[vtsnowedin]

Even in the US look at how strong the anti-abortion and anti-planned-parenthood faction is. It hasn't really worked and will never work because not enough buy-in.

As strong as that vocal minority is they still perform about 2000 abortions a day in the US which I think is a sad thing with all the effective methods of birth control there are out there today.

[Newfie]

Adjusting Europes canal system to clean energy.

https://gcaptain.com/europe-inland-waterways/

[REAL Green]

Adjusting Europes canal system to clean energy. https://gcaptain.com/europe-inland-waterways/

Newf, I lived in Nuremberg in the 80's. The Rhine, Maine, and the Danube inland water way come very near where I lived. I admired this cultural and economic artery in the heart of Europe. I grew up on the Mississippi and Missouri and always loved rivers.

[aspera]

Video discussing a possible revitalization of the Erie Canal as a means of shipping goods.

Erie canal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9& ... 3kd1nXsdtg
Source: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM9DtH ... _as=public

[vtsnowedin]

Video discussing a possible revitalization of the Erie Canal as a means of shipping goods.

Erie canal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9& ... 3kd1nXsdtg
Source: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM9DtH ... _as=public

There will be no progress on that front while bulk diesel is $2.25 a gallon.
It is sad to drive along side of it on I- 90 and see nothing in it even a private boat. Hopefully they will maintain it well enough to keep it viable for if and when energy prices rise.

[Newfie]

I went through from Albany to Oswego a few years ago. Its listed depth is 14’, boats with 7’ make it through but they either touch or have to wait for dredging.

We went through pretty quick as we were on a long trip, 4 or 5 days, cant recall. We saw zero commercial traffic and only a very few other private boats making the trip. Small craft that stay in the canal or lakes yes, but not traversing.

The canal is maintained by the NY Turnpike commission but its main function now is flood control. While it is a “canal” a fair portion of its route is Actually flooded valleys, think of linear lakes. There isn’t much evidence of commerce or industrial activity along its banks. Lots of signs of old abandoned docks, wharfs, etc.

http://www.canals.ny.gov/news/crc/index.html

[Newfie]

Day dreaming if how things may look in the distant future I think the major highways will shape America for a very long time.

When driving the interstates i look at how they are shaped and formed and I imagine a future where they will support linear small farms. The road surfaces are water catchment areas which diver the water to a drainage system that could be dammed to create catchment ponds. The slopes could support small holding farms, well drained soil with irrigation water nearby. The upper slopes and woods edge would have camps with accessible firewood. The slope is soil is frequently pretty poor having been scraped of topsoil, so this would not work everywhere, but in some locations it might work well. The road surface would provide transportation paths for exchange of goods, barter, and potable water transport.

But this view is of a far distant future.

[vtsnowedin]

I read a doomsday novel somewhere that had the people breaking up the pavement of all but one lane and hauling topsoil in wheelbarrows to return it to farmland. Groups of people where living under the remains of bridges. Obviously the population had continued to explode and things had not gone well.

[careinke]

Day dreaming if how things may look in the distant future I think the major highways will shape America for a very long time.

When driving the interstates i look at how they are shaped and formed and I imagine a future where they will support linear small farms. The road surfaces are water catchment areas which diver the water to a drainage system that could be dammed to create catchment ponds. The slopes could support small holding farms, well drained soil with irrigation water nearby. The upper slopes and woods edge would have camps with accessible firewood. The slope is soil is frequently pretty poor having been scraped of topsoil, so this would not work everywhere, but in some locations it might work well. The road surface would provide transportation paths for exchange of goods, barter, and potable water transport.

But this view is of a far distant future.

I could provide a whole Permaculture course based on your vision. It could happen in less than five years, with the proper mentors.

[REAL Green]

Day dreaming if how things may look in the distant future I think the major highways will shape America for a very long time. But this view is of a far distant future.

I could provide a whole Permaculture course based on your vision. It could happen in less than five years, with the proper mentors.

We are definitely in the Anthropocene which means permaculture must adapt. It must be a hybrid to survive. It must also reach back to the past and leverage the modern as another hybrid approach. It must embrace salvage which is taking what has been destroyed and adapted by modern industrial behavior and then adapted with creative change that represents a niche being exploited constructively. A permaculturist must use the status quo to leave it and in doing so realize the relativity of green.

I wish I could be TRUE Green but few can be all Green. Maybe a young person or motivated family can retreat to the margins of life off the grid and embedded in natural harmony. For most even if they desire this and have the skills are not allowed to by the limitations of their people and place. Society dictates who can and who can’t. The result is a lifeboat for most on a turbulent sea of destructive behavior. Save what you can and accept the destruction of the rest. Outfit your life with permaculture if you can. If you can't support it with good intentions like buying their products that are often higher priced and more difficult to reach. Keep in mind permaculture is more than agricultural it is about a diversity of best in the class products and skills related to planetary caring.

Seek to lower your footprint by declining in place in localism as much as your particular Anthropocene trap allows. You will have to pay taxes and earn a wage and in doing so you inevitably are corrupted by industrial life. Accept this and use it to leave it. Also accept the planet and human civilization is in decline. Do palliative care in the hospice of destructive change. What this means is accept decline and death in its many forms and what results is action. The action is found by being drawn to productive niches that offer constructive change amid an overall condition of destructive change of life in succession.

I am living this in my REAL Green. There are others who do more and have more Green credentials but that is not the point. This is individual and focused on the inner core of a personal local of people and place. Do not get caught up in comparisons of who is greener or not. Be individually green as is allowed by your people and place. This is all that can be done because anyone who thinks the world can be saved is delusional. You can’t save the world by proposing vast new growth projects of Green New Deals. Degrowth movement recommendations are likewise dangerous. We should understand degrowth means more environmental damage if not handled properly because of the potential for green efforts being abandoned or becoming dysfunctional. This also means that degrowth policy could become irrational by destroying more than it saves.

In my opinion the planet will lead the way and we should follow. The way you orientate to the planet cannot be done by the typical modern green today with digital and hyper transport. It is instead going local in a low footprint close to the beating heart of the planet. You can only know the planet with a proper lifestyle as close to it as you can manage. Keep in mind the majority of this is internal with behavior adaption. That said you will have to be the judge of your local of people and place. I cannot critique your way but I can mention in general the critical criteria of what works and what does not. This is a time of a vast global inflection from growth to decline of the human system and the acceleration of planetary decline that has been going on now for a few hundred years because of the human system. The only way to survive this in a green way is scaling to the proper place, with the right people, and the correct behavior. That is for you to find out. Nobody can know your most intimate place but you.

[TomWayburn]

You can't fix anything until you fix the government.

- Jay Hanson

I have been an exponent of de-growth for longer than the term de-growth has had currency. David Delaney's little piece The Economic Growth Trap is the logical choice for an opening gambit in an argument to convince reasonable people of good will that the radical steps proposed here are necessary and possible despite the very great difference from the world as we have always known it. Perhaps, I should present these strange thoughts as the principal features of a fictional world such as Samuel Butler's Erewhon ("nowhere". spelled as backwards as he dared). Then, after all the parts are described and are seen to be working in our imaginations, spring it upon the reader that I'm talking about Earth now.


The Economic Growth Trap appears in the middle of my personal low-flying introduction to the best possible post-Peak-Oil world guided by degrowth, decentralization, demarchy, delegislation, deschooling, and dechrematisticalism.
In short, dematerialism. The section on degrowth can be found at https://www.dematerialism.net/#mozTocId971796 .

[REAL Green]

The Economic Growth Trap appears in the middle of my personal low-flying introduction to the best possible post-Peak-Oil world guided by degrowth, decentralization, demarchy, delegislation, deschooling, and dechrematisticalism.

In short, dematerialism. The section on degrowth can be found at https://www.dematerialism.net/#mozTocId971796 .

Thanks Tom for your work on dematerialism. This is the kind of reading I enjoy with ideas to enhance my REAL Green prepping. I will slot this on my reading list.

[Newfie]

Welcome aboard Tom.

[Newfie]

A perspective about youth, revolution, aging and degrowth.

https://dailyreckoning.com/the-hard-math-of-demography/

[Ibon]

A perspective about youth, revolution, aging and degrowth.

https://dailyreckoning.com/the-hard-math-of-demography/

Good article. I feel like the old japanese. I identify with my old Japanese Nissan Patrol pick up truck. The chasis has been welded 3 times, it has all these kinks and problems but continues to go up and down the 4x4 road. I don't want a new truck.

The other day I took an old can of bent rusty nails and spent a couple hours hammering them straight.

One good thing about a bunch of old people, they were born before the internet, as time passes they will tune in more to their flower gardens and remaining loved ones. The digital world will not have so much influence.

[Newfie]

Ibon,

Was thinking how the world, our USA/Western culture world, is split between folks who have scared hands and split knuckles vs those that hire out manual labor. I heard a TED talk that claimed the average battery drill is used for less than a half hour in its entire life. I have six, at least. Some have many, many hours. I have 2 on each boat, in case one breaks. 2 grinders also, same reason.

Pounding nails straight, Something i have done. You can do some good thinking while letting your body work on Simple repetitive tasks. May explain a lot.

[Newfie]

Kunstler on Degrowth linked from our front page.

https://kunstler.com/other-stuff/articl ... he-future/

[JuanP]

I have six, at least. Some have many, many hours. I have 2 on each boat, in case one breaks. 2 grinders also, same reason.

Pounding nails straight, Something i have done. You can do some good thinking while letting your body work on Simple repetitive tasks. May explain a lot.

For tools I really need my rule is: Two is one and one is none.

I like weeding when I need to relax, think, or meditate.

[REAL Green]

“The objective economy, part three”
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/

“Having spent more than two centuries building an energy-profligate dissipative-landfill system, we now face reversion to a more energy-frugal economy in which the relationship between (a) exogenous energy inputs, and (b) the human component tilts back towards the latter. A useful shorthand term for this human component is ‘craft’, a word which captures skills as much as, or more than, it references physical labour…Changes in consumer purchasing will be accompanied by changes of supply processes. These changes – which will include de-layering and simplification, and will be spurred by falling utilization rates and progressive losses of critical mass – can be summarised as “de-complexification”, which involves the reversal of the economic and broader complexity that has been created by abundant, ECoE-cheap energy…In pre-industrial times, skills known as crafts played a very important role in a context of resource and energy scarcity. As the balance tilts away from energy profligacy, we should anticipate a greater reliance, not just on human labour itself, but even more on the application of craft, a term which needs to be understood as a combination of design and skill… “taxonomy of de-growth”…As this process goes into reverse, we will witness both simplification and de-layering. Whilst the latter term is self-explanatory, describing the shrinkage and elimination of whole tiers of activity, ‘simplification’ refers both to products (with customer choice reducing towards more basic ranges) and to processes, where methods of production will become less complex, whilst supply chains are shortened…Meanwhile, we should anticipate the compounding effects of two further processes. One of these is falling utilization rates…This effect applies to any activity whose viability relies on economies of scale, which means that exposure to this downwards pressure is going to be virtually ubiquitous across the economy. A second and related process is the loss of critical mass. This occurs where some of the many components or other inputs required by a production process cease to be available. Some such gaps can be worked around, and will indeed form part of the simplification process. But others either cannot be surmounted cost-effectively, or cannot be overcome at all. Accordingly, products cease to be made because some necessary inputs can no longer be sourced…the whole “de-complexification” process will affect services at least as much as (and probably more than) it affects the supply of goods. Service sectors are prime candidates for de-layering, are likely to be amongst the first casualties of simplification, and are particularly exposed to the adverse effects of falling utilization rates…Ultimately, service industries are adjuncts of the supply of goods, and are a product of the complexity and the efficiencies created by the energy-profligate system…The reality is that, in the pre-industrial economy, services were few in number, and rudimentary in character, and a retreat from an energy-profligate system can be expected to drive their role back towards that situation.”

[Newfie]

Its a cold rainy day. I am taking the day off reading “An Idiots Guide to World History”. Better than it sounds.

Putting cultural dominance in perspective
Europeans spent several centuries of the second millennium AD venturing out to other parts of the world, subjugating the locals and building empires. The world as you know it — with people speaking English in South Africa and Portuguese in Brazil — still bears innumerable cultural and economic marks (many people call them scars) of these adventures.
Some people, including some historians (although none recently), treat this European ascendancy as if it were inevitable, even right. This shortsighted view is called Eurocentrism, and you may think you smell it in this book. A reason for this is that European dominance has been so recent, relatively speaking, and that it continues — with the spread of Western clothing styles, the English language, Western-style

economic systems, and American movies. It continues despite backlash from certain quarters, such as Islamic extremists who reject Western values. This book is partly an account of how civilization came to this particular point, so it must include the story of how Europeans (and their heirs, such as the United States) accomplished what they did.
Throughout this book, I relate how one culture or another always seems to be coming to the forefront, dominating for centuries, even a millennium, and asserting itself as superior. I also point out how great civilizations can disappear so thoroughly that nobody remembers them. (For an example, see information on the Hittites in Chapter 4.) The disappearance of today’s worldwide civilization seems inconceivable in an age of satellites and computers and the other snazzy gizmos that have transformed commerce and daily life, but any study of history shows that civilizations not only rise; they also inevitably fall.