Showing posts with label Woo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Woo. Show all posts

Tuesday, 17 July 2018

Autobiographical Notes, Part 5: Becoming a Kollapsnik

Kincardine Community Garden

In the process of writing these autobiographical notes (1, 2, 3, 4), I realized how much living through the downsizing and breakup of Ontario Hydro prepared me to accept the ideas of Peak Oil and the Limits to Growth. I had learned a lot about the limitations of both human organizations and technology as solutions for our problems.

Then I watched my kids and their spouses spend their time as members of the "precariat", working underpaid, part time and totally insecure jobs. They never joined the ranks of the homeless, but on several occasions that was only because I was there to help. Many others are not so fortunate. This convinced me that our society is already failing miserably, not even capable of providing the basic needs of many of its members. This despite the fact that others, sheltered from reality by their wealth and privilege, see this as the best of times, with nothing but further progress in sight for the future.

In 2005 I retired from Hydro One at age 51. Typically people in that position start accumulating toys and having fun with them (hopefully—the fun seems to be the hard part). This is often financed by going back to work on contract for Hydro One, OPG or Bruce Power, collecting an excellent wage and a pension as well. But if I had wanted to go on working I would have stayed in the job I already had.

C&I Graphics, my design, printing and sign making company kept me busy about half of the available working hours, which was enough. For the first time in years I managed to get enough sleep. But I also knew about Peak Oil and the likelihood of it leading to some sort of crash/collapse. Such a crash would mean that neither my pension or my business could be relied on to support my family and I. My mind inevitably turned to preparing for what was coming.

You might ask, why not get involved in some sort of activism? Well, it seems to me that the efforts of most activists are focused on bandaid fixes to minor aspects of the problems facing us, and that they are unlikely to have any great amount of success because doing so would rock the "business as usual" (BAU) boat too much. Further, the activist themselves are highly invested in the continuation of BAU, even though it lies at the heart of the problems they claim to want fixed.

The only exception that comes to mind would by activism in the service of identity politics, where there has been some success in addressing racial and LGBTQ issues. Probably because the changes these people are seeking don't much threaten BAU. I congratulate these folks on their successes, but identity politics has little to do with the issues that concern me most.

In any case, it was clear to me that what we faced was a predicament, not a problem. In other words, something that couldn't be solved but to which we would just have to adapt. My main concern was, and is, to determine what those adaptations need to be and get started making them. BAU is doomed and there is no chance that we'll fix what's wrong with it before it is too late. But I do believe that being well prepared will greatly increase one's chances of making it through collapse relatively undamaged.

If you weren't there, I would guess that it is difficult to imagine the degree of panic in the peak oil community in the years leading up to 2008. It really seemed like we were facing a hard, fast crash and it was going to happen soon.

Almost everyone these days is dependent on the global infrastructure network for the very necessities of life. An economic crash, an energy crisis, the many consequences of climate change, either jointly or severally, all promised to damage that network and leave us in a very tough spot. As a former employee of an infrastructure company, the failure of infrastructure seems quite plausible to me. Indeed I was personally involved in the efforts to patch the power grid back together following the widespread outage in north eastern North America in August of 2003. This sort of thing was not some hypothetical possibility to me, but rather a very immediate reality.

And I had always had a keen interest in doing things for myself, making things and understanding how things work, which lead easily enough to a collapse preparation mindset. The only question was how exactly to start preparing. Even in 2006 I didn't think collapse would be sudden and permanent. I've written at length about this, but the upshot is that, initially at least, being prepared for relatively short infrastructure outages would be a big help.

I'm somewhat concerned that the following will be taken as virtue signaling or boasting. It has happened before—I prepare a list of things I've done to prepare for collapse, and somebody sees it as a challenge. Nothing could be further from my intention, which is more to show you how I have put a lot of effort into not actually accomplishing very much.

We built our house in 1982 with energy efficiency in mind. We have R40 in the walls, R60 in the attic, double pane windows (lots of them facing south), well insulated and sealed doors and an air exchanger to maintain air quality.

We have electric heat, with a long range plan to add a wood stove, which we never seem to get around to. The expense of having a chimney built is probably the biggest obstacle, even though the foundation for the chimney was part of the initial build. But hopefully later this year we'll get started on that project.

As it turned out, overheating in the summer was a bigger problem than being cold in the winter. In mid 1980s we put in an attic fan, which was a big help since it almost always cools off in the evening here and we can cool the house by drawing in cooler air from outside.

In 2007 we built a set of awnings to go over the south and west windows on the main floor. This stops the house from heating up during the day in the summer. We take the awnings down in the fall to let the sun in for the winter and put them up again in the spring. A bit of extra work, but worth the trouble. And the awnings have worked well enough that we didn't have to replace our window air conditioning unit when it failed.

Kincardine is often very cloudy in the winter, so solar heating is less effective here than you might think. Our large south facing windows are sometimes more of a liability than a asset in the winter. Over the last few years I built insulating panels to slip into the windows to reduce heat loss. But there are a couple of problems with this.

You have to get a good air seal on the warm side of the panels, or warm moisture laden air gets to the cold side and condenses, which isn't good for the wooden window frames. I haven't found a solution that allows the panels to be taken in and out easily, on a daily basis, but "tuck tape", normally used for sealing joints in vapour barrier, works well for those panels that can be left in all winter.

The other thing is that when the sun does shine on a window with an insulating panel in it, it really heats up the sunny side of the panels, enough to crack the window glass. We've only had this happen once so far. But this past winter I pulled back to just putting the panels in windows that are shaded most of the winter. I'm looking for a seal that would allow the panels to be inserted and removed easily.

At any rate, our house is well enough insulated and sealed that it takes a fairly long power outage before the temperature inside drops much. So far, most power outages hereabouts are less than 8 hours long, during which time the temperature in the house only drops a few degrees.

It was pretty clear to me by 2006 that food would be a major problem during a collapse and I had always had an interest in gardening and cooking. That spring, I set up a garden in raised beds in our front yard. We have continued with this since then, gradually expanding and improving the garden.

But our front yard is not large and limits the amount of food we can grow. In 2010 a community garden started up in Kincardine and I became involved, taking one plot in 2010 and 2 plots ever since then. Since 2015 I have been the co-ordinator for the garden, keeping things running fairly smoothly and interfacing with the municipality, which is actually quite supportive.

Even so, we still don't have a lot of garden space, certainly not enough to be anywhere near self-sufficient, even in the vegetables that grow well around here. For a couple of years, 2012 and 2013, we had some space in the large garden of friends who have a farm north of Kincardine. The gardens worked out well, as did sharing the space, but it was too far from home, too much time spent driving and I was still running C&I Graphics, so time was at a premium.

I have more time now that C&I is gone, but I'm co-ordinating the Community Garden, writing this blog and spending time with our grand kids, so we haven't tried to expand the gardens any further.

The space we have is enough to let us learn what works around here and how to cope with the problems that inevitably come up. That first year we used the techniques in the book Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholemew, but we learned the limits of that method pretty quickly. The plants are quite close together and in raised beds. You have to use really rich soil to support that sort of density, and even with good soil, there is a limit to how close together plants can be and prosper, since they are competing for sunlight. The raised beds are good in that they warm up and dry out earlier in the spring so you can get a head start on the season. But they dry out quicker in the summer and must be watered religiously.

The good news is that we live in the middle of a productive farming area and no one hereabouts need fear starvation in the event of a collapse, provided someone can organize a switchover to production for local consumption and the use of farming techniques that don't require a global scale network of suppliers.

In the short run, I am more concerned about occasional interruptions in deliveries. So we started, as far back as 2006, to stock more food in the house, using the "store what you eat, eat what you store" method. Turns out that it's convenient to mostly have everything we need in the house and it saves money to stock up during sales and to buy in bulk.

Beyond the food storage, we've also worked on being well prepared for emergencies. I've written more about that in a couple of posts in the early days of this blog, here and here.

Carolynn and I have always enjoyed cooking from scratch, having learned a lot from our mothers and grandmothers. I've been baking bread for more than 40 years now. We have a couple of hand cranked flour mills, some grain in stock and more is available locally. During the last few years I've taken up cheese making.

We've made an effort to reduce the waste we produce, composting everything that is compostable, switching to cloth shopping bags, and cloth rags instead of paper towels, using less, repairing what can be fixed, reusing where possible, and recycling.

In addition to the gardening, bread and cheese making, I've been developing a number of useful skills, including wood working and blade sharpening, and weaving willow baskets from willow I've harvested locally.

But no man is an island and it soon became clear to me that all my efforts would be easier as part of a like minded community. So I set out to find a group of people to prepare with and rely on. This turned out to be even harder than I had expected.

I started mentioning what I was finding out about collapse to friends and family. Most rejected the idea as absurd, only a very few even really listened to what I had to say and fewer still ended up agreeing with me.

Around 2010 I started hearing about the Transition Town Movement, got myself a copy of the Transition Handbook and began wondering how to get a Transition Town started here in Kincardine. I am not any sort of extrovert and had no idea of how to get a group of people together.

One day in the spring of 2011 some people from the local anti wind turbine group dropped by my print shop to pick up some posters I had printed for them at the same time as one of the members of the Meaford Transition Town group came to pick up some Farmers Market flyers. We got talking about Transition and decided to try to set up a group in Kincardine. Something that would be more positive than the negative activism the anti wind people were involved in (as they themselves said).

In 2011 and 2012 Transition was a big thing in Southern Ontario, but since then it has petered out and you hardly hear about it at all. I've since talked to a number of people and heard that there is a tendency for the transition groups to be co-opted by activists (various sorts of "antis") and used as platform to further their goals, with transition (preparation for collapse) soon fading into the background.

Anyway, we had several meetings and set up the Penetagore Transition Town in the summer/fall of 2011. I met some new people, some of whom became good friends. But there was a lot of "woo" (beliefs not supported by evidence) that rubbed me the wrong way. Still, I had read that Transition Towns were often made up of a mix of such folks and rationalists, and if you didn't make a big deal of it, it was possible for them to work together effectively. So I hung in there.

It wasn't long, though, before it became clear that many of the people in the group were activists and looking for something to fight against rather than something positive to do, despite what they had originally said. The issue of bringing natural gas to Kincardine came up and they were eager to oppose it. When it became clear that this was the direction the Transition Town really wanted to go, I dropped out of the group and then it pretty much fell apart. Nothing more has been done since then, but I am happy to say that I am back on speaking terms with everyone who was involved. That's an important thing in a town this small and who knows what may develop in the future.

In the fall of 2011 I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and in the winter of 2012, while recovering from the surgery, I started this blog. I was writing to take out some of the frustration I felt.

Since the enlightenment, the scientific method has enabled us to build up a good bit of reliable knowledge about the world we live in, always subject to revision as that same method refines and expands what we know. This "scientific consensus" is really the best understanding we have and you'd be a fool to ignore it, even though it is far from a final and absolute truth. But many ideologies today would have us believe whatever suits them, regardless of what the scientific consensus says. Two of those ideologies are of primary interest here.

On one side we have what I've been calling BAU (Business as Usual), made up people who believe that business can just continue along as usual, that we live in the best of times and that progress will continue and keep making things even better. Unfortunately this implies that humanity and the economy will keep growing. Most people don't see any woo in that, but such exponential growth has inevitable consequences, especially on a finite planet like ours. I talked about this at greater length in a post entitled the Biggest Lie.

Industrial civilization has turned out to be a wonderful device for turning natural resources into pollution, while producing a small amount of comfort and convenience for a few of the more fortunate of its members. Unfortunately there are finite quantities of both natural resources and sinks for pollution on this planet and BAU refuses to recognize this. We are currently running into some of these limits: depletion of fossil fuels, climate change, ocean acidification, shrinking habitat space and so on. Even if we find a way around one limit, we'll soon run into another. This was explained very clearly in The Limits to Growth, a book which I reviewed in great detail in a series of posts back in 2016.

One of the greatest "achievements" of BAU is the way it has convinced almost everyone that it is "scientific"—science and progress are firmly linked together in our minds, even though the scientific consensus clearly points out what's wrong with BAU.

To make the situation even worse, it seems that there is very little chance that BAU will change. The short term interests of a great many powerful people and institutions count on BAU continuing on its present course.

On the other side we have the counter culture, what I call the "Crunchies", who see what's wrong with BAU and would like to fix it. But they are fooled by BAU's claims about science and thus refuse to accept much of the scientific consensus. In the process they end up believing in a lot of things that aren't supported by the evidence—woo, in other words.

Sadly this means that many of the efforts made by Crunchies to change the world for the better are misdirected and a lot of effort is spent fighting things that aren't doing any harm while ignoring things that are.

My position is that of being a Crunchy (opposed to BAU), but without the woo. Indeed if I had it to do again, I'd probably call this blog "Crunchy Without the Woo". Starting in May of 2016 I discussed this idea in a series of post entitled "BAU, Crunchies and Woo".

Surprisingly, I've found there are a few other people in the world who think like this, and a number of them are regular readers of this blog. We don't agree 100% on everything, but then no one does. And that is something we all need to keep in mind while we are searching for people we can work with. We also need to keep in mind that people (including me) aren't all of a piece—we hold a variety of beliefs, some of which reflect reality and some which do not. And of course this is not a black and white thing, but a range of grays. It is quite possible to work together with people who are just reasonably close to being "of the same mind", and to reach decisions by consensus where everyone is just fairly happy with the results. Especially in the life and death situations we will face as collapse progresses, when it will be more important to survive that be proven absolutely right on every issue.

I find myself especially drawn to "working together in groups for mutual support". This idea has immense potential to insulate the members of such groups from the chaos in the world around them and to meet their human needs in ways that BAU does not do well even now and will do even less so as time passes. Indeed I would say that the formation and operation of such groups is at the heart of the response we need to make to the collapse of BAU.

I think many different variations on this theme need to be tried in order to see what works and what doesn't. And we need to be open to adopting what works for other people and discarding that parts of our own approach that aren't working. I am a big fan of "dissensus", which is the opposite of consensus, and consists of agreeing to disagree and wishing the other guy well while he goes his own way. In the coming decades, as energy become less available and the economy contracts and can no longer support the current level of centralization and complexity, we will be forced to decentralize, relocalize and simplify our society. Under these conditions, dissensus will become somewhat easier—we simply won't have the wherewithal to force our ideas on other groups, nor they on us.

Within these groups, we will find ourselves not worrying so much about a rigid ideology, and more about friendship and helping each other when the going gets tough. So the thing to do now is find some friends and practice getting along with them. This is by no means easy, but it is the direction we need to be heading. It is encouraging to find, that even though I am an introvert and quite shy, I have a fairly large network of acquaintances to draw upon—the people I knew while working at Ontario Hydro/Hydro One, the customers and suppliers I got to know while running C&I Graphics, the people at the Community Garden, my wife's large family (including our own kids and grandkids) and her far ranging networks, the group of guys organized by my friend Dave Leigh, who get together with regularly for coffee, and the people his wife Sylvia gets together to play trivia once a month at the Royal Canadian Legion.

Well, I think that just about finishes up my series of autobiographical notes. Next time I'm planning to start a new series of posts, looking in more detail at strategies for living through collapse.


Links to the rest of this series of posts:

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Thursday, 8 March 2018

Six Years of Blogging

Shortly after the new year I realized that I've been writing this blog for 6 years now.

I have published over 75 posts and a lot of them are in long series. If you happen to discover this blog in the middle of one of those, it may be difficult to find you way back to the start of the series, or to find out what else is here that might interest you. So I took the time to create a site map, which is live on the blog now, and can be accessed via the link at the right end of the row of links near the top of the page, just under the orange rectangle with the title and tag line. I've also started to put a list of links to all the other posts in a series at the bottom of each post in the series--this should be all done in the next few weeks.

In the process of setting up the site map I got a little distracted and stopped to read some of the earlier posts that I hadn't looked at in a while. I wasn't expecting to be very impressed with that early work, but actually I find myself quite happy with it and would change very little if I had it over to do again.But to judge from the number of page views for posts before 2016, only a very few people have bothered to go back and have a look at those early posts.

I can certainly recommend the first 10 posts as a good introduction to what I'm talking about here.


The Early Days

Emergency Preparation and Deliberate Descent were my first looks at what individuals, families and communities can do to cope in the age of scarcity.


Emergency Preparation


Deliberate Descent

In Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo I took a closer look at the lack of a reality based response from both the BAU (Business As Usual) people and the counterculture or "Crunchy" folks, and what a reality based response might actually look like.


Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo

For those who are eagerly awaiting more on what individuals, family and communities might do to weather the collapse of industrial civilization, that will be the subject of my next series of posts. Before going ahead with that, though, I'm going to update the "About Me" section of the blog, with some more detailed autobiographical notes.

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Saturday, 2 July 2016

Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo, Part 5: Life in the Age of Scarcity

This is a direct continuation of my last post, and if you haven't read that post yet, now would be a good time, especially if you want to make much sense of this one. In that post I was talking about "a reality based approach to life in that age of scarcity", which is the tagline for this blog. I talked about the end of that tagline, "the Age of Scarcity" and how it seems inevitable that if BAU continues on "as usual", it will lead to a collapse. Then I talked about the start of it, "a reality based approach". People, both BAU and Crunchy, buy into a lot of woo to support their ideologies. I'd like them to give up on that, accept reality and start talking steps to prepare for it.

If we do nothing, we may be "lucky" enough to survive and find ourselves coping with the devastating effects of randomly eliminating half or more of the population. That's certainly where BAU is heading and I would like to avoid having to picking up the pieces as part of the shell shocked remainder still alive after collapse is well under way.

To Life

And that leads us to the "to life" part of my tagline. As I've just said, I think the human race is about to fall on hard times. But unlike some, I don't think that mankind is about to be completely wiped out. Those of us who pull through will do so because we've found a way to adapt "to life in the age of scarcity" and keep going under very different conditions from what we are now accustomed to. We'll have to learn to be satisfied with "just enough" instead of always wanting more, and we'll have to get much better at working together in groups for mutual support instead of separately as lone individuals or nuclear families. And the sooner we start making these changes in our lives, the better off we'll be.

I find myself especially drawn to "working together in groups for mutual support". This idea has immense potential to insulate the members of such groups from the chaos in the world around them and to meet their human needs in ways that BAU does not do well even now and will do less so as time passes. Indeed I would say that the formation and operation of such groups is at the heart of the response we need to make to the collapse of BAU.

I think many different variations on this theme need to be tried in order to see what works and what doesn't. And even when it has become clear what doesn't work, there will still be many more or less right ways of doing it. I am a big fan of "dissensus", which is the opposite of consensus, and consists of agreeing to disagree and wishing the other guy well while he does so. In the coming decades, as energy become less available and the economy contracts and can no longer support the current level of centralization and complexity, we will be forced to decentralize, relocalize and simplify our society. Under these conditions, dissensus will become somewhat easier—we simply won't have the wherewithal to force our ideas on other groups, nor they on us.

Having said that, it is important within your own particular group to have a clear idea of what you are trying to do. As an example, here's a rough outline of what I'd like to try.

  • The group should be small. Less than Dunbar's number , which is basically the largest number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, between 100 and 250. I would aim for the lower end of that range at most.
  • It should not be too small, since it needs to have people who are competent in the necessary skills to maintain a certain level of technology. More than a dozen, one would certainly think. What that "certain level" of technology will be is determined by the resources and skills available and what the people involved are willing to sacrifice to hang on to some particular technologies. Realizing that in the circumstances we will find ourselves, progress can be the enemy of prosperity.
  • A larger group also has more purchasing power than a nuclear family, which can be useful when times are tough. They should plan on taking advantage of this.
  • It's members should be people of like mind, roughly speaking. It would be best if they already know each other and know the community where they are setting up.
  • They should be living in fairly close physical proximity. An internet group made up of widely dispersed people isn't going to work for this, although it might useful in getting things started.
  • If not actually rural, the group needs ownership or at least access to some nearby acreage, with farmland, woodlot, water and things like clay, sand, gravel and stone. People who already own homes in a small town could form such a group and involve a nearby farmer. This would keep the capital required to get started down to a minimum. No doubt there are many other possible approaches, as dictated by your circumstances and preferences.
  • I don't think large cities are sustainable in the long run, especially when energy intensive transportation is no longer available, so the group should not be in or near such a place. What's large? That's a judgment call and depends on geographic and social circumstances of the individual city. Obviously a city surrounded by farmland, with good water supply and good water transportation connections is more viable than one in the middle of a desert. And a city where the social fabric has already largely broken down should be avoided. The "zombie hoards" that survivalists talk about are not a realistic scenario, but big cities are still death traps.
  • It should be in an area likely not to suffer too badly from climate change. Not near sea level, or expected to suffer too badly from drought or flooding.
  • The group should be organized on a basis of small scale "socialism/communism", where the group supports its members, and the members support the group. It would provide meaningful work for people with a wide range of capabilities and cradle to grave security for people with a wide range of needs. It would not necessarily provide a very high standard of living (just enough), but the standard would be the same for everyone. One does what one can to help others and expect they will do the same for you, without any need for money or formal score keeping. Because this is a small group, everyone knows who is contributing and who is slacking off.
  • The group needs to set up some sort of business to provide income. For a while yet it will still be necessary to interface with BAU and money is needed to do so.
  • It should provide preparedness for and protection from disasters, especially infrastructure failure, economic recessions and social unrest. And, eventually, an alternative to BAU for when it ceases to function and can no longer provide us with the necessities of life.
  • This group needs to do crunchy things but without the woo. Things that actually work and don't waste our efforts on solving fake problems.
  • I would hope the group would be strong enough to welcome friends and family who are displaced from BAU, to adopt orphan children and take in homeless people and refugees.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel here, one can study up on intentional communities, eco-villages or as they are known among the "collapse aware"—lifeboats. If you do this, you'll see that there are some serious challenges involved.

There are, of course, the practical difficulties of finding a place, a business to start and capital to get this all going. This will be especially hard in a contracting economy, and if you insist on doing it to BAU standards, setting up an eco-village or lifeboat community can cost millions of dollars—the sky is the limit. But if you are willing to work to a "just enough" standard, it will be much more do-able.

I think the more serious challenges will be on the people side of things, though. Fortunately, as BAU gets to be less and less a hospitable place to live, we'll have more incentive to solve these problems. Currently only a few are interested, but that will change.

First, finding the people. I say this from the viewpoint of a fellow who is a Crunchy himself. I find myself looking among Crunchies for like minded people, because the BAU folks will just laugh at you if you bring up anything but their party line. And of course, I am looking for people who indulge in as little woo as possible. They can be hard to find. Unfortunately, it is easy to make this harder than it needs to be. If you want to get picky enough with your definition of "like minded", you can find a reason to exclude the whole rest of the human race. This cannot be our aim.

"As little woo as possible" is the key here. Aiming for no woo at all would guarantee failure—even the most rational among us has a few irrational beliefs. At this point let me say that just because I have a considered opinion on most everything, I don't think that I know everything for certain. I'm only human and while I've put quite a lot of effort into figuring out what's what, I have to admit that I may have made some errors. Keeping this in mind is, I think, a good start.

In many cases disagreement on a theoretical level is irrelevant to what you are trying to accomplish. People don't have to think exactly like you, as long as you can work together and share a common goal. People are not all of one piece and can be absolute fools about embracing woo in one area while being completely practical, reality based and highly skilled in another area. The woo may be aggravating, but the skills a person brings to the table can make it worth overlooking a certain amount of woo. If everyone in the group is thinking like this, regardless of what else they may believe, they can work together surprisingly well.

There are a number of Crunchy people who I do consider to be friends. They don't completely buy into my strictly materialist, science based approach, but neither do they completely reject it. We are willing to rub along and can actually work together.

There are also Crunchies I can't abide: alternative medicine practitioners who make a living pushing woo and activists who want to waste my time supporting bogus causes, for example.

Though I don't believe in good and evil in any absolute sense, I have learned the hard way that there is a small minority of people who are best avoided—call them "evil" if you will. The trick is to learn to recognize these folks before getting too involved with them. One has to attain a balance in this, aiming neither to be too exclusive or too inclusive.

Having found some people who want to set up a group for mutual support we will be faced with the task of getting along with them. Or perhaps having waited too long, we'll find ourselves thrown together in a disaster more or less by chance with people who need mutual support.

In emergencies and disasters, this is known to happen and it can work amazingly well. I would recommend reading Rebecca Solnit's book, A Paradise Built in Hell—The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, which examines how people behave in disasters and how different that is from what most of us expect.

As Solnit says, "In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing or major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbours as well as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky or regressively savage human beings in times of disaster has little truth to it."

After reading Solnit's book I was skeptical—it just seemed too idealistic. So I did some studying and found it to be solidly supported by researchers in the field of disaster response. Unfortunately, the "disaster mythology" is a widely accepted and enthusiastically spread by the media. It would have us believe some very negative things about how people act in disasters, but they are simply not true. With the one exception that when there is a disaster in an area where the basic fabric of society has already broken down, then things just get worse.

When working together in groups what you really need is a clear, common, immediate and practical goal and people who can do things to achieve that goal. It seems to me that this is why the victims of disasters have such success at working together to deal with their immediate problems. What they believe in is largely irrelevant, so long as they don't make a big deal about it, especially when it doesn't bear immediately on solving the problem at hand.

But there is reasonable doubt that this sort of "getting along" can work on a long term basis. When the disaster is over, things go back to normal. Within BAU, normal means that such relationships are monetized and you don't have to actually get along with these people at all, just pay them for what they do for you or accept their payment for what you do for them.

Throughout most of this blog I've been talking about resource depletion, climate change and economic disruption as the main challenges we face. But in another sense, our main challenge lies in the fact that growing up immersed in BAU we have not learned how to live together in communities and reach the sort of working agreement needed to keep a community functioning. The emphasis is always on individuality, being "right", being in control and getting what you are entitled to.

In BAU, about the closest you'll come to the kind of "getting along" that I'm talking about is in the kind of job where you work in a crew and actual teamwork is required. This can be a great situation and can give you a taste of "getting along". But often not so much. Someone is clearly in charge of such a team, appointed from above with the support of the organization behind him, and paid extra to do the job. And even though there are penalties for not playing along, there are lots of people who would rather make work miserable for their fellows (and themselves) rather than co-operate with the boss and their co-workers. In BAU, so much prestige is associated with leadership and individualism is so strongly encouraged that this is almost inevitable.

Even when people do share an ideology and a methodology that works (like the scientific method) there will still be communication problems, differences of opinion and personality issues that make it hard to work together. Or it may come down to each of us thinking that he should be the one running things. These sorts of things can be overcome with training and counseling, but only if the individuals involved want to overcome their differences.

I think it is important to see leadership as a burden rather than an honour. When you have someone who knows what he is doing in a certain area, let him lead when you're working in that area, and step back when it is done. General direction needs to come from the community as a whole, whether it is determined by formal consensus or by leaders who have worked out what the group's consensus is before taking the group in that direction. Consensus is foreign to most of us and as such we are not very good at, but it is a skill that can be learned.

For the first two or three million years of our existence as something more or less human, we did live in small groups and got along in exactly the fashion I am talking about. Indeed it seems likely that our ability to live successful in such groups evolved in parallel with the social structure of those groups.

Then about ten thousand years ago people at a number of locations around the world invented agriculture and not too long after that, re-organized themselves into states with a ruling class to run things, a working class to do the work and something more or less like money to mediate their relationships. Bluntly put, work to get money to pay for food—or starve. Or in the case of slaves, work or be beaten and starve—it simplifies things by eliminating the money.

This idea of "civilization" is great if you are one of the privileged few who are running things. Not so great if you are one of the rank and file workers or, worse yet, a slave. And indeed there is a long history of people leaving civilization when it got too oppressive. Sometimes this amounted to a collapse, with the civilization disappearing while the remnants live on in small groups with greatly simplified organization.

At other times, people left the state controlled area in smaller groups and headed for "the hills", areas too rugged for the state's enforcers to successfully track them down and march them back. Read James C. Scott's book The Art of Not Being Governed for detailed information on this. It turns out that a great many peoples who western science had originally thought were "primitives" who had occupied their area before civilization arose, are actually people who chose to escape the local civilization when it became too oppressive.

There may be something to be learned from these folks by those of us who are thinking about escaping BAU. There is also something to be learned by the few remaining hunter gatherers who are just now being "civilized" as they encounter BAU culture for the first time.

Of course, within BAU a great deal of effort is expended to distract people from looking at these examples of alternative ways of living and to make those ways of life appear inferior to BAU. I am sure that the mouth pieces of BAU will say that I am romanticizing primitive societies. But I am not suggesting that we go "back", but rather in a different direction altogether, beyond civilization rather than away from it. We may indeed find ourselves moving to a level of energy consumption similar to what was common decades or even hundreds of years ago. But this does not mean that we have to adopt a similar level of social justice or scientific/medical/nutritional ignorance. We have learned a lot since then that can be successfully applied to a society that uses much less energy and gets by with much less stuff. There is no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.

And, beyond all that, I would say that they are romanticizing BAU, which is doing a poor job of caring for most of its members, and a good job of convincing them that there are no better alternatives.

Which brings us back to the alternative I was discussing above: living in groups providing each other mutual support in a way that BAU cannot do. And back to the major challenge of learning to live together in such groups, which life in BAU has left us woefully unprepared for. But, having evolved in such groups, we do have the innate ability to overcome this challenge. We need to throw off the bad habits we got from growing up in BAU, and learn some better and more human habits. For guidance, we can look to the few remaining people living in small groups outside of BAU. We can also look to the people who are living in intentional communities within BAU, and learn from both their successes and failures.

There is lots of literature on this. From my own bookshelf I can recommend:

In closing, I should just say that if I had thought of the phrase "Crunchy Without the Woo" four years ago when I started this blog, I would likely have used it as the title, instead of "The Easiest Person to Fool". I think it ties in better with the tag line "A reality based approach to life in the age of scarcity" which, as I've been saying here, is really the heart of the matter. Oh well, that's water under the bridge. And also a wrap for this series of posts on BAU, Crunchiness and Woo.

The books I've read during my life have done a great deal to shape my thinking. In my next few posts I'll be sharing some of those books with you. If my elementary school self had heard that I am volunteering to write book reports, he would have shaken his head in amazement. I guess we all change with time.

This is the sixth in a series of six (even though the title says "Part 5"):

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Location: Kincardine, ON, Canada

Sunday, 5 June 2016

Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo, Part 2b: More on what's wrong with Business as Usual

In my last post I talked about some of the problems with Business as Usual (BAU), particularly that it is based on the Religion of Progress, which is nothing but woo (pseudoscience and magical thinking). That post was getting close to long enough and I still had quite a bit more to say about what's wrong with BAU, so here we are.

Pseudoscience in BAU

For some people the ongoing economic growth aspect of BAU has been a real bonanza. They tend to be the people in power and they aren't about to admit that anything is wrong or there is any need for change that would jeopardize their position. Much of the woo common to BAU is directly linked to the position in which these people find themselves.

They feel a huge incentive to maintain the status quo, to stay in their privileged positions. It's only natural these people want to deny things that would threaten their profits or require them to abandon the profit motive. They believe (and would have us believe) that there is no way to back down gracefully from a growth economy, and that the inevitable results of trying to do so would be disaster. This is pure woo, and it leads to some strange thinking and strange behaviour.

One example of this is the tobacco industry's response when the news about tobacco's health effects came out in the mid-twentieth century. They could have faced up to reality, reinvented their business in a less harmful form and been ahead of the game. Instead, they denied the findings of medical science, spent a lot of money to promote pseudoscience about tobacco's health effects and did everything they could to keep as many people addicted to tobacco for as long as possible.

Another example is the fossil fuel industries' response to the news about climate change, which they became aware of in the 1970s. They could have become leaders in a switchover to low carbon energy sources. Of course, this would have led to some pretty fundamental changes to BAU. The kind of changes that I am always advocating, actually. Instead they spent a lot of money to spread pseudoscience denying anthropogenic climate change and keep the demand for fossil fuels growing for as long as possible.

There are many other examples of BAU denying inconvenient facts so they can continue to make a profit in the short term.

Because many businesses are set up so that what really matters is the next quarterly report, they have a great deal of trouble taking a long range outlook on things. Probably the best example of this is the depletion of fossil fuels. Depending on how you interpret the resource and reserve numbers, we won't be running short of oil, for instance, for several decades yet. Of course, it may well end up being sooner and in the meantime what oil is left is more expensive, often disastrously so. The solution would have been to lead the switchover to renewable energy sources. As already mentioned, this would have led to some pretty fundamental changes to BAU. Seeking to avoid such changes the BAU response is that there is really nothing to worry about, by the time we get there, we'll have found a solution for that problem. And then they go on "as usual", not even starting to look for a solution. "We've got enough trouble making growth targets for this year, the next generation can worry about what is basically their problem anyway."

Continued economic and population growth means conversion of ever more of nature to human uses. BAU sees nature as something outside the economy, as source of material resources and a sink for pollution and wastes. Because BAU sees itself as separate from nature, what happens to nature has no consequences for BAU. Again , this is woo—the economy is in fact a subsystem of the natural environment, and relies heavily on "biosphere services"—thing like air, water, soil, forests, fisheries and so forth—without which it would be much more expensive to operate a business.

Neo-liberalism, the only remaining political party

Neo-liberal politics and the economics that goes with it is an organized effort to deny the problems with BAU and to continue on "as usual" for as long as possible, regardless of the consequences. This sort of politics has become the default for most developed nations and the ideal that developing nations are expected to strive for. According to this ideology the value of a thing is determined by its price in monetary terms and things which do not have such a price have no worth—if it doesn’t have a price tag on it, it’s not worth anything. More and more, even personal relationships are "monetized" and reduced to individuals paying other individuals for services.

That it would be "bad for business" is reason enough to avoid any change, no matter how vital, regardless of the damage to people and the environment.

Rich people are seen as superior to poor people, and poverty is seen as a moral failing. Financial success is everything. No unprofitable enterprise is worth pursuing, even if it provides great benefits that don't show up on the profit and loss statement. And all profitable enterprises are worth pursuing, even if they cause great harm to society and/or the environment. Economies must grow no matter what the cost.

The strategy of "externalization of costs" is used to reduce the expenses a business is held responsible for, and thus improve its profitability. Typical externalized costs are the effects a business' operation has on the environment or on the community it operates in. Usually those costs are transferred to the public (via government and taxation) or to future generations.

The free market is held to have essentially magical powers to regulate the economy, when in fact it is mainly valued as an excuse to free businesses from cumbersome regulations (so they can be competitive) while at the same time they strive to control the market as much as possible to protect themselves from competition.

One of the consequences of all this is ever greater economic inequality. Despite its faith in human progress, BAU has relegated most people to the role of consumers/workers. We are encouraged to concentrate on our own individual success and gratification, rather than our relationships with other people. Our primary motivations end up being fear, greed and selfishness. This is not really what people need from the society they are living in. Still, this was "fine" (in some strained sense of that word) as long as growth continued and we consumers could rely on improved working conditions, better wages and better toys to spend our earnings on.

But as depleted fossil fuel resources began to supply less surplus energy, business had to turn to automation and globalization to stay profitable, leaving fewer and worse jobs for most people. Without work (and money) it is hard to fulfill one's role as a consumer. We are left wondering how long the leaders of BAU think this can go on. Clearly they have bought into the woo that it can continue forever.

The load we are putting on the environment, our reliance on the "biosphere services" it provides, has continued to increase while at the same time we are destroying more and more of the biosphere that provides those services. The result is that we are in an overshoot situation, using more than the planet can supply in any sustainable way. With our population continuing to grow, there will inevitably come a point where what's left of the environment won't support us and the human population will begin to collapse. BAU is blind to this, striving ever harder to use up more resources to support a growing population with increasing prosperity, regardless of where this may lead.

As we wait for this unpalatable future to play out, it becomes less and less comfortable for ordinary human being to live as part of BAU. We spent the last few million year evolving to live in small groups in which people mutually supported each other, providing for their material and psychological (spiritual, if you insist) needs throughout their lifetimes. We are ill suited to live in BAU where the needs of business must always come first and those of people second at best. It's hard on our sanity and it brings out the worst in us.

What's worse, it seems very likely that this is not at all necessary—people's needs can come first if we simply decide that is the way we want to live and apply our resources to that instead of generating ever increasing economic growth. But we are paralyzed by BAU woo that says we are already on the right path, the only path.

Author Daniel Quinn refers to what I've been calling "BAU" as "the culture of maximum harm". That would make Crunchies those who want to do less harm, to their fellow men and to the planet. This definition leaves room for a pretty wide range of opinions within this movement, and I think that is a very good thing.

In my next post I'll talk about some of the problems with Crunchiness and the challenges this leads to for those of us who would like to take a reality based approach to doing less harm.

Once again, thanks to my youngest child, Lidean Mills, for their help in writing this.

This is the third post in a series of six:

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Monday, 30 May 2016

Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo, Part 2: BAU and The Religion of Progress

In my last post I talked about our growth and consumer based industrial society (Business as Usual, BAU), the people who are working to oppose it (Crunchies) and the woo (pseudoscience) involved in that sort of binary thinking, on both sides. Having brought up pseudoscience, I went on to discuss science as the only reliable way we have of knowing things about the material world (nature), and looked at the spectrum of ways that people do look at nature, noting that BAU and Crunchiness are at two extremes. I finished up by promising to look deeper into those two positions in future posts. Today I'll be talking about BAU.

On the surface, BAU is very practical and down to earth, interested only in what works—the farthest thing from woo. Its proponents would have us believe that they use exactly those reliable thinking tools I talked about in my last post, and proceed as indicated by science and reason. They have to a great extent co-opted science into their ideology, convincing us that their ideology is not just completely supported by science, but really is science, period. Of course, if you are allowed to pick and choose results, you can make science say anything you want.

They would also have us believe that everything is going fine with BAU and our industrial civilization is the best way to live, really the only way anyone would want to live. While they do acknowledge that there are some minor problems with the way BAU is working at the moment, they are sure that a little tinkering should fix them up in no time. And even if the big problems that I am always going on about are real, technology can no doubt be developed to solve them before it is too late.

Underneath that optimistic wallpaper, though, there are some pretty big cracks. Rather than being purely rational, BAU is based on the religion of progress. Supposedly, humanity is special—not strictly a part of nature like other species. Because of our intelligence, and our ability to evolve culturally as well as genetically, we have a clear destiny which places us on a path from the caves to the stars. Limits are something we are made to transcend via technology, not to live within. And however bad our current situation, we can always trust that things will improve, if not for us, at least for our children.

"What's so bad about that—what's wrong with progress?" you may ask. Or more pointedly, "what have you got against progress, Irv?"

I have nothing particular against things getting better, which must surely be what one means when talking about progress. What I am against is "progress as a religion", which involves several problematical ideas:

  • Progress is predestined.
  • Progress must continue, regardless of the consequences and despite any limits we may encounter.
  • Progress occurs in one direction, along a single path. If you don't like where progress is taking us, the only alternative is to move in the other direction, "backwards".
  • Cultures which are not part of BAU are "undeveloped", and that is a bad thing. Their only option is to start moving forward along the path of progress, to begin "developing" and eventually become "developed".

In the developed and developing world, all of us (even Crunchies) are immersed in a culture that worships progress, where those ideas are so obvious that we aren't even aware of them as such. It's like water to fish. I am no different, and I have to work hard to even consider the idea that progress may not be taking us to a good place. But I have done so and I would invite you to join me for a moment and have a closer look at those ideas and where they lead.

First, predestination.

The thing is that the belief in predestined progress is a religion. In North America, it seems to me that the majority of main stream Christian churches are little more than fronts for the religion of progress. For those folks, I guess that means progress is predestined by God. Health, happiness and success in business/work are the rewards of the faithful.

For those of us that aren't religious, though, the word "predestined" seems to mean that the nature of human beings, or perhaps more precisely, of human societies, is to progress. If you want to remain a true believer in progress, it's probably best not to look too closely at what "progress" means. But it's pretty clear that within BAU, it means that the human population grows and attains an ever higher level of material prosperity, comfort and convenience. Since health these days is maintained by the fruits of modern medical science and happiness consists (or so we are told) of ever increasing material prosperity (the fruit of success in business/work), this isn't very different from how the religious (Christian) folks see things. Not surprising, since we are talking about the religion of progress.

But let's take a more skeptical look at this. Is progress really part of human nature?

This idea is based on our ability to pass on advances via language—to evolve culturally as well as genetically. We've had this ability for two to three million years and during all but the last bit of that period, progress has been very, very slow. Cultural evolution during that period led to a wide variety of fairly stable small scale societies adapted to the many environments we encountered as we spread across the surface of the earth to every continent except Antarctica. About 10,000 years ago agriculture was invented in a handful of societies across the world, and the pace of progress in those societies "picked up" to just very slow (one less very).

Then a few hundred years ago the pace of progress began to accelerate dramatically. Looking back on this, those who believe in the inevitability of progress conclude that we finally got our act together and began to realize our potential. Many would credit much of this to the Enlightenment and the technological advances that came with it. I would say they are confusing cause and effect.

Something changed, for sure, but what? In the period leading up to when the change started, European society had just about run out of empty land to expand into and had maximized its use of the energy available from biomass (mainly firewood). Then the "New World" was discovered with great expanses of "empty land" and vast as yet untapped resources. Not long after this, coal began to replace firewood and heat engines (burning coal) began to replace muscle power.

And yes, a great deal of progress came about as a result of these changes. It probably was in some sense "inevitable" that this would happen, that some culture would eventually undergo the changes that European culture did. But this was progress driven not by destiny or human nature, but by the consumption of finite and non-renewable resources. The Enlightenment (while no doubt a good thing) was an effect of this progress, not the cause.

Now we find ourselves in the position of having already filled up essentially all the empty land on this planet and reaching the point of diminishing returns for fossil fuels. It appears that this period of progress will be of limited duration and is already starting to falter.

This is what makes me say the religion of progress is just woo. And the worst kind of woo, since it holds out the hope of continued progress which distracts us from the reality of our situation and the challenges we need to face up to.

Next, the necessity of continuing progress, regardless of the consequences.

BAU defines progress as increasing material prosperity and equates this to economic growth. This is a wonderful thing since there is money to be made in that business. For the financial industry this is literally true, since this industry creates money as debt to allow rapid economic growth. And growth must continue in order for the loans to be paid back with interest and the businesses involved to continue operating profitably. In order for economic growth to continue natural resources are consumed and pollution and waste (the by-products of the process) are created, both in ever greater quantities.

Unfortunately, we live on a finite planet, with strictly limited natural resources and limited sinks to absorb pollution and waste. BAU propaganda would have us believe that this is not so, that technology will always give us a way to surmount the limits we face. But the fact is that, in BAU, progress must continue because anything else is bad for business in the short run, and what happens in the long run isn't a concern in the short run.

BAU propagandists hold up examples of technology enabling continued growth, such as the success we've had in refining ever more depleted ores to get the metals we need and in getting oil and natural gas from deposits that formerly weren't economically accessible. We are told that when one resource runs out we will always find another to substitute for it.

There is even a movement, "eco-modernism" dedicated to this kind of approach.

Ted Trainer, a de-growth advocate, has this to say in an article debunking eco-modernism:

"Central to this sort of thinking is the claim that the economy can be “decoupled” from nature, from resource demands and ecological impacts. That is, technical advance can enable output and consumption to go on growing, presumably forever, while resource demands and ecological impacts are reduced way down to tolerable levels."

Sometimes all you have to do is hear a program's goals so clearly stated to realize how bizarre they really are and how unlikely their success really is.

Clearly, eco-modernism is more BAU woo. It seems very likely that the consequences of continued economic growth will be more unpleasant than we are willing to accept. But accept them we must, since there is no way to change the direction the BAU is headed. Or so it seems.

Then, the idea that progress is one dimensional.

If we object to any of the negative consequences of progress we are told that we can accept progress and go forward to better things or turn away from progress and go back (presumable to worse things), but those are the only choices. That is why Crunchies are painted as "dirty hippies" who want to go off grid and forego the benefits of modern society. It is even true in many cases, since having grown up in BAU society, it is very hard even for Crunchies to imagine any other alternative. It's no wonder that it is difficult to imagine change in other directions, when we have no clear examples of such and are continually told it is not possible. But this does not mean that such change is truly impossible, just that BAU desperately wants us not to head in any such direction.

Again from the same article by Ted Trainer:

"This world-view fails to grasp several things.... There can be many paths towards many end points, and we might opt for other end points than the one modernization is taking us to. In addition we might deliberately select desirable development goals rather than just accept where modernisation takes us, and with respect to some dimensions we might choose not to develop any further. Ecomodernism has no concept of sufficiency or good enough...."
"... we could opt for a combination of elements from different points on the path. For instance there is no reason why we cannot have both sophisticated modern medicine and the kind of supportive community that humans have enjoyed for millennia, and have both technically astounding aircraft along with small, cheap, humble, fireproof, home made and beautiful mud brick houses, and have modern genetics along with neighbourhood poultry co-ops. Long ago humans had worked out how to make excellent and quite good enough houses, strawberries, furniture, dinners and friendships. We could opt for stable, relaxed, convivial and sufficient ways in some domains while exploring better ways in others, but ecomodernists see only two options; going forward or backward. Modernity is a whole package we move further towards or retreat from and you must take the bad with the good. They seem to have no interest in which elements in modernism are worthwhile and which of them should be dumped. The Frankfurt School saw some of them leading to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Why on earth can’t we design and build societies that embody the good ideas and ways humans have figured out over thousands of years, taking some from high tech arenas and some from hunter-gatherer societies (e.g., that we thrive best in small face-to-face communities)?"

It seems to me that the path a society follows is determined largely by what it does with its surpluses. BAU's path is one dimensional path because in BAU there is only ever one thing to be done with a surplus—invest in more "progress" and make sure the profit from that goes to the investors and those who are in charge of things. But in fact there are many choices, which one we choose is determined by what we think is important and this can lead us in many different directions.

And lastly, cultures outside of BAU are undeveloped and need to progress.

The picture we are given of the remaining non-BAU cultures is a very negative one, focusing on all the things we have that they don't. I can recommend Jared Diamond's book "The World Until Yesterday" for a more balanced treatment of life in traditional societies.

And to borrow some ideas from Daniel Quinn, as expressed in his book Ishmael it seems that during those 2 to 3 million years before the invention of agriculture people were evolving genetically while their societies evolved culturally and the result was something that worked. Of course I am not saying that these societies were perfect or even particularly "nice" from our modern viewpoint, but they did provide their members with just enough of what they needed, both materially and in the more "spiritual" sense of having a "place"—worthwhile work which contributed to the group they lived in, and lifelong security provided by the group they lived in.

Note that I am not talking about the sort of societies that arose with the invention of the state not long after the invention of agriculture. These societies mark the beginning of BAU, and I find there is little good to be said of them. Although the argument can be made that in some ways, even those societies were better that the way most of us live now. If you are a North American, compare the number of days you get off work in year with a serf in medieval Europe. You may be surprised to find yourself on the short end of the comparison, though admittedly, most of his days off were church holidays.

Still, it is very hard to get away from the idea that positive change must be in the direction that BAU defines as progress. Surely, the people in those "primitive" societies would be better off if we could help them to progress.

Well, maybe not. An honest look at BAU makes it clear that the fruits of progress aren't very evenly spread around and that the promise of things getting better is, for the majority of people (or even their children), an empty one. If you don't already have a secure position in the upper levels of BAU, your prospects here in the early twenty first century aren't very good.

But beyond BAU's failure to deliver the fruits of progress as promised, there is the plain fact the BAU's kind of progress may not be what is really needed for us to live happy and fulfilling lives. Yes, it is true that if you are struggling just to get by, some improvement in your material prosperity will make life better for you. But once you have just enough, further increases yield diminishing returns, until eventually we find ourselves officially part of the rat race and begin asking if it is all really worth the effort.

To sum up all this talk about the religion of progress, it is the third religion that I have embraced and then been forced to abandon when confronted with reality.

It turns outs that I have somewhat more to say about what's wrong with BAU, so my next post will cover that, and then I'll finally go on with a closer look at Crunchiness.

Thanks to my youngest child Lidean for ideas and inspiration they have given me.

This is the second post in a series of six:

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Thursday, 12 May 2016

Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo, Part 1

I do mean something by that rather oddball title, something quite specific. Which I will explain, eventually. And be aware that the conclusion I reach at the end is not what it's going to seem like I am leading up to, so hang in there. This started out as a single post of over 6000 words, enough to try the patience of even my most loyal readers, so I've divided it into 6 parts, which will appear over the next few weeks.

Much of what I have been talking about on this blog for the last four years has been the damage being caused by our growth and consumer based industrial society (Business as Usual, BAU) and what can be done to cope with it and oppose it. The people who are working on that opposition are what I would call "Crunchy". I intend to cast a wide net when I speak of "Crunchies". Some people when asked to define "Crunchy" will say, "ah, they're just dirty hippies." While I do mean to include hippies (washed and unwashed) in my definition, I mean to include a whole lot of other people as well.

So it would seem that BAU and Crunchiness are two opposing ideologies. Of course, whenever you see binary thinking like this, framing a situation in terms of two opposing sides, you can bet that someone is benefitting from the conflict and is doing everything he can to keep it going. Examples from the industrial workplace, where I spent most of my life, would be management encouraging disputes among factions within the workforce to distract the workers from whatever management is up to, or during contract negotiations when both management negotiators and union negotiators emphasize differences between workers and management, making it more difficult to come to an agreement. In both cases, this is to the detriment of both workers and stock holders, but to benefit of management and the negotiators.

In the case of BAU versus Crunchiness, many of the leaders on both sides benefit from maintaining the conflict, in that it keeps our attention focused away from what might be done to actually change human society into something more sustainable and render that leadership redundant. And almost no one involved, at any level, really wants to make any of the major changes in lifestyle that would be necessary. We have been convinced that such changes would make life "no longer worth living".

That's nonsense, of course, but it is typical of the kind of nonsense that supports such binary thinking. Along with it comes quite a bit of "woo" (magical thinking and pseudoscience), as well as considerable doubt and confusion and some outright lies, all necessary to paper over the holes in the two positions, to avoid admitting there might be some common ground between the two, or a third approach that might work even better.

There is usually a lot to be gained by abandoning the binary thinking and looking past the woo to see what's really behind it all and that is what I hope to do in this series of posts. Originally, I was going to call this post "Save us from the flakes" and talk mainly about the unfortunate flakiness of Crunchy people. But then I was reminded that Business as Usual people are pretty flaky too, just sneakier about it. And of course, as always when one strays into binary thinking, it is important to remember there are many different types of BAU people and many different types of Crunchies. And all of these people are a mixture of various quantities of sound thinking and flakiness. Sorry if this seems complex, but that's the world I live in—nothing here is simple.

I'm using the word "flake" here in the sense of someone who is so fixated on his ideology (his side of the argument) that he will embrace any sort of magical thinking or pseudoscience that seems to support it, regardless of how irrational that may be. Such people end up believing in some very strange stuff. Of course, we are living in a very strange world where much of this stuff is widely accepted.

The Urban Dictionary defines "flake" as someone who is an unreliable person; someone who agrees to do something, but never follows through. That is not the sense that I am using here, but it has been my experience that many who are flakey in the ideological sense are so far out of touch with reality that they are pretty unreliable as well.

I like to think of myself as "Crunchy without the Woo." Many of you will ask, "Is there anything left when you take out the woo?" Others will be concerned that I not come down too hard on their favourite brand of woo. Some (the honest ones) will do both. Anyway, I do think it is not just possible, but necessary, to be Crunchy but without the woo.

Fence sitting is part of my nature—I seem to be pretty good at seeing the pros and cons of both sides of a thing, and I always suspect that there are only two sides to a thing because someone wants it to be seen that way. If anyone who worked for me at Hydro One is reading this they will be chuckling at the moment. I got this way by spending time on both sides of a number of situations, becoming unsatisfied with first one side and then the other, and finally looking for other ways of seeing the situation. There are usually many other ways, and some of them are more accurate and more useful.

I've been lied to on occasion and frequently led astray by genuinely deluded people. As a result of this, I began to question how anyone knows anything for sure. Accepting what the supposed authorities tell you certainly doesn't work. I finally concluded that the scientific method is the best tool we have at present for finding out the facts about the material world.

Here are some links to several good introductions to the scientific method:

What makes this method unique is that it calls for actually testing the ideas we have about the material world, to see if they are supported by the evidence or not, and changing those ideas if the evidence doesn't support them Then it calls for sharing your ideas and the evidence for them with others who will criticize your reasoning, the tests you did and your interpretation of the results and then try to duplicate your tests and see if they can get the same results. Over time this eliminates the sort of bias and fallacies that seem to be built into human thinking, and leads to a body of knowledge that might be called scientific facts, and a set of theories explaining those facts.

I am not suggesting that we should all become scientists, but rather that when a question is raised, we should make ourselves aware of what science sees as the facts in that field of endeavour and base our opinions on this scientific consensus. Here is some links on what the scientific consensus is and why we can trust it:

Of course, scientific knowledge is always provisional in nature, subject to revision as more evidence, and better understandings of it, become available. And we may find that science, especially out at the edges, doesn't have definite answers for us as yet. But the bottom line about science is that it works and you can rely on it. There is a lot of controversy going around these days on subjects where the science is already quite clear. Don't be fooled by this, by people who push pseudoscience to support their ideologies. Have a look at these links and see what I mean:

Many people say they are looking for absolute truth and can't believe in something like science that may change or be proven wrong. For me that is the great advantage of science—being able to adapt as we learn more, which we always do. Anyway, it's not about "belief". For me belief is a last resort to turn to when the currently known facts and the best available explanations of them don't yet answer your questions. And the best thing to do in those situations is not to pick a position and just believe in it, but simply to admit that you don't know, and then keep looking for real answers.

Some people object that science only applies to the material world and can only decide upon testable or falsifiable points. What about things outside the material world? Or that are not testable? Well, I've tried religion (more than once) and my eventual conclusion was that the material world is all there is, propositions that aren't testable are just nonsense and anyone making absolute, final statements about anything is not to be trusted. My statements here are not intended to be absolute— they are subject to modification should evidence to the contrary be found.

Here's a quote from the notable skeptic Michael Shermer that nicely sums up my thinking on the natural versus supernatural worlds: "If one were to argue that God exists outside of our world (or outside of the universe, or outside of nature), and that God’s forces are non-natural (or supernatural) and they can still affect the world but in a non-measurable way (because our scientific nets only catch natural fish), then what’s the difference between an invisible God and a nonexistent God?"

"Thus, it seems to me that once we have carefully defined our terms, it is clear that there really is only the material world, methodological naturalism is the only means to understand it, and science is the only form of reliable knowledge that we have."

Along with the scientific method, a few additional tools are helpful. Although the argument could be made that they are really integral parts of the scientific method....

Literacy is probably the first to consider. There is all kinds of good information out there in books and on the internet, and there is no point in reinventing the wheel. But of course there is also a great deal of nonsense, "woo" if you will, out there as well and you have to learn to sort it out from the good stuff. Because science has a well deserved reputation as a reliable source of knowledge, those who are pushing woo try to make their case sound as scientific as possible. Thus the term "pseudoscience".

Fortunately, there is also a good deal of information, written at a level suitable for the layman, which will help you sort out the science from the woo.

Numeracy is the next tool I would recommend. Math education is so bad in North American schools that people end up asking why they even bother to learn something they will never use. If you learn it badly (or not at all), then of course you won't use it. But a good grasp of high school level math (and even a bit of calculus), along with a good solid gut feeling for how numbers work in the real world is, in my experience, an important life skill—something you will use on a daily basis and which will give you a leg up on those around you, to whom numbers are probably a bit of a mystery. Numeracy is a great help in detecting woo, because the purveyors of woo tend to have a very weak grasp of numbers. This becomes obvious when they try to use numbers to pull the wool over the eyes of the defenseless public, and end up spouting numerical nonsense. It helps, of course, to be able to recognize numerical nonsense when you see it.

One of the reasons that science has done so well in the last few centuries is its use of numbers and the invention of tools which enable us to measure the world around us and express our knowledge about it in numerical terms.

Critical thinking is the next logical step after numeracy. Basically this means becoming familiar with the many biases and logical fallacies that human beings fall prey to, so that you can you can recognize when others are doing so and, perhaps more importantly, prevent yourself from doing so.

Which brings us to skepticism, which is characterized by a questioning attitude towards opinions or beliefs that others state as facts. Simply put, it is based on the idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Being familiar with the scientific consensus will help you recognize when someone is making an extraordinary claim. Of course a good skeptic has the scientific method, literacy, numeracy and critical thinking skills in his tool box. For more information check out these links:

I strive to be a good skeptic, but occasionally I stumble and I'm always questioning myself, concerned that I have been taken in by some sort of woo.

This may all seem rather academic. But what I think we should be aiming for here is a good practical understanding of how the natural world works, and where we fit into it. So many of us today live in cities and have very little exposure to anything but a human built environment. This leads to some inaccurate impressions about man's place in the world, and also about the workings of real world (nature) itself.

These ideas run along a spectrum. At one end are those who feel that nature is something to be mastered, conquered and risen above. Part of this is a fear of nature and a conceit that we can render ourselves independent of it. At the other end are those who personify nature, seeing "her" as a benevolent mother, and equating her with all that is good, trusting that by doing things the "natural way", we can live in harmony and prosperity.

Neither of these extremes is a very realistic. We are definitely part of the natural world and completely dependent on it for our survival. We are no different than any other species in that we are not exempt from the rules of ecology and population dynamics (or any other natural law). Nature can be as harsh or gentle as the realities of the situation dictates, but to personify nature, to say that it is either hostile or loving to mankind is to have missed the whole point—which is that nature is not an entity with feelings. As far as the "natural way" of doing things, for humans there hasn't been such a thing since we started taming fire and using tools, 2 to 3 million years ago.

As it happens, those two extreme ways of looking at nature line up rather well with BAU and Crunchiness in its more flakey incarnations. In my next two posts I'll be taking a closer look at both those positions, and using the thinking tools I've been talking about, I'll try to sort the good sense out from the woo.

This the first post in a series of six:
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