Moans and Groans and maybe some bitching

Sometimes I wonder about me. I mean, here I am seemingly pounding my head against a brick wall trying to get the folks around me to realize they really, really, NEED Permaculture and no damn body's paying me one whit of attention. The most feed back I've gotten from a local source is "Why do you have to be so negative all the time.

NEGATIVE? I haven't been any where near negative yet!! I've just been telling it like I see it. Yep, it dose not look rosy my friends. We will all have to make changes and choices. Some of them will be difficult to hard if we make them NOW. A lot of them will be choices you will have no option about in the future.

That future bit there is part of my problem I think as, in all honesty, I can't say "You need to get this done by Nov. 5th 2012 or July 13th 2014 or anything as definite as that. Why not? Cause I don't freaking know! I just can see the train wreck coming folks. The only thing that could save us from this wreck, as far as I know, is if some hardworking scientist or some new whiz kid working in his garage comes up with a really new power source that is cheap, plentiful, doesn't hurt the environment much and can run every thing the way it's been running. Now really. What are the odds of that happening? I'd say slim to nil and I wouldn't bet on it. But then there isn't much I would be willing to bet on other than the trends we can all see happening right before our eyes.

Gasoline, fertilizer, plastics and all things petroleum are increasing in cost. Yeah, yeah, I know. Some of that increase is because of some nation over in the mid east flexing it's muscles and saying "Do what I say you unbeliever heathens! Or I'll stop the oil!!" I also know that a lot of you out there are of the opinion that instead of raising the price of your gasoline, we should just yell back: "Go to Hell you un-Christian heathen! We'll just come in there and get it!!" Sigh. To which I can only ask, "Are you really willing to trade the lives of your children or your children's children if you are grandparents, just so you can drive two blocks to get a six pack of high fructose corn syrup laden soft drinks?"

There is a deeper reason for the rise in the cost of petroleum. A very simple reason I'll try to illustrate. Let's say that a while back, about the time that guy first drilled for oil on purpose and somebody figured out what to do with the smelly black stuff, your family won, earned or somehow acquired an unbelievable amount of money. Now, lets say everyone in the family immediately retired and started spending. Maybe a few invested the money but not with any study or help from experts. Basically everyone just threw that money around and never even  bothered putting it in the bank so it would draw interest. They kept it as capital and they spent it as capital and they have been living high on it every since. Only recently one of the odder kids in the family has looked in the vault and said, "Hey, y'all! Most of the money's gone! We need to start investing what's left and not spending so much!" Then everyone else laugh's at the young fool. There's money there. There's always money there in the family vault! So he takes pictures showing that while the money was piled 12 feet high at first it's only 5 and a half feet high now and suggests that maybe they all should learn how to work and live a little less extravagantly. But the Heads of the family just smile and say, "Junior! Haven't you kept up with the times! There's this wonderful new invention called a CREDIT CARD! It's not like we still have to spend OUR MONEY!" And Jr wanders away muttering, "That doesn't sound quite right somehow."

The moral of that little tale above is that oil is the capital we have all been depending on for a long time now. On top of that, it also is NOT sitting nice and easily available in a vault somewhere. It's down in the ground. WAY down in the ground hiding inside rock formations. It has never been in "pools" down there. Yeah, old wells are being reopened now. Wells that the oil companies gave up on several years ago. You know why they gave up on them? Because it cost to much to pull any more oil out. The oil had stopped flowing out of it'd own accord and now they had to suck really hard to get it out. Imagine a malt or shake you have to let set and melt before you can get it to come up the straw. Those tar sands up in Canada? I remember them being mentioned while I was taking Earth Science in College. A fellow student asked why we weren't using them. The Prof. answered "Way to hard to get the oil out. To wasteful too." Dose that tell you anything?

Now you may begin to see why the cost of petroleum is going up. "So we move to coal!" you shrug and say.
"Hah!" I reply. To get Gasoline out of Coal you'd have to processes it all kinds of ways which would not be nice for the environment. "So What?" you ask. My reply, "If  you think we have a lot of kids sick with asthma now wait til we start burning more and more coal. Especially the high sulfur content stuff. So we are back to the kids again. Do you want to trade the health and your kids or grand kids ability to breath freely just so you can drive that two blocks for the high fructose corn syrup stuffed fruit juice they want for breakfast? Or even for the electricity to watch that TV or play that computer game?

Then there is this odd little fact. What do you think all those big machines that are used to mine coal run on? Yep. Petroleum products! Is that a big "Gotcha!" or what?

I am not saying this stuff to panic anyone or even frighten them. I do think you should start to worry. Worry enough to at least start moving your house toward passive solar heating and cooling. Go ahead and get the solar panels and small wind turbines for active solar energy if you can afford them, just remember the process that creates them and gets them to you relies heavily on fossil fuels! So get the best  and longest lasting you can afford.

Setting up your house to gather it's own water from what falls on it's roof and your yard to survive from what falls on it should be your next worry along with scrapping that expensive and time consuming expanse of fake grass land. Put in gardens. Stuff  your front and back yards full of food plants, flowers, berries, nuts and even the odd small animal like chickens, rabbits, ducks, and such. Set up your own little ecosystem that will support you and your family with food, shelter, and dare I suggest it, entertainment. (Go to Google or some other search engine and check out the ideas in Urban Permaculture.)

Of course you can't do this alone. It takes a neighbors to really survive and be happy. The world dose not have to end up like that "Survivor Island" show. I wouldn't want to live in that kind of world where it's all about only one surviving to the end. The ideal is to see how many we can get to not just survive, but flourish!

And that's why I don't believe I'm being the least bit negative. Yeah. the world as we know it right now is rapidly headed for the crapper. I see nothing wrong with that, just as I see nothing wrong with using something called humanure in compost that will eventually be used on fruit and nut trees and other selected crops. What's this humanure? As it happens it's what you get out of a composting toilet, a crapper if you will.

I firmly believe that if we take some simple actions now, learn some possibly hard lessons now, that when the brown smelly stuff finely hits the fan we will be able to gather it up, compost it and turn it into a healthy productive garden we can live on for the rest of our lives. In deed, if we plan properly now we can start living the kind of healthy, earth friendly, emotionally, and mentally active lives I think we humans are meant to live.
Yeah, there will still be friction. But we can learn to use that to learn and grow, to improve and include new ideas.

So no, I'm not being negative! Not at all. Perhaps I'm just not being clear. There are big scary changes coming at some vague point in the future. It could happen ten or more years from now or it could happen next year. Some of it is already happening. But, oh my! What a wonderful adventure it will be!! Especially if we all prepare for what is coming.

Then there is this odd but quite possible alternative. We get prepared for the stuff to hit the fan and - nothing happens! Yet there we still sit. In our healthy, organic, continuously producing gardens, working not nearly as hard as you'd expect leaving us with lots of time for friends, family, reading, thinking or even working at some outside job we actually enjoy doing. Gee, wouldn't that be just a terrible outcome.

For idea's on what to do to prepare you can find a lot of Permaculture sites on line. My favorite is permies.com. Check it out. It's full of all kinds of information.