The Survivalists

Surrounded

I am surrounded by approximate numbers and they differ but they are all as if they are  fuzzy fences to a giant playing field. I see the field. It's where I must play the life game. I know we are as other plants and animals, dependent on solar radiation and that energy has been captured as fossil fuel. It's in the oi, natural gas, and coal. Those energy units got there, very, very slowly. I also know that modern societies are energy users, very, very fast. Some comes from nuclear energy , wind, and solar sources but most comes from fossil energy. The world, somehow, gets and uses 87 million barrels of oil every day. That use is increasing at about 1.5% or 1.3 million barrels a day. It's a fixed resource. We are using it up! and speeding up the use! By 2012... not too far away ... the producers  won't be getting out more than 1 million barrels a day.  Oil is used for everything, it seems, but the small amounts needed for precision instruments, for medicines, for critical plastics, and for crop growth and human food production can be essential but overlooked within the statistic that 50% of all of that oil is used in transportation ... and it is increasing to about 67% because of all of the new vehicles world wide.

We cannot win in this game. Even if it were not rigged, we must play "because there is no other game in town" as the old joke goes. We have to tend the last oil reserves for they will be priceless, life-saving, economic sources of greatness. We have to use remaining energy for restructuring and preparing for an energy-short future. We will probably do that poorly, inadequately, (distracted by wars over the residuals) for few can or will comprehend what profound shortages in profoundly important core elements of society really mean to a society. Changes are now essential in re-thinking small communities with minimally-essential linkages; new cropping potentials concentrating on solar, water, phosphorus, and nitrogen demands; new forest and watershed management; minimal essential housing; and a theology for survivors.

Silly Old Man

I've just turned 75 and I'm blogging about survival. I may be close to not surviving, but I do not think so ...  and I'm not planning on surviving with reasonable quality of life. I remember the gasoline lines of the early '70s and thought they were painful, depressing, and very frustrating. I call that "mental stress." The shortage seems like yesterday, and it was close to 40 years ago. I visited Nigeria in the early '90s and worried with my graduate student about whether we would have enough gasoline to complete our visits to research sites. The cost then was about $4.00 a gallon. That was about the same as in India at the time "if you could get it." That was about 20 years ago. In the '50s when gasoline was about $0.50 a gallon, ready access to crude was predicted to be over by 2020. It's 2008! Gasoline is now about $4.00 a gallon ... and processors, suppliers, supplies and markets remain in doubt. I am aware that oil,coal, and gas, the fossil-carbon substances are fundamental to all world societies, especially the USA. Those relatively non-renewable are part of travel, our satellites and Internet, our fertilizers for our food supplies, our current transportation (after destroying the rail system and de-regulating the air transportation system), our plastics, etc. , etc. almost unlimited. I think we are now in deep trouble, getting in deeper, and have not yet started to swim. There is no one to whom to call for a rope.

I lectured for several years on the needs for human population control and tussled with advocates of the "technological fix." I've met them again. As I said before, 60 years ago, I hope people can find such fixes ... but I am not willing to gamble or to reject the laws of physics related to sources of energy and its constant loss or dispersion.

Families understand  converging problems. A flat tire is not a big problem. But it changes into a very big one when that converges with a rainy day ... on a freeway ... without a phone ... with a crying baby in the car...at 5 o'clock.

I think we have a converging problem. It is repleted readily-available coal, oil, and gas supplies, supply-related price increases, demand increases among increasing human populations of users, CO₂related climate change, shrinking supplies and increasing instability of water quality and quantity, and decreasing acres on which large supplies of quality foods can be produced (even at high energy costs) for the world population.

I don't know whether we can survive this convergence. Much of the time I am depressed. The remainder of the time, I try to share my thoughts for survival, learn how people have done so in the past, an try to formulate solution systems.

I've thought old people with extreme ideas and single-minded approaches to their "pet" ideas and projects were pretty silly. Now I join them and suffer my past. Maybe I'm just another silly old man. I know I am wrong in some parts. I may be wrong by 10% but I'll take the resulting grade that is "not-an-F." I cannot imagine how I can be wrong by more than 10% about communities surviving in the USA. Most decisions are made with less confidence, more risk. I think major intensive long term efforts are now needed, personally, by each of us, but especially together in team projects ... while we have time. We must not leave our future to unknown conditions during "life after death" and out-of-Earth conjectures. I'm optimistic, but working hard. You'll have to decide soon.