A Future Without Homogenization

Yesterday we had some errands to run downtown. No, not in our own town; our central Arizona community has little more than a handful of private offices and too much big-box retail. It lacks a business center, and honestly there’s not much to make our town any different than most others. A Wal-Mart, a Home Depot, some fatty national chain restaurants, a nail spa, several churches, a dentist’s office, and neighbors we wave at but don’t really know. There’s not much distinctive about our place; this could be any town in any state. With no sense of place there’s also nothing to anchor us here. We know that we could move to a virtually identical place anytime we choose.

Why is our town so much like the next one over, like the one in California, like the one in Illinois, like the one in Pennsylvania?

This is a phenomenon – well, no, more of a sad process really – that I’ve heard progressive urban planners refer to as “Main Street homogenization” or “High Street homogenization.” In ecological science homogenization refers to a lack of (bio)diversity and of everything being the same. In chemistry homogenization is a term used when the studied chemical properties of a mixture show no variation. “Main Street homogenization” means that whatever town you’re in, Main Street will be essentially the same. You could fall asleep on the train, wake up in a different town, and in many ways continue your life uninterrupted.

Many years ago affordable automobiles and affordable fuels meant it was no longer necessary for the working classes to live near their work. Something new called “suburbs” sprang up all over the country, and it wasn’t long before city planners were being courted by corporations promising jobs and tax revenue if they could build a location of their national chain there. Family-owned businesses and local resilience were plowed down by economies of scale, and for several decades corporations have defined both our landscapes and lifestyles.

If you think about it it’s a rather dangerous situation: we’ve placed the livelihoods of entire populations in their hands. Without those big-box stores and chain restaurants we would have almost no way to feed, clothe, shelter, or support ourselves. At one time this was a self-sufficient nation of small business owners, of private producers and growers and cooks and craftspeople. Now, with the help of these cheerful omnipresent big-box stores and chain restaurants we have been turned into the world’s most proficient, and hopelessly addicted, consumers.

Industries make our vast quantities of daily consumer purchases possible by themselves consuming vast quantities of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels allow them to outsource raw materials from countries around world, to then transport those raw materials to points of outsourced production in yet more countries, to then transport finished goods to retailers, and for retailers to transport to goods to stores and consumers. When – not if – fossil fuels become difficult to obtain and more expensive to buy, every point of this chain of events breaks down. It will no longer be sound financially for big-box stores and chain restaurants to import from around the world, nor eventually to economically ship from regional distribution centers to local store fronts. To cover the rising cost of fuel they would have to price their goods above what consumers would tolerate. As consumers we may not be able to afford the fuel needed to drive across town to the store or restaurant anyway. At that point our economy as it is currently defined, and the way of life we know now, will cease to exist. Thank goodness better things lay ahead.

Our downtown errands took us to Phoenix, the economic center of Arizona. Partly because big-box stores and chain restaurants avoided Phoenix’s downtown corridor for many years, the people of Phoenix are now more resilient to future economic shock, at least relative to us suburban types. The city has a large number of small locally-owned businesses, farms and several farmer’s markets, and an active permaculture movement. There is some manufacturing, and although virtually all of these businesses currently use imported raw materials this still involves a skilled local workforce of makers. The makers of today will be the teachers of tomorrow… and by makers I mean everything: crafters, carpenters, bakers, cooks, farmers, knitters, sewers, plumbers, builders, potters, painters, all those skills that currently allow people from far away to make the things that fill our lives. We can do without those things, or we can learn how to make them ourselves and for each other.

Few city planners or politicians or Wal-Mart shoppers or McDonalds eaters have contemplated what our world might look like just thirty years, one generation, from now. Have you thought about where your food will come from? Where your water will come from? Where your news will come from? Where your music will come from? Where will you buy anything electronic? Who will build electronic things? From what? Where?

Finally, the future is in your hands. You will answer those questions. You will not allow corporations, or a culture totally reliant on corporations, to answer those questions on your behalf. The future is what you will make it, and it’s going to be very big, so you had better start today.

High Performance

In many other species it is the males whose colors and patterns trend towards the colorful and attention-grabbing, and the females whose entire wardrobe consists of grey and brown. Undoubtedly due to some genetic error we humans got this backwards, and for as long as we can remember this problem has been frustrating us. Questions such as “why does he only have black shirts?” and “why does she need fourteen different pairs of black shoes?” have plagued us for generations.

I smile when I see bored men being dragged around clothing stores by their wives, some of them moping on chairs by the entrance to a changing room, all of them wishing they were somewhere else, anywhere else, even if it meant the dentist. They usually have far-away looks on their impatient faces, and I enjoy this scene until I realize that I’m one of them. We should be comrades-in-arms, but as we pass each other sullen-faced amid the skirts and blouses and other unmentionables we can barely make eye contact. If anything it’s just a frown of acknowledgment for the other’s plight and a slight nod of commiseration. Thank goodness for smartphones, our lifeline to a world outside the stifling mountains of bras and shoes and earrings.

I have to admit though that in recent years my interest in clothes has been reinvigorated a bit. I still have no interest in fashion, but have become increasingly interested in what my clothes are made of and where they are made. This became an interesting topic of discussion recently when my wife and I were shopping for new running gear.

Interestingly, the world of athletic clothing is now overwhelmingly dominated by footwear companies. When you walk into any other type of clothing store you wouldn’t expect all the clothing to be branded by shoe makers, but this is clearly the case with athletic clothing. There are almost no designers or brands to be found; shorts, shirts, coats, and even underwear are all now made by shoe companies. It just doesn’t make any sense. When did it become stylish for clothing to bear logos bringing everyone’s attention to the stink emanating from their athletic shoes?

Most athletic wear is cleverly advertised as “high performance” or something similar, which really means that the item is made of a light-weight fabric that wicks moisture. This inevitably means that the fabric is woven from industrial toxins rather than natural fibers. These toxins are the kind of thing that any athlete truly concerned with his or her performance would avoid at all cost, so I made it my quest to look not only for natural fibers, but to look specifically for organic natural fibers. After all, what good are natural fibers if toxic chemicals are being dumped all over them anyway?

We visited a number of stores full of athletic clothing but found no item of clothing anywhere made of organic natural fibers. A handful of brands still use cotton in some of their clothes, but none of those items were organic.

As we browsed the fabric content labels something else became staggeringly clear: all of these clothes had been made in other countries and shipped to the US, often from literally half way around the world. A plane flight, boat ticket, or even bus ticket to any of these countries would cost a fortune, which made the sticker price of the clothing in my hand ridiculously low. It was clear that the sticker price did not reflect the true cost of the item. And it also meant that the person who made the clothing was paid very, very little. I held up a jacket made in Viet Nam, and as I looked at it wondered if the person who made it would ever be able to afford to buy it. I knew that the chemicals in the jacket were poisoning his or her country, and that they would poison ours in a landfill later. The only winner in this equation was the mega-shoe company whose bright logo appeared on the back.

It was becoming clear that “high performance” would have to come from us, not from our clothing. But wait – is has always been the athlete that performs, not the clothing. “High performance” was simply being used as a nonsense marketing phrase to sucker us into a purchase. This reminded us of how food marketers use misleading terms like “natural,” “reduced,” or “fat free.” Stores in our area weren’t selling clothing that supported farmers, factory workers, the environment, and community resilience, so we took our search online. Happily it turns out that there are plenty of organic natural fiber athletic clothing options available. We ordered and are now running happily, knowing that our performance comes from us, not from toxic clothing.

Shopping for clothes was a different kind of challenge this time around so wasn’t that bad after all. Just don’t tell my wife.

Occupy The Internet

Corporate influence over our government isn’t even being disguised anymore.

What The Future Will Sound Like

As a kid watching cartoons like the Jetsons, and then so many sci-fi movies in the years to come, I imagined that the future would be filled with beeps, swooshes, and the long, hollow, electronic noises that Hollywood taught us to associate with space. We would all have bleeping robots, and it wasn’t clear if we would all have personal spacecraft or be traveling silently by particle beam transfer.

Then the energy thing occurred to us.

It’s not just a matter of fuel; mining the raw materials, then using them, then assembling them, then distributing them, also requires energy. Without cheap abundant fossil fuels driving human productivity at breakneck speeds, our Hollywood visions of the future suddenly seem like, well, the wonderful fantasies that they are.

Our world without cheap and abundant petroleum will indeed be much quieter, but it won’t be silent – far from it. Just as we’re all accustomed to engine noises now, new noises will become a part of our lives in future. These new noises will be so common that we will overlook them and even sleep through them, just as we now do with the sound of passing automobiles or aircraft.

Cheap and abundant petroleum enables many of the things we enjoy today. For example, petroleum is used to carry coal to electricity plants, to carry raw materials and supplies to our workplaces, to carry products to the stores we visit, to import all the products whose manufacturing we have outsourced, to deliver all the products we purchase online, as the base component of most plastics and manmade textiles, and it is integral to every step of our modern food system. We have now hit peak oil; as petroleum becomes rarer and more expensive, these things we rely on will be forced to change. Some will do so successfully; others will not. Most importantly then, we ourselves will be forced to change too. We will be forced to change what we buy, what we eat, how we work, how we clothe ourselves, in short how we live our lives. Luckily, this change will happen over decades, not all at once, so will be far more comfortable than it sounds. Even so, some of us will change successfully; others will not.

If we focus on the threat to our food supply, history shows us that when our food supply was threatened by the task of supplying troops for World War Two, our government encouraged all citizens to plant seeds and grow their own food in “Victory Gardens.” Citizens responded en masse, replacing wasteful grass lawns with gardens of beans, tomatoes, potatoes, herbs and other essentials. In response to our current slow emergency we are likely to again see a boom in organic home gardening, and with that will come the gentle sounds of shovel splitting soil, trowel digging weed, vegetables and fruit being picked, and grains being threshed. Pollinators such as birds and helpful insects will return to serenade us.

These sounds will no longer be in movies, they’ll be coming from your own yard. And your neighbor’s yard. And apartment window boxes, and pots on balconies. With these sounds may come the voices of people talking to one another while they tend their plants, and maybe the sound of your own voice conversing with them as you fill your basket or wheelbarrow.

Cheap and abundant petroleum has made humans so much more productive that we tend to assume petroleum has been a wonderful thing for us. Honestly though I’m looking forward to a world without it. A world without fossil fuels sounds more sensible in many different ways. Occupy your food garden, and enjoy the sounds of humans beginning to live sustainably.

Peace And Quiet

One of the things we look forward to most about the coming end of cheap, abundant petroleum is the quiet. No one will be woken on early weekend mornings by lawn crews in their neighborhood using loud gasoline-powered devices. The gasoline will simply be too expensive to waste it on the tiny engines of all those lawn mowers, leaf blowers, string trimmers, chain saws and other annoyances. Without such gasoline-powered devices, most lawn care crews will adapt to electric-powered or battery-operated devices instead. Those are much quieter, and less polluting too.

But when the cost of gasoline gets too expensive for lawn care crews, it gets too expensive for almost everybody. As the world’s supply of petroleum continues to decrease and the price inevitably continues to increase, more and more people and businesses will stop buying gasoline. At some point, we will no longer be disturbed by loud motorcycles, trucks, or other vehicles. Tour planes and helicopters will no longer disturb the peace of our wild places, and no one will be bothered by the noise of passenger jets polluting overhead. Highways will be virtually deserted, making the engine roars, horns, and shouts of rush hour a thing people read about in history books. Our world without petroleum is going to be much quieter.

Peak Garbanzo

As you can see we’ve reached a critical point. We must now face the fact that half our resource has been used up. In the beginning there was a lot of our resource, it was easy to access. Now that we’re half-way done though there’s much less of our resource, and it is becoming increasingly awkward to reach way down inside the container to get more. I can remember a time not so long ago when we had so much that we never worried about not having enough. We never worried about it becoming difficult to get more. It wasn’t that long ago that no one was even talking about Peak Garbanzo.

Now that we know about Peak Garbanzo we can use less of them in order to make our supply last longer. We should also be using other things instead. Black beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, all kinds of things come to mind.

Or, we can just pretend that Peak Garbanzo is fake. We can keep on using garbanzo beans as if they’ll never end. We can laugh at those scientists and scholars and other hippies who warn us that when the garbanzos run out, we will be left completely unprepared, having no idea how to live our lives without garbanzos, and probably fighting with each other over the last few left.

Luckily for all of us, taking action to address Peak Garbanzo is about as easy as Peak Garbanzo denial. Because garbanzos are a renewable resource we can plant the beans in our own yards and always have a good supply of our own. What a relief to never have to worry again about the looming end of garbanzos that are currently trucked hundreds or thousands of miles to our local grocery stores. Before the rush starts, you can still find organic garbanzo seeds in places like Bountiful Gardens.

Everyone’s Annual Renaissance

New Year’s Day is everyone’s annual Renaissance, the day in which we gain new perspectives on our lives and resolve grand plans around our enlightened visions, only to abandon them a mere several centuries later.

New Year’s Day is a symbol of something exciting and new, even if it really means little more than another day on a calendar. New Year’s Days past have usually involved little explorations, trips down unknown paths in whatever area I lived at the time. It seemed important to go places I hadn’t been before, even if they were close by. A simple change of perspective seems to be the catalyst for so many wonderful things, so what better time to widen our perspective than right now.

On New Year’s Days past I’ve found myself each year at friendly little pubs in the English countryside, on others in the center of very cosmopolitan Toronto. Several New Year’s Days involved walks along Hawaiian beaches, and most recently hiking through sand of a different kind: the deserts of Arizona. The new path on this New Year’s Day was a fun 5K run, which sounds  very healthy and admirable but we celebrated immediately afterwards with a pizza. When I’ve figured out how to properly justify that I may come back and edit this.

Although resolutions based on calendars have a horrible track record, we tend to stick with resolutions based on our ethics and morals. One of my resolutions this year is to eat more organic, fresh, raw, locally grown produce. Bearing this in mind, here are some tasty things that farmers and gardeners here in Arizona will be harvesting this month. Look for these in your local farmers market or CSA:

arugula
beet
bok choy
broccoli – head
broccoli – Raab
broccoli – Romanesco
Brussels sprouts
cabbage – Chinese
cabbage – standard
carrot
cauliflower
cilantro
collards
dill
endive
fennel
garbanzo beans
Jerusalem artichoke
kale
lentils
lettuce
mint
mizuna
mustard greens
onions – multiplier
onions – scallion
parsley
pea – English
pea – snap
pea – snow
radish
spinach
Swiss chard
turnip

Enjoy a happy, healthy, peaceful, compassionate life!

Digital Holiday

I used to enjoy watching people in airports. All those strangers involved in loving reunions and tearful departures were romantic, occasionally unsettling, and almost always reminiscent of annoying television commercials. Couples kissing, business people shaking hands, college buddies doing stuff, all unfolding endlessly in little thirty-second plays.  And as in commercials, pharmaceuticals, mobile phones, and an announcer’s voice often play roles. I tend to avoid airports now though; there is no longer anything luxurious or even attractive about the air travel experience. A wide spectrum of human interactions still occur at airports of course, but these now include far too many scenes of frustration. In commercials, scenes of frustration only last for five or ten seconds until a product solves everything. In an airport, the frustration seems to go on forever.

Thankfully there are many ways to enjoy observing the human experience that don’t involve a trip to Cavity Search Memorial Airport. One of my favorites is our local movie theater.

It’s fun to watch people emerge into the bright open air from a dark movie theater. Certain behaviors are almost inevitable: a sudden break in pace as if they’ve walked into an invisible wall, a quick frown and squint, and then an arm instinctually raises to shield their eyes until they remember to fumble for their sunglasses. This experience is analogous to one in which people are often at their cutest: when they first wake up and are stumbling around wild-haired, squinting at the light, arms stabbing outward to steady themselves on any wall that happens to be nearby. People emerging from theaters offer the added bonus though of potentially being covered in a protective coating of popcorn. Realization often results in a wet dog shake, sending popcorn flying in all directions. Birds in the theater parking lot watch eagerly for these moments; to them a human doing the wet dog shake is a visit from a mobile food bank.

It occurs to me that the way I described the just-woke-up experience it sounds remarkably like the drunk experience. In fact, both involve varying degrees of bad breath and cognitive disfunction. I wonder why we perceive one as cute and the other as repulsive? I suspect it’s something in our DNA – we are probably hardwired to sustain healthy sleep and to nurture those we love while they sleep. And despite many of our collegiate attempts to overwrite our DNA, there is absolutely nothing in our coding meant to sustain and nurture getting tanked. That we do at our own peril, knowing that if a ravenous pride of lions were to attack we would be the slow ones taken down first.

In some parallel universe where lions rule the world, the security in airports is especially vicious. A family of lions could spend their entire summer looking for their gate, roaming the endless open savannah known as Terminal Three. Others would pounce on the baggage carousel, mercilessly tearing suitcase carcasses to shreds. Similar fates awaited rental car agencies, their fifty-page lease documents fluttering across the tarmac in the jet fuel breeze. None of these scenes is remotely sentimental, but perhaps lion commercials are different than ours.

Television News

As I prepared his breakfast this morning Marbles and I watched the lunar eclipse begin. Being a rabbit Marbles claimed to have insider information proving that it is indeed a rabbit in the moon, not a man in the moon, but I hadn’t had any coffee yet and was in no mental state to ponder such things. I rinsed off his cilantro, and carrot, and apple, and we stared into the pre-dawn sky. Just after butt o’clock a pale grey shadow appeared on the top third of the moon, then at around drool forty-five a darker, no-nonsense shadow cured the moon’s baldness and began creeping down its face.

Seeing this lunar rabbit / man turn into a wolf / wolfman as the darkness descended reminded me of a phrase that my old statistics professor often used: “the veil of ignorance.” He was a jovial type that mixed humor into what could have been a very dry subject, continually reminding us that study and understanding, though difficult, would open our eyes to the way much of our modern world works. Whether it was his intention or not, that phrase “the veil of ignorance” actually explained more to us about how the world works than the statistical formulas we learned.

The moon may have believed that it was still shining brightly, but as the Earth’s shadow crept across its face all the moon’s reflected brightness was extinguished. When finally the shadow completely blocked sunlight from the moon, the moon found itself in total darkness. It was dark on all sides, front and back, top and bottom, a dark rock floating in a dark void. Without someone else to provide its brightness the moon was imprisoned in darkness, completely shrouded by a veil of ignorance. I wonder if the moon feels scared? With enormous shadows looming and no one else providing light the moon may feel very lonely, unprepared, and cold.

The moon wasn’t concerned. It felt quite secure, and maybe even a little smug. No effort or action would be required on its part; it would not have to open its mind, increase its knowledge, consider other perspectives, volunteer time, or offer compassion. The moon will be able to sit on the couch while the Earth’s shadow moves away and the Sun’s light returns. Then, the moon will feel bright again, more normal, and maybe even happy. The moon can relax while someone else provides all the brightness the moon feels it needs. But because the moon has left its brightness entirely in the hands of others, the veil of ignorance is still in place.

I agree with Marbles that from way down here on Earth it looks more like a rabbit in the moon, but feel sure that only a man in the moon would voluntarily seek out the veil of ignorance.

Thanksgiving

Road trip!

KindlyIndulgeMe and I are hitting the road, traveling over 4300 km to visit family this Thanksgiving. Food, water, and little else is packed and the Prius is ready to roll. While we’re out the fort will be held down by the rabbit member of our family, who we understand will be entertaining a guest while we’re out (a sitter).

Although I won’t be posting here while we’re away, I will be updating Twitter. See you at @knowthankyou.

We wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday, and if Thanksgiving is not celebrated in your country have a wonderful week!