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July 18 2020 Business As Usual (BAU) Porn - or Why We Need a New Porn Story The heading is a play on Chris Smaje's recent essay posted on his blog Small Farm Futures [0] which creatively weaves together some of the vibes wafting about in the COVID-tainted summer breeze. Smaje is a 50-something hobby(?) farmer in the UK with what sounds like a public health background. I don't always agree with Smaje but his latest piece seems to capture the essence of where things stand, a significant chunk of humanity living like demigods thanks to a rapacious globe-spanning resource extracting industrial system whose machinations are simultaneously hurling the biosphere towards a likely collapse in carrying capacity in the not too distant future. The demigods largely follow Upton Sinclair's [1] observation that "[i]t is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.", really the epitome of the predicament we find ourselves neck deep in. Gotta get the economy growing, gotta get the Progress train going again; it's grow or die. Except it's really grow AND die -- BAU porn is a snuff flick. Smaje's first footnote -- a fellow footnoter! -- lists several indicators that our story likely ends badly. I was particularly impressed with the UN office of Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) Global Assessment of Risk (GAR) report -- UNDRR GAR, get it? The distilled summary [2] includes an interesting flowchart of cascading causation from "Current Context" to "Systemic Failure", literally a shit creek with waterfalls. I liked it so much I made a copy; it's under 'Images and Graphs'. Clearly some dark humor happening at the UN these days. The Arch Bloviator John M. Greer also gets a mention in regards to how quickly things might change. Greer is known for poo-pooing suggestions that a civilizational collapse could happen rather quickly as historically that has been the case. However our current predicament is unprecedented in scale, the first couple of steps in the catabolic collapse [3] may be very steep. When does a steep contraction become a collapse? So.. what's a better porn story, one that satisfies but with a happier ending? How about one with no ending at all, just a long sustained character-driven narrative? Stop yawning. Smaje and many others see a better future in a slower, localized life. It's the idea behind the Transition Towns movement [4] as well as the decidedly less granola practitioners of Transition Engineering [5], an engineering discipline I'd not heard of until last week when I came across an interview with Susan Krumdieck [6], professor of Mechanical Engineering at Canterbury University in New Zealand. Krumdieck is a bit like Ozzie Zehner [7], another Ph.D. with enough technical training and experience to see through the hype of many of the so-called green technologies being proposed as part of a Green New Deal (GND) which is largely about keeping us watching that BAU porn. Unlike Zehner, who has gotten a lot of flack for both his 2012 book 'Green Illusions' as well as his role in the recent 'Planet of the Humans' film, Krumdieck seems to have gotten the ear of at least some in the world of business. Her 2012 Presentation to Leadership New Zealand Programme [8] is really something to see. Krumdieck also has a book out, 'Transition Engineering: Building a Sustainable Future' [9] which I'm going to be reading soon and will likely write more about. I don't know much about the culture in NZ but it does seem that the island nation is quite a bit ahead on thinking clearly about our current predicament. Back in the US, the Land of Waning Empire, lots of money is pouring into the GND. Joe "fingerbang" Biden is looking likely to relegate the Orange Man to a one-term presidency. Assuming COVID-19 and the ensuing Great Depression 2.0 doesn't completely take the wind of of the economy during his oval office stay, Biden will likely support implementing much of the GND, setting the stage for an epic power play, a tale of late-stage capitalism featuring sword fights between the old guard and young usurpers on the deck of the Titanic just as the ghostly iceberg comes into view. Hope the music is good because we know how that story ends. - - [0] https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair [2] https://gar.undrr.org/sites/default/files/gar19distilled.pdf [3] https://www.ecoshock.org/transcripts/greer_on_collapse.pdf [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_town [5] https://www.transitionengineering.org [6] https://youtu.be/4mzRbEJfjPA [7] https://ozziezehner.com/ [8] https://youtu.be/M9YRNqewGIY [9] https://www.routledge.com/Transition-Engineering-Building-a-Sustainable-Future/Krumdieck/p/book/9780367341268