Extrinsic Tides

For now the price of oil is falling. The air seems clear (except in Beijing). Here in Japan, food is plentiful (we even got our butter back!) and, from my understanding the developed nations are flush with commodities, foodstuffs and the spoils of wealth as well. 

The world economy seems to be slowing, yet, again, this doesn’t touch us too directly. Those of us who have gone green or are thinking about going green out of fear, conformity or a sense of duty/obligation may begin to waver. I mean, hey, life’s still good if you’re on the developed side of things, right?

What motivates? What sustains? 

Spend some time with these big, broad, open questions. Meditate. Observe what emerges. 

At some point, the price of oil will rise again. The air, though clear, already holds too much of us. Food is only plentiful now because our oil-based food production system is still chug chug chugging along. Wealth continues to accumulate in the same places it has been for quite a long time. As gaps grow so does the resolve to close them. 

So, as you ponder green, as you wonder green, ask yourself:

What motivates? What sustains?

Observe what emerges. And,

do what needs to be done.

Tags: food production, peak oil, sustainability

Our World 2.0

Brendan Barrett, Head of the UNU Media Studio is web publishing a nice looking, thoughtful and thought provoking magazine called Our World 2.0. Here’s a recent article I recommend checking out:

Peak Oil What does it mean to you? Excerpt:

Does oil priced at over $140 per barrel signal the arrival of Peak Oil? The experts disagree on the cause of the price jump but agree on one message: The era of easy oil is over.

How this affects you: Health: 

The rising fuel prices cause a lot of stress and worry for everyone. We all know that stress is not good for your health. One important point is to make sure to stay informed about why this is happening and then consider how you can put a positive spin on the situation, one that can actually bring about improvements in your health. For instance, by cycling rather than driving, which is good for you and good for reducing your costs associated with fuel consumption.

Brendan does a good job of making the current rise in fuel costs understandable. He does a particularly good job of connecting the systemic dynamics to everyday living. 

Good work Brendan. 

Tags: peak oil, sustainability, United Nations University

A Simple Truth

Found an opinion piece from the Washington Post called “Wake Up, America. We’re Driving Toward Disaster.” Some of you might think some of the news items cited in this blog are overwrought gloom and doom prognostications. And, it may be true that some of the predictions the authors make may tend toward extreme extrapolations of our current situation. 

However let’s look at a simple truth: any disruption in the supply or availability of oil will affect all aspects of our lives. The article by James Howard Kunstler cited above states this clearly:

The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the “peak oil” story. It’s not about running out of oil. It’s about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:

The way we produce food

The way we conduct commerce and trade

The way we travel

The way we occupy the land

The way we acquire and spend capital

And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.

As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis.

The current rise in oil prices may be due more to speculation than shortages or supply issues but, really, it doesn’t matter. As a world we are now in a situation where the strands of commerce, trade and production that interconnect us (imagine a mandala of rubber bands all stretched taut) are getting pulled pretty tight. Any little vibration resonates throughout the entire interconnected system. This situation will not ease anytime soon. In fact, the stress on these strands will most surely increase due in no small part to the ascendancy of China and India.

The question is, are we going to wait for conditions to force us to make changes in the way we produce food, the way we conduct commerce and trade, the way we travel, the way we occupy the land, the way we acquire and spend capital, etc. or are we going to embrace the opportunity to proactively re-design the way we engage these activities.

In his article Kunstler chides Americans for their child-like attachment to wishful thinking. Americans are optimists and recently that optimism has revealed itself in some pretty shallow practices like those arising from the escapist idiocy being stoked by the The Secret. Still, that optimism, if grounded in an understanding and acceptance of the complex and dynamic systemic realities confronting us can, I believe, still be quite magical. As Kunstler says:

We cannot afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must understand that hope is not something applied externally. Real hope resides within us. We generate it — by proving that we are competent, earnest individuals who can discern between wishing and doing, who don’t figure on getting something for nothing and who can be honest about the way the universe really works.

We can still have hope, still dream and wish for better times but we can’t stop there. We have to let that intrinsic desire to be and live well manifest itself in informed, well-timed and thoughtful action. The logic behind that action is also key.

We have to evolve our understanding of the world from one of linear cause and effect that can be controlled to an understanding of the world of interconnected open, complex systems that can, at best, be influenced. And, we’re going to have to learn to live and act lightly, coherent with the systems that support and sustain us.

You want a simple truth? We’re not in control, never have been, never will be. Deal with it and remember the rubber band mandala. 

Tags: capacity evolution, leadership capacity, peak oil, sustainability

Shifting the Focus Away from Oil

Here’s the latest installment of the C+C News. There’s an article in the Wall Street Journal called If $4 Gas Is Bad, Just Wait. The gist of it is that, in the US, gas has gone up and over $4.00 a gallon. Prices in Japan are averaging over $5.00 a gallon and as the graphic from the article suggests, prices are going to continue to rise with Goldman Sachs predicting an upper limit of somewhere around $200 a barrel.

I don’t think we should “just wait.” Wait for what? For things to get so bad that travel becomes simply untenable? C’mon we are smarter and more capable than that. These rising oil prices are a glimpse of a future (and the reality of our present) in which petroleum powered travel and petrochemical manufacturing become non-sustainable. There’s nothing evil or malicious at work here. Oil and oil production are not inherently bad. I’m not suggesting some Luddite shunning of technology either. We are simply entering into a period of transition away from a century of fossil fuel dominated industry and development. Let’s acknowledge it, get over and get on with it.

Just waiting, now, would be about the worst thing we could do. We are being presented with an opportunity to expand our individual and collective capacities to engage the world. We, now, have the opportunity to radically re-imagine and re-create commerce, communities and lifestyles in ways that support our mutual, inextricably inter-related short and long term futures. Forget oil, forget the new “war” on global warming. Let’s stop trying to fix what’s irretrievably broken and shift our attention awareness, intention and attention to a more eco-systemically coherent, resonant and sustainable way of living, working and playing together. Imagine a future where oil dependency and carbon emissions are no longer a concern. Let’s plan and design that. 

Let’s recognize “now” for what it is. It is a gift, the opportunity to change change and respond with a proactive vision of a future we want versus the future we will get if we “just wait.”
 

Tags: climate change, gas prices, global warming, peak oil, sustainability

We are What We Eat

My colleague Norio has dug up another stunning article called Eating Fossil Fuels. Based on the book by David Allen Pfeiffer its main point is hard to ignore. Current agricultural production is expending more energy than it is producing. Much of the energy expended is of the fossil fuel and especially the petrochemical variety. Whether you believe in peak oil scenarios or not, what is indisputable is that as the cost of oil continues to increase the cost of food will also soar-unless we drastically change our approaches to food production. Or, as Pfeiffer succinctly points out in the forward:

…without the fossil fuel input, modern agriculture will fail and we will no longer be able to produce the food necessary to sustain more than a fraction of our present population 

 The article makes some other significant points as well:

In a very real sense, we are literally eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow in agriculture. Along the way, there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased 4-fold while crop yields only increased 3-fold. Since then, energy input has continued to increase without a corresponding increase in crop yield. We have reached the point of marginal returns. Yet, due to soil degradation, increased demands of pest management and increasing energy costs for irrigation (all of which is examined below), modern agriculture must continue increasing its energy expenditures simply to maintain current crop yields. The Green Revolution is becoming bankrupt.

Solar energy is a renewable resource limited only by the inflow rate from the sun to the earth. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, are a stock-type resource that can be exploited at a nearly limitless rate. However, on a human timescale, fossil fuels are nonrenewable. They represent a planetary energy deposit which we can draw from at any rate we wish, but which will eventually be exhausted without renewal. The Green Revolution tapped into this energy deposit and used it to increase agricultural production.

Total fossil fuel use in the United States has increased 20-fold in the last 4 decades. In the US, we consume 20 to 30 times more fossil fuel energy per capita than people in developing nations. Agriculture directly accounts for 17% of all the energy used in this country. As of 1990, we were using approximately 1,000 liters (6.41 barrels) of oil to produce food of one hectare of land.

Modern intensive agriculture is unsustainable. It is damaging the land, draining water supplies and polluting the environment. And all of this requires more and more fossil fuel input to pump irrigation water, to replace nutrients, to provide pest protection, to remediate the environment and simply to hold crop production at a constant. Yet this necessary fossil fuel input is going to crash headlong into declining fossil fuel production.

What used to sound like gloom and doom pessimism is now the emergent results from our inter-related thinking, actions and the way we have been engaging the world. Don’t you think it’s time we tried another way?

(The article can also be downloaded HERE)

Tags: food crisis, peak oil, sustainability

Oil Rules?!

This is the first installment of Chaos+Complexity News. These are news items that we believe reveal our fragile interconnection and point to a real need for changing the way we think and act in the world. Enjoy…?

My friend and colleague Norio Suzuki has an excellent article by Michael Klare on his blog at Integral Japan. This article is the most lucid discussion of the complex web of oil-related dynamics complicating the present and shaping our future that I have read. Here is a sample:

Oil at $110 a barrel. Gasoline at $3.35 (or more) per gallon. Diesel fuel at $4 per gallon. Independent truckers forced off the road. Home heating oil rising to unconscionable price levels. Jet fuel so expensive that three low-cost airlines stopped flying in the past few weeks. This is just a taste of the latest energy news, signaling a profound change in how all of us, in this country and around the world, are going to live — trends that, so far as anyone can predict, will only become more pronounced as energy supplies dwindle and the global struggle over their allocation intensifies.

Read the rest at TomDispatch or here, on Norio’s blog. 

Tags: global energy, peak oil

What this is about

Some say we are special people living in a special time. A number of powerful, seemingly uncontrollable dynamics like peak oil and global climate change seem poised to wreak havoc on a grand scale. Ecologically, geopolitically, at work, at home many of us have never felt so at risk, so exposed to the potential for chaos and complexity to overwhelm our lives. 

What can we do? We can open ourselves to the change at hand, to that which is emerging. We can strive to engage our selves, others and the eco-systems into which we interwoven as fully as possible. In that engagement there is opportunity, in opportunity hope and potential to influence the chaotic and complex, to change change. 

That which is emerging is, in a sense, that which has always been there. It is change. Change wrought by the beauty and infinity of open, living systems at play. The world is not in danger–we are. The silk cocoons of security we have woven for ourselves individually, communally, globally are fraying. The order we have dreamt into existence is deteriorating. Things change. Earth will continue to spin, life will go on–with or without us.

Yet here we are. Things are changing. Things are complex. Chaos is doing her dance of destruction and birth. What do we need to face this change? We need the capacity to engage and face all that we are as open living human systems intertwined with and contained by other open living systems in the dance of life. We need the capacity to pace, we need the capacity to lead and, maybe, change from a waltz to a rhumba. We need the capacity to be flexible, agile and centered, grounded, compassionate, firm and aware as that which we are emerging, does its thing.

That’s what this is about. Any questions?

Tags: capacity, climate change, peak oil