ETC Journal

Albert Bates and Cliff Davis to Teach Permaculture in Belize

2012-01-21T07:25:00.000-08:00

Ecovillage Training Center founder Albert K. Bates and Cliff Davis of Spiral Ridge Permaculture, will be teaching a PDC course at Maya Mountain Research Farm in Belize Feb 20th - March 2nd.

You can hear Cliff talking about this unique learning opportunity at the end of C-Realm Podcast episode 293: Infinite Rehypothecation with Nicole Foss.

ETC Voices Podcast 021

2011-06-17T09:22:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/ETC_Voices_Podcast_021

KMO talks with two young people traveling by bicycle and sustained by faith as they make their way from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific and back again with very little money. Brad, a C-Realm listener who came to the Farm for a visit, provides his own perspective on the path of job and mortgage.

ETC Voices Podcast 020

2011-06-17T09:17:00.000-07:00

http://c-realm.com/podcasts/etcvoices/etc-voices-podcast-020/

KMO concludes the talk with Professor Bob Rosenthal started on C-Realm Podcast episode 260. Bob describes why he brings his students to the Ecovillage Training Center to give them a working example of an intentional community. Music by Sara Jarosz

Reflections On a Recent Trip to NYC

2011-06-02T09:12:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting on the porch the Elk River House in Chesapeake City, Maryland, facing a river mercifully devoid of ear-splitting "go fast" boats. I can hear the mechanical whine of some distant machinery, but for the most part, I hear birds and insects. Yesterday was Memorial Day, and today, everybody is back at work or school. It's a hot day to be living without air conditioning here at the Elk River House, but I'm sitting in a rocking chair on the concrete porch in the shade. I have a laptop computer on my lap and a headset on my head, and I'm speaking rather than typing these words. Ah, the marvels of technology.

I spent the weekend in New York City with my children. We stayed with my aunt and uncle who live in Astoria in Queens. My uncle Steve is Greek. He has lived in New York City for as long as I can remember, but he still speaks with distinct Greek accent, and he retains certain "Old World" sensibilities; sensibilities which he shares with many of his neighbors and which have shaped the neighborhood.

Steve and my aunt, Eva Mae, own a three-story house with a back yard. By suburban standards their yard is quite small. It extends as a long rectangle off the back of the house, and the back half of the rectangle is devoted to Steve's garden. About three quarters of the remaining space is paved, and a good portion of that is covered by a shed roof with a picnic table underneath. There's a patch of grass with trees and lawn chairs, and the backyard serves as an outdoor room. Astoria is a largely Greek neighborhood, but many of the neighbors are Asian and Latino. Unlike many suburbanites and possibly many New Yorkers, Steve not only knows his neighbors, he visits with them over the fence with a vibe that I can describe, without irony, as "neighborly."

I said I was writing this from Chesapeake City, and according to the post office that is correct. But really I am in Port Herman, and this small well-to-do neighborhood used to be a town unto itself. Everyone here is white, and outside of the Elk River house, which has become a haven for people in transition, everyone here has a lot of money. The house next door belongs to the business manager for U2. He doesn't live there, and in fact, I rarely see him or his wife, and I have never spoken to them, nor they to me. A woman who used to live here in the Elk River House now works for them doing landscaping. She tells me that the neighbors refer to the Elk River House as "the Halfway House." It makes sense. According to their sensibilities, why else would unrelated adults live together under the same roof unless they were criminals who required supervision even after their release from jail or prison?

In New York City, people are surrounded by millions of strangers, and they have developed habits of body language and behavior which allow them to preserve a sense of personal space amidst the teeming throng. People avoid eye contact, and perfunctory interactions conducted with transit workers, sales clerks, and the like struck me as terse and impersonal in the extreme. I was riding the bus in Manhattan, and some Dutch tourists sat down next to me. One of them glanced at me and looked away quickly. I said, "It's all right. I'm not a New Yorker, so you can talk to me." My cousin's wife, Jenny, took mock affront at my remark, and she proceeded to chat with the tourists for the duration of our ride.

Given my interest in the topic of the potential collapse of industrial civilization, New York City strikes me as a disaster waiting to happen, but I absolutely love how New Yorkers live their lives in public spaces. The parks are full of children playing in playgrounds, young men playing basketball, people skating, playing musical instruments or just sitting on park benches or on patches of grass surrounded by people they may or may not know, but comfortable just the same. They haven't "gone to the park." They are just at the park, passing time and living their lives. People meet friends and sit and talk in outdoor cafés, and all manner of entertainment and distraction is available within walking distance of home, although 'walking distance' in New York is a very different concept from walking distance here in Port Herman. In Port Herman, people "take a walk," but bipedal locomotion is not a viable means of getting where one needs to go. Nothing is within walking distance, and even if you are willing to walk 5 miles to the nearest convenience store, there are no sidewalks. Any errand, no matter how trivial, involves driving. There are no buses. There are no subways. These are the conveyances of the unwashed masses. I'm surrounded by people of means who have no use for public spaces because they own all of the space that they require. When they travel, they do so inside a mobile bubble of private property.

New York City could not possibly feed itself, but it is replete with backyard gardens, container gardens on rooftops, and community gardens where people interact with their neighbors, while deriving nourishment from the soil. I saw a short video yesterday about a man who keeps bees on his NYC rooftop. In contrast, every property in Port Herman is landscaped, but there is not a single vegetable garden. A common nugget of wisdom in the peak oil community is the idea that 90% of the preparation required for Peak Oil is mental preparation, and I wonder who is better prepared to adjust to the new facts of life in a post-peak world; New Yorkers or the inhabitants and absentee landlords of Port Herman?

ETC Voices Podcast 019

2011-05-24T20:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast019

KMO talks with ETC neighbor, Carl E., about the community taking shape on the periphery of the Farm. There are great opportunities for getting "back to the land" in rural Tennessee, but Carl warns against making a move based on panic.

You can hear Carl discuss the philosophy and practicalities of salvage in episode 231 of the C-Realm Podcast.

ETC Voices Podcast 018

2011-05-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast018

KMO talks with two travelers in search of community. Topics include peak oil, nuclear power, and the challenges of preparing for a post-collapse environment when the imperatives of the money economy remain in full effect.

ETC Voices Podcast 017

2011-05-10T06:30:00.000-07:00

http://worldpeacediet.org/http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast017

This episode features an impassioned plea for veganism delivered to an audience at the Farm by Dr. Will Tuttle. Meals are the most powerful rituals in our culture, and every meal that includes meat reinforces a notion of human superiority and dominance. Dr. Tuttle proposes changing meals as a means of changing consciousness and fostering compassion.

At the end of the podcast, KMO shares some of the details of recent changes in his diet which have him eating more, not less, meat.

ETC Voices Podcast 016

2011-05-04T13:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast016

KMO talks with Mark, a successful business owner from Michigan who is nearing retirement age and is seeking a more meaningful and adaptive way to spend the last third of his life. Later KMO talks with Courtni Hale. Courtni stands in both the Native American world and the mainstream culture, and she is hoping to foster networks of association and cooperation between those divergent worldviews.

ETC Voices Podcast 015

2011-04-25T18:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast015

KMO talks with two ETC permaculture apprentices about how their desire to live close to the land has created a rift between them and their families. Later, Jason Deptula, a wizard in hippie's clothing, describes how his normally harmonious interactions with the muggles of rural Tennessee sometimes takes an odd turn.

ETC Voices Podcast 014

2010-12-24T14:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast014

KMO plays a kitchen table conversation with Jack and Lauren, who organized a book event for the Conversations on Collapse couch-surfing tour. They met, got married, and had a child on the Farm, but they left before the Changeover in the early 80s. They share their memories of the material hardship of life on the Old Farm.

Letting People Starve

2010-09-04T13:15:00.000-07:00

Since James Lee took hostages at the headquarters of the Discovery Channel in Virginia earlier this week and, in the process of getting himself killed, thrust the name of Daniel Quinn and the titles of a few of his books into the news cycle, a lot of commentators have invoked the name of late 18th century economist, Thomas Malthus. Malthus warned that human populations will inevitably outgrow their food supply and that, sooner or later, the four horseman of the apocalypse will turn up to balance the books.

This invocation has sparked debates in website comment threads about whether Malthus raised a legitimate concern or whether 200 years of continued increases in the food supply has "proved Malthus wrong." Those who favor the notion that Malthus was just plain wrong equate any concerns about population with Malthus and repeat the incantation "Malthus was wrong" thus dispelling any concerns about the long-term viability of a continually-growing human population.

Some commentators associate Daniel Quinn with Thomas Malthus, assert that Malthus was wrong, and conclude that Daniel Quinn and anyone who takes him seriously is a barking moonbat, a misenthrope, and possibly, even worse in some respectable intellectual circles, anti-business. What these reflexive ideological cascades completely miss is the possibility that Malthus was wrong and that the four horseman have thus far made only cameo appearances and have yet to strut and fret their true hour upon the stage.

I spoke with Daniel Quinn in his home in April of 2008. You can hear that conversation in episode 88 of the C-Realm Podcast: Making a Living. What follows is a partial transcript of that interview in which Daniel Quinn explains why Malthus was wrong and why a Malthusian Correction is still likely.

KMO: You've mentioned in a couple places that people frequently will approach you and say, “Mr. Quinn, I understand what you're saying, but what should I do?” And when they ask you, “What should I do?” you realize that they don't understand what you're saying.

Daniel Quinn: [chuckles]

KMO: What is it that they're missing?

Daniel: What they're missing is that I have no 12-step program. There is no universal program that everyone should follow. There are things like recycling, reusing, re... what's the other one? Yeah, absolutely. Everyone should do those things. But beyond that, what you should do depends on you; depends on what you can do.

A great many people, after reading my books, make unfortunate choices because they say, “Oh, I'm going to become an environmental engineer because, you know, the environment is in danger.” Well, that's unrealistic because they may not have any aptitude for that career, and there isn't that much call for them. They aren't going to be able to make a living. Not everyone who goes into that is going to be able to make a living as an environmental engineer.

The question to ask is, “What can I do best? What am I best at?” And if you are doing what you are best at, then you are going to have more influence there than anywhere else, and influence means having an impact on the people around you. It isn't necessarily sitting down and instructing them. I don't mean that, but people are changed by what the people around them do. Even if the people around them don't necessarily try to make them change, I'm sure that the people around you, people that you know, are influenced by your way of life. They see it, and they compare it to their own life. It does influence their actions in perhaps very subtle ways.

I've heard from teachers, for example, who say, “I don't use your books in my class, but I teach a different way now than I used to.” And that to me is very cheery news. That's what I want. Sure, I'd be happy to have them use my books in their class, but that's not necessary. The important thing is to change them.

The collapse of the Soviet Union occurred because the people of the Soviet Union had changed. From the seventies on, as the younger generation came closer and closer to power, it became possible to have a Gorbachev in office. It couldn't have happened in 1945; to have a Gorbachev in office. It's ridiculous to even think about, but by 1986-7, the people of the Soviet Union had changed and were ready to listen to a new idea, and wanted a new idea; wanted to go a different way.

I once proposed to an audience... I hadn't put it in print. I wouldn't dare to put it in print... that rock and roll had a tremendous influence on the people of the Soviet Union, and it was ultimately, at least in part, responsible for its break-up. And I was very pleased when a year or so ago a Russian student of the history of the Soviet Union expressed the exact same theory; that rock and roll was really very very important in changing the minds of the young people, who eventually became the older people who said, “No more,” to the Communist regime.

KMO: I had another guest who's been on my program on a number of occasions; his name is Dmitry Orlov, and he has just published a book called Re-inventing Collapse: the Soviet Example and American Prospects. He was born in Russia, but he mainly grew up in the United States, but he made trips back to Russia at various points during the disintegration of the Soviet Union. One thing that accompanied the disintegration of the Soviet Union was the deliberate creation of a super-elite class of 'oligarchs.' State industries were privatized and given to these people, and in the process, the former Soviet Union underwent a process of economic disintegration in which 20 million people died, and that figure is not widely known.

Daniel: No.

KMO: And it seems as though a similar chain of events is looming on the near horizon here, and some people feel a great sense of urgency. I've just come from the [annual gathering of] the Conference for the New Urbanism, and there are groups of people who are desperately trying to figure out how we can re-arrange our society with the utmost speed so that we're not so dependent on cheap fossil fuels for our just-in-time delivery system of our agricultural products, and those agricultural products are also the products of petroleum. We've taken half a century to structure our country such that we are utterly dependent on cars, and the whole structure of our society is laid out for the convenience of the car and certainly not [for] the convenience of people. Particularly people who don't have cars.

There are people who feel this sense of urgency. There are people who feel this sense of urgency over climate change, but then it seems there are the vast majority of people who are only concerned with their place in the hierarchy, with the status they can acquire, with the amount of money they can acquire, and I think money serves as a sort of placeholder for status. I think social status is really more important to them than controlling resources. And it seems as though the number of people who do feel a sense of urgency is growing, but it doesn't seem that it's growing fast enough to really avert some seriously unpleasant consequences that will result in what I've been calling a 'Malthusian Correction.'

Another guest I've had on the program is a retired mathematics professor from Colorado. His name is Albert Bartlett, and he talks about the exponential function. He has a lecture that he's given thousands of times that he calls 'The Exponential Function' talking about population and the results of our loss of cheap and easily available oil for producing food. And as I sit here, the hairs on my arms and legs are starting to stand up as I think about... when I take that idea from being an abstract notion and actually imagining what it would be like in the lives of the people, [voice wavering with emotion] in the lives of my children... [long pause]

Daniel: Well, certainly, if we don't manage to come up with petroleum-free agricultural in the very near future, there's going to be a massive die-off of humanity. No question of that, and there certainly isn't any problem that is more urgent than finding those solutions. [There is] one problem whose urgencey never goes away, and that is our continued population growth which makes worse the problems we face with the loss of petroleum.

We are in the midst of a period of mass extinction as great as any in the past.

KMO: Two hundred species a day, you say.

Daniel: Up to. I think the UN recently put out a report saying a hundred and fifty... a hundred and seventy five. It's still an enormous number when considered daily. And the thing is that, of course, we don't see species dropping dead before our eyes.

KMO: We don't see species. We just see individual animals, and we have a very small subset of the species in the world within our view. We see squirrels and a few birds.

Daniel: [Chuckling] Yes, that's right. Exactly, and when species become extinct, most of us are not anywhere near enough to see them become extinct. We're down there in Brazil, destroying the environment of countless species in order to provide more biomas for humans, and we are robbing the environment there of the biomass of other species which dwindle, and dwindle, and dwindle and eventually cease to be. And this will eventually, if we [let it] go unchecked and if we continue at our present rate, we'll be at nine billion, perhaps even twelve billion. There's no way in the world that the world can survive... that the living community can survive a twelve billion human population. It can't survive a six billion population, as a matter of fact. That's why we're in the midst of a mass extinction. It's because the six billion of us require so much biomass to keep us at six billion and growing.

I'm not a Malthusian. I'm here to refute Malthus. Malthus was the first to incorporate into science the notion of human exceptionalism. All living, animate species, without exception (except one); their populations depend completely on the availability of food. If more food becomes available, their population grows. Absolutely. And when food becomes less available, the population diminishes; absolutely, without fail. But according to Malthus, we are an exception to that. According to Malthus, our population goes up, no matter what. So, we must continue to chase our population growth with more food, whereas, in fact, it is the other way around.

Population chases food availability. Food availability does not chase population. When there are more deer, it does not mean that they are somehow growing more food for themselves. It means more food has become available for them. But once we took control of the production of food then we began to increase food production in order to have surpluses, which made us powerful and made it possible for us to overtake the world and conquer all of the peoples in the world. Our population has grown constantly in the last ten thousand years and continues to grow because we continue to drive growth with increased food production.

According to Daniel Quinn's worldview, agriculture is the engine of population growth. It is also the engine of famine. Hunter/gatherers certainly experience lean times, but since they don't raise crops, they never have crop failures and the sort of mass starvation that crop failures (usually combined with war) produce. If that is true, then what are the implications? What are we, assuming there is a 'we,' supposed to do about it?

Repeatedly, people who feel indignation at the implications of Daniel Quinn's worldview confront him with something like, "So what? Are you saying we should just let people starve?"

Daniel Quinn has developed a reply that goes something like:

I don't let the rain fall. I don't let the wind blow, and I don't let people starve. We are not God, and we're not in a position to let people starve. What's more, God does let people starve.

I understand what he's saying, but I also understand why a lot of people judge this answer to be unsatisfactory. Humans move a lot of food around on this planet, and our ability to harness the energy embodied in petroleum clearly gives us some pretty god-like powers. We can move thousands of tons of food into drought-stricken or war-torn regions. We might recognize the undesirable long-term consequences of failing to allow the population of any given bio-region to achieve a workable balance with the local carrying capacity, but nobody wants to be the one to try to explain these big picture concerns to the parents of starving children.

There is, of course, another response to famine. We have a lot of food here, and they have a lot of hungry people there. We could move the hungry people to where the food is rather than the other way around. Were that proposal on the table, I think a lot of people who judge Daniel Quinn to be heartless would soon find it in their own hearts to let people starve.

A Month on the Road

2010-08-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

It gets hot in Tennessee in August. Darned hot. So the ETC closes down for the month of August, as does the Inn. Someone still has to feed the chickens and ducks and do other basic care-taker operations, but it certainly doesn't require an innkeeper AND an assistant innkeeper, so I hit the road to go spend some time with my children. First I drove from central Tennessee to the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay with my usual stop in Greensboro to hang out with my friend and fellow podcaster, Marty. Marty always puts me up in grand style, and we usually take in some zombie media.

I picked up my kids in Maryland and we took a very expensive taxi ride to the Baltimore airport. We flew from there to St. Louis where we met up with my mother. After a day and a night doing touristy things in St. Louis we drove to Berryville, Arkansas. I wasn't born in Berryville, and except for summers spent at my grandparents' place in my childhood, I never lived there until I was an adult with a wife and child of my own. My second child was born in Berryville. I mention that I never lived there until I was an adult, but in a way Berryville is my home town. My family moved repeatedly when I was a child, and summers in Berryville served as my life-long point of continuity.

After a week in Berryville, I drove back to the Farm in Summertown, Tennessee with my mother and two sons. We spent four days and nights here at the ETC, and I was happy that my boys finally got to see where I've been and what I've been up to this year. We left on a Friday morning and headed back to the East Coast, stopping again in Greensboro. We stopped by Marty's place for some end of the day video game action. His girlfriend, Kaye, was there, and I showed her the cover proof for Conversations on Collapse. Kaye was the leading contributor in my Kickstarter Campaign to raise funds to get the book printed. My mom, my kids, and I spent that night in a Super 8 motel. I wasn't about to ask Marty to house our whole party.

We arrived back at the Elk River House in Chesapeake City on Saturday evening where we all stayed until the boys' mother came to pick them up at the end of the workday on Monday. Tuesday I drove down to Chestertown, Maryland twice; once to record an interview with Tara Shannon Holste, and a second time later in the day to enjoy a home-cooked meal at her place. On Wednesday morning, my mother and I set out again for the Farm. This time we were in two cars, and we had Boots, one of my two cats, with us. We would have taken both cats, but we failed to catch the other cat, Mocha. Boots and Mocha are brother and sister, and until a couple of days ago, they had never lived apart.

Again, we stopped in Greensboro and enjoyed the hospitality of both Marty and Kaye. I stayed with Marty, and my mom and Boots stayed at Kaye's house. We set out the next morning, and I spent 12 hours in my truck with Boots, who gave voice to his misery for almost every moment of the trip. On the Farm, Boots got a one-day reprieve from the torment of the road. He stayed in the greenhouse that is attached to the south side of the Inn and got to spend a bit of time outdoors, but now he's back in his cramped travel cage as he rides with my mom on the final stage of his cross country ordeal, where, late tonight, he will be re-united with my dog, Ungo. They've spent two years apart, and I don't think Boots missed Ungo in the slightest. I imagine that he does miss his sister, Mocha.

Over the course of the events I've just described I traveled about twenty five hundred miles by car. I also logged some air miles, but I don't care to find out how many. The trip from Maryland to Tennessee was doubly consumptive as we had two cars and two drivers, and while I'm the kind of person to make a mental note of the expanded carbon footprint, I'm not the kind of person to fret over it.

Did I have any insights or flashes of inspiration along the way? Well, sure. On one solo day of driving I was thinking about the upcoming AMC series, The Walking Dead. It's an adaptation of a long-running comic book series by Robert Kirkman. Frank Darabont, the director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, is adapting the comics series for television, and I have high hopes for it.

There is a very successful podcast called Galactic Watercooler, which started out as a fan podcast devoted to Ron Moore's re-imagined Battlestar Galactica TV series. That podcast was originally called Galactica Watercooler, but the podcast outlived the TV series that inspired it, and it has garnered the love of the SF/sci-fi fan community. The podcast is now professionally produced, provides a living for its creators, and has inspired an annual, in-the-flesh meet-up that draws hundreds of fans from all over the world. As I drove, I was spinning fantasies of replicating that sort of success by hitching my wagon to Frank Darabont's incipient zombie epic. I thought of a name for the podcast; The Talking Dead, and I imagined replacing the W in the stylized title logo of the comicbook with a T. Since Marty and I both love zombie movies, and because it's a lot easier to do a podcast with two hosts than to fill the silence with monolog, I called Marty to see if he wanted to co-create the show. He didn't answer the phone, but I left him a voicemail and he later got back to me to express enthusiasm for the idea.

When I was at Marty's house most recently we were brainstorming, and I said, jokingly, that before we go any further I ought to do a Google search and make sure that nobody else has already staked out this bit of territory. I didn't imagine that I was following in anybody's footsteps through the morphogenic landscape, but of course I was. It turns out that The Talking Dead Podcast is already up to episode #19. The creator of that podcast even used the exact same title graphic I had envisioned. Phooey!

Marty pointed out, quite correctly, that this doesn't bring the portcullis down on our potential podcast. We just have to come up with a different title. I agree, but at the same time, I'm not feeling the same wind in my sails now as I was when the idea first came to me.

So much for inspiration. What about insights? Well, maybe, but they certainly didn't spring unbidden from the churning ether. I cornered interview subjects with digital audio recorder in hand and solicited their insights. I had a pretty clear idea of what it was I wanted, and that's what I got: ideas that I already endorse spoken in voices other than my own.

I recorded a conversation with Patrice Gros, my old organic gardening guru, about the difficulty of competing with corporate agriculture and it's economies of scale. I got an apprentice of his to articulate my belief that it's better to get people to fall in love with quality food than to scare them with stories of famine and collapse. It also occurred to me, not for the first time, that it would be fun and possibly useful to travel around to various organic farms and capture images of sexy young people working in the sun, smiling, laughing, and showing lots of firm flesh. I could justify that project as an attempt to give enlightened agriculture a memetic leg up by eroticizing local food consciousness, but really, I just like being around sexy young people who aren't caught up in the cultivated materialism of commercial culture.

When talking with Daniel Krotz, he articulated my conviction that organized religion has a legitimate role to play in rural societies and that the New Atheists are doing more harm than good when they heap scorn upon Christians as it pushes people of faith into a besieged mentality and exacerbates the ideological polarization that politicians and power mongers cynically exploit to get poor working people in the so-called Red States to vote against their own economic interests.

As I took hundreds of photos of my two sons on our trip, I realized at the time, and then again earlier today as I looked at those photos, that in spending so much of my energy on trying to preserve the moment, I missed the full experience of the moment. Yeah, yeah. I've heard and had that one before.

I realized, as I got close enough to the Farm to turn off my GPS navigation device, that I'm glad to be familiar with this particular patch of the rural south and that I'm happy to have a place among the people here. Merry, the ETC innkeeper, is leaving today to spend a few days away from here to re-charge her batteries. Albert Bates is in Ireland, so I'll have the ETC pretty much to myself for the next few days. A new group of permaculture apprentices will arrive next week, and the familiar rhythms of this place, including weekly updates to this blog and the ETC Voices Podcast, are about to resume.

The Difference Between a Teacher and a Head-copper

2010-07-31T15:23:00.000-07:00

This is a transcript of a portion of my conversation with Stephen Gaskin recorded in the living room of the Ecovillage Training Center on July 29^th, 2010:

KMO: I've been talking to a lot of people since I arrived here in February about the relationship between the Farm and the Ecovillage Training Center, and it seems that the Ecovillage Training Center embodies a lot of ideas that were not really in circulation in the 1970s and which don't receive universal acceptance here on the Farm.

Stephen Gaskin: The certain values that the Farm was founded on were the synthesis of what was said by a thousand people at a time over a period of years. We read all of the religious books that we could get ahold of. Religious teachers were coming from all over the world. Suzuki Roshi came to sit with Allen Ginsberg. We had put that together. I presided over meetings where we argued these questions out. Like one particular hard night of arguing about the question that we had was the day the students were shot at Kent State.

We're having a discussion about that, and we've got about a hundred guys in the back row who were very militant and wanted to get guns and stuff. And some little girl gives me some candy, and she looked at me so funny when I ate it that I wondered a little bit. Bigger than shit, her daddy was a dealer, and I'd been hit with a LOT of acid. And so I said, “I'm dosed here. Do you mind if I go out and handle that?” And they said, “No, you've got to finish the argument.”

KMO: [Chuckles]

Stephen: So, we went on into a place, and I said, “Well, I come in here and I say, 'Peace and love,' and you guys say, 'Yeah, yeah.' And I say, 'Peace and love,' and you guys say, 'Yeah, yeah.'” And I said, “Peace and love,” and the whole audience said, “Yeah! Yeah!”

I said, “Thank you. Can I go out to the beach with my acid now?” And they said, “Yeah.”

[Laughter from KMO and Stephen.]

Stephen: And we argued out all the questions. We had a meeting about heroin when heroin came (to San Francisco). We had meetings about various religions, and we read the books of the various religions. And interestingly enough, there's a thing in Catholocism called the Credo which works as good for my god as their god. Catholicism says that God is omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient... [coughs] I think there's five of them. I can only remember a few of them right now, but those are the ones. And if you make any effort to take a look at those things and say, “Well, what are they?” The only thing that has all knowledge is every thinking thing in the universe in its totality. The only thing that has all power includes all the stars as far as you can see and farther. The only thing that includes all that kind of stuff is the actual physical living totality of the universe, and that would be a name of God for me. Or I might even settle for the definition of God to be, “The Parts of the universe we don't understand very well yet.”

KMO: It sort of sounded like you were talking about pantheism there, but I know you don't want to be any sort of theist, even a pantheist.

Stephen: Yeah. You gotta watch that stuff, you know. Hitler had a religious thing he wanted to do, for sure, and it was Neo-paganism. And that was where he'd give people lots of toys to play with and no responsibility, pretty much.

People come in here from all kinds of different religions... I haven't been doing religious ceremonies in quite a while. I think I'm about to start. I've been getting requests to start up again.

KMO: Here on the Farm? Or elsewhere?

Stephen: Here on the Farm.

We knew we were different, coming here, and we tried to make it so we had as much in common with the neighbors as we possibly could. And then I had this thing of trying to manage this thing, and among other things that I've never been is an executive. I had some ideas about how to handle things, and I would find that those ideas may not have been original. I may have heard about them or something, because they involved things that... like, have you ever heard of an 'event manager? Well, I invented that phrase for me. I don't know who else invented it somewhere else, but for me it's when somebody needs something done... When I would see something –a new thing emerging, I would look around for who was the closest reliable guy I could find and ask him if he'd dig that, be the event manager, and keep track of it for us until we understand it. And so that was a way where I could have a smart desktop without having to carry it around with me.

We tried to learn everything that we could. The results, woefully, are... uh...

One of the neighbor ladies that I would talk to sometimes, and we were out on the road talking. I opened my car door so we wouldn't have to have anything between us, and a car came by, and she leaned into my car and pulled the door closed behind her. And while she was leaned in close to me she said, “I love ya.”

She was one of the ladies on the lane that said, as far as she knows, I'm the honestest man on Drake's Lane. [Chuckles] Which is not too hard to do considering about half the neighbors are moonshiners. [Laughs]

KMO: What would you say the role of pyschedlics was in forming the synthesis that was the formalized Farm...

Stephen: Psychedelics didn't form the synthesis. Psychedelics destroyed the previous synthesis, and we built the synthesis ourselves, knowingly, smartly.

KMO: So psychedelics cleared the space for some new thinking?

Stephen: Yeah.

KMO: But you don't think it played any role in bringing together the various ideas and traditions that you were drawing upon?

Stephen: One Monday night I remember in particular, a guy comes running in waving this book and says, “I found this place here where this old monk in the 13^th century had exactly the same trip I had last Saturday night!” [Laughs] So we were checking everything out.

We had Shlomo Carlebach and Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan come visit us two weeks apart. It would have been fun to get the Jews and the Muslims at the same time, but two weeks was awfully close. I'm friends with Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan. I'm friends with Shlomo Carlebach. (Swami) Satchidananda and I were pretty good friends.

I didn't like Yogi Bhajan. I thought he was a bully. It's kinda funny. I met Aldous Huxley's younger brother, Julian, who is this upper class English dude, and he had known Indira Ghandi. He asked Indira Ghandi what she thought of Yogi Bhajan, and she said, “That bastard!” (pronounced “BAH-stawd”) [Chuckles]

Before Yogi Bhajan was Yogi Bhajan, he was head of airport security at Delhi Airport. He was a Sikh, and Sikhs do that. They'd be bank guards, and... that was part of their culture. They'd be “clean muscle.”

But, Yogi B, I never liked him. I did one of his meditations one time, and we were all lying down in the grass and closing our minds, and we're all laid out like that, and he runs a little commercial against pot. I thought, “You don't put commercials in anybody's mind about any subjects. You just don't do that. That's forbidden. It's a wrong thing to do.”

That's the difference between a teacher and a “head-copper.”

KMO: A teacher and a what?

Stephen: A head-copper; someone who cops your mind. My mother said, after understanding what I was doing for a while, “Well, Stephen, the hippies copped your mind.”

And I thought not only was she right but she used the usage exactly correctly. [KMO and Stephen both laugh]

KMO: Can you live without your mind being copped by somebody or something?

Stephen: My mind's a free will enterprise. That's something I believe in --free will. Free will and a fair shake; that's all you can ask for.

So, when I won the Right Livelihood Award, on the first anniversary, I was invited back. They were very interested in the Farm and things like that. So, the next time it was time for somebody to go, we sent Albert. And so all these little things go back to that meeting.

That's very funny to us, because people in Europe think the Farm is an ecovillage. And we say, “No, you go down this road about a half a mile, down this road about a quarter mile, and turn down into this little valley, and THAT's the ecovillage."

KMO: Except that Albert is quite clear that it's not the ecovillage. It's the Ecovillage Training Center, and no villagers are needed or wanted.

Stephen: I've heard that their most recent nickname is “the Ecovillians.”

KMO: Yes. The people who work here are sometimes called Ecovillians, and I can't really tell if it's in good fun or if there is a bit of animosity behind that.

Stephen: Well, it just used to mean the guys in the village. But, I'm glad Albert's doing this, and Albert's doing his thing his way.

To fully understand the implications of Stephen's comments it is helpful to know that Albert K. Bates started the Ecovillage Training Center on the Farm in 1994 and also that Stephen won the first Right Livelihood Award in 1980. One of the winners the second year was Permaculture pioneer Bill Mollison. The implication being that Albert's introduction to permaculture flowed directly from the philosophical synthesis that emerged from Stephen's Monday Night Class which eventually lead to the formation of the Farm and to Albert's being sent to the Right Livelihood Award gathering where he was exposed to the permaculture memeplex.

ETC Voices Podcast 012

2010-07-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast012

Paul interviews Mario, an ETC "eco-soaker" about his week on the Farm, and KMO talks with Gregory Landua about permaculture and about the philosophical that guide the ETC and how they differ from the guiding ethic of the larger Farm community.

You can learn more about the Gaia University Financial Permaculture course here:

http://www.financialpermaculture.com/cms/content/financial-permaculture-2010

Photo (left to right): Mario, KMO, Paul

Super Mega-Doom

2010-07-24T11:40:00.000-07:00

The day before yesterday, an on-line article caught my attention. It claimed that BP had set in motion a process by which an enormous methane bubble would erupt from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico sometime in the next six months and reprise the Permian extinction. The author of the piece spun a scenario in which the Earth's atmosphere, saturated with explosive concentrations of methane, catches fire and exterminates 95% of life on Earth nearly instantaneously. BP and the US government, goes the article, have imposed a total news blackout enforced with draconian punishments in order to hide the extent of the damage and the danger from the public.

I posted a link to the article before I'd even finished reading it. For my blog post, I paired an image of the Futurama character Proffessor Hubert J. Farnsworth with the title, “Good News, Everyone.” (The character of Professor Farnsworth owns an interplanetary delivery service, and he frequently introduces an episode's MacGuffin by walking into the Planet Express conference room and announcing some disastrous news to his assembled employees. He always prefaces the bad news with, “Good news, everyone!”)

I later read the entire article aloud to a group of Ecovillians (the affectionate nickname that Farmies use to refer to denizens of the Ecovillage Training Center) in the ETC kitchen. Paul, a C-Realm listener turned ETC permaculture apprentice, asked me how serious a worry I thought this was. Even before I read a thorough-going debunking of the article, I told Paul that I wasn't the least bit worried about this scenario. The situation that Cormac MaCarthy envisions in "The Road," wherein civilization collapses and a dwindling population of humans struggle to prolong their miserable existence by consuming the remnants of industrial society and by consuming each other, is deeply troubling. A scenario in which a single nearly instantaneous event poisons the atmosphere and sets it alight so that everyone is dead by day's end doesn't trouble me at all. That seems like a pretty easy way out. The only Doomsday scenario that I find less frightening is one in which some experiment in high-energy physics tears the fabric of reality and destroys the universe in an instant.

The notion of near instantaneous annihilation gives me comfort, as I know that I'll never have to live under a brutal local warlord. I'll never have to endure delousing at a FEMA camp. I'll never have to see my children victimized, starving, or suffering from diseases that only affect people who lack access to clean drinking water; diseases which were easily treated in the late Petroleum Age but which have become a leading cause of childhood mortality. Instantaneous annihilation means that I'll never suffer discomfort, indignity, or even inconvenience.

Minutes after I posted a link to the BP methane doomsday article, someone posted a comment that included a link to a convincing refutation of this particular set of wild-eyed claims of impending doom. The whole premise of methane super-mega doom hung on the claim that earlier mass extinction events mentioned resulted from a single methane escape event. Far from being scientific consensus, this isn't even a minority view in the scientific community. Annalee Newitz , the author of the debunking article puts it like this:

Another fishy fact in the methane bubble doomsday story is Aym's description of how methane bubbles are what caused the End Permian mass extinction event 250 million years ago. Many scientists do believe that atmospheric changes and ocean anoxia (de-oxygenization) were to blame for that extinction - but even Gregory Ryskin, the scientist whose highly speculative work is cited in the article, doesn't try to claim this as the sole cause, nor does he believe that one bubble of methane could bring down the biosphere instantly. The End Permian extinction took millennia to happen.

Newitz goes on to point out that methane leaks may very well lead to cumulative misfortune over time, but, “who wants to hear difficult, complicated pieces of information, when we could just be screaming about doomsday?” Really. If it takes decades for the harm to become apparent, how is that any different from the rise in prevalence of asthma, diabetes, and forms of cancer which used to be rare but which have become more common? How is that any different from climate change or abstruse claims about the long-term non-viability of petro-chemical agriculture or fractional reserve banking? If climate catastrophe doesn't play out in a matter of hours as in "The Day After Tomorrow," or if haphazardly disposed of chemical weapons don't spawn a hoard of flesh eating zombies, then who cares? If it happens slowly, then any harm to human health or the biosphere will simply be the new normal.

Newitz's article appears on the site io9 which seems to be devoted to topics that obsess Comic-Con attendees. The comments section consists almost entirely of self-satisfied derision of anyone who would be gullible enough to be concerned that a rapid change in the composition of the atmosphere might be a matter of grave importance. None of the comments addressed the fact that the supposed “BP/Obama Administration news blackout” escaped Ms. Newitz's debunking.

Oil industry financier and analyst, Matt Simmons, claims that the oil leak that BP recently managed to cap and which has been the star attraction in the carefully orchestrated disaster response puppet show playing out on TV and computer screens the world over is just one of three Gulf of Mexico oil leaks that BP has been struggling to bring under control for months, and that the one that BP has managed to cap was never the most serious of the three. A friend of the C-Realm posted a link to an interview with an investigative journalist who claims that the Deepwater Horizon rig which blew in April and has since starred in the big puppet show was actually a relief well for another blowout that occurred earlier in the year but which BP managed to keep from the public eye.

Is that true? I don't know. I don't even know how I would find out or how I might choose between the various disaster porn, PR sleight of hand, and conspiracy narratives which will remain on offer for as long as I have any interest in this story. What seems particularly telling, for me, is that when it comes to debunking, the claim that BP and and the Obama administration are selectively releasing information and imagery in order to manage the public's perception of the spill doesn't seem particularly important. That is to say, the claim that we're being lied to isn't controversial enough to warrant debunking.

As Charles Eisenstein details in his book, The Ascent of Humanity, we live in a matrix of lies. Every advertisement, every utterance by a public official, every name assigned to businesses, buildings, and neighborhoods by marketing professionals constitutes a lie, and the knowledge that we are being lied to provokes no particular emotional response from us. We know we're being lied to, and we are beyond caring. The abuse of language (and all other forms of symbolic communication – especially images) has continued for so long and has saturated public discourse so thoroughly that our ability feel outrage or indignation at being lied to is simply spent.

Eisenstein writes:

Why do we as a society seemingly accept our leaders' gross dishonesty as a matter of course? Why does the repeated exposure of their lies seem to arouse barely a ripple of indignation among the general public? Where is the protest, the outrage, the sense of betrayal?

The answer to these questions lies deeper than the machinations of one or another faction of the power elite. It lies deeper than the subversion and control of the media. Our society's apathy arises from a subtle and profound disempowerment: the depotentiation of the language itself, along with all other forms of symbolic culture. Words are losing their power to create and to transform. The result is a tyranny that can never be overthrown, but will only proceed toward totality until it collapses under the weight of the multiple crises it inevitably generates.

So here we are, back to collapse; inevitable collapse. And again, to echo Dmitry Orlov, collapse is the optimistic scenario. Without collapse, we have the perpetual matrix of lies and the continued degradation of our ability to feel much of anything other than a fleeting sensation of titillation when we see images of boobs or butts for the first time in a few hours, or a short-lived fascination with images of Mega-Disaster on TV.

Unfortunately, one power that words still retain is their ability to stoke rage. Pundits for one or another faction of the power elite seem as capable as ever or using words to invoke anger at the avatars of the opposing faction. Wildfire memes like the BP Methane Mega-Disaster stoke rage against corporations. Stories about pimps using government-funded aid agencies to help them house illegal immigrants working as prostitutes focus the rage of working stiffs on the only people in society who wield less influence and have less control over their own destinies than they do. But nothing constructive springs from this kind of factional animosity, and if the ubiquitous abuse of language and symbolic communication has left us unresponsive to everything except the pricking of our neurological rage circuits, then once again, the eventual, inevitable collapse looms ever larger.

But maybe that's just sour grapes on my part. I was pretty optimistic about our collective destiny when I lived in a big house and drove a Lexus SUV. Maybe this focus on lies and cynical manipulation is just my own expression of the Doomer's Curse. That, if all goes according to plan, will be the subject matter of the 216th episode of the C-Realm Podcast. I hope you'll join me.

ETC Voices Podcast 011

2010-07-20T05:48:00.001-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast011

I've been out of town, and in my absence, Paul, an apprentice here at the ETC, and Merry, our innkeeper, produced this installment of the podcast. I haven't heard it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. I'm sure they would appreciate any constructive feedback you might provide.

ETC Voices Podcast 010

2010-07-09T07:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast010

This week's show provides a glimpse of the annual Farm homecoming celebration, Ragweed. First we get an account of the genesis of the festival from Old Farmie, Peter Schweitzer, and later Molly, a recent graduate of the Farm school, shares her thoughts and concerns about what the Ragweed gathering says about the evolution of the Farm community. Music by Night Train.

Surge Capacity

2010-07-03T13:19:00.000-07:00

Just now, the Farm is closed to outside visitors. This is the week of the Farm's annual family reunion, called Ragweed. Over the nearly 40 years of the Farm's history, thousands of people have lived here at one time or another, and now most of the people who have some history and affiliation with the Farm live elsewhere. In the first week of July, many of them come back for a week of shared meals, live music, and other activities that keep the bonds of the Farm's far-flung community vital.

Merry, the ETC innkeeper, and I made up a number of extra beds in the ETC dormatories with the expectation that we would be getting a lot of drop-in guests for Ragweed. That didn't happen. We have just one family of four, a couple with two young children, staying at the Inn. Fewer people than expected showed up for Ragweed, but even so, the population of the Farm at the moment is about twice what it was last week. The additional people are not staying at the Inn, so where are they? One Farmie told me that most people are staying with friends or family members on the Farm.

Many buildings on the Farm that once housed 30 or more people now house only a couple or even a solitary individual. When members of the Farm's Changeover diaspora re-converge on the Farm for Ragweed, those now mostly empty dwellings can easily accommodate a temporary surge in population without having to draw upon the capacity of the Inn.

Many visitors to the Farm notice the front gate, the low population density and the fact that the average Farmie is considerably older than the average USAnian, and they come to the conclusion that the Farm is “a retirement community for aging Hippies.” I too have entertained this characterization of the Farm, but when I realized that the Farm could double its population without even having to call upon the housing capacity of the Inn, I saw the community in a new light and was reminded of my recent conversation with Jeff Vail. In particular, the influx of temporary Ragweed population called to mind the notion of surge capacity, which Jeff describes as follows:

Jeff Vail: I think that everything from the way I see legal practice management work in my immediate profession to the reason that Chaco Canyon and the Chacoan civilization collapsed can be related back to surge capacity.

I should also back up and say that Kevin Carson has written a fascinating book called The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto that focuses on the importance of overhead costs. If you have high overhead costs then you tend to have to create enough revenue to always be meeting that overhead, and so you try to maintain a consistent maximal output from all of your assets. And when you do that, you don't have the ability to either accept a dramatically lower output for a short while or to really surge when there's some new demand that requires that you rise to the challenge and dramatically increase output for a while.

So, in law practice that might be if you expect your attorneys to work 70 hours per week, and then a huge new case comes in. Well, you've already been working 70 hours a week. What are you going to do? You can work more, and the performance dramatically drops off, or you can squeeze the work into the time available. Either way is not a good option.

The same thing [holds true] with Chaco Canyon. Chaco was a central site that would redistribute food production from communities in the North and South which were usually only one at a time subject to a drought. So, as long as communities in the North produced in most years twice as much food as they needed, and the same with communities in the South, then when there was a severe drought on one side, Chaco Canyon could administer the re-distribution of food to make sure that everyone got fed.

But gradually, because this re-distribution was fairly efficient, and because they had several good years of weather in a row, populations would rise in both the North and the South to where their food production equaled their local requirements. Then when there was a drought in either the North or the South, there was not enough food to re-distribute. So that lead to increasingly totalitarian government structures. That lead to more extreme farming methods that depleted the soils, etc. Eventually when there were combined droughts, that lead to the collapse of the civilization.

So, I think those are two very different attempts to explain surge capacity. I think that in general terms if you have the ability to get by on a fraction of what you are capable of, you're in a lot better situation; whether that's food production, water, money, you name it. Because then, when there's a unique demand, you have the ability to rise to meet that challenge.

KMO: Well, another long-running theme on the C-Realm Podcast is my effort to build awareness of the notion that efficiency is, in many respects, the opposite of resilience and that the more you streamline, the more you put to use excess capacity, the more you eliminate duplication and redundancy, the less surge capacity you're going to have; the less resilient you're going to be when unexpected conditions arise. And I think a really good illustration of this is the single-income family, say, of the 1950s, where you had a bread-winner and a home-maker.

If something should happen to the bread-winner, the home-maker could go to work and bring in some income. And if you don't have much debt; if your house is paid off and whatnot, and something really bad happens and you need money, you can get a mortgage, or you can go into some debt and have some expectation of coming out of it again. But if you've got both husband and wife already working 50 hours a week, and you've already got your credit cards maxed out, and you've already got a second mortgage, and something happens to one of those bread-winners, then you don't really have any surge capacity. You're screwed.

Jeff: I think that if you were going to try to envision the ideal, resilient, high surge capacity, domestic economy, you'd have husband and wife (or partner and partner) maybe both working in the “traditional economy” 10 hours a week each, and then working maybe in a much more community-focused organization or production capacity 10 hours a week each, and then maybe working in domestic production, e.g. gardening or some other form of domestic production, ten hours a week each. That shows a pushing for localized self-sufficiency. It's not a very efficient system, but I think it has a lot of surge capacity. Probably either one of those people working 10 hours a week maintains enough proficiency or expertise in whatever their traditional state economy area of specialty is that they could surge if they had to.

I think that's really the direction... maybe just one visualization of a direction in which we could be pushing. But that's certainly not compatible with the goals of the state economy.

One can look at the Farm's fallow fields and low population density, it's skewed age demographic and the barriers to entry for young people and describe the situation as a group of aging Baby Boomers who kept the long hair and the beards but abandoned the communitarian values of the Old Farm. I've heard many visitors to the ETC level this exact charge. I'm not saying that this is a completely inaccurate characterization or that the Farm doesn't need to take a hard look at the implications of admission standards that screen out young people who have a lot of passion and energy but little portable income. At the same time I can hold a view of the Farm in its current state as maintaining a much needed surge capacity that might well prove invaluable should unexpected conditions arise and the former Farmies living out in the general population find themselves in need of a familiar and welcoming refuge in rural Tennessee.

ETC Voices Podcast 009

2010-06-29T13:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast009

This episode features more conversation with Martina Westover about her search for the social technologies to facilitate community cohesion, Albert Bates on Right Livelihood, banjo music by Luke Who and a farewell from Jamie J.

The Albert Bates material was excerpted with permission from the Enlightened Business Podcast:

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/search/albert-bates/

Walkability and Diversity

2010-06-26T15:49:00.000-07:00

Today's Writer's Block question on LiveJournal asks, “Do you prefer to live in an urban or rural environment? Why?”

Believe it or not, the pivotal and most interesting word in this question for me is “prefer.” When posed with the city-living-versus-rural-living question, I'm inclined to delve into big picture abstractions that turn on questions of viability and sustainability, but when asked what I prefer, I delve not into theory, but into memory. I have lived in very large cities, including New York City and Nagoya, Japan, and I have lived tucked away in the woods in Washington, Arkansas, and Maryland. And, of course, I have lived in suburbia. When it comes to quality of life, as much as I love trees, and creeks, and birdsong, I'm leaning toward city living as my preferred mode.

I grew up in suburbia. My father worked a job in which promotion meant re-location, and as child I remember living in the suburbs outside of St. Louis, Spokane, San Francisco, and Kansas City. As a child growing up in suburbia in the 70s and 80s, it didn't really occur to me that there was any other mode of life other than the suburban form, and in retrospect, suburban life had a lot going for it. I grew up in the days before children spent their pre-college years under practical house-arrest. Even before I started first grade, I would leave home on my bicycle with my friends and explore my suburban environment without adult supervision. I remember riding with a pack of other kids on bikes when I still had training wheels on my own bike.

I lived in Pleasant Hill, California from the latter half of first grade through the end of my third grade year, and I would disappear on my bicycle for hours to roam the network of trails through the undeveloped hills behind my house. This was normal for the mid-seventies, and unless I missed dinner, my mother wouldn't worry about my long absences. I returned to my old Pleasant Hill neighborhood as an adult. The hills where I used to ride my bike were covered with suburban houses. No child living there today has the opportunity for wholesome, adult-free adventure that I enjoyed in 1976.

I lived in the Kansas City suburbs from the start of fourth grade through high school and two years of community college. Again, I had friends and bikes, and there was no expectation on the part of a parent in those days of being able to pinpoint your child's exact location within a matter of seconds, and again, suburbia hadn't filled every inch of undeveloped space, and there were pastures and woods into which kids on bikes could escape adult supervision and engage in all the acts of imagination, cruelty, and pyromania that used to be purview of childhood. As with old my California stomping grounds, the process of suburban infill has erased those Temporary Autonomous Zones from that suburban landscape, and children living there now live in a panopticon.

I'll spare you the harrowing details of my close encounters with death as a teenager in suburbia. Suffice it to say that automobiles, alcohol, and no place for teenagers to go is not the most workable combination of elements imaginable.

When I left home, I went to the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri where I lived in a dormitory. Again, I had friends and no adult supervision, and I lived in the marvelous walkable environment of a university campus. My food came from the dining hall, and since I was 21 years old upon arrival, I could buy alcohol for my freshmen dorm-mates, which meant I mostly drank for free. That was pretty much the ideal living arrangement, but we all know that college is a temporary dream-world which vanishes long before we appreciate just how good we have it, so I won't include it in the list of candidates for my preferred living arrangement.

After a semester of dorm life at UMC, I spent the next year living in a dormitory on a small college campus in the very rural town of Nakajo, in Japan's Niigata prefecture. Again, on a college campus I had everything I needed within an easy walk, and lots of friends with cars made alcohol an easy acquisition. Again, it's the fantasy bubble of college life, and so it doesn't count.

After I finished college I wanted to return to Japan. I applied for the JET program, a system administered by the Japanese government that places native English speakers in Japanese public schools to teach English, but I didn't get it. Instead, I spent a summer in Alaska trying to make enough money in the commercial fishing industry to get back to Japan under my own financial steam. That summer I got a taste for life aboard a boat. The 18-hour workdays and exploitation by unscrupulous employers keep my memories of the life aquatic from being fond ones, but I could well imagine life on a boat agreeing with me if I had any say in who else lived on board and where we went.

Eventually, I did make it back to Japan, and shortly thereafter I had my first apartment. It was actually fairly large by Japanese standards, and I could only afford it because it was old, not in great repair (by Japanese standards) and apparently owned and administered by the local Yakuza (organized criminals). I lived two blocks from a subway station, and I could be in the commercial center of the city within 45 minutes of walking out my door. The city has castles, parks, museums, zoos, and endless opportunities for amusement and diversion.

I lived there with my American girlfriend, and she attended Nanzan University, which was about a half-hour's walk from our apartment. Between home and the university was a small, unassuming Buddhist temple called Tooganji that had an enormous metal statue of the Buddha in their back garden. I spent a lot of time there, and the priests never hassled me or asked me to move along.

Wikipedia describes Nagoya as the fourth most populous urban area in Japan, and just about everything one could want, other than solitude and quiet, can be found there. What's more, just about all of it is accessible by public transportation. If there were any American cities that offered the immense range of activities and the kind of car-free mobility that I enjoyed in Nagoya, I would probably be living there right now.

When I returned from my second stint in Japan, I ended up in grad school back in Columbia, Missouri. This time I lived off campus. Still car-free, I lived in a variety of student slums within an easy walk of the campus and, of equal importance, within walking distance of the old downtown. As with most small cities, the bulk of commercial activity has shifted out to the business loop off of interstate 70, but the old downtown core, being an easy walk from the college campus, is replete with places to eat, drink, play pool, get tattooed, dance, and buy comics, video games, and, if you're into that sort of thing, clothing. I remember spending long hours sitting outside of the St. Louis Bread Company, reading comics, drinking endless refills, and talking to friends and acquaintances who happened by in a steady stream. I've never been to Europe, but as I understand it, this is a fairly typical experience for Europeans. For me, this sort of experience is confined to a tiny portion of my biography, and I have little expectation of finding it again any time soon.

A friend with a car made it possible to shop at a big grocery store on the outskirts of town and thus secure a source of affordable food to supplement the mostly over-priced fare available downtown. One year, I purchased a campus housing meal plan, which meant that while I didn't live in the dorms, I could eat in the rather nice dormitory cafeterias at least once a day. Again, this was college, but because I was not only a student, but an employee of the university, that living arrangement orbits closer to the realm of sustainable possibility than simply paying tuition and living on faith and student loans.

When I left grad school, I moved to Seattle, and after a bit of couch-surfing I secured a studio apartment downtown. I worked one block from my apartment, and I lived in that small downtown apartment for longer than I've lived in any other place in my adult life. Again, I had no car, and again, I depended on a friend with a car to get me to and from the sorts of grocery stores you don't find downtown.

This was a marvelous arrangement for many of the same reasons that I loved living in Columbia, Missouri. Everything I needed was within an easy walk of my apartment, and because I did so much walking, my idea of “an easy walk” covered far more ground then than it does now. I could step out my front door and walk to see some of my favorite bands play live, or linger in bookstores and museums. I could reach Seattle's famous Pike Place Market in about 10 minutes on foot, and so I would go there on a whim with no plan in mind.

I have lived in far too many places as an adult to describe them all here, but in addition to all of this city living, I have also lived in the rural hinterlands, and while they have much to recommend them, one thing I really missed while living out there in the boonies was the opportunity to walk. In both rural Arkansas and rural Maryland, my opportunities for walking were extremely restricted. Almost all land out away from rural population centers in this country is private property. The roads lack sidewalks, and to set foot on any of the picturesque pastures that scroll past one's car window is to risk an encounter with a jealous land-owner or the police.

Here at the Ecovillage Training Center on the Farm I have a rather unique living experience. Without getting in a car, it's hard to reach anything other than the restorative ambiance of the woods, but without setting foot off the ETC grounds I come into contact with a steady stream of dynamic and lively souls. I live in an inn, and interesting people stay here. It doesn't offer me the range of social choices I would have in a city, but the social filter of the Farm puts me in daily contact with a choice selection of people. I don't know how long I will be here, but I suspect that I will only come to fully appreciate my situation here in hindsight.

My reflections reveal to me that what I really value is walkability and opportunities to spend time with excellent people as well as the option of being left alone when I've had my fill of social interaction. Knowing that, I could probably satisfy those wants in a variety of settings, but it seems to me that a big city or a college town offer the most promise. The country offers natural beauty, a slower pace of life, less intrusion and micromanagement by civil authorities and a high probability of running into people I know. The 'burbs seem to offer the worst of both worlds, and without a car or the sort of usable mass transit that one rarely finds in the United States, suburbia just isn't even an option.

ETC Voices Podcast 008

2010-06-22T12:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast008

KMO talks with Nathanael Johnson about his investigations into the harsh realities of medicalized birth in the United States. Nate also shares a recording he made of Ina May Gaskin talking about the role of midwifery on the Farm and how she discovered her life's work as a midwife and a teacher of midwives.

Music by Old Soul.

The Abyss

2010-06-19T16:24:00.000-07:00

A year ago I had a very stable routine. Five days a week I would wake up around 9 am and get to work on the next episode of the C-Realm Podcast. Some days I would record telephone interviews, other days I would edit them, on yet other days I went to the Chesapeake City public library to get online and correspond with the other people whose voices grace the program. I put two to three hours into the project most days.

After my daily stint of gratifying work I would steel myself for the portion of my day that I gave over to alienated labor in the service of a corporate behemouth. I worked my cubicle-serf gig from 3 – 11:30 pm with the better part of an hour's commute each way. I would arrive home well after midnight, feed the cats, read for a bit, and go to sleep. In the morning, I would get up and do it all over again. On days when I wasn't working my so-called “real job,” I had my two sons with me, and I made no effort to do any work on the podcast when they were with me.

This was a period of high misery for me, but in terms of keeping my creative output high, it worked well. My best mental energy is available to me in the morning, and working nights left my mornings and my best psychic fuel available for my own projects. Having the mornings available for my own creative activity and leaving only the dregs for my corporate employer helped things along, but the key ingredient was social isolation.

That two to three hours which I spent on the podcast each day was almost always completely free from interuption, and I got a lot done. My misery did not stem entirely from my social isolation. I have a high tolerance for solitude, but as I talked on the phone with authors and activists about the need for face to face interaction with neighbors and members of one's real community, I was acutely aware of the irony; the C-Realm Podcast with it's high-minded messages about community grew out of the soil of my own solitude. I longed for the opportunity to spend time with friends doing nothing in particular. I longed for shared meals and physical labor that would yeild tangible benefits for myself and my community. I longed to hear live music performed out of love rather than as paid performance.

I enjoy all of that in abundance now, and I am aware of just how thoroughly my wishes have been granted. I even have chickens in my life. At the same time, the C-Realm Podcast has suffered. For years I received praise from listeners via email expressing their amazement at the consistent high quality of the program. Now I'm getting feedback telling me that the shows have been hit or miss recently, and I didn't really need to be told that. I knew it already.

A year ago, I was doing just the one podcast and blogging haphazardly as often as the spirit moved me. Now I do two weekly podcasts (the C-Realm Podcast and the ETC Voices Podcast) and blog more rigourously, so the mental energy that used to feed one podcast now feeds two podcasts and a blog, but it seems to me that the strain on the C-Realm Podcast comes mainly from the fact that I now have, for the first time in many years, a “life.”

Here at the ETC, I eat three shared meals a day. I regularly enjoy spontaneous live music. I literally live in a forest, and I hear far more bird song than I do roaring engines. We even seem to be outside of any airline flight paths here (although we get our share of black helicopters befouling the audible environment with their noise). It's beautiful here, but it's also complicated. There are people; people who come to me and ask me questions. People who come to me in need of assistance with this task or that. People who come to me for help in interacting with other people. And the phone rings.

From the perspective of my having a life, these are all positive developments. From the perspective of the C-Realm Podcast, KMO's having a life is a problem. What to do?

I realize that it probably seems like I'm winding up to announce a podcasting hiatus. Not so. I have no intention of giving up the podcast that brought me here nor in scaling back the production schedule. People have written to me and suggested that I take longer to gestate each program and only release a new episode when I've got something that I am proud of, but I take pride in maintaining the weekly production schedule. I also believe that the best interview material comes unexpectedly, and I happen across it specifically because the podcast demands to be fed on a regular schedule. Had I not been scrounging to feed the beast, I would have missed out on some of the most stimulating and enlightening conversations that I've had since the Fall of 2006.

It seems that the solution to the problems that arise from an embarassment of social riches is yet more social interaction. I've written this entire essay up to this sentence without interuption because I managed to impress upon the right people with repeated, gentle reminders that I have committed myself to writing at least a thousand words every Saturday and that today is Saturday.

Communication is what I do best, and yet I do less of it with the people around me than I know I should if I want to honor what they do while securing the time and solitude I need to do what I do. I'm not the only person creating content around here. Albert Bates blogs and writes books. Merry, the innkeeper, gives far more of her mental and physical energy to the Ecovillage Training Center than I do, and she not only blogs, but she also shoots, edits, and posts videos.

The biggest challenge for me is in articulating the importance of sticking to my production schedule when I know full well (and I know that everyone else knows) that if I miss one of my self-imposed deadlines and end up posting to this blog on Sunday rather than on Saturday or (God forbid) that I should upload a new episode of the C-Realm Podcast on a Thursday rather than on Wednesday, no buildings will fall into rubble. No children will go hungry. No would-be podcast guest will withdraw her participation. No otherwise generous contributor will think twice about supporting my efforts.

There's just not that much riding on any given deadline, and yet the idea of missing one scares me in a way that the prospect of living without income or not knowing where I will be taking shelter from the elements six months from now does not. Merely entertaining the possibility of faltering in my weekly production of the C-Realm Podcast feels like tottering on the edge of the abyss.

ETC Voices Podcast 007

2010-06-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast007

Are there bad plants? There are certainly plants I don't want growing in my garden or near where I live, but Cliff Davis has heard enough talk about so-called "invasive plants." He tells KMO why that is, and Albert K. Bates talks about the population surge capacity of the ETC and about the difficulty of putting volunteer labor to productive use.

Music by Old Soul.

Here is the article from the Statesman and the Wikipedia entry from which I read on the podcast.

Armor Class Zero

2010-06-12T13:38:00.000-07:00

I'm 42 years old, and I spent the 1980's immersed in imaginary realms accessed through the agency of dice, graph paper, little lead miniatures, and books of tables, charts, graphs, and garish artwork. I'm talking about role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, Gamma World, Traveler, and Champions. I have a friend in Thailand (he's not Thai) who used to play such games but who thinks that the advent of computerized gaming makes the paper and dice gaming obsolete. I couldn't disagree more.

For those thinking, “Wait a second. I came here to read about permaculture, re-localization, peak oil and the like. What's all this fanboy geekery?” All I can tell you is that I'm composing these sentences while seated at my desk inside my room here in the Inn at the Ecovillage Training Center and that the gaming mania behind this week's blog musings has swept through the ETC population like a mutant cold virus through an elementary school. ETC staff, apprentices, and even guests of the Inn have contracted the bug.

It all started down at the Hippitat, an earthbag and cob cabin with a living roof. The Hippitat is located on the periphery of the ETC grounds just off a trail that leads through the woods and down to the creek. It is a favorite place for people to gather, sit and collect their thoughts. I was sitting with three of the new apprentices enjoying the nature vibe. Sean and Havana ( I call them the “the Wonder Twins”) have taken up residence in the Hippitat, and I was there along with Paul (the first C-Realm listener to take the plunge and sign on for a full two-month ETC apprenticeship) breezily engaged in free range conversation when a mosquito landed on Sean's arm. I pointed it out to him, and as he swatted at it he said, “He can't bite me. I have armor class zero.”

I asked Havana and Paul if they got the reference. Havana did not, but Paul had played the very popular computerized role-playing game, Baldur's Gate, which used the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition rules, and so he was familiar with the notion of armor class. For those of you still in Havana's now-sullied state of pristine ignorance, armor class is a measure of how hard it is to strike a blow against a character or monster in a Dungeons & Dragons game. Someone in street clothes has an armor class of ten, and adding different combinations of armor, shield, and magical items lowers one's armor class. Someone wearing full plate mail armor with a big shield has an armor class of 2, so Sean's claim to having armor class 0 was quite the brag.

I explained armor class to Havana and then lunched into a long-winded, spontaneous rant about the virtues of face to face, paper and dice games versus computer games that claim the mantle of RPG (role-playing game). At it's heart, a session of paper and dice role-playing amounts to the cooperative telling of an adventure story. Each player provides the thoughts, speech and actions of one character in the story, and the GM (game master) describes the setting and plays the parts of all of the people and monsters that the player characters will meet in the course of the story.

Some gamers would take issue with my characterization of a role-playing game as an exercise in group story-telling. For some people, like my friend in Thailand, role-playing games are about killing monsters, collecting treasure, and gaining experience points in order to make one's character more powerful and capable of taking down ever more powerful monsters. These are the power gamers, pejoratively known as munchkin gamers.

The rules to some games are absurdly complex for anyone who isn't an amateur actuary, and the more complex the rules the “crunchier” the game is said to be. Crunchy games lend themselves to rules lawyering where players who have spent countless hours pouring over the rule book(s) deploy their command of game minutia in an on-going contest of wills with the GM. For folks who take this approach, the computer is a godsend. Rolling dice and comparing the results to tables to determine the outcome of any action or event that has even a hint of randomness to it can mean that players spend hours rolling dice, consulting tables and rules-lawyering to play out what amounts to just a few minutes or even seconds of in-game time. Turning the dice-rolling and number-crunching over to a computer lets the power gamer accelerate his progress and exterminate beasties and bad guys in a fraction of the time it would take using paper and dice, and without the needless physical proximity to other humans.

As I wove my tale of conjuring up collaborative fantasy adventure stories, Havana said, “I think you'd make a good GM.” I thanked her and mentioned that I did run a few games when I was in my 20s and that it was a good time.

Then Paul asked the question that started the avalanche. “Is there any possibility of actually experiencing this kind of game here?”

I said that I would be willing to run a game, but the problem was that I didn't have any gaming materials with me, and as gaming companies have learned to tap into the typical fanboy's obsession with “collecting” in order to get them to spend outrageous amounts of money buying multiple rule books and adventure supplements, starting from scratch could be a spendy proposition.

This dampened spirits a bit. None of the appretices were at all keen on spending money on this project, and so I said I would put out some feelers and see what I could find on the cheap, or even better, free. I posted something to my LiveJournal asking for leads on low-cost, rules lite games. Rules lite is the opposite of crunchy. Games that play lite and loose with rules are better suited to actual role-playing and collaborative story-telling than are crunchy games, which lend themselves to rules-lawyering.

I already new about GURPS, the Generic Universal Role-playing System from Steve Jackson Games, and I knew that GURPS lite could be downloaded for free, so I downloaded it, but even a quick inspection of the paired-down GURPS system let me know that it was still way too crunchy for my purposes. I wanted something that would be easy for me to run and easy for novice gamers to grok and get into quickly.

A friend I haven't seen since 1996 wrote to me to suggest SLUG, which stands for “super laid-back universal game.” I read through the one-page rules summary and decided that while I got the appeal of the game, I wanted something just a bit crunchier when it came to combat and magic.

Continuing my quest for the optimal balance between ease of play and satisfyingly crunchy battles I found a game called Prose Descriptive Qualities. The PDQ Core Rules are available for free download, and it comes to all of 12 pages. Reading through them and surfing around for supplemental materials I ended up paying to download Questers of the Middle Realms starter bundle. QMR is a sword and sorcorey game based on the PDQ core rules, and it is very light in tone and pokes good natured fun at the conventions of fantasy literature and gaming. Players take on the roles of familiar fantasy characters like elves, dwarves, orcs and short folk who in this game are called Hoblings (Get it? Hobbits/Halflings?), but each of which is subtly twisted to confound expectations.

I spent a grand total of $12.45 on the downloaded material. (The money actually came out of my PayPal account, so sponsors of the C-Realm Podcast can rest assured that their contributions to the podcast continue to serve serious ends.) I spent another $16.00 at Office Depot getting my downloads printed out and buying binder clips. I also printed out the GURPS Lite rules, which accounts for about half cost of printing. I spent another $5.00 at Dollar General for notebook paper, pencils, and dice. The dice are the familiar six-sided dice that one would use for Monopoly or craps, and a pack of 5 cost me $0.75.

I spent some time with the printed materials and generated a few NPCs (non-player characters). I then sat down at the kitchen table with permaculture apprentices Joel and Will. I gave Joel the character sheet for Shemp, the placid orc herdsman, and I put Will in charge of Father Fester, the half-Hobling healer and priest.

The purpose here was just to get some practice with the combat system, so as a total throw-away scene I told Joel and Will, “You've both come into town and ended up standing on line waiting for tickets to a show. Two goons cut in line in front of you. What do you do?”

Will, speaking for kindly Father Fester, who concerns himself with the well-being of widows and orphans, said, “I take out my dagger and stab him in the throat.” The fight went on for several rounds, and as it progressed, more people gathered in the kitchen to watch and listen. The fight ended with the two goons fleeing the scene and kindly Father Fester attempting to plant his dagger in the back of a retreating goon. That brief glimpse of the game excited the assembled spectators, and now they're all keen to get started.

In most games, you build your character through a combination of random dice rolls and the calculated expenditure of points on abilities and skills. After the character has been optimized for game mechanics then some token effort might go into providing a touch of backstory. In PDQ, the reverse is true. The character starts out as just that, a character, whose qualities first take form in descriptive prose and only later get “statted out” and converted into numbers to interface with the game mechanics.

Thus far, Merry, the ETC innkeeper has put the most obvious care and effort into envisioning her character, Aralia, the daughter of Marachma, a wealthy Veribah merchant of the desert oasis town, Jewel in the Sand in the land of Ar-Karap. She sent me a 550 word description of Aralia via email. As is typical of a good RPG, thoughts of the characters and upcoming adventures already play a leading role in the imaginings of the staff, apprecitices and guests here at the ETC, even though we have yet to play our first session. “Yes, yes,” says the impatient reader. “How does this answer to the concerns of someone reading an Ecovillage Training Center blog?”

How about this? When peak oil sets in, and the lights go out, you can have a marvelous soulful time listening to live accoustic music and singing along, but at some point, it might be nice to take a break from Kumbaya, heft an imaginary battle axe, and cleave the skull of an orc, hobgoblin, or ghoul who really has it coming. You don't need a computer or an internet connection. If you've got paper, dice, and an idea of how these things go, you don't need to spend a cent. I still remember the details of D&D sessions from 1981, but I drew almost a complete blank the other day when someone asked me about my master's thesis which I left undefended in 1996.

RPGs are definitely not cool, but they RULE!

ETC Voices Podcast 006

2010-06-08T15:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast006

A new round of permaculture apprentices means a new round of community building. KMO talks with Innkeeper Merry, apprentice Paul G, and ecohostel guest Martina W about their hopes for creating community.

The Felt Presence of Immediate Experience

2010-06-05T16:03:00.000-07:00

I catch myself channeling ideologies; letting them hijack not only the movement of my typing fingers, but also whatever facility I have for clear explanation and lucid communication. These are the faculties that I prize most highly in myself. That said, they are the faculties that I have, in the past, ended up renting to the service of some corporation or another for my economic subsistence. I hate that.

In the service of not channeling an ideology let me tell you about the physical state of KMO. I'm bug-bitten. The ETC permaculture apprentices (the first group of whom has recently left the ETC while the new group trickles in) live in fear of ticks. I have not yet found a tick attached to me this year. I've caught a few on their initial reconnaissance, before they found a campsite to their liking. I have, instead, become the favorite food for mosquitoes and chiggers. Chiggers are the worst. A cursory check of my left leg just now revealed 27 bites. A mosquito bite, if left un-scratched, will fade in a matter of hours. A chigger bite takes days to run its course.

It's been many years since I last had a tan anywhere except on my forearms, the back of my neck, and those patches of the skin on the tops of my feet that showed through my summer sandals. I recently started wearing a black tank top in an effort to get a bit of sun. My soft, pale upper arms (“post-athletic” is probably the kindest description one could ascribe to my physique) contrasted glaringly with the black tank top.

A couple of days ago, I got a bunch of sun when I rode with Cliff, our designer of constructed ecosystems, to a Home Depot in the town of Franklin. Franklin is basically a suburb of Nashville, and I spent the better part of two hours in the front passenger seat getting an Australian trucker's tan. Or I would have if my skin remembered how to tan. It certainly remembers how to burn, but whatever chemical trick my skin used to employ in order to go brown in the shirtless summer months of my youth it has forgotten. Now it only knows how to go from Irish pale to boiled lobster red.

I slathered it night and day with goo from freshly harvested aloe plants and have, thus far (touch wood), prevented wholesale peeling. My skin backed away from its fiery crimson precipice, eased into a period of strawberry pink, and is now fading, hopefully not all the way back to baseline.

On Wednesday of this week now past, the day each week that I record, edit, and release the C-Realm Podcast, I injured my back while folding a shirt. In recent weeks I've helped move a heavy iron stove, lifted an oversized motorized tricycle into the back of a pick-up truck, and performed other fetes seemingly more perilous than bending slightly at the waist to fold a shirt lying on my bed, but it's always those seemingly innocuous little movements that trigger the muscle spasms that render me pretty much helpless and useless.

Merry, the inn-keeper here is a formerly-licensed massage therapist, and she worked a minor miracle on my back last night, but I still can't sit in any one spot for too long. If I wait too long to stand up, then the muscles in the middle of my back cry, “Enough!” before I've reach my full upright stance. In fact, I'm going to get up now, and not for the first time in this writing.

I'm back. Nothing new in the fridge, and I stopped short of walking to my truck and driving to a nearby store where I know they stock the muscle relaxant known as beer in varieties ranging from the affordable and quite drinkable for those with indiscriminate palates like mine to the $10 a six-pack varieties that I used to drink in my days of abundance and abundant excess and at which I now sneer.

Bug-bitten, sunburned, bad back flare up. And it's hot. No air conditioning at the ETC. It's a slow adjustment to this non-office-cublice life that I pined for and have been granted.

The last few phone interviews that I recorded for the C-Realm Podcast were start and stop affairs. When I recorded a recent conversation with Frank Aragona of the Agroinnovations Podcast, I was standing in the middle of the gravel road at the top of the ETC driveway. It's the nearest place where I can get any cell phone signal, and the sound of a car approaching on gravel translates as a blanket of white noise when picked up via the tiny microphone in my cell phone earbud jack and fractured into innumerable digital packets, transmitted down miles of fiber, re-assembled and piped into the earpiece of Frank's phone in New Mexico. (Imagine what an educated speaker of the English language would have made of that last sentence in 1950.) Again and again, Frank had to find the thread of his rap and get back into his flow before the next slow swelling of white noise forced him back into silence.

The next day I drove to the Farm Frisbee golf course to find a place with cell reception that does not lie on a heavily trafficked gravel road. I tried conducting a conversation with Tara Holtse from the bed of my pick-up truck, but I had to halt the conversation and flee the site when the mosquitoes discovered me there in the shade of the trees. I ended up parking by the Farm front gate. A continuous stream of cars passed by as I recorded the interview, but at least they were driving past on pavement instead of gravel, and the direct late afternoon sunlight kept the mosquitoes at bay long enough for me to capture enough audio to comprise a C-Realm segment.

“I never knew doing a podcast could be so convoluted,” said Tara.*

Tomorrow, I'm driving to Nashville to collect a C-Realm listener turned ETC permaculture apprentice from the airport. I don't have to be there until 4 pm, but I'm leaving before lunch so that I can record an interview segment with [subject to remain un-named until the interview is in the can] in air-conditioned comfort at the home of the person who has foolishly offered her place as big city crash pad. I intend to arrive early and soak up as much AC and wireless high speed internet (with no bandwidth cap) as I can before forcing myself back out into the sticky heat and discomfort of this so-called Real World that I've taken to comparing so favorably to the disembodied comfort of cyberspace.

G'ah. Ideologies.

*Or words to that effect.

ETC Voices Podcast 005

2010-05-31T19:06:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast005

Albert Bates describes the difference between "organic" and "biodynamic," and why people might still be drawn to the ideas of Rudolf Steiner in an era when less woo woo but equally effective options exist.

The Reality of Death

2010-05-29T10:28:00.000-07:00

I recently drove from Tennessee to Maryland to visit my two sons. When I returned to the Ecovillage Training Center, I found the non-human ranks of the ETC sadly diminished. We lost Gordon, our roster, and one of the hens to predators, and closer to everyone's hearts, Jupiter, the venerable ETC cat, died of seemingly natural causes. She was at least 15 years old and had lived a fine life here on the Farm.

Predators have broken into the hen house repeatedly since we first brought the chickens to the ETC, and inn-keeper Merry and apprentice Garrison have repulsed multiple attacks from opossums and raccoons. These most recent losses required no breaking and entering. The shared duty of making sure that the chickens are secure in their nocturnal fortress fell through the cracks one night, and it wasn't until the sounds of violence brought everyone running that anyone realized the lapse.

I have kept chickens in the past, and on occasion I have neglected to lock them up at the start of the evening and scrambled from bed in the middle of the night in response to the sounds of barnyard struggle and violent death. I remember feeling terribly guilty about it. The implicit deal between humans and chickens is that the humans provide food and protection from predators, and the chickens provide eggs and, in the fullness of time, their bodies in exchange for a comparatively easy death. I remember feeling as though I'd defaulted on my solemn obligation when I didn't do as much as I could have to protect my chickens.

In addition to his battles with OESs (Opossums of Extraordinary Size), while I was away, Garrison killed a very large cottonmouth snake that had taken up residence right outside the Inn. The warm and fuzzy (if not very practical) Farm ethic concerning the denizens of the forest is to live and let live, but when a large poisonous snake parks himself in a high traffic area where chickens forage, children play and city slickers get a theme-park taste of rural living*, responsibility trumps well-intentioned naivete. When it comes to the relationship between humans and the non-human creatures who share this space and whose needs on occasion conflict with ours, sometimes an even-handed assessment of the needs and rights of all parties prompts sensitive, ecologically-minded, compassionate human beings to mete out violent death.

I remember reading a fluff piece in the margins of Tricycle magazine several years ago in which a sample of American Buddhists were asked if their Buddhist commitment to compassion and non-violence extended to cockroaches in their homes. I remember one respondent who said that she told the roaches, “May you be reborn a Buddha,” just before she squashed them. That idea has stuck with me for years, and I sometimes say the same thing to mosquitoes and ticks before I usher them out of this existence.

When I lived on five acres in rural Arkansas and kept 25 chickens in a pen, my family and I arrived home one morning after an overnight stay with friends to find my neighbor's two dogs in the pen killing the chickens. The pen had been secured against predators, but one of the dogs was a 200 pound mastiff, and the door to the pen proved no match for his bulk. As my young children looked on, the other dog, a boxer, killed our chickens one by one. The mastiff stood guard and kept me from killing the boxer with my bare hands. I actually picked up a brick and went out to do battle with the mastiff, but my wife pleaded with me to come back inside.

We called the sheriff's office for help. The woman who answered the phone told me to shoot the dogs. It made no sense to her that I would pick up the phone rather than a rifle at such a moment. I'm glad that I could not see the facial expression that accompanied the silence that was her response to my admission of helplessness. We didn't have any firearms in the house.

An animal control officer arrived on the scene an hour or so later. As he surveyed the carnage, he asked me, “Why didn't you just shoot the dogs?”

The idea that someone would move to the country and try to keep chickens without arming themselves struck my rural Arkansan neighbors as ridiculous. Stupid. Life in the country leaves no room for the conditioned expectations of suburban life which allow us to live (mostly) removed from the reality of death; not unless you moved to the country to live a super-sized suburban existence with an extra-large helping of house, yard, and commute. If you're actually there to inhabit the land and keep animals, you will realize, eventually, that you will either kill predators or those predators will kill your animals.

The Farm allows no firearms, and the ETC allows no dogs. The ETC is not a functioning ecovillage, and the chickens are here as much to provide atmosphere as to provide eggs, and so we can afford to simply replace them as the local opossums, raccoons, weasels, foxes, owls and hawks harvest them. Other Farm residents also keep chickens, and they do not always take such a nonchalant attitude toward the loss of the their birds. One of them brought us a live-capture trap that he used recently to catch 7 raccoons in 8 days. He drove each animal that he captured several miles from the Farm and released them. Rather than kill those predators, he made them somebody else's problem. I don't blame him. He was faced with the choice of respecting the rules of his community and doing what needs doing. I have also heard stories of another Farm resident who recently beat an opossum to death in order to save his chickens. Even within the borders of enshrined orthodoxy, the reality that in order to for us to live something else must die finds its way in.

Industrial civilization along with mechanized agriculture allows suburbanites and those who live in the country but remain firmly tethered to very long industrial supply lines the comforting illusion that they can live without taking life. In allowing themselves to live with this palliative illusion, they trade the immediacy of death close at hand for the immensely magnified but comfortably removed violence that industrial agriculture visits upon the biosphere. It's an expensive delusion; one that requires the rapacious apparatus of petroleum-fueled industrial civilization and the myth-machine of modern media to sustain. As we adjust to the realities of energy decline we will, eventually, discover that it is a delusion that we can no longer afford to maintain.

_________________

* Most of the people who pass through Inn here at the ETC are really cool, and most of them are quite competent to look after themselves in the country. The oblivious ones are most at risk and can therefore be listed with kids and chickens.

Ducklings!

2010-05-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

I'm in Maryland, and I won't be posting any essays or screeds here until I return to Tennessee. In the mean time, if you're keen to keep up with the doings at the ETC, check out Merry's blog entry about the new ETC ducklings:

http://ecovillagers.blogspot.com/2010/05/learning-about-ducks.html

Warning: Those with an acute sensitivity to cuteness should consult a physician before viewing the embedded video.

On the road

2010-05-15T05:23:00.000-07:00

No long blog post or ETC Voices Podcast this week as I'm just about to hit the road. Wish me safe passage.

ETC Voices Podcast 004

2010-05-11T18:08:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast004

KMO talks with Site Manager, Jason Deptula who starts out talking about constructed wetlands for waste water reclamation and goes on to introduce the biography and ideas of Viktor Shauberger, the Austrian Water Wizard. KMO reads feedback from listeners about the tension between permaculture and vegetarianism. Albert Bates describes gardening as a literally cosmic experience. Music by Luke Who.

Vegetarian Apostasy

2010-05-08T14:06:00.000-07:00

I am not a vegetarian. Not anymore.

For a time, I self-identified as a vegetarian, and then for many years, after I had incorporated fish and fowl back into my diet, I identified myself as someone who did not eat beef or pork. Then, shortly after the turn of the century, when I was doing a lot of foreign travel, I made a deliberate effort to start eating meat again. It was distasteful and kinda creepy at first, and on a few occasions, a mouthful of meat went back onto my fork rather than down my gullet after a bout of chewing because the texture threatened to invoke my gag reflex, but over time I worked my way up to the point where I could eat a steak and keep it down. I haven't put that to the test recently, but I'm pretty sure I could pass for normal at any sit-down meal with mainstream industrial eaters.

Why would I endure discomfort in order to adopt a less healthful diet; one that is harder on Gaia than was the vegetarian diet it replaced? Simply put, I never wanted to be an ungracious guest and reject home-cooked food that had been prepared for me. I cannot overstate the importance I place on food rituals and food traditions for creating and nurturing the bonds of community and family. I never made it to Provence or to any of the Mediterranean food havens, but I did partake fully of some home-cooked meals which, in an earlier dietary phase, I would have sampled selectively while rattling off my usual schpeel about grain fed to cattle and the correlation between meat consumption and heart disease. That's all good information, and I would like to see more people incorporate it into their understanding of how the world operates, but I've done my tour of duty spreading that gospel and repaying hospitality with indiscriminate ideological spillage and implied moral criticism. No more.

Earlier today, I followed a link from the Facebook page of a C-Realm listener to an essay by Daniel Vitalis in which he explains how he went from being a fervent vegan and raw foodie to someone who signed up for and attended a class in “hunter safety.” The first of the user comments included the following:

I am sure you are sincere, however how sustainable would it be for 7 billion people to eat wild animals? There are simply not enough to go around! In neanderthal times, it was perhaps appropriate however for today's world we cannot afford to continue eating any kind of meat. We are eating the planet to death. An environmentally conscious person would never recommend eating animal products for this reason, irrespective of whatever health benefits you claim from your animal diet.

Groan. Would that we could eat righteousness. I'm reminded of the interview I conducted with Colin Tudge, author of the book Feeding People is Easy.

Colin: Now a lot of people would draw a line there and say, “Well you can, in fact, feed people completely on plants,” that an all-plant diet is best, and that an all-plant diet is very efficient. And many people say, “We should just be vegetarians if we really want to feed ourselves.” And I say, and a lot of other people say, “No, this just isn’t actually true, because however much, however efficiently, you can farm just using plants, you can always farm even more efficiently if you put in some animals somewhere.”

And basically you break the animals down into two classes. There are those that eat grass and browse, which means the leaves of trees, and you can raise them on places where you wouldn’t normally be growing arable crops or horticulture; in other words cattle and sheep and things like that, you grow on grass in places including up mountains, where you can’t really practice arable farming and horticulture. And then in the places where you can practice arable farming and horticulture, you also have pigs and poultry which feed on the leftovers and surpluses and so on.

So if you are really trying to feed people well and provide a maximum amount of food easily, you finish up focusing on the arable, fit in the horticulture in the best places, and then you just fit in the animals where you can. If you do that, you finish up with a lot of plants, not much meat and maximum variety.”

Collin Tudge describes this style of feeding people as “Enlightened Agriculture.” I imagine ideologically-motivated vegetarians taking offense at that. To them eating animals probably seems about as “enlightened” as infanticide or counting coup, and I have no interest in disabusing them of that notion. My only interest here is to point out to you, my broad-minded reader, that people interested in feeding all of Gaia's humans and keeping them healthy and minimizing the toll that doing so takes upon Mother Earth will reject fundamentalist vegetarianism along with industrialized factory farming.

Given that I mostly practice, but do not endorse, vegetarianism, mine is a curious circumstance. At present, I'm living at the Ecovillage Training Center on the Farm in Summertown, Tennesse. The Farm was founded in the early 70's, and vegetarianism was one of the primary tenets of the shared belief system held by the original Farm residents. The goals and sensibilities of 21st Century, ecologically-informed, “enlightened agriculture” and 1970's Hippie idealism (to the extent that I understand either worldview) seem to co-exist happily in some places and to rub each other the wrong way in others. I see vegetarianism as a potential source of friction between the two worldviews.

This kitchen here at the ETC is a vegetarian kitchen (no meat allowed, though dairy and eggs are okay), and the food co-op which feeds me and the permaculture apprentices provides only vegetarian fare, and yet none of the people living on site here at the ETC are vegetarians. Most every time the apprentices and I seek a meal off the Farm, everyone takes the opportunity to grab a meat fix. Everyone but me.

Again, I'm not a vegetarian, and I do love the taste and texture of chicken, but I can't bring myself to order chicken that I know was raised under industrial conditions, so even when I leave the Farm, I maintain a de facto (but not an ideologically-motivated) vegetarian diet. While I love chicken, I also love chickens, and I suspect that my experience of keeping backyard chickens has highlighted the connection between the mental category 'chicken,' which refers to a standardized industrial food product that is measured by the pound, and the mental category 'chickens,' which matches up with an image of living domesticated birds.

Here at the ETC, we have four hens and one rooster. We keep the hens for egg production, and we keep the rooster for the hens. The Farm, on which the ETC is located, does not allow the raising of chickens for slaughter but does allow Farm residents to eat chicken. A cockerel who spends six months scratching in the dirt under the sky in a backyard flock, following his mother at first but quickly gaining confidence and striking out on his own to explore his environment, and then gets the ax after six months and, as Michael Pollan quips, “Has one bad day,” lives a sweet life compared to a cockerel raised for slaughter under industrial conditions. I won't dwell on the details. Suffice it to say that life for animals raised for slaughter at the human scale is much kinder than for animals raised at the industrial scale.

So long as humans continue to eat chickens, I want to see more of those chickens living their (admittedly short) lives at the human scale in backyard flocks and fewer of them suffering in factory farms. The ban on raising chickens for slaughter does the opposite. Every chicken raised in a factory and then purchased and consumed by someone prohibited from raising their own might have lived a kinder life but for the prohibition.

My point is not to criticize a particular policy of a particular community. I use it to illustrate the blowback that seems to accompany any effort to force people to conduct themselves with morality, decency and good sense. This is because people disagree about what constitutes morality, decency, and good sense. When faced with this sort of disagreement, people in positions of authority can try to persuade or try to mandate. Neither guarantees success. Requiring people to behave as if they believed what you believe, even when they don't, inevitably produces negative unintended consequences. Persuasion requires more time and attention than legislating morality, but it 's worth the effort.

I think. Maybe. Isn't it?

I sure hope so, because I don't want to live in a universe where forcing people to do what you want them to do really just does produce better outcomes than trying to win them over to your way of seeing things. Wouldn't that suck?

ETC Voices Podcast 003

2010-05-04T13:47:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast003

In this third installment of the ETC Voices Podcast, KMO and permaculture apprentice, Nilsa harvest shiitake mushrooms after two days of torrential rain. Later, Doug Lain of the Diet Soap Podcast joins the conversation to compare contrast high-energy municiple waste water treatment practices with the low-energy alternative of humanure composting.

Music by Luke Who

May Day

2010-05-01T18:41:00.000-07:00

It's a rainy first of May here in rural Tennessee. I went to a May Day celebration which took place under the newly covered dome next to the Farm store. There, Farm residents and visitors wove ribbons around the Maypole to celebrate the end of winter and the beginning of new growth and vitality in the spring and summer seasons. Today is the ancient Celtic festival of Bealtaine which sits opposite the autumn commemoration of Samhain which has worked its way into American consciousness in the form of Halloween.

Alayne, one of the ETC staff, started the festivities off by reading the Song of Bealtaine:

I am the calm, I am the quickening,

... I am the intoxication and the force
I am the silence, I am the singer,
... I am the stallion galloping to its source.
I am the bright pavilion and the feasting,
... I am the wedding couple and the bed,
I am the morning chorus and the heartbeat,
... I am the goal to which all paths are led.

After the festivities, I asked her to tell me more about the traditions surrounding this day, and then I asked her if she knew about its political associations. She did not. To her, May Day is entirely wrapped up with the Earth, the ancient traditions, and the changing of the seasons.

I called my fellow podcaster, Doug Lain of the Diet Soap Podcast, and asked him about his associations with this day. He has a different take on the day. Here is a bit of our conversation:

Doug: May Day is an interesting holiday that has both elements that I try to highlight on the Diet Soap podcast. It's this spiritual pagan holiday about rebirth, but to me it's the political holiday that comes first. It has to do with the Haymarket affair... the Haymarket riot, which itself was part of the struggle for the 8-hour work day. After the riot there was a political kind of show trial where eight anarchists were charged with the murder of a policemen.

Basically, there was a protest. On the third of May there'd been a strike outside a factory in Chicago, and the police had fired into the crowd. Two workers were killed. The organizers called for a rally at Haymarket square to protest the actions of the police and to demand the 8-hour work day. Someone threw a pipe bomb there, at Haymarket. When the police marched in formation to disperse the protesters somebody threw a pipe bomb at them. That's where the idea of a bomb throwing anarchist comes from actually.

I don't know how many people were killed. I know one policeman was killed, and maybe a dozen workers were killed.

Then they took eight anarchists who were organizers and put them on trial, and I think four or five of the people who were charged with the crime... not really for throwing the bomb. They never made any strong case that there was any connection between the people they put on trial and the bomb thrower, but just for being anarchists really, were eventually hung by the neck until dead. They executed four people pretty much for having the wrong political ideas.

KMO: And they were protesting for an 8-hour work day? What was standard before that?

Doug: I think anything they could get away with. I don't know. Let me look.

Doug reads from Wikipedia:

The eight-hour day movement or 40-hour week movement, also known as the short-time movement, had its origins in the Industrial Revolution in Britain, where industrial production in large factories transformed working life and imposed long hours and poor working conditions. With working conditions unregulated, the health, welfare and morale of working people suffered. The use of child labour was common. The working day could range from 10 to 16 hours for six days a week.

KMO: Wow.

Doug: Yeah. So, they were struggling for something they really needed; some sort of cap on how many hours a week they could be asked to work by the new bosses of the industrial revolution.

The conversation turned to the topic of population overshoot. I summarized a portion of a conversation that I had recorded the previous day with SF author David Marusek.

David: I do believe that we are, at this point, already over-populated. We've exceeded the carrying capacity of the globe, and it's only a matter of time. (…) I just saw Paul Ehrlich, the author of the Population Bomb on TV the other day. When the book came out in the late sixties, Ehrlich was predicting that by 2010 society would already have collapsed because we wouldn't be able to feed everybody. That hasn't proven to be true... yet. Agriculture as a science has matured quite a bit in the meantime, and we are feeding a lot more people. Not everybody. What is it? A billion people who go to bed hungry every night? But we're doing it. We're feeding people at the expense of the Earth, and I believe that we are living on borrowed time.

(…)

So, yes, I believe we must be at Peak Oil, but we're also at the peak use of this planet. We are living not just on borrowed time but on borrowed resources.

I summarized David's comments for Doug, and he responded with:

Doug: When I think about overshoot, I think it's really unfortunate that we've come to this time where so many problems that require the best of us and the most intelligent and humane aspects of us are facing us at the same time the intensification of the current system is happening where we have less and less control and less and less ability to address those problems. So, rather than hunkering down and trying to protect as many people as we can, trying to put as many people in charge of solving technical problems and social problems as we can and dispersing power out and using our best selves, we are seeing more and more power and money going to fewer and fewer people and getting more and more concentrated.

And that process itself has a horrible impact on people's everyday lives, and it's seen as murder in the Third World because people are starving. It's hard to parse out what's real resource depletion and what's just this process of the intensification of private power and wealth. And that's why the story of Haymarket is important even now to remember because if we're going to have any hope of adequately and humanely dealing with overshoot, the principles that you see at work behind the Haymarket riot and it's aftermath and the memory of May Day are going to have to be a part of what we do.

As much as I admire that sentiment, I think that Bealtaine has a much better shot at an enduring place in human consciousness than does Haymarket. The seasons will continue their cycle, and when the Earth starts to stir from its winter torpor, people will perform rituals and ask the source of fertility and renewal for the gift of Her bounty. I hope that humans will remember and honor those of their ancestors who resisted coercion and rebuffed the efforts of the Machine to mine the cantankerous human spirit like an ore. I don't have any confidence that the names of the fallen will be remembered or that their contributions will be appreciated, but I'm pretty sure that humans will be clued into the change of the seasons for as long as there are humans on this planet.

ETC Voices Podcast 002

2010-04-26T13:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast002

KMO talks with Ecovillage Training Center staff and visitors about the Ecosoaker program whereby people can participate in the Permaculture Apprenticeship without a two month commitment. Site manager, Jason Deptula talks about advances in battery technology and about much deeper topics, and Apprentice Garrison calls out for a contact in Ashville, NC.

Power Down - Trade Up

2010-04-24T14:35:00.000-07:00

The daughter of one of the Ecovillage Training Center staff arrived home from the Farm school last week and exclaimed, “I HATE Nonviolent Communication!”

According to Wikipedia:

Nonviolent Communication is a process developed by Marshall Rosenberg. It is a way to communicate with greater compassion and clarity. It focuses on two things: honest self-expression— exposing what matters to oneself in a way that's likely to inspire compassion in others, and empathy — listening with deep compassion.

The girl had been studying honest self-expression and empathy at school, and apparently it's tedious stuff. Even so, if you plan on living with other people, and if you imagine that the day may come when you cannot or choose not to rely on authoritarian institutions to resolve disputes and ensure domestic tranquility, then expanding your communicative repertoire might be just the thing.

I see myself as living a little ways into the future here at the ETC. Compared to how I was living just a short time ago, I use far less energy and engage in far fewer economically quantifiable activities on most days. Yesterday, I broke that pattern and spent a couple of hours driving to and from the town of Spring Hill where I lingered in a bookstore, ate in a restaurant, and got my hair cut. That's a lot more travel and commerce than I engage in most days here at the ETC, but yesterday would have seemed like a normal day for me as recently as last December when I worked nearly an hour's drive from where I was living. Now, I live on a reduced energy budget that might soon be the North American norm. It turns out that a seemingly modest amount of energy can power a rich and fulfilling existence, particularly compared to the quality of life of a corporate debt-serf.

Here in the ecovillage pseudo-future, I use cars, computers, and the internet. I'm recording podcasts and writing for blogs. I'm also packing shipments at a mail-order business and doing household and outdoor chores, but more than anything, or so it seems to me, I'm living and interacting with people far more than I'm accustomed to doing.

When I arrived here, I was accustomed to eating alone while reading a book or listening to a podcast. Now, I eat at a table with other people where we have a formalized arrangement concerning who was to prepare the meal and who will clean up afterward. I'm coordinating with people to get chores done and to pick up the mail in town.

In the past, when I kept chickens, if I didn't put them up at night, they didn't get put up. Not so at the ETC. Here, several people share the chicken-care duties, and that requires communication. Some of that communication has become routine and is accomplished with logs and sign-up sheets, so it's not a matter of constantly having to be tuned into someone else's pyschological needs, quirks, and tics, but being here shows me the degree to which mainstream life enables and encourages us to run on emotional autopilot.

Having to marshal my psychic energy to deal with the people around me can be a drain, but in the absence of the normal standardized roles and scripted exchanges of life in the mainstream mode, there's no getting around it. Working stuff out with people can be a pretty complicated affair, and most of us are out of practice. Formalized techniques like Nonviolent Communication would have us say things that we would feel more comfortable leaving unsaid, at least in the short term. It might have us talking about feelings and judgments when really the other person just needs to get some facts straight. It can seem absurdly touchy-feely or new agey, but it beats Mad Maxy, and it beats getting your doctor to write you a prescription for a pharmaceutical aid to get you through one more cycle of scripted interaction with other alienated debt-serfs.

When I interact with a person as a person, I have to summon up more psychic energy than I do for an automatic exchange with an anonymous stranger playing a standardized role. Who deserves the benefit of my full emotional engagement and consideration? Are there times when it is morally permissible to deal with some people according to a role they play?

When I think of the people I deal with on any given day here at the ETC, I understand that some of them, like the ETC staff, will be here indefinitely. The apprentices have been here a month and will be here for a month longer. Then there are the eco-hostel guests who stay overnight or a few days at most.

The people who will be gone in a month seem like members of my community; people with whom I really need to stay tight, but not so people who will only be here a few days at most. I don't want to say that I ignore or tune out the itinerants, but at the same time, I make no effort to remember their names. I know that some other congenial but equally temporary face will occupy that same role shortly.

I wonder if this mix of practically permanent, short but significant, and largely ephemeral relationships will prove typical in an energy-descent future. I can imagine a scenario in which some people have found their workable, long-term living arrangement, and a lot of other people are still looking for their own long-term gigs and are traveling around checking out the various arrangements on offer.

This scenario comes in two distinct flavors. One is the “just how it all shakes out” flavor in which the old way of life becomes increasingly unworkable for more and more people who do what they have to in order to survive while corporate and governmental entities continue the program to sustain the unsustainable and continue doing everything in their power to deny the need for new modi operandorum. This makes for an exciting period of historic transition, but its the sort of excitement that is the acquired taste of the war correspondent or disaster first-responder.

The other, more quixotic flavor is the “let's see what we can do if we decide to do it right” flavor. In this possible future, corporations and governments recognize that a spontaneous, bottom-up, phase change is inevitable and decide to help people explore the space of possible alternative living arrangements without desperation driving people to accept whatever marginally livable situation presents itself first. It may smell a bit like hobbit holes and unicorn horns, but I can see a future in which people have the leeway to sample a variety of post-petroleum lifestyles before committing themselves.

This second flavor is definitely within our technical means, but it's not anything you can vote for. It's not a message that a politician can use to get elected, but it is a message that people can nurture and share and use to inspire each other. There are different ways of living both sustainably and within our means. Seeing a diversity of living examples, hearing about them, trying them on to see how they fit, all help to erode the facade of conditioned expectations that keeps us going through the stressful and alienated motions. The transition is upon us. What's needed is the understanding that in powering down we can trade up.

ETC Voices Podcast 001

2010-04-19T16:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast001

KMO talks with the other folks who live, learn, and work at the Ecovillage Training Center in Summertown, Tennessee. This week, KMO talks with Merry Moore, the ETC innkeeper about the kitchen co-op she conceived and continues to refine, then comes a walk and talk with Cliff Davis, ETC Head Gardener, about collecting and using local micro-organisms to make compost tea, and finally Garrison, an ETC permaculture apprentice, shares some surfer lingo.

I've set up an ETC Journal Pix group on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/etcjournal/

If you have photos of the ETC to share, let me know via email and I'll add you to the group.

If you are looking for images of the Hippitat, check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT6NIj4kEbQ

The Short Happy Life of Bobby McGee

2010-04-17T12:19:00.000-07:00

Last week, I wrote of buying four hens and a rooster at a local Mennonite store and bringing them back here to the Ecovillage Training Center to inhabit the cob henhouse that has stood vacent since my arrival here in late February. Chickens generally don't like a change of scene and require an adjustment period before settling in and going about their regular barnyard business. Not this group. They hit the ground happy and instantly started acting as if they felt at home. The rooster in particular seemed quite pleased with his change in circumstances. I closed that blog post with, “I'm typing these words on my ancient laptop computer at the kitchen table, and every couple of minutes as I've typed the rooster has crowed, voicing his approval and enthusiasm for his new situation. I concur.”

That rooster, named Booby McGee by one of the apprentices, died that very day. He spent one night and two glorious days at the ETC after spending a month in a small wire cage by the side of the road and before meeting a violent death. We found a scattering of feathers about a hundred yards from the henhouse near the edge of the woods. The modus operandi of snatching the prey and carrying it swiftly away to make the kill indicates a fox, according to Albert Bates. In all likelihood, death descended upon Bobby McGee around dusk but before the chickens put themselves to bed (or roost) in the henhouse.

Bobby McGee was a different breed from the four hens he came with. He was the same size as the hens themselves, and he had tufts of feathers on his feet. I took many pictures of those hens that first day, but Bobby shows up only as tail feathers or as a red blur in amongst the hens. Cliff, the ETC gardener brought us a replacement. The new rooster has lived on site before, and while these hens are new to him, the gig is one that he performs with authority and aplomb. His name is Gordon Lightfoot, and he is about one and half times the size of the hens. According to Cliff, Gordon is an Americana. He looks a lot like the Aracana rooster I used to own and whose crow you can still hear at the end of each episode of the C-Realm Podcast. He has long silver feathers that stream down his neck and back, and he has formidable spurs on his ankles. Gordon the rooster is no joke.

Click photo to enlarge

During Gordon's first night in the henhouse a raccoon pried open the henhouse door and got inside. The sounds of chicken panic woke Merry, the innkeeper, who lives on a school bus quite close to the henhouse. She got there in time to prevent any casualties and send the raccoon packing, but not before he had taken a chunk out of the thigh of one of the hens. That hen stayed close to the henhouse for the next couple of days, but now she follows Gordon and her sister wives around the ETC site. She can't keep up and must take frequent rests, but then she will get up and hobble in the direction of Gordon's continuous crowing to rendezvous with the group.

What lessons come from these experiences? The obvious and practical lesson is 1) to count the chickens in the hen house before securing it for the night, and 2) to remember that EVERYBODY loves the taste of chicken.

The fate of Bobby, who spent long weeks in unpleasant confinement, was placed into chicken paradise and shortly thereafter died a violent death raises (but does not beg) the question of whether it is better to live safely in drab confinement or to live dangerously in a paradise that answers to your every natural inclination, including the inclination to beware of predators.

I may dwell on that question in future posts, but for now I'd like to return to the question of the Changeover; the process by which the Farm re-organized and transformed itself from an idealistic religious movement under the charismatic leadership of a spiritual teacher into an economically viable community which accommodates the sink-or-swim moral assumptions of modern capitalism.

A lot of the people who come through here have visited other intentional communities, some of which operate as collectives. The one that comes up most often in conversational contrast to the Farm's Changeover is Twin Oaks, an intentional community in Virginia founded in 1967. Twin Oaks started out as, and remains, an economic collective. The example of Twin Oaks leads some folks to question the official Farm narrative of the Changeover which casts it as an unavoidable realignment needed to keep the community viable in the larger context of a money economy. In a previous post, I shared a portion of a conversation with Frank Michael in which Frank provided an alternative take on that official narrative, and I'll close out this entry with a transcript of part of a conversation that I recorded with Albert Bates and Joe of the Occult Sentinel Podcast. I used a different portion of this same conversation in episode 201 of the C-Realm Podcast. The transcript starts in mid-sentence because that's when I turned on the recorder.

Albert: ...fourth generation family here on the Farm. My mother died in 2003. She had been living here for 15 years. I'm now 63 years old. My son has 80 acres just outside the Farm where he's doing an edible landscaping nursery, and my granddaughter is just turning three. So, that's like four generations of family right here, and there are several families on the Farm that are that way.

So, you know, you can't, on the budget that we're talking about, turn every house into this kind of utopian landscape, but you can start, and you can get the ideas passed down through our alternative school to the next generation, and they can pick up and run with it for themselves.

Joe: So the goal, probably, if you had too much funding, would be to just become totally off-grid, self-sufficient solar...

Albert: I don't think there's any such thing as too much funding for a project of this type. If we had too much funding we would probably spend a lot more time on activism. And we're kind of Buddhist in the sense that we're not feathering our own nest. We're looking at the big picture. Insofar as we can make ourselves more harmless than we are right now, that would be great.

The other thing is to try to create a scene where people can come through and have the hospitality and a sense of what it is we're trying to do, so maybe it spreads that way too.

Back in 1980, or there'bouts, eighty, eighty four, somewhere in that region, The World Bank gave a grant to [the village of] Gaviotis in Columbia of $8 million, and he [Paolo Lugari] was able to use that to create this meme of sustainable living and sustainable production in a very rough and rural area, in the middle of a civil war, out in the middle of nowhere, [with] very poor soils, [and a] wicked hydrological cycle, and he created a forest system and an industry for making pine tar where eventually it was able to pay for itself and generate its own income, but in the interim, it began as this grant that enabled him to build community facilities: this kitchen, housing for his scientists, a shop for making windmills, [and] different kinds of things like that.

Well, if the Farm had gotten an $8 million grant in 1984, this would be a much different place today, because in 1984 we were just starting a solar car manufacturing company. We had ambitions to have a sailing fleet that would go through the Caribbean on a fair trade circuit. We had two thousand acres, and about a third of that was under cultivation, and, you know, it was a beautiful vision, and what happened instead, because we didn't have that external input was that we came up against bank loans, the Regan recession in building trades—the things we made our money from—and we ended up going into a different system. We de-collectivized. We had to say, “You know, okay, well, no longer can we just have an economy of love; a gift economy, where somebody does this job and they can go to the store and get everything for free.” Instead we had to exchange pictures of dead presidents between people, and that was the economy, and if you wanted to send your kid to the Farm school, you had to come up with the tuition.

Well, that changed the way everybody started doing things, and a lot of people actually left at that point. Some left because we didn't change fast enough, and some left because they thought we were selling out the Revolution, and the Farm population went from over a thousand to down 250 or so, and leveled off at that point, and it's been like that for 15 or 20 years now.

Those that stayed, curiously enough, were a lot of the people that had been in the original caravan that arrived here. So rather than selling out the Revolution, they were sort of like the people who stayed and washed the dishes after the party, and paid off a million dollars in debt to the banks, [and thus] bought the land a second time, and have been risk-averse ever since, and [they have grown] conservative in progressing the thing very slowly, in stages, so as not to become vulnerable again.

In future posts I will return to the question of creating community within the confines of a capitalist society that would rather see ersatz community sold as a commodity than real community arise spontaneously and organically as people work collaboratively to fulfill their own needs.

Picking Up Speed

2010-04-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

Last week I closed by saying that the first of the apprentices would be arriving the next day, and now they are here. Nilsa arrived on Sunday night, and Rich and Garrison both made their appearance the next morning. They've been here less than a full week, and already the group is tight.

Living here at the Inn is a very different experience now than it was when I sat down to write last week's entry. Things are a lot more formal now than they were a week ago. The refrigerator has a chore schedule attached to it, and at every meal one person is responsible for cooking and another for clean up. Out of courtesy for my fellow ETC residents, I have assigned myself clean-up slots exclusively.

Meals now begin with a series of ceremonies. When the food is ready someone steps out onto the deck and blows a note on a conch shell to summon the diners. When everyone has gathered around the table we join hands. The first time we did this, it seemed as though the hand-holding went on for an inordinately long time, but after nearly a week of this, the extended time spent in the circle around the table seems normal, and I'm starting to enjoy it whereas at first I got fidgety after a couple of minutes.

Once the circle has formed, Merry, the innkeeper, asks the group how their day went and invites people to share whatever details they like about it. After that comes the food tour in which the person who prepared the meal describes its various components. This usually comes with accompanying gestures, and the person doing the gesturing points to each dish without releasing the hand of the person next to them.

After the meal, each person washes his or her own plate, and the person assigned to clean-up takes care of the pots, pitchers and pans, common dishes, and assorted kitchen utensils. That person wipes down the counters and the table, and generally re-sets the kitchen for the start of the next cycle.

There are two bathrooms here in the Inn, and they need to be accessible during peak traffic periods, so we have notices posted specifying when it's okay to shower and when the bathrooms need to be left free. Readers outside of the United States may find amusement in the fact that American's will ask about the location of the 'bathroom' when what they really need is a toilet. Toilet is not an acceptable word for polite conversation in the US.

There are multiple composting toilets in outbuildings here at the ETC, and there are also outbuildings containing solar showers, so regardless of your need, ample facilities await you, but because of their single-functionality you won't be able to pretend that you were bathing or resting when in fact you were pooping. I think of my experience here as a scouting mission into one possible energy-descent future; one in which people live in closer proximity than they did in energy-rich 20th Century suburbia. In such a future, the fact that humans excrete both liquids and solids will not endure as a taboo subject.

Sex is not the taboo subject that it used to be. In fact, due to it's utility in selling products, anyone plugged into the corporate media will be reminded every few seconds that humans have sex with one another and that those who use the advertised products will have more frequent and better sex with nubile young partners. I hear tell that folks who spend time here at the ETC tend to hook up for durations both short and long, and as the sun shines and the trees turn green and more bodies move through the space I think I can feel an established hook-up energy stirring on site. There are detailed protocols posted for low-friction communal living, but the sex protocols remain un-posted. None of the outbuildings seem sufficiently isolated or sound-proof for total privacy, and I'm wondering if stealth sex is the norm or if the unwritten protocol is for everyone else to turn a deaf ear when ardor overcomes discretion.

On Thursday I made my first airport run. It's a good 90-minute drive to the Nashville airport, and as I left myself no buffer for contingencies I put my brain on idle and let my GPS device do the navigating. On the drive from Summertown to Nashville I listened to episode #52 of the Diet Soap Podcast, on which I appeared as a guest. (If you're of a mind to give it a listen, I would recommend that you first listen to the previous three episodes which feature interviews with James Howard Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov, and Robert Jensen. You might also take in episode 200 of the C-Realm Podcast, which features the first part of the conversation that continues between Doug Lain and me in Diet Soap #52.) I arrived at the baggage claim a minute or two before my passenger, and all went well. When I arrived back here at the Inn, I dropped off my passenger and then parked my truck up at the top of the hill. I got back here on foot just as Cliff, the gardener and the person most responsible for structuring the time and experience of the permaculture apprentices, was loading a wire cage into the back of the ETC car. He was planning to take Nilsa, Rich, and Garrison out to his farm to show them his nascent permaculture operation, and then they were going to go to Yoder's, a local Mennonite-run grocery store to buy some laying hens.

The trip to Cliff's farm was rewarding, and even a cursory summation of the information he imparted would require a blog post unto itself. In short, his ambitions inspired me.

When we arrived at Yoder's, we saw the chickens in a wire cage out by the road. They cost ten dollars each according to the hand-written sign attached to the cage. Cliff announced his intention to talk old man Yoder into parting with 5 for $40. That cage held four Rhode Island Red hens, two turkens (chickens with featherless necks that make them look like turkies, and a small rooster with tufts of feathers on his feet.) We all agreed, without specifying why, that we didn't want the turkens, and Cliff did manage to get Mr. Yoder to sell us the four hens and the rooster for $40. Later Nilsa and I both expressed a bit of nagging guilt at having left the turkins behind.

Cliff and I went out to collect the chickens. He moved the car over to their cage, popped the hatch and opened the ETC cage. Just as I was opening the road-side cage Garrison appeared and said that he'd never held a live chicken before. He seemed a bit uncertain about the prospect of reaching into that cage and grabbing hold of an uncooperative chicken. I have handled many a live and unwilling chicken, and after Garrison saw me stoop down and step inside that cage and lay hands on the first of the hens, he was gung-ho for the job, and we took turns extracting the four red hens and the silky rooster with the tufted feet and putting them in the cage in the back of the ETC Saturn.

As we drove back toward Summertown, Cliff pointed out a nondescript country gas station and explained that it is the closest place to the Farm to buy beer, and while Jim, the proprietor stocks the usual assortment of American macro-brews (“Like making love in a canoe,” as the Monty Python crew famously quipped at the Hollywood Bowl,) you can also find Red Stripe and a selection of seasonal offerings from Sam Adams and the New Belgium Brewing company (eco-friendly and employee-owned) at Jim's place. Alcohol was not allowed on the old Farm. These days Jim sells quite a bit of those high-end brews out of his little gray, concrete block building on that unremarkable stretch of rural Tennessee highway.

Now, I won't say that old hippies who have made their peace with capitalism drink more beer than idealistic young hippies working night and day to keep their commune afloat, but I will say that in the days when alcohol was forbidden on the Farm television was similarly proscribed. The ETC has a TV as does every residence that I have entered here on the Farm. The guidelines for living at the ECT posted on the fridge specify that neither drugs nor alcohol are allowed, and while I won't say that the Farm residents are making up for lost beer-drinking time, neither will I say that innkeepers, apprentices, and resident podcasters drink beer by candle light on school buses and cob cabins. I will say, however, that a good deal of bonding occurred on Thursday night and that I'm really starting to dig this community living thing.

At this point, the word-count tool tells me that I'm done, but long-time listeners to the C-Realm Podcast will understand that I can't leave off without saying something more about the chickens. When we got the chickens back here to the ETC and released them into the waiting enclosure with the cob henhouse, they knew in an instant that they had arrived in the Promised Land. Chickens often don't like to be moved to unfamiliar locations, and it's normal for hens to stop laying until they have adjusted to the change in scenery. As soon as these chickens hit the ground they were scratching and pecking, and within minutes the rooster had mounted one of the hens. They were home, and they knew it. We got our first egg the next morning.

I'm typing these words on my ancient laptop computer at the kitchen table, and every couple of minutes as I've typed the rooster has crowed, voicing his approval and enthusiasm for his new situation. I concur.

Growing Up

2010-04-03T09:17:00.000-07:00

In last week's post I shared the first part of a conversation that I recorded with Frank Michael. He is the proprietor of a mail order business here on the Farm, and he lived on the Farm in it's glory days prior to the Changeover in 1983, when the Farm switched from operating as an economic collective into a something more in tune with the economic realities of the larger culture. Before the Changeover, those who worked outside the Farm surrendered their paycheck to the collective. Now, people make and keep their own money and pay membership dues to support the community. Even non-members visiting the Farm pay a per-night bed tax, even if they are staying with friends.

Though the land is still held in common, a fundamental determinant of whether Farm residence is even a viable consideration is one's ability to generate an income in rural Tennessee. Some people make the 140 mile round-trip commute to Nashville. This option works best for Farm residents who can earn sufficient income working in town a couple of days a week. There are a handful of profitable businesses operating on the Farm which create employment for some residents, but not enough to offer ready-made economic niches for prospective new residents who come without a grubstake.

The official story of the Farm presented to visitors holds that the Changeover was a necessary economic adjustment to mounting debts and that it allowed the Farm to avoid the loss of the land to foreclosure and prevent the dissolution of the community. This narrative makes sense to me, and I hadn't questioned its fundamentals when I asked Frank for his perspective on the Changeover. I listened as he gave his answers, but each time I asked Frank a question, I tried to get him to address the Changeover in the economic terms in which had been presented to me, and while I suspect that there's a meaningful story along those lines to be explored, Frank has convinced me that the official story omits a very real dynamic; one that doesn't fit comfortably with the communitarian narrative of the Old Farm.

KMO: What caused such a dramatic depopulation of the Farm after the Changeover?

Frank: Okay. A little background. We were extremely different individuals to begin with. You know, there were people from all walks of life here, and what brought us together and kept us together for ten years or so was the strong glue provided by the philosophy of the Farm and by Stephen Gaskin and Ina Mae's real charisma, and good sense, intelligence, and loving personalities. You know, they're some of the most loving people I ever met. And also some of the smartest and funniest people I ever talked to.

So, I think the philosophy; non-violence and vegetarianism, and the practical idealism that we practiced on the Farm was the glue that held such a disparate group of people together when we were living in tents and buses and in impoverished situations. But we had fun. We enjoyed it. We had rock-n-roll; we had great parties; the food was fantastic. We were healthy because we got a lot of exercise. You had to really work here to make it.

I would say that there were two main reasons for the Changeover and the sudden population drop. One of them is psychological, and that is that, willy nilly... I mean, I don't think I ever did this. I was one of the older people on the Farm. I was 32 when I first came to the Farm, and I've been here ever since, but a lot of young people took Stephen and Ina Mae to be like their parents. They would actually call them up in the middle of the night, and say things like, “My old lady's not giving me any. What's wrong? Why can't we work it out?” Or, “The kids are crying, and I don't know what to do for them.” Or, you know, “My grandmother sent me some money, but she doesn't want me to spend it on anybody else.” All kinds of crazy things.

Well, not crazy things, but they were using Stephen and Ina Mae as their gurus, or parents, or councilors, instead of trying to figure things out for themselves. They were in a parent/child relationship with those people, and then what happened was they all grew up at about the same time. And why do teenagers rebel and dis their parents before they split? Well, some psychologists say that it makes it less painful to leave that way. Others say it's because they've been so dependent and so de facto slavish towards their parents all these years, and now they want freedom, and they just explode with it.

Whatever the theoretical explanation is, that happened on the Farm, and some of the people leaving held strong animosities against Stephen. They called him a guru or a cult leader, and in many cases they made up a long list of wrong-doings for Stephen, and they were not true at all. Not that Stephen was a perfect person at all. He screwed up enough, but a lot of the charges were ridiculous.

In my opinion, the philosophy we had [on the Farm before the Changeover] was the best ever. I mean, I cannot fault anything [about it]. We did make a few technical mistakes. For example, we used to say that anger is optional and that you should take that energy and do something useful like wash the dishes or chop wood with it. You were not supposed to express it. That's a hard one to follow, but it was well-intentioned. It was all inspired by the acid vision of a bunch of idealistic young people.

I would say that the second large reason is that we were getting older. Not only was there rebellion of the teenagers against the [surrogate] parents, but also, as we got older... To me, this is probably the most important thing, and this is just my opinion. I've never heard anybody else express this, but I feel like young people are full of energy and curiosity about all kinds of things, and they will dedicate long hours in the daytime to working on whatever it is, and then long hours at night to partying or having meetings and discussions and just hanging out with each other. And as you get older and start getting attached to a certain person – your girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever – some of the energy you spend in the group shunts over to your own personal affairs. And then if you get married, well, even more so. Now you have to manifest a house or a tent or whatever. Now your old lady gets pregnant and you have children. Wow. Now, even more or your energy has to be dedicated to your family.

Maybe at some point later on, you'll decide, “Well, you know, this is a great place, but I'd like to become a doctor, or I'd like to learn printing or something. Learn Japanese or whatever.” So that takes even more energy away from all the interminable meetings and community affairs.

So, that time and energy question, to me, is probably the most important one that caused the Changeover. It's surprising how little people realize that time and energy are strong determinants in your lifestyle and in your attitudes. The Changeover happened because people got older, and they didn't have the time and energy to be as communitarian as they were before.

I can imagine a proponent of an anti-immigration narrative holding Frank's story up as an illustration of why any community has to control it borders and favor the material well-being of existing residents over the needs of prospective newcomers. With fewer than 200 adult residents, the character of the Farm could easily be lost in a rapid influx of new people. And after a few weeks here, I'm just starting to get a feel for what a loss that would be.

Most of the young people I've met since my arrival – and at age 41 I'm a young face around here – either grew up on the Farm or came to it via the Ecovillage Training Center. Some of the folks in that second category made connections with non-ETC Farm residents, found an economic toehold and have started on the road to full Farm membership, but it's a long road, and the Farm thus far has struck me as a cross between a laid-back retirement community and an understaffed re-enactment of the Old Farm; like a Renaissance Festival in the days before the actual start of the fair, and as it gets warmer and as more people start to arrive or emerge from their winter dens, I'm starting to feel the festival atmosphere taking hold. The first of this season's ETC apprentices will arrive tomorrow, and if feels like the show is just about to begin.

The Changeover

2010-03-27T13:11:00.000-07:00

When I first visited the Farm in 2007 and then again just a few days ago, I saw a slide presentation by long-time Farm resident Doug Stevenson. The presentation detailed the early gathering of students in the Bay Area in California around the charismatic teaching of Stephen Gaskin, the cross-country bus caravan, the establishment of the Farm in rural Tennessee, and the humanitarian projects that the Farm community undertook in the 1970s. Very close to the end of the presentation comes the description of the Changeover; the time when the Farm re-organized itself economically in order to arrest their slide into debt and head off possible loss of the land to foreclosure. Before the Changeover, the Farm was making six thousands dollars a week and spending ten thousand, and, according to this narrative, it was a simple economic calculation that mandated the transition.

As I say, most of the presentation of the Farm's history focuses on the period between the founding in 1971 and the Changeover in 1983. The next 27 years, over two-thirds of the Farm's existence, gets summed up as a sort of dénouement, but given that the Farm population plummeted from somewhere in the neighborhood of thirteen hundred to less than two hundred in a handful of years after the Changeover, most of the hours of human experience on the Farm did, in fact, take place before the Changeover.

I've been helping Frank Michael, the proprietor of MushroomPeople, a mail order business here on the Farm, pack and ship orders for Shiitake mushroom spawn and cultivation tools and materials during the Spring busy period. What follows is a partial transcript of a conversation that I recorded with Frank yesterday as we packed up orders. The recording is unsuitable for use as a podcast because of the crackling of newspaper and plastic bags and the noise of a tape gun.

The Changeover had been presented to me as an economic response to an economic reality, and I was unsatisfied during much of the following conversation that Frank would not address it in those terms. In my thinking, the depopulation of the Farm came after the economic re-organization of the Changeover, and therefore it must have resulted from the Changeover. (Yes, I'm aware of the post hoc fallacy.) What slowly sunk in over the course of our conversation, and during the time spent transcribing and reflecting on it, is that the Changeover and the depopulation both resulted from dynamics of life on the old Farm that don't get much play in the official presentation of the history of the Farm.

Frank: The people on the work crews were more comfortable talking to each other than to anybody else, so there wound up being a certain amount of cliquishness happening. All very naturally and very understandably. And social position... I don't know if I would call it exactly social position, but there were some people who were much more active and more voluble. Back on the old Farm the real value system was that whoever had better oral skills wound up being the one who got heard more and got to determine what happened more.

We were right on the cusp of survivability because, for one thing, we took a vow of poverty when we arrived here, and so that made things a little flaky. We were always making decisions like, “Oh my God, shall we get penicillin for the clinic or toilet paper this week?”

Those were the kinds of decisions that would come up typically. We would typically burn out a bank person... We used to call them bank ladies – we also had some guys too to do the banking, try to keep up with the finances and pay the bills. We used to burn these people out at the rate of once every six weeks or so. I've seen 200 pound, big, yang, guys crying because he couldn't make the budget that week, and, you know, there was no way to make a decision about what to do with what little money was coming in.

So those were some of the pressures that caused the Changeover actually, and there was surprisingly little rancor because some people really sacrificed a lot. They would get up at four in the morning, and get in a truck or bus, drive all the way to Nashville and work some shit job, and come back after hours. And they would do this year after year after year to support the rest of us, and the rest of were not idle. I mean, we used to work long hours. Sixteen-hour, eighteen-hour days were not uncommon.

(…)

Frank: I would say off-hand that one of the major categories [of people who left the Farm after the Changeover] is people who disagreed philosophically with Stephen. It took me years to understand some of the dynamics of what happened with the Changeover, I tell you.

KMO: Stephen was de-elevated during the Changeover, right?

Frank: Very much so.

KMO: So, I wouldn't think that people would leave at that time because they disagreed with him.

Frank: Well, it was a slow turning set of issues. Some people wanted to close the gates for a while in order to upgrade out material plane, here. And, you know, we were living on a dollar a day. We were voluntary peasants under a vow of poverty. But some people were saying, “Look. We're getting older. Our kids are growing up. We can't afford to keep living in tents and buses. We need to sheet rock some of these tents. We need to frame some of these structures and make real houses of them. As we get older, we're going to need bathrooms; not outhouses. So come on. Let's close the gate for a while and stop this crazy influx of thousands of visitors every year who need to be guided, and toured, and fed, and coddled. And stop taking some of these people from jail and from the nuthouse who want to straighten up and we give them a companion to be with them 24/7.”

We call them a tripping buddy. Some of these people were really tripping all the time. Some of these people were highly neurotic or psychotic. And we tried to get them well. If they understood what we were all about and wanted to be here, we'd say, “Okay, here's the lick.”

And also we were delivering babies for free for ladies who were contemplating having an abortion. We'd say, “Well, don't have an abortion. Instead, we'll deliver your baby using natural childbirth, and if you don't fall in love with her and take her with you, we'll raise her for you.” So, talk about a burden on us.

KMO: What happened to those kids?

Frank: Many of them grew up happily and went to the Farm school and are now in college or have jobs. You know, there were so many of them it's hard to keep track of all of them. My wife and I adopted a little girl, and she grew up and had her own kids.

But it was quite a drain on a bunch of folks living without bathrooms. Sometimes we had really insufficient quality of nutrition. That's the reason my wife left; because she was really pissed off. Sometimes the kids would not have shoes that were decent. You'd wear out the shoes, and if people weren't there when the big shoe buy came in on the truck and got put out in the middle of the road someplace, at the head of the road, typically. There was a little place; a dry goods store... tent. And if you didn't hear it through the channels that the shoes had come in, then you just missed out, and that's one way in which social position manifested; If you weren't popular, if you weren't a good networker, and we weren't.

We were pretty square compared to everybody else. Most other people here were either hippies, Haight-Ashbury friends that had been knowing each other since the year zero, or they were highly gregarious, and [my wife] and I were not. We were typical squares. Actually, more typical than most squares. We were techno-squares. You know, she was a highly gifted mathematician, and I was a mediocre physicist, and so we weren't typical folks. And it wasn't that easy for us to talk about our tripping experiences with the rest of the folks on the Farm. We just didn't have any, but we shared the ideals. We loved it here; loved the energy and the goals and everything else.

So that put us in a place where we missed the shoes. And sometimes there would be someone coming back with a truck full of avocados and grapefruits and greens and all kinds of goodies, and we'd miss out on some of that stuff. So [my wife] wasn't real happy with it, and I wasn't either.

We said there was no class on the old Farm. Well, there was no arbitrary social position because of money or privilege, inherited titles or any of that crap, but de facto there was a class structure that made it so some people made out much better than other people. And a lot of it arose naturally. It was along the lines of friendship. I think that's what made groups of people who were more simpatico with each another, you know, totally understandable.

It was like accelerated social evolution from a charismatic revelation – in this case, acid revelation – religious tribe to where we are now, which is a fairly enlightened co-op; modern community. You know, we're more advanced than people in co-housing because we're co-landers. We share the land.

KMO: You know, one thing that just occurred to me was that after the Changeover you went from a population of about twelve hundred down to about two hundred in a few years.

Frank: Right.

KMO: [A] short span.

Frank: Yep.

KMO: It seems to me that two hundred is closer to the size of a traditional human clan or tribe.

Frank: True. That's right.

KMO: And, at this level, everybody can know everybody. And there will be natural cliques and sort of social structures that emerge, but given that it's not [on] a huge scale, there are not enough people for there to be all that many levels in the social hierarchy. You don't get the same sorts of disparities and stresses and whatnot.

Frank: That's right. If I had to characterize the Farm with a single word, I would say kindness. People are so kind and so sweet to each other on the Farm. I think it comes directly from our philosophy that gave rise to the Farm in the first place. You know, the psychedelic spirituality. It was the first religion or philosophy that I could subscribe to that didn't insult my intelligence. And I loved it. You know, it was great: We're all one. We take care of each other. We're out to save the world as the only task that's really worthy of a grown up. And take care of all the children as if they were your own children, and help other people. You know, don't just take care of yourself and feather your own nest only, but take care of other folks who have it harder than you.

So that 's how we got started helping our neighbors, most of whom became very kind and benevolent towards us once they understood who we were; that we weren't just a bunch of druggie, weirdo hippies.

KMO: Most of the things that you've described that motivated people to leave, it seems, would have been motivation to leave before the Changeover. What caused such a dramatic depopulation of the Farm after the Changeover?

Frank: Okay. A little background. We were extremely different individuals to begin with. You know, there were people from all walks of life here, and what brought us together and kept us together for ten years or so was the strong glue provided by the philosophy of the Farm and by Stephen Gaskin and Ina Mae's real charisma, and good sense, intelligence, and loving personalities. You know, they're some of the most loving people I ever met. And also some of the smartest and funniest people I ever talked to.

And here begins a fascinating element of the story, but I'm going to leave off here for this week and pick up on the role that Stephen and Ina Mae Gaskin played on the Farm before and after the Changeover in future posts.

Images of the ETC

2010-03-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

This video was made by Merry, the innkeeper here at the ETC. Last year she was an apprentice.

I'm going to get started on today's essay here shortly. Look for it later today.

Ecovillages in a Money Economy

2010-03-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

I had a brief but in-depth email correspondence with someone who is certain that the industrial phase of human civilization has all but run its course. I'll call him Adam. Adam is sure that a collapse and Malthusian Correction are immanent. He is Canadian, and for a time he thought that ecovillage living was a viable response to impending calamity and something worth pursuing. So Adam set about looking for the ecovillage that was the best fit for his desires, skills, and financial means.

He eliminated all ecovillages outside of Canada from his list of candidates . He'd spent 10 years as a vegetarian and found that he required some meat in his diet for good health, and so he removed all vegan and vegetarian communities. He is an atheist who spent time in India and who now has a strong aversion to cults and gurus, and so he disqualified any ecovillage that set off his cult detector. By this time the list of potential ecovillages was growing short.

In his email dispatches Adam named names, but I don't want to make things personal or get into a shooting war, so I will withhold the details and give a brief summary of the opinions that Adam formed regarding ecovillages and their shortcomings.

Upper-Middle Class Enclaves: The list of remaining candidates that survived the weeding out of obvious cults left several candidates that, upon closer inspection, revealed cult-like characteristics; the most obvious of which being that they were seeking prospective members with money. The price of admission was rarely less than $150,000 and after buying in, new community members would still be expected to build their own houses. These ecovillages amounted, in Adam's estimation, to little more than gated enclaves of upper-middle class privilege, in which the residents paid a considerable amount of money in order to live in a spiritual/intellectual monoculture.

Not Interested in “Lifeboat” Skills: Adam claims proficiency in a range of skills that would qualify him for the lead role in a story by James Fenimore Cooper, but the ecovillage communities that he surveyed were not interested in people with such skills. He writes, “Few were asking for hunters, meat cutters, butchers, cheese makers, dairyers, livestock husbands, horse wranglers, mule breeders, oxen drivers, foragers, leather workers, shoemakers, clothing builders, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carriage makers, leather tanners, trackers, snowshoe builders, gunsmiths, bullet re-loaders, bow-and-arrow makers, or any other "lifeboat community" skills practical after the Great Correction.”

What these communities wanted and needed were people who could reside on the ecovillage and still make money, either by commuting long distances or by working remotely.

Exploitative Caste System: Folks who can afford to buy into an ecovillage because they have good jobs often have to keep working those jobs and don't have the time or energy for a double life as a farmer, and so these communities need farm hands. In other cases, the founding members of the community had grown long in the tooth and were no longer able to maintain the level of physical labor that their communities required and which they did, in fact, perform in years gone by. The members of these communities recognized the need for “new blood,” but in most cases the financial requirements for new membership disqualified almost all interested parties who possessed the physical robustness and vitality implied by the phrase, “new blood.” Communities in each of these situations turned to an organization called WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), and Adam reported that he encountered tales of exploitation and abuse from former WWOOFers on internet forums.

The email from which I'm quoting and paraphrasing ran to over 3,000 words, so I won't try to summarize all of Adam's complaints and comment on them in a 1,500 word essay like this one. The three complaints listed above form the core of the problem with ecovillages in Adam's experience, and they really all come down to a single phenomenon in my mind, but before I comment on their unity, let me say something in response to each of them.

Upper-Middle Class Enclaves: In a world where governments are no-longer giving out free land to homesteaders it costs a lot of money to create a new community. This is equally true for an ecovillage, for a mainstream retirement community, or for a gated community built around a golf course. That expense comes only in part from the need to acquire land.

An ecovillage can be established near existing centers of commerce and non-eco-residential areas, or it can be out in the boonies. If the former, then you have to build it to conform to a system of standards that codify waste and inefficiency and which provides a source of continuous income for the people certified in building to those standards and to inspectors and regulators who are the institutional defenders of the dysfunctional methodology.

If you build your ecovillage way out in the boonies so that you can do your own thing, then you've got an even tougher row to hoe in terms of generating income. Your members either have to commute long distances to jobs, have sufficiently fast and reliable internet access to do “knowledge work” at a distance (in most instances satellite internet will not cut it), or your community needs a sugar daddy or a sugar daddy caste, which creates a killer counter-current to any egalitarian aspirations with which you might have started out.

Not Interested in Lifeboat Skills: While you can use money to buy organic yogurt, you can't pay your property taxes by bartering your “lifeboat skills.” The government doesn't want you to shoe the Mounties' horses. They want you to cough up some cash or forfeit your property. Until the collapse is well under way you will have to have a way to make money.

Exploitative Caste System: I checked the WWOOF Wikipedia entry, and it doesn't have a section on “controversy” or “reported abuses,” but I don't know if that's because no such controversy exists or because vigilent WWOOFer sentries keep watch over that entry and “scrub” any dissenting edits. I can say that I have heard first hand from someone who described very callous and predatory exploitation while working on a supposed ecovillage. I have not asked for his permission to share the details of that experience, so I'll say no more for now.

I do have the permission of Merry, the innkeeper here at the ETC to share her experience as a massage therapist at a spa at a small Mississippi casino prior to hurricane Katrina and how it compares to her experience here on the Farm. She is a hired hand and not an official Farm resident, and so she is clearly a member of a lower Farm caste, but she says she feels more like a person in this environment and less like a unit of corporate production than she did at the casino. For the casino, extracting money from the patrons was the unifying goal of all the activities that took place under its roof. Here at the ETC, economic realities require that everyone contribute to making enough money to keep the operation running, but the unifying goal remains providing an educational resource for people looking to live in a more ecologically enlightened way.

I don't want to embrace cynicism, but the old adage seems true: Life (in a capitalist oligarchy) is a shit sandwich. The more bread you have the less shit your have to eat. The fact that this adage holds true on ecovillages operating within the larger context of a capitalist society only demonstrates that ecovillages are not utopias. Hopefully you know enough to put your hand on your wallet and back away slowly when someone tries to sell you shares in Utopia.

In addressing each complaint individually the general theme shines through. The system does not allow actual dissent. You can say whatever you like, but it doesn't matter what you say. You may not opt out. You are more than welcome to spend your money buying into the “opting out” demographic, but the talismans of membership for that consumer category remain quite pricey indeed.

Whatever the flaws of ecovillage living as it exists today, the more people who have some experience growing food and who have an informed idea of what a hard day's physical labor really feels like, the better. Better still the larger the pool of people who appreciate how a desire for community, sustainability, and a soft ecological touch can be turned to exploitative ends. The collective pool of skills and experiences that we'll have to draw upon in a post-collapse environment is richer for the existence of these ecovillage experiments and for the people who lived them. Our post-collapse prospects would be no better had those burned WWOOFers spent that time as standard corporate cubicle serfs.

A Village of One... and Counting

2010-03-13T10:57:00.000-08:00

The weather is warming, and the Farm is starting to wake up. When I got here, it was cold, and keeping the wood-burning furnace in the basement of the Ecovillage Training Center going was a perpetual task. Now it rarely dips into the 30’s, even at night, and I haven’t kept a continuous fire burning.

I’ve also been selling the hours of my life, which long-time listeners to the C-Realm Podcast probably know is not my preferred mode of living, but this gig is cool because it’s on a human scale. I’ve been helping Frank Michael with his Farm-based mail-order mushroom spawn business. It’s called Mushroom People. Frank, a long-time co-conspirator with Albert Bates, is bubbling with ideas about all manner of topics that would fit right in on the C-Realm Podcast, but he does the bulk of his mail order business for the year in the month of March, so those wide-ranging conversations will have to wait.

Albert left for a two-week stint in Central America a few days back, and even when he was here he was working furiously on his upcoming book, The Biochar Solution, and he would spend many hours on at a stretch holed up in his two-story octagonal house which is next door to the Eco-hostel. The Eco-hostel is the largest building and the hub of social activity on the ETC complex, and it is where I lay my head at night and where I spend most of my days when I’m not packing up boxes of shitake mushroom spawn. I’m sitting at the kitchen table in the Eco-hostel as I type these words.

Yes, as the weather has warmed and the Farm residents are emerging from their winter dens, I have retreated indoors and planted myself at my computer. I am working furiously with the help of skilled volunteers recruited from the ranks of the C-Realm Podcast audience to prepare my book for publication. It’s called Conversations on Collapse: C-Realm Podcast Transcripts, and it features interviews with Dmitry Orlov, Albert K. Bates, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Sharon Astyk, Albert Bartlett, Cornelia Butler Flora, Bill McKibben, James Howard Kunstler, Colin Tudge, Joe Bageant, and Daniel Pinchbeck.

Albert is gone, but I’m not alone here at the ETC, the full-time, real deal in-keeper has arrived for the season. In fact she’s standing about three feet away from me at the kitchen sink cleaning up after her adventure in apple pie-making. For the first time in years I’m actually sitting down at a table to share meals with another human being on a daily basis. What’s more we’ve started pooling edible resources and collaborating on meals. Her efforts far outshine mine, and I’ll say nothing of last night’s attempt at grilled cheese sandwiches which would have set off working smoke detectors. In recent years, except on the recent Transitional Alchemy tour with Neil Kramer, I’ve eaten most of my meals alone and almost always while reading or listening to a podcast, and even, I admit, in front of the television. On weekends when my children stayed with me at the Heartbreak Hotel on eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, I was typically in the kitchen while they ate, and sometimes I would even be seated at the table with them, but mostly I stayed in motion preparing their individual meals, cleaning up, and attempting to keep the peace between them. It’s not like a shared meal with another adult.

I hope that these shared meals represent the beginning of the end of my isolation. A theme that comes up again and again in the transcripts I’ve been preparing for publication is that in the United States, we use the things that isolate us from other people as measures of our success. If you never have to share a bathroom with anyone, that means you’re doing well. According to this set of values, only losers who live in small houses or apartments have to share bathrooms with children or other family members. Pity the poor flunky whose financial situation forces him to cohabitate with roommates to whom he is unrelated. If he works hard and gets lucky, he may yet strike it rich and move into his own starter castle out in the ‘burbs where he can be assured that he and he alone pees into his porcelain bowl of drinking water.

Me, I like to pee outdoors. A couple of days ago I stepped outside with the intention of gifting a stand of bamboo with a bonus dose of nitrogen and found a young woman I did not recognize standing and admiring the very bamboo I had intended to visit. She was soon joined by three other young woman who turned out to be on the farm for a midwifery course. I ended up taking them on an impromptu tour of the ETC.

Bill McKibben talks about the poverty of more, by which he means the social isolation we experience because our fossil fuel lifestyle has transformed us into the first people in human history who have no need for their neighbors. It provides us with physical comfort but insulates us from the human interaction that is the key to our emotional satisfaction and sense of belonging. We compensate for our lack of genuine human interaction with on-line relationships of one sort or another, with video games or pornography, and mostly with television.

Other folks come through here most days. I haven’t asked them for their permission to reveal their identities, so they shall remain nameless for now, but they each take responsibility for helping the ETC fulfill its mission, though none of them live on site. I like them all and enjoy my regular interactions with them. For me, those face to face interactions and conversations about topics that I find worth-while represent tangible and verifiable progress in my transition to the kind of life I want to create for myself.

In April the first group of apprentices will arrive, and that will likely put my commitment to these touchy-feely ideas to the test. Ideas about community and human contact aside, I am accustomed to a life of quiet and solitude, or one animated by the frenetic energy of my children. A life in which adult conversations take place by phone at scheduled times or in the asynchronous realm of email is a life in which those contacts can be put aside at will. Not so when those people share your actual living space.

I’ve been getting emails and other communications from readers and listeners who encourage me to explore this or that topic in my conversations with my fellow ecovillagers. This reflects the misconception that the Ecovillage Training Center is an ecovillage. It’s certainly eco, but it’s not a village. You can’t have a village without villagers, and the ETC has only one-full time resident; Albert, and he travels frequently. The majority of my time here thus far has been solitary, but when the apprentices arrive, this place will morph into something much more akin to a village than it is now, and that experience my yet alter my fuzzy ideology about what makes for a satisfying human existence.

I’ll keep you posted.

The Locals

2010-03-06T12:53:00.000-08:00

In the spring of 2003 I moved from Perth, West Australia to Berryville, Arkansas with the intention of building an eco-homestead. Highway 62 runs through Berryville connecting it to Green Forest to the east and Eureka Springs to the west. On several occasions I saw a man walking along that highway with a walking stick and wearing a backpack. I remember he walked with a limp. I’m sorry to say that I never offered him a ride. His name, I learned later, was Darrell Michael (Hitchhikin' Mike) Heaster. He was fifty years old and lived on disability.

While I never spoke to him, I now know Hitchhikin’ Mike’s name because one day, twenty-four year-old Cory Lynn Howerton offered him a ride. Cory drove Mike about a half a mile down a little-trafficked logging road, beat him, took the $500 from Mike’s recently cashed disability check, poured gasoline on him and set him on fire. Hitchhikin’ Mike died 30 days later in an Oklahoma hospital.

This was not a routine occurrence in Carroll county, Arkansas. The old locals that I talked to about it said it was the kind of thing they thought only happened in places like Los Angeles. To the best of my knowledge, no acts of comparable brutality have followed it since then. So what’s my point?

In this blog I detail my impressions and experiences at the Ecovillage Training Center at the Farm, an intentional hippy community in Summertown, Tennessee. After last week’s blog post, Albert Bates, my host and sponsor here at the ETC told me that I seem to have gotten the wrong impression about the Farm and its relations with its neighbors. Albert explained to me that in the early days of the Farm, when it had nearly 2,000 residents (today it has fewer than 200) and it outnumbered the muggle population of Summertown, the Farm residents voted in a block. A solid block of 2,000 lock-step votes in rural Tennessee was a force that no would-be elected official could ignore, and the Farm residents made significant inroads into local and state politics and forged lasting relationships with the local movers and shakers which continue to bear good fruit to this day. The nearby town of Hoenwald, due in no small part to the on-going outreach efforts by denizens of the Farm, has officially set itself on the Transition Town path. As a result of the community-building efforts of the Farm’s founders, “You can cash a check on long hair anywhere in a 20 mile radius,” Albert tells me.

That said, Albert tells me that a certain segment of the population of rural Tennessee consists of scallywags and rascals and always has. The point being that acts of vandalism and larceny reflect the character of rural life more than they reflect any tension between “the locals” and the hippy culture of the Farm. The contracting legit economy here just isn’t up to the task of providing living wages to all of the folks who live here, and so folks make due with their given circumstances. The more brazen and/or sociopathic of the individuals who are getting by on the economic margins are the ones who make the headlines.

When I speak of headlines, I mean both the metaphorical headlines of informal conversation and the actual headlines of the local newspaper. Here is a full list of all of the headlines that appear on the front and back page of the news section of March 3rd, 2010 edition of the Lawrence County Advocate:

Resident returns to find pets killed

Injunction remains to stop ‘puppy mill’ dog adoptions

100 years, 100 miles

England candidate for Sheriff

Lawrenceburg man awakened by vandals

Resident warns of scam attempt

Summertown man chases prowlers from his home

Mobile home buyer is victim of fraud

Victim tracks down stolen property

South Lawrence Head Start taking applications

Do these headlines illustrate the moral poverty of rural life, or do they exemplify the media maxim of “If it bleeds, it leads?”

It’s also worth noting that the top story in the fyi section of that same issue of the Lawrence County Advocate opens with a full page story on Ina May Gaskin, the world’s most famous midwife. She is married to Farm Founder, Steven Gaskin, and she founded The Farm Midwife Center (It is mainly due to Ina May’s book, “Spiritual Midwifery” that my two children were born at home.)

Yes, there have been break-ins and vandalism on the outskirts of the Farm. The victim of one such incident told me that he thinks the locals in the immediate vicinity have a good opinion of the Farm and its residents and that the perpetrators probably came from some distance away. I asked him if he thought that the incident was a one-off or if his living arrangement required on-going vigilance. He said he remains vigilant, but he also thought that his relationship with the non-Farm locals was improving. He told me about trying to rent a video in Summertown. The proprietor was wary of him until she learned that he was associated with the Farm. Once that was on the table the tension lifted. “I’ve never had any trouble with those folks,” she told him. The implication being that she had had trouble with other folks.

Another of the younger folks who work here at the Ecovillage Training Center expressed some impatience with the very notion that there’s a conversation to be had about the relationship between the residents of the Farm and the locals. It just takes one or two rowdy jerks in a pick up truck to conjure up a conversation about “our relationship with the neighbors” when for the most part relations are amiable and generally a non-issue. What’s more, the land bordering the Farm is a patchwork of plots some of which are owned and inhabited by people associated with the Farm and by the so-called “locals.”

Gaining membership to the Farm is a long process which requires more compromise than some would-be residents are willing to make. The Farm, with it’s marked and defended borders, is a bit like a fort in Indian territory. Some settlers think they can set up housekeeping outside the walls of the fort and thereby enjoy the cultural benefits of living in proximity to the Farm without all the strictures of life within the fort. Then after having their homes violated and their property vandalized they decide that the security afforded by the fort’s perimeter defenses is worth the cost. I hear that that process works the other way as well; that the bother of internal Farm politics motivates some people to move out but not away.

What’s more, the line between hippy Farm denizen and “local” is sometimes blurry within individual people. So-called Dreadnecks, children who grew up on the Farm with friends out in the local community, embody the blurring of the categories. Which is not to say that all tribal affiliations are ephemeral or academic. As is true in just about every place I’ve ever lived, there are certain crowds and locales that common sense tells me to avoid.

This topic connects to several others that I hope to explore in the coming weeks, not least of which is the question of whether rural living is a responsible or even viable option in an energy descent environment. I won’t attempt to address that question today except to say that, without a massive Malthusian Correction, we’re going to need ecocities at least as much as we need ecovillages, and the quality of ecocity life will play a much larger role in human consciousness than will the quality of rural life. Again, sans an enormous dieback.

Initial Mindset

2010-02-27T08:21:00.000-08:00

At the moment, I live in the Ecovillage Training Center’s eco-hostel on the Farm, a long-standing intentional community in Summertown, Tennessee. The eco-hostel is a two story farmhouse with an attached greenhouse. Doors on both the first and second floor of the south face of the house open on to an attached greenhouse. The two second story doors lead out onto a wooden balcony called “the Beach.”

Day and night I feed the wood-burning stove in the basement which heats the eco-hostel, and if I’m diligent about it, the house stays in the mid 50s (Fahrenheit) throughout the day, but by mid-afternoon, it will be in the 80’s up on the Beach. Strangely, I spend very little time up there.

This morning I woke up to a cold house. I went down to the basement to discover that the fire had completely died. The house was 41 degrees. It was 21 outside. Usually, even when the logs in the stove have burned, a bed of hot ashes and glowing embers remains in the bottom of the stove, and if I just put some small pieces of wood on top of them I can get the fire going again without matches or kindling. Not this morning. It was completely done. I squatted by that metal stove in the cold basement for several minutes working with long matches, glossy pages from a catalog, and little scraps of wood to get it going again. I’ll need to go check it here in a bit.

After I’ve had my coffee and it’s gotten a bit warmer outside, I’m going to go out to carry and stack newly cut firewood that needs to cure before it can be burned, and then I’ll be hauling cured wood in a wheel barrow down to the entrance to the furnace room in the basement where I will split it with a maul (a cross between a sledgehammer and an axe) and stack it in the covered rack outside the basement so that it will be there when I need it.

Please don’t think that I’m complaining. The physical exercise does me good, and this really is the kiddie pool compared to what people living in suburbia would have to do (will have to do) to stay warm when the power goes out or the trucks stop delivering the heating oil which keeps their automagic furnaces in operation.

The ETC is in the woods, and there are plenty of downed trees around here which could be scavenged for firewood if need be, but I didn’t have to do that. A man in a truck brought logs, and Cliff, the ETC gardener, sized them with a chainsaw and split a good many of them with a maul. Most of the work has been done for me, but compared to the lifestyle to which my body has adapted itself in recent years, the piddling little physical exertion required of me at the very end of the process feels like work.

I’m grateful for this opportunity to ease into the process of chopping and carrying wood. At this point in time, I don’t have to carry water, and I probably never will here at the ETC. Many of the buildings here harvest rooftop rainwater, and there is a large cistern up the hill.

The ETC has solar power though it is also on the gird. It has a large garden, greenhouses, a series of lagoons for gray water reclamation, a cob henhouse, a propane-fueled on-demand water heater for the eco-hostel and solar showers elsewhere on the grounds. It has composting toilets, a root cellar, and the nearest neighbor has a sauna. All in all, not a bad place to ride out a storm.

Not a bad place to ride out a storm except for the fact that the Farm’s non-hippy neighbors hold a cultural grudge against the Farm and its inhabitants, and while my contact with the locals has been minimal and mostly congenial, they scare me. And I’ve got a leg up on other would-be pre-emptive refugees. I was born in Arkansas, and while I didn’t grow up there, I spent summers there throughout my childhood, and while I can’t pass for a local here in rural Tennessee, I can, when in need, put on a dialect that will provide me with some camouflage.

At this point, I should be working around to some sort of conclusion, but the obvious conclusion seems vacuous to me. Either you already recognize a need to prepare for transition and you’re taking steps, or you see it coming but think that whatever wiggle room your current situation allows will only permit you to make token efforts which only serve to highlight your consciousness of the need to prepare yourself and of the inadequacy of your efforts thus far. (If you think that business as usual is tenable for the foreseeable future or that god-like artificial intelligence with save the day, I doubt you’ve read this far.)

If you’ve tried gardening, you know that a home garden on anything but a grand scale cannot replace your regular supermarket. My own solo gardening efforts have been therapeutic, at best. Unless you own your home, you probably don’t have permission to install a composting toilet or modify your roof to harvest rainwater or replace your front yard with a vegetable garden. If you have a full time job and a long commute, you likely don’t have the time or mental energy do much of anything, and if you don’t have a full time job, you probably feel too broke to do what is necessary to extricate yourself from the vast but floundering life-support system upon which you depend.

My situation, while incredibly privileged from a transition point of view, does not point toward an obviously viable strategy for you. I didn’t build this place. I was invited in. And my situation still feels quite tenuous. I don’t have paid work here, and the money economy still makes demands upon me. Most importantly, my children are not here, and my ex-wife would offer up this essay as proof of my madness and lack of parental fitness.

While I don’t have the exact quote at hand, Albert K. Bates, my host and benefactor here at the Ecovillage Training Center has said something to the effect that the major stumbling block when it comes to ecovillages is that most people who feel called to ecovillage living try to start their own rather than join an existing community. I think that’s probably right.

I mentioned that my solo gardening effort provided mainly therapeutic benefits. I did apprentice under an organic market gardener for a season, and under his direction, my efforts helped produce a considerable quantity of high quality food. And I had a great time doing it.

Someone near you has some skill that you could learn from them that will move you in a helpful direction. The Internet might facilitate initial contact, but the most gratifying and useful interaction you have with that person will not be via email, instant message, or telephone. It will be face to face. You probably already know who that person is and where to find them.

As for the job that eats up the bulk of your time and energy…