, and while some people are listening to the bad news, next to nobody’s making any preparations for what could be a very, very rough time immediately ahead.

Those of my readers who have been paying attention know already that the preparations I have in mind don’t include holing up in a mountain cabin with crates of ammunition, stacks of gold bars, and way too many cans of baked beans in the pantry. Nor do they involve signing onto the latest crusade to throw one batch of scoundrels out of office so another batch of scoundrels can take its place. Rather, I’m thinking of a couple of friends of mine who are moving from the east coast megalopolis where they’ve spent most of their adult lives to a midwestern city small enough that they can get by without a car. I’m thinking of the son-in-law of another friend who is setting up a forge and learning blacksmithying in his spare time, so he’ll have a way of earning a living when his service economy job evaporates out from under him. I’m thinking of another couple of friends who just moved back to his aging parents’s farm to help keep it running.

For a great many people just now, actions like those are unthinkable, and even the simplest steps to prepare for financial crisis – paying down debts, reining in expenditures, making sure savings are in federally insured banks rather than the imaginary economy of paper assets, and putting by extra food in the cupboard and useful supplies in the shed to deal with the spot shortages and business bankruptcies that usually accompany economic crisis – are off the radar screen. That’s unfortunate, because some tolerably simple changes made now, while there’s still time to make them, could spare a lot of people a lot of grief not that far down the road.

It’s no fun to be jolted out of bed before dawn by a warning siren, and told that you have to head for the nearest lifeboat station, leaving everything behind but the clothes on your back. It’s even less fun to climb down into an open lifeboat in 20°F weather, knowing you’ll be tossed around on the gray Antarctic seas until somebody responds to the SOS – if anybody does. Still, add up all the unpleasantness of both and they’re still preferable to a last-minute scramble for survival on a sinking ship, when half the lifeboats and survival suits are already under water and the deck is heeling over so fast the other half may be out of reach.

Millions of people went through some approximation of that last experience between 1929 and 1945. Millions more may undergo the same sort of thing once the current crisis gets under way. There’s been plenty of talk about peak oil and the twilight of the industrial world, and that’s been useful in its way, but talk doesn’t substitute for constructive action when lifeboat time arrives." 

After reading this, ask yourself - Can we keep the ship of state afloat with sufficient change in culture, economy, and society? It will pretty much mean rebuilding the ship from the keel up, such that we no longer operate anything like the way we have... and doing that while we are still at sea. 

The alternative is identify the lifeboats and get in them in an orderly fashion, because, as the author says  -

"It’s no fun to be jolted out of bed before dawn by a warning siren, and told that you have to head for the nearest lifeboat station, leaving everything behind but the clothes on your back. It’s even less fun to climb down into an open lifeboat in 20°F weather, knowing you’ll be tossed around on the gray Antarctic seas until somebody responds to the SOS – if anybody does.
 

Still, add up all the unpleasantness of both and they’re still preferable to a last-minute scramble for survival on a sinking ship, when half the lifeboats and survival suits are already under water and the deck is heeling over so fast the other half may be out of reach. Millions of people went through some approximation of that last experience between 1929 and 1945. Millions more may undergo the same sort of thing once the current crisis gets under way. [Ed. Note: they have] There’s been plenty of talk about peak oil and the twilight of the industrial world, and that’s been useful in its way, but talk doesn’t substitute for constructive action when lifeboat time arrives."

Remember, there is no one to respond once we are in the life boats, and he was writing this in 2007 just before the last collapse. We are now facing collapse #3 and business is no longer, and can no longer be, "as usual". If and when we get into the lifeboats this time, we take up oars and row for shore, wherever we think that is, and we start over, from scratch. Maybe you should not leave everything behind except the clothes on your back. Bring your pocketknife and some matches...