RADIO
ECOSHOCK SHOW February 27th, 2009.
Holy Hanna - the wheels are coming off the gilded wagon of capitalism. This is Radio Ecoshock and I'm at least one Alex Smith, maybe two. Part of me is excited that the zombie system killing the planet has cracked open. My other side is fearful. I like peaceful streets and grocery stores with food in them. Damn it, I'm cheering and weeping for both sides!
Over the
past 3 years of weekly podcasts and radio broadcasts, I've had the good fortune
to interview top experts. Like many of
you, I've nervously scanned both the bad economic prospects, and the worse
threats of climate change.
Let's
have a little chat.
After
last week's program, where I realized the climate has already tipped, I briefly
considered ending Radio Ecoshock. Part
of my mission was to save the climate, to stop the change. Now, with the latest science in, I don't
think that is possible. We have
inadvertently tripped a switch that will end up, as James Hansen says, with a
different planet. Just with the
greenhouse emissions already released, and committed by our dependence on coal
and oil, the irreversible melting of the Polar ice has begun, along with the
world's glaciers. It's just a matter of
how fast, how bad, and can we adapt.
In this
time together, I'll give you my best guesses, and my own puny plans, and
chatter from the Net.
Is it
co-incidence that the financial world has collapsed just as we learn our
climate fate? I don't think so. The same people who looted our pension funds and banks were
allied with the fossil fuel and automotive lobbies that quashed the early
warnings on climate. Even deeper, three
out of four Americans now know how serious climate is. They've seen it in the fires, floods,
droughts, and storms. A poll done by
Rasmussen Reports found 23 percent of Americans, one in four, say it is somewhat likely that global
warming will destroy human civilization within the next century.
In the
early arrival of birds, the strange weather.
We know, and we have lost confidence in both the system and
ourselves. There is no return to
normal. There is only adaptation to
constant change.
You and I
need to prepare for turbulent times - on two different but related paths. We hope to stay fed, in our homes, in the
short term. Yet some of us may have
to move, as climate migrants, in the coming decade or two. We'll call it the three month strategy, and
the three year plan. That is coming up,
along with another installment of my audio blog on long-term food storage,
where Alex finds out not everything goes as expected.
Basic to
all this is the idea that you need to move from being an information consumer,
a witness to tragic times - to become an actor in your own life and
community. I know how easy it is to sit
spell-bound at the screen, watching unheard of events unfold. But one of the most astounding results will
be people thrown awake from the former system. Just as Soviet Communism fell, we are now engaged in a similar
disruption, the fall of greed-is-good capitalism. The replacement could be better or worse, and that is where you
come in. Whether you build a better
world, or just choose to survive in a sustainable way, it is time to get
engaged.
The
corporate system has always demanded most of our life energy. People worked crazy hours, sometimes at two
or three jobs. Hardly an idle hour was
left - and those were filled with mindless entertainment for our worn out
brains and bodies. Now the system is
letting us go, by the millions. Even
the media is breaking apart. We are
back on our own, to do as we will.
I
challenge myself to learn, and act for survival, while building sustainable
community around me. You too.
When it
comes to the economy, the gilded age has passed. Even mass media admits the world's banking
system is insolvent beyond the resources of any government. Like the airliner hitting birds, pilot
Obama is trying to ditch in the Hudson River with a minimum loss of
lives. In my opinion, he's chosen the
wrong people to do it. Most of the
financial advisors are coming from the same Wall Street crowd who screwed the
system. Tim Geithner was head of the
New York Federal Reserve, one of the chief enablers of the sub-prime mess and
the off-book gambling by banks. Who did
Obama pick to oversee the restructuring of the American auto industry? Another Wall Street honcho, Steven Rattner,
the co-Founder of Quadrangle Group LLC, one of leveraged-buyout companies who
did so much damage to corporate debt loads.
Oh yeah, Rattner just happens to be a top Democratic Party fundraiser as
well. Are there no experts outside Wall
Street, and outside the Democratic insiders?
The
latest plan is to give hedge funds, those jackals, a trillion dollars of tax
payer money to buy out worthless paper assets from banks. That after the Administration pulled it's
previous bank rescue plan at the last moment.
It seems inevitable that the big American banks, like Citi and Bank of
America, will be nationalized, meaning those multi-trillion holes of bad debt and
imaginary money will all be laid on the taxpayer. It's a last ditch desperate gamble.
I like my
regular three meals a day. I like
finding supplies at the store when I want them. My old life was pretty good, so part of me hopes that the Obama
magic can stall off the crash as long as they can. Every day is a good day.
But in my opinion, no we can't. The
old economy was a planet killer based on greed and lies, and it is falling
as I speak. Maybe the illusion will
continue for a year or two. But the
patient has already died. That means
big changes for you and I, whether we like or not, and mostly, we won't like
it.
There
may be an upside. Those millions of unemployed, and millions
of soon to be homeless, will be free to get active in the community, and in the
streets. That could end up with a
demand for fascism, or a Great Leader syndrome. But there is an equal chance that the big systems will crash,
revealing more local organization.
Already we are seeing giant corporations like General Motors in their
death throes. We are also seeing
national governments dissolve, unable to form a government. In Iceland, Latvia, the Ukraine, and
possible even in Britain. Of course,
such national chaos and weakness is common in many developing countries, which
may not develop much after all.
That's a
new development I'm trying to emphasize.
The bigger they come, the harder they fall.
Municipal
governments, weak and in debt as they are, may become much more important in
your life, and your life support systems.
And new micro-networks will spring up, based on Faith, community, or
other causes.
You will recognize
the ladder of homelessness. People
try and sell to buy lower cost housing, but no one can get financing. Many lose their homes, and go to rent. If key jobs are lost, the next step can be a
travel trailer or old gas guzzling motor home at an RV Park, or even on a side
road. The RV Parks are already filling
up their monthly rental spaces right now.
Then it's
a tent. Even before this crash, a
series of tent cities appeared in America.
For example, around the Seattle area, after a period of police
harassment, there is now a rotating system of tent cities. The tenters get a field or big Church yard
for three months in one area, and then have to move to another part of the
region. Of course, this makes education
for the kids nearly impossible. Church
groups and other community organizations are arranging gardening spots, and
daily food runs, for these homeless people, some of whom were recently Middle
Class.
For what
it's worth, I think your family should have a tent, and the equipment to cook
there, in case of any emergency, whether it's financial, climatic, or a natural
earthquake. Add that to your planning
list: a tent, sleeping bags, a tarp, metal cookware.
Most of
us with an income face a different challenge: should we
stay where we are, or prepare to move soon? It's flight
or fight in a way.
I found a
good chain of discussion under the title "Survival Retreat vs.
Neighborhood Survival" by Dr. Richard. It appeared on the oildrum.com, originating at virginiapreppersnetwork.blogspot.com
on February 11th, 2009.
Richard
writes, quote:
"There are four major flaws in the survival retreat separate from your home concept:
1.
There
are significant liabilities and social problems with communal retreats where
one does not own the property - you are vulnerable to the actions of the
others, particularly the property owner.
2.
2. Property left at unattended retreats is
vulnerable to theft and vandalism. This is going to be a growing problem as the
economic depression gets worse, especially if we have economic collapse.
3. Getting to the retreat would be
problematic in the event that it is actually needed - particularly in martial
law scenarios where the military and law enforcement block traffic at key
intersections or in cases where there are fuel shortages.
4. Relatively undeveloped retreats with a
trailer and undeveloped land may not be sufficiently developed for long-term
survival and offer insufficient space for storage of the various preps and
other items you need. Many of these items would likely be at your day-to-day
residence and you cannot assume that you can transport everything at the last
minute.
My view
is that survival retreats only work if you live there full-time. Furthermore,
although remote locations are further removed from the masses, they are also
further removed from jobs, markets, customers, hospitals, and many other useful
infrastructure and will be harder pressed to gather a sufficiently large group
to cover all of the tasks needed in a true long-term survival scenario."
I
agree. In my own case, there is no hope
of selling off our condo. No buyers with
money. So we have taken a two tracked
approach. First of all, we are now
homesteading where we live. Right
in the city. I'll talk about that. We also had the foresight a few years ago to
buy a trailer in a small village in the mountains. We do have a place to run - but I can tell you from personal
experience of living from the land, without electricity, for ten years, older
people are not likely to be able to make that change suddenly. It takes years of preparation, learning and
set-up to provide most of your own basics, from food to heat. I'm hoping we don't have to fly away.
Homesteading
in the city has several components.
First, I suggest you need to switch from fast foods to self cooked
meals, coming from bulk foods stored now.
In just a few minutes, I'll tell you exactly how I've created food
insurance for our family.
Second,
you need to consider local food supplies, and how they function. After decades of flying in winter fruit from
South America, many of us are not prepared for the natural economy, which only
provides in the appropriate season. I'm
going to call that the pulse economy.
The third
step is community organizing, right down to your neighbours. That's hard, as we've all been trained to
individuate not communicate. Many of us
hardly know our neighbours, but we will need them in the times to come. I won't be discussing that in this program.
Now it's
time for my audio blog on preparing food to survive. If you have listened to Radio Ecoshock, you will know there
are tremendous stresses developing in our food system. Just this week, for example, the State of
California, which provides the bulk of fruits, nuts and vegetables, announced
there is zero water allowance for the most productive area in the Central
Valley. The Central Valley Project
which irrigates those lands simply has no water for sale, due to the continuing
drought brought on by climate shift.
Another state run water system has 15 percent of it's normal water
supply.
That's
just one of a long list of crop problems, many caused by climate change, that
will make food more expensive and harder to get. Do not fool yourself. The
full shelves you see in the Supermarket are not backed by massive warehouses. The food system shifted to just-in-time
delivery, were trucks arrive directly from California, Mexico, or Florida. Where the United States and Canada used to
store more than a year's worth of grains, experts like Lester Brown now warn
the world food storage has fallen below two months worth.
Here is a
record of what I'm doing to protect my family.
[Audio Food Blog][Alex
describes his 3 month project to store food long-term on the cheap]
I could
spend a whole program on the ways you can economize and do without in the
coming Depression. We'll do that
soon. In this program, we'll also touch
on Plan B, where you either decide to get out of Dodge, as they say, or are
forced from your home by conditions beyond your control.
Just
wrapping up the homesteading at home idea, you also need to look around and see
what natural food may be available. For
example, we do have a salmon bearing stream within walking distance, and I
suppose it would be possible to hunt for ducks. We take some time to learn about edible wild plants, where the
mushrooms and berries grow, and all that.
You'll
need some energy, in case the power grid goes splat.
I have about 100 pounds of propane in various tanks, plus about a
month's worth of wood out on our patio.
There are boxes of candles in our pantry, plus some LED headlights, and
wind-up flashlights. We are also
blessed with a 50 Watt solar panel and two deep discharge batteries. I figure we could hang in for three months
without power, but we still need some heavy insulated drapes to survive with
just a fireplace in the winter months.
We have lived that way before.
It's tough, but not necessarily unpleasant.
Please
pay attention to this idea of a pulse economy.
That means that instead of regular services, like water, electricity,
food on demand - the new economy is more likely to come in waves. The power may be available for a few hours a
day, like in most of the undeveloped world.
Food, in particular, naturally comes in waves along with Nature's
seasons. It makes total sense to buy
lots of potatoes when they are cheap in October, and store them in a cool but
not frozen place, where they can last at least until the following March. We did that this year in our condo, and noticed
that the price of potatoes doubled by January.
Money saved, and potato security.
You will
learn when the rhubarb comes in, the asparagus, the green beans, and buy them
by the bushel from farmers, or at farmers' markets. Then pressure can them into glass sealer jars for the coming
year. The same later in the summer for
the fruits, which just need a dehydrator or a simple boiling water canner. Remember, you must have a pressure canner to preserve most vegetables, cooked meals like
stews, and all meats. Home canned goods
do not depend on freezer space or electricity at all. Many are already cooked, so you have food to heat up over a fire,
if the gas or electricity goes out.
Note that the power just came on in Arkansas this week, a full month
after a freak ice storm in late January.
That can happen anywhere, as it did in Quebec Canada a few years
ago. Ditto hurricanes and earth
quakes. Not to speak of a global flu
pandemic.
So you
learn to harvest food when it comes.
I expect industrial production will be the same way. Right now the stores and sales lots are full
of excess goods that consumers are afraid or too broke to buy. That production will be sold off at sales
prices. And that's the end of that consumer
dream. The shippers who take raw
materials to Chinese factories are parking their big freighters or going
bankrupt. The factories are shutting
down all over the world, as demand slumps.
It may be a decade before they start up again, if ever. I predict that things like socks and cooking
pots will appear sporadically in the remaining outlet stores - exactly like
life in the former Soviet Union.
When things appear, buy them if you can, adapting to the pulse economy
of goods.
Speaking
of comparisons to the Soviet Union, I highly recommend Dmitry Orlov's tips for
surviving hard times, at cluborlov.blogspot.com. I also recommend his book "Reinventing
Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects" It is very useful reading for those shocked
to find themselves in the new Depression.
And he has free audio mp3s of his talks at the blog. Also, check out my Radio Ecoshock interview
with Dmitry Orlov at our web site, ecoshock dot org. That's in the show for May 30th, 2008, in our archive.
But in
the longer term, is it really time to look for a better place to live? How friendly will your city be when the
riots hit? How defensible is your
little hideaway in the city? Will
rising seas overwhelm your real estate?
What about wild fires driven by killer heat waves? Hmmmm.
Maybe you are ready for Eco-Migration.
It
recently came out that Baron Nicholas Stern, former chief World Bank economist
and author of the British Stern Report, experts mass refugees due to climate
change. Charles Hanley of Associate
Press said that without significant carbon controls, Stern expects climate
change to quote. "transform where people can live. People would move on
a massive scale. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would
have to move if you talk about 4-, 5-, 6-degree increases" Stern is talking 7 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit
and likely local if not global wars because, quote "there's no way the
world can handle that kind of population move in the time period in which it
would take place."
Most of
the billions who will be forced to move are in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. They will go toward the cool
and water. That means either the
remaining wet tropics, but more likely, like the birds, and the fish, toward
the poles. Welcome to Siberia,
Scandinavia, New Zealand, or Canada - the new most populous countries in a
climate damaged world.
[In the
audio broadcast/podcast/download for 090227 there is a 12
minute interview with one of the world’s pre-eminent experts on
Eco-migration: Dr. Norman Myers. He is
currently a Professor at Oxford University, a visiting professor at many other
prestigious universities, author of 19 books, and one of only two people in the
world to have won the top 3 environmental prizes.
He wrote
a pioneering paper on Eco-migration in 1993.
We discuss the problem, including what may happen to the masses in China
pushed out by the drought in the North.]
In the
meantime, check out the
article by Dankar Vedantam in the Washington Post February 23rd. The title is "Climate Fears Are
Driving 'Ecomigration' Across Globe"
In the story, an American couple from Montgomery Country decide to move
to New Zealand, hoping to provide a safer climate for their two children. Many more of our American listeners will
decide to move North to Canada. Perhaps
we'll do a show on what that means, the hoops to jump currently for
immigration. But in the longer run, I
expect an unstoppable march and migration from the United States North,
following the rain, cooler temperatures, and places where crops still
grow. The new northern temperate zones.
While all
the world can see the climate shifting, we still have lots of Congressmen and
Senators who just don't get it. Listen
to this Texan Congressman at last week's hearings of the Subcommittee on
Energy and the Environment.
[Texan
clip – a sceptic who admits warming, but thinks Nature has changed before, so
humans have nothing to do with it]
I don't
know how Chairman Ed Markey, who does really get it, how he can sit
there so patiently, listening to the flat earthers say that our huge industrial
exhaust has nothing to do with climate change.
Still lots of oil and coal lobby money for campaign funds for the
deniers, I guess. At least the Texans
have stopped denying climate change exists.
Worse, I
keep finding comments from right-wing bloggers saying "Oh well, there has
always been climate change, nothing we can do". Yes, there have been hot house worlds, which developed over long
time periods, not a couple of hundred years.
And everybody larger than a mouse died!
Or this
spiritual cable TV host, who thinks that the Earth just wants to be warm:
[quote
from spiritualist Alan Steinman, saying perhaps Gaia just wants to warm up, and
humans may be part of that plan]
Yeah. The seasons we all knew were just
tired. Earth was ready for a
change. Our stupidity of hauling out
millions of years of concentrated solar energy, to drive out to the Dairy
Queen, is Gaia's will!
That's
when I need to practice my belly breathing.
It's a technique I picked up recently to focus on the body's breath and
release stress. We'll all need
something to keep our cool, while everyone around us is losing theirs.
Oh, what
fun and adventure we have ahead of us.
I'm Alex
Smith, for Radio Ecoshock. Go ahead and
steal a bunch of mp3s from our free web site, at ecoshock dot org. Load up you IPOD, computer or CD player, and
get ready. The change is upon us.
In this
program you hear song clips from reggae master Jimmy Cliff, The Harder They
Come, Mark Knopfler and Emmy Lou Harris, and Canadian artist Shane Philip,
"See You In the Sun" Leonard
Cohen with "Closing Time". Check out You tube for The Monster Crash with
lyrics by Martin Eiger, and the comedy bit Greensumption from
nuganics.com.