ETC Voices Podcast 015

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

 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

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

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

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

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

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.