Big chunks of great article on the need for Transition

Still one of the more accessible introductions ot the topic out there. Cover via Amazon

Cheer Up, It's Going to Get Worse

Transition communities gear up for society's collapse with a shovel and a smile

By Alastair Bland

Three years ago, David Fridley purchased two and a half acres of land in rural Sonoma County. He planted drought-resistant blue Zuni corn, fruit trees and basic vegetables while leaving a full acre of extant forest for firewood collection. Today, Fridley and several friends and family subsist almost entirely off this small plot of land, with the surplus going to public charity.

But Fridley is hardly a homegrown hippie who spends his leisure time gardening. He spent 12 years consulting for the oil industry in Asia. He is now a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute in Sebastopol, where members discuss the problems inherent to fossil-fuel dependency.

Fridley has his doubts about renewable energies, and he has grave doubts about the future of crude oil. In fact, he believes to a certainty that society is literally running out of gas and that, perhaps within years, the trucks will stop rolling into Safeway and the only reliable food available will be that grown in our backyards.

Fridley, like a few other thinkers, activists and pessimists, could talk all night about "peak oil." This catch phrase describes a scenario, perhaps already unfurling, in which the easy days of oil-based society are over, a scenario in which global oil production has peaked and in which every barrel of crude oil drawn from the earth from that point forth is more difficult to extract than the barrel before it. According to peak oil theory, the time is approaching when the effort and cost of extraction will no longer be worth the oil itself, leaving us without the fuel to power our transportation, factories, farms, society and the very essence of our oil-dependent lives. Fridley believes the change will be very unpleasant for many people.

"If you are a typical American and have expectations of increasing income, cheap food, nondiscretionary spending, leisure time and vacations in Hawaii, then the change we expect soon could be what you would consider 'doom,'" he says soberly, "because your life is going to fall apart." . . .

Fridley says too many Americans believe in solutions to all problems, but peak oil is a terrible anomaly among crises, he explains, because there is no solution. Fridley doesn't even see any hope in solar, wind, water and other renewable energy sources. Even nuclear power creates only electricity, while crude oil is the basis for thousands of synthetic products.

"There is nothing that can replace oil and allow us to maintain life at the pace we've been living," he says. "Crude oil is hundreds of millions of years of stored sunlight, and we're using it all up in a few generations. It's like living off of a savings account, whereas solar energy is like working and living off your daily wages."

The sheer cost-efficiency of oil eclipses all supposed alternatives. Removed from the ground and burned, oil makes things move almost miraculously. A tank of gasoline in a sedan holds enough energy to equal approximately five years of one person's rigorous manual labor.

Historically, too, oil has been very easy to get since the world's first well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859; for each barrel's worth of energy invested in the process of accessing crude oil, 30 barrels are produced, says Fridley. By contrast, ethanol is a paltry substitute; each barrel's worth of ethanol invested in ethanol production produces a mere 1.2 barrels of raw product. Other renewables offer similarly poor returns. "The thermodynamics just don't add up," Fridley says. . . .

Fridley does not see peak oil as doomsday, though he predicts that there might be "die-off," just as marine algae bloom and crash periodically. In fact, Fridley views Transition as a process of world improvement. The environment around us has been falling apart for decades due to our excessive lifestyles, he notes. In our oceans and wildlands, doomsday has already arrived with deforestation, water pollution, fisheries collapse, extinction and other plagues. Peak oil presents an urgent cause to rethink and reshape our lives and theworld for the better, he says. . . .

Forever Growth?

Fridley has seen peak oil coming for years. From his small Sonoma farm, he may be prepared to feed himself, but our world's dependence on oil goes far beyond food production. Even electric machines need crude oil byproduct.

"Every single machine in the nation runs on lubrication," Fridley says. "If that lube isn't there, then what?"

In theory, the world freezes up. A person may first digest this concept as an abstract, distant nebula, like climate change, extinctions, water pollution and other newspaper headlines. However, when the reality of peak oil hits—when it hits a person so that his or her personal life is deeply affected—it hits hard.

"It's hard to internalize," says Miller, who has seen many people react in many ways to being told that the world in which they have grown so comfortable is about to end. "One tendency is for people to believe that there is a solution, that technology will fix it or that the powers that be will fix it."

But technology and the powers that be run on oil. Santa Rosa author Richard Heinberg, a senior fellow with the Post Carbon Institute, described peak oil in his much lauded 2003 book aptly titled The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, and indeed, most experts on the matter now agree that the party is over. Transitionists are readying for the new era with open arms while struggling to convince others of the severity of the matter.

In Santa Cruz, several city figures, including councilman Don Lane and the city's climate action coordinator Ross Clark, have stepped up and proven themselves allies of the Transition movement, attending multiple community meetings. San Francisco, too, has acknowledged peak oil, and a city-appointed task force recently submitted to the supervisors a 120-page report detailing the city's vulnerabilities to the crisis.

Savinar has been trying for years to invite government participation in peak oil preparation. In 2005, he sent a letter of warning to each member of the Santa Rosa City Council, advising that they begin aggressively readying the community for peak oil and its aftermath. The letter was articulate and "lawyerly," he says, and included a copy of Heinberg's Party's Over in each package, yet not one councilperson
responded.

"And I guarantee that if I was a car manufacturer and I scribbled out a letter with crayons, they would have answered me," he says with a short laugh.

Fridley also believes assistance will not come from the world's leaders. Transition can only be a grass-roots revolution. He points out that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was previously the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where Fridley has done much of his thinking about peak oil and Transition.

"[Chu] was my boss," Fridley says. "He knows all about peak oil, but he can't talk about it. If the government announced that peak oil was threatening our economy, Wall Street would crash. He just can't say anything about it."

Thus, world leaders would like to have the populace believe that this oil-age feeding frenzy will continue forever, that the economy will continue to expand and grow. At the 2008 G-8 Summit on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, for example, our leaders declared a resolution to resume economic growth. Fridley says such a goal is impossible, yet no one wants to face the fact.

"Ask scientists if something can grow forever exponentially, and they'll say, 'No.' Then ask how our economy can keep on growing, and they'll say, 'Well, it has to.'"

Elsewhere, many politicians and leaders have been reluctant to address peak oil, and full governmental leadership may never arrive. Levy believes that politicians locally and nationally will be even more reluctant to discuss peak oil than they've been to address climate change.

"Transition is probably going to grow from the ground up before the government comes onboard," he predicts.

Nice

Change SF to Salem O and it's the same story

Image by Alex Mahan via Flickr

A little slowly dawning recognition but mainly deep denial that our way of living (and certainly our caloric abundance) depends entirely on abundant cheap energy . . . the kind that is not going to be around much more.

Report says peak oil could cause food shortages in S.F.

In May, an obscure city advisory group released the results of a 15-month study of San Francisco's vulnerabilities to peak oil, a scenario that assumes the global supply of oil will run thin in the near future and that the world could go the way of Mad Max. Produced by the now-disbanded Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force, seven volunteers appointed in part by Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi in late 2007, the 120-page report warns that San Francisco [and Salem too] is looking at a grim future if public policymakers and city residents don't start preparing for the post-oil apocalypse right away.

Jason Mark, a local author and urban farmer who sat on the task force, says serious food shortages could be a reality. He recommended in the report that residents be allowed to graze goats in their yards, keep more than four chickens per property, and raise and eat their own rabbits and hogs as supplemental protein sources. He says these tactics — currently prohibited by the health department — would help alleviate pressure on outlying Bay Area farmlands while building agricultural self-sufficiency within the limits of San Francisco. He would also like public golf courses to be converted into productive urban farmland and have the city plant fruit and nut trees along sidewalks.

The lengthy report further warns that if San Francisco [--or Salem]'s leaders don't take peak oil seriously, we can expect "violent fluctuations in energy prices," extreme gentrification, and poverty. But Supervisor Sean Elsbernd believes the city has more important problems to address. He points to the deficit, which he predicts will hit $1 billion in two years: "And they're worried about farming chickens in backyards and planting nut farms? We've got enough nuts in this city already." He calls it "ridiculous" to ask the Board of Supervisors to tackle such global issues as peak oil. [And who does he expect to tackle local preparedness if not local governments?]

Mirkarimi, though, believes this is one matter that must be addressed at city level. "This conversation has to take place soon, but we can't compel the federal or state governments to do anything," the Green Party member says.

Oil supplies, the task force's report states, are fated for "an inexorable decline," and natural gas supplies will careen into an "unstoppable descent." If we don't brace ourselves now, it warns, adjusting to life in San Francisco [-- or Salem] after the energy crash will be "enormously difficult, painful, and expensive. There is no time to lose." . . .

Powering the Future

Image by mattlemmon via Flickr

This is a short version of a talk that Dr. Lewis has been giving for some time. Worth your time.

For an older, fuller version, find the talk here.

See also "Out of Gas" by Dr. David Goodstein, Provost at CalTech.

Like to watch things circle the drain?

Better take your bike with you, because the buses will stop so early (7 p.m.) that you're likely to be stranded otherwise. Image via Wikipedia

If you can ignore the infuriating passive voice ("service reduction is needed," "a system redesign is being proposed"), you can notice that there's still a few days left to weigh in on the service amputations that will render our already anemic bus system even scrawnier and less able to support the community.

For the Salem-Keizer Transit Board Meeting of June 25, 2009 Agenda Item #F.4

You can contact all the Transit Board Members use board@cherriots.org

An overall service reduction is needed by September 2009 in order for the cost of service provided by the Salem Area Mass Transit District to be covered by annual revenues received and to stay within budget. As a result a system redesign is being proposed to not only address the budget issue also long-term ongoing issues with inefficiencies in the current system

Salem Area Mass Transit District
Bus Routes Redesign – Information for our Customers

The following information is for use with customers who have questions about the bus system redesign or specific questions about their routes.

Questions & Answers

When will the final decision on the bus routes redesign be made?

• No decision has been made yet.
  
  
• The Board of Directors will make a final decision at their Thursday, June 25 meeting (6:30 PM, Senator Hearing Room, Courthouse Square, 555 Court Street NE.)
  
  
• Everyone is welcome to come to this meeting
  
  
• No formal public testimony on the bus routes redesign will be taken at this meeting.
  
  
• The meeting can also be watched on CCTV Channel 21 or by video streaming on their website at www.cctvsalem.org at 6:30 PM
  

Where can I get more information?

• The Board agenda packet with information about the bus routes redesign will be available on our website by Friday, June 19: www.cherriots.org.
  
  
• Maps showing bus routes redesign scenarios can be seen on our website: www.cherriots.org. Go to the Current Updates section to view a redesign presentation.
  

How can I talk with Cherriots staff or board members about the bus routes redesign process?

Appointments to talk or meet with staff can be made. A representative from the Transportation Development Division will contact customers to make appointments. (Get the caller/visitors contact information.)

• Name: ________________________________________
  
  
• Phone number and/or email address: ___________________

• Best time to call them back: _________________________
  

Customers can email Board or staff directly with their opinions, questions or concerns: Staff email: skt@cherriots.org
Board of Directors email: board@cherriots.org

How will I be informed of the new bus system routes?

The Salem Area Mass Transit District Board will make a decision about the bus system redesign on June 25. Information will be:

• Posted on our website www.cherriots.org
• Available on the buses and at bus stops
• Mailed to customers
• Available at the Transit Mall Customer Service Center

Important Upcoming Dates for the Bus Routes Redesign to be aware of:

• June 19 -- Board meeting agenda packet with information about bus routes redesign options available on our website: www.cherriots.org.

• June 25 -- Board picks a bus routes scenario.

• July–August Information distributed to public about new routes.

• September 4 Last day of bus service on existing routes.

• September 8 First day of new bus service with new routes and frequencies.

Yes, appears so: Threat to Minto Ag acreage pulled from June 22 agenda?

2nd Update: Transportation and Parks Director Mark Becktel sends:

This is to let you and your folks know that the staff report to Council has been pulled and will not go before the Council tonight (Monday 6/22/09). We have requested additional time from the USDA/NRCS to work through some issues regarding the conservation easement, both related to issues your group brought up and concerns our legal department has with the easement language itself.

I will let you know when the staff report is scheduled to go before the Council in the future.

ORIGINAL: It's not clear why or how it happened, but the agenda for Monday night's City Council meeting (June 22) has chickens (action in the consent agenda to refer it over to the planning commission, as was decided some three weeks ago on May 26) but nothing about the proposed easement-for-cash trade that would lock up precious farm land on Minto Island.

Note that there already a Master Plan for Minto that calls for continuation of agriculture. (Oddly, not available on the city website.) More than that, there's also a City of Salem Parks Master Plan, which proposed more trails on the island, trails that this easement deal would prohibit.

So it may be that there's good news, and the city staff has realized that you can't just junk the master plans created with lots of citizen participation just because the feds wave some freshly-printed borrowed money at you.

Updates posted here as soon as available. Meanwhile, the map above is Figure 4 from the City of Salem Parks Master Plan. Note the proposed "primary" trails on Minto that have yet to be developed -- and could never be if we accept this "stimulus."

Garden and Other Transition Assets Tour -- can we come by your place?

Good big label and a sign with information about the crops -- nice! Image by Annie&John via Flickr

WANTED: You to show off your garden [or other sustainability assets]!

Transition Salem is planning a series of self-guided bicycle tour maps to highlight local food gardens and sustainable living assets. Many of Salem's bicyclers share our interests in gardening and healthy living, and are active participants in our community. The tour will be free of charge to all bicyclers. Transition Salem is in the initial stages of planning how the tour will unfold, so suggestions are welcome.

We anticipate having several bike routes, allowing riders to chose different difficulty level for the ride. We would still like to plan routes which will allow riders to see as many of our gardens as can be seen, and speak with garden owners when possible. This will be be a great opportunity to cross pollinate ideas, skills, and possibly even resources.

What do I need in order to display my garden as part of the tour?

• Provide your address [and any information you have about best biking routes to it]
  

• Is your garden viewable to people driving by and viewing from the street, or do you need to be present to guide people?

• What days would you be available to talk about your garden? (At this point this is of less importance, as we haven't narrowed down the time frame further than July – September. We are intending that the tour be ongoing for a number of weekends, or perhaps even weekdays, so we're not thinking that someone would have to be there at all times.)

• Give us a quick description of your garden, or list items of interest in your garden. Perhaps list the gardening techniques you are using (for example: square foot gardening, permaculture, biointensive, raised beds, gray water irrigation, etc.)

• Anything else of interest. [We're thinking of features that will be assets during the Transition period we're entering: For example, your chicken coop, solar panels, solar hot water heater, rainwater harvesting systems, solar or manually powered water well, passive solar design features on your house, your greenhouse, your container gardens, etc.]
  

It would also be helpful if you could label the plants in your garden, and in any other way provide visual clues to items of interest. As a bonus, it may also be helpful if a few people could:

• Provide water/liquid to bicyclers

• Provide printed material on other events, gardening tips, and items of community interest.

And last of all, be prepared to meet lots of interesting new people, and perhaps a few of your neighbors you haven't had a chance to talk with before!

If you want to know more, to help plan the tour, or to offer your place as a stop along the way, shoot us an email.

Transition Salem will begin developing a new webpage at transitionsalem.org, but until then, go here for to learn more about us.

If you know of someone else who might be interested in displaying their garden or other features of interest, or if you have ideas of how I can contact other gardeners please let us know.

Happy Growing!

The promise of the future: Voided by our cleverness

When they dig up the bones of people from this era, will they think of us kindly? Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Since time immemorial, the promise of the future has always been that, overall, on a global scale, each generation will be better off than the prior ones. Humans are clever, and they share what they have learned with other humans, so even young humans can access the hard-won knowledge and experience of many generations of prior learning. Moreover, our lives are short but material goods last a long time -- meaning that the wealth of the ages slowly builds up and people enjoy the results of prior generations' efforts that way too.

Earth, the only habitable planet known, is perfectly suited to support human life in relative ease and comfort. Every day, unfathomable riches of solar energy arrive, for free. Reserves of solar energy, concentrated and distilled over millions and millions of years were provided under the ground, for free. Plants and animals in symbiotic relationship maintain the atmosphere at just the right level of oxygen. If used judiciously, those solar energy reserves (known as fossil fuels) can provide all the energy needed to provide an abundance of comfort and decent livelihood for all people.

But alas! Humans are clever, rather than wise.

As a result, we have voided the promise of the future.

Because of the way we use energy, the future for many generations will be much worse than the present.

Worse, our response to this sickening realization -- that we are the first generation in 200 million years of human evolution to leave our posterity with a degraded future prospect at every point on the globe -- is a combination of angry or sullen denial and magical thinking, where we lunge after "solutions" that are really just doing more of what has gotten us into this mess in the first place. Meaning that each generation will not only be worse off than we are, for the foreseeable future, but that the degrading trend will continue, with each generation leaving their own progeny (and the progeny of all other humans alive at the time) with an increasingly unstable climate, in an environment of increasingly scarce energy, with increasingly short food and water supplies.

We cannot avoid some of this. Earth's climate is far too vast to right itself immediately, even if we were to stop pumping millions of years worth of carbon into it entirely in an instant -- the carbon we've already pumped in will continue to make itself increasingly felt for a thousand years.

But we can stop making it worse. But it would require living as if we owed something to the future, rather than only to ourselves. So, while there is little cause for hope, there is something we can do: Transition. Not a guaranteed solution or even a "solution" at all -- but a way of adapting to our predicament and learning to live so that we don't leave our children an even more limited and difficult future life.

Here in Salem, a small group (the Salem Transition Initiative for Relocalization) has begun to meet to organize the necessary transition to a more local, low-energy, low-emissions future, as part of a global network of Transition Towns that is growing every day.

STIR is poised to become Transition Salem and to begin developing strategies for the transition and an energy descent action plan for our region. We are meeting every other Wednesday at Tea Party Bookshop (corner of Liberty and Ferry in downtown Salem) at 7 p.m. with the next meeting on July 1. If you would like to become an active participant in helping with the transition, you are invited to join us.

Celebrate Summer's Arrival!!

Wonderful! See you there!

To kick off the summer in positive fashion, we are planning a celebration this Saturday (6/20) from 1-4 pm at the Garden on 19th St. SE, between Oak & Bellevue streets. Please join us for music, food, and activities for all!

Sincerely,

Jordan Blake
Garden Project Manager
Marion Polk Food Share

Email: jblake@foodbanksalem.org
Work cell: (503)798-0457
Web: www.marionpolkfoodshare.org

Ruh-roh -- you mean we can't ignore natural resource limits? Who knew?!

Eola Hills. Image via Wikipedia

A member of Salem City Watch writes:

Note the lengthy article in today's Oregonian ( "Reliable water data running dry in Oregon," by Les Zaitz, page A1). Apparently, underfunding the Water Resources Department over the last several years has left us without the data, resources or manpower to intelligently plan for the next million people expected to be living here by 2030.

Here's a classic quote, "If we had known in the 1960s what we know now, the department would not have issued as many groundwater permits." Brenda Bateman, Senior Policy Advisor, Oregon Water Resources Department.

Of course this information is coming out just as the Legislature passed the Big Look bill which in all likelihood will increase rural development and Metolius Protection is fighting for its life.

In 2009, many believe we have already overcommitted our water resources and we're still behaving as if it were the 60s.

Yes Salem has an abundance of water, until we're asked to divert it to "create jobs" and "improve the economy" by developing Eola Hills.

Richard

Of course, there is reason for extreme skepticism about projected growth in population; those numbers are based on total obliviousness to the reality that we've hit Peak Oil and that the end of easy, cheap energy is going to permanently rewrite our economic rules, such as how much we move around (and how many jobs there will be to move for, etc.) But the underlying point is good: the first thing the developers and corporations want is for the public to be without good data on natural resource limits, because then they can sell "growth" and "jobs" much easier.