The Ascender's Creed

I am not a Prepper.

I am not a Survivalist.

I AM NOT A DOOMER.

I REFUSE TO BE KILLING MYSELF TO KEEP MYSELF ALIVE.

I will not worry about every possible hazard we could face.

I will focus on the future I want to create.

I will steadfastly work towards achieving that future.

I will only worry about the things I can control and leave the rest up to higher powers.

I will follow the principle of ensuring that every function is covered by multiple elements and every element has multiple functions and trust in the resiliency of the system.

I BELIEVE IN MANY FUTURES WHERE PEOPLE HAVE HAPPY, HEALTHY, MEANINGFUL LIVES WITHOUT HAVING TO CONSUME NONRENEWABLE RESOURCES OR RENEWABLE RESOURCES AT AN UNSUSTAINABLE RATE.

I believe that entering such a future is purely a matter of choice, collectively and individually.

I believe that we can choose those futures at any time up to the point of extinction.

I believe that the sooner we choose such a future, the easier the transition will be, the more people will be able to make the transition, and the more comfortable and prosperous that future will be.

I call it The Long Ascent because in the end we will only choose one, but at this point there are many paths open.  Where do you want to go?

Tools vs. Machines

I'd like to expand one idea I alluded to in the Death of Tyranny, that the Industrial Age was brought about by making mechanical slaves.  In my language of patterns, the difference between a tool and a machine is that a tool helps you do something while a machine does it for you.  The distinction isn't always clear cut; in between scythes and lawn-mowing robots, you have the options of reel mowers, push mowers, self-propelled mowers, riding lawn mowers, and lawn tractors (not to mention cows, sheep, rabbits, ducks, etc.) for getting your grass trimmed.  While there are important philosophical reasons not to even have machines as slaves (especially Cylons), today I am more concerned with the practical side.

One rumor I have heard from the very early days of industrial automation (circa the 1950s), they had to make a choice between analog and digital robots.  Analog robots were cheaper to produce, easier to maintain, worked faster, required less power, were far easier to modify, and did much more precise work.  Digital robots only had a single advantage: they didn't require an full-time operator.  In other words, analog robots were tools, digital robots were machines.  I think we all know which choice they made.

Nor is this question just a matter of history.  I love what Marcin Jakubowski is trying to do over at Factor-E Farm.  I truly wish him the best of luck in completing his Global Village Construction Set.  Honestly I think what he is doing there is the best chance of maintaining a high level of technology as we move off Hubbert's Mesa.  I just hope he has the time to complete it.  If you look at his Compressed Earth Block Press, you will clearly see it is a machine.  Just give it power and dirt and it will spit out blocks for you.  Contrast that with the Auram CSEB Press.  It is completely human powered.  There are no fancy hydraulics or gears or belts to break down.  It is basically just a box with a giant lever.  The GVCS Press will clearly win on a per person or per machine basis over the Auram one.  But there is much less that can go wrong with the Auram.

On the Long Ascent, machines can be useful, but good tools are essential.

An End to Literacy

You may be surprised to see this topic in this blog.  If you are a long time reader, you have rightly come to expect basically uplifting posts about possible positive futures.  On the face of it, this topic can seem quite discouraging.

Let me first state, I am talking about an end to literacy, or more exactly, one possible end.  This is not like the death of tyranny, where the outcome is like that for cancer that has metastasized; the question is not whether the cancer will live, the question is whether it will kill the patient in its process of dying.  Nor am I talking about the complete extinction of literacy; like calligraphy after the invention of the printing press, writing may go from a major industry to a rare hobby.

Nor do I view literacy as a bad thing, or even as a needless luxury.  Tripp Tibbetts wrote a good post on the role of books in the preservation of knowledge; the Leibowitz Society is an excellent if infrequent blog on that general topic.  What made literacy so special was it allowed the transmission of knowledge from one person to another without being in the same place and time.  As energy availability declines, the second part may grow greatly in value.  It is quite conceivable certain knowledge will be forgotten only to be learned again from books.  Not having to travel to meet in the same place is also an important consideration; after all, everyone reading this blog probably is literate.  If this was a podcast, I couldn't be quite as certain.

Therein lies the key.  Knowledge no longer needs to be printed to be transmitted.  Videos are more complex than books and are more likely to decline with the availability of energy.  Once books are made and distributed, using them takes little energy, at least during daylight hours, but the costs of production and distribution are not trivial, and they are subject to mildew.  However, while audiobooks require much more storage space than ebooks, they are much smaller than regular books, and earpieces are much smaller, simpler, and more resilient and energy efficient than screens.  As long as we retain the technology to crystallize the abundant earth of silicon and print circuits on it, we should be able to continue make audiobooks.

On the Long Ascent, your MP3 player might just be your library, too.

The Forgotten Sister

Remember the HMHS Britannic?  If not I'm not surprised, very few people have even heard of her.  She was the slightly larger sister to the Titanic, a name which is familiar to most, especially after the film by James Cameron.  The third ship in the White Star line, the Olympic, had a long career, but the Britannic was sunk in its first year of service -- not quite as spectacularly short as the Titanic's, but still quite short.

Why then is one a tragedy of epic proportions and the other a minor footnote in the annals of World War I?  Because every single person was able to get off the Britannic.  Now, 30 unfortunate souls in 2 lifeboats did die when their crafts were caught in the propellers, but there were 1036 survivors.  They had redesigned the craft so that there were more than enough lifeboats for everyone: 48 lifeboats capable of carrying 75 people each, or 3600 total.  They even designed it so that all the lifeboats could be launched from one side of the ship, in case the ship was leaning to one side.

What was the real difference?  What made the sinking of the Titanic a tragedy and not merely an accident was the faith that it was "unsinkable".  Once the shipbuilders realized that their design could sink, it wasn't too hard to make the ship survivable.  They did also add a double hull, a standard in still in use today, but while they work great for icebergs and rocks, torpedoes and mines pretty much ignore them.

This blog is not about history, however, and this is not just an interesting anecdote.  We stand at the same juncture, and this time billions of lives are at stake, not thousands.  Others will tell you we face a dark future ahead, and to be honest, that is likely to be true.  But all that really stands in our way is our faith that our civilization cannot collapse.  We still have the capability to make a smooth transition, but it requires people to stop thinking we can keep going as we have.

We all can make the Long Ascent if we choose to.

The Road Ahead

I've been working out the map for the Long Ascent for a long time. Tripp, over at Small Batch Garden, is ahead of me on the actual journey, which he documents well in his blog.  I highly recommend reading it if you want to see what everyday life on the Long Ascent is really like.  He recently posted on his blog an excellent piece, "Starting at 40", that maps out the future pretty well.  The last paragraph gives a wonderful explanation of why I call the road ahead the Long Ascent.  Coming from someone who truly lives it makes it truly meaningful:

I've modeled my activity around these trends and around permaculture principles more generally for the past 4 years, and can say, first-hand, that it is a joyful and rewarding way to live, whatever the time frame for energy descent turns out to be.  It's hard sometimes - automatic dish and clothes washers are pretty awesome tools when one wants to spend their time doing something else.  And let's face it, who doesn't want to spend their time doing something other than washing clothes and dishes by hand!  It's a lot more deliberate, living in power down mode; the number of things one can accomplish in any given day declines dramatically without those excellent fossil fuels working constantly behind the scenes to free up our time.  But there is a certain elagance, a kind of da Vincian sophistication, that can only be found in a life lived simply.  Hardly a day goes by now when either I or my wife don't utter the phrase, "I love our life," and how many people, fossil-fueled or not, can say that?  There is a real and tangible silver lining in energy descent, but it has to be experienced first-hand.  It can't be lived and written about by proxy.  I mean, it can, obviously, but it won't mean much until you own it for yourself.  It's not a lesser life, it's not even a lateral move, it's actually better this way, because it's the way we have always lived and done business.  Realigning with a more classical way of life is normal, peaceful, and fulfilling.  It's the last couple hundred years that are the strange bit.

That's why overcoming our addiction to fossil fuels is the start of the Long Ascent.

The Ratchet Effects

For those who don't know tools, a ratchet is a device which allows something to move in one direction but not the other.  A ratcheting screwdriver, for example, will only turn the screw in one direction, so you can twist it back and forth without having to let go.

When a technology is introduced that expands the capacity to produce food, population grows to use all that extra capacity.  People don't generally voluntarily reduce population size, so the adoption of that technology becomes irreversible.  (I would like to thank Garrett Hardin for introducing me the ratchet effect.  It really is just an extension of Thomas Malthus's ideas and is central to Jevon's Paradox, that increasing efficiency in using a resource increases the overall use of that resource.  Hardin was specifically concerned with food production, but the ratchet effect applies to many other endeavors.)

Just because people don't choose to do something, however, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.  Technologies can be lost and populations reduced without any intention.  When they cut down the last tree on Easter Island, being a lumberjack was obsolete.  The bubonic plague significantly reduced the number of Europeans.

Going back to the tool analogy, a screwdriver which only tightens or only loosens screws isn't very useful.  That's why ratcheting screwdrivers have a switch: flipped one way it tightens, flipped the other it loosens.

There also is an reverse ratchet effect.  Extinction is a 100% phenomenon; a species is not extinct until every male or every female of a species is dead or incapable of reproducing.  So too is it with technology.  As long as someone somewhere in the world knows how to do something, the technology is not completely lost.  With the key technologies that allowed populations to expand, this leads to a ratchet effect on the downside.  Those who still have those technologies will have an advantage over those who don't, and they will grow in proportion to those who don't.  (Please note I am talking about relative percentages, so if one group loses 50% of its population and the other loses 75%, the first has doubled in relative proportion to the second.)

No matter how bad things get in the short term, the reverse ratchet effect will determine where we resume the Long Ascent from.

Starfish

I am a major fan of Jeff Goldblum.  I have loved every movie of his I have ever seen.  Today I want to relate a story from Holy Man, which he co-starred with Eddie Murphy and Kelly Preston.  The story was told by Eddie's character.  I am, of course, paraphrasing:

========================================

One morning a man went for a walk on a beach.  A major storm had passed through the night before, and the beach was littered with thousands of dying starfish that had been washed onshore and were now drying out in the sun.

The man came upon a young boy who was picking up the starfish one by one and tossing them back into the ocean.  The man chastised the boy, "Why are you doing that?  You're not making any difference.  There is no way you can save all these starfish before they die!"

The boy answered, "Yes, but for each starfish I save, it makes all the difference in the world."

========================================

We face a perilous point in Hubbert's Mesa.  From our current vantage point, we can still see the possibilty of much brighter world is visible in the distant future.  We do need to keep that vision in our mind, as it will become more hidden from sight.  But the immediate future requires our attention, too.  The path ahead has many hazards, and if we lose control and tumble, it could be fatal.  We need to look to our destination when we rest, but focus on our surroundings as we proceed.

One thing we cannot do is look at what we are losing.  There is so much more than we can possibly save.  We have to block that out and concentrate on saving what we can.

On the Long Ascent, that makes all the difference in the world.

Tom Brown's "Grandfather"

When I was going to college in California, I took a survival course from Christopher Nyerges.  One day he related to us the story of Tom Brown, Jr.  He gained fame for his skills as a tracker.  One interviewer mistakenly reported that he ran a survival school, and he was flooded with requests, so he did start teaching survival skills.  His story, "The Tracker", is a fine read.

Today, however, I want to discuss part of the story of his teacher, who was called "Grandfather" even from a young age.  One particular valley plays an important role three times in his life.  When he was growing up, he would frequently visit that pristine valley to play.  In the middle of his life, decades later, he discovered that a mining camp had been erected.  The natural beauty had been devastated by all the human activity.  Finally, as an old man, he visited the valley one last time, when he discovered that the intervening decades had erased much of the evidence of the exploitation.  Except for a few scraps here and there, the valley was starting to look much as it did in his youth.

There is, of course, a point beyond which nature will never recover.  After the last tree on Easter Island was cut down, they never came back.  But as long as something remains, the natural world has a remarkable ability to heal itself, given time.

One of our most immediate tasks on the Long Ascent is ensuring that enough of the wilderness is preserved so that healing can take place.

TSOABWTWHEK

2012.

The End Of The World As We Know It.

TEOTWAWKI.

I'm confident you've already heard that the Mayan calendar ends on 12/21/02012.  In reality, it doesn't so much end as it starts over.  It's more of a Y10K problem; as long as we only use 4 digits to write the year, in 7988 years we will have the same problem.

Don't get me wrong, while I don't like the concept of THE EOTWAKI, it is useful to talk about the world changing so fundamentally that the rules we have known no longer apply; you could call it a teotwawki.  However, I don't the fact that the emphasis is on what is ending.  If the sun goes supernova or an asteroid the size of Texas crashes in to the Earth, then by all means call it a teotwawki.  Other, lesser changes like the supply of oil not meeting the demand represent an opportunity, though.  We should use an acronym that represents that. I propose TSOABWTWHEK:

The Start Of A Better World Than We Have Ever Known

While we need to watch our step, we also need to keep looking up as we make the Long Ascent.

Waiting to be Saved

To close out the year, I would like to tell you one of my favorite jokes:

========================================

A devout believer is trapped by a flood.  He climbs onto his roof and waits to be saved.

As the water gets close to the roof, a neighbor comes along in a row boat.  "Hop on," he says, "I'll get us both to safety."

"No, that's okay, you take care of yourself, God will save me," the believer replies.

The water keeps rising, almost to the top of the roof, where the believer is sitting.  A Coast Guard power boat comes along.  They yell out, "Come aboard, we'll get you to dry land."

The believer replies, "No, that's okay, go look for someone else, I have faith that God will save me."

The Coast Guard argues with him for a little while, but he steadfastly refuses, and they decide they do need to move on to save others.

The water keeps rising.  The believer is holding on the the chimney, with just his head above the water.  A National Guard helicopter comes along and spots him.  They throw down a ladder and yell through a bullhorn, "Quick!  Grab the ladder and we will save you!"

"No, this is a test of my faith, I know God will save me," he yells back.

As they try to argue with him, the chimney breaks off and he is swept away and drowns, and the believer goes to Heaven.

As he meets God, he says to Him, "I don't get it... Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to be here, but I thought for sure you would save me.  Why didn't you?"

God booms out, "I SENT A ROW BOAT, A POWER BOAT, AND A HELICOPTER!! WHAT MORE DID YOU WANT??"

========================================

Faith is a very good thing, but we should take advantage of every blessing we are given on the Long Ascent.

The Christmas Orange

Back in my youth (which, in the grand scheme of things, wasn't that long ago), my family would hang out large stockings for each of us on Christmas Eve.  We didn't have a fireplace, so we hung them on chests and curios in the dining room.  (Ironically, after my sister and oldest brother moved out, my parents did put a wood-burning stove in that room.)

I vaguely remember getting small toys and lots of candy in my stocking.  One thing that has stuck in my mind to this day was getting a fresh orange in my stocking, one that was just for me to enjoy; I didn't have to share it with anyone else.  My family wasn't poor, but fresh oranges weren't something they stocked regularly in the small grocery store in my hometown.  Apparently, though, enough people had the tradition of the Christmas orange that they were available at that time.

I still look forward to eating oranges at Christmas, since that seems to be around the time they start harvesting them in Florida and California.  They are so readily available, though, that they aren't as special as they were in my youth.

What does this have to do with the Long Ascent?  Well, the current state of affairs is representative of the Age of Profligacy.  As we come down off Hubbert's Mesa, eating foods from far away will become more of a luxury.  That is not necessarily a bad thing.  Getting an orange for Christmas may again be a special occasion.

Sometimes on the Long Ascent, the joy is in the smallest details along the way.

The Glass is Always Full

Pour 8 ounces of water into a 16 ounce glass.

Is the glass half-empty or half-full?

If you say half-empty, people call you a pessimist.

If you say half-full, people call you an optimist.

I say, the glass is full: half with water, half with air.

If you pour out 4 ounces of water, or pour 8 more in, it doesn't matter, the glass is always full, only the proportions change.

What if you take the glass into outer space?  The glass is still full.  Even if you were to have a perfect vacuum with no matter in it, the glass still is filled with the electromagnetic field, and the gravitational field, and all the other fun stuff that inhabits "empty" space.

If you truly could eliminate everything from inside the glass, the forces on the outside surface would completely overwhelm any structural integrity and instantly crush the glass, so it would be no more.

As long as the glass is, the glass is always full.

This perspective will serves us well as we travel the minor dips and bumps on the Long Ascent.

No More Problems

One thing you will find over the coming weeks, if you haven't seen it already, is that I am a very much in favor of making careful distinctions.  One distinction John Michael Greer emphasizes is between problems and predicaments: problems have a solution; predicaments do not.  That distinction I am not so happy with.

Don't get me wrong, I think it is very useful to distinguish between things that can be solved and things that cannot.  My issue is with the connotations of the words he uses.  If you have math homework and you say you have 5 problems to solve, I have no problem with that.  Most of the time, though, both the words problem and predicament are very negative.  After reading Napoleon Hill, I came to the conclusion:


THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS, only opportunities.


Or to put it more humorously,


Opportunity knocks often.  Most people don't answer because it comes disguised as a problem.


Now, I have come to realize this isn't entirely true.  There are problems that are not opportunities, but they only happen when people are oblivious to them.  As soon as you recognize something is a problem, it becomes an opportunity to make a change and make things better.

Similarly, things we cannot change I prefer to call parameters, rather than predicaments.  We need to plan for things like mortality.  Fighting them makes no sense.

The language of opportunities and parameters will serve us well as we make the Long Ascent.

An Attitude of Gratitude

"For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away."  Matthew 25:29

Today in the United States we celebrate Thanksgiving.  We fill the day with parades, football, cooking, family, and shopping.  We may recall the Pilgrims and the Native Americans feasting together.  How many of us take the time to reflect on how blessed we are and be thankful for what we have?

The original celebration of Thanksgiving was different.  It wasn't merely a harvest festival or a block party.  The Pilgrims were truly grateful for what they had.  They had much to complain about.  They originally had meant to go to Virginia, they weren't expecting the cold New England winters.  They had lost many of their companions to the harsh weather.  Even by the standards of the day, they had little in material comforts.  For one day at least, they chose to ignore all their hardships and be thankful for what they did have.

========================================

There is an old story about a man who lost his feet in an accident.  He grew bitter about his loss and was always complaining.  Finally one day he met a man who lost his legs in an accident.  He realized how much worse his life could have been, and he starting being grateful for what he did have.

========================================

Having this attitude of gratitude by itself makes life less unpleasant.  The consequences are more than just mental.  As Jesus explained in the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25, we need to care for what we are given.  If you are not thankful for what you have, you will not take care of it, and you will lose it.

We will need an attitude of gratitude to take care of what we have been given as we make the Long Ascent.

"This is the day which Jehovah hath made; We will rejoice and be glad in it." Psalm 118:25 (ASV)