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December 24 2022
Year's End Roundup -- 2022 edition
Has turned out to be a rather light posting year for me. While I'm
still very much engaged in learning about our predicament I haven't felt
as compelled to write about it as it kind of doesn't matter anymore
and arguably many folks are probably better off staying ignorant. Also
as previously mentioned, awareness of just how fucked we are seems to
have crossed some threshold, abet still mostly confined to the climatic
aspects and still mostly eliciting calls for technical solutions that
don't entail significant curtailment of overshoot economics.
Anyways.. here are some things I've read or happened upon recently that
seemed worthy of a mention.
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Some books I've read this year:
'Ultrasocial' by John Gowdy
This is probably the most all-around insightful book I've read in many
years. I've already written a too-long phlog post on it so I won't
add much other than it has changed how I interpret events these days.
While it would be nice if more of us came to understand and appreciate
this aspect of ourselves and learned to manage it as the current System
comes apart, I think more likely we'll have to wait until our numbers
have been reduced such that the power shifts back towards the individual.
There aren't many interviews with Gowdy specifically related to this
book; here's one by Rachel Donald:
John Gowdy on Planet Critical: https://youtu.be/E2ALn2ltC7Y
Donald has interviewed many people that understand the actual nature of
our predicament, people like Alice Friedemann, Tim Garrett and Nat Hagens.
Sadly she doesn't seem to take much of it in and continues to espouse
the usual eco-modernist nonsense.
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'Sex at Dawn' by Chris Ryan
Despite the arousing title the book is a serious and radical take-down
of several persistent myths of human nature and why we'd collectively
be much better off if we at least had a better understanding of how we
got here and how much of modernity leaves us emotionally impoverished.
This was the precursor to Ryan's second book 'Civilized to Death' which
continues the critique of modern industrial civilization.
Be the bonobo.
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'Heat' by Arthur Herzog
A surprisingly accurate climate catastrophe novel published in 1977.
It's a bit wooden and full of cliches but the author clearly researched
the science. Focuses on the risk of a sudden release of heat from
the ocean. The oceans have absorbed more than 90% of the heat produced
by Earth's energy imbalance during the Fossil Fuel Age, something that
gets almost completely ignored in most mainstream climate discussions.
Retired oceanographer Jim Massa[1] is one of the few people that
regularly covers ocean heating and the resulting thermal momentum that
makes stopping climate change an unrealistic goal now.
[1] COP27 Ocean Warming Moves Much Faster and Deeper
https://youtu.be/vrupJa2W6ZE
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'Parable of the Sower' & 'Parable of the Talents', by Octavia Butler
These were the first two books of what was intended to be a trilogy.
Don't know if Butler even started on the final book before she died.
As dystopian fiction they are well written and engaging and Butler's
take on how fascists often come to power is disturbingly familiar. My
main critique is with Earthseed, the non-theist religion invented
by Lauren Oya Olamina, the story's main protagonist. It's basically
the modern religion of Progress with humanity's destiny in the stars.
It reflects an energy blindness on the part of Butler, something that
appears throughout the novels as various technologies mysteriously
stay functional despite widespread state/infrastructure collapse.
The novels are described as dystopian science fiction; perhaps this
is the science fiction aspect.
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'An Inconvenient Apocalypse' by Wes Jackson & Robert Jensen
A recent book which -- very gently -- probes some of the uncomfortable
aspects of our predicament. Personally I found Jensen's video interviews
about the book more enlightening than the actual book with respect
to the points they were trying to convey. I'm not sure about Jackson
by Jensen is one of the few commenters on the unfolding "poly-crisis"
willing to include the shear number of humans as a primary driver of
overshoot AND willing to question the usual "educate women" proposal as
insufficient as the newly educated and their fewer offspring often become
greater consumers, the other half of the overshoot equation.
A couple of interviews which pretty much convey the main points of the
book, namely that we are part of Nature and when it goes we go, that
we are way out of balance with the natural world, that our "stone age"
brains are grossly ill-suited for the techno-industrial world we've
build using dense energy (fossil fuels), and that all of this is going
away much sooner than most think and a managed collapse is preferable:
Jackson & Jensen on Facing Future: https://youtu.be/ouKfivBCbsY
Robert Jensen on Collapse Chronicles: https://youtu.be/n24Xz4suwy8
Not really a fan of Facing Future as they often promote Business as
Usual by Other Means but it's a nice concise interview. The second is
a longer less rehearsed conversation with Sam Mitchell.
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'The Monkey Wrench Gang' & 'Hayduke Lives!' by Edward Abbey
Very engaging eco-sabotage novels that inspired groups like Earth First!,
back before the age of surveillance when one had a better chance of getting
away direct action AND there was still time to stop the runaway doomsday
train. I like Abbey's refusal to bend to expectations regarding how the
various characters comport themselves. He also had a knack for turning
the logic of the System on its head. There is a very cool illustrated
version[1] of the first book by Robert Crumb I'm going to buy someday.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/57/The-monkey-wrench-gang.jpg
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'Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival' by Richard Heinberg
This is Heinberg's take on how humanity got into it's current pickle. It
traces Power -- the ability to do work via directed energy -- from
single celled life and mitochondria through the evolution of more
complex life. It examines energy flows within ecosystems, and the steady
co-option of ecological productivity by a particular big brained primate.
The story eventually leads to the unique mess that is humanity and how
our socio-economic organization morphed over time, our hunter-gather
past to the techno-industrial civilization of today.
I mostly liked the book but I think Heinberg ultimately engages in wishful
thinking with respect to continuing to maintain that there is some way out
of this mess if we just change ourselves. While acknowledging things like
the maximum power principle -- all living things seek to maximize their
energy uptake, both volume and rate -- he proposes the presumably voluntary
adoption of an "optimum power principal" as a path to sustainability. It
seems little more than a restating of basic degrowth principals which have
gotten pretty much no traction to-date. It also assumes a level of agency
over our collective actions which we likely don't possess. As Nate Hagens
likes to say, _nobody_ is in charge.
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'Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History' by Matthieu Auzanneau
A real brick of a book but absolutely the most comprehensive thing I've
ever read about humanity's history with oil. Originally in French,
the English translation was underwritten by the Post Carbon Institute
and the Richard Heinberg wrote the foreword. I've had the book on
my shelf for a while as the shear heft of the thing was intimidating.
Fortunately it turned out to be a very engaging book. Much more than a
chronicle of oil exploration, it maps out how this magical stuff quickly
became the master resource and the interests of the oil industry became
de facto national interests, particularly so for the United States which
has several oil wars under it's belt and likely a few more in the works.
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Misc. things that caught my eye recently:
Science talk with Jim Massa -- Alaska Snow Crab Crisis:
https://youtu.be/O2-3zrQVIwc
(most experts expect the die-off to start in the oceans)
Two Different Perspectives, Same Conclusion - Modern Lifestyles Will End Soon:
blog post by Rob Mielcarski / Un-Denial
https://un-denial.com/2022/11/25/two-different-perspectives-same-conclusion-modern-lifestyles-will-end-soon/
(Simon Michaux is a mining industry consultant; his presentation is worth watching)
The Simple Story of Civilization:
essay by Tom Murphy / Do the Math
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-12-20/the-simple-story-of-civilization/
(civilization is a cult)
I have seen the future and it is Ramp Hollow:
essay by Kurt Cobb / Resource Insights
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-12-18/i-have-seen-the-future-and-it-is-ramp-hollow/
(no access to land => no alternatives)
The Poetry of Predicament
Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future:
a panel discussion with Ehrlich, Ceballos, Diamond, Hagens, Rees
https://youtu.be/Fdn0m866dzM
(related to similarly titled peer-reviewed paper)
The Enigma of Climate Inaction and the Human Nature in Policy Failure:
a presentation by William E. Rees
https://youtu.be/oJJ2GnSRX14
(keep the superorganism in mind while you watch)