Memorial Day Plans

The Age of Limits: Conversations on the Collapse of The Global Industrial Model
 
Friday May 25th thru Monday May 28th, 2012

Memorial Day Weekend at the beautiful Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary. If you are in reasonable traveling distance of Artemas, PA, please join us.

There will be talks, workshops and moderated discussions on specific topics of interest with John Michael Greer, Carolyn Baker, Dmitry Orlov (that's me), Gail Tverberg, Thomas Whipple and others.

Here are my talks:

I. Slowly at First, then All at Once: Progressing toward Collapse

It seems counterintuitive to most people that highly optimized, integrated, technologically advanced, progressive, mechanized, automated, highly efficient systems are far more fragile and far more prone to sudden failure than low-tech, localized, labor-intensive, inefficient ways of getting things done. But in fact striving for higher efficiency, be it labor efficiency or energy efficiency, is a way of coping by increasing complexity (and fragility) in order to be able to operate on a thinner and thinner margin. Once that margin disappears altogether (due to resource scarcity or when other limits are reached), or when the costs of complexity come to exceed its rewards (due to diminishing returns) then it is suddenly game over (a.k.a. "systemic failure", or collapse). I'll cover some theory on the subject (a light, non-mathematical treatment) and then talk about some examples: the electric grid, big box retail, centralized internet-based services, global finance, container shipping, air travel, etc. In each case, I'll try to show what a scaled-down, non-fragile, resilient substitute might look like, and try to outline some steps that can be taken in that direction.

II. Our Brave Experiment: Living Aboard a Sailboat

Some years ago I started thinking about the importance of bringing back sail transport. I put my thoughts together in an article titled The New Age of Sail, which has been called my “manifesto.” In it I described the sort of sailing vessels that could be quickly put together and operated in a resource-scarce and chaotic environment, in spite of problems such as lack of highly trained crew, lack of dredging and channel markers, coastal erosion putting destroying dockside facilities and global warming putting them underwater. I further expanded on this topic in a later article, Sailing craft for a post-collapse world. In the meantime, in keeping with a time-honored scientific tradition of experimenting on oneself (and one's family), my wife and I purchased a sailboat of the sort I described, moved aboard, and have spent a total of about three years living aboard and sailing up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the US. In the process, I was able to verify, by direct experience and by observation, everything I wrote in the above two articles, with one exception (it turns out that small sailboats can't outrun hurricanes). Along the way, we discovered a great deal about the pros and cons of minimalistic living. In this talk, I will discuss the role of sail in our future, and also share our experiences of living on the water and extrapolate them to life on land.

III. Sustainable Living as Religious Observance

Our understanding of the world in crisis has become increasingly compartmentalized and fragmented: there is scientific analysis, cultural criticism, political discourse, discussions of economics and finance, community organizing, survivalism and a mystical/spiritual approach, to name a few. There is only one type of institution that can transcend all of these boundaries and provide the basis, the motivation and the discipline to create and to perpetuate a sustainable living arrangement, and that is organized religion. It is also the one institution that has the political power to stand apart from the mainstream and to refuse to adhere to the standard set of practices: from the Amish ability to exclude invasive or oppressive technologies through their Ordnungen, to the Christian Scientists' successful refusal of medicine, to numerous other exceptions from the status quo. There simply isn't time to evolve a new set of resilient and sustainable social institutions from scratch, while the vast organizational possibilities offered by religion are simply too important to ignore. It is hard to imagine a religion, from primitive animism to pantheism to Islam, that is dogmatically opposed to living in harmony with nature. It is a question of emphasis: a charter entered in addition to, rather than instead of, existing religious observance. On the other hand, sustainability is no more a specific religious choice than is survival. A spiritual approach to sustainability is valid, but, at the same time, so is a perfectly practical, if not to say materialist approach to the question of using a religious orders as an organizing principle around which sustainable communities can be built. Rather than present a lot of material on this topic, I will attempt to paint a broad outline, and then open it up for what I hope will be an interesting and fruitful discussion.