Obituary

It's been a bit of a tough week. I wanted to write about the book I'm reading at the moment which is called Navigating the Coming Chaos: a Handbook for Inner Transition and is written by peak oil writer Carolyn Baker. There's been a bit of talk about synchronicity recently on other peak oil sites and for me this was mine because, like others, I am feeling a particularly strong level of fear lapping around my knees. It's a kind of fear of a greater fear, if you like, that only a Cassandra could feel. The best quote I saw this week that could approximate the cause of this came from Noam Chomsky … here it is:

”The general population doesn't know what is happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.”

So I felt fortunate indeed when I opened Carolyn Baker's book and began to read. In it she posits that humankind is about to have a near-death experience. There's nothing we can do about this, it's as if we are walking in front of a bus, oblivious because we are listening to our iPods. We have no comprehension of the three e's: energy, environment and economics, and the interplay between them that has led us into our dazed predicament. We are not prepared for it, either materially, mentally or spiritually. It's as if we are going to be forced to march into a battle wearing our bathing costumes rather than body armour. The only thing that can come from this is disaster on a scale that is scarcely imaginable to the modern mind and we can expect to see mass social breakdown and suicides as the myth of our exceptionalism disappears in a puff of smoke.

Anyway, that's the bad news. The good news, if you could call it that, comes in the form of inner transition, and that's what she talks about in the book. She talks about becoming a new kind of human being, and one that can live with a continuous conscious connection with the living universe. And cultivating your own inner bunker. There is plenty of Jungianism in it and I just know that it is going to be one of those books that opens up new paths for me.

But I haven't finished the book yet, so I'll wait until I do so before offering up more.

The second thing I thought I might right about was a follow on from last week's post about George Monbiot. Having accused him last week of not really understanding peak oil it was only 48 hours later that he published a hot button article claiming that peak oil was irrelevant. Could it be that GM reads my humble blog? Ha, I doubt it, but still he put the cat among the pigeons and there was plenty of roiling debate about whether he has a point or not. The unofficial consensus seems to say that he had a couple of good points (namely that peak oil won't stop us being fried by burning fossil fuels – something we knew anyway) but that overall he was still wrong, primarily because he was basing his arguments on dubious data supplied by cornucopians.

John Michael Greer commented to the effect that climate change activists such as George Monbiot are labouring under delusions of grandeur because they see mankind as omnipotent whereas peakers recognise the limits of our power and are therefore somehow more realistic. There might be something in this but I for one am growing a bit tired of this dualism – it's like a football match with the environmentalists (in the green shirts) on the one side and the peakers on the other (in the black shirts) with the Earth as the ball. I became an environmentalist as a teenager because my local forest was cut down to make way for a new housing estate, and because I couldn't stand seeing whales being harpooned or seals being clubbed to death: does that sound delusional?

The third thing I thought I might talk about is how fast things are unravelling. I read an article yesterday about numerous cities in the US going bankrupt and how feedback loops effectively bring about fast collapse scenarios far more rapidly than it took to build up the city in the first place. It goes something like this: city gets into financial difficulty because it has borrowed too much based on the value of its assets (i.e. real estate in most cases); city suddenly finds it can't pay the debt due to sinking asset prices and a stalling local economy; city cuts back on essential services and cuts pensions and welfare payments; crime sky-rockets as a result but there is not enough money to pay the police so certain areas (usually the poorer ones) become unpoliced; which causes even more crime which in turn further lowers house prices which in turn further makes the gap between asset values and debt wider. People are trapped because they can't sell up and move somewhere else. The tax base falls and another step towards third world status is complete.

What I'm interested to know is what the limiting factors of these negative feedback loops might be. I can imagine vigilante citizens patrolling the streets perhaps, and maybe local food coops and trading arrangements springing up. Whether people are ready for this kind of sudden shift in lifestyles is the 64 million dollar question.

I was going to write about all of these things but this week's blog post is overshadowed by the death of my father in England. Now before anyone thinks that I'm sobbing into my keyboard I'd better point out that my father and I had a somewhat strained relationship and I have barely seen him for the last 18 years. The last seven years he has been slowly degenerating into a second infancy as dementia ate away at his brain, and the last year has been particularly bad for him. It was, as they say, a merciful release.

I'll try not to make this into a pity party but I would just like to say that there won't be many people attending his funeral. In life he seemed to think that people were eggs, because one of his favourite sayings was 'You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.' He broke quite a few eggs during his life and prided himself on being feared by his employees when he was a company director of GEC. He used to stroll around the train factory where he worked summarily firing workers for things such as wearing earrings. He boasted about workers dying from asbestosis and prided himself in never having read a book in his life.

Born in Cheadle in 1932, Jack grew up, as he said, as a dirty-kneed urchin in a solidly working class household. As a teenager it seemed he was destined to be a footballer and played for Manchester City in their junior team. Furthermore he built up his strength lifting scrap metal round the back of the factory he worked in, becoming an anatomist's model in the process. He must have got bored with this because he met my mother, got married at 21 and hopped on next trans-oceanic liner to America. Stepping off onto American soil, the first thing he did was to come down with acute appendicitis. He was rushed to hospital only to be left in the corridor for hours while my mother, only 19 and in a state of frenzy, rushed to find a good Samaritan who would pay a bond for my father to have the operation. If she hadn't found one such man I wouldn't be writing these words.

They spend the next 16 or so years living on and off in Canada. My father, a member of the Communist Party, was finding life in the US too difficult (so he said). Canada took him in and he made the swift conversion from Communism to Capitalism, once he had made enough dough as a property owner there.

Back in England I arrived in 1971 (my sister is ten years older than me and grew up with a Canadian accent) and my father climbed the greasy pole of a manufacturing industry in terminal decline, working his way up as others slid down. As a ruthless cost cutter who was not afraid of making omelettes he had found his niche and was rewarded correspondingly. Thatcherism was on the rise and my father was one of her acolytes. If anything, she was too soft for his liking, and he advocated paying lower taxes and instituting the death penalty for petty offences such as smoking dope. I was packed off to private school and the intention was to turn me into a mini prodigy which, of course, I never became.

The scene was set for one conflict after another and, despite my caving in to his insistence that I study economics at university (I was all set to study classics) he never really saw me as much more than an expensive failure. A few attempts at reconciliation proved fruitless and in the years after my mother died (some 20 years ago) he devoted himself obsessively to researching ways to avoid paying tax; something which, in the end, I think contributed to his decline.

Still, it doesn't do to speak ill of the recently dead, so I'm going to present another side of my father as well because he had sides that not many people realised. He was great nature lover and he took us on walks most weekends around some of the most beautiful parts of the English countryside. If it wasn't for this early exposure to nature, where I was allowed to play to my heart's content, I'm not sure how I would have grown up.

Furthermore, he abhorred waste of any kind. Every scrap of food had to be eaten, no matter how bad it tasted, and he would state again and again that we are spoiled in the west and that people were starving in other countries. He saw military expenditure as morally wrong too, saying that for every minute an F1-11 was in the air it could stop a child dying from malnutrition. Lights left on in the house were punishable with having my pocket money docked (from the 10p it stood at!) and nearly all technology, which in those days meant colour televisions and VCRs was profligacy that would turn your brain to mush.

”People,” he would say to me time and again ”are really quite stupid and will do anything and buy anything you tell them to. The trick in life is to do what you think is right and not be bothered by what others think of you.” I didn't agree with him at the time (I just wished my father would be like everyone else's!) - but I now realise that this was one of the lessons I really took to heart. While all my friends were going on holiday each year to Florida and on cruises, we stayed in a leaky caravan in a field in Cornwall, where it normally rained continuously.

His toughness extended to central heating, which he was almost ideologically opposed to. Every winter he would construct his own storm windows and generally weatherise the house. One room (the lounge) was kept warm, while the rest of the place was as cold as the crypt. Sleeping with a thick jumper on was the norm and it was unusual if you couldn't see your breath indoors between December and March.

Again, this is something I now thank him for. I am able to weather a far greater range of temperatures than most people I know, although it does mean that I suffer in offices when the thermostat is set way too high.

Similarly, my father taught me a lot about tools and gardening. Almost everything was 'home made' in our house, from the car which he had salvaged from a scrap heap and put together one cold winter (with me standing there handing him tools for many a long Saturday when I'd rather be out with my friends), to the beer which he drank rather too much of at weekends and many of the clothes I wore. Some of our food came from the garden too, and every autumn he would take us out into the 'wild' (i.e. on National Trust land) to pick masses of elderberries, which he would make into wine with his own printed labels 'Château Heppenstall'. Unless it was work related he never went in restaurants, flew on planes or bought furniture.

In his later years, hit by the grief of losing my mother at the relatively young age of 58, he softened a lot in his stance on things. With old age he partially gave in to the insistence of everyone who kept saying he should 'enjoy his money' and splashed out on a few of the consumer items that most other people take for granted. He tried to reconcile with me but couldn't help but get caught up again in his emotions, with the result that I stayed away from him whenever possible.

When I analyse the core cause of the conflict between us I think it can be boiled down to our world views. I have an innate sense of what I call optimistic pessimism – all I can remember feeling since I was very young was that we were destroying the world and that by the time I was an adult much of it would have been wrecked. My father, like everyone else of his time who had lived through the Second World War, was the opposite and took the view that scientific progress was marvellous and cost-free. Everything from giant dams, to nuclear power stations and our town's first McDonald's restaurant was 'marvellous' and he claimed his only wish was to be young again so that he could see these fantastic developments take shape. This unacknowledged worship of progress was his true religion and was probably what drove a wedge between us.

In the end he spent the last year of his life at a string of nursing homes and hospitals. He was kicked out of the first one for 'inappropriate behaviour' and ended up under heavy sedation in hospital while doctors experimented on him with different cocktails of drugs. It's a sad way to end up and he died alone, with even the nurses at the nursing home (who only spoke Polish and could not even communicate with him) failing to notice he had died. My sister discovered him in his room on Tuesday evening, having come down with a cough that morning which had quickly overwhelmed his immune system. It occurs to me in writing this that I don't even possess a picture of him.

We are now arranging a funeral. As a devout atheist he had made it clear that he didn't want to be anywhere near a church, even in death. So we are arranging for a burial in a woodland setting, something I think he would have approved of. We're getting a humanist speaker to conduct a ceremony and I'm writing a eulogy, which will probably end up being a more saccharine version of what is above. I realise now deep down that I loved my dad, despite all of the conflict. I hope that when I die my children will possess a picture of me. How does that Neil Young song go … ?

Old man take a look at my life I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes and you can tell that's true.

How Not to Eat a Planet

What does it mean to be an environmentalist these days? That's a a question that's being asked with increasing frequency. It used to be so simple. If you wanted to protect a part of the biosphere that you considered precious but which was under threat all you had to do was write letters of complaint to your MP and the local paper. If that didn't have the desired effect (and usually it didn't) you might make up some placards with a plain message painted onto it (such as Save Bluebell Wood!) and join a group of like-minded people and stand around on the High Street on a Saturday morning. When that tactic failed then more often than not it was time to take direct action and set up camp in the local wood that they were planning to cut down to make way for a new supermarket. This involved some personal risk of injury and you might have to lie down in front of a bulldozer, but at least it attracted attention and the chances of your success increased notably.

A good example of this type of protest, and one that I wrote my dissertation on when I was studying for a master's in environmental philosophy, was Twyford Down. This, for those who have never heard of it, represented a watershed moment in the history of environmental protest in Britain, and even twenty years on it arouses strong feelings. Twyford Down was an area of water meadows on chalklands, rich in biodiversity and full of historical significance with at least two ancient monuments. Unfortunately it also stood in the way of a planned link up with the M3 motorway and the Department of Transport (DoT) was determined right from the outset that no amount of protest would deter it from completing the motorway network in that area.

The process that eventually led to pitched battles as police cleared the way for the heavy earth moving equipment to wreck the fragile ecosystem turned into a textbook example of the limitations of doing things 'by the book'. Most of the people who wanted the project stopped had played by the rules and even the DoT went through all the motions of appearing to be democratic and holding public consultations. When all was said and done, what had previously been officially designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), and Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AOB) and the site of two Sceduled Ancient Monuments – in theory one of the most heavily protected areas of Britain – became just another stretch of tarmac so that goods could get to and from London a little quicker. Yet another piece of the biosphere had been sacrificed on the alter to the gods of progress and nature's rich tapestry suffered another small snip.

Twyford Down: Once a protected natural site but today a stretch of tarmac 

It was a crushing defeat for Britain's environmental movement, but nevertheless it didn't crush their resolve and the whole fiasco meant that ministers would at least think twice about planning something similar again. That can't be said of the Rio+20 Earth Summit that recently took place. At least I think it took place, I couldn't find much mention of it in the news. In fact, if anyone needed a reminder that concerns about the environment have officially been downgraded over concerns about the economy then this was it. You couldn't even call it a damp squib, because at least you expect a squib to go bang when you light the fuse. World leaders stayed away in droves and it was only the professional activists who ended up attending. If there was ever a clear signal that what some people call the global elite don't care about our planet then this was it.

Which gets me onto George Monbiot. Soon after the end of the non-summit he wrote that, not to put too finer point on it, he had given up. The whole political sphere of environmentalism had been coopted by big business interests he concluded, with the end result being an official text that talks not of sutainability but of sustainable growth. What, he asked, is the point any longer if this is the best we can acheive? In his own words:

"Giving up on global agreements or, more accurately, on the prospect that they will substantially alter our relationship with the natural world, is almost a relief. It means walking away from decades of anger and frustration. It means turning away from a place in which we have no agency to one in which we have, at least, a chance of being heard. But it also invokes a great sadness, as it means giving up on so much else."

Now, despite Monbiot's controversial support of nuclear power, I still happen to like him. I like his articulacy and his committment to unfashionable causes and willingness to act as a lightning conductor for the more vicious Telegraph troggers, who call him Mr Moonbat (note: the term trogger is something I just thought up i.e. a contraction of troll and blogger - which is what the poison pens employed by the Telegraph effectively are, and has nothing to do with what the urban dictionary defines it as!). I also like the fact that he's a father of two young kids and the moving piece he wrote to his newly born daughter about the world she will grow up – which resonates with my own experience. I met him once, getting a very short interview in Copenhagen, and he comes across as a slightly eccentric geography teacher at a boys' grammar school. He's endearing in that, up until now, he seriously seemed to believe that the powers that be would listed to his reasoned arguments and act upon them in good faith. He was a reasonable voice in an unreasonable world.

But this endearingness is also what makes him somewhat dangerous. There's nothing that a powerfully funded lobby such as the nuclear industry likes better than to display the scalp of a former enemy and George Monbiot, in claiming that Fukushima has convinced him that nuclear energy is safe, handed over his own scalp on a sliver platter. Those of us who gasped in horror at his announcement reacted at first with disbelief and then anger. His conversion seemed so utterly blinkered and naive that it was all some of us could do to open and close our mouths in disbelief like fish out of water. There are many things about nuclear power that are abhorrent but the one statistic that suffices is that there is, on average, one serious accident for every 3,000 years of reactor use. Thus, with the approximately 11,000 extra reactors that would be needed to phase out coal, we could expect around four Chernobyls or Fukushimas per year and also lack the money or resources needed to deal with these disasters.

And Monbiot isn't the only scalp, of course. In Britain alone we can add James Lovelock, Mark Lynas and former Greenpeace man Stephen Tindale to the pro-nuclear shills. There's nothing pleasant about seeing them on bended knee before Big Nuke, repeating the same press release rhetoric about 'meeting future energy needs without boosting CO2 output.' It's still more unpleasant to realise that these few greying men have come to think of themselves as the official mouthpieces of the environmental movement, and that everything they say is somehow more insightful than anyone else. Their message and tone is increasingly brittle and closed for discussion. Thus I once found myself in an on-line discussion with Mark Lynas that was supposed to be about his new book in which he expouses virtually everything he once opposed, such as a massive roll-out of GM crops across the Third World and a wholesale switch to nuclear energy. During the open discussion I raised some of the issues I have learned in the past few years from peak oil and Lynas had an iHissyfit, saying my reality-based reasoning in which I mentioned Liebig's Law of limiting factors was 'evil'.

So it's actually refreshing to see Monbiot's breakdown of faith in the sytem. He's a bit behind the curve but it's pleasant to see that finally he's 'getting it'. After all, in his own words he says:

"I do not believe that the planet-eating machine, maintained by an army of mechanics, oiled by constant injections of public money, will collapse before the living systems on which it feeds. But I might be wrong."

Bingo!

Yes, that's where I store what's left of my hope. For all the doom and apocalypic predictions surrounding the peak oil scene, the rather substantial silver lining is that the 'planet eating machine' is running out of power before our very eyes. Nearly every mainstream environmental organisation, from Greenpeace to WWF, trots out the same old figures about CO2 emissions rising into the distant future, taking no account of catabolic collapse due to declining net energy. Relatively soon, it will no longer be possible to ravage the world on such an industrial scale. George Monbiot, and his ilk, want to replace the oil powered planet eating machine with a nuclear powered planet eating machine. It's hardly environmentalism, is it?

But not all environmentalists have gone over to the dark side. Paul Kingsnorth, for example, whose articles I used to read in The Ecologist, 'gave up' years ago and started the Dark Mountain Project. The Dark Mountain Project is a kind of half-way house for recovering environmentalists. It's for those who have confronted their despair but refuse to give in to it, instead turning it into something more useful. Paul Kingsnorth says why he walked away from conventional hope-based environmentalism:

"It was the despair of an environmentalist who could see that environmentalism was failing and who had to work out how to deal with that. It was the despair of someone who felt he had no-one to talk to about his despair because, though many other people were feeling it too – oh, you could see it in their eyes however hard they tried to conceal it – it was never talked about. Activists do not talk about despair. No-one talks about despair. Despair, in a progressive society, is taboo. We do not want despair. We want hope. Hope, all the time. Hope, like a drug. Do not look down – look away."

And it seems to me that being a modern day environmental activist is all about cheating despair. Sign up for any newsletter from groups such as 350.org and you'll likely be bombarded with chirpy upbeat messages about how well their campaign is going. All we have to do is click away and someone somewhere will deliver a petition to someone important who will in all probably ignore it. It's an efficient system for limiting the effectiveness of protest and at the same time making the would-be protesters feel as if they are doing something useful. I even saw one group recently saying that if every protester were 'armed' with a quad-core laptop and linked in to Twitter, Facebook and various other networks they could out-process the evil global elite and effect a revolution that would usher in a new age of global peace based on an equitable distribution of ... yadder yadder yadder. You get the point.

But maybe it's time to confront the depair, work through it and get on with something useful? I'm not saying that there is no point in protesting on a global level or being a clicktivist – just that we should realise that by doing so we are getting involved with ritualism and our 'actions' may never be more than symbolic. As such, in an age dominated by the dark forces of progress-at-all-costs, placing too much faith in the effectiveness of altering consciousness with symbolic gestures can end in obessive denial and even psychosis.

For his own part I read that George Monbiot had moved to a remotish part of Wales to raise his kids, catches his own fish every morning from a kayak and is now focusing his efforts on projects that restore the wild in areas degraded by man's destructive habits. All that's needed now is a strongly worded renunciation of nuclear power and I suspect that 99% of UK environmentalists would forgive him.

By fighting to protect places and species instead of focusing obsessively on the impossible task of getting nations to reduce their CO2 emissions we can throw a lifeline to our planet. Or at least to bits of it. Have a look for example at Miranda Gibson, who is currently living up a tree in Tasmania and trying to stop logging concerns from trashing the forests. She's as good an example as there is of someone willing to forego personal comfort and safety to protect something of immeasurable beauty and natural worth.

Some people just shrug and say 'what's the point?'. This is both a defeatist and nihilist attitude. None of us should think that their individual efforts will 'Save the Planet' (or some other nonsense) but neither should we think they have no effect at all. We just have to accept that there will be consequences of our individual actions, some of which are noticeable and most of which are not. The actions we take today set the scene for what happens in the future.

To me at least, that's something worth fighting for.