Banff Transition

Global Guerrillas: “Within human social and economic systems, pathogenic behavior is spreading.  This is particularly true among powerful, successful, and wealthy people (finance, economics, politics, etc.) in the developed world.  What specifically do I mean by pathogenic?  An ever greater number of these people are adopting behaviors that are actively hostile to the human systems we rely upon.  They actually think it is OK to put these systems at risk for personal benefit.”

 

Club Orlov: “[I]t behooves us… to begin a serious examination of the… cultural adjustments necessary… before unmanageable crises arise….”

Hubbert said, "The third curve (on the left) is simply the mathematical curve for exponential growth.  No physical quantity can follow this curve for more than a brief period of time.  However, a sum of money, being of a nonphysical nature and growing according to the rules of compound interest at a fixed interest rate, can follow that curve indefinitely…Our principle constraints are cultural… we have evolved a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non-growth…."

 

Casaubon’s Book “5. “Ordinary Human Poverty- The Great Depression, Plus Climate Change, Plus Peak Oil…” Seriously, this is my bet. And I don’t think I’m in the minority here – I think what we’re facing is a massive, probably worldwide economic depression, a very extended one from which the magic of fossil fuels will not lift us back into growth. I think we are facing using a lot less energy without the money and resources to make that easy on anyone. We are likely to see large scale unemployment, lots of poverty, people unable to meet very basic needs, and a very mixed level of response – some places doing better than others at helping people, some places essentially on their own, some places becoming very violent or unsafe, some places doing better – rather like the world we live in now, where some places are violent and some aren’t, hunger is increasing, access to basic necessities going down….”

 

The Archdruid Report: “It’s unquestionably inefficient in terms of your personal time and resources to dig up your back yard and turn it into a garden; that inefficiency, however, means that if anything happens to the hypercomplex system that provides you with your food – a process that reaches beyond growers, shippers and stores to the worlds of high finance, petroleum production, resource politics, and much more – you still get to eat”

 

The Archdruid Report: “The role of ecosystem limits in sustainability is tolerably well understood. Less often grasped, because of its unwelcome implications, is the second category of limits that has to be addressed, which might best be called complexity limits. … This is why, for example, I’ve suggested here that the internet is not going to make it very far into the post-abundance future. To keep the internet up and running takes a vastly complex technological structure, ranging from gigawatts of electricity from centralized power plants, through silicon chip factories and their supporting industries and supply chains, to universities that can train people in the wide range of exotic specialties that keep the net functioning.”

 

Winter Watch: “Every 10 percent increase in global food prices equates to a 100 percent increase in anti-government protests, according to a recent report from the International Monetary Fund. Looking at recent increases in foodstuff commodities — up a total of 45 percent since the arrival of QE2 last year — it’s no wonder there are revolutions, civil wars and riots breaking out across the globe. According to the IMF, a  45-percent increase in foodstuffs should quadruple the levels of unrest, and that seems to be precisely what’s happening”.

 

Casaubon’s Book: “[S]udden evacuations tend to leave people hanging for a time, and during that time people need to eat. … For the very short term, there’s the bug-out bag. This is simply a light pack of urgent necessities – food (the kind that doesn’t require much, if any heat or cooking – this is the place for cup a soup, instant coffee, dried fruit and power bars), a change of clothing, essential documents, something to do with your hands and brain…, water, toilet paper, emergency supplies like matches, a space blanket, medications, small first aid kit… “

 

ClubOrlov: “A lot of people just don’t have the right character to deal with collapse. They’ll be running around trying to fix things. That’s the opposite of what they should be doing.”

 

ClubOrlov: “As for the rest of us, who are itching to do something useful within the confines of existing legal framework and economic reality, there is just one path: the path of emergency preparation, with the added twist that the emergency in question has to be accepted as permanent. Community emergency preparation is about the only type of officially sanctioned activity that may allow us to prepare for collapse.

“The first and obvious part of preparing for the permanent emergency is to construct systems that will allow some, ideally most, of the population to survive in the long run without access to transportation fuels, or to any of the technology that comes to a standstill when starved of transportation fuels. The second, equally important part involves laying in sufficient emergency supplies of food, medicine, cooking fuel, temporary shelter for displaced persons, and so on, to allow some, ideally most, of the population to survive in the short run, while the transition non-fossil-fuel-based existence is taking place.”