thomtrance Otoole

I read a quote once from William Gibson, author of Neuromancer (and other wonderful reads), and coiner of the word "cyberspace" which at the time was reflecting on technology:

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed"

This quotation came to mind recently in a different context, as I read the news coming in from around the world.

The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.

The non-hyperbolic prognosticators, Lester Brown, James Hansen and others, have been laying out scenarios for the past 20 years based on the logical outcome of continuing Business As Usual.  Highlights of these scenarios are falling food production, peak oil, changes to our climate, and social unrest.  I look at the edges of our global civilization, and can clearly see the edges fraying as people go hungry, countries begin to withhold rice exports, oil triples in price and countries report an inability to produce more, and poor Africa just comes apart at the seams. 

A very large part of this is our refusal to see that we need to live within our budget of current sunlight. That economies, projects, and human social life is in truth bounded by the amount of sunlight captured by plants in a current cycle, and that this present manifestation of high speed human endeavour is an anomaly, one that cannot sustain beyond a few decades more.

I seek hope, I seek human life in the service of Life, I seek a manner of living which is in accord with our natural cycles, which relies on local materials, and current energy.  A life similar to what was maintained in this country (The USA) in the 1860's, before oil was discovered, and before we had ramped up this "progress" to the corporate enslavement it has attained.

This is not a "going back", not reductionist, but a vision of life that allows for the best of the human spirit, the best of the application of the tsunami of knowledge we have gained in the last mere hundred years.  It is a vision of Responsibilty, of acceptance of Limits, of realization of the boundary conditions that current sunlight places on our activity. It is a vision that incorporates our vast knowledge acquired in the last 100 years; knowledge of physics, chemistry, systems, medicine and computing to move our society as a whole to a lighter impact, a lighter footprint, while freeing us from the marketing induced somnambulance by requiring more individual skill, knowledge and responsibilty for our daily lives. 

In short, 1860 with laptops.

There is no skill in buying a piece of cheap junk from a big box store. There is no skill in grabbing a ready to eat, processed, injected, packaged bit of snack off a megasupermarket shelf.  There is no skill in turning a key and having transportation.  Just as in SL, where our builders have the highest respect, a new ethic of skill and knowledge should develop in RL. It either will develop voluntarily, or be forced upon us as the existing systems and institutions struggle to maintain some semblance of order.  Those with skill will weather this storm, those without, who feel entitled, who feel the governments and businesses will protect their way of life, will perish.  

Oil is depleting, climate change and global warming are reducing our harvest outputs, our industrial activities are poisoning our natural infrastructure, and people still don't see that having only one child, or none, is in the best interests of all, not the least of all being that very child.  The consequences of these realities are already being felt around the edges of our global civilization.

The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.

From the Los Angeles Times 5/02/08
Oxygen-starved waters are expanding in the Pacific and Atlantic as ocean temperatures increase with global warming, threatening fisheries and other marine life, a study published today concludes.

Most of these zones remain hundreds of feet below the surface, but they are beginning to spill onto the relatively shallow continental shelf off the coast of California and are nearing the surface off Peru, driving away fish from commercially important fishing
...
Researchers believe these phenomena are linked to subsurface layers of hypoxic water in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans that have been thickening over the last 50 years, according to the analysis published today in the journal Science.

The study, led by Lothar Stramma at the University of Kiel in Germany, warns that the spread of hypoxic waters that suffocate marine life is consistent with climate models forecasting what would happen as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere.

The trend, the study points out, eerily echoes a scenario that unfolded about 250 million years ago, when 95% of life on Earth went extinct after heat-trapping carbon dioxide spewing from volcanoes warmed the planet and the oceans became stripped of oxygen.

Full Article
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-deadzone2-2008may02,0,1285619.story?track=ntothtml

Excellent 5 part series on the Oceans
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-oceans-series,0,1636600.special

It's easy to be overwhelmed by the bottleneck of events that we are facing.  Activist  burn out,  a sense of despair, a sadness, are common emotional responses. 

I find it  extremely helpful to me, to climb a tree sometimes.  

Hey, I found Squirrels!!

As our 150 year fossil fuel party is coming to an end it is a fun thing to start thinking about the NEXT party: the post-industrial world.  We now live
in the most complex societies our Earth has ever seen, created in full by the millions of years of solar energy we have appropriated from underground in the form of oil and natural gas.  It is evident from the data that our production of this vital energy source is  now in decline, with even the United States reporting the peak of crude and condensate production occuring in May 2005.  The US Energy Information Agency www.eia.doe.gov/ipm/t11d.xls (MS Excel spreadsheet)

So, the glass really IS half empty.  As demand by business as usual increases, the remaining half of the glass could be expected to deplete at a more rapid rate than the first half, with an accompanying increase in the difficulty of keeping all of this complex society running.   One sensible approach would be to begin NOW shedding some of this complexity and creating a post-industrial society of selective complexity.   We will have much less energy  available to us as we move into the 21st century.  Making the correct choices, AS INDIVIDUALS,  may allow us to maintain a thriving society within the bounds of a sustainable energy cycle. 

To achieve a sustainable society one of the first steps is to reduce the amount of energy and material flowing through this social system.  I take all of this personally, so that means to me:  I begin to consume less, begin to watch my energy inputs like a hawk, and begin to experiment with ways I can supply my own needs without reliance on a complex system that is coming under severe stress as each day progresses.  We consume the planet to make what amounts to a high degree of crap, all marketed under the illusion that having more of this crap will increase happiness.  For me, personally, the first step is to avoid this crap, and shed the existing crap I have accumulated by recycling or donating, or reusing components of it.  (i.e. An old washing machine gets disassembled and turned into a compost tea brewery).  Being aware that complex system behavior can result from simple changes to underlying agents, I feel my behavioral change will have some impact, not in a grand way but in a Healing Power of the Small way.  Plenty has been written about the grand schemes and big policy pictures of sustainable living, but in the end, it is each one of us who creates the world.  

While re-skimming The Party's Over  by Richard Heinberg, on page 207 I stumble across a delightful quotation from environmental systems analyst Hartmut Bossel  from his book Earth at a Crossroads: Paths to a Sustainable Future:

In discussing our future, it is important that we understand the full implications of "sustainability"...A sustainable society will have to allow development without physical growth (of material and energy flows and population).   Its population must eventually remain below a certain limit that is probably less than today's global population.  The per capita use of energy and materials must be less than what is now in the industrial countries of the North. All energy must be renewable, all materials recyclable.  These limited throughputs of resources must support a system that maintains an unlimited potential for non-material cultural, social, and individual growth.

This paragraph really struck me.  How can we do this??   " development without physical growth...a system that maintains an unlimited potential for non-material cultural, social, and individual growth." ..... Yes! Yes!  But How?  Where?  

The Where is obvious to those of us who spend a large percentage of free time immersed in virtual space.    "the system that maintains an unlimited potential ..."  is Here -in our 3D worlds we are now creating.   What we are building is in essence, a Life Star (as opposed to a Death Star); devices that can create places and systems that will allow us to continue to grow culturally, artistically, and spiritually without an accompanying destruction of RL planetary resources.  Moving our complex enterprise into the virtual, while reducing our complexity in RL by adopting a path of Voluntary Simplicty, may be the  choice that allows our RL funadamentals to recover from the raping and pillaging we have inflicted on it in the last 100 years.   Energy throughput is minimal in comparison to transportation, building and agriculture in RL. Material throughput is confined to the manufacturing of the processors, servers and fibers needed for its existence.

The virtual experience can be quite close to the real, as we all know.  Our economy is real, our builds and culture are real, and our potential is unlimited, only restricted by our ability and skill as used within the physics of the system.  Moving our need to build and create, to own, to purchase, to interact witha community... moving those human imperatives into the virtual space relieves the pressure on the slow moving systems of RL and allows them the time to restore and heal.  Adopting a life pattern of reduced complexity in RL with increased complexity in SL solves the dilemma of losing culture and civilization as we collapse from the peak of high energy civilization in RL.

Our meat avs have a few fundamental requirements, all of which can be met by personally assuming the responsibility of providing them. By this I mean,   I begin to figure out how to supply my electricty, I begin to learn how to provide my food and water, I begin to live in a Deeply Ecological way by understanding my surrounding environment and how it can meet my fundamental requirements in a sustainable way by not relying on the magic of corporations, but on personal knowledge and skill.   This scaling back of RL activity to the essentials, while moving my more human activities into virtual space, provides me  with the best of life.  My meat av becomes more connected to its natural environment as it grows food and understands where the water comes from, as I pass the entrance exam into energy use by learning more about electricity and how I can produce it here, and by connecting with my community to trade for those items I cannot, or am not skilled enough or willing to produce myself. 

In-world,  I am free to build my McMansion, drive my vehicles,  party to great music, join in communities of like minded souls, attend events with people from around the planet (with no need for flying or oil burning travel) and obtain an experience that is a close approximation of what it would be in RL - without all of the attendant damage to our vital natural systems which we now incur by acting out our human impulses in RL.  No RL - No SL. Protecting RL, while building our virtual spaces, is a middle path that holds a solution to our current dilemma. 

A dream, and a hope. We begin living it,  See you there. 

Global oil production peaked in the spring of 2006 at about 85 million barrels per day of all-liquids and 74 mbpd of crude-and-condensate only. For about 18 months the all-liquids figure has been declining at 0.1% per annum. The crude-and-condensate total has been declining at 0.5% per annum.

How many of us here will live to be 82?
How many of our kids will live to be 52?
How many of their kids will live to be 32?

Will we be the first generation that fails to provide survival information to our progeny? As we begin to experience the planetary climate adjustment, the likes of which we have not seen for 20,000 years (the Last Glacial Maximum) it seems possible that whatever info we can provide our children will be relatively useless. Our climb into civilization, if it can be called such, has been possible because of the relative stability of our planets climate. As it becomes evident that this period of stability has ended, what useful information can we give them? Plastics? Get an MBA? Be a lawyer? Get an aerospace engineering degree? Be a rock star?

Or does, learn how to do with less, learn how to manage your food supply, learn how electricity works, learn how to make things yourself, make more sense? And if it does, how can we impart that when most of us don't have that knowledge to begin with? When we live in a faith based society - I believe the electric company will continuously supply me power, I believe the food will be on the supermarket shelf, I believe I will be able to drive my car tomorrow - when we deal with this kind of low level faith every day, what do we do when the gods go away?

Taking the position of the reality of our looming bottleneck of problems: population, oil and energy, water, climate change; the next 50 years will determine how we embrace our future, or more accurately, the future we leave the coming generations, our kids and theirs. What I don't see in the media, or governmental debates, is the sense of urgency that a reading of the data relating to all of this should produce. We have talked about voting with our wallets, writing our reps, debating the benefits of wood burning pellet stoves, and even wasted bandwidth on debating the scientific basis for anthropogenic climate change. All of it has been interesting discussion, but little of it helps us to build the future in a concrete sense. And seeing how it is quite evident that we will not see any leadership at the federal level on this, we are left to our own resources.

This is happening now. Today. Peak oil is here, climate change is here. The manner of living we have known for our entire lifetime, and our parent's lifetime, is over. O-V-E-R.

Building the future will require a different set of premises, and a different set of skills. If we remain sanguine in the face of millions of refugees within the US, if we remain sanguine in the face of an economy relying on a diminishing resource, if we remain sanguine in the face of drought and famine, we can only do so by knowing we are acting Now, and not cooking our generations books by off loading the environmental consequences onto our children.

No matter the cause, anthropogenic or sunspots, the thought of dealing in 2080 with millions of refugees, New Yorkers and Floridians, roaming the country essentially homeless, should give all of us pause. The rise in sea level will force these millions out into the country, and at a time when oil, our foundation energy source, has depleted to a few small remaining pools. The ability of us to deal with a small disaster like Katrina should abide as our abject lesson in the scale of the coming displacements. The latest report of millions in refugee camps and political disruption may very well be coming from the US in a very near future.

The meme of urgency needs to spread. The realization of this epochal shift, forget the blame of how and why, raises serious concerns about the viability of our institutions and their continuance. The premise of catastrophic climate change coupled with the depletion curve of our business as usual energy base makes everything else pale in comparison. It should galvanize our greatest efforts as individuals and as a nation to prepare for a time we know little about, a new era that will be evident within our lifetimes.

Sustainable living in the suburbs seems like an impossible task. It is only easy when compared to living in a collapsing society of refugees, where the infrastructures and institutions are incapable of providing enough assistance, where the economy is crippled, and where the effects of destroying the natural fundaments on which we depend are being manifested all around us. It can't happen here, right?

After five years of reading and study it is my conclusion that the realities of Global Warming and Peak Oil are poised to change forever the world we have known.  But don't believe me, do your own research, and watch the weather.  It's not just an excellent documentary, it is happening today and is our certain future. The books you will find in the Happy Clam Island Library section have provided the wealth of information upon which I base the following proposition:

The planet's climate is being changed by the human industrial economy and that this change is most likely to be on an order not seen since the birth of human civilizations 10,000 years ago. Over the next 100 years it will manifest in ways that will severely stress human ability to cope with those changes. This is happening in conjunction with the final depletion of the main resource of oil, which provides the energy and raw material for creating and maintaining the modern manifestation of civilization.

The stresses incurred by global warming (falling food production, severe weather events, loss of habitat and species, resource wars, and new areas experiencing floods and droughts), IN CONJUNCTION WITH the depletion of our primary resource and a projected 3 billion increase in population, will be severe enough to force the civilization into a new state. This new state will not resemble what has endured for the last 500 years, and will most likely be arrived at through a severe loss of population and industrial capacity entailing great human suffering and hence can be considered a Collapse of Western Industrial Civilization.

I also propose that this state change is already under way and will only continue to accelerate over my remaining lifetime.   

The only hope I see for the humans, and other life forms, is to start building the future step by step.  Right Now.  A future that provides the requirements of life for all people, a future whose economy doesn't rely on poisoning or plundering the planet,  a future where people live as if Nature mattered.  It is my hope that my small actions, and others small actions, will accumulate and allow us to heal our natural foundations.  Small steps, small improvements, over time.  

The Healing Power of the Small.   

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.  What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong I condemn.   
Henry David Thoreau

Primum non nocere (First, do no harm)
Galen (after Hippocrates) 

that such clams exist?   Contrapuntal to a blog post by Elpis, I will wax poetic about these clams I find myself enmeshed with.  Throughout the  history of Happy Clam Island I have always delighted in the emergent quality of what happens here, our own manifestation of the Taoist concept of Wu-Wei - "success with no action".  The rain comes, and the grass grows by itself. 

Like a signal passing over our collective synapses, the idea will appear, and then ripple through the community, activating this Steff, that Elpis, this Finny, that Rebecca ( I essentially do nothing but beat my chest).  From that, I get the delightful experience of watching a Festival and Parade unfold, and can start my day riding the parade route built by our own Master Engineer Elpis Oh.   From the Finny / Serina mind comes the idea, from the Elpis mind comes the realization and implementation, from Alexi and Qee the music will flow, and all without millions of dollars in consulting fees, or strategic planning, or top down dictates.  

 It has been thus with the clam since its rezzing, more like a hive, or an organism than a sim.  A flow of avs, personalities, ideas, projects, all flowing through it and creating this special space I call home.  An idea appears, and suddenly Steff has created our Organica tree and Cellular stage that captures the essence of our tribal music space:  "Organica is made of people!" as the av said.  A solar festival is planned, and suddenly Vandalite has created fire effects that even the gods would envy. The community we have, this essence of happy clam, Eau de Clam we might say... emerges beautifully in a way I still find mysterious.   What fortune, to be surrounded by such a tribe!

existing or being everywhere at the same time : constantly encountered  (Merrian Webster)

As I continue to explore and create the Metaverse, I begin to ponder the way in which it has effected my own sense of self and the nature and definition of existence in general.  Obviously I have too much time on my hands, but the unexamined life is not worth living, as they say.   The confluence of technologies which emerged in the last 30 years, from internetworking, desktop computing, 3-D graphics, video game tech, and 2-D web have conspired to lay the foundations from which can emerge this self organizing space in which we now live.  For the purpose of this discussion, let us call this space The Noosphere, and reserve the particular term Metaverse for the 3-D virtual worlds.

The term Living my Life now encapsulates not only the meat aspects of Real Life survival, but also the maintenance and interactions of our self as projected into the Noosphere, either in 2-D form on the social networks, blogs, forums, emails and IM clients, or as avatars in the Metaverse.   So answering the question "Who Am I?" is now no longer as simple as a collection of facts such as  job, town, interests, religions, or an impression created by our behaviors within family, job, and community but now extends and spreads throughout the Noosphere.  We are defined by our posts, and blogs, and images, the links we share, the sites we visit, and the Metaverse worlds we choose to inhabit. 

These are exciting times for self awareness!  Just as consciousness and mentation are being seen as not merely residing in the brain, but spread across the central nervous system, so can our personas and self representations be seen to be spread across the Noosphere.    The prism of the Noosphere can reveal the more granular aspects of our self and serve as one of the more useful tools in our quest to nosce te ipsum.