My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird – equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren,
to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over,
how it is that we live forever.

~ Mary Oliver ~

In some spiritual and psychological circles we often hear unambiguous proscriptions against the emotion of anger. However, in many indigenous traditions, anger is not experienced with the same suspicion one finds in Western psycho-spiritual circles. While ancient teachings regarding anger do not condone aggression, they do not unequivocally assume that feeling the emotion of anger will lead to hostility or violence. In fact, they tend to revere anger as an innate human emotion which may be utilized on behalf of the earth community without inflicting harm. Ancient teachings often include practices for “uploading” the raw emotion of anger to higher chakras or physiological energy centers on behalf of preserving boundaries or protecting the innocent-both of which are characteristics of the non-aggressive warrior.

Anger is one of the Five Stages of Grief articulated by the death and dying researcher, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. As I noted in Sacred Demise, in the context of those stages, anger shows up in reaction to a loss. First we feel shock and denial, then move into anger which may include frustration, anxiety, irritation, embarrassment, and shame. Subsequently, we move into depression and grief, followed by bargaining, then acceptance and re-investment in our lives. As Kubler-Ross emphasizes, none of the stages are neatly detached from the others. We tend to move through them fluidly, with each stage somewhat blurring into the next stage or containing remnants of the last one.

In the process of preparing emotionally to navigate the coming chaos, it is crucial to examine each stage of grief, to note where we have been in the process, to look at where we are in the moment, and to honor each emotion along the way. Many people today are stuck in anger because they have not allowed themselves to move through it into mindful grieving. In fact, I believe that the United States, and many nations throughout the world are currently mired in anger. In 2009, author and spiritual teacher Caroline Myss, stated in her article “An Epidemic of Global Anger“:

“We are a community of nations on fire with anger. And we are getting angrier by the day. Whether we look at the increase in uprisings occurring around the world or at the escalating tension brewing in America, what is becoming more apparent is that we are witnessing a rapidly increasing rate of global anger, so much so that it qualifies as an epidemic.”

Many Americans are enraged at their government. Some who have been researching the demise of the current paradigm and understand the self-destructive aspects of corporate capitalism, the limits of economic growth, and the unsustainability of a civilization dependent on fossil fuels feel angry because their leaders refuse to acknowledge what is so. As their minds have been awakened, so have their emotions, and anger has been part of the process. But as they have come to understand that industrial civilization itself is collapsing, they are likely to have stopped wanting to repair and improve it and have begun to entertain a larger picture of how they could join with allies in constructing a new paradigm and a new culture.

It is likely that for these individuals, anger metamorphosed into deep grief or despair as a feeling of powerlessness to “fix” civilization set in. Implicit in the emotion of anger is the sense that something can or must be done to alter the that has evoked anger. As one comes to understand the inevitability of the unraveling of industrial civilization and the futility of attempting to prevent it, one may in fact experience a sense of relief that collapse is beyond control and proceeds in its own way, in its own time. One grasps that our mandate as a species is to move with the demise, not against it, and find within the unraveling a greater purpose than the one civilization has offered, proceeding with the work we came here to do. At that point, even though we may carry some residue of denial or anger, and even though our willingness to see what is so puts us directly in the path of deep grief, the embrace of our purpose and our role in the collapse process, is in itself a re-investment in our lives and the well being of the earth community.

However, the individuals I have just been describing do not comprise the vast majority of those in the United States or the world who are fixated in anger because they are also fixated in denial. One cannot move through the Five Stages of Grief if one does not move beyond denial. Refusing to see what is so guarantees that the journey through the stages will not occur. So whether one is an enraged Muslim suicide bomber or a vitriolic white, middle class Tea Party enthusiast, one’s emotional state and behavior belie an inordinately diminished perspective of reality, resulting in a desperate need for vituperative scapegoating. In other words, fixation in anger.

The Mary Oliver poem above about loving the world which in part means reveling in the sensual delight of nature which means becoming “accustomed to savoring that which is momentous, concealed within bare bones simplicity.” It also means a profound gratitude which the poem describes as “mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here.” The world has given us stupendous gifts which Oliver says causes her to “stand still and learn to be astonished.”

But does our gratitude for the world mean that we should never be angry about the injustice or self and eco-destruction its inhabitants have perpetrated upon each other and the earth community? Certainly not, but being deeply connected with our purpose in the world provides perspective that buoys us and allows us to keep moving forward when the magnetic pull to become fixated in anger may feel irresistible.

When we are intimately familiar with our purpose, we understand that the world is not paradise, it is not a vacation resort, and it is not a place to which we have come to live in perpetual bliss. Rather, the world is comprised of both the magnificent wonderment and extraordinary beauty depicted by Mary Oliver as well as the horrors engineered by a species about to become successful in its incalculable attempts to commit suicide.

Author and spiritual teacher, Marshall Vian Summers, writes in his book Greater Community Spirituality:

Be without judgment of the world. If the world were a perfect place, you would not need to come here. If the world were a place that functioned harmoniously, without friction or conflict, this would not be the place for you….The world is your place to work and to give. Its pleasures are small but real. Its pains and difficulties are great. The world cannot give you what you seek, for what you seek you have brought with you from beyond the world.

That which we have brought with us from beyond is something greater than our personality or human ego. Summers refers to it as Knowledge, and others use terms like the sacred, spirit, the Self, the divine within. However we choose to name that part of ourselves, it comprises our core. I believe that the more intimately familiar we are with it, the less we expect from the world, and the more we are willing to serve the world in order to imbue it with the sacred. Loving the world, as Oliver names it, is not about sentimental emotion, but about a commitment to the work we came here to do which by definition, serves the earth community.

The mathematical cosmologist, Brian Swimme, in his extraordinary lecture series, “The Powers of The Universe,” clearly articulates this concept. Cataclysm, he notes, is one of the inherent powers of the universe, and “it is currently happening on our planet. The choice before us is whether we will participate consciously.” Participating means that “as all the structures that are destroying the earth are collapsing, they are releasing us into the essential nature of who we are.” While this awareness does not remove our anger or our anguish, it brings us face to face with the deeper meaning of the collapse of industrial civilization and our purpose in it.

I believe that the world of the future will be a chaotic world which will be, among other things, an angry world, especially in the initial stages of the demise of the current civilization. In a December, 2009 article “America The Traumatized”, Adele Stan argues that a series of events that occurred in the first decade of the twenty-first century have made us a PTSD nation–and that was before the BP oil disaster of 2010. Until we understand trauma and post-traumatic stress, the need to blame the traumatizing event or person(s) who inflicted it is exceedingly compelling. When we do grasp the magnitude of trauma and its consequences, we come to understand how futile is our rage in the face of an inundation of horror.

I write these words more than two months after the BP Gulf of Mexico cataclysm. Am I angry as I witness the horror? Am I enraged at the lies of BP with regard to its prior knowledge regarding the safety of the Deepwater Horizon rig? Am I livid when I hear the stories of people who tried to warn the corporation that its bypassing of standard international safety regulations would result in catastrophe? Does white hot rage pulse through my body as I witness BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, taking a yachting trip and begging to “get his life back” as the entire world lays the blame for this debacle at his door and as the entire ecosystem is now in the path of the destruction visited upon it by a multitude of corporations and CEO’s of BP’s and Tony Hayward’s ilk? Am I incensed when I see millions of people immersed in an epic blame-fest, pointing fingers and mouthing incessant sentences beginning with “they shoulda, coulda, woulda”?

The answer to all of those questions is a resounding “yes”, and from the moment the catastrophe was first made public, I realized the probable scope of it, and I saw the word t-r-a-u-m-a writ large all over it. What purpose at this point will my anger serve? How could I be seduced by the inherent assumption in my anger that the there is a possibility that the situation can be remedied? In my opinion, the BP oil disaster of 2010 is nothing less than 100 Hurricane Katrinas in slow motion. It is an unfathomable game-changer-perhaps the tipping point in humanity’s destruction of this planet. As I witness countless animals dripping and dying from disgusting quantities of crude oil resembling raw sewage suffocating their bodies; as I consider that perhaps 40-50% of the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico will soon be covered with petroleum; as I reflect on the spread of the spill into other oceans and the death of plankton and the ultimate devastation of the food chain; as I consider the economic devastation of a section of the country that comprises about 20 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, and as I speculate that perhaps the entire Gulf Coast region may become uninhabitable, I see, hear, and feel nothing but trauma. Furthermore, if the entire population of the United States were not already suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, it is now.

Yet what I have personally discovered about my anger over the years is neither that I shouldn’t have anger or that I should discharge it whenever I feel like it, but rather, to approach my anger mindfully. A stellar article by Holistic Psychologist, Jennifer Franklin, entitled “Mindfulness In Practice: Anger Management” defines mindfulness this way: “To be mindful is to be conscious, more awake, more informed about how one lives one’s life.

Being more mindful, therefore, allows us to make more awake or informed choices in every moment. Our words and actions would be more mindful if we were more awake or conscious in those moments in which when we choose them.” According to psychotherapist Richard Pfeiffer, quoted in the article, anger is a neurological response process that essentially prepares us to fight or flee.

We have many options for creating more mindfulness within ourselves. Meditation is, of course, one of the principal tools for strengthening mindfulness, even if the meditation is not the specific technique called “mindfulness meditation.” It is important to remember that mindfulness isn’t so much about becoming mindful of the world around us, although that generally accrues from a meditation practice, but rather, mindfulness is about being mindful of ourselves. It helps us become centered observers of our own process.

For example, the Dr. Franklin’s article offers the classic example of road rage and how it can be handled mindfully instead of reactively:

When you exercise mindfulness, you exercise non-reactivity or the capacity to stay centered, grounded, and unshaken in response to a stimulus. Now, don’t confuse non-reactivity with non-feeling. Let’s use road rage as an example. You’re driving, and someone cuts you off, and in response to being cut off you flip the driver the bird. You’ve just behaved reactively.

Contrast that with what non-reactivity would look like in that scenario: You are cut off by the driver, and rather than focusing your attention on the event itself, you focus it on you. You focus it on the sensations you are feeling in your body, most likely a fast heart rate, perhaps a tightness in the chest, or constricted breathing. Then you shift your attention to your breathing, sending the breath into the parts of your body that are feeling the anger-your heart, your chest-wherever it is for you. In the time it took you to do this exercise, you never even thought about flipping the driver the bird because you were too busy focusing on your reaction; that driver has probably gone on his or her merry way by now. This is non-reactivity.

Non-reactivity allows us to feel all of our feelings but not react to them. We feel them until we organically feel something else or until we decide mindfully, with awareness and choicefulness, that either we want to focus on something else or we want to act.

As I sit with the BP disaster, other emotions course through my body-deep, deep grief; fear, despair, and helplessness, and I have to wonder about the emotions of the earth itself. And since I believe that Gaia is a living, breathing organism, I must correct my use of “the earth itself” and state unequivocally that I believe she must be very, very angry. Within the past two years prior to the BP disaster, we have witnessed what many believe is an unprecedented number of natural disasters. Although officials from the U.S. Geological Survey insist that the number of earthquakes has not increased in recent years, many question that conclusion. Is Gaia “working through” her Five Stages of Grief? And if she is angry, what might she do next?

Perhaps those questions feel too anthropocentric to the reader, so I refer to the natural process of homeostasis which is “the ability of a system or living organism to adjust its internal environment to maintain a stable equilibrium.” When a system is out of balance, some internal process attempts to adjust the imbalance and return it to a state of balanced functioning.

In a 2008 interview with C-Realm Podcast, Albert Bartlett, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of The Essential Exponential for Our Planet, stated, regarding population and unlimited growth, “If we don’t stop it now, then Nature will stop it through a big die-off.” Bartlett argues that population and growth spell annihilation for the planet if humans do not radically change their ways of occupying our planet.

One might argue that if Bartlett’s theory is so, it is all a matter of simple physics and that speaking of earth’s anger is pure anthropocentrism. Yet the distinguished doctor of medicine and biophysics, James Lovelock, who penned the book The Revenge of Gaia, argues in that work, as he does in many places, that humans have created out-of-control global warming and climate change which are now wreaking revenge on our species. Lovelock too may be indulging in rampant anthropocentrism, but if the earth itself has conscious self-awareness, both Bartlett and Lovelock may be onto something.

While we cannot validate with certainty earth’s anger, we can certainly attest to our own in the face of humanity’s devastation of the ecosystem. And while I do not concur with some in the field of psychology who argue that anger isn’t really a fundamental human emotion but a kind of mask for other feelings such as fear and grief, I do believe that in the case of our anger toward members of our species who are committing ecological suicide, it is crucial that we connect with our grief and terror regarding the state of the planet and the dire consequences of the project of industrial civilization which we are now beginning to experience.

In the short term, anger may be useful in motivating us to act-to prepare for the coming chaos, to help raise the awareness of others, and to inspire others to prepare, but if we allow ourselves to fully grasp the calamitous reality of the future into which we are moving, I believe that our anger will soon be eclipsed by fear, grief, and despair. My forthcoming book, Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Toolkit for Inner Transition, provides an extensive array of options for utilizing all emotions we might encounter in a world unraveling in order to sustain and protect ourselves.

Among the myriad reactions I hear to the BP disaster from the folks with whom I interact, the one that overshadows all others is anguish. We hold hands across the sand and bodies of water, we pray, and we talk to our friends, but fundamentally, we are absolutely powerless to remedy or reverse what occurred on April 20. We knew our planet was in a state of full-blown collapse, but we didn’t expect it to unfold this way. As one friend recently said to me, “It’s just a matter of time now.” I could have said, “Until what?” but I long ago learned not to ask questions I already know the answer to. My friend and I could just as well have been standing on the deck of the Titanic having the same conversation.

In an angry, chaotic world, it will be important for us to read the deeper emotions that underlie the rage we are likely to see erupting in society and in our communities. We will need to fortify ourselves emotionally and logistically from the collateral damage that myriad wounded-animal outbursts from others could inflict upon us, and even more importantly, not allow our egos to succumb to the momentary pleasure our own indulgence in rage might afford. At the same time we validate the rage our fellow humans feel, our compassion must penetrate the vitriol and understand the shipwreck that any human soul might become after years of sailing the waters of dogged denial and unwarranted faith in the American dream. If you are reading these words, it is likely that you have awakened from the dream or are in the process of doing so. Millions more never have and never will. How will we hold all of our emotions in the face of the rage their sense of betrayal will evoke in them? How will we go on loving the world?

In addition to the oil itself, BP has (in this case deliberately) spilled a million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersant, banned in the UK. Biologists’ accounts of the devastation being wreaked on fish, birds, amphibians, turtles, coral reefs, and marshes grow more apocalyptic by the day—especially in view of the fact that the vast majority of animal victims die alone and uncounted. Warnings are now being raised that the natural gas being vented along with the oil will significantly extend the giant dead zones in the Gulf.

And guesses as to the ultimate economic toll of this still-unfolding tragedy—on everything from the tourism and fishing industries of at least five coastal states to the pensioners in Britain whose futures are at risk if BP files for bankruptcy or is taken over by a Chinese oil company—surge every time an analyst steps back to consider the situation from another angle.

We all want the least-bad outcome here. But what if events continue on the current trajectory—that is, what if the situation keeps deteriorating? Just how awful could this get?

For weeks various petroleum engineers and geologists working on the sidelines have speculated that the problems with the Deepwater Horizon may go deep—that the steel well casing, and the cement that seals and supports that casing against the surrounding rock, may have been seriously breached far beneath the seabed. If that is true, then escaping oil mixed with sand could be eroding what’s left of the well casing and cement, pushing out through the cracks and destabilizing the ground around the casing. According to Lisa Margonelli in The Atlantic:

There is the possibility that as the ground and the casing shift, the whole thing collapses inward, the giant Blow Out Preventer falls over, the drill pipe shoots out of the remains of the well, or any number of other scenarios,” that could making it virtually impossible ever to cap the well or even to plug it at depth via relief wells.

Read, for example, this comment at TheOilDrum.com, a site frequented by oil industry technical insiders who often post anonymously. The author of the comment, “dougr,” argues fairly persuasively that disintegration of the sub-surface casing and cement is the best explanation for the recent failure of “top kill” efforts to stop the oil flow by forcibly injecting mud into the wellhead.

Concerns about the integrity of the sub-seabed well casing appear also to be motivating some seriously doomerish recent public statements from Matt Simmons, the energy investment banker who decided to go rogue a couple of years ago following the publication of his controversial Peak Oil book Twilight in the Desert. Simmons says, for example, that “it could be 24 years before the deepwater gusher ends,” a forecast that makes little sense if one accepts the conventional view of what’s wrong with the Deepwater Horizon well and how long it will take to plug it with relief wells.

Are these concerns credible? From a technical standpoint, it is clear that improperly cemented wells can and do rupture and cause blowouts. It’s fairly clear that this is part of what happened with Deepwater Horizon. But is the well casing further disintegrating, and is oil escaping the well bore horizontally as well as vertically? We just don’t know. And that is largely due to the fact that BP is as opaque on this score as it has been with regard to nearly every sensitive technical issue (including the rate of leakage) since its drilling rig exploded two months ago.

So far, up to 3.6 million barrels of oil have spilled into the Gulf. The size of the Macondo oilfield has been estimated as being anywhere from 25 to 100 million barrels. It is unclear how much of that oil-in-place would escape upward into Gulf waters if its flow remained completely unchecked, but it is safe to assume that at least half, and probably a much greater proportion, would eventually drain upward. That means many times as much oil would enter the Gulf waters as has done so until now.

Already Deepwater Horizon is the not only the worst oil spill, but the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Multiplying the scale of this existing catastrophe multiple times sends us into truly uncharted territory.

Already, coastal ecosystems are being shredded; for a sense of how bad it is for wildlife in the Gulf now, just read “Biologists fear Gulf wildlife will suffer for generations.” In a truly worst case, oil — and perhaps dissolved methane as well — would hitch a ride on ocean currents out to the deep Atlantic, spreading ecological destruction far and wide.

For the economies of coastal states, a worst-case leakage scenario would be utterly devastating. Not only the fishing industry, but the oil industry as well would be fatally crippled, due to the disruption of operations at refineries. Shipping via the Mississippi River, which handles 60 percent of all U.S. grain exports, could be imperiled, since the Port of South Louisiana, the largest bulk cargo port in the world, might have to be closed if ships are unable to operate in oil-drenched waters. Unemployment in the region would soar and economic refugees would scatter in all directions.

The consequences for BP would almost certainly be fatal: it is questionable whether the corporation can survive even in the best case (that is, if “bottom kill” efforts succeed in August); if the spill goes on past the end of the year, then claims against the company and investor flight will probably push it into bankruptcy. Americans may shed few tears over this prospect, but BP happens to be Great Britain’s largest corporation, so the impact to the British economy could be substantial.

The consequences for the oil industry as a whole would also be dire. More regulations, soaring insurance rates, and drilling moratoria would lead to oil price spikes and shortages. Foreign national oil companies could of course continue to operate much as before, but the big independent companies, even if they shifted operations elsewhere, would be hit hard.

For President Obama, an environmental disaster of the scale we are discussing could have political consequences at least equivalent to those of the Iranian hostage crisis during the Carter presidency. Obama’s only chance at survival would be an FDR-like show of leadership backed by bold energy and economic plans and ruthless disregard for partisan bickering and monied interests.

For the U.S. economy, already weakened by a still-unfolding financial crisis, a worst-case scenario in the Gulf could be the last straw. The cumulative impacts—falling grain exports, soaring unemployment in southeastern coastal states, higher oil prices—would almost certainly spell the end to any hope of recovery and might push the nation into the worst Depression in its history.

We would all prefer not even to contemplate such a scenario, much less live with it. It is irresponsible to inflict needless worry on readers on the basis of entirely speculative and extremely unlikely events. But the more I learn about the technical issues, and the worse news gets, the more likely this scenario seems. We all hope that a relief well will succeed in stopping the oil flow sometime around August, and that until then BP will be able to siphon off most of the oil escaping through the riser and damaged blowout preventer. But one has to wonder: is anyone at the White House seriously considering the worst-case scenario? And what should citizens be doing to prepare, just in case?

“Speak to others the way you would want to be spoken to,” the chair of the meeting pleaded one last time before opening the floor for questions.

And for a while the crowd, mostly made up of fishing families, showed remarkable restraint. They listened patiently to Larry Thomas, a genial BP public relations flack, as he told them that he was committed to “doing better” to process their claims for lost revenue – then passed all the details off to a markedly less friendly subcontractor. They heard out the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency as he informed them that, contrary to what they have read about the lack of testing and the product being banned in Britain, the chemical dispersant being sprayed on the oil in massive quantities was really perfectly safe.

But patience started running out by the third time Ed Stanton, a coast guard captain, took to the podium to reassure them that “the coast guard intends to make sure that BP cleans it up”.

“Put it in writing!” someone shouted out. By now the air conditioning had shut itself off and the coolers of Budweiser were running low. A shrimper named Matt O’Brien approached the mic. “We don’t need to hear this anymore,” he declared, hands on hips. It didn’t matter what assurances they were offered because, he explained, “we just don’t trust you guys!” And with that, such a loud cheer rose up from the floor you’d have thought the Oilers (the unfortunately named school football team) had scored a touchdown.

The showdown was cathartic, if nothing else. For weeks residents had been subjected to a barrage of pep talks and extravagant promises coming from Washington, Houston and London. Every time they turned on their TVs, there was the BP boss, Tony Hayward, offering his solemn word that he would “make it right”. Or else it was President Barack Obama expressing his absolute confidence that his administration would “leave the Gulf coast in better shape than it was before”, that he was “making sure” it “comes back even stronger than it was before this crisis”.

It all sounded great. But for people whose livelihoods put them in intimate contact with the delicate chemistry of the wetlands, it also sounded completely ridiculous, painfully so. Once the oil coats the base of the marsh grass, as it had already done just a few miles from here, no miracle machine or chemical concoction could safely get it out. You can skim oil off the surface of open water, and you can rake it off a sandy beach, but an oiled marsh just sits there, slowly dying. The larvae of countless species for which the marsh is a spawning ground – shrimp, crab, oysters and fin fish – will be poisoned.

It was already happening. Earlier that day, I travelled through nearby marshes in a shallow water boat. Fish were jumping in waters encircled by white boom, the strips of thick cotton and mesh BP is using to soak up the oil. The circle of fouled material seemed to be tightening around the fish like a noose. Nearby, a red-winged blackbird perched atop a 2 metre (7ft) blade of oil-contaminated marsh grass. Death was creeping up the cane; the small bird may as well have been standing on a lit stick of dynamite.

And then there is the grass itself, or the Roseau cane, as the tall sharp blades are called. If oil seeps deeply enough into the marsh, it will not only kill the grass above ground but also the roots. Those roots are what hold the marsh together, keeping bright green land from collapsing into the Mississippi River delta and the Gulf of Mexico. So not only do places like Plaquemines Parish stand to lose their fisheries, but also much of the physical barrier that lessens the intensity of fierce storms like hurricane Katrina. Which could mean losing everything.

How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged to be “restored and made whole” as Obama’s interior secretary has pledged to do? It’s not at all clear that such a thing is remotely possible, at least not in a time frame we can easily wrap our heads around. The Alaskan fisheries have yet to fully recover from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and some species of fish never returned. Government scientists now estimate that as much as a Valdez-worth of oil may be entering the Gulf coastal waters every four days. An even worse prognosis emerges from the 1991 Gulf war spill, when an estimated 11m barrels of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf – the largest spill ever. That oil entered the marshland and stayed there, burrowing deeper and deeper thanks to holes dug by crabs. It’s not a perfect comparison, since so little clean-up was done, but according to a study conducted 12 years after the disaster, nearly 90% of the impacted muddy salt marshes and mangroves were still profoundly damaged.

We do know this. Far from being “made whole,” the Gulf coast, more than likely, will be diminished. Its rich waters and crowded skies will be less alive than they are today. The physical space many communities occupy on the map will also shrink, thanks to erosion. And the coast’s legendary culture will contract and wither. The fishing families up and down the coast do not just gather food, after all. They hold up an intricate network that includes family tradition, cuisine, music, art and endangered languages – much like the roots of grass holding up the land in the marsh. Without fishing, these unique cultures lose their root system, the very ground on which they stand. (BP, for its part, is well aware of the limits of recovery. The company’s Gulf of Mexico regional oil spill response plan specifically instructs officials not to make “promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal”. Which is no doubt why its officials consistently favour folksy terms like “make it right”.)

If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks). No amount of money – not BP’s recently pledged $20bn (£13.5bn), not $100bn – can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.

“Everything is dying,” a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. “How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don’t know.”

This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it’s about this: our culture’s excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During Thursday’s congressional testimony, Hayward said: “The best minds and the deepest expertise are being brought to bear” on the crisis, and that, “with the possible exception of the space programme in the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one place in peacetime.” And yet, in the face of what the geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as “Pandora’s well”, they are like the men at the front of that gymnasium: they act like they know, but they don’t know.

BP’s mission statement

In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to re-engineer at will is a relatively recent conceit. In her ground-breaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans – like indigenous people the world over – believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate “the mother”, including mining.

The metaphor changed with the unlocking of some (but by no means all) of nature’s mysteries during the scientific revolution of the 1600s. With nature now cast as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts could be dammed, extracted and remade with impunity. Nature still sometimes appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and subdued. Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in the 1623 De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum that nature is to be “put in constraint, moulded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man”.

Those words may as well have been BP’s corporate mission statement. Boldly inhabiting what the company called “the energy frontier”, it dabbled in synthesising methane-producing microbes and announced that “a new area of investigation” would be geoengineering. And of course it bragged that, at its Tiber prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, it now had “the deepest well ever drilled by the oil and gas industry” – as deep under the ocean floor as jets fly overhead.

Imagining and preparing for what would happen if these experiments in altering the building blocks of life and geology went wrong occupied precious little space in the corporate imagination. As we have all discovered, after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April, the company had no systems in place to effectively respond to this scenario. Explaining why it did not have even the ultimately unsuccessful containment dome waiting to be activated on shore, a BP spokesman, Steve Rinehart, said: “I don’t think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we’re faced with now.” Apparently, it “seemed inconceivable” that the blowout preventer would ever fail – so why prepare?

This refusal to contemplate failure clearly came straight from the top. A year ago, Hayward told a group of graduate students at Stanford University that he has a plaque on his desk that reads: “If you knew you could not fail, what would you try?” Far from being a benign inspirational slogan, this was actually an accurate description of how BP and its competitors behaved in the real world. In recent hearings on Capitol Hill, congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts grilled representatives from the top oil and gas companies on the revealing ways in which they had allocated resources. Over three years, they had spent “$39bn to explore for new oil and gas. Yet, the average investment in research and development for safety, accident prevention and spill response was a paltry $20m a year.”

These priorities go a long way towards explaining why the initial exploration plan that BP submitted to the federal government for the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon well reads like a Greek tragedy about human hubris. The phrase “little risk” appears five times. Even if there is a spill, BP confidently predicts that, thanks to “proven equipment and technology”, adverse affects will be minimal. Presenting nature as a predictable and agreeable junior partner (or perhaps subcontractor), the report cheerfully explains that should a spill occur, “Currents and microbial degradation would remove the oil from the water column or dilute the constituents to background levels”. The effects on fish, meanwhile, “would likely be sublethal” because of “the capability of adult fish and shellfish to avoid a spill [and] to metabolise hydrocarbons”. (In BP’s telling, rather than a dire threat, a spill emerges as an all-you-can-eat buffet for aquatic life.)

Best of all, should a major spill occur, there is, apparently, “little risk of contact or impact to the coastline” because of the company’s projected speedy response (!) and “due to the distance [of the rig] to shore” – about 48 miles (77km). This is the most astonishing claim of all. In a gulf that often sees winds of more than 70km an hour, not to mention hurricanes, BP had so little respect for the ocean’s capacity to ebb and flow, surge and heave, that it did not think oil could make a paltry 77km trip. (Last week, a shard of the exploded Deepwater Horizon showed up on a beach in Florida, 306km away.)

None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been making its predictions to a political class eager to believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some, like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others. The Alaskan senator was so awe-struck by the industry’s four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling to have reached the very height of controlled artificiality. “It’s better than Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way,” she told the Senate energy committee just seven months ago.

Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that’s when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” – with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich’s telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be – locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore – was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, “in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty”. By the time the infamous “Drill Baby Drill” Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.

Obama, eventually, gave in, as he invariably does. With cosmic bad timing, just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blew up, the president announced he would open up previously protected parts of the country to offshore drilling. The practice was not as risky as he had thought, he explained. “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” That wasn’t enough for Sarah Palin, however, who sneered at the Obama administration’s plans to conduct more studies before drilling in some areas. “My goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death,” she told the Southern Republican leadership conference in New Orleans, now just 11 days before the blowout. “Let’s drill, baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!” And there was much rejoicing.

In his congressional testimony, Hayward said: “We and the entire industry will learn from this terrible event.” And one might well imagine that a catastrophe of this magnitude would indeed instil BP executives and the “Drill Now” crowd with a new sense of humility. There are, however, no signs that this is the case. The response to the disaster – at the corporate and governmental levels – has been rife with the precise brand of arrogance and overly sunny predictions that created the disaster in the first place.

The ocean is big, she can take it, we heard from Hayward in the early days. While spokesman John Curry insisted that hungry microbes would consume whatever oil was in the water system, because “nature has a way of helping the situation”. But nature has not been playing along. The deep-sea gusher has bust out of all BP’s top hats, containment domes, and junk shots. The ocean’s winds and currents have made a mockery of the lightweight booms BP has laid out to absorb the oil. “We told them,” said Byron Encalade, the president of the Louisiana Oysters Association. “The oil’s gonna go over the booms or underneath the bottom.” Indeed it did. The marine biologist Rick Steiner, who has been following the clean up closely, estimates that “70% or 80% of the booms are doing absolutely nothing at all”.

And then there are the controversial chemical dispersants: more than 1.3m gallons dumped with the company’s trademark “what could go wrong?” attitude. As the angry residents at the Plaquemines Parish town hall rightly point out, few tests had been conducted, and there is scant research about what this unprecedented amount of dispersed oil will do to marine life. Nor is there a way to clean up the toxic mixture of oil and chemicals below the surface. Yes, fast multiplying microbes do devour underwater oil – but in the process they also absorb the water’s oxygen, creating a whole new threat to marine life.

BP had even dared to imagine that it could prevent unflattering images of oil-covered beaches and birds from escaping the disaster zone. When I was on the water with a TV crew, for instance, we were approached by another boat whose captain asked, “”Y’all work for BP?” When we said no, the response – in the open ocean – was “You can’t be here then”. But of course these heavy-handed tactics, like all the others, have failed. There is simply too much oil in too many places. “You cannot tell God’s air where to flow and go, and you can’t tell water where to flow and go,” I was told by Debra Ramirez. It was a lesson she had learned from living in Mossville, Louisiana, surrounded by 14 emission-spewing petrochemical plants, and watching illness spread from neighbour to neighbour.

Human limitation has been the one constant of this catastrophe. After two months, we still have no idea how much oil is flowing, nor when it will stop. The company’s claim that it will complete relief wells by the end of August – repeated by Obama in his Oval Office address – is seen by many scientists as a bluff. The procedure is risky and could fail, and there is a real possibility that the oil could continue to leak for years.

The flow of denial shows no sign of abating either. Louisiana politicians indignantly oppose Obama’s temporary freeze on deepwater drilling, accusing him of killing the one big industry left standing now that fishing and tourism are in crisis. Palin mused on Facebook that “no human endeavour is ever without risk”, while Texas Republican congressman John Culberson described the disaster as a “statistical anomaly”. By far the most sociopathic reaction, however, comes from veteran Washington commentator Llewellyn King: rather than turning away from big engineering risks, we should pause in “wonder that we can build machines so remarkable that they can lift the lid off the underworld”.

Make the bleeding stop

Thankfully, many are taking a very different lesson from the disaster, standing not in wonder at humanity’s power to reshape nature, but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; that it is part of us. And thanks to BP’s live camera feed, we can all watch the Earth’s guts gush forth, in real time, 24 hours a day.

John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the few independent observers to fly over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After filming the thick red streaks of oil that the coast guard politely refers to as “rainbow sheen”, he observed what many had felt: “The Gulf seems to be bleeding.” This imagery comes up again and again in conversations and interviews. Monique Harden, an environmental rights lawyer in New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster an “oil spill” and instead says, “we are haemorrhaging”. Others speak of the need to “make the bleeding stop”. And I was personally struck, flying over the stretch of ocean where the Deepwater Horizon sank with the US Coast Guard, that the swirling shapes the oil made in the ocean waves looked remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery lung gasping for air, eyes staring upwards, a prehistoric bird. Messages from the deep.

And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine. After 400 years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is coming alive.

The experience of following the oil’s progress through the ecosystem is a kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day we learn more about how what seems to be a terrible problem in one isolated part of the world actually radiates out in ways most of us could never have imagined. One day we learn that the oil could reach Cuba – then Europe. Next we hear that fishermen all the way up the Atlantic in Prince Edward Island, Canada, are worried because the Bluefin tuna they catch off their shores are born thousands of miles away in those oil-stained Gulf waters. And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf coast wetlands are the equivalent of a busy airport hub – everyone seems to have a stopover: 110 species of migratory songbirds and 75% of all migratory US waterfowl.

It’s one thing to be told by an incomprehensible chaos theorist that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It’s another to watch chaos theory unfold before your eyes. Carolyn Merchant puts the lesson like this: “The problem as BP has tragically and belatedly discovered is that nature as an active force cannot be so confined.” Predictable outcomes are unusual within ecological systems, while “unpredictable, chaotic events [are] usual”. And just in case we still didn’t get it, a few days ago, a bolt of lightning struck a BP ship like an exclamation mark, forcing it to suspend its containment efforts. And don’t even mention what a hurricane would do to BP’s toxic soup.

There is, it must be stressed, something uniquely twisted about this particular path to enlightenment. They say that Americans learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about nature’s circulatory systems by poisoning them.

In the late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U’wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria, “the blood of Mother Earth”. They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn’t as much oil as it had previously thought.)

Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world – in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests – as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the Earth “sacred” is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.

If we are absorbing this lesson at long last, the implications could be profound. Public support for increased offshore drilling is dropping precipitously, down 22% from the peak of the “Drill Now” frenzy. The issue is not dead, however. It is only a matter of time before the Obama administration announces that, thanks to ingenious new technology and tough new regulations, it is now perfectly safe to drill in the deep sea, even in the Arctic, where an under-ice clean up would be infinitely more complex than the one underway in the Gulf. But perhaps this time we won’t be so easily reassured, so quick to gamble with the few remaining protected havens.

Same goes for geoengineering. As climate change negotiations wear on, we should be ready to hear more from Dr Steven Koonin, Obama’s undersecretary of energy for science. He is one of the leading proponents of the idea that climate change can be combated with techno tricks like releasing sulphate and aluminium particles into the atmosphere – and of course it’s all perfectly safe, just like Disneyland! He also happens to be BP’s former chief scientist, the man who just 15 months ago was still overseeing the technology behind BP’s supposedly safe charge into deepwater drilling. Maybe this time we will opt not to let the good doctor experiment with the physics and chemistry of the Earth, and choose instead to reduce our consumption and shift to renewable energies that have the virtue that, when they fail, they fail small. As US comedian Bill Maher put it, “You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.”

The most positive possible outcome of this disaster would be not only an acceleration of renewable energy sources like wind, but a full embrace of the precautionary principle in science. The mirror opposite of Hayward’s “If you knew you could not fail” credo, the precautionary principle holds that “when an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health” we tread carefully, as if failure were possible, even likely. Perhaps we can even get Hayward a new desk plaque to contemplate as he signs compensation cheques. “You act like you know, but you don’t know.”

The whole thing is worth a read, including the many cites and sources (again, why I take it at least a little seriously), but here’s one of several major points made, building on a Wall Street Journal article (link at source):

There are some inconsistencies with this article. There are no “Disks” or “Subsea safety structure” 1,000 feet below the sea floor, all that is there is well bore. There is nothing that can allow the mud or oil to “escape” into the rock formation outside the well bore except the well, because it is the only thing there.

All the actions and few tid bits of information all lead to one inescapable conclusion. The well pipes below the sea floor are broken and leaking. Now you have some real data of how BP’s actions are evidence of that, as well as some murky statement from “BP officials” confirming the same.

I took some time to go into a bit of detail concerning the failure of Top Kill because this was a significant event. To those of us outside the real inside loop, yet still fairly knowledgeable, it was a major confirmation of what many feared. That the system below the sea floor has serious failures of varying magnitude in the complicated chain, and it is breaking down and it will continue to.

What does this mean?

It means they will never cap the gusher after the wellhead. They cannot…the more they try and restrict the oil gushing out the bop?…the more it will transfer to the leaks below. Just like a leaky garden hose with a nozzle on it. When you open up the nozzle?…it doesn’t leak so bad, you close the nozzle?…it leaks real bad, same dynamics. It is why they sawed the riser off…or tried to anyway…but they clipped it off, to relieve pressure on the leaks “down hole”. I’m sure there was a bit of panic time after they crimp/pinched off the large riser pipe and the Diamond wire saw got stuck and failed…because that crimp diverted pressure and flow to the rupture down below.

Contrary to what most of us would think as logical to stop the oil mess, actually opening up the gushing well and making it gush more became direction BP took after confirming that there was a leak. In fact if you note their actions, that should become clear. They have shifted from stopping or restricting the gusher to opening it up and catching it. This only makes sense if they want to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed…..and that sort of leak is one of the most dangerous and potentially damaging kind of leak there could be. It is also inaccessible which compounds our problems. There is no way to stop that leak from above, all they can do is relieve the pressure on it and the only way to do that right now is to open up the nozzle above and gush more oil into the gulf and hopefully catch it, which they have done, they just neglected to tell us why, gee thanks.

A down hole leak is dangerous and damaging for several reasons. There will be erosion throughout the entire beat up, beat on and beat down remainder of the “system” including that inaccessible leak. The same erosion I spoke about in the first post is still present and has never stopped, cannot be stopped, is impossible to stop and will always be present in and acting on anything that is left which has crude oil “Product” rushing through it. There are abrasives still present, swirling flow will create hot spots of wear and this erosion is relentless and will always be present until eventually it wears away enough material to break it’s way out. It will slowly eat the bop away especially at the now pinched off riser head and it will flow more and more. Perhaps BP can outrun or keep up with that out flow with various suckage methods for a period of time, but eventually the well will win that race, just how long that race will be?…no one really knows….However now?…there are other problems that a down hole leak will and must produce that will compound this already bad situation.

This down hole leak will undermine the foundation of the seabed in and around the well area. It also weakens the only thing holding up the massive Blow Out Preventer’s immense bulk of 450 tons. In fact?…we are beginning to the results of the well’s total integrity beginning to fail due to the undermining being caused by the leaking well bore.

Read the comment, follow out the links, and read the subsequent commentary. It may or may not be true, but it seems we’ve found a new worst-case scenario.

(Updated to add that Heading Out over at TOD has more on flow rates and the reasons behind them. As always, I recommend the comments as well.)

Last night’s presidential speech on the Gulf oil spill had been pre-billed by the Washington Post as Barack Obama’s “Jimmy Carter moment.” But reading any of Carter’s speeches (a good one to start with is that of April 18, 1977) side by side with last night’s bromide is an invitation to nostalgia and bitter disappointment.

President Obama offered up one promising paragraph:

“For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we have talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked—not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.”

It sounds for all the world as though the President is about to unleash a grand program on the scale of the New Deal—an energy Moon Shot, a rousing call-to-arms reminiscent of December 8, 1941. But this is what follows:

“So I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party—as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels. Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development—and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development. All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead. But the one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet. You see, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon. And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom. Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is our capacity to shape our destiny—our determination to fight for the America we want for our children, even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know precisely how to get there, we know we’ll get there.”

Translation: “I don’t have a clue what to do; but, if anyone else has some good ideas, I’m all ears.”

Look: I want Obama to succeed; I want it earnestly, even desperately. And so I hate to be critical. It’s true that we’ve all got to work together to solve our energy crisis, and that means rising above partisanship. But leadership is sorely needed here, and leaders must set definite goals.

Jimmy Carter at least had a plan. He proposed lofty objectives and investments: targeted reductions in oil imports, an energy security corporation, a solar bank. In contrast, Obama’s strategy seems to be to avoid specifics while insisting that we Americans will somehow overcome our oil dependency because . . . well, because we’re Americans. We’ve gotten through other scrapes throughout our history as a nation, so why not this one? “I demand action,” the President seems to be saying, “but I’m unwilling to say what that action should be.”

Yes, we Americans have risen to meet previous challenges. The problem is, we haven’t been doing so well in dealing with the energy crisis, which has been going on for at least forty years—since 1970, when U.S. oil production peaked and began declining. Despite complaints, exhortations, and hand-wringing from both Democratic and Republican administrations, very little has actually been accomplished. America continues to import more oil, and to burn enormous amounts of coal and natural gas—and the monetary, geopolitical, and environmental prices we pay for these depleting fuels just keep escalating. Mr. Obama seems to say that now something has changed, but it would be nice to know what, and why, in a lot more detail.

The reality is that nothing significant has been done to deal with our energy crisis because tackling it will require fundamental changes to our economy—to our transport and food systems, even to our financial institutions. Until we are willing to honestly face the fact that an “American dream” based on ever increasing rates of consumption of non-renewable resources is a dead end, and that we will have to dramatically cut back on energy usage in order to make a transition away from fossil fuel dependency, all discussion about renewable energy, efficiency standards, and energy research is fairly pointless.

Call it the Carter Curse. Ever since the great peanut farmer-President scolded the American people about the need to reduce consumption in his famous series of cardigan-clad homilies, leaders have shied away both from telling the American people the truth about just how dire our energy dilemma really is, and from proposing any remedies powerful enough to make a difference. Instead we get only whimpers about our “addiction to oil” and timid suggestions to raise fuel economy standards another notch. It is assumed that if any President actually told it like it is—the way Carter did—he or she would suffer the same fate. Carter’s plan, after all, was ignored by Congress and ridiculed by candidate Ronald Reagan, who trounced Carter in the 1980 election.

Maybe the Carter Curse is real. Perhaps straight talk about energy is political suicide. But if nobody at least tries—if no one has the courage to make specific proposals that are commensurate with the scale of the challenge that faces us—then the political survival of the current office holder is essentially irrelevant. If no one is willing to confront the Carter Curse head on, then in effect we face a failure of our political system that will also ensure a failure of our economic system, our food system, and our transport system.

I keep hoping that’s not the case, but hope needs to be based on evidence from time to time, and I’m not seeing any.

I took a class from an amazing spiritual teacher along with people who are doing great things in the world.

I’m just a hard-working citizen who is on a journey of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. I have a long way to go. I still have stacks of paper towels and packaged food in my kitchen – I’m not ‘no impact woman’ (yet), but I am trying to do more today than I did yesterday to become a good citizen of the Earth.

Why do I prepare for this? Because to me, it means being a good citizen.

I would rather be prepared than not – for the same everyday reasons of uncertainty about the future I have a spare tire and renters insurance. If I could predict the future, I would be very wealthy. I only know that the people who have predicted collapse have also predicted the things that are currently happening in the economy, so I think I’ll listen to them.

I worry about people who will become afraid and allow themselves to be taken advantage of by buying, for example, a survival capsule of seeds that wouldn’t be viable anyway after so many years. (The best way to keep a line of heirloom vegetables going is to actually grow them year after year.) Likewise, to keep a skill alive, even if it is never needed, we need to pass it on to our children before the knowledge is lost.

This is why I chose to learn gardening. I don’t expect to produce enough food on my deck to feed a family of four – what I’m doing is logging experience. When should I start seedlings? What’s eating my eggplants? How can I avoid using pesticides? I read about it for long enough – but by actually doing something, even a little something, I’m learning much faster. And at the end of all this learning, what then? Do I sit and wait for the world to collapse with my canned goods tucked away in the basement? I hope not!

I need to ensure that I have well fed neighbors! If people in my community also have some skills of self-sufficiency, they will be less afraid and hopefully less likely to react irrationally to any ‘rebalancing’ that could happen now that ‘the party’s over’, as the IMF puts it. Once we have the basics of food, shelter and safety under control, we would be free to focus on the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

I don’t hope for collapse. I hope for the best – I hope we transition off of fossil fuel by getting radically local. I hope I gain some muscles from working in the garden. I hope I snack on tomatoes instead of packaged candy bars. I hope I can be part of a greater web of local resilience. And I hope I can make a difference in the lives of others and in the preservation of our planet’s gifts because we are all connected.

We have always seen ‘boom in doom’ I feel like Andre’s classes at Post Peak Living are taught in the spirit of helping people to become resilient – FEMA and the CDC say all the time that we should be prepared for emergencies but many of us, including myself, are not prepared for anything other than a three day disruption of food, water and power. If many natural or economic calamities happen at once, I feel like the government and our emergency response systems could be overwhelmed and I am doubtful that the government could ‘bail me out.’ While I would be grateful for their assistance if they could help me, I would feel like a better citizen and more empowered if I could take care of my own needs (put on my own oxygen mask first) so that I could turn around and help my neighbors. What Andre, Carolyn, and others are teaching is resilience, community, compassion and respect for the forces that are greater than us. It is a labor of love for them and I wish them all the best success.

What I really want people to know is that they are not crazy or delusional for worrying about peak oil, climate change, or economic collapse. These are very real fears and you must process and understand these fears before you do anything else. It is important to work with a practitioner, group or church who can validate your fears, not dismiss them as ‘generalized anxiety.’ I am pretty sure that I experienced ‘existential depression’ after learning about peak oil and I feel like a mainstream therapist would have put me on ‘happy pills’ without acknowledging my fears as being valid or real and I would have never had the opportunity, like I did with Carolyn, to address my grief. I feel that her book Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse is so important because it doesn’t trivialize my awareness-related anxiety. You may have a hard time with this book if you haven’t been initiated into the idea of collapse. (I wish we could call it ‘rebalancing’ instead of ‘collapse’!) Check out the books and links in my sidebar for a balanced set of information.

I think that people who are unaware of peak oil will not understand what’s happening to them over the coming years. They will or are experiencing their own personal financial collapse. They will see gas prices rise and then fall due to lower demand, only to rise again, and so on. I saw a story in the Washington Post over a year ago about a couple where the man killed his wife and then committed suicide because they were losing their house. I cried for them because I felt both helpless to do anything for them and guilty for having a good career. I wished so greatly that they knew it was ok to feel so much grief, and I wished that there were a place for them to go. I had visions of setting up an organic farm for people like them – it would have had sustainable housing and teachers to show them new skills like permaculture so that they could be with nature, start a new livelihood, and feel safe, empowered and peaceful. I want to do good things for people, communities and our planet, but first I have to deal with my own feelings of shame, fear, and sadness so that I don’t burn out as I did last year. The people who are doing the hard work of environmental and economic clean-up, social work and sustainable design are, I feel, at risk for burning out or being very depressed if they do not find tools for dealing with their emotions.

I also need to find people like me who are more aware of the state of the world. I censor my words all the time partially because I feel others will label me a ‘doomer’, though that’s been taken care of thanks to the Times. I originally didn’t want to talk to the Times because I have such a great fear now of others seeing me as insane for thinking that I need to prepare for collapse. But I decided that Carolyn’s work is too important for my own fears and my own ego to stand in the way. I find it hard not to care about fitting in with the norms prescribed to my by society, but as a result of this class I have realized how self-centered my thinking can be and I am learning to let go so that I can do the work that needs to be done, so that I can discover my true purpose, and so that I can be fully open to uncertainty.

By taking Carolyn’s class, I found a way to free my mind from worry and replace it with compassion and action. I was suddenly able to look at my whole life and see what I had been ignoring because I was so absorbed with worry about collapse. I wasn’t getting enough sleep. I wasn’t taking care of my health. I wasn’t paying off enough debt or saving enough money. I wasn’t being ‘present’ with my family because my thoughts were occupied with worry.

Now I’m actually working on my garden, losing weight, spending time with my family, and getting out in the community. I’m going to an Urban Farming Summit on Friday!

What started it all: worrying about where to buy a house

A lot of my worry was stemming from deciding where to live. Our main criteria is that we only buy a house we can afford on one income in the event that one of us loses a job. When I first read the peak oil and ecological collapse literature last March, my knee jerk reaction was to set up a farm in the country where there was plenty of water. I rationalized that I could set up a non-profit farm to help others reskill and learn permaculture, then sell the food at local farmers markets.

Not only did I not have enough money to buy a farm in Northern Virginia, I also don’t know how to farm. So this was a bit of a fantasy that was dispelled by my personal economic conditions and by Joel Salatin’s book You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise. While I probably ‘could’ farm, I would be doing it by myself while my husband worked and I couldn’t be sure that, 20 years from now, my son would want to stay near the farm to help. I decided I would be happy with a little garden, and have since decided that I would even be ok signing up for a CSA. (I do really want to learn how to garden, though, because it makes me happy.)

Last summer I visited a local Virginia eco-village. We could afford a plot in this community (we were unsure how we would afford to build a house, though), and was it ever beautiful! The people are so nice. When I visited, I only heard birds, no highway or air-conditioner hum. The houses were LEED certified with passive solar designs and solar hot water systems. The new straw bale house they’re building had a grey water system that was the first of its kind in this state. They plan to build a community house and hire an organic farmer. It was just a beautiful, peaceful place to visit. We decided against living there because I would have to take a 2 hour train ride to work, and my husband’s career is now so far from this place that it would be a 3 hour commute each way.

I have to say that my dear, dear huband has been the most patient man through all of this. Yes, there were many times at the dinner table when he was tired of hearing the latest news about peak oil, climate change or economic collapse – most people do. But when I said I wanted a farm, he said ‘let’s do it.’ When I said I wanted to live in a Yurt, he thought it sounded like a cool idea. When I said I didn’t want to buy a typical box of a house in the exurbs just to cash in on the tax credit, he understood. But I’ve had to do a heck of a lot of talking about these issues to get my family to understand because the cognitive dissonance is just too great. Ultimately, we both just want our family to be together and safe and he just wants me to be happy, and for that I am blessed.

For now, we have renewed our lease on a townhouse near Vienna, VA. It’s not off the grid and I would be worried about the price of heating and cooling the place in the future, but for now, it’s a good deal. We pay much less in rent than what we would have to pay if we had bought the place. We’re in an excellent school system in a strong community with bountiful sidewalks, bike trails and farmer’s markets. We’re not far from a Metro stop. I have a tiny farm on my deck and in my courtyard. My neighbors are very nice people.

If I won a million dollars, we would buy a few acres close to where we live now and build a passive house or buy and retrofit an existing house. I would set up a teaching market garden so that others can learn new skills. Since winning the lottery is unlikely (especially since I don’t play), I’m playing a waiting game to see what happens with the housing market.

I would love to see Community Solution’s Agraria idea take off: If it were in a town like Vienna, VA, I would move into one of these places in a heartbeat!

I am lucky and humbled to work for an international company with sound finances and a history of changing course or innovating when needed. With as much as I’ve learned, I haven’t been spooked away from this company. In fact, working here has made me more aware of global issues and has made me a better person! I am surrounded by compassionate people and the company has an honest commitment to social and environmental responsibility.

I am frustrated by my complete lack of time to do anything other than commute, work, and sleep. Of course I would rather spend the day with my son, garden and bike around town and meet other transition groups than have a long commute and sit in a cube like I do now, but I have debt to pay off and a low-carbon lifestyle to save for, so if I have to work right now, this is a great place to be working and I am grateful to have the opportunity to learn and grow with my co-workers.

My plan for the coming year is to keep learning how to grow veggies, get in shape, get rid of the stuff in our house that we don’t need, pay off debt, keep learning new skills like mad (starting with Sharon Astyk’s Adapting in Place class), stop buying stuff that has a lot of embodied energy or uses energy when possible, get involved in my community, and relax into the flow of whatever comes next.

‘Oceans’

I have a feeling that my boat
Has struck, down there in the depths,
Against a great thing.
And nothing happens!
Nothing, silence, waves
Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
And we are standing now, quietly, in the new life?

— Juan Ramon Jimenez

So Chris, introduce yourself and the Crash Course to any Transition Culture readers unfamiliar with your work.

My name is Chris Martenson and I’m the creator of something known as the Crash Course which is an online tutorial that explores the connections between the economy, energy and the environment. I’m a father of three children, a former scientist – toxicology was my training but I was a research scientist. I then went on and got an MBA and spent about a decade in the corporate world, corporate finance and various strategic management finance positions, terminating in a position where I was vice president in a company doing high level consulting to the life sciences industry, which is where I was when I stumbled across the information that is now enshrined in the Crash Course and that changed my life forever.

If you had to explain the Crash Course to somebody in a lift for three minutes, how would you encapsulate the essence of the Crash Course?

I would say that there’s an amazingly high chance that there’s going to be an enormous change in our future. The economy is the way in which we organise ourselves, it’s how we get things done, it’s the living, breathing creature that surrounds our daily lives and so we have a commanding interest in its health and well-being – certainly the events of 2008 have really brought that to the forefront of people. But the economy doesn’t exist by itself – it’s intimately connected to, and feeds upon resources that come out of the earth, human resources, all kinds of resources.

I connect the economic ‘e’ to another ‘e’, which is energy. There’s enough information out there around the concept that we might be nearing peak energy. Peak oil in particular – people owe it to themselves to take a good, hard look at that particular story. Then I extended into the environment, that being the third ‘e’. There I’m really looking at resources, all kinds of resources – phosphorous, copper, uranium or any of the other resources that we get from the earth. When we put all three of these ‘e’s into one spot, it seems very likely that the ways in which things have been working up until now is not the same way things will continue to work.

It’s a story of change, it’s a story of a sharp corner in the road, potentially, but it’s really ultimately a story that at first might look disturbing, or potentially even depressing to some people, ultimately is a story about the options and opportunities we have to take control, to seize the power back in our lives, to be responsible for how our personal, individual and community futures turn out.

Chris, I know that the Crash Course and your thinking has been evolving. Since you first put the Crash Course online, are there things you’ve fundamentally changed your views on?

I think one of the things that’s shifted very dramatically for me is thinking about what responses make sense, given the information in the course. For me, when I first started on this journey, it occurred to me that there were a lot of personal changes I had to make in my life, and I made those. When I say ‘my life’, this is my wife and my family – we made some very profound changes in our individual lives. But along that path, which has been about 5 years for us now, we discovered the power of community and the importance of community.

There are some individual things everybody should do – my approach is to think that if you want a strong nation, you need strong individual provinces or states, and if you want a strong states you need strong cities, and if you want strong cities you need strong communities, and if you want strong communities you need strong individuals. So that’s the path I say. There are some changes that can be made in our lives that really apply to us as individuals, but the most important ones for us, particularly in the last couple of years, have been in the importance of community and really thinking about how we want to approach this next ten years and really coming to the conclusion that for us, in my family, we want to approach it with joy, excitement, as much happiness as we properly can.

We are where we are, whatever’s going to unfold that’s out of my control will unfold, but of the things I can control, there’s no reason to do those from anything than the position of excitement. I really truly think there are some very exciting times coming, maybe some hard times as well. My learning has been that in order to have these changes not of the disrupting, hard sort – in order to have them be of the exciting sort, that’s all about community. I guess that word means different things to different people, but to me, that means strong, inter-dependent relationship with the people around me on my street, in my town, with the people I know.

So does that mean you might make some changes to chapter 20 of the Crash Course as it’s currently up there, on the web?

You know, my wife and I have been in this together and we hold seminars. The Crash Course is a prerequisite for people coming to our seminars, because we don’t want to spend another minute talking about it. The Crash Course is a big step into the left side of the brain, it has all the information there, it can present a very compelling case that something needs to be done, that there’s a sense of urgency that perhaps the way things used to work is not how we’re going to work going forward. That would be a bad strategy to plan on that sort of future.

When we do the seminars however, we step over into the right side of the brain and we talk about what are the implications of this material. There might be some practical implications, and we might spend a lot of time with some people talking about those; that there might be physical implications in terms of where do I live, where does my food come from, what are the things I can start to engage with on that front. But there are emotional implications as well. A lot of this material confronted beliefs, very powerfully held beliefs, beliefs like, ‘my country’s number one’, or ‘we’ve always made it through crises before because we’ve kept an optimistic view.’

Or beliefs about money and how it is created. So when those beliefs are confronted, that creates a lot of emotional turmoil. And in many cases we’ve found it really does follow the model that Kubhler-Ross laid down, in terms of the five stages of grief, although we add another stage or two in there because they seem to be stages that people enter when they first encounter this material.

In the seminars, a really important part for people is how you can identify where someone is on that spectrum, from denial at one end to acceptance at the other. And how to talk to people who are not where you are on that spectrum, so if I’m in a position of anger, where I was a few years ago, I found that I could talk to angry people and we’d have a little angry get together and we’d be preaching to the choir with each other. Once I learnt that my intentions to be as effective as I can, to communicate this information – and it can be really challenging, not just intellectually, but emotionally challenging – I found that once I lost my attachment to needing people to be where I was with the material, I became a lot more effective.

So we have a whole part on how to talk to friends, loved ones, reluctant partners, spouses, about what can be a really challenging amount of material. So instead of going back and reworking chapter 20 of the crash course, our intent is to build off all this other material that we’ve got that really just extends and builds off it, and say, ‘okay, we’ve got the left side of the brain, now let’s talk about the other side of things’.

It’d be good, following on from that, to look at how you prepared the Crash Course. I remember you saying that you had very deliberately gone through it, stripping out things which were questions of opinion and sticking to facts, so as to make it as hard as possible for people to say, ‘I’m not going to listen to that at all’. But it sounds like in your seminars, you’re doing almost the opposite there from that process you did with the crash course.

The similarity between the two pieces is that we’re still taking the complicated information, and we’re putting some structure around it and we’re unpacking it and taking a good careful look at it. You mentioned the piece which is very important, which does show up in the second part of the seminar as well, it’s in the first crash course, which is differentiating between fact and opinion and belief. There are good facts and flakey, murkey facts and we spend some time talking about the difference between the two. Opinions are generated off of facts and they tend to be conclusions.

Beliefs exist at the sub-conscious level, they’re actually what cause us to take actions or not take action. The point of everything, the one thing that I’m trying to get across to people is that this is a time to take action, even if we’re not really clear what they are, we haven’t got it all mapped out, it’s really time to start demonstrating strong alignment and in many cases any alignment between what we know to be true and the lives that we’re living. For a lot of people that’s a huge gap and it creates anxiety. My goal is to help reduce that anxiety and to give people the most important gift I know, which is the gift of time – time to begin adjusting to a possibly difficult future on your own terms, in your own way.

Having this lead time can be one of the most important gifts that anyone can give to themselves even, to begin working with this material on their own terms while the time exists, while the resources are there; taking a more central path up and around an escarpment rather than having to scale it all at once at some point in the future when things change. So that’s the direction that we go with that. I don’t see them as necessarily in opposition to each other, it’s really an extension of the same kind of structured thinking, but it does get into an area which is a little bit murkier than straight facts, if you will.

One of the criticisms by some of crash course has been the degree to which it downplays climate change and doesn’t factor that in as one of the key issues. Can you talk about your thinking behind that?

I very specifically avoided that whole area for two reasons. The first is that I thought I could create a compelling enough sense of urgency without going into that topic, and the second reason is that I had worked with this enough in various life settings to discover that there are people on both sides of that story that hold very strong beliefs around that material. I only know one climate scientist and I trust him very intimately with his material and we’ve talked about it a lot, but not everybody else is a climate scientist – they’ve fallen into camps.

They’re approaching the topic with very strong beliefs. In talking about things that touch on very strong beliefs, it’s very tricky territory. My experience is that when I’m talking to somebody who’s holding a very strong belief is that in presenting it, or even slightly challenging it, or even raising a fact that runs counter to it, they’ll react to it emotionally, usually with anger or with some sort of a charge, sometimes sadness.

In looking at that, I waded pretty deeply into the story and because I would have to spend a whole other hour of material on this – I’m not sure how many up sides I could get out of this. I can see a lot of ways I could fail and create down sides. And you know, I think I can still tell the story in a way that creates the same sorts of changes that I’m seeking, preaches the same sorts of urgency that I’m seeking, without touching that story. So it was really a strategic decision and part of it was a tactic and it was really centred on my belief at the time when I was putting the crash course together, that I was going to be opening an enormous can of worms and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to or qualified to manage.

I doubted my ability to go into that territory and come out of it with the ability to reach everybody. If I had a mission or a goal for the crash course it was to create it in such a way that it’s not partisan, there’s no religious beliefs in there; I’m not engaging in any class or socio-economic warfare zones if you will. I hope that the crash course is presenting a body of material that is so important that I want everyone to have the chance to hear it, without them shutting down and saying, ‘Oh he holds the wrong position on a political party, on climate change, on a belief-laden area’. So it was just my belief that I could reach more people telling it the way I did without going into climate change, than if I had.

In Richard Heinberg’s Powerdown, he talks about the difference between ‘Building Lifeboats, or ‘Powerdown’ as a response. There was the paper that David Korowicz just produced, ‘Tipping Point’, that FEASTA published, where he talks about whether what we’re looking at is sudden collapse, systemic collapse, or whether we’re looking at oscillating decline. What’s your sense of what the terrain of the next 5-10 years looks like in relation to those scenarios?

I see ranges of possibilities, that’s part of my background and training. I would give about an 80% chance that what’s going to happen is all these trillions of dollars that have been pumped into the economic landscape by governments all across the globe, they’re going to find their mark in the sense that they’ll what will be a viable economic recovery – I think we’ve seen the first glimpses and glimmers of that in some of the data, but it’s really a false rebirth, it’s not born on the back of what I would call legitimate economic foundations, it’s just money that’s been printed out of thin air and poured into the economic patient.

It will jolt back to life and the problem is that all the energy data that I’m reading right now suggests that because of the credit conditions we’ve run into, and because of volatility in the markets and uncertainty, a whole lot of projects in oil and gas have just not been undertaken. So there are some real issues with supply as we go forward. My view is that there’s an 80% chance, a very high chance that within in the next 5 years our economically rejuvenated patient runs into an actual legitimate supply constraint on energy.

So we’ll see that old $147 barrel of July 2008, we’ll see that again. There’s a risk in there that some nations discover that this concept of resource nationalisation potentially, they worry about not exporting oil if it’s truly in limited supply. When I look forward to that….you’re asking a question about the scope, the scale, the pace of the next shock… it is my contention that that next shock has a very strong chance of being a lot worse than the last one, meaning that we could see much larger volatility in the currency markets, we could see some markets shut down, we could see that whole portions of the economy basically cease to function, particularly the portions that were predicated on ever expanding credit growth.

I see that has a very high chance of happening. Whether that leads to, or is perceived by some people as collapse; I don’t really know what collapse means, but I do know that what I suspect is going to happen is that we will see a dramatic shrinking of expectation and economic complexity as a result of the next oil or energy shock that’s going to come forward. I base that on the fact that I can’t find any literature, I can’t find any academic discussion, I can’t find any policies, I can’t find any writing that has even begun yet to address the gap that exists between the idea of economic growth on one hand, and the failure of energy to continue growing on the other hand.

There’s an enormous gap there – nobody has yet explained how economic growth can happen in the absence of growth in basic energy supplies. I know some people are starting to work around the edges of that and start wanting to produce some amount of work in that regard. Certainly I’ve been hammering at it, a number of other people are as well, but there’s really, as far as I can tell, no high level official response, recognition, thinking around that. That’s going to take time. My concern around how this will unfold is that I see that when we hit this next shock, we’re probably going to be about as unprepared for it, intellectually…as we are today, because there’s almost no curiosity, there’s no room for these sorts of ideas to yet be involved in, or engaged with these high level ideas.

If the next crisis happens, I believe this is the kind of crisis that’s so fundamental, so structurally major that we need every possible minute to begin wrapping our minds around this, to begin thinking about how we’re going to respond to this in a proactive rather than a reactive fashion. Once we’re reactive to the reality of the second energy crisis I think the consequences are going to be higher magnitude, a little bit more volatile, possibly a lot more vicious than the set of shocks we just went through.

That’s the highest likelihood – I always reserve a small chance somewhere in there that we might discover that there’s a system error, that would cause things to really, really change, like international banking not really working in a viable way anymore or something like that that would fundamentally alter the landscape that we’ve carefully built over the last few decades, which is a global, just-in-time delivery network of manufacturing and supply. So I have some concerns about supply chain disruption and things like that, but my major thought is that we experience another shock that feels like the last one, but probably more severe.

When you say Chris that you don’t think there’s been much intellectual preparation for this, would you not see some grappling of these ideas in the work of say Herman Daily on Steady State Economics, or Peter Victor on Managing Without Growth?

Oh absolutely, you’ve mentioned two academics and there’s a number of others I’d include in that as well. I was really referring to official recognition, at the higher levels of parliament or in D.C. or places like that – from the political class would be one end. And then on the banking side, we are still being very heavily patrolled if you will, by a set of bankers – talking about my country specifically, the central reserve is really, really tight with our Wall Street bankers.

I haven’t detected anything yet from their analysts that would suggest they’ve understood the rift that I see, to the larger economy and the overall model due to energy insufficiency. That’s something that’s still wide open. There are one or two notable exceptions – Jeff Rubin of CBC, their chief economist, he’s got this story down and he’s up there talking about it. So there are some, but I’m talking about do we have critical mass, are we really talking about this as something other than a few pockets at the edges – how close to the centre are these discussions. It’s my assessment that we’re not that close to the centre yet.

Clearly you know most about how close to the centre this discussion is in the US – do you see significant cultural differences between the US and maybe the UK and Europe or other parts of the world?

Absolutely, the UK is in my estimation way ahead of us rhetorically in talking about some of these issues. When I was just over there on a visit it really struck me that several decades of much higher petrol prices has this shaping effect on society, that leads to all sorts of things around how efficient mass transit is, around people’s relationships with automobiles vs. walking, there’s all kinds of very subtle, long term impacts of having lived with a very different energy landscape, and a very different cultural landscape.

My assessment of my own country is that we still have a dominant belief in the story that there are no resource limits, and if there are technology will fix them. We haven’t yet got to the point of self-admission on a cultural level that says, ‘we might actually have to live within some sort of limit.’ That work has not really begun here yet at the centre, but people all around the edges are absolutely figuring that out and coming to these sorts of conclusions on their own, so that’s what gives me great hope.

That’s the reason I tend to work with groups on the edges rather than spending my time trying to wade into the centre and convince the centre of something. It’s not clear to me that we’ll be able to change attitudes at the centre fast enough before the next crisis, so I think we’ll have to manage that things as best we can at the centre.

When we talked before, you mentioned some practical stories about how people in the US and how people in Transition projects were making use of the Crash Course – could you tell us about those?

Certainly, a number of people have used the Crash Course to great effect. It’s available online for free but not everybody watches 3½ hours of material on a computer, and it really wasn’t my intent for people to sit down alone and watch 3½ hours of stuff on the computer. It’s meant to be shared. So we produced it as three separate discs – they come in a single DVD case – and each of those discs is an hour and a half or less, and that was produced so that people would take that and bring it to their communities, maybe run three separate sessions a week.

That’s what we recommend because you have to integrate the material – I would not recommend watching it all at once. Some people really picked that up and ran forward with it. In January 2010 this year I was out in Sonora, California where a gentleman whose an architect in town had taken the crash course, had the 3 disc set. He put the first disc on on Thursday night, invited everybody back next Thursday, and for the third and final disc. On the fourth Thursday he led a discussion and people talked about it, and then he repeated that the next month. He went from 12 people to 48. Then he repeated it the next month and it went up to 90 odd people, and then he had to move to a larger space.

He did that for 6 months in a row, and when I showed up out there to give a talk they were going to use that talk as a springboard event to introduce the concept of becoming a Transition Town, organising themselves together around this idea that there’s things they might want to do together as a community. When I showed up they rented the largest auditorium – it seemed very ambitious to me, it seated 440 people. They ended up having to turn maybe 50 or 70 people away at this event because the hall had been filled to capacity. To capture the feeling of it – it was very exciting, there was a lot of energy in the room, it was really fantastic.

Somebody who stood up afterwards just captured it perfectly. He said, ‘before I ask a question I just want to make a statement. I see everybody in town here, I see lawyers, I see council people, we’ve got our hippies in the room, our conservatives – we’ve got everybody here. This reminds me of 3 years ago when we had that forest fire that was threatening our town, and everybody dropped their social walls and we just came together because we knew that there was something facing us that was larger than our daily lives and we banded together. That’s what it feels like.’

To me that’s just a fantastic success story because that’s exactly how I envision the Crash Course being used: as a way of taking a very complicated bit of information and putting it into one spot so that we don’t have to keep reinventing that particular wheel, and put just enough in there so that people can see the context that underlies the actual set of conditions that we find ourselves in today, so that we can come to the conclusion that we need to start doing something. That’s where the Crash Course leaves off and then it’s up to each community to go forward and take their interpretation of that that’s unique for them.

Everybody’s got different land, different water, different socio-economic, different sources of wealth – everybody’s got a slightly different condition. That’s why I’ve just been so pleased that they were able to go and pick up the Transition Handbook because the Transition model is all about individual communities holding up a framework and then adapting it to their situation and particular condition. They had a great kick-off and they’re up and running and I’m getting reports back from them, and the best part about that whole story is that yes, there’s an urgency, yes, there’s some anxiety, but they’ve just done it with a real sense of excitement and purpose and joy.

To me they’re an absolute model of how this can be done – the fact that we not only can, but we have to find ways to reach everybody in town, not just the usual people that show up to change things. We need everybody to pull on this. Everybody’s got to contribute, and everybody has something to contribute. So I’m just really pleased with that particular outcome out there, I love what they did.

That’s a great example. On that subject of reaching everybody, when you came and spoke in Bristol, one of the people that came up on the platform afterwards for discussion was the person was the senior officer leading on this sort of energy planning work for Bristol City Council. And he sat there and he said, ‘Thank you Chris, that’s a real eye opener but what do I do with that now? How do I actually create organisational, infrastructure level, meaningful change in response to this, because what you’re really saying is we need to fundamentally change our practices, and most organisations are not built up to enable fundamental change – they’re built up to respond to either business as usual or incremental change.

Yes, and certainly that’s one of the great challenges. I don’t know any other way to begin to approach that, besides starting with developing a critical mass of awareness within the community, within the town, within the organisation. Once that critical mass of awareness is there and you have enough people on board who are saying, ‘yeah, I get it, we have to fundamentally do things differently’, I think you can open it up to the second part of the conversation. That’s when we can start to explore ways in which we can culturally realign ourselves so, what is the culture of an organisation and how does that adaptability work?

Here’s a perfect example of this. Katrina comes into Louisiana and makes a mess of things, and it turns out that FEMA is mortally embarrassed. There are life long members of FEMA that are mortally crushed by the lack of ability to respond to that type of crisis. So they commissioned a study, they said, ‘why did that happen?’ They realised that they’d built themselves up over time in these siloed types of organisations, so there’s somebody who’s responsible for water, and there’s somebody who’s responsible for shelter, and there’s somebody whose responsible for food.

That person who’s on the ground doing food will move to their particular corner of the disaster and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I need water’. They have to go all the way up to the top, jump over and go down to the water people, and it’s a very poor response. So they said, ‘is there any example that we can look to that says, here’s an example of a major disaster that was dealt with really well – we’d like to know how that happened and why they were organised.’ It turns out there was another hurricane, hurricane Aniki, just an amazing blow and it came across Hawaii and the community on one of the islands got the full brunt of this thing and it was absolutely destroyed.

By the time anyone got there three days later, the town had its own water set up, it had taken care of its injured, it had basically gotten everything under control….so FEMA went back and did a study and asked, ‘how did this happen?’ It turns out it was the culture – they still had this indigenous culture there such that when this storm came in, people knew that if their children weren’t with them, they’d be with someone else and they knew they’d be fine; they had cultural means of managing chaos and disruption, they did a lot of things horizontally.

Everybody within each of their areas felt empowered to do whatever they needed to do in their areas, but felt perfectly empowered to do other things that needed doing. Everybody just more organically did what needed doing, right where they were at that moment of crisis. So FEMA wrote this whole report up and said, ‘no, we didn’t suffer from a lack of resources, we totally had enough resources to manage this particular crisis….what we had was a cultural problem. Our culture was geared towards one set of circumstances, and it couldn’t realign itself, couldn’t be flexible, couldn’t reorganise itself in the face of a crisis that was actually larger than our organisation’s current ability.’

So I don’t know how you have that level of discussion about how Bristol City Council could benefit from changing itself culturally, until people have that critical mass of awareness that there’s a hurricane like Aniki? coming, and that it’s in our best interests. It’s something we have to do.

Because we either respond now, while we can, with the luxury of time, or we respond later when pressed by circumstances. Between those two particular responses there’s just a world of difference, night and day. I just think that step one is building that awareness, building that sense of urgency, getting that critical mass, and then we can step into that next box. It’s cart before the horse to start talking about fundamental, non-status quo changes until people are ready and receptive to really have those conversations.

Does what’s going on in Greece at the moment mean that the cultural stories can change very quickly because the crisis becomes far more obvious to people and you can move pretty much immediately onto fundamental infrastructure change? Also, what lessons do you think the UK could be learning from what’s happening in Greece?

I think both lessons are ones that we’ve learnt before and that we’re going to relearn again, that is that financial crises are incredibly quick. They’re like bush fires – one day everything is fine, and a couple of weeks later everything is not fine. This is particularly true to the extent that our entire financial system is one global construct so when they say that Greece is about to default the first question is, ‘default on what, and who do they owe it to?’ It turns out that France is exposed, Germany’s exposed, the UK is exposed, America is exposed, a lot of countries are exposed to this debt.

The lesson there is that when these things finally break, they break incredibly quickly. So I would extrapolate that just a little bit and go forward and say, ‘Greece has a problem because it had spending mismanagement at the government level, but really it has a problem of living beyond its means, and it was piling up debt. A debt edifice creeps to a higher and higher level and then it suddenly breaks, and we saw that in Greece. Well let’s fast forward – there are a number of other countries out there right now, and the UK is one of them, whose debt level should be creating some pretty serious cause for concern amongst people because those debt levels are really at the same sorts of levels we’ve been seeing in Greece.

The chief lesson is, don’t be complacent. Be aware of the risks. You should be asking yourselves if these risks are getting larger, or are they getting smaller. One of my chief criticisms on the way in which this economic bailout was handled on both sides of the Atlantic, was to increase the level of indebtedness of the public sector, and it’s therefore increased the threat of a Greece-like event. I really believe individuals should trust themselves, look at the numbers, read them, say, ‘Does this make me feel better or worse about our future prospects?’

A lot of people are coming to the conclusion that this whole notion of just piling up ever higher larger amounts of public debt to cover up a shortfall in private borrowing – yes it’s a solution, but it’s not addressing the root cause of the problem. This is a crisis rooted in debt, we’re going deeper in debt, and that creates higher levels of risk. For the UK I think there should be hard, fundamental questions around the level of indebtedness, how this is going to be serviced, how it’s going to shape the future, and really question is it that important that we get consumers back consuming at any cost, or should we maybe consider that this is the time when should be retrenching?

We’ve lived beyond our means for a period of time, maybe we have to consider living below our means to offset that, get the yin and the yang balance again, and then come out of this crisis stronger, more structurally sound, with a better functioning economy after taking a run down. That makes a lot of sense, but it’s not the direction the UK has chosen, it’s not the direction the US has chosen, and it looks like it’s not the direction the EU is going to choose with Greece. It looks like they’re going to print and add more public debt to cover up debt that’s essentially already gone bad. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I’m hoping I’m wrong and that their strategy will work, but the risks are still there – in some cases I think we can make an argument that they’re higher than they used to be, and that’s a cause for concern.

What we’re seeing in Greece is that as the kind of cuts that are required to get an economy out of that mess kick in, we’re starting to see some significant public order issues and big strikes. Is it inevitable that the way out of that amount of debt is going to involve major hardship across the board and we just have to accept that’s how it is?

Public disorder is something that concerns me because it just shows what happens when people have one set of expectations or a set of entitlements and those are not met, or are dashed. Often that does result in social strife. That’s certainly a very well understood dynamic. There’s something called an IMF riot – those used to happen all the time down in South America, and in Africa and other places. What’s interesting is that a little bit of the IMF medicine is now coming to the Western world and so we’re seeing it get better television coverage, but the dynamic itself is really well understood.

Greece got itself into some trouble, and yes they over spent and so now we’re seeing the early stages of IMF riots in their country as austerity measures are imposed and that’s a predictable sort of a reaction. When I cast forward and I look at peak oil and this lack of energy expansion and its impact on the economy, it will create kind of that same condition all across the western world. We could be entering a period – and I try to make a case for this in the work I do – it’s a serious option and I think people should consider it as a possibility.

We could be facing that same sort of circumstance across much of Europe and across the United States, Japan as well, China is a bit of a wild card to me. I see those countries as being heavily exposed to this particular story. So in some ways I look at Greece and I see that in some ways it a harbinger of things to come. I try to understand how the official sectors respond to this, what do the policy makers do on the fiscal side, on the monetary side. There’s a larger lesson in this: the same story is playing out in Greece now that I saw play out in General Motors when they bailed it out, which is that they’re going to print money in order to protect the current holders of the bonds from experiencing significant losses. That’s one way you can do it, but all that does is it makes the holders of the bonds whole in the story, and transfers the cost of that onto everybody, through the pernicious effects of printing money out of thin air, which creates inflation and a truly regressive tax because it hits everyone at once, it punishes savers. So really we could see this in some ways as rewarding the imprudent at the expense of the prudent – I’m not a big fan of this because people are quick learners and it doesn’t take them long to figure out it doesn’t pay to be prudent.

The next thing you know, you’ve got a worse problem on your hands. So I think we’re seeing very predictable, short sighted responses which are, ‘let’s just keep the pain in Greece down as much as possible now, we’ll just make it through next week, we’re just trying to manage a crisis.’ But inevitably, we find that the long term health and very important sources of sociological and cultural impact are really swept under the rug in the name of battling a crisis.

History shows that when these sorts of crises come around, when governments resort to the printing option instead of the bitter pill option – the printing option has not yet worked in a long term capacity. It’s all descended into some sort of pain: currency collapse, major inflation, sometimes hyper inflation. We had hyper inflation in Yugoslavia, hyper inflation in Germany before World War II. Inflation is the absolute number one thing I would want to avoid at any possible cost, but we’re seeing our early responses are to print our way out of this and so there are some concerns there as well.

If I could give any advice it would be to say, ‘why don’t we just try to see what happens if the people who have been imprudent have to live with the consequences of that, and not sacrifice the prudent at this particular order. Is there any way we can make the outcome of this rest on the shoulders of those who are most responsible? So far that’s not the course we’re taking, at least as far as I can see.

You could argue that the imprudent ones are the ones that are taking the decisions still! I have a final question for you – I know you strove in the crash course to stick to fact and not opinion, but this is definitely one on opinion. It’s to do with the depth of the crisis you’ve very convincingly argued we’re hurtling towards, and whether in fact, given the deep grained nature of our industrial growth system, we would have had any opportunity to change in a meaningful way without such a crisis?

I absolutely think we could – if everyone woke up tomorrow with an entirely different view we could do things completely differently. It is entirely possible for us to use energy in ways that are much more clever, efficient. We are wasting enormous amounts of resources at this particular point in time. My understanding of energy is that this is a once in a species bequeathment, it was built up over hundreds of millions of years and we’re going to use it in a roughly 200 year time frame and so we could actually be giving ourselves the most important gift. We could absolutely be giving ourselves the gift of time by entering into very aggressive conservation programmes, and being much more clever about how we use our energy.

Here’s an example – if someone wants to come forward and have a great idea for say turning algae into biofuel then they’ve found a way to recycle nutrient loss coming out of sewage plants and that want some energy to go forward and do that – if I was king for a day I would say, ‘okay, here’s what energy is going to cost you for that particular use.’ But if Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft wants to take a 400 ft yacht around the world, I would have a different cost for that fuel. I think that instead of pulling all of this energy out of the ground as fast as possible and then allowing ‘the market’ to decide where it gets used, I think we could be a lot more directive and a lot more specific about where it’s going.

In my own little corner here on my property we’re starting to work with a wonderful, bright young guy with permaculture principles for growing food. I understand that it’s possible to use a lot less energy and still have a very good quality of life, in my own small corner of the world and I don’t understand why that can’t be possible elsewhere, why we couldn’t be much more clever and creative about the ways in which we use energy. I think this doesn’t have to end in crisis, there are lots of ways we could restructure currency systems that we already know about, there are already the technologies that exist – we don’t need any new ones to be developed – that can allow us to use our energy much more efficiently and usefully.

We don’t need any new thinking, we don’t need any more books to be written, we don’t need any more technology, we could absolutely apply what we’ve already got and make enormous differences. But – we are not. That’s why I think that of the things we need most, we need political will, more than anything, to be serious about this, to confront the issues on the basis of the data, to really face the facts as we know them. If we do that, I can see ways that this could be really positive, that this could actually turn out that we have many generations of time in front of us.

If we do it poorly – meaning status quo, all engines full, must get back to consumptive lifestyles, must bet back to full spending then we’ll talk about the real issue – I see a lot of ways that that story could fall of the rails and have an accident. I’m hopeful because I see ways it could turn out, I have a loss of hope in some ways because I don’t see us being serious, really serious about the nature of the predicament we’re in at that stage. But we could close that gap, that’s where Transition Towns come in, that’s where I come in, that’s where Daly comes in, that’s where all the people that you mention come in, to try and change the narrative where there’s still time.

To me, that’s where the work needs to happen. It’s about changing the stories we tell ourselves, it’s about having a different narrative. The most important one, that we’ve touched on a couple of times today, if we could just change this one sentence then a lot would fall off and it could all be beautiful: ‘the economy must grow’. If we could just drop that concept and be really serious about finding economic models that aren’t reliant on continuous exponential growth, then a lot of great things would fall off of that. Big changes, but they’d be exciting changes and I think a lot of people, particularly young people, would find a very purposeful set of ideas and jobs to throw their hearts and minds into.

What is a Pattern Language?

In 1977, Christopher Alexander and colleagues at the Centre for Environmental Structure at Berkeley University published a book called ‘A Pattern Language: towns, buildings, construction’, the second in a series of 3 books. Fifteen years later, a much younger me was a student on my permaculture design course in Bristol. On Day 5 of the course, the teacher introduced ‘A Pattern Language’ to the group, as though it were some ancient, dusty, sacred text, in much the same way as I now introduce people to it. He lovingly flipped through the book and introduced the concept of patterns and why this book was essential for the design of anything.

I borrowed his copy and took it home that night. Initially it looked huge and impenetrable, but once I had read the ‘key’ at the beginning, I flew through the book in a couple of hours. What blew me away was not the these ideas were in any sense revolutionary or new, but rather that it captured and put its fingers on so many things that I had felt and been unable to articulate. Why do some built environments make you feel alive, connected and celebratory, and why do some make people want to stab each other? Why does the heart soar in the old parts of Sienna, in St Ives, in Paris, and not in most of Swindon or Slough?

Alexander’s observation was that any built environment is like a ‘language’, it is composed of different identifiable elements, some obvious, some subtle, and like any language, it can be used to write beautiful poetry or doggerel. Alexander put it like this; “the elements of this language are entities called patterns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem , in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice”.

Since ‘A Pattern Language’ was published, the idea of pattern languages has gone on to inform the software world, web design and many other disciplines. Author J.K.Rowling talks of how the whole story for her Harry Potter books, with fully formed characters, names and events, came to her on a train journey from Edinburgh to London. The idea for a Transition Pattern Language came from discussions between Ben Brangwyn, Ed Mitchell and myself on a train journey from Totnes to Slaithwaite in Yorkshire for the Transition North conference. It struck us that it was a perfect way of redefining and communicating Transition. If it could be applied in areas other than building, then why not Transition?

For me, in terms of music, the best music opens doors to lots of other music you have not heard before, sends you off exploring previously unheard music. My hope is that communicating Transition in this way will do the same, not least in terms of perhaps getting you to pick up a copy of ‘A Pattern Language’, one of few books published in the 20^th Century that deserves to be called a work of genius.

Why Change the Transition model?

What is Transition? It is merely a pulse, a suggestion, a catalyst, an invitation. For some it is permission to get started on something they have dreamt about for some time. Since its inception, people have wondered what it is, how it works, and how best to communicate it to others. From the early days of Transition Town Totnes, people asked “what are you doing and how are you doing it?” That led to the ‘12 Steps of Transition’, the model currently used by Transition groups, as set out in the Transition Primer, the Transition Handbook and the Transition Training.

Over time though, there is a danger, identified sometimes in a near-obsession with “doing Transition properly”, that what was a model thrown together in order to communicate it to people becomes ossified and encourages slavish adherence rather than creativity and innovation. For some the 12 Steps becomes something where they feel they have to do it in a particular chronological order, they have to do all 12, they can’t add new ones, and so on. Also, the 12 Steps served very well in the early days, but given that the last of the 12 Steps is ‘Create an Energy Descent Plan’, and that now some initiatives have reached this stage, the question arises “then what?”

Therefore, in the interests of promoting non-attachment to ideas and enshrining the principle that none of us really know what we are doing, as encapsulated in the ‘Cheerful Disclaimer’, for the Transition Handbook 2.0 I am taking the original Transition model and throwing it up in the air, using ‘A Pattern Language’ as a way of recommunicating and reshaping it. Transition has evolved and grown hugely since the first Transition Handbook. The principle of it being an iterative process, of the sharing of failures being as important as the successes, has done it a great service, and much has been learnt as a result. New models and tools have been developed, and as a result the second edition of the Handbook will look very different to the first, but it will also, I hope, actually be a more familiar representation of the Transition you know, and also a more useful tool.

The Qualities of Transition

Perhaps in the same way that Christopher Alexander did with ‘A Pattern Language’s precursor ‘A Timeless Way of Building’ (’Pattern Language’ was the second book in a trilogy, the first, ‘A Timeless Way of Building’ a beautiful piece of prose about ‘the quality with no name’ that has run through built environments throughout history, and the third a case study of applying pattern language to the design of a university campus in Oregon), it might be useful to identify some of the qualities of the Transition approach. What does it feel like? In the time that passed since version 1.0, I have come to think that Transition has a number of qualities, which include the following;

• Viral: It spreads rapidly and pops up in the most unexpected places
• Open Source: It is a model that people shape and take ownership of and is made available freely
• Self organising: it is not centrally controlled, rather it is something people take ownership of and make their own
• Solutions focused: it is inherently positive, not campaigning against things, rather setting out a positive vision of a world that has embraced its limitations
• Iterative: it is continually learning from its successes and its failures and redefining itself, trying to research what is working and what isn’t
• Clarifying: it offers a clear explanation of where humanity finds itself based on the best science available
• Sensitive to place and scale: Transition looks different wherever it goes
• Historic: it tries to create a sense of this being an historic opportunity to do something extraordinary – and perhaps most importantly of all
• Joyful: if its not fun, you’re not doing it right

Any pattern language designed to communicate Transition therefore needs to be able to embody these qualities. The Transition patterns straddle a range of scales, from regional design tools, to very local projects, and even down to personal qualities, and are grouped accordingly. As Alexander puts it;

“no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that it is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns within which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it. This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it”.

A Transition pattern language makes Transition much more accessible than the 12 Steps, because it allows a range of other organisations to see a way into it. A Council for example, or another NGO, can find their place much more easily, can see how most skilfully to interface with Transition. It enables people starting a Transition initiative to have a loose sense of where they are going and to put their early work in a wider context. It will always be an evolving pattern language, changing as the model and the movement evolves, but my hope is that, for the second edition of the Handbook, scheduled for publication next Spring, we can create a rich, robust and fully functional pattern language which will much better reflect the depth and complexities of what Transition has become in its short lifespan thus far. The draft of the Transition pattern language in the booklet that I posted yesterday created for the 2010 Transition Network conference sets out about 70 initial patterns. Over the next couple of months I will start posting some of those patterns and invite your input and thoughts.