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