Let's replace all the teachers with iPads (and other great ideas)

A futuristic lesson once all the teachers and other impediments to a Brave New World have been done away with 

There's been quite a bit of talk on the peak oil blogosphere this week about machines and, more specifically, our addiction to them. Cars and TV have come in for quite a well deserved bashing, as have various other things such as gadgets and computers.

I think there's a growing awareness that the traditional master-slave relationship between human owner and machine is not quite what it seems. Take modern cars, for instance. Your average middle to top range new car comes packed with so much technological gadgetry – from GPS locators to onboard entertainment systems and engine management computers – that fixing it, should a problem arise, is beyond the ken of practically everyone. If a single element of a circuit board in the engine management module is damaged the entire vehicle is rendered useless until either the circuit board is repaired (unlikely) or the entire module is ripped out and replaced with a new one (the normal solution). This is not what you might call resilient, to say the least, and yet people, for all their grumbling, continue to buy these things.

It's all a far cry from the kind of good old clunky mechanics of yesteryear – and here I'm particularly thinking about a VW Kombi van I owned in my mid twenties. It was lime green and made a monstrous racket when you drove it. I rescued it from a scrap yard in London and did my best to restore it to functionality. Things quite often went wrong with it but when they did it normally required not much more than a Haynes manual, a set of wrenches and a hammer. I'm no mechanic, but I'd just read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, so was quite into fixing mechanical things as a way of expanding my knowledge of the universe (yes, I know ...).

Indeed, taking this one step further, I recall fondly travelling on buses in India, which seemed to break down on every journey, and the resigned-looking driver would inevitably climb underneath the vehicle with a hammer while the passengers stood around drinking chai and smoking bidis. After a few minutes of frightful whacking noises the driver, covered in oil and dust, would re-emerge and whatever mechanical ailment had occurred would inevitably have been cured.

You try fixing an iPad with a hammer. I mention iPads because I have a colleague with one and, like most people with these things, he seems to be constantly trying to justify owning it. Furthermore, as an Apple evangelist, he is always trying to get me to 'see the light' and buy one ('But wait until the iPad 3 comes out.'). Needless to say he may as well save his breath – I can't afford one even if I wanted one – but he thought he had delivered the killer justification last week when he demonstrated an electronic textbook he had downloaded, proclaiming it as a vision of the new future where students wouldn't need to buy books and, by extension, wouldn't have much need for lecturers or teachers either.

It goes without saying that this demonstration ticked all the techno religion boxes of being 'interactive', 'open source' and 'social media friendly' etc, etc. Instead of students needing to purchase piles of books all they had to have was a tablet and a subscription – and think of all the trees that would be saved!

Yes, but... What about the immense energy intensive infrastructure needed to create an iPad? The colossal government expenditures in the form of grants, university departments and Phd stipends needed to train and keep the highly specialised service personnel who work in these industries? The constantly changing models that render any piece of hardware older than a couple of years obsolete? Is that really such a great use of resources? I speak as someone who once wasted nine months of his life learning to program industrial robots as part of an Msc. in IT.

But these are the kind of questions that are not taken seriously and I just got 'that' look – the one that people use when assessing whether I might be crazy or not. I'm getting quite used to 'that' look and tend to avoid conversations with techno evangelists for that very reason – but in this instance I was cornered and other people in the office were listening in.

He went on to say that, being constantly connected to the publishing firm, the content could be updated ad infinitum – so if an error was noticed it could be silently corrected by the editors. This set alarm bells ringing in my journalistic ears. What if someone wanted to change things for less than honest reasons? Like a government changing lessons on history or evolution or whatever else might be deemed controversial. Or perhaps publishing firms would start slipping adverts for Disneyland into geography lessons.That won't be a problem, he said with a wave of his hand, there will be editing logs which independent people would scrutinise (more expense, more complexity).

I conceded that this might be a good idea for the kind of highly complex and constantly changing subject matter in the realm of things like computer sciences and engineering – but for more subjective subjects it would be a disaster.

And what of the teachers? You know, the flesh and blood beings with whom we entrust the important act of passing down useful information to our offspring? It's not hard to envisage cash-strapped schools and colleges cutting staff numbers and increasing iPad numbers. What would these redundant teachers then do?

Oh, I know, they could become freelance online eBook editors and get paid half the wages they had before and with the added benefit of no job security or pensions. Another great way to save resources.

But whatever concerns there may be about replacing paper books and teaching jobs with silicon books and Steve Jobs it doesn't seem to be stopping schools rushing headlong into this brave new world, with many across the UK adopting a strategy of buying iPads instead of books and subscribing to eBooks instead of, er, pBooks.

So there again, we have something with a high level of resilience being replaced unthinkingly by something with a low level – at an increased cost – all because the dominant evil twin paradigms are high technology and increased efficiency. Ebook developers point out that with children's lower attention span they are unable to concentrate on long texts and need to have whizzy graphics to demonstrate, say, rainfall patterns and DNA structures. If that is true then eBooks will reinforce that trend and pretty soon we will have teachers Tweeting lessons to pupils who will then read them on their hand held devices as they chow down in McDonald's (if you have eBooks and eTeachers surely the next logical thing is the eClassroom). And, incidentally, the children these people are talking about are American children who have had their concentration levels zapped by exposure to too many cartoons and advertising – why should they be the exemplars for a system being imposed on our not-quite-so-short-attention-spanned kids?

So, I won't be buying my kids laptops, iPhones or iPads any time soon. Our eldest, at eight, is now the only child without a mobile phone in her class and the teachers have told us in no uncertain terms that we had better get her one sharpish if we don't want her to be bullied. I find this incredulous (gawd, don't get me started!).

As far as I am aware there was never any trustworthy conclusive proof that mobile phones didn't cause brain tumours – or that scientists couldn't pin firm proof on it, or something (but nevertheless the ones involved in the study stopped using mobiles soon afterwards). And isn't there a wave of cyber bullying going on with kids texting and FBing each other hateful messages causing some of them to commit suicide? And yet here are the teachers saying that we are being irresponsible parents by trying to protect them from such insidious influences.

Jeez – maybe they should be replaced with iPads after all.

Well, I was going to write about my new bicycle – truly the only machine that I'm addicted to - but I guess that will have to wait for another day as it's snowing outside right now and I want to go and slide down a nearby hill with the kids on a piece of plastic (a low tech way to spend a Sunday morning).

Interlude in Andalucia

The cortijo is perched on a hill overlooking the broad valley of La Alpujarra

Last weekend we got back from a nine day visit to our small farm house in Spain. It was a relief to swap the cold grey skies of Copenhagen and replace them with the bright sunny ones of Andalucia, and a welcome tonic to see the almond blossom coming out again, even if it is two months ahead of normal.

Returning to our house always arouses mixed emotions. Like the deck of the Mary Celeste, the house always appears to have been abandoned in haste, with projects left unfinished and half read books on the shelves. In fact it is coming up to four years since we left – at the time I had been offered a job that started the following week and had had to pack whatever I could into our small car and drive non-stop 3000km to Copenhagen. We were only supposed to have been gone for a year to earn some cash...

But the good news this time was that Jose, our resident Mexican house-sitter, has been busily working with our neighbour Antonio to bring the land back under control. It being a hillside farm, with several terraces, there is always the danger of banks collapsing during the rainy season (i.e. winter) from the weight of the olive and almond trees, many of which grow out of the banks between terraces at 45 degree angles. In the past couple of years we have seen two trees come crashing down, bringing a few tons of earth with them. One of our neighbours, a hard-as-nails old Danish woman who lives alone raising horses, had an even worse experience when her entire house was destroyed in a landslip a few years ago. This being Spain, of course, everyone chipped in and helped her rebuild it free of charge.

Being a northern European and a preppy wannabe permaculturist, I have resisted ploughing the land. I thought that doing so would break up the structure, kill the life within it and generally render it less capable of supporting biotic matter. Antonio thought I was nuts. 'Hombre,' he said 'your land is like concrete. Every time it rains it just runs off and floods my land. You need to rotavate the lot.'

And so I agreed. I'm still unsure if it was the right thing to do but at least it looks a lot better. Some friends of mine, who used to live nearby, had been conducting a study into managing the soil in the Alpujarras. The region is threatened with desertification and they turned their farm Semilla Besada into a research station. When I ran my newspaper in the area they were the first people I ever interviewed. David and Aspen had studied the land management theories of Allan Savory, and had concluded that one of the best methods of restoring the severely degraded land of southern Spain was to reintroduce ruminant animals, whose droppings acted as fertilisers. Encouraging drought resistant grass species, some of which have roots going down meters, holds the topsoil in place and the animals prevent a buildup of dry dead material, which is a fire risk in the area. The experiment was producing great results and looking down on their hillside farm from above was like looking down onto a green oasis in the yellow and brown hillside. Tragically, Aspen died of cancer a couple of years ago and David sold the place to some younger people who are still carrying on with the experiments.

So anyhow, I was back to do a bit of work on the land. One thing I wanted to do was plant trees. There are already a couple of hundred trees on the one acre or so of land, and I had thought of getting rid of a few orange trees, which are very thirsty, and planting some others. On my shopping list were a pair of avocado trees, two walnuts, some pears and apples, a cherry tree or two, as well as a quince and another peach, and two chestnut trees. All of those grow extremely well on our hill, Cerro Negro. Indeed, just about everything seems to grow there and Antonio even has some banana trees, alongside his walnuts, in his front garden.

Unfortunately though it hadn't rained for months and, as Antonio pointed out, the ground was like dry and rock hard. If recent weather patterns were anything to go by though, February and March were likely to be very wet, and would be the best time for putting in new trees. He insisted I hand over my shopping list to him and said he'd put the trees in for me before our next visit.

I should probably say a bit more about our neighbour Antonio. He was born and bred on Cerro Negro and even managed to find a wife, Paquita, on it – quite an achievement given that there are only twenty or so families in farms strung out across the hillside to choose from. They'd got married some time in the 1980s and built a house on an inherited piece of land next to the house that would one day be bought by us. The house, Antonio always says proudly, was built in three hard weeks, with every single male relative pitching in. He paid only for the materials, which means next to nothing in Spain, and then settled down into the life of an olive farmer, raising two daughters in the process.

In the late 1990s disaster struck. House prices rocketed in Spain and practically every single family on the hillside sold up to foreigners and moved into town, abandoning the land. Antonio couldn't stand the thought of living in a town and carried on living a life that most of us would view as extreme poverty. A small solar panel powers the single lightbulb in his TV-less house and practically all the food for the family was grown on his own land. Paquita has a cleaning job in Orgiva and together with the miserly sum he earns from selling olives (around 1,000 euros a year for the past several, for, as he puts it, three months of backbreaking work – or around 1.5 euros an hour) they manage to purchase a few of the things that make life more pleasant. He has a good flock of chickens to provide meat and eggs, several milking goats and a few million bees – all of which he can do great impersonations of. Occasionally he'll shoot a wild boar on his land and cure the meat for the tapas he likes to nibble while sipping a glass of (home made, of course) wine as he sets his white doves free every evening and watches the sun go down over the valley – something he's done every evening for decades.

The almond blossom was coming out and was being busily attended to by the bees

He's a friendly and amenable neighbour who speaks not a single word of English but nevertheless listens patiently to me as I mangle up Spanish. He's never been anywhere and doesn't plan to either - as far as he's concerned life outside the hillside may as well be on another planet.

And yet, Antionio, for all his financial hardships, seems far better off that a lot of my foreign friends who still live in nearby Orgiva and seems now to be existing by scratching around for odd job in the way that Antonio's chickens look for insects beneath the olive trees. The first great shakeout occurred in 2007 – 2008, when the housing market froze solid and then leaped off a cliff. In those heady days there were about 10 estate agents in Orgiva (now only two remain). It was easy enough to see how this would affect those foreigners who made their living from buying and selling houses, but what most people hadn't realised was really how much it would affect almost every other foreigner.

Before the great housing bubble which, at its most inflated was seeing 1-2 million uneccessary houses and apartments being built around the country's coasts, the only type of people who moved to Spain were retirees who could rely on a nice monthly pay cheque in the form of a pension. By the 1990's, however, Spain's housing bubble was dwarfed by the bubbles in northern Europe and, egged on by the earnest propaganda of property programmes on TV and lubricated by the sudden availability of cheap flights, millions reasoned that they could swap their humdrum lives in Birmingham or Glasgow for a sun-soaked one where everything from property and beer was dirt cheap. It was a heady time of optimism and I'd be a hypocrite if I claimed not to have joined in the stampede – even if my dream was to build up an organic small holding and protect my kids from the crass excesses of materialism that seemed not to have taken very deep roots in proud, tradition-rich Andalucia.

When the bubble popped practically everyone either found themselves without a job or economically inconvenienced to some extent. Businesses went broke or hit the skids – including my newspaper when advertisers suddenly stopped coughing up money - and it hit some harder than others, with people losing their life savings almost overnight. Many people ended up stranded, with literally nowhere to go and no funds to get back home. It suddenly became abundantly clear that the foreign economy – which was often loudly proclaimed to be 'propping up' the Spanish economy - was in actual fact just a tiny bubble within a bubble, equivalent in money terms to a mid sized English town.

Most middle class types with capital were able to make a sharpish exit, possessing the means to offload their Spanish houses before the crash really hit. Plenty more though – especially in La Alpujarra – were in it for the long term and had no plans to go back to where they had come from. My friends are among these and it was interesting to see how they were faring because they have basically learned how to be poor and still, in most cases, make the best of it.

Not many of them possess cars any longer, or if they do, they are not driven very much (one friend has bought a donkey which, as he optimistically points out, means he can now drink and drive without fear of crashing or being arrested). The Guardia Civil, also hit by money concerns, long ago learned that the quickest way to raise money is to target foreigners who don't know how to defend themselves. The region's multitude of hippies still manage to drive their battered trucks and camper vans without fear of harassment because the Guardia know they are stony broke, and also find it disagreeable to house them in the cells at their HQ in town.

And so people are driving less, meaning that the nearest supermarket, some distance away on the coast is off limits. In any case, people are learning to avoid supermarkets because of the temptation factor and now plan out their meals a week at time and shop at the local market which comes round every Thursday. Going too are the mobile phones. First the monthly contract turns into a pay-as-you-go one. Then everyone finds themselves with no credit to return calls or texts. When the battery finally dies, it seems, some people are not bothering to replace them. The local internet café is doing a roaring trade with its Skype booths, where you can make a cheap call to anywhere you want.

People, of course, complain and gripe about their situation. The biggest problem, it would seem, is that everyone seems to have some money-earning plan or other, but nobody can get anything off the ground because of the paralysing effect of having no access to funds. People are frozen like statues in a party game where the music stopped and nobody has turned it on again. Some of them are worried, very worried – especially those with young families who relied on the sole breadwinner, usually a builder, to bring in funds. No house sales and no credit means few building jobs in an area saturated with builders. What few jobs come up are fought over like scraps tossed to dogs and some builders will even take them on for next to nothing in the hope of more work being offered by the same customer in the future. The rosy new life most imagined it certainly isn't, and many people have effectively burned their bridges in moving down to Spain.

One puzzling aspect of this whole 'crisis' though is how invisible it is. Orgiva has never been cleaner and new shops have sprung up wherever you look. New roads have gone in and a swimming pool and football pitch have been built. The place, on appearance only, seems to be thriving. Crisis, what crisis? Even the legions of unemployed young people we are told about every day on the news would seem to be something out of an economist's bad dream. Spain, and other southern European countries, has a very efficient system for dealing with unemployment: it's called family. Indeed Antonio's daughter Rocio is one of those unemployed twenty-somethings. She's just finished a degree in pedagogy at Granada University and so far, hasn't been able to find a job.

Instead she's back at home, helping to raise her baby nephew and earning her keep harvesting olives, making soap with her mother and lazing around by their irrigation pond (read swimming pool) reading books. She doesn't seem to be all that distraught by the prospect of long term unemployment and just shrugged and said 'we'll see' when I asked her if she expected to find a job.

My neighbour Antonio showing his baby goats to my daughters

And so, after a week of being there, pruning the pomegranate trees and digging out rocks from the driveway, it was time to return to the alternative reality of Denmark where people go on shopping trips to New York for the weekend and imagine that Spain is a giant gold course with cheap sangria.

I can feel the sirens calling again for us to stay and take over the farm again. A man did come and view it while we were there and I could be forgiven if I seemed unenthusiastic to sell it. I have to be realistic however. If it sells it sells and we move on with the next stage of our lives, but if it doesn't, well, let's just say there are worse things than joining Antonio of an evening to watch his doves wheel and circle in the valley below while we discuss irrigation systems and the pros and cons of soil rotavation as the fiery Spanish sun sets over the distant mountains.

For real?

Just watched the evening news here in Denmark and they were reporting on the latest in the US Republican presidential candidacy race in Iowa, the big story being that someone called Rick Santorum is the front runner. DR (the Danish public broadcaster) had even sent a man with a microphone there who poked it in Mr Santorum's face as he finished a talking event, managing to ask him what he would do if he were president.

The slightly annoyed looking politician sputtered "I would make America great again, free enterprise and free markets, and restore Christian values."

In the following to-camera segment there followed the kind of Danish exchange only discernible to those who have lived here long enough to recognise it - that is, a kind of Victor Borge ironically raised eyebrow - as the reporter explained Mr Santorum's platform to the anchor. "Ban gay marriage. Block all abortion. Restore Christian values," and finally "Rick Santorum doesn't believe in global warming."

I half expected the two men to break out into loud guwaffs - as if they were talking about not believing the tooth fairy or Father Christmas. Luckily they cut away to an audience member just in time, a women, who said: "I'd vote for him because, y'know, marriage is between a man and a women, like it says in the Bible."

It's good to see those Republicans are debating the important issues of the day!

Interestingly enough, the following item was about the storm (real, not political) which is currently battering Denmark. Dozens of summer houses - i.e. wooden houses that Danes own but are not allowed to live in other than for holidays - are, as I type, at threat of being washed into the North Sea by surging tides and violent winds. Some have already succumbed and will be driftwood in the morning. "When I bought a house on the beach, I never expected this," explained one owner as he stood next to the wreckage.

Quite.

Finally, the last thing to report from this little corner of Europe is that money has apparently been pouring into the country over the last few days as scared investors look for a safe haven. The Danish treasury is not particularly in need of the cash (compared to others) and has started selling bonds with zero yields i.e. investors will just be happy to see their money back again.

They have been flooded with offers.

On the cusp of a New Year

Will we be sucking our Spanish lemons in 2012?

Well, I'm sat here at the kitchen table with a cold beer in front of me, Wagner playing faintly on the stereo and a chicken roasting in the oven. The rest of the family are in the lounge watching something unspeakable on the telly and, outside, darkness has fallen and the impatient are already letting off their fireworks.

So that was 2011 - I wonder what 2012 will bring. There are many worrying signs that a lot of the things most people take for granted will evaporate in a puff of pixie dust in the next few months and we all have our own pet worries about what will happen. My personal worry demon is that a euro (currency) crash will freeze up the banks and I won't be able to sell our house in Spain. If that happens it might mean that we need to move back into it - which would be no bad thing as it's a fantastically sited smallholding in a beautiful valley. But we're not finished paying off debts yet and, in my view, Spain isn't the most stable place to be when things go pear-shaped. To do so would mean that we may still be at the mercy of the increasingly merciless Spanish banks.

No, ideally we'd like to sell up and move on, 'investing' in some woodland and a another ramshackle ruin to do up in a place that's more aligned with our own culture i.e. England.

But a worse scenario would be that we do sell the house just before a bout of hyperinflation or a currency crash and end up holding a few peanuts rather than a piece of land with a house on it. One thing's for sure, Denmark isn't as immune to economic problems as it likes to think it is. With a new socialist government now in control of the country with the largest public sector (as a share of the economy) in the world it will certainly be worth keeping an eye on the next bond auction to see if the markets decide to inflict some punishment. Watch this space.

Nevertheless, I'm thankful that we have it as a bolt hole down in Spain in case things do turn nasty. We have a good network of friends and neighbours down there and people have been practising living on next to nothing for the past few years. At present our house is cared for by José, a Mexican immigrant, who is the ideal house sitter.

What's more, I'm more than grateful that we own a property somewhere and have a bit of land attached. To many, if not most, these kind of things are now beyond their reach. If only the UK property bubble would finally pop and planning restrictions would be relaxed to allow people who want to work the land the chance to actually live on it that would be a great step towards securing some tentative measure of self-sufficiency in that overcrowded island.

I will not, of course, be entertaining any fantasies of Mayan prophesies or any such thing in the coming year. Not that many people over here in Europe pay heed to such things, but the slight worry is that people who do believe the world will end in December next year will have a hard time adjusting to the fact that it hasn't - and if they are armed and dangerous then so much the worse. It will be 'interesting' to see how that one pans out.

This being New Year I do have a few resolutions to make. I'm not about to share all of them but the main gist is that I'll be giving up a couple of things that frankly I should have given up quite a while ago. The chicken that is in the oven is a farewell parting to a regular meat diet, and there will certainly be far fewer cold beers in front of me during the coming year as well. Another resolution is to publish the book I've been writing for two years - yes, publish.

It's about my time living in Spain, running an enviro newspaper and trying to live sustainably. I found a publisher (no easy task these days) but the more down the line we got the more they wanted me to make it more light-hearted and remove any mention of peak oil or any other 'conspiracy theories'. Well, the book is light-hearted enough but I've decided not to grace the publisher and will explore other options, including self-publishing. It's been more or less finished for about 9 months, living on a flash memory stick that is an advert for Hamburg Airport (complete with a plastic airplane in a liquid bubble). It's high time it came off the memory stick and into the real world.

My final resolution is to live more by the precepts that I've always felt drawn to - and that means being a bit more formally spiritual. As a first step I'm starting Tai Chi classes in January and want to get going with a daily meditation session. Aside from that I've been reading John Michael Greer's Druid Handbook, as well as downloading course material from a British druid order. I'm not sure it's for me - I come from a solidly atheist background - but my mother was a spiritualist and I'm pretty sure I've inherited her genes. I'll give it a try and see if it feels right.

Anyway, the chicken is starting to look crispy and the beer bottle is now empty so I'll bid any readers I have a Happy 2012 and hope that you have a peaceful New Year.

The Rock and the Spike

Agpalilik - it came from outer space ...

Last summer I came across quite a remarkable find. It happened on a day out in Copenhagen when I was taking my youngest daughter to the National Gallery to see what she would make of the paintings there. Not far from the gallery we happened to be walking down a busy street past the entrance to some grand old red brick building when something in its courtyard caught my eye. There was a large skip stacked up with abandoned office furniture and black bin bags, but it was something next to the skip that caught my eye. For, sitting there on some steel beams was what appeared to be a large red-brown meteorite.

There was nothing to stop us from going to have a closer look, so we did. Sure enough, it was a meteorite, and what's more it was heavily pockmarked and appeared to be made of iron.

A door swung open and a lady wearing a white lab coat came out into the courtyard. Having spotted us from inside the building (I now realised we were at the Geological Museum) she had been eager to tell us more about this large lump of iron sitting unceremoniously in the courtyard. The meteorite, it turned out, was part of the Cape York Meteorite, which smashed into the Earth some 1,000 years ago in Greenland. Named Agpalilik – aka 'the man' – the meteor weighs about 15 tonnes and had a section cut away, revealing the core.

It looked a bit sad and abandoned in the yard next to the skip but when it had been discovered it had caused great excitement. Inuit legend told of the arrival of this celestial gift and it took European explorers a number of years to locate the smashed fragments, the largest of which weighed 31 tonnes and required the construction of its own railroad to transport it to the coast and away to the United States. The fact that they had been pilfered must have caused the Inuit some distress because, historically speaking, these unassuming lumps of solid iron had a profound effect on the development of the local Greenlandic population.

It was the American explorer John Ross who stumbled upon the meteor, having discovered to his amazement that local Greenlanders had iron tips on their hunting weapons despite there being no mineral deposits in the area. At first the locals refused to show him the location of their stash of iron – a veritable gift from the gods that had allowed them to utilise iron age technology in a harsh environment. Eventually though Ross was able to bribe a guide by offering him a gun and was led to the impact zone. Three of the fragments were then shipped off to New York, where they remain, and it wasn't until the 1960s that 'the Man' was discovered and carted off to Copenhagen. By this point in time the Greenlanders had access to all sorts of modern conveniences and were less defensive of the meteor which had once brought them so much good fortune.

After we left I had time to reflect on our accidental discovery. The meteor, for the Greenlanders, had been not unlike our discovery of oil and other fossil fuels a couple of centuries ago. Both were gifts from out of time and space that had landed in our laps more or less randomly and radically changed the way we did business. In the case of crude oil, once we had learned a few good uses for it, nothing would ever be the same again. In that sense we are, as a species, opportunists, or less politely, scavengers. A Martian, viewing our activities over a long period of time, might reasonably conclude that as a species our job is simply to burrow into the planet's crust, bring various minerals to the surface that we find 'useful' and process them into forms that are at odds with the finely crafted balance of the biosphere i.e. 'pollution'.

And thinking in the long term is very useful when it comes to comprehending peak oil. Reading the various online arguments raging about whether we have reached peak extraction of this or that energy resource is a bit like not being able to see the wood for the trees. The point is not whether we have reached it in in 2006, or 2010 or even 2025 – it's that we are currently bumping along the plateau of a very tall and steep-sided mountain that, when viewed from a distance is a mere blip in human history.

Consider the diagram of the energy spike. We are, at present, right at the top of it. Most of us can't imagine that simple truth – we have been climbing to that summit since our grandfathers' grandfathers were babies. It takes no more than a couple of generations, three at the outside, for something to become normalised into human consciousness. In this case what we have come to believe is unassailable it is the idea that the planet we live on will continue to provide us with virtually limitless energy to power the lifestyles we feel we have become entitled to.

Our energy plateau. Image courtesy of Transition Towns

How do we safely get down from that spike? Alas, there are no easy options but one of the worst thing we can do is to go on believing that the energy mountain will keep getting higher and higher. Already our global energy system is showing signs of breakdown. The mega fields, such as those in Saudi Arabia, show no sign of being able to meet rising demand and the price of a barrel of oil is still hovering at around 100 dollars. Enthusiasts of shale gas come up with wild figures for its supposed productivity, although most operators report that the finds go flat after a year of operation (champagne bottles don't fizz for long) and in any case the other energy inputs and water requirements make the extraction difficult, expensive and environmentally destructive.

Those of us who are expecting some kind of collapse need look no further than the news headlines. As John Michael Greer posited in this week's Archdruid Report – this is what collapse looks like. It's going to be a long and rocky road down from that spike, and we'll find ourselves lurching from one crisis to the next, punctuated by periods of stability and calm, and we should ask ourselves how exactly are we going to prepare for it?

After all, it is one thing theorising and conducting online debates about catabolic collapse, but quite another to actually do something useful about it. My own steps have been modest but at least I hope they are a step in the right direction. We have started making and selling our own soap as a means of making some money from a product that people will still find useful for years to come (we can hope). I have also amassed a collection of practical books on everything from house building to home wine making that I spend evenings reading. My wife, luckily, already has a set of useful skills in that she is a qualified upholsterer and seamstress. She can take old unwanted furniture and restore it – and she is good at knitting.

Of course, these are first steps. We are looking at buying a piece of woodland and learning charcoal making skills. Woodland at present is very cheap on account of it being there 'only' for recreational purposes. I'm learning all about coppicing and other woodland crafts and, thankfully, several years as a conservation volunteer in my 20s means that these things are not alien to me and I can swing a bill-hook with confidence.

But there's a lot to do and learn and intuitions says that time is getting somewhat short. I'd be interested to hear from anyone else about what steps they are taking.

King Cnut and the Rising Tide

Storm surges have left parts of Denmark under water this week

I know it no longer gets as much media attention as it used to but global warming has been back in the news again lately with the COP17 meeting in Durban. Of course, you could be forgiven for not noticing it as it hasn't received as much press coverage partly because of lowered expectations that anything can be achieved by world leaders but also because the anti global warming talking heads have convinced enough people that it's a non-issue cooked up by greedy scientists and megalomaniac one world order socialists.

So it's all the more ironic that almost two years to the day after the Copenhagen talks ended Mother Nature has served a reminder of just who runs the show. A few days ago a powerful storm swept down from the North Atlantic, passing over Denmark as it continued south. The resultant storm surge saw sea levels rise quite dramatically around the coastlines and a number of areas were flooded, including Copenhagen's picturesque Nyhavn tourist area. Not since King Cnut has anybody seen anything quite like it before and, strangely, even though the storm was over several days ago sea levels remain high. I took the picture at the top of this post on a walk to my nearby beach this morning and you can see the rocks that act as sea defences are still, well, defenceless (and yes, that's an oil fired power station and incineration plant in the background).

Rising sea levels are of particular concern here because it is a pretty flat low country. Where I live is one metre above sea level, so even if the more modest predictions come true then where I am currently typing this blog will be part of the Baltic Sea before too long. Of course, readers of the Spectator would rubbish this claim, if they'd taken any notice of this week's cover story which claimed sea rises are, yes, a scam.

And there lies the dark irony because it was at the COP15 talks here two years ago that the world learned that political leaders are particularly useless when it comes to acting for the common good of securing (and acting upon) a deal to phase out hydrocarbons. A powerful binary has been created that says we can either save the planet or save the economy. Of course, even my six-year-old daughter could point out that the economy is part of the planet and not the other way around, but politicians and business leaders insist that this isn't so and we need to 'fix the economy' before we can 'fix the environment'. We are told this relentlessly. Just in the last week, by way of example, we have had in the news:

• UK chancellor George Osborne telling us that protecting the environment places a 'ridiculous' cost on businesses.
• A plan to apply a small tax on airplane departures will apparently damage the economy.
• US Republican hopeful Newt Gingrich mocking President Obama for delaying the Canada to Texas oil pipeline, implying he was a flake for heeding environmental concerns above economic ones.

So, if you believe all this, we can either have an economy with jobs or we can have a habitable planet. Relatively few question the assumption that we can have a third option - an economy without growth that could provide for us reasonably well without distorting the biosphere. But that's not up for discussion at present because all politicians can talk about is this magic thing called 'growth'.

We all know what growth is, of course, but most people don't realise that it has only been the aim of economic policy-makers since the end of the last world war. Before then we were quite happily going along without any explicit attempt to fuel it. But with the de-hitching of the money supply from anything of value (e.g. gold) and letting financiers write their own rules, we've seen an explosion of fractional reserve banking and consumers being led by the nose into unsustainable high-debt lifestyles. Why has this happened?

Italian Peak Oil writer Ugo Bardi has a pretty good answer. In his recent essay 'Why is Economic Growth so Popular?' he points out that with a ready abundance of cheap energy at hand the path of least resistance is always to exploit non-renewable resources in the short term at the expense of the long term. If the economy hits a sticky patch on its upward trajectory the political pressure is there to offer stimulus packages to the most exploitative and short-termist industrialists in order to get the ball rolling again, whatever environmental damage it causes.

And that's part of the reason any top-down conferences on what to do about the predicament of global warming will always end in failure. National governments, who for the most part are elected by individual voters, can only ever retain their power by maintaining their unholy pact with the voters, who by and large demand a higher standard of living. I can't personally think of any election won on the promise of 'less jobs and a lower income for all!'

I was there at the COP15 two years ago and witnessed the wheels coming off first hand. I had convinced the publisher of the newspaper where I worked that we should print a daily newspaper covering the conference. He refused at first, but when it got closer and he became aware of what a big deal it was he smelled money in the air and agreed to let me go ahead with it – provided I was 'neutral' in my editorial tone (of course I wasn't, but his English skills were not too hot and so …). We were just a small newspaper normally, run from an office in an ex-slaughterhouse in the red light district area of the city. Our audience was normally comprised of disgruntled expats, multinational employees on hardship postings out in the wilds of Jutland and the pampered diplomatic classes, whose functions we were expected to attend and photograph. All in all it was not dissimilar to the fictional Rome newspaper in Tom Rachman's excellent book The Imperfectionists. So it was quite a change to suddenly find ourselves at the centre of the then biggest media event on the planet.

It was a surreal couple of weeks. The city suddenly became more multicultural than it had ever been, with huge numbers of protesters from all over the world, including in their numbers plenty of indigenous folks from far mountain kingdoms and perpetually shivering tropical islanders in their thin polyester suits. Our normally placid office became a round the clock hive of activity with swarms of journalists and distributors traipsing in and out. We worked feverishly, sending the final proofs to the printers close to midnight and picking up 20,000 copies way before dawn broke so that the army of distributors on bikes could get them out to every corner of the city.

We interviewed everyone from Nobel Laureates and landless Amazonians to film makers and film stars (yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger was there, advising us that the only way out of the impasse was to give more power to big business). I got to meet and talk to some of my then environmental heroes, such as Bill McKibben and a pre-nuclear George Monbiot, and I'll never forget the phone call from the Israeli Embassy saying that Shimon Peres wanted to talk to us about his new electric car scheme. One day, introducing myself to a tired-looking man hunched over a laptop at the next desk whom I assumed to be a streetwalker feeding off our WiFi connection, I found out I was talking to the editor of Politico. “Are you always this busy?” he asked.

But all this is not just to walk down memory lane and air a few choice anecdotes. I remember the distinct mounting excitement among invited delegates that Obama was going to fly in at the end and strike a historic deal that would save us all from damnation. I wasn't so sure. The news leaking out of the conference centre was not good and the over zealous Danish police had spent two weeks cracking down hard on peaceful protesters, leading to a frustrated feeling of betrayal in the air. The night before the end of the conference we received a leaked email detailing a plan to railroad a deal through that favoured the big industrialised nations at the expense of the smaller ones. So, predictably enough, when Obama did finally arrive on his big blue plane there was simply no way the US and the Chinese were going to sign anything that remotely committed them to a binding deal. Obama was shunned by the Chinese, and the only thing that prevented him from looking a total fool was the Danish hosts' fig leaf of a treaty aka the Copenhagen Accord.

The conference had ended with a whimper and the clean up crews got straight to work erasing every trace of the fact that the city had been occupied by an unruly army of people whose cause for optimism had been crushed. Polar bear suits were retuned to rental shops to be dry cleaned and a wheelie bin outside our office was full of signs that said 'Stop Global Warming!'.

The two years since Copenhagen have lead many campaigners to despair. What is the point of protesting if you just end up in a 'free speech zone' kettled in by the police and ignored by the media? What hope, they ask, do we have if neither individuals nor government are prepared to act?

It's a good question and I'm not claiming to know the answer. Maybe we can hope that consumerism dies and is replaced by something more connected to the natural cycles of the Earth. Stranger things have happened in history – but even so, consumerism is a relatively recent phenomenon and, malevolent as it is, an end to consumerism won't mean an end to resource over-exploitation. Some believe that a return to a monastic way of life could be our saving grace, but my pessimistic side tells me that's not likely to happen any time soon.

But perhaps there's a silver lining in the dark cloud that is Peak Oil. The direst predictions of environmentalists such as James Hansen all assume that we will be accelerating our extraction and use of fossil fuels far into the future. Peak Oil tells us that we can't and won't. Indeed, the more one looks into the idea of the decline or collapse of industrial civilisation the more one can see that the forces which power our most rapacious technologies are running out of steam and running out of supporting resources. Furthermore, given that many energy sources, such as coal, have a high level of fossil fuel subsidy in the form of oil, could we soon see these becoming unproductive? Is that why China is importing so much coal right now?

Whatever, given what we know of the likely climate and energy situations we know that we will be hit hard. The question is, do we as individuals let ourselves be knocked down by it, or do we try to roll with the punch? The choice, unlike the fate of global climate deals, is up to us.

Running on almost empty

Greenpeace tried to defeat Cairn Energy but in the end it was Arctic geology that won

Two stories in the past couple of days days illustrate the way two very different political dogs can bark up the wrong tree. The first was from Denmark, where I currently live, in the form of the government setting out its 'roadmap to the future' with regard to energy. When most people think of Denmark they think of wind mills and bicycles. The country has been the poster child for sensible sustainable development since the 1970s, and the latest vision for the future would seem, at first glance, to be a continuation along that path.

The plan, as it stands, is to be entirely free of fossil fuels by 2050. Denmark is an oil producer and exporter, albeit a small player, and imports large amounts of coal to fuel its power stations. Renewable power makes up for a significant minority of energy and the rest is imported from Sweden. So how, one might ask, can it shake off the shackles of carbon? Well, no prizes for guessing that it will be smart grids, more wind power and sophisticated electricity storage systems all the way.

The climate minister (yes, Denmark has one), Martin Lidegaard, when he had finished conjuring up this hallucinatory future did concede at the press conference that the pesky actual details of how this was to be accomplished were not exactly apparent just yet. Smart grids, for example, are still in the chin-scratching phase, electricity storage seems to boil down to vast banks of low-tech batteries and nobody is even asking where the country will get all the rare earth minerals for building millions of new wind turbines. Perhaps they could strike a deal swapping them with China for designer furniture …

So it was a relief to turn to the UK and see that for the Conservative/Lib Dems coalition business as usual was being touted as the only business worth a damn. Chancellor George Osborne, in his Autumn Statement, airbrushed energy and environmental concerns away, announcing a grand new road building plan that would tarmac a fair bit of the remaining non-tarmacked bits of Britain. In a tough talking speech, the young millionaire told the rest of us to expect at least six more years of austerity measures before things get better. And the way to make things better and restore the nation to a path of growth, he seemed to be saying, was by building more roads and airports while slashing funds for renewable energy and environmental protection and letting big polluters and energy hogs off the hook. It wasn't the kind of speech that would go down well in Denmark.

And yet both of these politicians on different shores of the North Sea, in their own different ways, are pinning their chances of re-election on the prospect of growth on a finite planet. Okay, so the Danish version is a bit more fuzzy and warm and at least acknowledges that energy shortages and global warming are issues to be taken seriously, but do either one of them take into account their respective countries' abilities to pay for these grand projects?

To refit the whole of Denmark with smart this-and-thats, pay thousands of PHDs thousands of work years to come up with systems that attempt to bend the laws of thermodynamics and basically keep the whole show on the road is likely to be so expensive that bankruptcy looks a preferable, and altogether more likely, option. After all, it's not as if any country in Europe can particularly afford to squander large sums of money on anything at present and Denmark's North Sea oil bonanza has been declining at an terrific rate and is expected to hit zero in just six years (2018). Six years - that's practically tomorrow! (And Britain isn't far behind with production expected to fall to 1/3 of its peak by 2020.)

George Osborne is equally broke but in a state of denial. He thinks that growth can be restored if we all just man up and try really hard. Never mind that most of the manufacturing industry has been packed up, the service industry relies on consumer spending, consumers have no cash to spend and the much vaunted financial sector is under attack from both itself and everyone else. Where, exactly, is this growth going to come from?

Another story caught my eye today that ties the above two together. The darling drillers of the denialist press, Cairn Energy, who sailed to Greenland with a drilling rig have found, after three test wells and up to a billion dollars of trying … not a drop of oil. The British company, who had to be protected by the Danish navy from Greenpeace protesters, have finally given up and will be towing their rig to somewhere oil is easier and cheaper to get at. Unfortunately places such as those are getting harder to find on the map, and Cairn, whose share price has shot up about 1,000% in the last decade, can expect it to go back down to Earth again pretty soon.

The above is not to poke fun at politicians or oil companies, although God knows they deserve it. Rather it is to illustrate the likelihood that for the next few years and decades we will get to hear increasingly futile promises from politicians whose aim is to restore the energy bounty that we have had in the post war years. That they are no more able to deliver on those promises than I am able to conjure bananas from thin air is by-the-by, but most people will want to believe them and that is how they will retain political power.

But that energy isn't coming back, no matter how much blather is spouted in parliaments and how much City traders manage to talk up the share prices of exploration firms. Simply put, we've picked all the low hanging fruit and what is left will cost more – a lot more- to extract. And when I say 'more' I'm not just talking about money, I'm talking about energy, which is not the same thing.

The best thing for any rational person to do under such circumstances is stop believing the snake oil salesmen and get to work on the task of making their own lives more sustainable and resilient to future shocks in the energy – and by extension food - supply. It's not exactly straightforward to do so and once you embark on the process one realises quite how dependent one is on the fruits of three centuries of industrial materialism, thaumatergic marketing and cheap energy. But the sooner one can make a start the better, and that's what I will be talking about in future posts.