Life Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff (2009, Random House)

Those who control history control the future and in Life Inc. Douglas Rushkoff makes his mark on our future by detailing the history of Corporate Capitalism as the political and economic reality of the modern world. After evolving over hundreds of years into its current form, Corporate Capitalism is now taken so thoroughly for granted that few even question the basic mythology behind it. Rushkoff was jarred into this revelation after being mugged outside his home and being told by neighbors to keep quiet because it might hurt property values. His fellow homo sapiens were becoming dispassionate economic actors instead of human beings. The unquestioning behavior towards the value system of Corporate Capitalism is compared to waking up with Microsoft Windows on every computer, and every computer you’ve ever known.While nations and economies thrived using alternate models of economic transaction, the course of history has resulted in our particular economic arrangement. Rushkoff succeeds in tracing a clear and coherent history uncovering how arbitrary the  rules of the modern economic game truly are.

As corporations gained power in the Colonial era they changed places into ‘territories’ and people into ‘labor’, solidifying the power of the state to grant monopoly power to the corporations. Ultimately, everything and everyone could be colonized for profit, fueling European colonialism and establishing  corporatism as the basis for a new continent. This new classification of human interaction created a value system that extended to every aspect of human life. Rushkoff draws a distinction between the division of labor and specialization of labor, in doing so he reveals a major flaw in our valuation of specialization. We would think a society of trained merchants, managers and laborers are more specialized than one of self-taught artisans and inherently entrepreneurial shop-owners but managers didn’t want to hire highly skilled labor which could demand higher wages. The managerial classes standardized processes as to hire the least qualified and most replaceable laborers around. This activity favored generalization instead of specialization: the basis for the modern education system. A modern education system designed by people like Stanford professor Ellwood P. Cubberly created a curriculum to produce “mediocre intellects” for a docile citizenry. The model for this education was one of the factory where, “the raw product (of children) are to be shaped and fashioned according to the specifications laid down.” My own thought is that by creating a population of generalists, we create individuals that have no specific knowledge, no actual ability to create a tangible good or to experience the inherent pleasure of such creation. This is an insecure individual and one with an inherent fear of survival imposed on them by the scarcity in a compounding interest based monetary system.

Even the original American Revolution was one against corporatism, as the Tea Party slogan of “No Taxation without Representation” was primarily about Britian’s tax laws which removed barriers to trade and allowed the East India Company to destroy the colonial economy. The irony is that our modern Tea Party movement shares the same angst as the original one but without the clarity of understanding the connection between Corporatism and their frustration. In the United States, corporatism was held mostly in check until the landmark 1886 decision of Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad Company. This case established the ability for corporations to claim all the rights of personhood granted under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, a law ratified to ensure the rights for former slaves. Over the next 25 years 307 14th Amendment cases went before the US Supreme Court and 288 of them were brought by corporations. With this as a precedent, money became equivalent to speech, so corporations could obtain their 1st Amendment right to free speech by spending money. Since 1944 when the US set the rules of the global economic game with the Bretton-Woods agreement which established the US Dollar as the global reserve currency, the policy of Corporatism has been international. We’ve dragged the rest of the world along, yielding a race to the bottom as municipalities and then nations competed to offer corporate handouts for attracting major companies. We’ve demolished local economies and land with the scorched earth policy of Wal-Marts and other big boxes.

The corporation has built a mythology so transcendent it has disconnected us from the world of true science, technology, ecology and thought. As Rushkoff notes, “Corporatism depends first on our disconnection. The less local, immediate, and interpersonal our experience of the world and each other, the more likely we are to adopt self-interested behaviors that erode community and relationships.” We become the rational dispassionate economic man the corporations need us to be for their survival, and in doing so we become ever more dependent on their services, confirming in our own minds a subconscious subscription to the ideals of the system. We were told the perfect society is one we could own a stake in, through owning a home and a car and our own piece of suburban perfection. As Walt Whitman wrote, “A man is not a whole or complete man unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on.”  This was a directed goal because it was the burden of home ownership which, “chained a man to the factory where he worked.” A focus on home ownership drove a seperation of classes and produced much of the wealth disparity in the US today.

Ultimately, the myth that we are all free to compete for the great prizes the free market has to offer prevents us from conferring about the value of the system itself. Divided and conquer, as a people but mostly as a mental environment. And so we are stuck with branding instead of the relationships we used to have with real people and their craftsmanship. We are piled in droves towards others with similar brand loyalties and the public discourse is standardized by using the media to speak to “individuals”. We’ve removed everything of value from its context and in doing so we’ve removed the sense of awe that is a product of its uniqueness. Even the quest to find our place in the world while recognizing the power of being human has been co-opted by a spirituality that is derived from corporate values. From L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz where Dorothy could have whatever she wanted as long as she believed, to the modern obsession with The Secret, we’ve developed the purist spiritual expression of consumerist culture: a disembodied other delivering whatever we want when we want it.

A questioning and curious mind is culled with the depravity of  modern intelligensia as dominated by the de-facto standards of a corporate value system. Surely there must be more to this world? Fear not, economists have explored it and found, as in Freakonomics, that maximized utility is surely the primary drive behind human actions. Malcom Gladwell offers spiritual and intellectual comfort for modern persuasion professionals with advice to classify our fellow humans for finding Tipping Points and harnessing snap judgements with Blinks. When we think Wal-Mart succeeds because it is efficient, it only does so because it has access to speculative markets beyond the reach of local shopkeepers. In reality, the Fortune 500 are just names on huge piles of debt. Adam Smith and his invisible hand were regulated by the pressures of neighbors and social values, not abstract speculation on derivatives and demolished trade barriers.

In the modern era corporations became giant externality generating machines, displacing liabilities as fast as possible to increase profits and our natural world suffers. Yet, the primary discourse regarding economies treat them as a natural system, ignoring that it is itself but a man-made system imposed on an ecosystem. Fiat currency has become the operating system which runs this game but has faded to the background so that we no longer think about. We can only think of one system of money despite the existence of many others throughout history. The most valuable piece of Life Inc. are the historical accounts of jealous monarchs which outlawed local currencies based on tangible grain stores in medieval towns to regain power through their coin of the realm.

As the Corporate Capitalist systems which have driven economic reality and moderated human life continue to break down, Life Inc. provides a guide to understanding that our species has survived and thrived in many alternative economic arrangements. This is a powerful book which dispels an unconscious acceptance of the corporate value structure and outlines a path towards returning to authentic human interactions once again.

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Post tags: corporations, economic game, economic growth, economy, history, human beings

[via Awful Library Books]

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Post tags: books, united states

Babylon's Banksters by Joseph P. Farrell (2010) Feral House

The global economic crisis that started in 2008 has summoned a deeper skepticism of the economic mainstream with its corresponding prognostications for endless growth and prosperity. Individuals are starting to question the need to play on the giant wheels of churning money that represented the retirement funds and investments of the past. While I’ve been reading extensively about alternative economies and monetary systems, nothing has provided a picture of finance as intriguing or as challenging as Joseph P. Farrell’s Babylon’s Banksters: The Alchemy of Deep Physics, High Finance and Ancient Religion.

Babylon’s Banksters serves as a comprehensive outline of the evidence for a group of international monetary elites that have attempted to control the destiny of human affairs throughout history with banking and physics. Even if you don’t buy into the historical monetary elite portion of the thesis, you’ll still find a lot of meat here.

Early on, Farrell draws a clear distinction between the two types of money a nation can create: money built on scarcity and money built on the state itself. Money can be created as a receipt for goods and services with no built-in principal of debt and scarcity. In this case, the money supply can be expanded based on the needs of the nation. For the other type of money, created by a private bank and issued to a nation, the principal is created and not the interest. Thus, the monetary supply must always expand at an exponential rate to continue repaying the interest. When the money supply can no longer expand to make interest payments, the currency falters and eventually collapses.

This is where the connection between a physical system and a financial system begins. For nation-backed money, the system is open and the available amount of money can expand along with the economy, there can always be more money as long as available goods and services expand as well. For a private bank-backed money, the system is closed and there is never as much money as there is debt, inducing scarcity.

Farrell then posits that the first modern nation to discover a connection between open or debt-free economics and open energy systems was Nazi Germany. What Nazi Germany realized was that the Mark’s dramatic devaluation began soon after the Reichbank was privatized, driving the German monetary system into hyperinflation. When Hitler took command of Germany, he turned his back on the international private bankers that shorted the German Mark and created his own fiat money, embarking on a massive public works campaign using one billion non-inflationary bills called Labor Treasury Certificates. At this same time, Germany understood that they were subject to playing by global financial hegemony because they needed access to global oil supplies. And thus, Nazi Germany devoted many of its scientist to pursuing “free energy, i.e. the technologies that would allow Germany to engineer the physical medium and its energy directly…”. But Farrell does not apply heroics to the Nazi movement, he merely points out that they recognized an international malevolent influence in banking and sought to usurp it, all while committing horrible atrocities. Modern China has recognized this same influence, growing into a sophisticated world power by issuing state-created debt-free money, solidifying independence in doing so. Farrell’s overall point being that an international group has controlled money systems and has suppressed technologies and alternative physics in order to maintain this control. In doing so, this group has hidden the connections between alternative physics and alternative monetary economies.

What surprised me most about Babylon’s Banksters was how persuasively Farrell argued the connection between economics and an unpublicized system of physics. This is where the book shined. During the start of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover sought a solution to the problem of the boom-bust economic cycle and commissioned Chief Economic Analyst of the US Commerce Department Edward R. Dewey to study how the business cycles occurred. What Dewey discovered was that cycles or waves of behavior appeared in nearly all aspects of human societies. In the 1947 book by Dewey and his collaborator Edwin Dakin, Cycles: The Science of Prediction, graphs and charts appeared of everything from railroad industry growth to the Atlantic salmon population. These compiled studies revealed repeating and predictable cycles in the form of discernible waves that were quantifiable as well as regular and predictable. Farrell makes the point that this is the secret a global financial elite is privy to, being able to manipulate these predictable boom-bust cycles for their own benefit. Further, a 54-year and 9-year economic cycle that proceeds at at regular intervals is depicted. Oddly enough, from the 1947 book, when the low-points of the 54 and 9 year cycles are overlaid they hit exactly on the date of our current crisis. While explanations for this phenomena can vary wildly, one way to look at is by imagining the effect a fourth dimension would have on our three dimensional perception. Consider a two dimensional being on a plane with a multi-colored wheel that passes through its plane on a regular basis. The two-dimensional being would perceive nothing but a predictable pattern of colored lines but would be unable to understand why the regular interval occurred because it was a higher dimensional object that was passing through. Perhaps a fourth dimensional object passes through our own world on a regular basis. In other words, Farrell is outlining a deeper physics behind the financial and economic transactions of the human race.

Even stranger, Farrell describes the work of an RCA company engineer, J.H. Nelson who published several articles on the bizarre anomalies that he encountered while working with trans-atlantic short-wave signals. Nelson discovered that the accuracy of long-range radio propagation could be forecasted on the basis of planetary relationships. Oddly enough, his signal degradation charts looked quite similar to astrological forecasts. After further exposition, the point Farrell makes is that modern astrology is a nearly worthless and degraded form of an ancient science that recognized and understood these planetary effects on a larger basis, even within human and social systems. Once again, the implications of a deeper physics behind human economic activity, a ‘paleophysics’ even.

So what energy sources were the Nazi’s researching? Most likely energy from an unknown source that resulted from rotating plasmas, like those described by Swedish physicist Hannes Alfvén. Starting in 1936, Alfvén outlined cosmic electrodynamics or the science of a plasma universe. If a conducting liquid is placed in a constant magnetic field, every motion of the liquid gives rise to an electromagnetic field which produces electric currents. These currents yield mechanical forces which change the state of motion of the liquid. A combined electromagnetic-hydrodynamic wave occurs which appears to transduce energy out of space-time itself, from an unknown source or maybe even the oft-discussed ‘zero-point field’. Also of note, Alfvén’s theories discussed the possibilities that space itself exhibits a cellular structure, or crystal lattice along which energy can be tapped. There is some actual evidence for this ‘electric universe’, specifically in the questions raised by Dr. Nikolai Kozyrev who noted that during the first hydrogen bomb tests there was an unknown source of energy. The energy of the detonated hydrogen bombs actually varied with the time which they were detonated. Farrell discusses the possibility that the energy variation occurred because the bombs became a transdimensional gateway into the energy of space-time itself which varied based on planetary rotations and proximity to higher dimensions.

Farrell draws connections between this obscured physics and an ancient international money power which are revealed in various historical accounts as they guarded gold mines with mercenaries and usurped local economies with gold and silver based transactions. But how would this international money power communicate in an era without radio? German physicist and engineer Dr. Meyl published a comprehensive account of scalar waves and their corresponding relationship to ancient temples in 2003, drawing the connection between temples as a long-range communication system between the various factions of this monetary elite. And while it sounds a little outlandish, the resonant frequency calculations of each building along with the similarities between modern magnetrons and ancient temple floor plans are rather convincing.

While the book is extremely well footnoted and referenced, where Farrell fails is in quoting his previous work too often. He could have dramatically strengthened his case by omitting those references and linking me to his original sources. Farrell breaks down every section with numbered lists of evidence he presented in previous pages which helped me track the overwhelming amount of information. This is the densest few hundred pages I’ve ever read. While I still remain unconvinced by the entire premise Farrell lays out, I’m thoroughly fascinated by the obscure scientists and historical references he can ferret out. I’m surprised I’ve waited this long to discover Farrell’s unique approach to science, technology, history and humanity. Clearly there’s much more to physics and finance than I could ever imagine and through Babylon’s Banksters I’ve discovered a tremendous number of new and interesting speculative paths on which I can embark, and that’s really all I can ask for from a book like this.

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Post tags: conspiracy, economic crisis, economics, finance, humanity, physics, science

Supernatural by Graham Hancock (2007, Disinformation Company)

Graham Hancock is the king of speculation. His books will either convince you there’s a lot more to human history or make you scoff at his possibly outlandish ideas. Regardless, it is damn entertaining. One of the first books I ever bought was his Fingerprints of the Gods (1996) which discussed how anomalies associated with ancient monuments tend to indicate a wide-spread ancient advanced civilization. Even though I was intrigued by the way Hancock tied all those threads together I’m still deeply skeptical of his overall thesis. And yet, I’ve been completely hooked by his 2007 book Supernatural. This one is deeply convincing because anyone can follow his thesis with a little supplemental research. Using the bitterly accepted idea proposed by anthropologist David Lewis-Williams, that ancient art depicted what early humans saw in altered states of consciousness, Hancock weaves a story that gets at the very heart of what it means to be a member of our species. Where academics might be starting to accept Lewis-Williams’ idea, they are far from ready to use the same plants and rituals that produced these early trance states. This is where Hancock picks up, by starting taking the iboga vine, the plant that enables men to see the dead, and follows with the sacred ayahuasca brew of the Amazon.

Where I’m sure I would have been more sympathetic to Hancock’s other works if I had actually been to the monuments he describes, I can follow the writing here because of my own exposure to these ancient plants. Before I knew the themes and details in this book, my own experiences were eerily similar to those described in Supernatural. I’ve been the archetype of the wounded man and had interactions with serpents. Reading the story of someone thousands of years ago describing something that happened to me (along with its “mystical” significance) is a chilling synchronicity. Hancock’s sketch on p. 52 of the beings he encountered while doing his field research were exactly the same things I’ve seen, and as I learned by reading, have been seen for thousands of years by scattered native groups across the world accessing these same states through various means.

Hancock ties the similarities of the modern UFO/abduction phenomena to experiences that indigenous tribesmen have in altered states to the mythology of the medieval fairies. In doing so, he uncovers that throughout human history our species has been describing the same thing from different angles. Whatever this phenomena is, it appears to be changing over time, evolving and advancing. Hinting at a form of intelligence. All of these encounters have similar themes, particularly in encountering entities with an interest in human sexuality and reproduction mechanisms. That fairies allegedly impregnated and abducted women or danced around in circles to fly into the sky draws more than a few parallels to modern UFO lore. While the case Hancock lays for these similarities takes up the first half of the book, it is in the second half of Supernatural where the mind gems really shine through.

All human languages have a direct, exact, unvarying mathematical relationship between the rank of a word and the actual frequency of occurrence of that word. This relationship is known as Zipf’s Law, named after linguist George Zipf and has proved to hold true for every human language. Oddly enough, when the non-coding regions of DNA are analyzed according to Zipf’s Law a perfect linear Zipf Law linear plot emerges. In fact, the chemical “writing” of the non-coding regions of DNA appear to have all the features of a language, and may in fact be a language. Perhaps it is this language that ancient plant based sacrements tap into. Hancock brings to light the evidence that our interactions with ‘the other’ could be enabled by ancient plant substances because these chemicals allow us to access information encoded in the 97% of our DNA we currently think of as ‘junk DNA’. Further work in this area was done by Dr. Jeremy Narby in his book The Cosmic Serpent, which Hancock touches on briefly, specifically regarding the presence of snake constituted helixes in nearly every culture. That the snake in mythology is often a reference to DNA.

Since Hancock published Supernatural, the knowledge that Francis Crick discovered the shape of DNA while using LSD has become widely known. What is less well known is that Crick later published a book where he explains that DNA is so complex no mechanism of evolution could have produced it on this planet, concluding it must have originated elsewhere in the universe. Strangely, the mythology of many tribes in the Amazon tell the exact same story, of serpents falling from the sky and living inside us. While anthropologist Michael Harner ingested ayahuasca in 1961 he reported seeing, “dragon-like creatures that came to earth from deep in outer space after a journey that had lasted for eons.” These dragons explained that they hid in the multitudinous forms life and that humans were the receptacles for these creatures. Similar encounters have been described by other scientists ingesting these ceremonial brews and ancient cultures are inundated with related stories. Hancock hesitates from drawing any sort of conclusion other than that these ancient myths and timeless sacraments may be far more interesting than we could ever guess. Personally I agree.

Even stranger is that psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) is essentially orally active DMT, an indole compound with a phosphorylated functional group which exists nowhere else in nature. If this pattern exists nowhere else in nature, where could it have come from? What if the alien we’ve been searching for has been here inside us all along? A chilling prospect to consider, but after reading through Supernatural you’ll be forced to confront this possibility in all of its grandeur.

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Post tags: ancient civilizations, ancient knowledge, extraterrestrials, humanity, mysterious, myth, psyche, psychedelics

Reinventing Collapse by Dmitry Orlov (2008, New Society)

If there’s one thing about the inevitable decline of the United States that gives me some bit of deeper comfort, its that people like Dmitry Orlov have been writing about it for a long time. His article, Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century was first released in 2005 and clearly Orlov had been thinking about superpower collapse for quite a while before then. Orlov strikes me as an unlikely yet inevitable product of our modern world, a lucky person cursed to find himself at the improbable intersection of circumstances where growing up in the Soviet Union (SU) allows him the context to truly observe the predicament faced by the United States (US). Dmitry’s background in the SU allowed him understand and interact with his homeland as it collapsed in a far more valuable way than any casual tourists would have been able to. His experience allows him to recognize and provide a deeper context on the similar process currently underway in the US.

Reinventing Collapse is the modern day Democracy in America, as valuable as de Tocqueville’s thoughts on life in America for our modern time, and what a different America this is. While de Tocqueville described an underorganized loosely affiliated and dynamic nation, Orlov describes a system barely able to sustain itself encapsulated by a populace bent on a particular definition of the American Dream mythos. A mythos that is out of touch with the fact that rapidly depleting cheap energy made car ownership, suburban life and basically everything we think of as “American”.

I was disappointed that Orlov does not offer specific suggestions for people who are “reinventing collapse” in Reinventing Collapse, especially since his 2005 essay, Thriving in the Age of Collapse was full of brilliant hypothetical scenarios which could serve as a jumping-off point for those acknowledging the United States as they knew it was rapidly approaching its dissolution. What is presented in Reinventing Collapse turns out to be some of the most accurate cultural commentary I’ve read on modern America. And I know it is accurate because it stung a little, while making me laugh. Broad generalizations made of the American peoples and psyche might be offensive to some but its hard to argue with their general accuracy. While Soviet schools had far fewer resources, they resulted in kids that knew much more general information and had better conceptual understand rather than a focus on exams. In my own schooling experience, even at my university, every student was filled with angst when a professor wouldn’t outline specifically what to study. When I had Russian professors, students complained that exams didn’t follow homework problems, testing concepts instead. Orlov concludes this is because schools in the US aren’t about learning, they are about institutionalization. Merely biding the time while kids enter the institution of prison, a corporation, the government or the workforce.

This book methodically makes the case that the SU was prepared for successful collapse far more than the US. And on this point, I have to agree with Dmitry. Most everyone in the US is deeply dependent on having a regular income. It would take a 9/11-sized event every month to compete with the national homicide rate. Our can-do spirit and career oriented mindset will be particularly vulnerable to extreme pain in the transition to a post-growth economy, where-as Russians thought that being someone who “works hard and plays hard” was a bit of a fool. Our pattern of migration uproots people from communities, although it makes us more open to strangers than the Russians. The private housing system and its surrounding sprawl make squatting and a nomadic lifestyle the likely viable options in the future. The conditioning of expecting a monetary exchange to obtain needs will be difficult to transition from but the good news is that a favor and barter economy will be more efficient than consumerism, we’ll get products and services customized to our personal needs.

Reading Orlov is like sitting down with a Russian to have a conversation about what life was like in the the collapsing Soviet Union. I’ve yet to find a more vivid and comprehensive description of what to expect when living through the decline of a superpower. Even if you aren’t sold on the idea that the US is going down, at the least, you’ll find the presented insights on the USSR entertaining and interesting.

Dmitry gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation last year on Collapse Best Practices , it was highly entertaining and summarizes most of the key points in the book. Thanks to @rjboyle for reminding me of the talk and suggesting that I should link to it in this post.

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Post tags: collapse, economic crisis, united states

John Michael Greer's The Ecotechnic Future (New Society, 2009)

If industrial society turns out to have been little more than finding the fastest way possible to turn raw materials into pollution, the status quo won’t be maintained for much longer. We’re running out of those raw materials at a rapid pace and the outputs threaten to bring everything down with just as much certainty. We see the possibility of business as usual slipping further and further away as the world falls deeper into a recession which shows no end in sight. In The Ecotechnic Future, John Michael Greer argues that the reason our globalized civilization faces this catastrophe is because our definition of technology is wholly misguided and counters with a realistic vision of the future.

Since the science fiction writers of the early 19th century, our dreams of advanced technology have been synonymous with “extravagant energy use”. It is this redefinition of what the future and what future technology will look like that is the scope of Greer’s most recent book. Our modern industrial society may be a primitive and vastly inefficient form of the coming ecotechnic society which maximizes the efficiency of its energy resources and obtains raw material inputs sustainably. Of course, at the cost of a more restricted access to goods and services when compared to the globalized supply chains of today.

It seems that Greer is the first to apply the ecological concept of succession to explain the rise and fall of societies. Perhaps our current civilization is just the fast-growing opportunist colonizers of the Earth which will then be replaced by a stable climax community. This is a powerful insight, one that views our many mistakes in the supply chain infrastructure not as immoral (as many environmental groups would have you think) but failed attempts at obtaining a future ecotechnic society. Greer’s analogy breaks down to an extent because modern ecology tends to think climax communities are unattainable because the low probability of obtaining an equilibrium community is hampered, ironically because of climate change. Our species was once a climax community but was driven out of the African canopies as the continent slowly dried.

Greer offers an alternative to the current technological program of modernity which reaches a possible end state in a technological singularity, the development of a true artificial intelligence which imprints our minds on immortal silicon and blasts into space to colonize the universe. The absurdity of this vision is quickly revealed by examining the logic of authors and visionaries pushing this ideal, they’ve completely failed to consider energy inputs and the failure of past civilizations. Once we understand the limits placed on us by our rapid consumption of the very resources driving our goals, we realize that industrial society has been largely a “crackpot realist’s” approach to the world, using rational means to reach irrational goals. Our view of nature is that of a helpless adorable bunny which we can easily transcend or a frontier for conquest on which to impose our will. Greer understands that nature is neither, he likens it to a bear which when roused can easily tear us to shreds. If technology saves us from this possibility, it will do so without historical precedence. Human innovation will clearly play a role, Greer quotes Koestler in that, “creativity arises from the collision of incommensurate realities” But to assume that human innovation will allow business as usual to continue is to cement the outcome of repeating the past all while thinking we’re original.

I didn’t expect Greer to provide the clearest description of science that I’ve yet to read, especially since he is a practicing druid. But it is hard to argue with the difference between Science as a product and science as a process. Everyone agrees on the power of the scientific method, unfortunately we’re too infatuated with the products of current Science which have developed over a limited period of history and are subject to the same problems of energy scarcity as our economics and psychology. Science as a profession is also at risk, with its trained personnel and infrastructure. The scientific method will hopefully always be with us, it just won’t be used in the ways of the present.

The Ecotechnic Future is refreshingly not a book which will neatly lay out the reasons for the possible demise of industrial civilization, this has been done many times before, and by Greer himself in The Long Descent. All that is dealt with in about 18 pages and covers everything from the likelihood of culture death (what we call the United States is disparate regions tied together by cheap fuel for travel and mass media) to the implications of the depopulation explosion (that the “world is round” and solutions to being human will take many different forms). Within this section is his most eloquent passage however, tying the faux culture designed by marketing experts and sold over mass media distribution in its supplanting of regional US cultures and its ability to demonstrate that that people can be bribed by propserity and convinced by advertising into doing the same thing.

While many seem to think that an end to the globalized economy will come in an Armaggedon-esque collapse scenario replete with hordes of the angry urban poor looting the countryside while heroic loners that foresaw the crash pump them full of ammo to defend their homestead, Greer is convincing that empires and societies do not collapse overnight, and in ways that aren’t likely to grace plot-lines of blockbuster films. Our pre-disposition to biblical scale catastrophe pushes us towards the extreme. That the French Revolution appeared to occur so rapidly is mainly because our study of history focuses on key moments. Greer mentions that a teenager on the day of the Etats-General in 1788 would have been a grandmother after Waterloo in 1815. Put simply, we’ll still have lives even if industrial society is unraveling, they’ll just be different lives than we’ve expected. The failure to obtain a 9 to 5 job and a suburban mansion is not necessarily such a bad thing. None of the possible futures are unknown in human history, it is only the current members of our species that have been protected due to the shelter provided by inexpensive oil extraction. Although, I do take some exception with Greer’s idea that were a sudden depopulation to occur, our skills and knowledge would be applicable to the future. Some of the training that prepares us for industrial jobs is completely useless in a post-carbon world. Although Greer must understand this, he just omits it from his illustration of what our transition will look like.

Greer provides the first coherent view I’ve read of a post-industrial future. Regardless of your thoughts on what the future may hold, John Michael Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future will challenge you. He steps on everyone’s toes eventually, and that’s what makes his writing so valuable, but far from comfortable. This is the first book written by a member of the peak oil community that I would recommend to someone unfamiliar with its concepts, mainly because Greer is so convincing and eloquent but also because his vision is so well reasoned. The Ecotechnic Future leaves me optimistic about our future as a species, even if it will be a vastly different future than we all thought it would be.

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Post tags: climate change, ecology, future, humanity, peak oil, post-industrial society, sustainability, sustainable development, transition

The Wayfinders by Wade Davis (House of Anansi, 2009)

With the converging crises of imminent energy scarcity, environmental degradation, resource depletion and economic insolvency, suddenly I’m recognizing the apogee of our modern civilization may have passed us by a few decades ago. Being on the slope of globalization’s decline as opposed to its ascent or plateau is a precarious position, mainly because the evidence increasingly indicates an ever more bleak definition of the future. But that’s precisely why I found Wade Davis’ 2009 CBC Massey Lectures collected in The Wayfinders so deeply inspiring. The way we define our lives and the meaning of being a human is far from an absolute and objective answer to reality, it has been the result of numerous decisions made in a compounding form over hundreds of years. Because humanity at large expresses itself in the form of modernity is largely a result of the ever growing demand our lifestyle has on ever more hard to reach raw material inputs. Although I listened to this entire series of lectures through the CBC Ideas Podcast, Davis’ presentation hit me with much more gravity the second time around.

The genius and intelligence recognized by modern humanity is only in that of highly advanced technology while the genius of the cultures detailed in The Wayfinders takes many different forms. Each culture is far from trivial but an answer to the questions that come with being human, all of these answers just as impressive as our own. Our tendency is for to look at the naked and painted body of the native as a failed attempt at modernity. A native to be saved by induction into our economic system with all the benefits of employment and monetary exchange. Even until the 1960′s some Australian textbooks included the Aboriginals among, “interesting animals of the country”. To this point Davis quotes from the testimony of a Penan nomad to the UN General Assembly in 1992, “The (Malaysian) government says that it is bringing us development. But the only development that we see is dusty logging roads and relocation camps. For us, their so-called progress means only starvation, dependence, helplessness, the destruction of our culture and the demoralization of our people. The government says it is creating jobs for our people. Why do we need jobs? My father and grandfather did not have t o ask the government for jobs. They were never unemployed. They lived from the land and from the forest. It was a good life. We were never hungry or in need… In ten years all the jobs will be gone and the forest that has sustained us for thousands of years will be gone with them.”

Davis is able to continue his discussion without resorting to the “noble savage” or the Hobbesian, “nasty, brutish and short” dichotomy. For the cultures he touches on from Australia, the Americas, Africa and Asia it is clear that a genius is required to flourish in harsh environments, against any odds we would consider possible. And all of this despite harmful environmental degradation brought about by our lifestyle. Denial of climate change is a luxury provided by a temperate environment and disconnection from the natural world. For native peoples, when the glaciers their ancestors have worshiped for generations are disappearing and the Arctic lands they’ve hunted annually for all of history fail to freeze but for a few months there is no ideology, only survival.

I was nearly drawn to tears by the examples of rituals and lifestyles Davis uses to illustrate the depth of beauty of human experience. The Pacific islanders sailing thousands of kilometers between beautiful islands with wind blowing through their hair to complete the Kula gift sharing ring live the lives we can only experience through fictional characters projected onto glowing rectangles. The indigenous have no sense of paid employment, of work as burden as opposed to leisure as recreation. These cultures are the definition of the human experience that we have lost and try to replace through futile substitutes. These people experience pain and suffering along with glory and triumph, but through the full spectrum of being human, as opposed to our path which fails in its attempts to shield us from the realities of death and darkness.

These cultures have disappeared rapidly over the last hundred years, entire ways of life wiped out in less than a generation. Davis wonders why we have a universal rejection of genocide yet the ubiquitous practice of  ethnocide destroys more than individuals but whole solutions to the human experience. We may discredit an indigenous approach to life, but they disdain the fact that so many of our own suffer from abject poverty. A native tribesman from Malaysia when observing the homeless in Canada said, “How can homelessness exist, a poor man shames us all.”

The most important lecture included in this collection was the discussion of sacred geography, of the stewardship shown by indigenous to their land. When the Spanish tore down Incan churches and monuments, building Christian churches and monasteries in their place, the native villagers celebrated because this further confirmed the sacredness of those sites. Likely not the reaction the Spanish intended. If we are to look at cultures in terms of success and failure, wouldn’t the successful culture be the one that has survived for over 50,000 years in the harsh deserts of Australia as opposed to our modern world on the verge of extinction after only 300?  An idea of a sacred connection to land may be dismissed as meaningless superstition, but if it does not draw from an actual spirit world, perhaps it was the technological solution created long ago to ensure our species wouldn’t destroy the earth.

Davis has convinced me that when we talk about threats to our planet such as climate change or peak oil, we’re really talking about the end of our globalized civilization and not the extinction of humanity. Our species can exist in many other forms that live far more meaningful lives than the “modern man”. And for that reason, no matter how bleak the global situation may appear to be, the existence of the indigenous and their ability to maintain ancient wisdom despite all odds is a reason for hope.

Fortunately, to see these ideas and illustrations you don’t have to buy the book, you can listen to Wade Davis’ entire series of 2009 CBC Massey lectures online for free.

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Post tags: climate change, culture, human beings, humanity, indigenous

Blackout by Richard Heinberg (New Society, 2009)

Regardless of the consequences of peaking oil extraction rates, coal is the often overlooked driver of global economic growth. Coal provides the majority of the electricity responsible for our way of life and for consistent industrial production, around 49% of the electricity generated in the US comes from coal. When I worked for a coal-based electric utility company, one of the larger stations burned 18,000+ tons a day. And every bit of that coal was mined using oil based machinery, which required personnel using oil to drive to work every day. The relationship between coal and oil is rarely clear or explicit but easily and cheaply extracted oil provides a significant subsidy to coal used for electricity generation. As oil prices climbed in 2007 and 2008, Europeans and Americans have been immune to the idling plants and intermittent blackouts of China, South Africa and the rest of the world.Despite increasing fossil station efficiencies and the abundance of oil over the last 100 years, we use more coal now than ever and our rate of coal use is rapidly accelerating.

Energy analyst Richard Heinberg’s latest book, Blackout provides an in-depth review of why we should be concerned about coal and what we can expect as the peak energy output of coal continues to decline. Even if coal supplies can continue to fuel the growth of economies in developing nations, the environmental costs of such a result would be tremendous. CO2 emissions threaten to make the earth inhospitable to life and toxic ash residue is becoming a growing storage problem as exemplified by recent spills in Tennessee and Alabama. Heinberg uses Blackout as an in-depth literature review summarizing the known work in the field (which there isn’t much of) and takes the results of several studies to indicate that coal reserves are not as abundant as they may seem. In 1864 Edward Hull forcasted that 900 years of British coal remained, in 1984 estimates were down to 90 years and now the British coal industry has almost entirely disappeared. This is a common story in the history of coal reserve estimates because rates of consumption are never constant and resource extraction rates tend to peak and then decline. This has been the history of coal in every nation.

Surprisingly few studies have been undertaken to accurately assess coal reserves and the six that have been released recently indicate that we are headed towards a serious shortage in the net energy available from coal. The highest energy density anthracite coal has been used up leaving bituminous and sub-bituminous coal to burn. The lower energy densities of these coals mean that even more energy must be expended to transport the same amount of energy between its point of extraction and its point of eventual burning, i.e. the same amount of energy takes up a far greater volume. Heinberg uses these recent coal surveys to look at the coal supply situations of the United States, China, Russia, India, South Africa, Europe and others in subsequent chapters before detailing the impacts of burned coal on climate. Climate impacts of burning coal claim to be mitigated by technologies like integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC), coal-to-liquids, underground gasification and carbon capture-storage (CCS) but all these approaches look to significantly increase the cost of burning coal and are not applicable to most situations for numerous reasons.In summary, there is no technology that can keep coal from harming the climate, clean coal is an absolute myth.

At the end of the book, Heinberg uses all of this information to outline three possible scenarios for dealing with the reality of the situation. A maximum burn rate scenario devestates the climate and the economy when coal supplies run thin. A “clean” scenario devestates the economy and distracts attention from the problem of coal energy scarcity. A post carbon transition provides the least amount of pain but with a slightly lower standard of living. Blackout is a brilliant and concise book adding to the growing evidence that business as usual is no longer possible for a number of reasons.

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Post tags: coal, net energy, peak oil

Contactees by Nick Redfern (New Page, 2010)

The history of the human race is full of anomalous phenomena but no one set of border experiences has captured the attention of  paranormal investigators more than the alleged interactions between members our species and those of the extraterrestrial. Since the modern UFO era broke open in 1947 after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of an unidentified flying object over Mt. Ranier in Washington St. authors have been delving into the relationships between our race and the alleged one from the other. British author Nick Redfern adds another chapter to this legacy with his latest book, Contactees. While most alien interaction books are obsessed with the modern stereotype of the X-Files style abduction, Redfern takes a novel approach to the topic by looking at the contactee movement of the 50′s and 60′s. A movement characterized by the Space-Brothers, blond haired and silver suited aliens that run counter to the big-eyed grays of modern alien folklore

Contactee history begins with a “Mr. Jones” of Los Angeles who reported to a local columnist in 1947 that he encountered a large silver object in an isolated location which contained life from another planet that had, “become curious as to the reaction caused by the atom bomb causing trouble in an expanding universe”. In this single incident we can see the trend of many following events in the history of the contactees, Jones lived in California and referenced concern over humans and their use of the atom bomb. Just a few years later in 1952, George Adamski became the poster child of contactees when he encountered a being claiming to be from Venus that emerged from a silver craft in the desert. This Venusian was named “Orthon” and warned of atomic weapons and wars before departing in his craft. The contents of this encounter were eerily similar to that and many of the events described in Adamski’s 1949 novel, Pioneers of Space. But this isn’t the only reason to cast doubt on Adamski’s experience. George Adamski continually expanded his story to even more outlandish proportions and later faked an infamous saucer photograph, the Adamski disk. However, this was all the beginning of a pattern that would spread world-wide.

In 1952, a construction worker named Truman Bethurum had repeated encounters with a silver saucer in the Nevada desert which had a hot female space captain from the planet Clarion, Aura Rhanes. Bethurum’s obsession with Rhanes was the final nail in the coffin of his marriage and his repeated encounters with the lady from Clarion continued as Rhanes repeatedly fulfilled her promises to return time and again until one night in 1953 when she didn’t. Bethurum was crushed and eventually re-married after writing about his encounters and then dying in 1969. As with other contactees, Bethurum’s encounters were filled with discussions of pseudo-scientific language and seemingly obfuscated details.

Redfern continues by detailing the encounters of Orfeo Angelucci, George Van Tassel (of Integratron fame, a giant machine he built in the desert for healing) and several others before drawing similarities between their interactions. Some of these contactees were likely planted by governments (or at least manipulated by them) while others could have come into contact with a phenomena that released endogenous di-methyl-tryptamines leading to modulated psychedelic experiences. Perhaps some even encountered a race that evolved alongside humans concerned about our agression and claiming to be from the sky so we didn’t find them here. The brown mountain lights of western North Carolina even enter the discussion, because widely reported interactions with similar orb’d entities that might be an undiscovered biological intelligence. Each of these possible explanations (as well as others) are given due diligence by Redfern completing his balanced reporting of the historical contactee phenomena. Contactees is a highly entertaining and fascinating survey of a curious time in human history and is truly an outlier in a genre saturated with re-hashed abduction stories.

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Post tags: extraterrestrials, weird

Confronting Collapse by Mike Ruppert (Chelsea Green, 2009)

I first learned of Mike Ruppert through a chilling trailer for his then upcoming movie, Collapse. Ruppert has a long history as an investigative journalist that began when he broke away from the mainstream after his excellence in the LA police  led him to be actively recruited by the CIA for running cocaine through South-Central LA. Ruppert realized this wasn’t the world he’d pledged to serve and tried to break the story only to find that the systems he was working to support were quite different from how we perceive them in the mainstream. I went to the Vancouver International Film Centre with a few friends for a screening of Collapse only to have my tentative notions of civilizational instability confirmed in a tour de force of face melting facts. I quickly got a hold of Ruppert’s latest book, A Presidential Energy Policy, which had been re-printed as, Confronting Collapse to draw more attention to the work which had been largely ignored. Explaining bad news is not a route to popular success, as witnessed by the rapid end to careers of any American politician over the last 20 years that tried to curb deficits by cutting spending or raising taxes.

Confronting Collapse is a far better introduction to the topic of Collapse for the lay person than the corresponding movie is. And I say that because it is possibly too easy to write off Ruppert as a crank and a lunatic on-screen when he’s talking about governments breaking down and a global population that might face a huge die-off. This is so far outside the mainstream narrative that most people who aren’t receptive to it will completely block it out. It is much harder to ignore the case Ruppert makes for industrial civilization’s collapse when it is nicely footnoted and indexed. Ruppert’s writing style is absolutely clear and accessible to someone that isn’t a technically adept reader but might come across as “arrogant” for someone unwilling to look at the evidence. Modern economists counter the claims of the Peak Oil/Collapse theorists by saying that market corrections will solve the problem, Ruppert clearly explains that the only market corrections available will be in the form of tremendous suffering and loss of human life.

In the book, Dr. Colin Campell sets the stage by discussing the short time humanity has had access to energy dense petroleum reserves (only about 150 years). Ruppert uses the first chapter to make the case on why the US Federal government might keep the severity of the energy supply situation confidential and why we might question the status quo on this issue, “if we were lied to about mortgages, 401(k)s, stock portfolios, hedge funds, derivatives, insider trading… the invasion of Iraq and torture… why do so many accept on faith everything we have been sold about energy?”

Ruppert is clear that he views the entire American political and economic system as broken and corrupt and subservient to corporate/financial interests. This is something that neither Barack Obama or John McCain were willing to confront in their naive energy policies and political solutions. Thus the reason no real leadership exists and America/The World might be headed off a very steep and disturbing cliff in the near future. This assumption might lose some readers right away but if you read further, you can see why Ruppert has reached these conclusions.

The case for collapse is made by Ruppert in his connection between the financial system and oil supplies/energy flows.  Growth of this economic system is impossible because recent oil reserve discoveries (they are all in hard to reach places like 6 miles under the ocean) do little more than confirm the fact that extraction rates of oil supplies will continue to rapidly decline, leading to a quick and painful dissolution of the mechanisms of modern society. If our infrastructure was able to handle such a decentralization, America would be in better shape, but Ruppert destroys that myth by dissecting and reporting  facts regarding global oil and gas infrastructure ($22 trillion in investment needed by 2030 to support the global energy-supply infrastructure), the electric distribution grid (coal supplies need oil for extraction), roads and bridges (a $1.6 trillion investment needed to avoid bridges collapsing), an over-reliance of commuting (asphalt prices and their tie to oil, impact of driving on economic growth in America) and the alternative energy infrastructure (which does not and will not exist).

For Ruppert, Iraq is confirmation that the US government knows what is about to happen to global energy supplies, if we are fighting over the scraps of the remaining global oil fields that isn’t good news. Since Obama hasn’t even begun to withdraw from Iraq or Afghanistan supports this notion. By the time Mike Ruppert ties together the dependence of our food system on cheap petroleum (10 calories of petroleum for every calorie of food, not counting for transport), the case he’s making for a major reshuffling of society is clear… but you are only halfway through the book.

He continues by detailing how we should evaluate alternative energy solutions, that we should focus on how much energy we get out based on how much energy we put in and then completes this point by discussing why none of the available alternatives (solar, wind, tidal, etc…; all ranging from 3 barrels of oil energy equivalent for every one barrel of oil equivalent that we put in or 3:1 net energy) can match the net energy of oil (200:1 in 1900 and now 50:1 in 2009). But there is an alternative that works: localization. When everything  requires tremendous energy inputs to bring it to you from far away, the most straightforward response is to make something and use it locally. This is where electricity sources like solar PV panels and mini-wind turbines can help.

Ruppert closes out the book with a realistic assessment of money and how it will respond to oil depletion, our system of fiat currency and fractional reserve banking has only existed since the late 1960s because of rapid oil extraction. This is where Ruppert’s book shines as he lays out a 25 point plan for creating stability in the face of oil extraction rate depletion. Hi solutions would build local resilience and quickly reduce oil consumption if implemented on a Federal or even local level. Sadly, none of these solutions are being considered at a national level in the US because the paradigm is still so focused on solutions for growth that it ignores solutions for managed contraction. Only one of these 25 approaches is being considered by California, and that’s the legalization of marijuana which could lead to pratical hemp production offsetting the need for many petroleum intensive fabrics and materials.

If Ruppert makes one mistake, it is that he appears to assume the rest of the world will follow the United States down the drain, while collapse for the US appears inevitable, the social fabric in other nations may be able to withstand the challenges of the oil age much better.

So in summary, Ruppert’s claim is that the monetary system, supported by ever expanding supplies in oil will collapse bringing down the system of globalization and the failing infrastructure and weak communities of the US will lead to a long period of civil unrest.

Regardless of your preconceived notions, Ruppert’s book is filled with clear concise charts, graphs, news articles and summaries which outline the magnitude of our current global predicament. I’m not completely sold on the concept of collapse, I think societies tend to seek out equilibrium in the face of dire circumstances. However, complex civilizations have fallen apart when energy sources were no longer accessible (see Ancient Rome and peak wood supplies). What is inevitable is that business as usual cannot and will not continue in the face of physical constraints imposed by reality.  It is truly disappointing to see the citizens of North America, and specifically the leadership of its nations, completely unwilling to acknowledge the magnitude of these problems.

Mike Ruppert and his team blog regularly, take some time to check out their work. The fact that its based on regularly available headlines might be enough to convince you that the global status quo of the last 50 years is changing rapidly.

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Post tags: collapse, economic crisis, energy, net energy