LOV

It's Sunday, and I'm the windswept shores of Walker Lake in Nevada. I have been reading and thinking and weaving a few thoughts together for the last few days. I live in the space of personal action and personal influence. If Archimedes said "give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I will move the world," then I see that I am standing on the wrong end of the fulcrum. The world moves me, not I, it.

The good news is that I have begun to see a crack, a small local variation in how things will play out where peak oil, soil depth, global warming, sterile seas all come together. I call this edge that you and I might share, Local Overshoot Variation, or LOVe (hah, get it? what a wit, not). To describe this and how it will affect your decisions over the next two years, the next 20 years, we need a small digestible primer on sustainable population. Fortunately the Canada Paul Chefurka has provided that.

Here is his excellent article on Energy, Carrying Capacity and Overshoot. He is a gentle, polite, respectful writer and the piece is not very long. You should read this before continuing on with today's blog.

In the inevitability of population reduction he also made a point that this was a global average and would vary locally. With that, he showed me the door for some of us.
Here where I see the Local Overshoot Variation (LOV). His model is a worldwide machine model, where all capacity is the same, soil loss average.

HOWEVER the model is accurate only in average for the whole world.
Since I act locally, live locally, and have only my personal action and personal influence, I am interested not in the total global outlook, but what will happen to me and my friends and family where I might be living (well, I do care about the world, but personally - its about ME! ME! ME! and maybe you, but not so much).

Fortunately we who are wealthy by accident of place of birth have the choice to exploit the differences between where the impacts will occur. Not all populations will be in equal overshoot and therefore the population reduction will be less in some areas more in others.

An example: I can choose to be in Las Vegas when the lights go off in a grid failure, when the Walmart trucks can't get fuel to keep coming in and the food isn't delivered to the Safeway. I would be standing on a land that is too hot for most human life in the summer, has almost no water of its own, and a place where every bite of food and everything necessary for my life comes from thousands of miles away. The top soil is non existent, and there will shortly be 2 million people living there. As my nephew has said, water and goods move even uphill to money.

Or I could choose to move my life, my work, lock my transition plans plans to the next few years to a place like Southwest Oregon that has natural water, spring water, rain water, long growing season, deep top soil, many natural resources, and few few people, NO big cities, wind, and south facing slopes.

You have read Paul's article, so do you see how important it will be where you live and where your children live for the next 70 years? More than just being in the right place you can also begin to put into action those things that well locally - very locally, in your own yard, your own neighborhood, reduce the impact of the global overshoot and population decline. This is an exciting thought to me. It seems obvious that the larger the area of sustainablity - good soil and water and moderate temperatures, the better your chance of holding onto the place in troubled times. Since the Overshoot is large because of oil's near magical propping up of all other resources, the adjustment will be ever more violent. You want to be where the adjustment, the die off is bearable and slow.

To refresh, Overshoot is the difference between the natural carrying capacity of a place, a planet, or your neighborhood, and the number of people that it is currently supporting. In Las Vegas that would be nearly 100 percent overshoot. In Grants Pass, Oregon that might be as little as zero.
Your local overshoot variation is what you have to open your eyes to. If you live in Las Vegas like my nephews, you are in the wrong place, no matter what criteria you supply for local sustainability.

There are many good ideas to look at and pull apart, but that is enough for one meal.
Nite chicklets!