A World of Limits and towering magicians

There is a Mark Twain quote I love, but cannot find the exact words. To paraphrase:

The important thing about a new idea is that once a man understands it, his mind can't snap back quite as small as it was before.

I've not done it justice, but that's close. A world of limits is a new idea for any human alive today. It is a hard idea, and it is hard to get your mind around it. In that idea is the recognition that we are the greatest extinction event in recorded history (we're getting rid of species quicker than any meter strike or glacier could). In that new idea, oil runs out, doesn't go forever. There will be continually less food, and people will die.
We who will look at this feel like the drunk who wakes up with a hangover next to, ah, someone, and wonders what he had been thinking last night? We always did live in a world of limits, but it was a big world, so big. It was such a big world that certainly we could not really affect it. Right? It is a very very big ocean, we could not fish it out, could we? It is just, it is just a little and a little. Each little left less and now we have to use a lot of energy just to stay medicated and stupid. We live in a world of limits. We should never pat ourselves on the back for waking up, we should rather wonder that we could think the rules of physics didn't apply on our space ship earth.
It is a stretch to look at peak oil, but it is not hard to do. Just google "peak Oil" and read the oil geologists and scientists you'll find there. There is no question of decreasing supply, all arguments are about how quick our energy decline will be and what comes from that. So stretch and read. Then read about global warming, don't worry about the cause - that is always up for debate, or at least where the rich choose to put their stinking red herrings. Doesn't matter what is causing global warming now - us or space fairies - the result is massive problems in food and water for everyone alive. Then read about the bird flu and what just happened this week. Then take a breath and relax.
For me, as I learned more and more, I looked harder and harder for the opposing views based in science. Then I looked for any good news -the 11th hour fix. Then I learned that the 11th hour was 1986. We're in the 12th hour. The fix it train takes decades and voluntary compliance from a population of 6.5 billion who must agree to fall to about 1.5 billion or less by 2070. NO, you can't do that by birth control. Bird flu works though, as does starvation, war, nuclear "solutions" to resource allocation problems.
You are at the height of Rome's power, and personally you command energies undreamt of for all of mankind that went before. Even in 1940 each person commanded the energy of 32,000 lbs of coal each year. Who says there isn't something for nothing. We, the cumulative we, have been wizards conducting the world with our magic wand of cheap energy. Primarily oil. It was and is liquid fuels that made us towering giants of change and magic. Technology always took the bow, but the power was the free oil from more than 100 million years ago, that lay underground, waiting to make us giants. Giants we are, giants we were, but we are in the process even now of getting small. We mistook technology as the energy, and it was just the trick, the machine of using the energy. Technology is not the energy itself.
And maybe if the energy goes away very quickly - as hard as that will be on all of us who will die because of it, then maybe our children's children will have a world left that they can live in. If we "solve" this with the well worn stick of technological "progress" - if we find a way to drag this out with nuclear and liquified coal, Colorado oil shales- we will certainly to kill our remain forests and the sea. There are just too many of us.
Before oil there were about a billion humans. Now there is 6.5 billion. That is not because we are more efficient at growing food. That is because oil energy fuels our tractors, trucks, combines, harvesters. Natural gas makes our fertilizer, and oil makes our bug sprays. When the oil is gone, nuclear, wind, solar, oil tar sands, oil shales, and Jack 5 super deep oil wells will not replace the river of oil that we feed ourselves with every day. 10 grams of sweet crude light oil puts 6 grams of carbohydrate food on your plate. Our world population is still growing. Our world is staggering under the load of us, the needs of us, the wants of us.
We have come to the age of magicians. We are standing at the back door of the oil age looking at the setting soon of our cheap energy empire. We are looking at the future through a dark glass. All the tools in our heads and hands are likely the wrong ones for what comes.
So that is the thought that is stretching my head now. It is stretching my friends, all my close people. Some are looking briefly and then going back to the "real" world. Some are brought to their emotional knees by it (me for instance), and some get angry at the messenger (even at me - imagine). Some of you are angry that I don't believe technology will fix us out of this mess.

I live in a transition state anyway, in my Airstream, mobile at a moment if I choose. So I sometimes forget that this information might impact many of you differently than hits me, and it hits me plenty hard. Maybe what you read and absorb is a round house punch to the jaw. For some of you, debt, investments, health, children and significant others make it important that this not be the end of the age of NO LIMITS.

It is hard to think that all you were told was success is in the process of ending, and that you will be hard pressed to make a cocoon of protection and comfort around your children. You are no longer the towering magician, now we will be as we were before, living by our wits, and strength, facing real risk for the first time in a long time. Those that can't stand it will group and die in crowds waiting for the help promised tomorrow by a dying federal bureaucracy.

In the beginning of Steinbeck's book, the "Grapes of Wrath" there is a scene at the end of a three day dust storm. The sun had not shown for three days, and the soil buried the farms, crops and houses in it's path. The farm families huddled indoors, blocking the door sills with towels. When they emerged everyone was stunned. They were the walking dead. Everything buried, everything lost, their lives as they had known them dead. The children wept, and the farm wives wrung their hands and knew that everything was at an end for them. The men walked through the dust, were covered in it, wraiths, the walking dead, in shock. Then Steinbeck has the women relax. They see the men starting to curse, getting angry, getting really fucking pissed. The anger is survival, whereas stunned and shocked acceptance is death.

So get mad. Get mad and working on your angles, survive. What you do once the collapse is in progress will actually count for something in your own survival unlike the lives most of us currently lead, sterile, repetitive, boring, meaningless.

So for those of you holding tight to denial, I know that when I irritate you by what I write, you may stop writing me, stop calling me, stop talking to me, but I know in my heart that your mind will not snap back quite so small, and in that you are somewhat forewarned, somewhat prepared.

mcnalan on a Friday in August, pre-collapse

Sit Down Hard

Kumbayah -A request for divine intervention, singing Kumbayah as we all hold hands and pray for deliverance. Whenever in the course of human events a people are presented with a sufficiently complex set of problems, rather than ponder at length or be comfortable with the difficulty of making projections or finding solutions, most people would rather clasp hands with others and pray for divine intervention.
If you lived through the 60s and 70s and the singer Joan Baez popularizing Kumbayah you may understand the power and comfort of praying rather than thinking. I don't underestimate the power of belief when spread across a large group of people.
I just question the two polarities of dealing with the coming peak oil de-industrialization. The reaction of most people presented with the simple mathematics of pumping oil means less oil, either go to denial or, well, there's nothing to be done, we're doomed. There is a wide space between those two viewpoints, i.e. "we're fucked, don't matter" and "ain't going to happen." In between there is where we will construct the distant future that might allow us to remain on the earth indefinitely. But between that distant future and now, is the Transition Period. It well may be bloody, and certainly complex and often unfair and unequal, but it will come whether we deny or do nothing.
It is time to sit down hard. If your skiing and falling, squat. With the coming "perfect storm" of energy depletion, financial collapse, global warming, resource wars, and a government that not only spins everything it says, but even forces others to spin what it hears, it is time for each of us to lower our center of gravity, spirit, soul and thought.
A friend who has followed my tortuous path to today's page has recently questioned if I have cut the moat from where I am to where my friends and family lie? I understand why it would appear like that to some of you. I am writing less, chatting less, and apparently refusing intimate partner relationship. While the observation has merit, it is not what is going on in me.
I pretend to be bright some times, vanity being one of my many flaws, but the truth is that observation and analysis is just hard work, and I'd rather run off at the mouth than do the hard work of careful reading and weighing, comparing, and testing.

I have no primary resources that you do no have, and I have no direct way to know truth. I am not a good analytic thinker. I sometimes like an idea because it is exciting rather than true. I would rather see the sky fall than the grass grow, because the first is more dramatic. That is my confession, and all my friends certainly knew about me within minutes of meeting me.

That said, I have been hunkering down this last six months trying to think, doing the hard work, for me, of reading material from a variety of sources, and trying to figure out what to do. I have minimized connections and my social life, and I have been listening to activists here in Eugene, reading everything related to energy decline, listening to podcasts from much more eloquent and critical thinkers than myself, because, just like you, just as anyone can if you sit and do it, eventually the various agendas of smart people average out and you begin to see the bones of the problems we are all facing.

So I have been doing what I suggest you do now. Sit down hard. Sit down and begin to think about what you do with and to other people. To answer my friend's question, no, I have not cut myself off from my friends, loves, step children, ex wives, and co workers, I have sat down hard and tried to think how I could make this transition better for all of us, especially my close people.
Doing the hard work of thinking outside my little box does not make me an easy go lucky, well met comrade of the first rank, always quick with a smile and a joke. It makes me goddamn well irritable with everyone around me, especially clucking noises of people who are not thinking at all, but just making "this too shall pass" noises.

No, it will not just pass and even out. This is not like any other time in history, this is not the depression of 29 or the fuel crisis of 1978. This is a new beast - a global loss of free energy. That energy was the lever with which we moved (created) this modern world. This free energy from the ancient gods of Pangea became the food of 6.5 billion people. Fuel is going, people will follow.

There are things we will all as a group do voluntarily, or we will certainly do involuntarily. You will NOT live in suburbia in ten years, you will not be driving the latest model car, your job will have likely evaporated, and you personally will be dead or in much better shape than you are today. You will be walking more, and gardening. You will bicycle more and learn a lot about wind, solar and hydro power. You will have met your neighbors, you will have moved out of an inner city if possible or be part of a gang if you stayed. Your gang may be your block, you can call it the neighborhood work group, but it will be your gang. You will not survive alone.

If the downside of the energy depletion curve is gentle, we here in the USA might not have people starving to death in our sight, but you can be sure that out of your sight around the world they will be dying in enormous numbers. By 2030 hundreds of millions will die, one way or another. The oil will not be there to be turned into food. There is no magic bullet of technology. Technology is NOT equivalent to energy. Technology is the manipulation of existing energy resources. We have used more than half of the easy one (oil, liquid gold), that is what I mean, by the other side of the energy curve. Each year from now on , we loose by depletion of reserves, one Saudi Arabia's worth of annual production. Each year.

Please go and check all that. SIT DOWN HARD and do your own reading, thinking and math. We were running out of oil the very first day we pumped the first barrel. Math skills required are so simple than any grade school student could go it. Take some away, have less. Take it faster, have less faster. Read, think, and break the bubble that the market, government, church and state creates around you. Your current use to the society is as a consumer and a worker. Your use to the future society is as a creator, teacher, participant, farmer, and good neighbor. A good neighbor who has honor, keeps his/her word, and does the hard things when required.

It is horrible to be immersed in the speculation of what comes and beyond and yet it is also wonderful to be immersed in what might come out of this transition period which has NOW STARTED (The collapse of public funds holding derivatives of the sub prime mortgage market has acted as one of the triggers of the perfect storm. It is part of the transition).

As I said above the transition has begun. It doesn't matter what the FED does or the coalition of world banks will do - it could be great tomorrow, Monday morning, or it can be horrible collapse of further funds and market values. Either way, nothing is changed, the transition has begun.

Time to draw your energies in, sit down hard. Put your center of gravity low. There is no information that will come from the general media or from government that will be of value or even true. You are their consumer and worker. They will tell you nothing to upset that. Their wealth depends on your work and purchases. They all will constantly say this is a minor bump, be calm, be well, eat and shop. While in any large herd it is critically important for the herd not to stampede, it is equally true that for each of you staying calm, investing, planning for retirement and the next big purchase is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Instead begin amassing hard assets, not dollars. IF you can be the least bit social, it is time for a block party, meals in the street - projects that all the neighbors get involved in. Involving yourself in local government is wise, wasting even a second on state and federal is totally useless. Unless you have access to power through wealth and position right now, you will have NO effect through political means (above the local level).
Bring your family close, make plans on where to meet if problems arise in their neigbhorhoods, towns and cities. Make plans for getting in motion before roads are clogged.
Build a system of concern points - where you say, well family - when you see this go here. Do your research and set those points. If you think that is extreme then you might be shocked at the number of people who have already left, who have relocating in the last few years. You might also wish to spend some time looking where the power elite in the USA is stashing their hard assets. It is not in the USA.

Sit down hard and start to think where you want to spend the next ten years. Make sure you have the basics covered. You should be somewhere where you are not alone, where you can grow a garden, have water and will have water when it much drier than today. You should be able to walk to get everything you need. If you have medical needs, store what you can, and figure out how to adapt. Think about food, water, heat, shelter and communications. Keep your concerns as loud and public as you desire, but keep your personal preparation quiet, out of sight. Sing Kumbayah with your neighbors and friends but talk about the die off only with those you will trust your life with. Before you buy one more thing, sit down hard and think. Always ask yourself what good is this thing I want when there is NO oil energy.

Kunstler has a point he often makes. If we persist in making no partnerships for survival then we will be given a partner by default. That partner is reality, and he has no remorse.

So what has alan been doing? I've been thinking about me and you and the necessary die off of 4.5 billion currently living people and a billion of the soon to be born. It does make a difference what you do. Sit down hard and do the math, do the heavy lifting, THINK. ACT, or go stand with the other sheep.

What's up, Doc?

Our post carbon world will be, is, rich with materials held in the body of our physical civilization. Mining that stream will be the work of transition. What we do with that decaying body, our current world, determines our children's future.

In 1985 I was walking through the Belizean jungle and like so many before me I was struck by a sense of awe. There at the Mayan City of Laminai, it smelled exactly like my mother's spice cabinet. The second stange observation was that the ground was not rich and thick and moist, but bare and orange sterile looking soil.
Where was the top soil? I learned that the the jungle in the tropics is so hot that soil activity is so fast that everything is simply decayed and gone in a very short time. HOWEVER, the plants of the tropics are thick and hold water and all their nutrients in their own bodies. In most of American temperate zones our carbon and nitrogen, and all other nutrients, including water, stay in the mass of decaying vegetation, fungi, insects, worms, animals, and bacteria that make up the temperate living top soil.

In our modern world, we have exhausted the easy oil. We have exhausted the easy metals. We have only a few decades of coal, and again, we've got the easy coal. Of course you can argue until as my mother used to say "the cows come home" about how much coal etc., been then like VIRP in the last post's comments, you're focusing on the irrelevant detail of time and missing the message. The message is that all the easy energy and materials are gone and going and we have so fucked up the planet in getting them that we may all die in any case (I don't personally believe the last part. In a pinch people are like cockroaches - hard to get them all)
We took the goodies off the top, and they are and were finite, and while there are some left, it soon comes to a point where we cannot get it. When it costs more than one barrel of oil in energy to get one barrel of oil, you quit. It is simply economic. The message is that this articular way to make life is done.

Like that tropic rain forest, when you remove the supply of oil from underneath our society then you can work only after the economic collapse with the dying body of this civilization. While currencies, stocks, bonds; all paper instruments can collapse in a moment, the physical "stuff" of our society is massive. Just a small example to clarify the size of this beast.
I read that there are 2 million alternators in junk yards just in the USA. That doesn't count the 300 million cars that are running right now in the USA.
There is in this societies stuff the seeds of a future kinder gentler world or of resource wars, the Mad Max devolvement that Terrie pointed out in a previous post comment. We will have many years to salvage this society. The steel, the plywood, the stored fuel, the future wind generators we will build, the solar to build with the last of that precious petrochemical gift of the gods, petroleum. We will have giant tools, those genies of industrialization, the big machines, that will be coveted, pampered (no replacement parts except those made by hand), and running on waste stream bio diesel (any animal fat - and america is FAT!) to build sane housing in sane locations (not the desert, not the far north), for those fraction of humans who will survive this transition. The projected best guess is 1.5 billion people world wide might survive out of 6.8 billion. Many who have been doing the heavy lifting mental work think as low as 500 million. Very sad, but I've had that sad thought much too often for it to have much impact on me now, no, instead I see that we will have much more body of society to salvage. More stuff for any who make it through.
So how we make best use of this bloated body?

There is so much that could go wrong and produce the scenario that Phil (flintknapper) sees - that each for ourselves and turn 90 degrees from civilization and hold out for a few years in the most primitive areas you can find. In two or three years you begin making contact with the few survivors. Perhaps the answers lie in intentional communities of which many are forming which of course makes them targets. As Terrie said in her comment, you hardly know which cliff to fall off.

So what's up with Alan? What's he doing privately? I don't have any special information that is available to all of you. But I just can't stay in grief and despair too long. I'm a diabetic and I'm just happy not to be dead today. So maybe that changes my perspective every time the needle goes in. I have a physical reminder of my mortality about eight times a day.

I have heard that I'm basically selfish, building my shelter so to speak and cutting myself off from the world. Yes and no. Each of us must find a way not to be pulled down by the great sucking whirlpool of need that will reach out to drag us down as this society falls apart. You cannot save everyone. Chefurka's math models put the height of the die off at 2032.
So where is the humanity.

I pull back and in because it is so self destructive to defend what seems obvious to me. I'm not trying to convince anyone else. Virp said to me long ago, cut yourself off from them, those in denial won't be convinced, just polarized, and they will burn your energy and emotional strength shouting "it ain't so!" So this summer I have buckled down, had fun growing a garden, planting fruit trees, fixing the trailer up and putting in a year's supply of food. I have joined with a permaculture group in Eugene.
However the larger body of thought has been around saving those who are close to me. I have been working out the construction of a loose knit tribe, and the tribes communication triggers and actions allowing each member action of their own but giving them alternatives at a time when there will few paths that will be clear.

Currently each of us must exist in this current bloated insane society and survive it while we prepare for what comes. We also need to be preparing ourselves, insulating ourselves from the suction that will emotionally, mentally, and physically seek to make us sheeple at the moment when we must be anything but! When we have to act we will have to act quickly, definitively without much discussion the disabling effects of grief shock.

So I have been building a framework of ideas that will work for many of my "close" people whether they believe any of this or not. This includes my family who have little concern for my "vision" other than to think me slightly deranged. I would give anything that they were right. They are having babies and making new lives in this ending time. In this mental equation is the fact that I will last to see only a small fraction of the next 70 years, so tribe must allow for living, humanity, art, celebration and the continuing on of rich personal lives. So from 72 hour survival packs to visions of a coastal community of traders, hunters, protectors, farmers, smiths and barn dances where town hall meetings direct the future away from this capitalist machine that ate the world, and now threatens our little planet completely. Can it be done? Certainly events will evolve totally different than I can foresee, but to paraphrase Eisenhower, all planning is useless, but to plan is essential.

Geographically I'm looking at climate, population centers, sites lying at the confluence of rail, sea, river and far from large city centers. I also have a distributed idea of how to bring us all together in emergency, and let each of us know when it is time to gather and when it is time to disperse. IT is an impossible task to hold all this in my head as the "perfect storm" of collapse can start from any direction - the collapse of the dollar, a natural disaster, bird flu, crop failures, water failures, power grid collapse. Therefore my framework that I have been sketching out has trigger events, like the music form of "call and response."

The first triggers are likely to be in - rapidily rising fuel costs, brownouts and black outs, and a break down in food distribution. Regardless of what TV and radio tell you the answer for you personally is rarly to wait and stand still. IN any national emergency you are a problem not a resource. You must be controlled for your own good, made safe and static. Personally for your own survival and those that you love, your path is do exactly the opposite. The key is in moving quickly, before security forces close off your movement.

Waiting for the first triggers is not an excuse not to try to follow all roads - that is what I'm spending my time at when I'm not working (storing cash as gold and food) and working out every morning. I've also put in short wave radios, 3 CB radios, standard radio and a scanner. Whereever I place the trailer I will be able to "hear" and communicate locally with other close members of the tribe. I am looking to expand my ears to ham bands in Europe. Shortwave is commercial and will withhold information just like the federal government and US media do.


So your work if you except it is to find what you bring to the group that the group needs. Love is not enough, bring skills, land, materials, skills, skills, skills, energy, attitude and tolerance for others.

In times of collapse, sex and your ability to look good will have near zero value. There are too many people, many will die and will be willing to do anything to survive. I really suggest that each person who thinks sex and personality are survival skills learn to weld, to grow food, tend rabbits, raise pigeons, become a dentist or go to medical school.

Picture 20 years from how. 2 people come to our encampment along the river. Both are dirty scruffy and alone. We have so little food and are doing our best with fishing and waiting for fruit trees, nut trees, vines and new gardens to produce, but another mouth to feed is a very bad idea. Of the two, one is a young Pamela Anderson type. The other is a short obnoxious ugly man who picks his nose. He is a doctor. She is, well, what? You choose. Who lives, who dies? I suggest dental school medical school, EMT training or a skill at breaking and entering, military training, cooking, building. Can you even now consider making a choice of who lives or dies? Because if you plan to keep social units together, instead of heading out to the wilderness a few miles from Phil, you will definitely be making those decisions, or worse, having them made about you.

While change may be scary, what we live in right now is horrible for us in more profound ways. The changes coming may be immense, but a guilty corollary is that we each will get a chance to be alive again. I know it must sound laughter at a funeral, but fuck we're going to get to be alive again!

A last note about media - it is not wrong for the government/media to lie to us. We are the flock. You do not talk about wolves to your sheep. You also never talk to them about their slaughter. All you ever say to sheep is - all is well, be calm, eat, eat.

mcnalan

Personal bubbles

It has been a while, hey? The state of mcnalan, my personal bubble world. A small world comprised of work and sleep and working on my trailer, and, oh yea, being plugged into the burgeoning, looming, giant of our staggering drunk and failing economy. I'm just scurrying trying to make sure that it won't fall right on me.

The housing bubble has begun the public display of it's inevitable death throes. Even a child knows that you can't just sell something (houses) back and forth between each other, pretending it is increasing in value each time. The extra money came from in loans from China. Eventually someone begins to doubt you can pay it back and clenches it's corporate money pooper and companies begin to fall, and worse yet, these lousy loans have been repackaged and mixed with the good stuff, but like rodent shit and hair in the cereal box, there is a point where even the blind begin to notice. Bear Stearns, American Home, and now others today. Crumbling down.

It is like the drunk with the big bar tab. Cut him off and cut your losses or keep his tab open hoping he'll find a way to pay. For every big tab there is a day of reckoning where you have lost credibility with the bar owner and he is sad to realize you will NEVER pay your tab, and he closes you off. No more credit. Watch the Dow for the next 12 months.

Oil is money and they ain't making any more of that, unlike money which we can print or coin out of anything left. But oil and home mortgages are arm in arm in this dance, and as the oil goes, the petro dollars go, the credit streams dry up, bad loans foreclose (foreclosing quickly now), and America's false real estate bubble bursts and destroys, well, a better question is what is NOT destroyed with the credit dries up?

The ruling class of the capitalist world who hold your notes, they will be hurt too, but don't cry for them to much, they are busy getting their ill botten gotti out of US investments and into Europe. Watch for the dollar to tumble when they are done looting the companies that will be forgotten in a moment. Today Dell closed a center in southern Oregon and 200 jobs went poof. All the poofs will not make the papers - back page stuff, 200 at a time and then larger but your media is owned and controlled and it will be spun that good times are just around the corner. No, the collapse will be very personal and it will be one person at at time.

So back to my little bubble. I have no real estate and no wads of cash to inflate, no ulcers over my 401K (though I worry if there will be anything there when I want to reach for it when I'm 59 and 1/2 years old (1 year and 8 months -minus a few days). I'll pull every dollar I can and convert to real trade items.

Meanwhile in the day to day I have picked up my first 50lb bag of wheat, 25 lbs of pinto beans, I've stocked up a year's worth of food, dehydrated, 5 years of insulin, and I'm working out in the gym here at work almost every morning that I can stand it. Some days I get to sore, pushing this 57 year old body to be more flexible, stronger, and more fit.

The garden grows, the corn has Kentucky wonder beans climbing up and squash leaves shading the roots. The blue berries are done and I've mulched them heavily with sawdust and horse shit. The raspberries are loving their spot, spreading out and very green. I'll mulch them even deeper for August's heat soon and card board over the area which will be a new row of raspberries and black berries. The two apple trees- one has done well and the other seems lost in limbo, probably because of the big pine root we cut digging it's hole. We smelled turpentine but didn't know it would shock the little tree so much. When it is dormant I'll dig it up, hose off the roots (November) and replant it in a different area.

The next year garden area is covered and the grass is dying.
Why do I bother? Because when all is unsure all you can do is the next thing that moves you in the direction of independence from the thing that is the problem. I might not being doing exactly the right thing at the right time or in the right place, but I can promise you that doing nothing, doing business as usual, being an ostrich with your head stuck in the sand (or up your ass) is exactly the wrong thing. IF you do something you have a chance of surviving what comes in a better position, MAYBE. If you doing nothing but live in your mortgaged home and go to work in a company that will evaporate in the next 2 years you will not be alone. Unfortunately being without direction, assets, or skills among a great crowd people all looking around, shaking their heads, saying "what the fuck happened?" is not a very good strategy for your physical or mental health.

So I'm working every weekend, every night to move my little trailer world further and further from the umbilical of industrial life. I read others who are more eloquent than I, like Chefurka and Kunstler and try to map out an ethical life that I would like to pursue during the upcoming collapse.

You might think that society is doomed, and in fact the society of over abundant cheap to free energy is going to become a very different society, HOWEVER, I have, you have, choices about how YOU (not all people - YOU) can live in this new society.

Look to your salable skills. Let your imagination open wide and see yourself with all choices again open to you, including the preciously sweet right to make the wrong choice and die. We are entering a time in which as strange as it might feel, what you think and do will make a tremendouos difference in what happens to you.

You think not? What if today you googled "floating neutrinos sailing". You quit your job, move to the coast on a river, work for hamburger joint for minimum wage and build yourself a huge ocean going raft out of the discards (Styrofoam and broken plywood) from the poor side of town. You leave on an ocean voyage, continually growing your little floating world, following the currents back and forth across the oceans? Is that different enough from what you are doing today?

I had a friend talk to me about suicide not too long ago. That's what our straight jacketed world of social convention and sterile work does to people. We feel trapped and there is no support for doing something different. You have to be crazy to break away. If you're not, and you break away, you oddly feel very normal but begin to make "regular" people uneasy. But my advice to anyone who thinks they might do themselves in, and I'm no psychologist - but why not just say fuck it and build yourself a raft. Have some freaking FUN!

Live loud chickies, LIVE BIG! Do the different thing, cut a new path to the waterhole, refuse the velvet harness that seeks your neck. Everything we have been told in school and on TV and on the job about the world and your right place in it is FALSE. You and I were born with the right to an equal share of everything on this planet and we have the ability to choose freedom at every moment, not just once but again and again and again. Build your raft, make your cob house, and stay away from the people who whisper then shout society's enslavement messages in your ear until you think you are your possessions and that they are important.
For me, the only important thing is to witness each new day, to eat it up, to see it coming, live it, cry, laugh, despair, rejoice - none of which I'm good at chickies - you know that - but I have thrown that velvet harness off my back and I will speak what I feel, and I will be honest to myself and I will not please them. I will not please you. But I will always love you all.

mcnalan in the summer of 2007, before the collapse.