Discount theory, stories of tomorrow

It's Monday and I'm outside of Reno, a parasite on a Wild Blue satellite connection owned by the state of Nevada that has a kick ass bandwith with no apparent limits, and I'm watching some online shows which I can't do easily through my internet connection, and I'm enjoying hearing the sounds of people around me. Check the main site for pictures that I've put up.

If you've digested the link from yesterday's post a question comes up for all of us who start to tell our family about what we are "discovering" - it's the blank stare. It isn't that your close people think your nuts (though your mileage may vary) but rather that the knowledge doesn't give them an action to perform, and worse, it is about an indeterminate future. Why don't most people give a shit that Peak Oil is happening now? Is it that they don't believe it? Is it that they don't care? Hyperbolic discount theory shows how simple the explanation of an unfathomable response can be.

Discount theory says if it isn't happening right now, in an evolutionary context, it is better that you don't do anything. If our neo cortex (the thinking part of you and I) were running the show, and we were hanging out at the fire 30,000 years ago, and a mountain lion track was seen near the camp, we would ACT! Groups would be sent out to kill it or drive it off. Mountain lions are bad and there are babies in camp, so mountain lions have to go. If that were the case, that the thinking part ran the show, we would act on a large number of events that happened every day that were good ideas for future security, but ultimately a huge drain on energy and therefore survival in the short term. You can't chew your food well if you're in reaction. The lion print might be seen a thousand times, even the lion, but there would be a distance that we all deemed OK. We could outrun it or get up a tree or react, but ONLY when the problem was literally ready to eat us. That was good then. We concentrated on eating and making babies, and because of our brain size and trickiness, we were a winning construct.
NOW, in this time, we have no predator to keep us in balance (except ourselves) and we still have the same built in twitch - the hyperbolic discount theory - it has to be really close to bother us and it has to have demonstrated real threat.
Peak oil, global warming, seas becoming sterile are all future worry. Please pass the meat. Don't you look nice tonight honey. Life goes on because in evolutionary terms - that was the winning combination.
So here we are this, wonderfully complex planet eating animal, and we understand with our neo cortex that we needed to act in 1970. We needed not to keep breeding more of us, and we knew that fossil fuels were a flash in the pan for this animal's long term experience. But it didn't bite us in the ass then. And it hasn't bitten us now, yet.
That's why people don't listen or are slow to convince, or if convinced do nothing about it except exhibit a fatalistic view of que sera sera, what will be will be.
So what do you do if you do want us to turn away from this horrible population "adjustment" which is more crudely known as the "die off"? You give up on changing the planets course and you work on changing your own outcome. Start today? What can you do to move to put yourself and those you love in the less likely to die category? If you thought, "savings bonds" your are so fucked.

Yesterday I suggested you work towards relocating in an area that will have less difference between carrying capacity and population (which is called the degree of Overshoot). The second method is more important to me (after all, I'm 57 and a diabetic).

I believe there is a way to get past the Hyperbolic Discount Theory, and it is the way that has been done since very primitive times. Stories. Every culture has stories that teach about the lions and the snakes and creation and the right way of going. Here is why I think stories work when charts and powerpoint demonstrations fail. Stories program right through the neo cortex. They allow the listener to "be there" to put themselves in the story, and when they do that they experience the lion taking a bite and they react to the lion as if it is right there - emotionally. It bypasses the "you see a problem, I don't see a problem NOW" of the discount theory.

What will work better for Al Gore than "An Inconvenient Truth" are stories, fictional accounts of the great transformation to low energy that is coming. Fiction excites and involves the emotions and the neo cortex is not that place. So that is where I am. Ran Prieur did it a little with his unfinished online novel, but I think the stories should be short, stand alone, yet involve a specific set of characters that repeat through many stories. It is the peak oil, die off, soap of words.
So that is what I am thinking of doing. More on this later.

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!

So what do we do? Theory of Anyway

I found an update on the Cuban "The Power of Community." Of particular interest to me is the extent that their two home grown solar companies have electrified the rural areas. Solar may be expensive but it is very compact, has no distribution costs and for a simple lifestyle, it works. The rural homes get 200W of panels and they run one light, and a small radio. So far the companies have installed 1.2 megawatts of panels. I have not found out if they are producing the panels in Cuba or if these are imported. Possibly another free chicken could track that down?

How to make decisions on your future with Peak Oil here now? If you are changing jobs or looking for a new place to live, so many decisions are confused because of our uncertain future regarding Peak Oil and climate change. How can you make any rational decision? Its impossible!

Pat Meadows stated it a simple idea of action which she calls "The Theory of Anyway" -- when dubious about how to adjust to Peak Oil, do something which would be good to do ANYWAY, whether or not Peak Oil happened.)
How might you or I implement this? To me this means breaking addictions to things that would be good for you "anyway" and save you money (your energy which is needed to fuel your personal changes" and make you healthier anyway.
Examples:
Quit smoking
Throw away your TV and walk and talk to your neighbors. Can't walk yet, get several used CB radios (they are so cheap!) and sprinkle them among your friends in the neighborhood. Two way communication is always better than one way.
Weekends at the lake with the ski boat and a 4 hour trip each way become "Lawn and driveway ripout and planting parties!" Block parties, friends over, music, laughter are the transition drug of choice.
Going to the movies becomes bicycling for the afternoon.
Dull apathetic weekends of sleeping in and smoking cigarettes; couch potato in front of the TV becomes brainstorming with friends and attending local community theatre, music in the park, lectures at the college, and working with preparation groups that are in almost every city now. You'll meet new people, think new thoughts, get your head stretched. You're going to get your hands dirty. Good.

Any of these things are great for you mentally and physically - no matter what happens. Thus the theory of "Anyway."

But why do anything? Today is perfect weather where I sit in my airstream, and Peak Oil and Global warming are not at my doorstep. Later today I will lay out some heavy shit for you. We, you and I if you comment, will have an opportunity to understand hyperbolic discount theory - why we don't care about anything important until it bites us in the ass (or the gas pump - oh, I paid 3.29 for gas in Beatty two days ago). We will also look at a tentative answer to how long do we have before the shit really hits the fan.

I've got to pack up and get up the road to Walker lake boondock. My official meander is underway back to Oregon.

Blog function changes beginning tomorrow!

Yesterday I made it to Beatty, NV which was quite nice but after parking and napping for 1/2 hour in the heat I felt restless. Leaving Vegas was a total clusterfuck of road construction and poor signing. Irate people zip like bees, and merging is abrupt and unexpected with the construction problems. At one point I thought to myself that there is no part of 215 that cuts around Vegas that isn't under construction. Anyway, restless I pushed on to Tonopah late in the afternoon, around 4:30pm. A rise of 5000 ft found me at twilight exiting Tonopah for the Miller rest area 10 miles west of town.
And here I am, after having spent the night and planning on another night (against the 18 hour law). I'm re hydrating and cleaning and resting.

TJ and I discussed many things during the day by cell yesterday. I've been trying to find a way to make both the website and this blog complement each other. TJ had the excellent suggestion of making this blog the place where controversial items are aired and debated, and the daily where the hell is dildo (me) items and pictures can populate the daily entries on the main aftershock website.
I like that concept and I have some ideas to start it with tomorrow morning - Sunday. Meanwhile today is a day off and the sun is too hot but the temperatures are 80 outside. A very nice change after Quartzsite and Lake Mead.

Moving Day, Friday

Good morning! This is a moving day and a busy day. I've decided against Pahrump and I'm headed to Beatty instead. It's about an hour further but unlike Pahrump which except for the Escapees park seems seems very developed and anti bondocking, Beatty has a nice free area close in. I had problems with the compass on the Satellite dish, it is more than 20 degrees wrong now and it couldn't find the satellite yesterday when I got back from Callville Marina (getting water). It took me two hours to figure out the problem; widening the search window allowed it to find it. Today I need a flat spot where I can turn the truck and trailer around 180 degrees. That allows me to "train" the compass and solve the error.
So this morning I'm gassing up, shopping for some new jeans, picking up my phone from the Chinese restaurant at 11am, then saying farewell to this absurd city that produces nothing of use to the society and is at the end of very long supply lines for foods and goods. Over Lake Mead each twilight I can see the jets stacked up, always two or three waiting to land, supplying the fuel to run the city - you. In any peak oil scenario, airlines are hit very early on because their running costs require cheap jet fuel - oil.
Off to Beatty, NV, were today it will be a full 10 degrees cooler than Henderson, NV according to MSN weather.

Skype at night

So I went to dinner with my nephew David, somewhere in Henderson, south on Boulder Highway somewhere and I left my cell phone on the table at a Chinese restaurant, name unknown. So now I'm out at the boondock site at Government Wash, packing up for an early leave in the morning and NO PHONE. FUCK!
So I emailed my nephew to figure out where we had eaten and to have him call the phone.
While I was drumming my fingers on the keyboard, thinking, thank god for email, I remembered I had bought a Skype phone that plugs into the USB slot about a year ago.
I funded my Skype account for a year for $29.95 charged against my paypal account, and I was on the phone with David in about 15 minutes total. Even over the satellite the quality was very good. No distortion and he could hear me clearly. There is a delay of about 6 to 7 seconds because the satellite is 22,000 miles above me, and everything is a round trip, but it works!
Best of all the Chinese restaurant has the phone and they open at 11am. So much for getting out of Vegas at 7am before the heat. So if you were thinking of calling me, wait until after lunch time!

Damn it was hot today. Trailer was well over 100F and it got up to about 97F outside. Time to go north!
alan

Boondocking, how do you know where to park?

Well chickies, it's my last full day along Lake Mead. (New to the blog? Read about free chickens). Tonight after work (his, not mine of course, I'm in deep deep idle time) my nephew Dave is driving out to Government wash to see me and tomorrow about 6 am I'll drive west to Pahrump, NV. Pahrump is almost on the California border due west. The following day I'll be at a beautiful oasis that birders stay at in the desert near Tonopah, NV. I'm leaving now because Saturday and Sunday are forecast to be above 100F here. Pahrump is 10 degrees cooler and Tonopah a bit cooler yet.
Rick sent me a very good knife sharpening link. Phil Churchill previously mentioned this guy to me too. He won a competition and is in the Guiness book of records. Something about getting an axe sharp enough to shave with. Here's the link .

I was talking to a lady here at the wash and it finally dawned on me that most boondockers just go to where they have been told by other boondockers. That is extremely valuable, but in talking to her, she and her husband had missed some very nice overnight stops, just like I had previously missed Craggy Wash north of Lake Havasu. That got me thinking of course, how is that I use the web and maps to find these places? You wouldn't think that it would be very important, just park anywhere. That is sort of the George and Tioga way to do it but I never sleep well in spots where I expect someone to knock on the door and tell me to move.

So this is how I find free places now, and each year I've become better at it. This came up because this is exactly what I did this morning to lay out the next two days of travel. I do all of this while I have an internet connection, which of course I usually do because of my satellite dish. If I knew there would be no connection I would lay out weeks worth of places, but that is time consuming and does not allow for weather related changes to the plan.
1. I bring up a weather program like this one and look at the 5 day forecast. I look two days into the future for the high and low and this is the number I use to compare each free site I locate. I want above 30F and below 92F. That is my ruling criteria while in travel mode.
2. I have a general direction I would like to go based on seeing something in the area or heading back to Oregon or to the southwest from Oregon. It is fuel expensive to move the trailer so I like to work in reasonable patterns. If I can get within 5 miles of what I want to see, then I use the moto bicycle. Based on that general direction I look on the map and find the nearest city. I immediately check weather 2 days into the future and make sure it falls within my range for highest and lowest. If not, I change towns until I find one or two that match my weather criteria.
3. I then use Google and search for "free camping name_of_town" and then "boondocking name_of_town". You will find hours of reading when you do this and in a pretty short time you'll find websites to bookmark that come up again and again and have good directions. Almost everyplace west of the Mississippi has boondocking locations that are free or less than $10. I am only interested normally in free (but you guessed that, right?).
4. Sometimes the links you are searching will have good directions and other times you just get something like, the Hicksen rest area is pretty good west of Austin five miles. I look at my maps and see where they are talking about and if it is in my line of travel, but the next step is crucial.
5. Once you know the name of the boondocking area google the name. You can get lucky and find a site which has pictures and greater detail, and often personal experiences with the area. The best sources when you google the name is anything that has to do with birding. Those people take good notes! THis morning, for my Tonopah stay I found the exact GPS coordinates and even the layout of the boondocking area.
6. Last, if you're social, when you find a good spot with other RVers walk around and say hello. Many are as hungry as I am to talk after spending so much time alone, and you will learn of other places, but more importantly, you'll learn all the little ins and outs of the place you're at. For instance, I paid $5.00 a couple of weeks ago to get into the Lake Mead area from the Vegas side. Later from other boondockers I find that only the Vegas end of the Lake Mead Recreation area has a fee. THEN I find out they close the booths at 4:30pm and you can come in for free. I also learned where to dump and fill up with good water for free and where the best no pay showers are.
Boondockers are concerned with these things usually.
a. Finding big areas that they can spread out in and have plenty of room, and of course, not paying money so they can camp longer and go back to work less.
b. finding good tasting fresh safe water and a free place to dump the black water tank. Most do not worry much about the grey water as they dump it out at night illegally. There is no smell if you do that every day! In a dispersed area where they rigs are not close together this is better environmentally that pouring it down a septic leach field to be eaten anaerobically. However you can make a point that in the desert that water was not part of the ecosystem. Feel free to comment on this.
c. HOT showers that are free or cheap.
d. Better weather suckers (sorry that was impolite)!

So that's my secret method, and I miss few good spots this way. I still have all the Flying J's marked on my maps but less and less do I need to stay in a noisy gas station, and more and more I find myself in beautiful, stunning places, like two nights ago parked on an ancient bed of coral, overlooking dramatic erosion canyons working their way to Lake Mead. There is NO commercial campground that can offer you even a tiny bit of that experience. Commercial campgrounds are for scaredy-cats who fear anything that doesn't look like their suburb or their class A. In a commercial campground you'll be cheek to jowl with your neighbors and have a whole host of features that mean nothing to a boondocker. Got to have that cable tv connection I guess, oh, and full time power for the two air conditioners. If you go to some place that hot, what are you going to do besides sit in the air conditioned RV anyway? I'm ranting.
Later chiclets.

Adaptation

Welcome to the new blog for Aftershock, preparation for an uncertain future!

If you have found your way here for the first time, here is the link to all website blog and diary entries up through today Aftershock!

I'm learning to adapt to this new space, and over the next few days I'll get everything set up. There are many reasons for this change, not the least that my friend Gary did it for me, but the important one is that I want to make it easy for you to comment without having to write a separate email.

So I'm adapting. I'm a human, an adapting machine, the most destructive and fearsome creature in the history of life on earth. There is nothing we won't change to suit us, there is never a thought of, that's enough, I'm full, just constant expansion. We are fucking relentless. I adapt so well that I have learned to destroy my entire world in order to get "more." We adapt through changing our thinking and inventing technologies to create the change we need.

This desert tortoise that I came upon yesterday hiking on the north shore of Lake Mead is a type of adaptation that is so extreme it hardly seems worth it. This little tortoise can go a year without a drink, spends most of his time underground, and can almost completely reabsorb his urine. He has adapted through physical evolution to the world around him without changing the world. His limits to growth are his ability to compete with other animals for water and food. His expansion is slow and limited. Our expansion is limited only by oil to grow the food we need to live to breed ever more people. That got me thinking.

We have a dramatic uncertain future ahead of us as a species. We use it up, absorb, eat, consume and discard more material and energy than this little tortoise could every imagine. We are bad dogs, top dogs yes, but very bad dogs indeed, and in your private moments you know it in your bones. We are the problem.

The question to ponder is what sort of adaptation will we make, individually and as a tribe to have some hope of surviving the next fifty years (yes, I know this does not apply to me, as I'll be dead long before that). Will we create the thoughts of compromise, collaboration, limits to resources, and will we except that we do not have any right to breed without limits, to use resources that are SHARED resources with the rest of life on this planet? As a species we seem to have never thought to say, I'm good, I've had enough, leave some for others who share my world. Our survival memes, our social lessons at mother's breast, are so deeply ingrained that we believe we are separate, special, and that the world is for our use. We act as spoiled children gods, uncaring of the consequences of our godhood. Oh we are such fearsome beasts, and we wield the power of fossil fuels as our sword to demand and create homes and life and population where it is inimical to us.
Aftershock is a blog about the morning after. The party's over and the empties lay all about. The world has more than a headache. Her seas are fished out, and becoming sterile, the forests that support us with precious topsoil are disappearing, global warming is changing our weather and food in human visible time instead of geological time. The adaption that the tortoise made through eons of evolution, we must make in an instant by us.
I've been accused of being gloomy. I guess we see anyone who says "hey there is no more beer" as being a sour pus. In fact I'm am having a great time. Chiclets, we're ringside for the big bout, this is the Sunday afternoon match up that has been several million years in the making. Every ancestor of yours that dodged a lion or dug a trap and outsmarted that lion has led us here to this moment. As terrible as we are, and dinosaurs would have shrunk from our hubris and resultant actions, we are also sublimely beautiful, creative, loving, caring, and sweet.
We did not destroy our planet on purpose, it was our nature, oops. We were playing a close in game with our eyes on the small field. That's not good enough for what comes. This blog is about how we channel our power, our nature into partnership with our home planet, instead of having it for lunch.
Can we do it? Fucking ay! Of course we can, we do anything we want, we do everything want . When we expect things as a group, we get results. So take your hand out of your pants, it is time to yet become different again. This match up is with ourselves, we must change our very nature. What the hell, it is the thing that we really are best at.
So welcome to Aftershock, a website dedicated to recovering from the peak oil hangover and planning a new (much smaller!) civilization. Normal blogging of my life, because "it's all about me" will recommence after I'm done playing with the new blog software.