Home for Michael A. Lewis

REALITY!

September 28, 2004

Optimism

Tonight I sit here, again, pecking away at this infernal electronic beast. True, it makes little noise, even less than my old Underwood rusting away in some obscure corner of southeastern Wyoming. But it has this cord coming out it, two cords in fact, which connect It, and me, to the stultifying blast of energy production and transmission that lies beyond my sight outside the walls of our humble abode.

Everything's hitched to everything else, so the sage pontificated. Must be so.

It's plainly obvious, to anyone who cares to see, that old Homo sap has got himself (Yes, him. Who runs this misbegotten world, anyway?) in quite a pickle when it comes to energy. We've gone and built a civilization, if that's what this is, which I doubt, based on dead dinosaurs and primitive plants, something they're not making much of anymore. Even in living form.

That goo that used to bubble up in Pennsylvania is getting scarcer these days. No, we won't ever run out; that's not the problem.

The problem is we're using the stuff four times faster than we're finding new supplies, and what's left is getting harder and harder to pump out of the ground. That makes oil more expensive, not only in terms of dollars but, more importantly, in terms of the amount of energy needed to change that black gooey stuff into gasoline, electricity and plastic, the very stuff that runs our world today.

Let's say it took a barrel of oil's worth of energy to produce 10 barrels of oil in 1930. That's when we were finding most of the large oil fields around the world, the pickings were easy, all we had to do was lean down and dip it up with a bucket. When those first fields were half full, it took 2 barrels to work at the rest, then 4, the 8. Get the picture?

Along about 1970, two things happened in the United States: 1) domestic oil production began to decline, and 2) the quality of the remaining oil began to decline.

Oil is the most energy dense substance we know of in the universe. Nothing else contains as much energy per kilogram as oil, which has, at best, the equivalent of 40 kilowatt hours per gallon. Everything else has less energy per unit volume: coal, natural gas, tar sands, oil shale, peat, wood, buffalo chips or rolled up newspapers. And the remaining oil now has less energy per unit volume than the oil we already have burned up creating this massive, go-for-broke, growth at any cost, consumer society we hold up as an example to the panting 5,650,000,000 humans on this planet who have yet to arrive.

It's too late. We will reach peak oil production before 2010, meaning worldwide oil production will decline at a rapidly increasing rate very soon, meaning that we have more energy available right now to support human activity than we will ever have in the future.

Think about that. Then think about billions of people in China who want a new car and gas to burn in it. Think about trillions of new light bulbs lighting the dark side of the planet. Think about trucks, trains, ships and planes filled to the Plimsole line with exotic foods transported half-way around the world to support a global economy. Think about petroleum-based fertilizers growing that food to transport around the world. Think about millions of steam plumes rising from oil and natural gas furnaces in northern and southern latitudes.

This world we think of as normal is in deep shit. Soon. We poked our ears and covered our eyes far too long to do anything about it now. We lulled ourselves to sleep to the murmurs of ignorant politicians with their hands stuffed in oily pockets. We swallowed the promises of corporate CEOs, stilled our questions with PDAs, ground penetrating sound systems and ubiquitous cell phones.

We created a civilization based on 21st Century technology and a Pleistocene economy.

Gasoline $2.50 a gallon? Fiddling small change. Steak $5 a pound? Add a zero or two. Electricity too cheap to meter? Science fiction wet dreams.

Everything we consider normal today is going to change within the next twenty years, for those who live that long. Some will find the change easier, those of us who live simply now, who are self-reliant and self-sufficient as possible. Many will die of starvation and disease, at increasing rates around the world.

If we're very, very lucky, the inevitable economic and energy collapse caused by the end of the Age of Oil will arrive soon enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to stave off the worst effects of global warming, that is, unless we've already kicked off irreversible changes.

Time to read "Good News" again.

Michael
Leona Gulch
Pacific Plate

July 17, 2004

The Continuing Rape of the West...

... and the east, north and south.

Ed said it best in his essay, "The Second Rape of the West," in "The Journey Home." Bears repeating every now and then, as does all good literature, even bringing it up to date a bit, if I may be so bold.

Written in the mid-70s, Ed's poignant oral history of the arid lands of Wyoming and Montana and the greedy machinations of the energy industry, the desperate work of environmentalists and poorly funded environmental organizations, and the plight of the multigenerational ranching families in the area was a harbinger of even greater excesses of his future.

Ed's was a voice of sanity in a world even then as insane as the cancer cell, destroying the body that supports it. And yet, even at that, he had never seen the markers of the 21st Century we enjoy today: SUVs, pocket motorcycles, cell phones and cell phone towers disguised as trees, iPods, the Internet and the World Wide Web, Palm Pilots, lights in running shoes, laser printers, FAX machines, scanners, printer/FAX/scanner/copy machines integrated into computer networks, CDs, DVDs and their players and support technology, ground penetrating stereo systems in cars designed to make as much noise as possible, five-foot square TeeVee screens with quadraphonic, wrap-around sound: the whole panoply of electronic jiggery-pokery that takes up so much of our time and attention, robbing us of our silence, demanding more and more energy, requiring more and more power plants, spewing more and more air and water pollution, fed by greater and greater expanses of grasslands devoured in the maws of ever more and larger strip mines, to distribute electricity across the country over more and more extra-high voltage transmission lines. Everything's connected to everything else.

We are rapidly approaching a state of complete and eternal domestication, in which every moment of our lives, from parturition to departure is mediate, packaged, interpreted, predigested and regurgitated for distribution to the gaping mouths waiting to be stuffed with the pabulum of corporate media.

Ashes to advertising, dust to DVDs.

Is it any wonder that democracy has failed utterly in the Land of the Free (Market), Home of the Brave (CEO)? Democracy requires free and open access to information, an engaged populace and a responsive electorate, all of which are missing, deleted or otherwise compromised in our modern, capitalist, technocratic society.

And yet, even as bad as the political scene is today, it is not capitalism that is the root cause, even as it is not socialism that is the answer. Capitalism and socialism are two sides of the same coin of totalitarian industrialism, the basic premise of a global society based on technology, hierarchical social organization and the myth of linear progress. Even if it were possible, which it is not, switching from one side of the coin to the other, still leaves us stuck with the same coin, and the same things that will buy.

What we need, as Ed mused thirty years ago or so, is something different, something entirely different, something based on technologies appropriate to local bioregional biological and geophysical limits, egalitarian social organization, and progress "as if survival matters" for all life on earth.

It's a tall order, but we can do it, since we must or perish. Look what we've done to this world in only a few centuries. Imagine what we can do in the next.

Michael
Leona Gulch
Pacific Plate

Damned Immigrant Trees!

April 4, 2004

It seems our northern border with Canada is disappearing!

The International Boundary Commission, the agency responsible for maintaining the 5,000 mile long clear-cut twixt our two North American nations, is running out of money, unable to afford new snow machines, aircraft and herbicides to patrol this largely imaginary line and keep it clear of obscuring vegetation.

Wily trees, shrubs and four-legged creatures are taking advantage of this appalling breach of security and quietly slipping across the border, seeking new opportunities in the land of... opportunity. In some places the clear-cut is succumbing to biological growth and development, monuments are deteriorating under the relentless onslaught of acid rain, and even the locals are beginning to forget where the spotty line on the map is on the ground.

Meanwhile, to the south, hordes of Latin nationals are crossing the southern border, insinuating themselves into the economies of our southwestern states, making a sieve of this former bastion from democracy, once the Rio Grande, now a mere trickle of its former self. Desert sands are twined with foot trails, each one ending at a nondescript gray van ready to whisk these new workers to the land of Wal-Mart and MacDonalds. Each one of them carries a piece of the southern border in their back pocket.

Even the Sierra Club, the venerable symbol of environmental posturing, has taken notice, making immigration a highly visible and divisive feature of this year's Board of Director's election, as usual preferring the politically correct rather than environmentally relevant path for this particular outing.

I think it's a conspiracy, a dastardly plan to deal with global warming by moving the United States slowly and incrementally north, following the northward march of temperate agriculture so important to The Economy. We don't got to have no steenking Kyoto Protocol: we'll deal with global warming in the great American tradition, by moving when we see the smoke of our neighbors' fields desiccating in the drought.

As the northern border becomes obscured with vegetation and convenient forgetfulness, farmers will increase their acreage by slow increments, gradually planting new crops on what once was maple leaf properties. Our cattle will wander northward to greener pastures, ignoring the crumbling boundary markers lying in the grass. Meanwhile, in warmer climes to the south, our newest American agriculturalists will empty their pockets, gradually drawing up our southern skirts.

Who cares if the west withers in drought? Who cares if Res Foul is drying up our interstate and international water compacts? Forget about it, move on, leave it all behind. We have new frontiers to conquer, by God; it's our legacy, our obligation, our right to take what we want and leave the rest to sizzle on the griddle of global warming, fired by the methane of our manifest destiny.

It's the American way.

It just might work, if we do it quietly, with no fanfare or public outcry.

Shhhhhh... we're moving north!

Michael
On the Pacific Plate
Staying put

Boxed Up!

November 7, 2003

Lying on the sand, looking up at a sky-blue sky, brilliant white clouds scattered about to best effect. Sheer rock walls ascend in exaggerated perspective above, leaning in, defying gravity, portending a descending disaster. The sun glares down in disapproval, reminding all living things of the hydrologic cycle, water to vapor to clouds to rain to ground water to tree roots to water vapor, a closed loop, an unending cycle: no one gets out alive.

At the edge of perception, high in the thin, blue firmament, a lone feathered biped floats gently, peering down with sharp, hungry eyes, chuckling quietly to himself.

Opposite the encircling cliffs, the canyon widens, hiding its feet in brush and trees. Something rustles in the branches below, something large, something deadly, something with a simple mind, something with single-mindedness of purpose. The purpose is food and there's not much to eat in this neighborhood, except a certain collection of basic elements mixed with water surrounded by a flexible, fragile integument.

There's two ways out of this predicament, or maybe three. Climb the vertical walls through sheer determination and some handy technology that must be lying about here somewhere. Pitons, Jumars, chocks and biners, good braided rope, the best a productive civilization can produce. A vehicle to make a fast and noisy escape, a set of mechanical wings to soar safely out of harm's way, a weapon to scare off the shaggy beast below, a cell phone, a radio to call in technocratic reinforcements to save the day, for one of us, at least.

What, no technology around? No clever extensions of the hand, the brain? No power, no last minute reprieve from others of like mind?

What to do?

A quick inventory reveals a motley array: fingers worn smooth on packed sand, toes curled tightly in worn boots, a sphincter puckered in panic. Not much in the way of fearsome weapons to fend off the furry foe at the feet.

But wait, what's this? Scintillating synapses deep in the recesses of brain and nervous system, memories, old legends, ancient genetic codes unraveled in cellular complexity, chaotic simplicity, infinitesimal universality: the limbic, reptilian recesses of the primary human organ, steeped in the waters of its self-contained ocean, carrying within the legacy of trillions of turns of this star-born jumble of elementary particles gathered here, temporarily, to watch this final act of self-absorbed annihilation.

Is there an escape? Can we turn from this box canyon, face the growling menace blocking our passage to the cool and green waterhole beyond? Can we meet our furry friends and call them brother, embrace and be embraced as long-lost relatives welcomed home at last, returned to the fold? Or must we hold out to the last, praying to our keepers for a miracle to turn oil into water, computer chips into food, cell phones into family and friends?

Time is short. We're burning daylight, the sun screams down from above, turning water to vapor, vapor to clouds and clouds to rain... over there... way over there.

And the growling's getting nearer.

Michael
Twin Lakes
Pacific Plate

October 26, 2003

Automania

Ed Abbey traveled down the coast of central California some years ago, from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, on the Coast Highway, and then further south to Monterey and Carmel, chasing the ghosts of Kerouac and Steinbeck, no doubt.

Even then, long before modern high-density housing and even higher density motorized traffic, Ed found California insufferable:

"There is science, logic, reason, there is thought based on experience and then there is California."

His experience in Salinas led him to question immigration practices and to contemplate revolution, real revolution, for our neighbors to the south. He turned his despised electric typewriter against automobiles and their drivers even then.

Where are we now, so much further along the road to automated oblivion?

The noise of the traffic on 7th Avenue outside our home increases exponentially, even without ground-penetrating stereos, mufflers tuned to maximum volume and the huge knobby tires of testosterone fueled trophy trucks. Average speed increases inexorably, driven by TeeVee ads and the inescapable busyness of modern society, matched in a steeply inclined increase of decibel levels. Soon, we won't be able to hear each other talk outside, let alone listen to the mocking birds or golden crowned sparrows in the trees.

High tide was 6.09 feet above mean tide today - a portent of things to come - bringing fresh sea water into the old outwash from Schwann Lagoon for the first time in years. The sight of high water inevitably brings to mind inexorable sea level rise, as this old beat-up and much abused planet warms under a thickening blanket of auto exhaust, CO2 and a chemical effluvium of greenhouse gases.

The cliffs will hold for a time, but soon they, too, will succumb, crumbling back further from the encroaching sea, leaving a dangling mess of dribbling sewer pipe, asphalt chunks, sidewalk ends, basement foundations and old human skeletal parts best left long forgotten.

Nature changes slowly and inevitably, far beneath the radar screens of the technocratic human animals, focused as only a highly complex society can be on bank accounts, the latest fashions and fads, the newest automotive madness, football scores. The subtle changes often go unnoticed entirely until it is entirely too late, and official humandom goes into a paroxysm of panicked preparations for the crisis already underway.

What can we do, those few of us aware of the sinking, stinking miasma human society has created on this once lovely ball whirling in a star-studded firmament?

As Ed said, "They have us surrounded," the developers, the corporate toadies, the government sycophants, the media whores. Most of us are unaware of our peonage to the new corporate serfdom - resistance is feudal.

We can either make a stand where we are and be the change we want to see in the world, as that mad, bald little South African once said, or, once again, we can strike camp and wander the land seeking a place of solace, a bolt-hole, an enclave of sanity where we can live out our natural lives.

The few, the lonely, the misfits, accepting self-exile from an insane society with no place for the sane.

We see the precipice ahead, we apply our brakes and sound our horns, but few listen and even fewer possess the will to bring this hurtling SUV to a halt, or even divert it slightly from its path, before we all plunge over the abyss in a satisfying cacophony of rending technology.

Is it inevitable or merely my deepest desire?

Michael
Twin Lakes
Pacific Plate

REALITY

August 13, 2003

I've been getting up early lately, riding my bike through the pre-dawn fog down to the KUSP studio near the beach, where I host NPR's Morning Edition, substituting for Genial Johnny who's on vacation in Las Vegas, of all places.

Fire lookout towers being in short supply these days, it serves as my remote aerie from which to view society from a comfortable perspective, in the quiet of a coastal California dawn, with the fog horn bleating sharply in the distance (what ever happened to the old reverberant rhuuuuuuuuuu-unh?). I watch the morning light creep through obscuring vapors, observe the eucalyptus gradually gaining ghostly form, their long leafy branches serving as convenient and secure perches for families of dark cormorants to discuss among themselves the coming morning flights.

This is supposed to be a "non-commercial' radio station, meaning that we don't sell advertising to keep the station going, nor are we beholden to the pleasure of advertisers to cover our operating expenses. Even so, every ten minutes or so, I read "grant announcements," typed on 3 X 5 cards, explaining, "This program is made possible by a generous grant from..." and, "for information, call..." They may not be advertisements, as such, but the station does agree to air so many of these "spots" in exchange for the grantors' unspecified generous contributions. Sounds something like a duck to me.

It's not a matter of greed, really. We love doing radio and we're happy that someone will pay us to do the things we love. We get what we want and they get at least some of what they want: a good trade. "Public" radio goes on and the business of doing business slips a bit more to the capitalist side of the ledger.

The cormorants, meanwhile, raise their families of cormorant babies in piles of twigs perched precariously on largely bare branches, peeping and pining for food from their busy parents. Theirs is a different kind of greed, a demand for the essential sustenance vomited forth from their parents' long hooked bills in a basic relationship older than time. In due course, the dependent fledglings will take wing to find their own mates, raise their own broods of hungry children and scour the nearby lagoons for suitable baby food.

Hmmm, analogies abound, stretching credulity perhaps, begging comparisons between broadcasters and birds, funders and flyers. Each has a part to play in the foggy moments of first light, insuring the continuance of free communication and feathery communion.

There is a basic difference, however, a difference that clarifies the relationship between Homo sapiens and the non-human world. The apologists for human excess always claim that man is part of nature and therefore whatever man (and woman) does is natural and must be accepted as part of the natural processes of this Earth. This ignores the fact that man is the only animal capable of self-reflection, self-knowledge and the ability to foresee the outcome of our own actions, however dimly. Humans can decide for themselves whether or not to destroy habitat for non-human species, all the while understanding the consequences of any decision to continue in destructive practices.

The cormorant, on the other, uh, wing, can only do what cormorants have done for millions of years: dry their wings in the dim morning sun, raise their babies high in the branches of trees bordering the coastal lagoons where they spear fish in the brackish waters, and perch convivially in mute contemplative rows on bare branches etched against a perfect sky. They know nothing of time, progress, tomorrow or yesterday. They can't worry that they are taking too many fish from nearby waters, nor discuss the effects of bird poop on the e-coli content if its effluent. The cormorants are innocent, pure, sublimely fortunate.

It remains for us, headphones clamped on ears, microphone held captive in its proffering hand, gazing upon the primordial scene through single-paned, mullioned windows of human manufacture, to do our job of contemplation, introspection and ponderous prognostication. Those of us with access to the communication media: to books, magazines and newspapers, to radio public, pirated and for-profit; yes, and even unto TeeVee, the great bastion of United States greed and propaganda, have a responsibility to spread the word of the task assigned to us by millennia of evolution, and to infuse in our fellow navel gazers a sense of responsibility for our great calling.

Michael A. Lewis
Leona Gulch
Pacific Plate

August 1, 2003

There is a Taoist concept expressed as wu wei, meaning of itself. The central tenet of Taoism is the active form of wu wei, or self-arising, sometimes translated less accurately as "not doing" or "not striving."

As an apple tree does not have to think about producing apples, the apples arise of themselves from the very nature of their "appleness." Humans do not tell their faces how to grow and change, the nature of the human face arises of itself, with no conscious intervention. We could say that humans "face" in much the same way that the apple tree "apples." (Thanks to Alan Watts for this concept)

It is also true that relationships among humans arise from the circumstances within human societies. In a society in which economic production is organized under a centralized authoritarian hierarchy, relationships among humans in all circumstances are also so organized. The principle organizing structure of the society comes from the central authority rather than from within the individual. The humans are told how to "face" rather than "facing" as a self-arising part of being human.

Some people see centralized authoritarian hierarchy as unnecessarily limiting human "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," of those who are not in control of the hierarchy. Our present situation is a perfect example: the United States government is proposing to kill thousands of people in another country in order to force them to "face" in a particular way, on demand, rather than the way they normally do. This government demands that everyone should "face" in the same way it does, regardless of how we would "face" through self-arising behavior. The emphasis is on control and authority rather than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The question posed then is "How do we change our society so as to maximize "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" for all members. The question, posed this way, is another example of centralized, hierarchical authoritarian thinking. It is not up to us to change society to achieve our predetermined outcome. Rather, we should ask, "How can we remove centralized, authoritarian hierarchy from our lives and allow a new society to arise of itself?"

One approach is non-cooperation. If we turn our backs on the central hierarchy, conduct our economic and political lives in our local neighborhoods, communities and bioregions and withdraw our support from the central authority, we will build a world in which the society of human interrelationships can arise of itself. If we think less in terms of opposition, denial, destruction and elimination, and think rather of nurture, support, mutual aid, and addition, we will foster these human activities and allow the others to wither from lack of energy.

Another way of thinking of this is living in place. If we concentrate first on living our own lives in harmony with the natural cycles of the place we inhabit, and conduct our relationships with others in our neighborhoods, communities and bioregions with this same emphasis and understanding, our society will arise from these interrelationships of itself. We need not strive toward "democracy," "anarchy," "socialism" or any other mental construct of human behavior as an overriding template of what our society should look like. Such a predetermined outcome will only produce a centrally guided society.

Alternatively, we can learn to let go, let live, be one with the place and the people. We can coevolve with all living things in our bioregion, celebrating the joy of living, living the joy of celebration.

This seems idealistic, utopian, in a world dominated by central authority. How can we hope to escape from the centralized system when everything in our lives is dependant on and controlled by the system? Do we start a commune, withdraw to a cabin in the wilderness, move to another country?

"Freedom begins between the ears." Ed Abbey

"Be the change you want to see in the world." Mahandis K. Gandhi

"If you want the world to be a better place, you must do it, every day." Meatball Fulton

Lobo Place
East Mesa

Last modified 4/6/21