So How Are You Today?

During challenging times most people are working hard to keep up the facade that things are just fine. Here is a conversation I might have overheard at a local coffee shop.

Alec: Heah Bob how are you doing?

Bob: I am well. Thanks for asking.

Alec: Good to hear. You are looking trimmer these days.

Bob: Yea well I have been eating less.

Alec: Good idea. And I see you are sporting a new hair style.

Bob: Yes my daughter has started cutting hair.

Alec: Really. Isn’t she only 11?

Bob: Sure but we encourage our kids to keep expanding their skill set. Why just the other night we had our 12-year-old make dinner.

Alec: Really and how did that turn out.

Bob: Well she really didn’t understand that large flames would trigger the fire sprinkler system.

Alec: Oh my, that sounds like it didn’t turn out so well.

Bob: The real issue is if our homeowners insurance will pay to have the house rebuilt.

Alec: That is why we have insurance.

Bob: Yea but only if you are current on your payments.

Alec: So it sounds like you skipped the homemade meal.

Bob: Oh it just gave us a good reason to go out to eat.

Alec: Good plan. So where did you go?

Bob: Well the first place we usually go had unexpectedtly gone out of business. So we drove across town to our favorite all-you-can eat place.

Alec: Bet that filled you all up.

Bob: Well our credit card was declined when we got to the cashier. But we were able to snack on the stuff on our trays before we found out.

Alec: So it sounds like things are a little challenging right now.

Bob: Yeah I guess so. Do you happen to have $100 I could borrow?

A Recent Chat With Benny Bernanke

On a recent elevator ride I had the opportunity to chat with Benny Bernanke about the current financial situation we find ourselves in.

Zev: So Benny how are you feeling these days?

Benny: Well Zev, to be honest I am a bit overwhelmed.

Zev: Really. What are you most concerned about?

Benny: When I was in grad school at M.I.T and went on to become a tenured professor at Princeton University in the Department of Economics, all we talked about were the best ways to achieve economic growth.

Zev: Well isn't that what we want?

Benny: Of course. But the problem is that no matter what I do, significant growth remains elusive.

Zev: What if we stopped focusing on growth and looked at scenarios that promoted sustainability?

Benny: Huh?

Zev: What if we were to organize our economy around sustainability and quality of life and not around growth at any cost?

Benny: I don't understand?

Zev: I think I see the problem.

The elevator stops and the door slides open.

Benny: This is my floor. Nice chatting with you and have a great day!

What is Really Important?

Earlier this month on the even of Rosh Hashana the Jewish New Year, my family and the other 11 households who make up our small cohousing community, were faced with a difficult decision. At that time, a raging forest fire was gobbling up thousands of acres of Colorado forest just a few miles west of our community.

Earlier that morning the neighborhood near our location were told to prepare for a possible evacuation if the winds picked up and the fire jumped the fire line. To our relief that turned out to be unnecessary.

Just in case, members of our community met briefly to talk about our situation and to set up an overnight web and visual watch for an evacuation order for our part of town.

During that informal gathering, the topic of what should we pack became a central topic of conversation. The diversity of strongly felt opinions showcased how different people value their possessions. It was a common theme that packing required medicines, old family photos, and paper documents — which would be extremely difficult to track down or recreate — were mentioned by everyone. But beyond those items the conversations became very interesting and personal.

For one community member who is very athletic, he said he would be taking several of his bikes if an evacuation was required. Another resident said her clothing would be almost impossible to replace and would plan to fill her car with as many clothes as possible. A third resident commented that his life is mostly digital and it was all securely backed up at a remote location. "Look at my house," he commented. "I am not one to collect things and would probably not take much of anything with me if I had to leave."

Even in my own family there was a wide range of priorities as we were forced to decide what should be taken if it was all you had left when the fire was over. It was these conversations for me that placed all the material aspects of our world into stark perspective. It offered me the opportunity to be grateful for the people in my life and skills I have acquired that can be taken with me where ever I go.

I would never wish a fire on anyone but the chance to decide "What is Really Important?" was a very valuable exercise I would suggest we all do every once in a while.

The Emperor's New Clothes

Like the famous short tale by Hans Christian Andersen, our current leaders stand before us saying one thing when a totally different reality is evident to even the youngest members of our society.

According to Wikapedia:

In his tale, an Emperor who cares for nothing but his wardrobe, hires two weavers who promise him the finest suit of clothes from a fabric invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position. The Emperor cannot see the cloth himself, but pretends that he can for fear of appearing unfit for his position or stupid; his ministers do the same. When the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they dress him in mime and the Emperor then marches in procession before his subjects. A child in the crowd calls out that the Emperor is wearing nothing at all and the cry is taken up by others. The Emperor cringes, suspecting the assertion is true, but holds himself up proudly and continues the procession.

Here in the waning days of Summer 2010, I find myself referring often to the current similarities to this strange tale written in 1837. I wish that President Obama could stand before the American public, and state that the growth paradigm we have been operating under for the past 150 years, is now history, and that we must for the sake of our children, and their children, create a sustainable economy.

If the President of the United States or the Secretary of the Treasury, or the Chairman of the Fed were to make this proclamation, he would either be assassinated before the end of his speech, or simply carted away and heavily medicated under the guise of "national security." If this reality was openly acknowledged, our current economy and army of investors working away at developing and selling fantasy financial products on Wall Street, would crash and burn in a matter of hours.

I am here to proudly say, and ask all of you reading these words, to yell at the top of your lungs, "The Emperor Has No Clothes!" We are rapidly approaching the edge of an abyss that could make the Great Depression, look more like a slight economic correction if we do not change our direction.

Along with the creation of renewable energy technologies, re-localized food production, made in America campaigns, and rebuilding America's passenger railroads, we need to acknowledge that "sustainable growth" is an absolute impossibility and it is time to seriously engage in how we can transition this great nation to a sustainable economy we can believe in.

The Road Ahead

On a recent vacation to Costa Rica earlier this summer, I spent more hours than I had wanted experiencing the driving conditions first hand. For many of the main roads, driving is pretty similar to my Colorado experience. But when you get into the secondary roads, the ones that take you to many of the wonders of the country, the driving becomes a very different experience. The combination of changing road widths, potholes, washboard and the ever present passing cars and trucks made driving a real challenge. I remember turning to my wife and saying, welcome to our future. We are going to see a lot more of this in the U.S.  Now a month later I see this article in the WSJ.

"The Road to Ruin"
January 17, 2010

Outside this speck of a town, pop. 78, a 10-mile stretch of road had deteriorated to the point that residents reported seeing ducks floating in potholes, Mr. Zimmerman said. As the road wore out, the cost of repaving became too great. Last year, the county spent $400,000 on an RM300 Caterpillar rotary mixer to grind the road up, making it look more like the old homesteader trail it once was.

Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

But this change is not all bad. It will increase the trend toward localization, but it slows us down, and will ultimately create a number of very local jobs to keep the roads in usable condition.

Understanding the Oil News of the Day

One of the more challenging aspects of the entire Peak Oil conversation is the fear of "running out of oil." I can stand here today and tell you with 100% confidence, we will never run out of oil! Why is that? Because there is still a lot it in the ground, and as we continue looking we are quickly seeing that the vast majority of the oil that is left is getting harder and more expensive to get out of the ground and refine into gasoline.

For example. A few years ago in 2006, British Petrolium (BP) announced that it hat hit it big with the Kaskida field in the Keathley Canyon region of the Gulf of Mexico. A very sophisticated and expensive submersible called Deepwater Horizon, drilled the well to 32,500 ft in 5,860 ft of water and encountered an 800 foot deep pocket of sand which was saturated with oil. In 2009 they drilled a second exploritory well and learned that the oil pocket extend into another part of the same canyon. Three years and two wells.

That sounds promising on the surface, but let's take a minute to drill down a bit deeper (pun most defiantly intended). This is not like drilling a 500 foot well in your backyard and hitting a gusher. British Petroleum went out 250 miles southwest of New Orleans, and with a very specialized submarine went down over a mile to the bottom of the Gulf and then proceeded to drill a 5 mile deep well to discover sand soaked oil.
That is an incredible feat. And a very expensive one as well. The bigger challenge is what will be necessary in both time and money to create an ongoing pumping and refining complex to get this oily sand out of the ground, pump or ship it hundreds of miles to the nearest refinery and do what needs to be done to make this liquid ready to be used in your car or truck. That process can easily take 10 years to accomplish. If BP is very fortunate and the oil field turns out to be a "Super Giant Field" with at least 5 billion recoverable barrels of oil, this discovery will feed the world at our current rate of usage for 90 days. If you want even more details about the challenges of this kind of project, please read this.

So this is what BP calls hitting it big!

The challenge we are faced with is not running out of oil but figuring out how we will ever afford oil that takes this level of effort to get out of the ground and into our gas tanks.

I suggest we seriously focus on how to re-organize ourselves to avoid needing that oil in the first place.

I think creating Peak Communities may be a big part of the answer.

Introducing Peak Community

Over the past 35 years I have had the privilege of working on a wide variety of efforts all aimed at creating a more sustainable society. These have included recycling, aquaculture for waste water treatment, neighborhood composting systems, bike sharing, mass transit, urban agriculture, green construction and mixed use developments.

Since the early 1990's, the concept of cohousing, environmentally-sensitive clustered neighborhoods, has become established here in the United States. Started in Denmark, it has evolved to adapt to the realities of American Culture as well as our changing economic landscape. Over that time, the residents of these neighborhoods have learned a tremendous amount about how to work together and to design, build and organize their homes to improve their energy efficiency while developing of strong relationships between neighbors.

But now even more is required if we are to transform our communities to adjust to the demographic and economic tidal waves heading our way. The issues of sustainability, green construction, food production, renewable energy and walkable communities need to be woven together with the inter-personal lessons we have learned creating and living in cohousing communities over the past 20 years. The result of this merging of innovative ideas is a concept I am calling “Peak Community.”

What kind of a future can we create, which is both spiritually uplifting, and increasingly sustainable for our environment?

Over the next few months I will be posting blog entries which explain the various components of this emerging concept of Peak Community. I hope you enjoy them.