I have numerous essays where I discuss reasons to do this and what it might look like. In this one all I have is the step by step instructions to physically get there.

1. Year one, announce the plan has begun. Install GPS speed reporting using cellular technology. Strictly enforce all speed limits. No allowances. One mile over, ticket. Every time. Five times in one day if applicable.

2. Year two. Global maximum speed limit is set at 60 mph / 95 kmh.

3. 55 mph.

4. 50 mph

5. 45 mph

6. 40 mph

7. 35 mph

8. 30 mph

9. 25 mph

10. 20 mph

11. 15 mph

12. 10 mph / 15 kmh or animal trotting / galloping speed.

That’s it. A dozen years, the whole world runs at a walking pace. There was no day when the supply chain collapsed, no day when the tractors couldn’t get fuel, no day when four or six billion people starved to death.

By the time we get down to about 35, there will have to be a good reason to ship something across the country.

By the time it’s 10 mph, everything is local.

The objective is twofold: De-carbonize by de-energizing the global economy, and use the available local human power everywhere that we can live to restore the ecosystem. Permaculture. Agri-forestry. I can’t foresee all the solutions that would be invented, but if our cleverness and our ability to think up groovy new stuff is going to save us it can only be if we put it all to work fixing what we know we broke. And the first step to that is to land somewhere and notice that spot. The only thing that could possibly save us now is a living biosphere, every piece of it.

Subscribe now

Share

Mary died last winter. They’re both in their 30s in this picture. A mule can easily live to be 40, but Mary didn’t.

Regular readers know that my animal of choice is the donkey. There are numerous reasons, but I have to confess that one big one comes down to psychic yelling.

SLOW DOWN NOTHING GOES SLOWER THAN THIS IT WORKS SLOW DOWN. And it’s true. Nothing goes slower than a team of standard donkeys. This is why donkeys are the most energy efficient work power source we have. Speed is energy and donkeys don’t invest much in it. Even oxen at a comfortable walk will move faster than walking donkeys. Eat more, too.

Subscribe now

Lately I’m in a hurry. Busy. The reason I bought Buttercup was to teach her to pull my buggies to town, because longer legs go faster at the same pace. She’s tall and built to run. She could trot all the way easily.

I’m getting pretty old to be training big animals to work. I’m not the world’s most skilled donkey trainer, and have gotten myself injured a few times learning what I know now. Tuition is too expensive and I’ve decided to forego the Master’s Degree. My most recent mistake was in April and it’s not healed yet.

But like so many people in the modern world, I’m busy. I’m in a hurry. We’re repairing a house here on the farm to use as a recreational rental. We’ve got donkeys, farm tours, and we’re active in our country town and county.

I’ve been working since late winter on a cart which will enable my donkey team to pull small tractor farm implements. I’ve got it to where it can carry loads and pull trailer-type implements, but I still want it to be able to connect to “three point hitch” implements. The three point hitch is a system which was designed by Ferguson in England and Ford in the US after WWII for picking implements up for transport and putting them down for work. It is adaptable to a wide variety of implements. It’s a device for hooking to an implement so it can be lifted off the ground from one end, operated by a hydraulic pump and cylinder inside the tractor.

Here’s a picture of a 3 point hitch hay rake attached to a 1949 Ford 8N tractor. The rake is hooked to the tractor via 3 point hitch. The silver bar running from the tractor to the rake is the top hitch of the 3. There are two lower arms.

In this photo the rake is sitting on the ground. If the tractor moved the two wire wheels on the rake would turn and would sweep whatever they found on the ground, presumably cut grass, to the left where it would roll off the rake as a long loose pile called a windrow. When transporting it, for example across a gravel road, you don’t want it dragging, sweeping gravel into a row and wearing out the tines. All you have to do is pull a lever from the driver’s seat and tractor hydraulics magically lift that rake about a foot off the ground. That’s it. Up and down. Extremely useful.

We have since sold that tractor. I bought that rake specifically because at its size it is fully reasonable to expect a team of donkeys to pull it to rake hay for gathering.

Share

We also use a tractor pulled, one row, no-till planter. I chose this implement as well because two donkeys can pull it. But again, I have to pick it up to transport it, and for that I have to have a 3 point hitch on the back of the cart. In this photo it is lifted for transport.

This essay is a lot of show and tell, please excuse.

Here are the donkeys on the cart pulling the manure spreader. This is about a 3½ minute video. This manure spreader is rated to require a 10 hp or greater tractor to pull it. Donkeys walk slowly, so they don’t spread the manure as wide as a faster tractor would, but they spread it well enough to serve our land. This our objective.

It’s taken me half the winter and the summer so far to build that cart as it is. I designed it and fabricated all of it except the trailer axle and caster wheels. I’ve bought all the passive parts to a Kubota small tractor 3 point hitch, and now I’ve got to design and fabricate a frame to adapt it onto the back of that cart. I don’t want to have to add in high energy tools like an electric hydraulic lift for the 3 point. I think I can do it with human power and leverage. We’ll see.

It all keeps me busy.

Recently we planted our sunflower field, directly through grass turf with no plowing or tillage.. We still need to plant our Sorghum, but it’s about a 70 day crop so we’re still OK. We planted about 125 trees on two farms this spring. Recently we’ve surveyed and dug two new swales for runoff management.

I don’t want to make excuses, but lately it’s been hard to find a whole day I could spare to go to the store in Richmond by donkey power. When I drive the donks it’s a whole day. As I said, that’s why I bought Buttercup, to go faster. We all know about fast. But I chickened out.

Bess is what a teamster calls “Broke to death.” That’s not a negative term. It means she’s so well trained that neither a semi trailer truck nor a Harley Davidson will spook her. She knows how to stand behind a stopped school bus. Bess and Mary spent several years pulling a covered wagon with fifteen to twenty-five people in it on paved roads 8 hours a day. To work the way I work, not pulling anything too heavy for two donkeys, only having to haul me, groceries, some feed, and miscellaneous hardware to and from Richmond, would be easy living for her. She’s gloomy since Mary died. We’re thinking she’d enjoy some new scenery, enjoy a distraction. I don’t even have to ask the sweet old lady to trot to halve my trip time. She’s a lot taller than my donkeys. One step by her is more than two of theirs.

So far she’s living out behind the barn where the fresh green pasture is. She’s got fresh water and fresh hay. She’s got shade. The donks are on the other side of her fence. She’s been here three days and she’s already figured out that I’m more likely than not to have treats in my pocket. She comes up to see me. She’s soft mouthed and sweet natured. I’ve driven them as a team. I’ll start her here, just on the farm, let us get used to each other. Let her get used to working alone. She’ll get it.

I need some lighter than normal harness for her. Draft harness weighs a ton.

Maybe later I can hitch Buttercup up with her. I guarantee Buttercup can’t stage a runaway with three quarters of a ton of Bess standing her ground.

I can’t tell you how sick I am of cars. Of having to drive my car. Today was a shopping day for house and farm, one feed store, three hardware stores, two grocery stores, two towns. Bess couldn’t have done all this, but she could do a day in Richmond and leave me half a day to plant or build.

There’s still nothing like driving donkeys.

Subscribe now

When we look at the best predictions for global heating, ecosystem collapse, and fossil fuel depletion, there’s about no chance that things won’t be drastically different forty years from now. It’s likely that it will take a barrel of oil to raise a barrel, and the game ends. Sea levels will be far higher. I wouldn’t even hazard a guess what the population might be. I think it’s more likely to be lower by then rather than higher, but obviously that’s just a guess.

Forty years. Long time. Lots of time. No time at all.

I write this from the perspective of an old man. Next month I will observe my 79th birthday. I remember forty years ago like it was yesterday. Forty years ago I was trying to learn to live without concentrated energy. I’d been at it for a year.

I’m still working on it. I’ve gained a little.

Today, now, take a moment and picture life with no cars. No fast machines. No magic replacements. Be realistic about energy and physics. If there are no cars the first choice for transportation will be shank’s mare. Our own two feet. The vast majority of us come equipped.

We evolved to walk. With a little practice we can get good at it. Worse things could happen. If you didn’t have anything faster than your own two feet how would you like to have your surroundings arranged?

I am not making an outlandish prediction here. In one short lifetime there is a high likelihood that things are going to change significantly. Rather than wring our hands in dread, let’s plan for it. Forty years is the wink of an eye. I got my driver’s license 63 years ago. I’m still alive and functional.

Share

I’m not saying everybody buy a farm. It’s not possible. Look for farmable land in your city. Vacant lots. Freeway median. Anything. Since cars aren’t running its safe enough, except for all the tire dust, oil, and old lead. We’re not making a good world to survive in, but it’s the only one we’ll have. Just like now. In the wink of an eye.

Modern suburbs are not going to be easy to farm, but it would beat going hungry. Look around yourself, where you are, and think, “OK, nothing goes faster than I can walk except if I run, which makes me tired. How can I survive here?”

Think. Dream. Make up stories and tell them to yourself. I tell you the truth: I am literally living my dream. I dreamed this up, found it, and built it. It’s taken 41 years. I didn’t know how to do any of this when I started.

I don’t know what life you want. I do know that no matter who you are, and no matter what your initial biases are, going outside and interacting with nature is good for you, body and mind. There are tons of research.

There is no part of life as we live it that can operate without high surface speeds. This is a fact. During the Oregon, California, and Santa Fe trail days, people leaving Independence, MO, in May, were planning to reach their destinations by October if all went well. September for Santa Fe.

It is also a fact that humans throughout all of recorded time and before have managed to get by without going any faster than the fastest horse could run. Most of humanity is doing it today. We privileged few have this image that the power to go fast is irrevocable, that “collapse” means “Mad Max” (I’ve never seen it) and gasoline for the intrepid. I think that’s unlikely,

Either way. Forty years. Assume you’ve got forty years and start today. We may not have two weeks, but we always might. What I’d like, though, is to see the topic of speed somewhere in the conversation. Speed and scale. Slowing down. Walking. How to survive that way. Like a million teenagers before us, walking because we’re out of gas. Except this time it’s forever. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion. I think it’s worth thinking about.

Start with current food and humans. The numbers I’m using here are a few years old, but they came from the IPCC regarding food then. Back in about 2015 when there were 7 or 7½ billion people, about two billion were overweight or obese. This is a real number. Two billion of us would see improved health if we had a little less to eat, particularly if we had less fat and sugar.

Twenty-five percent of the food produced worldwide is wasted. This waste is an inevitable output of industrial scales of production and shipping. Much of the food waste in industrial eating didn’t exist when food systems were local.

Fewer than a billion people were undernourished, food stressed, or starving. Over twice as many people’s health suffered from too much food as from too little while we wasted a quarter of the total, spilled on loading docks, rotted in storage, eaten by rats and mice, thrown out of grocery stores.

In the United States the largest single consumer of Haber-Bosch nitrogen produces very little human food. Corn. The king of boosted H-B yields. We’ve got so much of the stuff that we just passed a law to put more corn in your fuel tank this year than last. Corn also makes fat cows. The entire corn-to-hamburger chain is a grotesque parody of agriculture. Every place it touches Earth it physically degrades her. From industrial corn deserts to toxic feed lots, from plastic wrappers to quadruple bypasses, the corn-to-hamburger chain is a crime against nature and against us as part of her.

I’m not saying quit eating meat. I’m saying get real. Any golf course in the world would be ecologically improved by being turned into a managed, rotational grazing, beef, lamb, or dairy farm. So would every big box parking lot. Grazing ground wouldn’t require poisons, for one thing. Meat would take longer to finish, cost more, and be worth more. There is a wide path between hamburgers on every street corner and veganism. We don’t have to be stupid, even though we seem to enjoy it.

The question of whether we could feed our many selves on a third less nitrogen fertilizer forever is not answered by arithmetic. If you hear the word “biofuels” you are talking about Haber-Bosch nitrogen in cropland. Nobody eats biofuels, but they’re getting fertilized. Stop making biofuels. Slow down. Use less fuel.

The same people who have been screaming to just stop oil are suddenly noticing that just stopping oil requires that every single thing we do be done in a different way. Some of them, sadly, are still convinced that means renoobles, but it doesn’t. Farming has to be done with the minimum of energy possible, transported the shortest distance possible, and performed with the direct objective of feeding the local population. Everywhere on Earth. Perennial food crops like nuts and fruit should feature highly.

Share

Profit mode industrial agriculture is not what we need to feed the world. It is not a food system, it is a money making system. Here’s how it works:

1. How much corn can we grow?

   1. We can grow a hell of a lot of it. The more anhydrous ammonia we inject, the more urea we spread, the more corn we grow. We’ve plowed every possible acre in Missouri and Iowa, and on across the arable nation, to grow corn.

2. How can we add value to it?

   1. We can convert it, at a giant food value energy loss, into beef, into hogs, and into chickens. We can make it into whiskey. We can make it into ethanol fuel and burn it in our cars. We can turn it into high fructose corn syrup. At the final, lowest value add level, we can turn it into hominy and corn chips and let people eat it.

3. How few humans can we employ to do it?

   1. John Deere’s largest human operated tractor is rated at 830 horsepower full time, with peak hp above 900. This spring it was listed at 1.3 million dollars.

   2. John Deere is advertising a fully autonomous tractor which will do field work with no human present.

This last item is the one we maximize under the metric “efficiency.”

Our agriculture is not efficient in term of output calories for input calories. This is to say, industrial agriculture does not produce a net gain in energy. We put in more BTUs in diesel fuel, machinery production, and chemical production (fertilizer, insect killers, plant killers, fungus killers) than we get out in food.

Today I ate mulberries on my farm. Those mulberries were produced at a net energy gain, by capturing solar energy and so forth. The closest I came to adding energy to these mulberries was when I decided, several years ago, to mow around them when cutting hay. Today I ate a light lunch of mulberries off trees while I was out working. That meal came, in production terms, at a net energy gain. To me. There’s no way in the world I could do that with a hamburger.

The diet produced by industrial agriculture is profitable to them and it tastes good. They can sell more of it to all of us with money than we should ever eat.

Global meat consumption is going up. The share of global acreage devoted to producing the worst of meats is going up. Industrial corn-fed meat is the worst meat available. It’s made from cattle, hogs, and chickens raised in crowds and cages, fed antibiotics and hormones to keep them alive and make them grow fast and fat. Every acre of corn grown to feed that system is sucking up Haber-Bosch nitrogen and pissing it into the ocean.

Every major river system in the world runs through human agriculture.All over the world, at the mouths of all those rivers, are large and growing ocean dead zones directly caused by excess Haber-Bosch nitrogen spread across every watershed. The price of this practice just went up. We’re told that the price increase is a global catastrophe.

I can’t open Substack and not read about how we’re all going to starve because some overpowered ill-mannered dipshit started a war he couldn’t win. And you know what disgusts me?

I bet we do. Starve. I bet a lot of people starve. I bet we go right on letting Senator Chuck Grassley and his ilk, every Iowa industrial farmer just like him, the people who keep him in office, buy up all the fixed nitrogen. Imagine yourself as the farm chemical rep. You could sell anhydrous to the last farmer in the county making a living on 237 acres, or you could sell it to Chuck Grassley. Chuck’s got tens of thousands of acres and can get the Senate to pass a law buying his corn. I’d say biggest check gets the ammonia. Then he turns around and sells your nitrogen to the local industrial fuel distillery and writes a law to sell it to the suckers instead of gasoline. It sounds green, doesn’t it? Gasoline is a significantly higher energy and better storing fuel than ethanol, and in the final analysis both of them are made out of petroleum.

Aside from concentrated land ownership, it wouldn’t be as hard as it sounds to change crop selections and production methods. Agriculture has a strong annual focus. By definition, annual crop agriculture means planting anew every year.

Subscribe now

Most of America’s corn ground would fare better next year if it were sewed with annual ryegrass or a similar cover crop, perhaps buckwheat or cowpeas. There are several choices. Plant it, leave it be, no sprays, no fertilizer at all. It won’t produce well - the land has been mined for every naturally occurring form of life and fertility - but if something grows the roots will feed the land. At season’s end, leave what grew on on the ground to nurture it, or if we’re that desperate, let the cows graze it off.

All those articles about how we’re going to starve fail to discuss actual food production. We probably will starve, but it’s voluntary, or perhaps a better term might be starvation is an acceptable cost. The Epstein Class has been making it clear for a few years now how little they value our continued existence. Any society which cared if its citizenry lived or died could take a look at the real world we live in and say, OK, the old way of farming is over. Arabian natural gas based, CO2 emitting, land killing, corn growing Haber-Bosch fertilizer is over. There are over 8 billion of us. How do we do it?

The solution can be found in the problem. There are over 8 billion of us. Send out a global call for volunteers who will trade their car or their place in a homeless encampment for a six acre farm and a donkey. Catch young donkeys off the Western prairies and teach them to work. That’s how they got there in the first place.

Or use oxen. We’ve always got lots of young beef cattle. One of the wars the US lost in my lifetime was to a society raising their food with oxen. That turned out to be part of why they whipped us.

As industrial farms go bankrupt, which they are currently doing at a record clip, buy them up and subdivide them into actual food-producing low energy farms.

The average single family farm is Africa is in the four to six acre range. Those farms feed people, and they do it with no or very little bought fertilizer. The people who own and farm them outnumber us by about two to one. They’re the four billion who are neither obese nor starving. We lack the knowledge they have, but government / society could provide a physical and resource base for volunteers to grow food.

I read once of an American who asked an Italian why they didn’t have lawns like ours, and his host replied, “We can’t eat grass.”

I’m not advocating for an American version of the Cultural Revolution, dragging all the university presidents out and making them shovel shit. People tell me every day they’d give a lot to have a smallholding like I do. I’m advocating a system to take willing, interested people, put them on four or five acres, give them the tools for permaculture, and to quit growing corn to feed to hogs, cows, chickens, and Mercedes-Benzes. Grow enough corn to make Fritos, Doritos, and all the tortillas everybody wants, and put the rest of that land to productive use.

Because what we’re doing with it now doesn’t produce anything but money, and it produces that at a net energy loss. Net topsoil loss too. Net water loss. It’s impossible to describe how deadly it was to wildlife. There is no possibility that industrial agriculture can continue to operate for the long run. Right now would be a good time to develop a better system.

My farm is 27 or so acres, although I’ve always been told it was 28 and still tend to say that. I’m an old man but I can still work five or six hours a day, outside, with saws, shovels, donkey wagons, lifting and digging and working. I don’t do the heavy lifting anymore. I have staff. I’ve got an 18 year old young man who works for me. He has to work to keep up with me. He’s not the heavy lifting division either. He has to learn how to use his strength efficiently, and I’m teaching him. I know how to apply the least energy to the most efficient tool (by my terms) to accomplish my goals. We minimize our use of electric or gasoline tools. We use human power. Today we were pruning a fencerow where I want to be able to drive my team in the shade and not get slapped by branches. We had a pole saw, a folding hand saw, hand clippers. He worked harder than me most of the time. Mostly I drove and stopped the donkeys and supervised them while they stood, while he pruned trees. When the wagon filled up with prunings we took them and added them to our imitation beaver dams in our creek.

Young people today rarely if ever encounter muscle powered tools, so this is all a learning process for him. On on a couple of tricky cuts I had him hold the donks while I showed him how to handle the pole saw. He never says so, but I’m pretty sure I’m the weirdest thing he’s ever seen.

Besides the young man, who works here two days a week, I’ve got a full time young woman who’s highly skilled in many things farm and is my mentor on donkeys, and I have a younger woman who works here part time. Those two, particularly the younger woman, do the heavy lifting.

There’s a lot of heavy stuff to lift on a farm.

I pay all of them. That’s how I created my community. I hired them. I gave one of them a nearby farm. If the gasoline and diesel go away she’s still close enough to work here. She can drive a horse and wagon.

She and I have crops in common. If money goes away we’ll still have a reason to work together. That’s my community, such as it is. We’ve got some good neighbors, too, but not crazy like us. Counting my two part timers, my full time manager and her 8 year old daughter, my elderly wife and my old self, we’re already up to six (five adults and one 8 year old girl). It’s only taken me 41 years to grow it this big. Even keeping this many together is - well, people are always the hardest part. But that’s how we work.

The little girl took one look at the old woman and said, “Yes!” Cindy and I are elderly childless adults, and life’s decision to insert a then five-year-old into our lives has been interesting. The little one follows Cindy around like a puppy. She was flower girl at our wedding.

Of the other four working here now, one (me) is full time around the clock, one is Mon-Fri and as needed, one is Wednesday and Thursday 10:00-to-4:00, and one is unpredictable, theoretically 2½ days a week. The youngest has no training but is a willing young man and does his best. There’s plenty of work around here where the only absolute requisite skill level is “Pick that up, please.” The point of all this is, we six, we four, we two, could not keep up with this 28 acres without gasoline and diesel machines. My full-timer owns draft horses who can work some. She owns two young draft mules almost ready to start training. I have two very well trained donkeys and one whom I’m reevaluating. If we were going to do it all with just our animals, we might be able to take care of the ten acres we have on this side of the road. Even that would be crowding it.

If the 18 acres across the road were a commons I’d be OK with that, but not in a high energy culture. It could only be a commons if I really lived in the make-believe world where I spend most of my days.

The reason we need all that nitrogen, and the reason we suck up all that petroleum, is because our entire global agricultural system is designed to maximize land per human, minimize human hours and attention input, replace humans with concentrated energy and computer technology. People call this capitalism, but so-called communist countries play the exact same game. I call it industrialism. It’s killing us and it’s killing the ecosystem which evolved us and supports us to this day.

And if I don’t miss my guess, a lot of people worldwide are about to starve, maybe to death, for its perpetuation. I think it’s a shitty idea.

Don’t be worried. There is no blood, no guts, no death. There are no heroes or bad guys.

I fought for a year as a light weapons infantryman, my rank ranging from private to sergeant, in The United States’s war in Vietnam. I didn’t want to go, but I was drafted at the age of 19, and from where I was on that day, of the choices available to me after that draft notice came, going to the Army seemed the best of a bad lot.

It offends me to be thanked for my service. That’s a whole different essay, just information to anyone who might be interested in it.

I was assigned to a unit of the 4th Infantry Division, located in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, an old, worn down mountain range covered with an ancient rain forest. In the way that war was fought, infantrymen went out to the jungle with a company, usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 young men between the ages of 19 and about 25 at the oldest, with a handful of 40-ish professional combat soldier sergeants to do the real leading, and a smaller handful of 20 to 30-ish year old commissioned officers officially in charge.

We went out into the jungle and we stayed there, for weeks and months at a time. The image of infantry combat from the desert wars fought by the generations after mine is of people, men and women, living in barracks buildings, pretty sparse but still beds under roofs, and going out from time to time to engage the enemy. In camp you might expect email, maybe a cell phone, regular contact with The World. That’s not how it worked in Vietnam in the 1960s.

We went out into the jungle and we stayed there. Every morning we would get up, tear down the tent we had slept in and divide it among two or three men. We would empty the dirt out of ten or twelve sandbags per man, roll them up, and put them onto our rucksack. We would put the dirt and logs we’d sheltered behind the night before into the foxhole we’d dug so nobody could use it after us, we formed into two or three columns of men, and we walked through the jungle for four or five hours, navigating by maps and compasses which every man carried. Each day we moved to a destination chosen by someone with a clean uniform who’d spent the night indoors.

Each of us carried a rucksack containing up to 3 days of canned food, called C rations. Later in my year there we started getting freeze dried rations which were better, but not enough to fully replace the Charlie rats. Each man carried about five quarts of water in plastic canteens. Most men carried fifteen or twenty or so magazines for their M-16s, but a few - typically four in an infantry company, one per platoon - carried a machine gun each. Each and every enlisted man carried a hundred rounds of machine gun ammo. Most of us carried a hand grenade or two, maybe more. We carried one or two ponchos, which we never wore to keep us dry. Ponchos were our houses. Two ponchos snap together to make a two to three man tent. Another poncho goes across the windward end to keep the rain out while we’re sleeping, and one more makes a ground cloth to sleep on.

Each of us carried a thin nylon quilt called a poncho liner, which was our bedding. We were issued air mattresses, but they weren’t very reliable, and when you’re carrying your life on your back, weight matters more than comfort. So most of us slept on the ground, separated from it by only an army poncho, covered with a poncho liner. Often as not a steel helmet supported our heads as our pillow.

Each man carried a machete and an entrenching tool (folding shovel).

Besides that men carried books to read, letters from home, and writing materials to write home. Every 3 days helicopters would come to wherever we were, deliver us the next three days of meals, and mail from home. Typically a letter from the US got to Vietnam about seven weeks after mailing.

Freshly resupplied with food, fully stocked with ammunition, and with all our canteens full, each man carried somewhere between 70 and 90 pounds on his back, walking up and down mountain slopes, all day.

After we did our day’s “hump” and arrived at our location for the night, we had to set up camp. The hundred men would get in a circle where each two or three man group had enough room to set up a hootch and dig a foxhole. That was our perimeter. After that initial organization, we would cut down every tree within a hundred meters of our perimeter, all the way around. That was called a field of fire, and was bare so opposing troops couldn’t sneak up through the woods on us.

We cut those trees with machetes. Corn knives, No chain saws - we’d have had to carry them, and carry the gasoline. No hand saws, same problem. Machetes. We kept them sharp.

We would also dig a foxhole for every two or three man hootch group. You know those little folding shovels they sell at camping stores, with the screw collar to keep the blade extended? The ones that don’t quite reach to your hip? The little shovels that sort of look like a toy?

In Army talk those toy shovels are called entrenching tools. Those are what we dug our foxholes with. In mountain soil. Every night. We took the dirt out of the foxhole and put it in sandbags, so a foxhole only had to be half as deep as we were tall. A sandbag wall would make up the difference.

We cooked our meals in the cans they came in. If we were lucky we had little lumps of fuel called heat tabs, which burned at an appropriate heat and rate to heat up a can of beans, or potted meat, or any other of the ever so appetizing available entrees.

If we weren’t lucky, and supply didn’t have any heat tabs, we tore up C4 plastic explosive blocks and burned little lumps of high explosive about the size of a lima bean. It has to be detonated to explode, but can easily be burned. It burns way too hot for cooking and tends to spoil the meal. If you’re hungry enough you eat it anyway.

We wore the clothes on our back until the powers that be delivered clean ones, which was typically about once a month. It was not possible to wear underwear because of rash and fungus issues. The red-brown discoloration on my pants in the photo above is red clay mountain dirt. I might wear them another couple or three weeks like that.

The shovel that dug our foxholes was also our bathroom facility. To defecate, a man took his shovel, a small roll of toilet paper that came with the C rations, went a little way outside the perimeter but still well within the field of fire. dug a hole, squatted over it, filled it, covered it over, and went back to work.

what I have described was a regular day for me, and for all the people around me, for a year of my life. In my outfit, out of every 100 men assigned, 88 would be hospitalized either because of wounds or sickness within his year there. I was hospitalized for both during my year there.

I arrived in Vietnam three days after my 20th birthday, and arrived home on my 21st.

The most important thing I learned in Vietnam was that a good day or a bad day has little to do with your surroundings, little to do with your standard of living. A day when nobody shoots at you, when you get a letter from home, those are good days. A day when the black flies bite you while you’re clearing a field of fire, a day when everybody you can see has streamers of blood running down his back from fly bites, that has a good chance to be a bad day. It’s always a bad day if they shoot at you.

This is the most important thing I ever learned. I, or any of the other hundred men around me, might be halfway around the world from home, wearing filthy clothing, no underwear, eating barely edible crap out of a can we only partly opened, so we could fold the lid into a pan handle to cook and eat. Always, running parallel to everything else, was the knowledge that at any moment somebody might launch a mortar bomb at us or run up shooting at us. In spite of all that, we could still have good days. Lots of good days.

There were no bills. There were no traffic jams. There were no decisions. Get up, work, walk, work, eat, sit with friends and talk of home, of loved ones, of dreams, and it could be as good a day as any other day anywhere ever. A good day is a good day.

When I write of living a simpler life, of living without TVs and computers, without cars and bars, living a quiet life in a small home with people you love, I’m not talking about sacrifice. I’m talking about, all the crap we’re killing the world with and for doesn’t make us any happier than I’ve personally been, just knowing that my foxhole was dug and I didn’t have to dig another one until tomorrow.

The ancient forest spoke to us all night every night. More often than you might think, a tired old standing dead tree might fall in the night, a cascading, crashing, fading sound. On the way out of our campsite in the morning we might find a tree across the trail that was so broad that, laying down, we couldn’t easily climb over it, and would have to make a trail around it.

We got our water from clear mountain streams. I grew up in Missouri, in an allegedly civilized, advanced nation, and we couldn’t drink the water out of our streams. Here in this jungle we could.

Although we did find our later that our side had sprayed Agent Orange into at least some of them, upstream from our campsite, leaving us filling our canteens with poison. The natives hadn’t done it.

Everything that salesmen and PhDs tell you about the absolute requirement of Progress and a High Standard of Living in order to live a happy life, every word of it, I have lived the rebuttal.

There is nothing about modern technological life which enhances our chances of having a good day on any given day. I fall for it just the same as others, but it’s bullshit. The toys don’t make us happy. Friends make us happy. Peace among nature makes us happy. A decent meal when we’re hungry makes us happy. The entire developed world could start to walk away from modernism today, could progress to where nothing man-made travels any faster than a running horse or a clipper at full sail, and be no less happy, day by day, than we are now.

Personally I think we’d be happier. We live in a culture where despair takes more lives than disease, where anger kills and depression empties lives out. We’ve got more stuff, and go faster, than anyone before us in all of geological history, we’re killing the entire ecosystem to do it, and we’re, overall, not happy.

We can do better.

At the same time I see reports on quantum physics, and the utter unreality of what we think of as reality. Observers cause the actions they observe. Things on opposite sides of infinity are directly connected and react to one another. Trees talk to each other through the mushrooms.

I live in a different world than you do. I live in a world where, if I need to go to the store tomorrow, I can hook up a donkey or two and go. I don’t need any gasoline, I don’t need any diesel, and I live on an utterly foreign time frequency to yours. This is my reality. It’s exactly as real as yours, no more and no less. Consciousness created this. I thought this up and did it. I’ve been learning half my life. I’m still learning. I still might go fire up the Subaru, zip over to Harp’s, and be back in 45 minutes. I’ve got one foot in each world. It’s not an entirely comfortable position, but it’s tolerable.

The way to create a different world is not by preparing for it, but by living in it.

The scales of modern life are the results of the speed, not the cause. Observe the past. In all cases the speed came first, then the adaptation.

Before there was an automobile, literally every person on Earth had their needs for today and tomorrow within walking distance of wherever they’re standing right now. Everything was close to everybody. There wasn’t a helluva lot of stuff, but it was within walking distance.

How much of what you need this week is within walking distance of you right now? If you didn’t have access to high speed transportation and nobody else did either, could you get everything you need on a day-by-day basis for the next month? This is the opposite of storing up stuff. I don’t have any beans in the cabinet, I have beans in the ground. I have a whole shallow pond full of cattails. We could survive all year on cattail roots, but we’d be pretty tired of them by the end.

Water is first. Water and shelter. Depending on the time of year and the place, exposure might kill me even faster than thirst, so I need a place to sleep out of the weather. Water is next. I’m an easy thirty-five pounds overweight and could live on stored fat for a while, but sooner or later I need food. I need people to help me. I’m a human, I can’t do this without help, not over the long haul. That’s how we work.

Ideally, we could start building these things now. Like I said, I have been, for forty years, but we need to do it where we are. We need a vision of ourselves moving at a walking pace forever. Start driving slower, that’s where it starts. Your daily peak of kinetic energy goes down. When you drive slower you’re outside the normal wave form. Our national frequency in the United States is 60hz at 60mph. Drop yourself to 55 mph and you’re entirely outside the wave form. You’ll see it. For a while you’re all alone, then half a dozen cars some up behind you, they all roar past you, you’re alone again, nobody in front of you, nobody behind. You’re literally out of the dominant frequency.

Whatever is the closest thing to you that can accomplish your goal, choose that. Cost extra money? Spend it. Ignore the money. Break the machine. Go slower less far forever.

Slow down for a while and pretty soon, even if you’re going to drive the car, it’s a hassle. It’d be just as good to wait til tomorrow. Driving the donks is vastly more pleasant, but I’ve got to go up and harness them, which isn’t a big deal but it blows half an hour or so, and the trip is a whole day. A full donkey shopping trip in Richmond, from here, takes in the neighborhood of six hours. I can make a run to Harp’s for a light grocery run and not stop anywhere else, with Missy by herself on the doctor’s buggy, and do it in three.

The doctor’s buggy is light as a feather. A healthy adult human could easily trot on flat ground pulling this buggy empty, and Missy can trot uphill and down pulling it with me in it. I’d say we’re making five or six miles an hour. I can’t carry much in it, though. To go to two or three stores, maybe do a recyclables run, takes a bigger wagon, which is heavier. Although the team can trot this wagon on flat ground or down a gradual hill, it’s asking too much of them to trot this load uphill. So it’s a whole day.

When I spend a whole day doing a trip to the recycle center, the farm supply store, maybe the bank, the grocery store, and back home, I don’t use much energy any other way. I don’t fire up a lawnmower or a torch. I don’t grab an electric drill to drill some holes in steel. I don’t fire up the laptop to write something, or the tube amp for the steel guitar. I might have my cell phone recording the trip. Like I said, a foot in each world.

The last time I drove the team to town, which was Tuesday of this week, I had a record two (!) people say to me in so many words that I had the right idea and everybody else was wrong. I saw at least a dozen thumbs-up signs and only had one asshole pass too close too fast out of the whole day. I made up this world.

Energy and consciousness are the only things that are real. Everything else is made out of those two.

What we have to do to unwind the particular mess we’re in is let the energy out of the global machine. We carry the energy.

There is a viewpoint that there are only two forms of energy, kinetic energy and potential energy. We tend to speak of energy in various forms, such as electricity, light, heat, and sound, all active energies which we can apply to do work, and potential, pent up energy that isn’t doing work right now but can be released to do work, such as a barrel of oil, a battery, or a bowling ball on a top shelf.

Of the various forms of active energy that I listed above, all can be viewed in kinetic terms. All are the energy of motion. Electricity is moving electrons. Thermal energy, heat, is moving molecules. Light is moving photons. Energy moves. Energy stands and waits, and it moves.

It appears that even mass is energy. If we increase the energy in a mass, add heat to it for instance, the mass itself increases. According to Einstein’s famous formula, if the E increases then either the M or the C² have to increase, and C is, by definition, constant. E=MC². Add energy, increase mass. Add energy increase scale. Add energy increase entropy. More fire more ashes.

Reduce energy, reduce mass. Cooler is smaller. Slower is smaller too.

What we need to do is let the energy out of the global machine. Right now today a set of events is underway which will force reductions in global energy throughput. Something is going to change.

The energy of modern society flows through all of it. Energy is everything. If something happens energy caused it to happen. If somebody thought it up energy created the thought, but consciousness caused the energy. Consciousness and energy, that’s all there is. The observer creates the action. This isn’t mumbo jumbo, it’s as close as we can get to understanding what’s out there.

Want to enrage an American? Go five miles per hour slower than the posted speed limit, in front of him. Or her, although the odds of her having some self-control are higher. The degree of disgust they feel has nothing to do with getting anywhere else, schedules, or time. It’s a response to your reduction of their kinetic energy.

The kinetic energy of a non-rotating mass in motion is Ek=½MV². Whatever the velocity is, square that. Then multiply by the mass. The energy measured in joules is half that number.

Since the velocity number in that formula is squared, any reduction of velocity is proportionally a greater reduction in energy. You don’t want to squat on an American’s kinetic energy, you’ll piss him off for sure.

The greater the average kinetic energy, the longer the average trip. People didn’t bankrupt all the small towns and then demand cars. The order of events was, first cars, then bankrupt small towns. First tractors, then bigger farms, then bankrupt the small towns. First amplifiers, then deafening. Not the other way around. Never the other way around.

From where we are the only factor we can change is speed. Perfect. Speed is energy. Less speed is less energy by (half the mass times the velocity squared).

The vast majority of us drive cars. We live in America, which is kind of like LA except from ocean to ocean. You can’t see anything from home except a million other houses and you don’t know who lives in many of them. If you want a paycheck you have to drive. If you want to spend your paycheck either you or somebody else has to drive. Nothing you need is close to you. If there was a one room store with beans, butter, bread, beer, and fishhooks within walking distance of your house you’d have no use for it. It wouldn’t even be worth starting the car to go there. WalmarTargetHomePriceFreight is all within fifteen minute by car, all in the same direction, all down there where the six lane highway crosses over the 7 lane highway with the braided lanes five and six wide weaving among the negative spaces and NOBODY would be crazy enough to go into that intersection in a buggy.

OK, you’ve got to drive. Drive slower. Be an energy vampire. Suck the kinetic energy out of the entire machine wherever you encounter it.

See yourself being on your shopping journey on a 3 wheeled, non electric, pedaled conveyance. See the store being three blocks away. Your trike has plenty of room to take home food enough for a week. Young people zip by on their bikes but that’s young people. See yourself nodding and chatting to your neighbors the traffic as you travel your three or four blocks.

Or maybe see yourself as the young people. See yourself flowing silently and gracefully past the old folks in their donkey carts and trikes, taking joy from the strength of your young body and the kinetic energy throughout your speeding self. See yourself talking with your friend beside you, planning for what you’ll do next.

Maybe see yourself as the village baker. See yourself getting up at 2:30 every morning to go to the shop at the edge of your holding and bake the breakfast breads for everyone in your community. See yourself pottering around the garden after the day’s bread is sold.

See yourself able to feel the energy off the sun, hear the energy the birds are singing, noticing what is in bloom today. See it. Pretend it’s real. Let the energy out. The faster you go the more you miss.

For me, I’ll be down the road in the repair shop. If your buggy breaks you come down my road, I see it and fix it and you trot off. The young woman who works at my shop fixes your horse’s loose shoe.

Every hateful thing about life in twenty first century civilization runs on the excess energy in the whole system. Without the speeds of our everyday lives, without the kinetic energy present in every body and mass going those speeds, virtually none of what we see every day could exist.

Houses would. Neighborhoods would. Roads and lanes would. Nothing would go faster than a young horse could run. There couldn’t be a big box store, couldn’t be a Walmart. There couldn’t be TVs as big as your wall, or stadiums seating 80,000 people. There couldn’t be strip malls running five miles along an urban freeway. There couldn’t be cities of 30 million people. It wouldn’t be possible to tell the same lie the same day to a hundred million people spread over three thousand miles of mountain, prairie, and desert.

No, that’s not coming tomorrow, it’s not coming right away because of His Madnesty’s fool war. It’s not that close. More pieces are going to fall off tomorrow, but the machine will still clank and stagger on. It’s big and it’s got a lot of inertial. It will stagger along for a while. But it’s out there. We know it is. This machine can’t run after it runs out of gas. Like my dad used to tell me about my first car, “You can’t wean ’em.”

If what we were looking at afterwards was a more-or-less intentional outcome of a rational, staged slowing, there is no reason the every day person on an every day day would be less happy, or less sad, than today. Life goes on. Everybody knows all that crap doesn’t make us happy. Start slowing now, slow a little more every day, pretty soon somebody starts stocking bread and beans in her front room and selling them to the neighbors. That’s how it develops.

We could go on as we are now, pedal to the metal. Growth. Lately I’ve been reading a number of essays about money, debt, and growth, about the birth of money as debt and the requirement that growth come to pay off the debt - that’s way simplified, you can find it anywhere you want in ten thousand words, but that’s the general idea.

Given that most of the newly created money has miraculously wound up in the hands of about fourteen assholes worldwide, I don’t see much purpose in doing our part to preserve its value. The growth it requires, given that space on Earth is finite, can only occur in the form of energy. We continue to pour more energy into the machine, it goes faster, we grit our teeth and blast through the intensity, falling asleep half an hour after we got up, energy drink and fill’er up. Or don’t. Slow down. Yes, your share of the imaginary money will evaporate too. I don’t know how it all comes out. I just know that it runs on speed. On kinetic energy.

And consciousness. See a different life. See a smaller life. See a slower life. See a life that runs at the pace people walk. Live the closest piece, the one part you can most easily reach from where you are. Do it again tomorrow. Do it again every day for the rest of your life.

People went about their business in the open, on foot, in or on animal drawn vehicles, rarely moving at a speed which precluded greetings or conversation with all the other people out and about on any given day. In any day it would be rare for any human being to go more than ten or fifteen miles in any direction from wherever they started out, rare for any person to go far enough to encounter people they’d never met. Two hundred years ago it was nearly impossible.

Today a human being anywhere in the United States, and probably anywhere in the developed world, rarely encounters anyone but strangers.

What changed?

Speed. Cars. Jet planes, trains, but more than anything else, cars.

Subscribe now

This evening I’m going to drive my car fifty miles to go to a friend’s home and play music. I’ll probably stop somewhere to eat. I’ll undoubtedly stop to waste my body’s metabolic byproducts. I may have to stop to buy fuel for my car. Nowhere I stop will I encounter anyone I know. Aside from my friend’s home, aside from family and musicians there, it is unlikely that I will encounter a single human being known to me. I will travel through a world of strangers whom I will never see.

Before the automobile there were few people who ever took such a journey. Here in the United States, recently colonized by strangers from all over the world, traveling among strangers was more common than elsewhere, but even here it was rare.

There have always been nomads. There have always been long distance travelers. We know that as long ago as the Bronze Age, traveling merchants moved copper and tin across the face of the Earth, from culture to culture, from society to society, but they were the exception. Even the traveling traders had repeated routes, and knew the innkeepers, merchants, cobblers and tailors and blacksmiths along their journey.

Other nomads, the Rom and Travelers and others, brought strangers, suspicions, exotic ways, but they, too, were among friends, living in permanent, moving villages, brushing up against strangers but spending their lives amongst known comfortable communities.

The rest of the world, the villages, the individual human societies they traveled among, changed very little. People were born, people died. A few always came and went, moved in, moved out, but by and large, people rarely encountered a stranger.

I live on a smallholding three and a half miles from the town square of a Missouri county seat town. Sometimes I drive my donkeys on a cart, wagon, or buggy, into town to do my necessary shopping, but most days, like almost everyone else in America, I drive my car.

Almost all the people I ever see or talk to are strangers. To the extent that I see people I know, we’ve met because I am the one moving at a walking pace. We speak as I pass them on a sidewalk, I come and go. I actually know a few, and they me.

Even in the small town which has been the commercial center of my life for forty-one years I rarely see anyone I know. Each of us lives in our own home, spends our time with our own entertainment, manufactured to teach us how to conform, to not make waves, and to buy products. Most of us travel fifty miles or more each day to our assigned jobs where we earn the money required to pay for every single thing we ever touch, from a glass of water to a bite of food, from the roof over our heads to the clothing on our backs, for the entertainment that endlessly distracts us from our loneliness and uselessness, and always, always, always, for our sacred cars. Fuel, tires, brakes, insurance, licenses. We pay to drive them and we pay to park them. We pay to buy them and, like as not, we pay to dispose of them. Each of us, on every journey, sits alone in a car, moving faster than any trotting horse, far too fast to individually acknowledge one another’s existence. In general we don’t even acknowledge one another’s human existence to ourselves, thinking of each other as “that car.” That car cut me off. That car just sat there when the light changed. That car took my parking place.

I suppose I do often get acknowledged as a human, or at least as part of one, because I drive below speed limits, below posted maximum speeds, which functionally in modern society are posted minimums. I’m not a person with a name, but I am part of a person. Specifically I’m “that asshole.” “That asshole isn’t even going the speed limit!”

We live in a world of strangers, and by and large, they piss us off. Virtually every day, somewhere in the United States, some person takes a high powered, rapid fire firearm, and goes out to kill several of the annoying strangers.

The scams, anger, cheating, stealing, the sexual abuse, which are rampant in developed society cultures today would be minimized in a society where everyone knew each other. There was a reason why snake oil salesmen and medicine show con men were nomadic: you couldn’t stay in one place and cheat everybody who came to your store for long.

At the speed of life, all scales are smaller. In all cases, increasing speed increases scale. In a world of walking communities, whether the walking was done by our own legs, by horse legs, by oxen legs, there could never be such a thing as a big box store. There is a reason every big box stores sits in the middle of a blacktop desert full of cars. Each car brought one shopper, but the several hundred cars prove that several hundred people have come from miles around to take advantage of the bargains offered because of economies of scale. A mom and pop hardware store can’t feed the family if each individual transaction only nets them a few cents in income, but Home Depot can make a nickel apiece on plumbing parts and still have a ten thousand dollar day.

The parts were cheap. The car wasn’t. The fuel wasn’t. The highway wasn’t. The world itself, the very living system which made us possible in the first place and which formed each of us as living things today, is degraded further every day by those cheap plumbing parts.

The parts are cheap, food is cheap, and everybody is deep in debt.

And we all live, alone, not like humans in a village but like shrews in a pasture, busily pursuing bugs to eat, occasionally coming together with another shrew, probably a stranger, to grope and struggle and beget another generation, before returning to our lonely bustling existence.

It’s a life, but it’s not a fit life for a human.

Share

There are a million stories from the next ten years, at the end of which she departed, for good reason I must admit, and another set of stories was born. But this began long before that.

We spent a whole summer looking for someplace to live outside of Kansas City. I was a working tradesman in Kansas City, and the plan was that I’d go on working my trade and commute. So it was. But first, after we had found the forty, we still lived in Valentine. I’d go to work, do my day job as a phone man, go home, pick her up, and we’d drive the hundred mile round trip to the forty. Fifty miles out we’d walk on it, look at it, talk and think about it. Then we’d drive the fifty miles home, to do it again tomorrow.

In those days land a ways out was still affordable for a working person. What has since been done to access to land, houses, and property by the oligarchy is a crime against humanity. In those days as you moved farther from the city, prices went down. We looked at is as finding the place where we could tolerate the drive and afford the price, looking for more land than house. We found a place, as I said, right at 50 miles from my place of employment. We did the drive enough times to be tired of it. I decided I could tolerate the drive better than I could tolerate living in the city, and we moved.

The house was little, about 750 square feet, sitting on the north side of a gravel road, up quite a slope from the road. I’d say it was about 150 steps from the road to the house, what had once been mowed lawn from the house to the ditch. When we first looked at the place the formerly mowed lawn was mostly a stand of giant ragweed about eight feet tall, but the realtor hired somebody to mow it down when we showed interest. The first weekend we were there I started at the house, walked about halfway to the road, drew an imaginary line on the lawn and said, “Beyond this point I will not mow.” This was January of 1985. We came to call it The No-Mow Zone.

That patch of land has not been mowed since.

It is anything but a wonderland. If poison ivy was food a family of four could live off the no-mow zone. Besides the rampant poison ivy, the trees which grew up were early succession, short-lived, wind frail. To add to their frailty the various utility companies spray poison along the road edge from time to time under the time honored principles of Because we can and Progress.

The no-mow zone wasn’t wide enough to create a shaded center, even after it contained several trees. It became a haven for giant ragweed, poison ivy, more poison ivy, some poison ivy, ten or twelve soft maple trees, four or five Eastern Redcedar, a few elms and honey locusts. Some green ash sprouted in there just in time to welcome the Ash Borer Beetle.

The no-mow zone did serve to filter out road dust in the summer. I’ll give it that. We had poison ivy out there that was as gray as the gravel road. Missouri summer, no rain for weeks, gravel road, homo Civilus rolling by in his truck at 45 or 50, dust clouds rising and rolling toward us on the south wind. It was almost worth the poison ivy to filter out the dust.

I thought not mowing would make it wild Missouri. It made it ugly and inhospitable, a place to be avoided.

Subscribe now

In that same space I could have had elderberries and hazelnuts, both native to this very spot on Earth. Both shrubs would have filtered the dust better than the poison ivy did.

Hazelnuts were a staple for the first human immigrants to this part of the continent.

Alongside the hazelnuts and elderberries I could have put an oak tree at one end of the strip and a pecan at the other, both native. If I’d have done that in, say, 1987, after having time to get my feet on the ground, by now both would be producing so many edible nuts that a family could partly live off them. Add in the hazelnuts for staples and oil. Elderberries for medicine and jelly. Wine if you want.

On the sunny edges I could have had a handful of okra and a few melons of various kinds. Okra has beautiful big pale yellow flowers that attract bees like nobody’s business. It would filter the dust out better than the poison ivy did.

There is a big push for “rewilding™” these days, a big push against mowing, a strong inclination towards saying that Earth is better off without us.

We’re here. For as long as we are, we can make it better with a little thought and effort than it will make itself if we just let natural succession do its thing. It would have been easy for my wasted no-mow zone, properly managed, to both feed humans, and simultaneously to house, shelter, and feed a wide range of wildlife. One family could do a little spot, or a sane humanity could do it over the face of the entire Earth.

When I came here from the city at the age of 37 I shared many of the beliefs about humans and nature that I often see expressed today, beliefs that I learned the hard way wouldn’t work to my satisfaction. I am still motivated by the same ideals and goals, but I’ve tried a lot of things that haven’t worked.

I think of a human as a being of a kind with the beaver. When beavers move into a place, they wreak havoc. The cut down trees. They flood land. They dig ditches to further away trees and cut them down too. They turn the whole creek bottom into a wetland. Wild creatures come as if from nowhere to live in what looks to them like paradise. Fish and fowl take up residence in the ponds. If a fire rages by, the wetland shrugs it off. If a gullywasher roars down the creek valley the beavers slow it down once, again, yet again, and pretty soon its energy has watered all the fields nearby and the storm has passed, but - we have to be prepared to abandon our roads if the beavers flood them. We have to watch trees fall. The benefits have costs. Beavers modify their environment.

Humans do too. There is soil in South America that is magically, perennially fertile. Terra Preta. The people who lived there created it out of the things they found around themselves. We, on the other hand, homo Civilus, homo Industrialenis, have so savaged our soils that they will not produce so much as a poverty weed without industrial chemical inputs.

We are doing this all wrong.

Earth has all the parts. Earth has what we need. Anywhere on Earth where humans can live on annual energy flows, which is most of the occupied Earth (with the obvious exception of Las Vegas), that place, that Earth, that immediate ecosystem, that immediate biosphere, can produce everything which humans and other living things require to live well. In the quarter million years we’ve spent wandering across the face of Earth we’ve never entered a biome which didn’t produce healthy food for us. Many of us learned to live an easy life among the plants and animals who share their space. Most of the native tribes who lived on what I choose to call Turtle Island were able to live for tens of thousands of years without wasting topsoil, without denuding the land, without needing to move outside the cycles of life and energy. I’m not saying homo Sap is without history - yes, from early on we killed off many forms of megafauna. As with the beaver, we have always altered our home.

Opposite to the way industrial civilization as a system works, we humans can be fully human and happy while making our local ecosystem wherever we are richer and more productive. We can increase how many spare calories and what range of nutrition comes off any specific place on Earth, particularly now when we have left so much damage and degradation.

The idea for my no mow zone from an Enlightenment worldview, a civilization worldview, the worldview that I grew up learning in a burgeoning industrial civilization. Cars. Speed. Machines. Totals. Interstate Highways. Jet planes. Human superiority, human separation from Earth.

If I didn’t like what mowing made, I’d just not mow.

Earth is not that simple.

I have been tending two small parts of Earth, a grand total of just under 68 acres in two parcels five miles apart, since 1985. I cared for the forty from 1985 to 2004 when I married Gloria and moved to her farm. From 2004 to now I have been here, on Gloria’s 28. Gloria has since died, here on her farm.

When I moved off the forty I retained ownership of it. I had paid it off, it wasn’t eating anything, and I didn’t want to see some bozo turn it into a suburb.

Share

For about 19 years it sat untended. Nobody lived there. I had neither the time nor the energy to care for this 28 and the 40. The forty grew up in brambles, thorn trees, and the ever-present poison ivy. The roof on the house caved in. One of the neighbors set was was left on fire. The old barn caved in, but the old machine shed, built standing on black locust poles cut on the land, still stood, weary but salvageable. Black locust is more durable in contact with Earth than any treated lumber.

At the end of 2021, pancreatic cancer took Gloria. I cared for her at home until the end. After she was gone I was at loose ends, and turned to my donkeys. This was about a week later, I’m not sure of the date. Some time in January of 2022, warm enough to roll my sleeves up.

After that I started trying to open up the forty. It is the literal truth that after you got past the old barnyard you could not walk three feet in any direction. Between every tree and thicket was an endless impenetrable briar patch of native blackberries, ten to twelve feet tall, arched over, entangled, and armed to the teeth. I had originally bought the blackberries from the Missouri Department of Conservation and planted them, and they had taken over the whole hilltop. Thorns, an impenetrable thicket of thorns. Don’t throw me in that briar patch. There were probably bunnies in there but it was such a thicket that a whitetail deer didn’t stand a chance of moving through it.

Now, once again, we are mowing it. For the express purpose of mowing the 40, I bought a 74 horsepower diesel machine called a Bobcat and an 8 foot mower that is alleged to be able to mow an 8 inch tree. It might be able to, but the noise is horrendous and the flying debris is life threatening. If we had 80 or 100 strong young people with hand tools we could do it without the diesel.

As time has passed my life has proceeded in wondrous ways. Another woman consented to join her life to mine. Her presence makes me happy. I have been able to afford to hire two young (30s) women as farm staff, which means that in spite of my lessening strength and vigor, I can still guide work towards my long term goals.

To one of them I gave the 40. Lock, stock, and barrel. Now she can deal with the no mow zone, and its 38 acres of children. That was never my best idea.

At least diesel is still flowing, so far, and I’m not having to drive the Bobcat. She’s already got lanes mowed through the woods, got enough opened up to have a working farm. Many of the trees I planted there were food bearing trees, and for those we are both grateful. She’s freeing them from the neglect, restoring their proper place as sentinels and storehouses.

Sometimes mowing is the best choice.

I am not going to permit my body to be embalmed. Living, dying, being eaten. It is the way of all life and I respect it.

Recently I read a statement in a climate activist’s essay that the biggest thing anybody could do for the climate was to quit eating meat.

Please do not reply to this essay with the talking points. I won’t be having that conversation.

If everybody in the world quit eating meat, would the portion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere grow at a slower level? Unlikely. Would the sudden extinction of genus bos and the removal of their digestive byproducts from the total of daily aggressions we commit against the atmosphere reduce the 6th mass extinction? Well, it would remove one excuse that homo Industrialensis uses to clearcut forests, but it’s far from the only one and probably wouldn’t solve even that one problem, and aside from that - no.

The cattle industry is a symbiotic entity with the corn industry. The can of hominy I had for supper tonight was made of field corn. Aside from taco shells, tortillas, and corn chips there’s not much else human food in the whole industry. Just this year Chuck Grassley, Iowa corn farmer, saw his wish come true that the portion of corn ethanol in America’s motor fuel be increased. Cars don’t need corn. Cows don’t need corn either. Cows are just machines that package field corn for value added sale. People like me who eat three hamburgers a month don’t support that business plan.

Advertising can do it, though.

But it doesn’t make any difference. If everybody in the world quit eating meat, things would continue to go to Hell in a handbasket. It’s our entire system.

For years I’ve been saying Slow Down. By itself, slowing down would have the same effect as quitting beef. I’ve been trying to sneak a system-altering idea in as a simple action.

Because there is no part of modern techno-industrial high energy life that is consistent with a survivable ecosystem.

You can’t pick up a climate writing and not see about the overpopulation, expressed as equal to overshoot, which requires the assumption that 8 billion people could not survive with any lower per-person withdrawals on the planet, therefore overshoot can only be addressed via population reductions.

The oligarchy has heard their people’s cries. Even now they are doing everything in their power to reduce human populations.

They say you should be careful what you wish for.

Meanwhile, modern technological high energy life gets faster and faster. Every year we increase the energy throughput. Pedal to the metal.

What happens when you put the pedal to the metal? Your car goes faster. Why does it go faster? Because you added energy to it.

What happens in an atmosphere when you add energy to it?

It gets faster. The wind blows faster. The water falls faster. Storms go faster.

What happens when something goes faster?

It gets larger. By adding energy to a mass we also increase its mass. Ask Edison.

There is no one thing in our socio-economic disaster that could address the overall mess we’re in.

It has recently become fashionable to insist on using the term predicament instead of problem, because problems have solutions and predicaments have outcomes. I don’t like this framing, because I still believe that we could take actions, humans in the aggregate worldwide, which would ameliorate the problems we face.

Whether this is a predicament or a problem depends entirely on what “this” is. Climate change is a predicament. We’re stuck in it and it’s not going away. We like to act like the 6th mass extinction is also a predicament and just happens because there are 8 billion people and our needs and requirements mean we must. But that’s crazy.

The biggest single thing we could do right now to reduce the rate of extinction would be to quit paving things. We don’t need another big box store in order to survive. We don’t need another strip mall. We don’t need another lane from Kansas City to St. Louis. We don’t need a longer runway because we don’t need bigger jets because in simple point of fact we don’t need to fly.

We don’t need renoobles because the entire system they exist to preserve and provide power for can no longer exist. The only open question is whether we, homo Sap, continue to exist.

So I would propose to you a problem which might have a solution. That problem is to maintain enough of a habitable Earth to make it possible for our species to continue to exist as a feature of our ecosystem.

I’m writing this essay from the point of view that it would be desirable that our species might continue to exist. I am confident that not all people alive today share that viewpoint. I read essays. For me, I just take the fact that we did evolve to mean there should be a place where we can fit in the ecosystem.

The general trend since the begging of lifeforms on Earth is that each generation of each life form has further enriched the planet. All the limestone used to be critters. Almost all of the topsoil was. All the oil was, all the coal, most or all of the shale. The once seemingly bottomless pit of fertility was created by all the creatures who had ever lived and died.

Then came along homo Civilus and turned the whole thing on its head.Since we invented agriculture fertility has been falling. All the “cradles of civilization” are deserts now. If we were smart as we think we are I thing we could bring back fertility and life where we once wasted it away. It would be a slow process and no amount of machines could do it as well as human attention.

The amount and types of food that grow on the Earth that will support h. Sap in strength and health is beyond imagining. Some of the native peoples ate their house mice. But one day somebody said, “Hey, if everybody eats this one grass seed and I own the buildings we store it in, they’ll all have to beg me for every meal they eat,” and everybody else said, “Hey, great idea.”

Two weeks later somebody said, Hey, this sucks, why do we have to have a government?

We have to have a government to protect the people who control all the food. We also have to have a job where we do something that has nothing to do with food so we can have food. After all, money doesn’t grow on trees.

Food grows on trees. Take the shortcut.

Share

Two things have been destructive throughout human history. The first one is civilization. For reasons nobody knows for sure, some people have lived within the cycles of Earth, the cycles of growing, eating, adding back, enhancing, never inventing civilization, while others have risen, civilized, and collapsed. There is very little doubt that groups of people who have been viewed from a civilized perspective as primitive, as savages, have in fact been groups of people enhancing, grooming, harvesting, shaping the world they lived in, discouraging plants and animals they couldn’t live comfortably with, encouraging those they could. Just like the beaver, when humans came into a place that place changed, but in some cases, also like beavers, overall fertility and productivity grew. There is good evidence that at least parts of the Amazon rain forest had been gardened and managed for generations by their humans. Personally I believe that the incredible richness of this continent when the white people found it was to the credit of its humans. It’s obvious at a glance where all that richness went. Civilized Man™ cashed it all in. I don’t think humanity writ large has benefited any from it.

I don’t “romanticize” or otherwise have an unrealistic view of life as a global species of villagers, nomads, horticulturalists, working with rather than against the forces of Earth which bore us. Neither do I romanticize the life we have. Life has good days and bad days. Sooner or later everybody dies. Personally I’m having a good time.

If this life was so great, it wouldn’t spawn the richest industry in the world to tell everyone every day how desirable this life is and what they need to buy tomorrow to be satisfied because yes, we know you’re unhappy, listen to this horrible thing the Other did to your tribe, but buy this and you’ll feel all better. It goes faster.

The other worst thing that ever happened, besides civilization, is the heat engine. The worst single step was the invention of the automobile, but even the pure, sacred train’s first important task was enabling the white people to kill damn near every buffalo on the continent.

But the automobile. Civilized Man™ was bad enough before the automobile, but Katie bar the door.

First thing Civilized Man™ did was kill virtually every beaver on Turtle Island, trade them for trinkets that they called Money and began the end of the working hydrosphere. Next they cashed in the trees. My home state, Missouri, the last wooded state before the Great Plains, sent her native ancient forests west to lay on the ground and rot under railroad tracks. We traded the Great Plains for ever decreasing yields of three or four grass seeds and a couple of beans, plus cattle, cattle, cattle. Kill off the buffalo, kill off the pronghorn, the elk, for cattle and sheep. And hogs, don’t forget the hogs.

It’s not humans who did this to Earth. It’s civilization. Humans were here when this land was getting richer. Civilized humans came and started making it poorer.

And they’ve never stopped.

The car came. Then the gravel. Then the oil. Then the concrete. Then to two lanes, the three, the four, six, eight, it’s like how many crimes will it take to get Trump arrested? Just one more. How many lanes do we have to pave? Just one more.

I’m not convinced.

First the car took the farmer to town faster. Then the store in the next town was cheaper, so he could go there. The store in his town went broke and closed. Since he had to go farther he needed a better road. A gas station. Another gas station.

The airplane. More faster.

We don’t need, never needed, and still don’t need today, any of these cars or airplanes to feed ourselves, house ourselves, dress ourselves. It would be relatively easy to redesign that part of our system.

What we need is a habitable planet. We need water to fall from the sky and soak into the land. We need topsoil to grow back. We need beavers to slow down all the flash floods, harvest all the topsoil, bring again the mud that the Great Spirit used to build the Earth.

Every missing animal, every missing fish, every missing bird, every missing microbe, every missing leaf, root, and stem, is made of carbon. All of that carbon must come from the atmosphere. We have no place else to get it. It’s not just the trees, it’s not the grass, it’s not the algae. It’s every living thing. Every living thing is made of carbon. Most of them are about half carbon, give or take, by dry weight.

Water and carbon. Some metals, iron and calcium. A fair amount of nitrogen twisted up in fancy shapes. That’s all we are, us and every other living thing, Earth herself, all of us. We’re not different. We’re not separate.

We can’t go back. In the first place we’ve never been there and don’t know our way. In the second place, back there is where we fucked everything up in the first place. We’ve just been doing more of it faster because we never admitted that it wasn’t working, and it was not human nature.

People living according to their human natures do not die deaths of despair. The death of despair is a characteristic of civilization. The higher energy the civilization becomes the deadlier their despair becomes.

We we born here. Every cell in our bodies is made of Earth. When we die we will go back to her. She needs our help. She is crying out to us. She doesn’t need more machines. She needs loving human attention. The system which requires mines and concrete and 2,000 pound steel boxes to enable us to scurry around like beetles is an utterly failed system.

We can do better. Hobbs was wrong. A healthy human life among an increasing healthy Earth is neither nasty, brutish, nor short. He was thinking of civilization.

Subscribe now

Almost nobody can. Small farms are something, but that thing is not a business plan in 21st Century industrial societies. People aren’t going to pay much for food when industrial systems can produce untold tons of barely edible yummy stuff to support widespread obesity and sell it dirt cheap. On top of that, everybody has to subscribe to fifty writers on Substack, subscribe to streaming this and Photoshop that, subscribe to MS Word, Excel, and the rest of that, pay for their cloud storage, buy a new phone every couple of years, pay for that service, pay for internet service, support a car or two, insurance, taxes, health insurance, a TV bigger than any wall in my house, pay dues to the homeowner’s association so they can tell you what you can plant in your yard, tell you what you can park and where you can park it - who’s got money for decent food? Nobody.

The dirty secret is that of course nobody can make money on a small farm. Few can make money on a big farm, and most of that comes from various government subsidies that are only available to the rich. The average farm in the United States runs 6 years from founding to bankruptcy. At ten years, Eric has already beaten the odds.

Money is a scam. Every time you run what you own or make through a money transaction it gets smaller. A few people make money on money, and most of everybody else loses. Including me.

So I avoid money transactions. I’ve been farming now for 41 years, and I can just about count on the fingers of one hand all the times I’ve ever gotten paid for anything I produced on my farm.

I’ve eaten a lot of it, though.

Attempting to operate a small farm at a money profit, or a money livelihood, forces short term thinking. You’ve got to plant something that you can sell this year, or raise an animal you can sell this year. You’ve got to be able to work as much land as you can, as fast as you can, to have enough yield to keep the lights on and the tractor running.

The other option is to find ways to get such money as you need from off the farm. When I started out on my small farm I was working fifty miles away from home, in Kansas City where everybody else in my county worked, commuting an hour and a quarter every morning, another hour and a quarter every night. I moved to my farm in January and didn’t see the sun shine on it on a weekday until late March. Left in the dark, worked all day, came home in the dark. Fed chickens in the dark, gathered eggs, worked all day Saturday and all day Sunday to build something worth having.

If I was going to do it again I think I’d sell the car, or at least park it except in case of emergency, get a job in the local town at McDonald’s or Sonic or behind the counter at an auto parts store, and commute by bicycle. By the time you commute a hundred miles a day the car eats up all the additional earnings anyway.

I started out building something that would provide for me if - when - the machine collapsed. I moved to my 40 acre farm in 1985. I’d already seen the Arab Oil Embargo, the Iran Oil Embargo, Ronald Reagan’s decision to run the US on borrowed money so rich people wouldn’t have to pay taxes. Everybody thinks the machine is going to go down now because a couple dimwits decided to drop a bunch of bombs on Iran, and it well might, but I’ve been planning for it to go down in my lifetime for over forty years. I’ve spent the whole time trying to build a life that doesn’t rely on it so heavily.

Subscribe now

We’re only planting about 150 trees from the Missouri Department of Conservation this year, and most of those not food bearing. We’ve got a foundation in oak and hazelnut that’s mostly not bearing yet but should start soon. We’ve got a few chestnuts that should bear soon. We’ve got elderberries bearing, persimmons bearing, and one big burr oak in the back yard that produces generously. We’ve got corn planted, squash ready to go under it, pole beans to climb it - the three sisters. We’ve got a team of donkeys that are smarter than the average American voter, and far more willing to work. We’ve got a pretty good wagon I built, we’ve got a work cart that enables the donkeys to pull the manure spreader.

For the past two years I’ve been buying hay, to the tune of almost $1800.00 a year, but this year we’ve got a horsedrawn hay mower. Syd my helper has two solid broke draft horses that can pull the mower. We’ve got a little diesel tractor that will pull our square baler, but if the diesel goes away we know how to haul the hay in loose and store it. That’s how I used to do it.

Animals had been eating stored hay for five or six thousand years before anybody thought up baling it.

While the diesel flows we’re digging water management structures to catch modern high energy extreme rains and distribute them across the fields instead of letting it all run down into the creek and away. We’re planting willows along the creek to attract beavers, which we know already live within less than a mile from here by water. If the beavers come we’ll have beaver ponds to catch fish out of.

While we wait for the beavers, we build imitation beaver dams ourselves, wood piles in the creek to slow the water and let our neighbors’ topsoil settle out to reverse the erosion which was happening.

We get the sticks from pruning, from removing trees which are in our way, and picking up deadfall out of our fields. Most of the prunings and removed trees get run through the donkey yard before they go into the creek, because donkeys love leaves and bark, and also eat twigs.

The deer have been eating on the chestnut trees, which is ok. If times get hard we’ll eat on the deer.

Share

Besides our perennials, and our kitchen gardens, this year we’ll be planting sweet sorghum to make syrup. We’ve got a horsedrawn sorghum press. Although we don’t focus on making a profit here, we will be taking donations from visitors to see the sorghum worked.

We’ll also plant a small field of sunflowers. We have a no-till planter which enables us to plant annual crops directly through close-mowed turf in grass meadow. This year we’ll be pulling the planter behind a little John Deere tractor, but we chose a planter which our donkeys will be able to pull after we finish our work cart / forecart. We plan to put a donation station down by the sunflower field so people who want pictures will have an opportunity to contribute to it. I spend a ton of money every year on black oil sunflower seeds for my bird feeders. I can save on that.

We made a few bucks this year on a donkey drawn road clean-up, put the word out to the homeschool community that we’d be running our donkey wagon to clean up the trash off the local roadside and offered an opportunity for them to bring their kids for a small fee.

A little later this summer we’re planning to have a fort building day, where kids can come cut Amur honeysuckle, an invasive shrub, in the woods and build forts out of it. We’ll probably do a lot of the cutting - we’ve had practice. We’ll make a few bucks. We hauled scrap iron out of the fields and outbuildings to get the money for the sorghum press. Sometimes we have to do money, but it’s not our focus.

I do pay my help. I have two young women who work here. One I pay a full living wage to, the other is part time and also earns money trimming horse hooves. I’m fortunate enough to have some accumulated money from my life fixing this and that, I’m a disabled veteran and get income there, and I worked a long paid life and get social security. We work as a community, but young people can’t live without income in this world and I need their help. When the whole machine goes down and the money disappears, the objective is for all of us to be able to survive on what we’ve built.

I’m an old man, and childless. My wife is a childless old woman. If the machine stays up longer than I do, the help will get the farm. I already gave my other one to one of them.

And I never have to spend money on entertainment. My life is more fun than you can buy in a city.

Besides the refrigerated trucks, the global supply chain fell on its ass. It turned out that some woman had fed some specific lie to some specific critical point, but with her or without her, lots of things became unavailable. Toilet paper, for one. People were panic buying toilet paper, which, in a country as full of shit as this one, seems appropriate.

I suppose not very many currently living Americans remember the oil scare of 1973, the Arab Oil Embargo. Similar to today, the 1973 OPEC embargo was an outcome of a war between Israel and oil producing states in the Persian Gulf region. As a result of that war, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries cut off or reduced exports to nations which had assisted Israel in that war, resulting in (among other things) a nationwide 55 mph speed limit to reduce fuel demand.

We had another one in 1978, after the people of Iran threw out the US-installed dictatorship and replaced it with a rabid theocracy. During that oil shortage I was earning my living on the road, out of my own truck, hauling tools, materials, and a large box of technical manuals from job to job each day. As a result of my way of living I had to fill up my truck every day. At the peak of the crisis that meant that I spent at least an hour, and often two hours, every day in line to buy fuel. At that time I was driving a Datsun pickup truck, the company that would eventually become Nissan, and my truck had the gas filler on the right, or passenger, or wrong side.

This meant that I had to back through the gas lines, in order to present my fuel tank filler spout to the gas pump when I got there. This alone would often infuriate my fellow Americans, who weren’t a lot smarter then than they are now and were sure that, because I was backing through the line, I was somehow cheating, gaining some invisible advantage.

I recall it well. I hated it.

We’re not there yet. So far we’re pretending that we’re hunky dory. We are, after all, Americans, and Exceptional, and have Lots Of Gas and a president with the intellect of a banana slug. I can’t tell you what tomorrow is going to bring. I have read that the End is Near, and last night I read that the brilliant mad king is going to make us all rich because we have So Much Petroleum.

What I can tell you for sure is that one day the gas pumps are going to all run dry. It might be because of this war, or it might be because of the next one. It might be because of a pandemic as virulent as Covid and as deadly as smallpox. It might simply be because we’ve pumped all the readily available oil out of the ground, and the simple math that it takes two barrels of oil to raise one barrel means that the game is over. I don’t know, and nobody else knows either.

We know that it’s coming, though. We’re pretty sure that it’s coming soon. It takes a lot of energy and a lot of poison to squeeze the oil out of shale beds, but once the energy and the poison are applied it doesn’t take much time. If I don’t miss my guess His Madnesty is going to sell as much of “our” shale oil as he can to the highest bidder as fast as he can, and the American commuter and his sacred large car can go hang, but I admit that’s a guess.

Just for laughs, let’s say that we dodge this bullet. Let’s say that American business as usual makes this leap and our billionaires go on selling Haber-Bosch nitrogen to burn the life off 55% of the land in the United States for the purpose of producing corn and soybeans to feed to livestock, cars, and trucks, as well as fertilizing lesser acreages to produce such food as we don’t import by diesel ship and jet plane. Let’s say suckers go on demanding and getting wind turbines and solar panels, go on building concrete roads and lithium batteries, go on building electric cars, gasoline cars and pickups, and diesel semi trailer trucks.

Let’s say the global supply chain staggers back to its feet and goes on globally supplying all that our little hearts can desire.

Then what? Then, when the final outage comes, do we all pretend we’re surprised? To we all read tens of thousand of essays about how we can’t feed the eight or nine or ten or seven or six billion people we have by then without the monster tractors, the Haber-Bosch, the diesel fuel and the kerosene?

I understand - we have proven beyond any trace of debate - that we’re too stupid to dodge the bullet of global heat accumulation. We’re too stupid to dodge the bullet of sea level rise, too stupid to dodge the bullet of Category New Numbers hurricanes, of tornadoes wider than a medium sized city, of rainstorms capable of washing away all the highways in whole counties, maybe soon whole states. We’ve seen all that. Nobody in the developed world would change anything about their lives to avoid the ever worsening ecosystem collapse going on around us every day.

But are we really so stupid we won’t even localize food production after watching the global supply chain fall flat on its face and kick its feet in the air over and over, faster and faster, year after year?

Are we really too stupid to figure out other ways to produce food besides high tillage, dead soil, and Haber-Bosch nitrogen?

I realize that’s how we do it now. There’s no indication that’s the only way we can do it. We’ve got 8 billion people available to do work. We leave millions to billions of them in developed countries sleeping on sidewalks and under bridges and claim we can’t work the land without 900 horsepower tractors. This is utter madness.

Of the ones who do have jobs, so far, until the AI replaces all of them, well over half are doing bullshit jobs, meaningless paper pushers, keyboard peckers, bored people wandering up and down the aisles of big box stores looking for somebody to help or someplace to hide.

It takes skill to grow food, but there are some who know. They could teach others. It would be worth a lot more to our future than building more chips.

Personally I do much of my work with a donkey, or two, or even three. People tell me every day that we can’t afford the land to grow donkeys hay. Each and every day tens of thousands of acres of farmland gets paved over for parking lots, for strip malls, for tattoo parlors and massage parlors. Nobody says, “But how can we feed the billions?”

We can afford grass for golf courses, for suburban yards, for highway median strips, but we can’t afford grass to power our work.

Talking about having to keep on doing like we are doing so we can feed the billions is an insult. We can’t keep on doing like we’re doing. We keep getting shown how it goes down, then when we dodge that bullet we go on pretending we can keep up like we are today.

We can’t. Renoobles won’t do it. Oil won’t do it. Liquified natural gas won’t do it. Nuclear power won’t do it. Electrify everything won’t do it. The more we electrify the more diesel fuel we burn AND WE KNOW IT.

We have the records.

There is no discussion of finding ways to live without all this energy. We did it for over a quarter of a million years. Yes, there are more of us now.

That’s more hands available to do the work. If 350 million humans could work enough land to feed 350 million humans, there’s no reason 8 billion humans can’t work enough land to feed 8 billion humans. If we left out the acreage we’re working to feed cars and trucks, cattle and hogs and chickens, if we freed up the acreage we’re covering with roads, parking lots, strip malls, airports, and junkyards, we’d have more to work with to feed ourselves.

We won’t even discuss it. I’ve read easily a hundred essays since His Madnesty slammed the door on the Strait of Hormuz about how we can’t feed ourselves without Haber Bosch. I don’t believe we couldn’t, but I fully believe that if we go on relying on it until the day it goes away we won’t have any land healthy enough to feed us without it. I fully believe that if the only way we work a field is with a 900 horsepower tractor, the day the diesel fuel goes away we won’t be able to work a field. We won’t have the tools and we won’t have the knowledge.

We could feed ourselves with permaculture, but we can’t do it if we don’t start until all the dead industrial fields starve to death without their HB nitrogen.

Forty-one years ago I bought a 40 acre farm. Ten acres of that farm had been industrial corn every year since World War II. When I took over that land and didn’t inject anhydrous ammonia into it it literally would not grow one single weed per square yard of land. Ten acres of bare lifeless clay.

Within 5 years I had it growing a full coverage of Korean lespedeza, a low productivity, acid tolerant, annual legume. Every year that legume died all its roots turned into life in the land. In another four years I got enough oats to grow on it to be worth hand harvesting grain and feeding to my horses. I returned the straw to the land.

Today it’s a forest.

If we don’t start until the Haber Bosch runs out, lots of us will be dead before the land struggles back to its feet.

Maybe all of us.

Maybe it’s just as well, but we could at least try.

It doesn’t look that likely from here.

The global telephone network is an almost indescribably complex system. Essentially a user can pick up any telephone on Earth, dial a bunch of numbers, and be connected to any other specific telephone on Earth almost immediately, exchange information by the spoken word for as long as they choose, and then disconnect, leaving all the components of their connection available for the next person to use.

Just as an example - this will only make sense to you if you are old enough to have lived in a world where dial tone was a regular feature - if you had a telephone in your house or business, you could pick up the handset and by the time you had lifted it to your ear there would already be a steady tone playing down the wires to your ear, a tone which told you the system was ready to accept your dialed digits.

When I went to school on that machine, the one that gave you dial tone and connected you to anyone you wanted to talk to, we started out with two books, a circuit description, a book which explained in words what was happening, and a circuit diagram, a larger book with drawings representing where all the electricity flowed and how it got switched to do what we wanted.

This school wasn’t like a college, where students move from class to class, studying subject A for an hour on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, subject B on Tuesday and Thursday, and so forth. This school was 8 hours a day, five days a week, for thirteen weeks, studying one machine’s operation from start to finish.

On the first day of school, at about 8:05 in the morning, the class opened the circuit description and read the following sentence: “The subscriber lifts the handset.” Then it goes on, battery and ground through the windings of the L relay through the cable to the subscriber’s phone, through the hookswitch and network, operates the L relay. Step one of calling someone on a Number One Crossbar Central Office.

Two weeks later, at 3:30 or 4:00 on Friday afternoon, the student reads the following sentence: “Dial tone is heard,”

In the subscriber’s life, nothing much happened. Picked up handset, heard dial tone, called Bob. In real life, relays operated other relays which actuated decision networks to find paths from the phone to decoders, busy or defective circuits were eliminated from the choice network, more decisions were made, and this incredibly complex machine found a path to get ready to decode and store the digits to indicate the desired connection, and sent to the subscriber a signal that the machine was ready for this. So many relays had to operate, so many decision paths had to be solved, that just to read about it and trace the path on paper took intelligent people two full weeks of work.

Amusingly, people today believe that the old system was analog, didn’t have digital decision making functions, and required less knowledge than fixing a computer. This is exactly the opposite of the truth. In a computer you only troubleshoot to a whole board full of decision making chips and swap it out. Troubleshoot to a block diagram level. Before that you could troubleshoot to a component level. We troubleshot to a single function within a component. In a crossbar relay office, you troubleshot to one dirty relay contact and cleaned it, which is roughly like troubleshooting to the specific bad “transistor” inside the chip and repairing it. Only once in my life since the “digital” revolution did I ever work anywhere where we even troubleshot to the specific chip and replaced it, and that was just because my employer was too broke to buy whole circuit boards and he and I were both trained and able to troubleshoot to the chip level.

The last “analog” telephone system was before the invention of the rotary dial, back when you picked up the receiver, cranked the crank, and said, “Grace, get me Henry Jones.” Grace was analog. By the time rotary dials came along they were the very definition of digital, 1 and 0, on and off decision making. A rotary dial literally turned the circuit off and back on once per digit quantity, once for one, six times for six, and ten for zero. Digital digits. It ran on relays, turned them on an off, what someday would come to be called ones and zeros, all powered by a basement full of 12 volt lead-acid batteries connected to provide 48 volt DC power. The “originating marker,” a processor to find you dial tone and then later to connect you to your desired distant party, was about as capable as an 8008 digital processor, except an 8008 was smaller than your thumb and an originating marker was a steel box four feet wide, twelve feet tall, and a foot deep, a box full of relays that turned on an off, operated and released, and the programming was fixed and all wires.

As soon as you heard your dial tone the originating marker dropped off to be available for the next caller. Only after you had entered all your digits would another, or possibly the same, marker be summoned to process and form a path from your mouth to your friend’s ear. This is called “common equipment,” equipment shared among users, and is still a feature of miniaturized digital circuitry.

The office I worked in served 40,000 telephones in Johnson County, Kansas. It had 8 originating markers, which were able to serve all the calls placed by those 40,000 phones, at two uses per call. They were fast. They may have been giant boxes of relays, but they were fast processors. All it took to bring one down would be one dirty relay contact, and somebody wouldn’t get dial tone. When the switchman placed a test call the marker would go Ker-whonk! and be done. We would have to know what relays needed to operate to attain the objective, and place scraps of paper torn from a sheet in the armatures. After it went Ker-whonk! and all the scraps fluttered to the floor, the scrap still in one relay or group of relays told us what hadn’t operated, what path was defective. From there, with the same circuit description and circuit diagram books, we would troubleshoot to the dirty contact, clean it, and return the marker to service.

And that’s just to get users dial tone. And it’s just one function. The Central Office in those days was a large, two story building full of relays. It hummed, rattled, and clattered nonstop as people placed calls and ended calls. While they talked their path was still, maintained. The voice part was still analog, audio AC carried by 48 volt DC through the miles and miles of wires which made up that one central office.

When they hung up there would be a cascading clatter across the building as all the magnetic connections between them were dropped.

During the day it was an endless roar. At 3:00 in the morning, in a quiet suburb, there would be times of complete silence, as there was no activity among our whole 40,000 users. Then somebody would make a call. Ker-whonk! as they drew dial tone. Back then over half of the phones in Johnson County still had rotary dials, and you could tell by listening which kind of dial the caller had. If they had a rotary dial, after a few years in the business you could write down the number they dialed, just by counting clicks. With one of them new-fangled Touch Tone phones you just got one click per digit, as the system decoded and stored it. Somebody would make a call, the machine would clatter, and then silence. When they hung up you could hear it drop all the connections spread across the building.

It was a fascinating machine. One could work on it for years and never get bored. Unfortunately, it was owned and operated by a giant corporation, and after about five years I’d had all the fun I could stand, and I left.

By that time, businesses were able to own their own in-house telephone systems. This was before most living USians were born, so the odds are you don’t remember this. Those in-house systems were the same technology as central offices, enabling staff to call one another in-house as well as to dial outside to essentially any telephone in the world. My knowledge still had a market, but I had other things to learn. I had to learn people.

People are always the hard part.

People think they know more about everything than you do. I’d go into a business on a trouble call, troubleshoot the failure, possibly with the same “bits of paper” technology I had used in the CO, clean some dirty contact, test the problem clear, and go to get my ticket signed.

“What was it?”

I’d tell them. “Dirty relay contact in a trunk circuit.”

And then, about half the time, “Oh, that wasn’t it!”

Huh? It wasn’t working. You were here. I wasn’t. You couldn’t make it work so you called me. I came, and now it’s working. And you’re telling me I don’t know what I did to fix it? Why didn’t you fix it yourself?

As years went by I became the repairman of last resort. When nobody else can fix it, send Jeff. Jeff could fix it.

This is what writing about systems to use less energy to reduce ecosystem degradation and greenhouse gas emissions is like. I’m out here, an old geezer troubleshooting the system to the component level, saying, We’ve got to change the system, and here’s the component or feature which makes it able to operate as it does.

In the unlikely event that you’re interested, here’s how we could do it.

All these people who have never troubleshot a device, all these people with PhDs and strings of letters after their names, tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. What we’ve got to do is make some new policy, build renoobles, degrow, reduce our population - I had a guy today tell me that burning less fuel, admitting less energy into our system in order to develop a lower energy system wouldn’t work, what we needed to do was reduce population and he had a system which would to it in 35 years…

35 years. What’s your rush?

It’s contact 2 make on the G relay. Clean that and…

Oh, never mind. I know. That’s not it.

Fix it your damn self. More likely don’t. I’m tired.

Subscribe now

When the automobile and the tractor spread across the United States, changing everything about life as it was known in a few short years, one group of people rejected them, rejected the change, rejected the new ways of living. They have continued to live happy, fulfilling lives in the century since. Their numbers have grown. Their communities have expanded. But they stand alone against the car and tractor.

This group of people shared a common religious heritage. Not everyone who shared this heritage refused the car and tractor, only the most committed. We know them as the Amish, although that’s not strictly accurate. The Americans who refused cars and tractors, who refused electricity, who refused the telephone, shared a rejection of infant baptism, held a belief in adult baptism which had its roots in the Protestant Reformation in northern Europe. Their first leading preacher, Menno Simons, (1497-1560) was a contemporary of Martin Luther. His followers, referred to by his name, came to be known as Mennonites. Since most members of Christian families at this time had been baptized as infants, and were then baptized again as professing adults, they came to be known as Anabaptists, where “ana” meant “again.”

I understand that many of my readers reject religion. I ask that you bear with me throughout this explanation. I am specifically not advocating any form of Christianity or other religion. I myself do not hold Christian beliefs. I’m talking here about practices, practices which in this case do result from a religion, but whixch do not require any religious faith. I’m talking about how and why one people chose to live without the high energy machines which have, over the past 150 years, driven the living ecosystem to the brink of collapse.

Menno Simons preached that infant baptism could not be valid, because an infant could not consciously accept Christ. His message offended both the dominant Roman Catholic church and most of the new Protestants, and as a result his followers were violently attacked, their homes and farms burned, many of their members burned at the stake or hanged.

In terms of theology, of worshiping one God, in worshiping Jesus Christ, in terms of communion, prayer, Heaven, and Hell, Mennonite beliefs were essentially indistinguishable from the beliefs of the Church of Rome or any other of the newly born Protestant churches. The one critical theological difference was their rejection of infant baptism. It appeared that members of other faiths resented being told that their infant baptism didn’t count.

The persecution of Anabaptists continued up through the 1700s, which led many of them to emigrate from Austria and Germany to the new American colonies.

Aside from their rejection of infant baptism, the largest single difference between the Anabaptists and other Christian sects was their focus on community. Simons, and Jakob Amman after him, preached that believers should, to whatever extent possible, refrain from social interaction and entanglement with non-believers, which to them included the rest of the Christian world. The community of believers became the center of their lives, not only when attending church but at all times.

Centuries of persecution only served to intensify their focus on staying within their community and avoiding, to whatever extent possible, being connected to The World, also known as “everybody but us.”

They formed other practices based on their interpretation of Christian teachings, practices which have been taught by religions and philosophies throughout history, practices which I admire. Modesty. Not putting oneself above others. Frugality, being satisfied with enough. They all dress alike so nobody has the finest suit, the prettiest dress. To outsiders they look odd, but they don’t care what outsiders think.

At the heart of it all was their religious faith, and their dedication to their community. Then along came the automobile and the tractor.

By the beginning of the 20th Century there were nearly no Anabaptists left in Europe. Centuries of persecution had taken their toll. Most of the remaining Anabaptist congregations in the world were then in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, with smaller numbers in Belize and other Central American nations. Since then they have spread to Iowa, Missouri, and other arable land states.

Aside from dress, language, and a commitment to pacifism, a rejection of war, their lives were little different from their neighbors of other faiths, or of none. They, just like everyone else in the US, Canada, and Europe, farmed with draft horses and mules, traveled in horsedrawn wagons and buggies. They maintained contact with their brethren around the country through letters and publications via the US mail.

In 1890, some 43% of the American work force was engaged in farming. About 65% of the population lived in rural areas. A majority of the arable regions of the nation were relatively densely populated, with market towns within an easy day’s journey from almost every farm. The lands between the towns were divided into modest farms, farms of sizes which could be managed and tended by a family with the power of horses, mules, or oxen. Amish and Mennonite communities were barely different from any other community on the land.

Share

When the automobile and tractor were introduced, the various Anabaptist communities responded in different ways. Unlike their neighbors, they lived in self-governing groups, communities who had longstanding policies of deciding as a group how they would dress, where they would attend church and how often, where they would educate their children, and other minutia of daily life. Each church district met annually do decide on rules for their communities, rules which in their Germanic dialects were known as Ordnung, or ordinances.

Like many other churches since Luther’s original Protests, Anabaptist churches were given to schism, to splitting into divergent groups and congregations over differences of opinion regarding the fine print of worship. Within 150 years of Menno Simons’s original separation of believers from The World, from secular society, a Mennonite preacher named Jakob Amman called for further separation. Among other changes, he wanted to see Mennonite communities shun, or totally isolate from, non-believers, particularly those who had once been members of the faith. Ultimately Amman’s teachings were not accepted by the majority of Mennonites, and they split from the church. Amman’s followers came to be known as Amish Mennonites, or more commonly simply Amish.

When the automobile and tractor came to rural America, most Mennonites accepted them, feeling that they would be able to incorporate the new technology into their isolated communities. Most Amish did not. These decisions were not based on theology, not some theory that God didn’t believe in cars, but on their parallel focus on the primacy of their communities. The Amish felt that adopting the speed and ease of cars and tractors would lead to the fragmentation of their communities. Many farm jobs, as performed before the introduction of the tractor, required community participation. All the men from the farms in a community would move from farm to farm during haying season, during harvest, and to raise barns and houses. The Amish felt that the tractor would end those practices, that one family could farm more land with a tractor and do it without the help of their neighbors.

Electricity and the telephone brought another decision. In order to bring electricity or a telephone to a farm, wires had to be strung connecting the farm directly to the outside world, nothing less than a physically connecting the believers’ farms to those of non-believers. To most Amish this was simply intolerable.

The recent introduction of home wind turbines, solar panels, and the inherently wireless cellular telephone system have forced new decisions on the Amish, and as always, different communities have reacted differently. They can have electricity, have telephones, and not wire themselves to The World, and some do.

This telling is simplified. There are car Amish and horse-and-buggy Mennonites. The most technologically conservative community I have ever personally visited was a community of horse-and-buggy Mennonites who had been driven out of Belize by gang persecution and moved to rural Tennessee. They made the trip walking, across Central America, across Mexico, across half the continental US, as well as in buggies and in horsedrawn wagons, herding livestock and hauling farm equipment the whole way.

The upshot of all of this is, the only people who have eschewed the technology which has caused climate change worldwide did so based on their religion, but not because of some belief that God hates gasoline, engines, or speed. They did it because they believed that high energy applied to transportation or agriculture would increase the scale and weaken or destroy their communities.

The Amish refer to the rest of us as English. It makes no difference what we look like, the color of our skin, the shape of our features. There are two named groups of people, the Amish, their Us, and the English, their Everybody Else.

It would be fair to say that the Amish were right. The adoption of the car and tractor destroyed English agricultural communities. When I was ten years old, Missouri was covered with small towns and small farms, but they were already fading. Cars weren’t as fast as now, tractors weren’t as big, and the Interstate Highway system did not yet exist, but scales were increasing, smaller farms were being absorbed by bigger, speed created scale as it always has. In spite of those trends, in those days there were so many people in rural Missouri that every tiny town had a bank, a hardware store, a lumber yard, a grocery store, and usually a railroad station. Those businesses are all gone. Most of the towns are gone. Most of the farms have been consolidated into ever larger farms cultivated with ever larger tractors. There are so few people left in rural America that almost all the schools, businesses, homes, doctors, hospitals, and jobs are gone too.

The Amish say, “We need our neighbors. You need your neighbors’ farms.” And they’re right.

They didn’t do it for the environment. They didn’t do it to combat global warming. They did it to force themselves to travel slowly enough that they wouldn’t pass the community store to buy their goods more cheaply in the next town over. They did it so that in haying season and at the harvest they would still have to gather together. Many hands make light work.

Today there are other reasons for people to adopt low energy technology. We know that our cars and our tractors are killing the biosphere. We don’t have to farm with tractors to feed ourselves. 54% of the tractor farmed cropland in the United States goes to produce non-food crops. One of the primary outputs of this industrial agriculture is fuel for, yes, cars, trucks, and tractors. I have recently explained this in detail.

Most of rural America is a desolate wasteland. The few remaining hospitals are going out of business, one after another, because there are too few people to support them, and of the people there are, the vast majority are either employed in the nearest big city and can obtain medical care there, or are poor, mostly unemployed, and unable to afford medical care at all. Necessities can be bought at Walmart or at a Dollar General. The urban majority who look down their noses at Walmart and Walmart shoppers don’t have any idea how it is to have no other choice.

Virtually all privately owned enterprise is gone from rural America. Lucky towns still have a mom-and-pop restaurant, but there are few even of those. Even farm supplies, once available in every surviving small town, are now consolidated in ag center towns spread about every 100 to 150 miles across the face of the land. This was done by choice, recommended by the federal government.

One retailer remains who sells to small farmers, hobby farmers, and rural suburbanites. Their name is Tractor Supply, but they don’t have much for tractors, and nothing for horsedrawn farmers. We horsedrawn farmers go to our closest Amish community for supplies and technical support. For me that’s about 60 miles one way, so obviously I can’t get there and back by horse and buggy, not unless I’ve got a couple of weeks to spare.

I have worked for 41 years to learn the skills that an Amish child absorbs without ever thinking about it, how to harness a horse, how to drive a buggy, how to build a building with muscle powered hand tools. I have spent much of that time trying to find others who would join me. After over 40 years of effort I have attracted two young people, both of whom still drive cars and trucks, as do I. I pay them a modest living wage to help me on my farm. One of them already knows horsedrawn, donkey drawn skills, and we are teaching the other.

I often wonder about this all, about people, about motivation, about willingness to be different, willingness to do without.

I have read that some two-thirds of Americans are concerned about climate change. I read essays of despair, essays of desperation. What I don’t read is essays about living otherwise. When I mention that some 400,000 Americans live happy, fulfilling lives without cars, tractors, or electric lights, people shrug it off. They’re religious, that’s why they do it. I’m not religious, goes the reasoning, so I can’t do it.

They do it for their community. We don’t need community, we’ve got social media? And cars? I don’t know. I just know that what we’re doing isn’t working. I know that there is another way.

Those horse-and-buggy Mennonites from Belize bought themselves one, 700 acre, farm in Tennessee. They subdivided it among their families. They are descendants of an intentional community which has survived since 1536. Is there no other power equal to religion? If not, why?

I’ve wondered for years. I believe in Earth. I believe in Life. I believe in Nature. If I have a religion that’s it. It’s enough for me.

Presumably everyone able to read already knows about the blockage behind which wait one fifth of the fuel, and one third of the fertilizer, used by industrial society worldwide.

Presumably everybody knows that without the Haber-Bosch process of producing biologically available nitrogen, industrially farmed land can barely even produce weeds, let alone crops.

Everyone should know, but I’m not sure how many do, that the endless flow of edible plant and/or animal parts is necessary every single day to maintain human nutrition, and that without it, no human can live very long.

I can’t speak to agriculture worldwide, but I can speak of agriculture in the United States. The first, and most important, fact about it is that well under half of it directly produces food for humans.

Total cropland in the United States in 2024 was 328 million acres. Over half of that cropland was used to produce exactly two crops, field corn and soybeans. Neither of these crops is produced primarily as food for humans.

Approximately 6% to 7% of global soybean production is eaten by humans annually. In the United States, less than 2% of field corn, our largest single crop, is eaten by humans annually.

If we add in cooking oil and the barely edible high fructose corn syrup, human consumption of both crops edges up into the double digits, but just barely. Field corn and soybeans aren’t grown as food, they are, like petroleum, predominantly produced as industrial raw materials.

A fair percentage of both corn and soybeans is fed to animals which will later be eaten by humans, but if we were concerned about sudden industrial shortages causing starvation worldwide, wasting grain to produce meat and eggs would not even be under consideration. Cattle can live on grass. Hogs can live on forage and garbage. Chickens can live on bugs, weed seeds, and garbage. Humans can live on plants and don’t really need much if any meat anyway.

Share

Second only to livestock production, roughly 40% of all field corn grown in the United States is converted to ethanol for use as motor fuel. It is claimed that roughly 1.5 to 2 more units of energy can be obtained from ethanol than goes into its production, but at a time when nitrogen fertilizer availability is limited I think it is fair to ask whether it is more important for humans to drive than it is for them to eat, and I think the answer is no.

The largest two inputs into a bushel of corn are diesel fuel and fixed nitrogen. These are the same two inputs which are limited as a result of the US/Israel attack on Iran. Soybeans, as a legume, are able to fix nitrogen through symbiotic bacteria and do not require Haber-Bosch nitrogen, although some agronomists still recommend nitrogen applications, particularly in irrigated, high yield systems. Nitrogen notwithstanding, industrial soybean agriculture is still primarily a method for converting diesel fuel, topsoil, and (often) groundwater into other industrial raw materials.

54% of US cropland is used to produce predominantly non-food crops. This fact is totally ignored in virtually all discussions of agricultural energy requirements and human food insecurity. That cropland is managed in ways which virtually guarantee that virtually no wildlife, no birds, no insects, no fish, and even very few microbes can live on it. It is compacted by huge tractors, cultivated, sprayed, planted and harvested with diesel fuel. It is subsidized with public funds. It employs very few people. John Deere is producing autonomous tractors, combines, and spray vehicles to eliminate the few jobs which remain.

Meanwhile, any discussion of reducing the energy wasted on this industry is met with cries of Starvation!

I doubt if the shortage of diesel fuel and Haber-Bosch nitrogen resulting from the current war will result in any re-allocation of either fuel or fertilizer to food production. I expect to see global hunger and perhaps starvation while we continue to waste these finite resources on purely economic industrial agriculture. I expect to see self-identified climate concerned people continue to praise biofuels and bioplastics.

I can’t make any of this stop, but I refuse to pretend it has any purpose other than to further enrich the already wealthy.

I guess I knew that it wasn’t going to happen, although I confess I did have a hope that it would become part of the public conversation. Either way, it didn’t happen.

Today, we live in a world where, at best, liquid fuel availability is going to drop by at least 20%, and in all likelihood it’s going to stay there for a long time, possibly forever. Yes, the Strait of Hormuz might reopen, although it might not, but refineries and ports have been destroyed, and if the war ended tomorrow they couldn’t be fully replaced within a decade. There has been a drastic reduction in petroleum availability and it’s not going away for a long time, if ever.

Many writers are gleefully predicting that this will lead to the long-promised Renewable™ Energy Transition™. These writers appear to be unaware that mining, smelting, manufacturing, shipping, site preparation, and erection are all powered by fossil fuels. A culture which loses 20% of its fossil energy overnight is going to dedicate the energy which remains to perform immediately necessary tasks like farming, shipping, and manufacturing daily needs. Like it or not, wind turbines and solar panels are unlikely to make the cut.

I have specifically advocated slowing surface speeds to reduce fuel use.

Public response has been overwhelmingly negative. The most common form of negative response has been the simple, self - fulfilling prophecy, “Nobody will do that.” The second common response has been denial that slowing would significantly reduce fuel burning, but in scientific terms this is exactly the same as denying global warming. There are none so blind as those who will not see, and there’s no fix for them.

Right now there is no reason to discuss my suggested options for ameliorating ecosystem degradation. There is only one new action happening in the world, and that is tomorrow’s steps in the war.

If His Madnesty blows up a few of Iran’s power plants, and they respond by blowing up several desert kingdoms’ water desalinization plants, there is going to be a mass death event that will make the Black Plague look like today’s measles epidemics. Measles epidemics suck, but - those deserts will not support any more humans today than they would in 1800. Probably fewer. All the difference comes out of concentrated energy via desalinization plants. And Arizona, another fucking desert.

If that happens, the global high energy socio-economic system will respond negatively. The very best this could be is analogous to the engine dying at 70 mph. A median outcome might be like blowing out a tire at 70. A not totally unimaginable outcome would be closer to running into a bridge abutment at 70. What we’re not going to do is continue to cruise along at 70 arguing about the cliff up there somewhere.

If you want to know what will happen next, there are hundreds of writers on Substack who can tell you. Personally I don’t have a clue. I see a massive slowing of everything as inevitable. Speed is kinetic energy. If a mass moves, energy moves it. The faster it moves the more energy it takes.

We’ve gotten so used to talking of things in abstract terms that we tend to think that the way things are is the way they have to be. All the cars, all the noise, all the dirt, all the stuff in all the stores, all the goods and services competing for our attention and our money, that’s just the way things are. We ignore the energy. We are oblivious to the universal energy flow underlying our entire global economy and social system, what one might call our civilization. A vast flow of kinetic energy pours without ceasing across Earth, and without it none of things we take for granted would happen or appear.

An inconceivable amount of mass is moving around Earth’s land surface, water surface, low atmosphere, and close orbital space. All of that motion, all of that kinetic energy, was released from petroleum molecules by burning. That which we call civilization burns over 100 million barrels of petroleum a day. Over half of that, some fifty-five million barrels a day, goes to industry, including industrial agriculture. Over half of what’s left goes to transportation. The biggest single portion of that is ocean vessels which burn the heaviest diesel oil in the word, and that’s with over 100,000 jets taking flight every day.

There’s no place in that system where you can take out one of every five gallons and not notice it. If we lose half of it we’ll be in deep shit.

The current economy is what it is as a result of unimaginable amounts of energy being unbound from molecules and released into the wild, into the ecosystem, into Earth, Water, and Air. Added to that, and exceeding it, excess solar energy gets caught by all the extra carbon we’ve put into the air. It’s massively not working. Everybody’s crazy.

Writers measure the energy that atmospheric carbon has captured from the Sun in terms of atomic bombs. So many Hiroshimas.

By the tens of thousands.

The ancients were absolutely right: the real elements are Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.

Too much Fire for the Earth, Air, and Water. She’s tired of us. She’s made us put a crazy man in charge. She’s got a plan.

We don’t. I’m not sure what hers is, but I think it could be summarized as: less Fire.

This may sound crazy, and it’s partly imaginary, I guess, but only partly. I think that Earth is alive. I know absolutely for certain that each and every living human on Earth is part of her. We start out invisible. All the part of a human that you can see was built out of other plants and animals, and several levels before that the animals built themselves of plants, and all the plants undeniably built themselves of Earth. Plants create themselves out of water and air, of carbon, nitrogen, rocks and metals, using only the power of the sun. We eat them. If we had any sense, we would return the leftovers to Earth in balanced applications. We would return the portion of what she gave us that we did not need. However we try to avoid it, when we die we go back to her. Even if we squirt our bodies full of poison, sooner or later we return from whence we came. Our bones, being metal, last the longest.

We’re three quarters water. By dry weight we’re half carbon. Calcium is a metal, what reductive science calls an element. We’re busily building robots while we’re already walking on metal legs. We just don’t have the sense to respect them. Instead we roll blindly over the surface of Earth who made us, blind to her beauty, oblivious to her suffering.

Actions which have already been taken have removed one out of every five gallons of diesel fuel, and probably more, from the global energy supply. I’m not going into details here, but oil isn’t exactly fungible. This barrel and that barrel aren’t the same stuff, and you can’t make the same stuff from them. Global industry, specifically including industrial agriculture, runs on diesel fuel. Not gasoline.

I don’t know what comes next. My only suggestions at this time would be things like, buy a hoe, maybe a shovel. A big knife, corn knife or machete. Be handy to have a little knife too, one you can carry in your pocket. Buy a good pair of walking shoes, buy a two wheeled wheelbarrow or an old lady shopping cart so you don’t have to carry everything you need in your arms. It’s too late to go looking for donkeys, and anyway our government is busy killing them. It takes a long time to learn to train a steer to work. Really, as of now, I don’t have anything else to offer.

I’m just waiting to see what shakes out. I don’t know what it’ll look like. There are a lot of ugly possibilities out there, but they’re not guarantees. Mr. Rogers was right: Look for the helpers.

I’m an old man and rely on daily intakes of industrial medicine. I have no thyroid. There’s no guarantee I’ll survive this, although I’ve heard that pig thyroid contains all I’ll need. Either way, it’s been a good ride.

Best to y’all.

Jeff

Share A Systemic Approach

Subscribe now

Tankers are not moving through the Strait of Hormuz. I don’t have to explain that, everybody who can read knows by now.

Many thoughtful people see this as likely to drastically curtail the availability of middle distillates of petroleum, particularly diesel and jet fuel. Here is representative essay, rather long, which I think expresses the risk very well.

The Honest Sorcerer

The War in Iran: A Giant Leap Towards Collapse

Things have escalated rather quickly. Who could’ve thought? Well, what many astute commentators have been warning about for years, now has become a terrible reality. In response to the full-scale US-Israeli war of choice on Iran, launched on Feb…

Read more

3 months ago · 340 likes · 71 comments · The Honest Sorcerer

You know all of this. I’m not going to attempt to add anything to that set of facts, I’m going to talk about situations.

The situation we’re in now has the possibility of evolving to the point where there is only enough jet fuel and diesel available on the market to run the war machine. Obviously, that’s what war machines run on. A few nuclear reactors, but mostly diesel oil and jet fuel.

The entire global supply chain runs on diesel fuel. Everything the United States requires and uses daily that wasn’t made here, which is most of everything including our food, comes on a ship that burns the heaviest diesel fuel there is. The stuff is almost tar. It’s called bunker fuel. It’s where the market for Canadian tar sands lives. We can’t make it out of fracked petroleum, it’s too runny.

If that one middle distillate of petroleum goes away, so do all the international ships hauling everything. To the extent that middle distillate becomes harder to get, shipping reduces.

The global supply chain both contributes a huge amount to global heating, and is a single point of failure - one thing that can easily break - which can essentially bring the United States of America to a screeching halt.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I can remember when it wasn’t this way. Basically we have Bill Clinton and the usual oligarchs to thank for this. Oh, it’s more complicated than that, but - global free trade, when applied to things which used to be locally produced worldwide, exists solely to enrich the few and sell a lot of bunker oil. It offers no tangible benefits to any of the working class people involved on either end of the trade. Global free trade of necessities is utter madness.

Murphy was right. It’s not a joke. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. It’s not a joke, it’s a basis for planning.

I made my living from high school to retirement based on Murphy’s law. Whatever can go wrong, I can fix, meant I never missed a meal. Whether I had a job or not. I’m still living by it today.

If the global economy survives this particular ugly moment, makes no difference. One day it’s going down. Anything which drastically interrupts the availability of diesel fuel halts the global trade, extraction, agricultural, and manufacturing economy.

Our food system is susceptible. Right now, according to Substack experts, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the anhydrous ammonia in the world is blocked behind the strait.

In all my years of writing slow down, deenergize, one of the most common pushbacks has been, “We would starve without the Haber-Bosch process producing fixed nitrogen fertilizer.” That statement leaves out a critical phrase required to make it factual. That phrase is, “under current industrial agricultural systems and practices.”

The nitrogen fertilizer in question is in the form of anhydrous ammonia, referred to in farm country (where I live) simply as “anhydrous.” Without water. We fertilize our corn deserts with without water. Or more technically, with ammonia without water. Huge tractors run up and down the fields pulling tanks on trailers, long white cylinders with spherical ends, attached by hoses to machines that plow through the land injecting ammonia. Any living thing in the way is immediately killed. It kills the occasional farmer too. Nasty stuff.

But since we’re ripped all the life and all the fertility out of the ground we manage, and since we’ve got a major industry turning diesel fuel into ethanol at a net energy loss, the anhydrous it is.

And 900 horsepower diesel tractors.

The Missouri River bottoms near me are full of these million+ dollar tractors. They run on diesel fuel. The primary crop produced is corn, which is fed to cattle, hogs, cars and trucks, trucks that burn gasoline at least, as well as Fritos and Doritos. Last year the US Congress increased the amount of alcohol “allowed” in gasoline to 15%. I put scare quotes around allowed because - in the real world the legislative maximum is the industrial minimum.

This week those tractors are out pulling anhydrous tanks. If they can get it. And if they can’t get it by April, the year is lost.

We know other ways to produce food. They require more intensive human attention, more human-hours of attention, more physical labor. We know ways to produce food which can be powered entirely by humans, oxen, donkeys, horses, and mules. We can feed them golf courses.

Women in Guatemala made their family’s clothes on looms strapped around their waists. There is no factory on Earth producing clothes as beautiful. In other parts of the world the weavers were men. From the invention of spinning and weaving there is no historic record of people having to go naked because their community couldn’t produce enough clothing. There is no reason on Earth that all the clothing should be produced out of plastic in Asia. It’s the original cottage industry.

And food. American agriculture doesn’t produce food, not most of it. When you hear people talking about biofuels for jets, they’re not interested in producing food.

When my parents (born 1913 and 1915) were children in Iowa, the state produced over 90% of its food. Today the state of Iowa imports over 90% of their food and farmer suicide is a major issue. There is no place fit for humans to live that cannot grow human food. That’s how we got there in the first place.

If - IF - we get away with this, I see no excuse for the usual suspects, leftists and progressives and liberals and climate activists and the two or three surviving self-identified enviromentalists, to not have a serious discussion of slowing all speeds and localizing all common human tasks. But there is no chance we will.

The only reason we have to go fast is because we don’t have local services, so we have to go fast to get far away where the services are.

The only reason the services are far away is because we can go fast, so we were able to go far to get cheap and starve out the mom and pop shop down the street. I was here. I watched it happen.

You young people who write beautifully and passionately about villages, about local services - sell your cars. Buy bicycles. Walk. Get donkeys. Donkeys are literally the most efficient work power source known to humans, more efficient than oxen, more efficient than horses, and the reason they’re efficient is because they’re slow. Speed is what killed the village, and until the speed goes away the attempt to create village life faces an uphill battle. The reason the Amish don’t do cars and tractors is to preserve their villages. Speed kills villages.

Speed is energy. Just like temperature is energy, speed is energy. Speed is energy just as sure as heat is, just as sure as electricity is. Unnecessary speed, more speed than required to live a human life, is wasted energy.

Speed is fun. People invented skates, the bicycle, swings, zip lines, high dives, and who knows how many other things just for the brief experience of speed. The automobile did not win because it was efficient. It won because it was fast and loud.

There’s a place near here which still carries the name of the man who used to own the mules that pulled Model Ts up the hill. They couldn’t do it on their own. Cars didn’t win over the populace because they were convenient or efficient. They won it over because they were fast and loud. Not only did fast and loud thrill the humans, it scared the horses who’d never before seen or heard such an awful thing. Made it too dangerous to drive horses.

It still is, but I still do. Well, not horses, not me, but people do. I drive donkeys. The smallest, the slowest, the calmest, the least costly, and lovable.

We don’t have to encounter a mass death disaster to change over to a globally local system. We could do it by slowing, as a central activity, while also watching needs and opportunities as they arise. If, at the same time, we focused on global ecosystem restoration, we could drastically reduce emissions, slow and halt excess extinctions, and learn to live as natives on this planet. We were once.

But we won’t even talk about it. If there is one topic that is off the table, it’s physically abandoning this speed. I’ve written a systematic method by which the world could slow to a walk in a decade without anybody having to die for it. Here’s one example.

If we do it the other way, assuming we dodge this bullet, which is by no means guaranteed, any abrupt collapse of international mass tonnage shipping, the very best we can hope for is a long spell of extreme deprivation and want, and more likely a large spike of death by starvation and want worldwide.

If it’s not too late already, now would be a good time to start thinking and talking about it.

People speak of collapse. I don’t know what they expect to see as a defining milestone between pre-collapse and post-collapse civilization. For instance, Donald Trump is now ruling the United States by decree. Whatever we choose to call this current regime, that thing which was The (Constitutional) United States of America, for all its flaws, no longer exists.

Big pieces of LA and a whole city in Hawaii have burned down. Roads, bridges, and thousands of houses blow and wash away annually. It’s been a long time since rebuilding could keep up with weather destruction. More pieces fall off so-called civilization every day.

That said, I think people will notice that civilization as we knew it has collapsed when they can no longer count on watching TVs and computers or driving their cars.

After that day, the scale of everything which developed society humans do will change drastically.

How could we run out of electricity and liquid fuel? A serious global pandemic would do it. The Covid pandemic, at its peak, killed one percent or so of those who were infected. The black plague killed in the neighborhood of 90 to 95 percent. A fifty percent fatal global pandemic would be enough to turn off the entire high energy economy. In spite of all the brags about AI, people are involved in fuel availability from the well head to the delivery truck and everywhere in between. Without the people the oil will quit flowing. Electricity requires nonstop services by repair people. Something breaks every day. Without continuous repairs the grid would begin to show signs of failure within a week or two.

The global supply chain is absurdly fragile. We’ve already seen that. Yet we rely on it to feed us.

When considering what future human settlement might look like, we have to admit that the large scales made possible by high speed transportation will cease to exist.

Some day when you’ve got an hour and a half to blow, watch the video below. I recorded a trip on one of my donkey wagons, with my team of standard donkeys, driving home from the grocery store where I mostly shop. Using a car I can leave home, drive to the store, buy a few needs, and drive back home, in somewhere between half an hour and forty-five minutes. From home to store by car is ten to twelve minutes. At no time in that drive do I even reach, much less exceed, posted speed limits.

Half an hour. Round trip. Slow driver, driving a car.

Here’s half of that journey at the speed a human or a donkey walks and sometimes trots. It takes an hour and a half.

I budget about four and half to six hours for a full shopping trip in Richmond by donkey cart. I visit the hardware store, liquor store, grocery story, feed store, bank, home. Drug store if we need any ‘scrips.

From here to the farthest point of my shopping trip in Richmond is about 7 or 8 miles. The day’s shopping and business journey, then, is about sixteen miles.

A sixteen mile one day journey is a goodly trip by donkey power. Donkeys, my chosen work animal, are small and slow. Oxen are larger but don’t walk much faster. With a taller equine, an Amish trotting horse or mammoth donkey, an hour or more might be cut off the journey, but no more. Four to five hours for the task.

Instead of an hour by car.

This will be the scale of all of global society when the gas stations run dry. We won’t be driving electric cars either. All those movie collapses where the lights stay on and everybody has gas are fiction. We’re supposed to know that.

Surface speed is the keystone. The lynch pin. Virtually no part of the current global economy and society can operate without interurban surface speeds equal to or greater than 60 miles an hour, a mile a minute. With the spread of of urban freeways, even in cities drivers routinely go a mile a minute.

Either that or a mile an hour. It’s a crapshoot.

A functional economy can exist at walking speeds. A global supply chain economy cannot. To see a functioning, walking speed society and economy, go visit any Amish district. Ignore their religion. Their religion is why they chose the technological systems they use, but those systems are not dependent on or based on their religion. In 1890 Amish Americans and everybody else in America lived just the same. Horses and buggies, draft horses, mules, and plows. They just wore different clothes and went to different churches.

The Amish chose to stay with their buggies and work horses, not because God hated cars, but because they saw that fast machines were going to expand scales and destroy their close-knit community. They were right. Non-Amish rural America is a depopulated wasteland.

Some five or six billion of Earth’s current population of over eight billion still rely on walking speed, food powered technology, predominantly donkeys and oxen, for transportation and food production today. The rest of us are no better than them. They’re not causing global heating.

These billions do not share a common religion. Religion isn’t going to make the gas go away, physics is. Americans have no example of walking speed technology among us except the people who do it for religious reasons, but we could learn their ways if we chose to. Observe their technology. Observe the scales of their communities. Observe their economy. It all works as well as ours does.

Western animal powered transportation and agriculture are by no means the only ways available for humans to organize working cultures at a walking speed. Agriculture, row crop monocrop annual agriculture, is an irreparably destructive means of producing food. Ecosystem based, horticultural, varied diet perennial food production could feed the humans of Earth better than our current systems do. Every indigenous culture that still exists represents a group of humans who have organized themselves to provide for all their needs at a walking pace directly within the operation of their local ecosystems. They know we’re out here. They don’t believe we’ve got it better.

When the dust settles, whether it be a year or a hundred, (assuming, of course, that humans didn’t go extinct in the aftermath of our glorious technological orgy) humans will have recreated village scale communities everywhere they live. All food will be obtained locally. Clothing fiber will be obtained locally. Building materials for lodging will be obtained locally.

In a walking pace global economy, scales will be limited. In broad terms, if you live in a nomadic culture your daily range will be equal to a moderate day’s walk. If you live in a village or smallholder settled culture, your daily range will be, at the maximum, half a day’s walk out and half a day’s walk back, or you’ll have to arrange lodging for the night.

In all likelihood, after we settle ourselves in stabilized village communities, humans will once again begin trading over long distances. We’re weird creatures. Before Europeans defiled this continent’s cultures, people were trading from coast to coast, north to south.

They weren’t trading staple foodstuffs. In any sane culture food is the most local of supply chains.

It’s obvious that after the lights go out in America, animal power will not soon be widely available. Parts of Africa and Asia still have enough donkeys and oxen to go around, but the developed world has done everything in its power to get rid of, to belittle and condemn, food energy traction. Besides a few religious oddballs and even fewer philosophical oddballs, nobody in America today could harness an animal, drive an animal, feed an animal, or train an animal. Fortunately, humans can walk about as fast and about as far in a day as a horse can. We’ll have plenty of time to develop appropriate technology.

The highly developed societies of South America never domesticated animals. Their highly complex, architecturally creative, continent spanning societies and economies ran entirely on transportation via walking humans. They didn’t even use wheeled carts, although their children played with wheeled toys.

We don’t need all this energy, we just created our cultures around it. It’s going to be hard to unwind them.

This is why I advocate recursive slowing. Given that our current systems could not exist without high speed transportation, if we wished to gradually unwind them so that we could make a painless transition to low energy, small scale, village societies, the way to find and implement the necessary changes would be to gradually bleed off speed and high energy and observe what options developed. Given that global high energy economies are measurably degrading all facets of the global ecosystem, it would seem obvious that if we wanted to reduce the shock to our systems when high energies become unavailable, we would begin to learn the necessary skills today.

I have no prediction what global populations might be after the development of village societies based on ecosystem restoration. There are a lot of us now, all piled up on top of one another in teeming cities. In the case of the United States, in most of the potentially food producing regions today, land is subdivided into multi-square-mile farms, tended by five hundred to over eight hundred horsepower tractors. Most of those tractors, up til now, are still driven by individual humans, but John Deere is hard at work at eliminating even the drivers of the giant tractors from the land. Every part of this system, from the tractor, to the nitrogen fertilizer, to the land-sterilizing toxins used to kill every sort of plant, arthropod, fungus, and yeast we can think of, is made possible by the constant availability of highly concentrated energy sources. Most of the energy sources which industrial agriculture requires are fossil fuels used in the form of extremely high temperature fires, and there is no realistic replacement for them.

Most agricultural soils currently managed with annual applications of anhydrous ammonia and industrial agriculture methods are, without the fertilizer, nearly dead, unable to even produce good crops of roadside annual weeds. These soils fail to hold water. These soils are, by any rational measure, degraded to not much more than rock dust. We can do better.

Human urine is fixed nitrogen fertilizer. There are 8 billion people on Earth. Tell me again why we can’t fix nitrogen without the Haber-Bosch process?

It is a simple fact that only a minority of all the arable land in the United States is producing food directly edible by humans. Almost all of it once did and, after considerable effort, could again.

The way to get the most food from the land, the way to improve wildlife habitat, the way to clean up running water, and the way to eliminate the huge dead zones offshore from virtually every major river system in the developed world, are all the same thing. Treat the natural biome as the most critical part of the human food chain. Apply human attention. Human effort. Be humans at our best. We can heal soil. None of these skills are unknown. People are doing it all over the world. Virtually all of the best processes are low energy, small scale, individually managed, and can be done best by more humans and fewer engines.

The structural foundation of an ecosystem healing human culture is villages. To create a long term, ecosystem based, reasonably happy and comfortable human society using all the humans worldwide, we must re-inhabit our ecosystem. We know that various indigenous cultures worldwide have enhanced the productivity of natural woodland and savanna. Industrial humans today are mining and selling highly productive soils created by indigenous groups in the Amazon forest, while at the same time telling us that food won’t grow in the soil they manage unless they annually inject ammonia created using the Haber-Bosch process. That by itself tells me all I need to know about industrial society.

We do our best in villages. I have watched indigenous villages in the mountains of southern Vietnam, seen the people, seen the children, looked at their farms and their systems, and I’d say they make every bit as much sense as my donkey powered small farm community, make every bit as much sense as an Amish community, and made a thousand times more sense than any 21st Century megalopolis anywhere on Earth.

When I was a boy in Missouri, we were still a semi-village economy, in the middle of the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. In those days there was a town about every 8 miles up and down Missouri’s miles of two lane blacktop, no shoulder, hilly and curvy roads, both in the agricultural north of the state and the hardscrabble rocky hills of the Ozark Plateau. What were farms then are today either far suburban estates or multi thousand acre corn and soybean deserts. I grew up among small farms of 40 acres, 80, 120, only a few bigger. All the towns were alive. In 1955, crossing northern Missouri and southern Iowa on a Saturday afternoon meant a few miles at highway speeds, then intervals crawling at 8 miles an hour around the squares or through the downtowns of busy farm towns dotted across the land.

Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act in 1956. By about 1962 or 1963 there were enough four lane divided highway built to let us see our future. Small towns were dying like flies. Every year the tractors got bigger, and every time the tractors got bigger the people who couldn’t afford one went broke. Farms got bigger. Schools closed. Small town downtowns died. Their local customers had been driven off the land into cities, and the highways didn’t go there anymore. There were just a handful of people left in any region, and they lived on mega farms, houses five or ten miles apart all over the county.

Walmart was as inevitable as sunrise. Most all the people are gone, the ones that are left are scattered all over the county, but they can all jump in the car and go 60 miles an hour at the drop of a hat. One store to fool them all.

Meanwhile Americans lived in cities and got sicker and sicker. At the same time medical science kept them alive, on the average, longer and longer.

Everyone knows that interacting with nature provides humans positive physical and mental health benefits.

Everyone knows that the ecosystem which makes life possible on Earth is further degraded every day than the day before.

If we remove the speed, human nature will recreate village societies. We cannot know in advance how any community of villages might develop, in terms of culture, language, organization, or society. It is unlikely that any one form would cover more than a few tribes, one bioregion, but - this is all the future and the future is unknowable.

However, even though the future is unknowable, when we pull the plug out of the bathtub we can fairly confidently predict that sooner or later it will become empty.

We have pulled the plug out of our ecosystem.

We should at least stick our thumb in the hole.

Slow down.

Share

Subscribe now

This is a simple fact.

All it would take is a universally enforced global reduction in speed limits.

The more we want to reduce emissions, the slower the limits.

One slowing wouldn’t be sufficient in the long run, but one slowing would immediately result in emissions reductions, which no other alleged climate action in history has ever done.

To address the catastrophe at any meaningful level would require recurring slowing, eventually all the way to walking speeds, simultaneous with redesigning virtually all our production and distribution systems.

That, of course, would only be possible if world governments wanted to reduce emissions, and they don’t.

Emissions is another word for GDP. Reduce emissions, reduce GDP.

It’s this direct: If the drivers of the United States went 10% slower on every trip everywhere, liquid fuel consumption - gasoline and highway diesel fuel - would go down at least 15%. But to avoid quibbles, let’s instead just pretend the savings would only be one to one, and calculate based on a 10% reduction in motor fuel burned.

The petroleum industry in the United States is slightly over 7.5% of our GDP. Reduce petroleum industry revenues by 10%, GDP goes down. Even if nothing else changed, and other things would change. Everything would change. Speed is the lynch pin of the global economy.

Slowing would reduce industrial and commercial activity. All that stuff in the global supply chain is moving. Slow surface speeds by 10%, average daily distances go down by 10%, transport times go up, annual throughput goes down.

Without exception, any action which actually reduced fossil fuel burning in the United States would blow a giant hole in GDP growth.

There is a school of climate thought known as Degrowth. To the best of my understanding it consists of several abstract plans and no specific action to launch the project. Presumably they’ll figure it out a Davos or somewhere.

Slow down. Growth will immediately slow or stop, depending on how much we slow.

This means a whole bunch of people are going to lose their jobs. What do we do about that?

Well, we could clutch our pearls and not do anything. For the short term that appears to be working.

Or we could make plans to employ them.

A huge amount of annual economic activity in the United States and presumably the world is funded by the various governments. Airport lights around the US are maintained by US Civil Service employees. So is air traffic control. Agriculture receives billions of dollars annually. Highway construction is federally funded and state funded. Some road construction is funded by counties, by cities. The United States gives millions of dollars a year to Elon Musk alone.

So instead of using government money to help rich people get richer, use it to employ the people in a new low energy economy.

Pick up trash. We could literally walk every square foot of the United States two or three times a year and never run out of litter. Trash. Plastic crap. Pay people to pick it up. Want to reduce plastic in the oceans?

Pick it up off the land before it washes in.

Trim the trees along county roads with hand loppers. Mow the grass with push mowers. Pay a decent living wage, just like we do for highway construction. Makes more sense than spending public money to butcher roadsides and emit CO2.

To be more realistic, let’s assume that world governments continue to be useless and do everything in their power to increase emissions measured as GDP. Then what?

According to reports well over half of all the people in all the developed world are concerned about “climate change,” even those who are not aware that we are living in a rapid and complete collapse of the global ecosystem. Let’s say that every licensed driver in every car nation who claims to care about climate change decides to do something specific about it. They all slow down by 15% all the time everywhere. That means the other half the drivers have to pass them all, all the time, and when they can’t pass they have to (shudder) drive slower.

The long term objective is to de-energize the global economy. The first place to do that is on the conveyor belt that the entire economy rides: the highways of the world.

How come revolution has to be spectacular?

Now. I’ve been writing almost the exact essay you have just read since 2018.

Do you know how many other climate writers have taken up this proposal?

Zero.

Why do you suppose that is?

There is no way, operating within the laws of physics as we know them, that this one action could fail to reduce our emissions.

Everybody claims to want to reduce our emissions.

I no longer believe them.

What they want is new gee-whiz technology, new biggests and new fastests and Technological Breakthroughs. They want Jobs. They want Electric Cars. Reducing emissions is just an excuse.

If anybody wanted to reduce emissions they would (a) shout from the rooftops that everything we’re doing in the world today is moving the opposite direction, and (b) admit that the machine we are currently operating, the machine called global industrial society, is the problem and cannot be modified to be otherwise.

We’re not reducing our emissions. We’re not even trying. We’re building highways. We’re building data centers. We’re building satellites.

We can use the satellites to get more detailed reports of our destruction of the entire living ecosystem from which we evolved and without which we cannot exist. We can use the data centers to undress the reports and show the public photos of them naked without their consent.

Or something. I forget what the justifications are. Something like that.

We could reduce our emissions tomorrow. My state, Missouri, just increased our highway speed limits. I read that another state had - maybe New York? These actions are guaranteed to increase emissions.

Doesn’t anybody else ever get tired of being lied to?

We toss the word efficiency around as though there were such a thing as efficiency, generic term, obviously a good, which has no referent. “It’s more efficient.”

In fact, efficiency only exists relative to some measure.

The dictionary isn’t a great help here.

ef·fi·cien·cy

/əˈfiSHən(t)sē/

noun

noun: efficiency

1. the state or quality of being efficient.

   “greater energy efficiency”

   • an action designed to achieve efficiency.

     plural noun: efficiencies

     “to increase efficiencies and improve earnings”

   • technical

     the ratio of the useful work performed by a machine or in a process to the total energy expended or heat taken in.

     “the boiler has an efficiency of 45 percent”

Although in the above definition they do show the need for a referent: “greater energy efficiency.” Energy is the referent in this sentence.

All right, we’ll back up. Define “efficient” for me.

ef·fi·cient

/əˈfiSHənt/

adjective

adjective: efficient

1. (especially of a system or machine) achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.

   “fluorescent lamps are efficient at converting electricity into light”

   • (of a person) working in a well-organized and competent way.

     “an efficient administrator”

   • preventing the wasteful use of a particular resource.

     suffix: -efficient

     “an energy-efficient heating system”

Achieving maximum productivity with a minimum of wasted effort or expense.

That’s not how we use it either.

When modern technological society says “efficient” it means, “Maximum output per person hour.”

We can waste a hundred thousand joules to save fifteen minutes of human labor and unabashedly call that efficient.

Then if we reduce the energy waste to fifty thousand joules to save fifteen human minutes we refer to that as “energy efficient.”

There are well over 8 billion humans on Earth. In the current high tech economy millions of people in prime working age and health are useless, because we do their work with machines powered with concentrated energy, well over 80% of which is derived from burning coal, naturally occurring methane, or petroleum.

Our ecosystem is dying from the outputs of this process.

“…with minimum wasted effort or expense.” Our definition of efficiency assumes, as a minimum, that the global ecosystem has no value. Therefore whatever ecological degradation our processes require does not get calculated as “expense.”

On our farm, we seek energy efficiency as a high priority.

There are some jobs where we on Slow Walk Slopes do rate time efficiency more highly. For instance, if our water system sustains a failure in winter and we’re going to be out in zero F temperatures working, we will expend energy to save time. But we don’t kid ourselves that this makes us more “efficient.” It just keeps us from freezing out in the miserable Missouri winter for any longer than necessary.

By our standards, any job we can do with our strength or the strength of our donkeys, mules, or horses is more efficient than that same job done with a fuel burning machine.

There is no power source known to humankind, aside from our own strength, which is more efficient than our donkeys. Donkeys can do more joules of work per joule of input energy than any machine or any other animal. Adding to that, the input energy which donkeys require is less concentrated than the input energy required by horses or mules, and the hours of work output from low grade forage is higher in donkeys than in oxen, which have to ruminate.

The fuel powered machines we do use are, relatively speaking, small scale, low speed machines. In all cases, increasing speed arithmetically requires increasing energy inputs exponentially. To double speed requires four times the energy.

As one concrete example, a typical statement might be, “The county road district bought a bigger tractor. Now we can maintain the roadsides more efficiently than we could before.”

To translate that into English, “Now we can spend four times as much diesel fuel to mow the roadsides twice as fast. Our only referent is how many operators we pay and for how many hours, so this is more efficient.”

If the governments of the United States cared about ecosystem degradation, climate change, mining, manufacturing, or waste, they could park all the tractors forever and hire the county’s unemployable, poorly educated work force, most of whom now make their livings via theft and petty crime, and pay them to mow and trim the roadsides.

In terms of maintaining a livable ecosystem for the current and future generations of humans this would be vastly more efficient.

Right now today there is no resource available to the human race at larger quantities for lower ecological cost than human labor. The only reason that “efficiency” came to mean “less human labor” was because the word was captured by the owner class in a capitalist system.

In terms of living creatures and Earth our home, it’s exactly backwards.

The following quote comes from an essay by a writer I follow and often agree with, but not this time.

I am not crediting the author of this essay because I plan to criticize it, and the belief it expresses is so widespread that it would be wrong for me to blame any one writer for it. I read versions of this statement almost every day.

It is about the WHOLE DAMNED PLANET (or at least the oceans, which cover 70% of its surface) being affected by the changing climate - which, in turn, was affected by the grotesquely selfish and evil actions of a handful of (mostly) men in the fossil fuel industry who have spent the last half century lying and gaslighting and funding contrarian “science” to keep the blinders on the populace so that they can go on making money.

(emphasis added)

The reasoning goes, we could have easily built an entire new industrial infrastucture which did not require fossil fuels to operate, but we didn’t, because “a handful of (mostly men)… [kept] the blinders on the populace so they could go on making money.”

This is simply not correct. Yes, the fossil fuel industry has done all the things this writer alleges, but no, that didn’t cause the ecosystem catastrophe. For two reasons.

First, the ecosystem catastrophe is much wider and deeper that just global heating. By far the greatest cause of mass extinction is habitat destruction. Yes, heating is likely to accelerate extinction going forward, but the extinction we have already caused was not caused by CO2 emissions, it was caused by the things we did using fossil energy. Had we done those same things using unicorn farts or pixie dust or any other non-emitting energy source, the habitats would be just as destroyed and their former inhabitants would be just as extinct.

In fact, one major habitat, big river ecosystems, we destroyed for the express purpose of generating “clean” energy. The Missouri River, to cite one example, was turned from one of the longest and most varied fresh water habitats on the entire planet into a 600 mile long dredged, channelized, and managed ditch below six big hydroelectric dams.

Second, in spite of all the advertising and messaging, we cannot now and never could have built a clean energy industrial system which does not require fossil fuels. I understand that thousands of credentialed people have told you otherwise, have told you that “we have” the technology, but that is simply false. We don’t. As John Kerry said publicly just before COP 26,

“You don’t have to give up a quality of life to achieve some of the things that we know we have to achieve. That’s the brilliance of some of the things that we know how to do,” he told BBC One’s Andrew Marr show. “I am told by scientists that 50% of the reductions we have to make to get to net zero are going to come from technologies that we don’t yet have. That’s just a reality.

Just as an aside, Kerry was savaged by the community of climate professionals for this statement. They were outraged by the very idea that he would admit in public that even if we had already built all the energy harvesting and storage machines that we are alleged to already have, we’d still fall fifty percent short of the emissions reductions we need.

But take comfort. As Mr. Kerry said, “…you don’t have to give up quality of life to achieve some of the things we know we have to achieve.”

Some of.

All we have to do is invent enough new technologies to decarbonize virtually all of mining, most of manufacturing, and all ocean and air transportation. Among other things.

Now, today, as modern technological societies attempt to make good on the falsehood of clean energy, our ecosystem degradation has accelerated to previously unimagined levels, and by our actions, not least the mining, smelting, transporting, transforming, hauling, and installation of our promised salvation in built technology, our emissions are higher than ever before. The rate of warming, rates of extinction, and literally every other measure of ecosystem collapse are also higher than ever before.

It wasn’t fossil fuel executives whose lies to us led to the current crisis. It was every voice which told us that we could keep our high speed, high energy, high tech, massively consumptive lifeways. It was John Kerry and Joe Biden. It was Elizabeth Warren and Michael Mann. Rachel Maddow’s in there somewhere. It was every registered participant of every COP meeting since COP1. It was the writers of the Paris Agreement.

Among those voices we can count almost the entire climate science community, every government on Earth, virtually all centers of higher learning, and, to be fair, just about everyone who lives in modern civilizations.

The grim truth is that before our massive degradation of the entire global ecosystem, land, water, and air, ends, we will have to either abandon, or simply lose access to, virtually every high speed, high energy, mass production, post-Industrial Revolution system we currently use. We will have to live mostly without concentrated energy.

Grim indeed. But better to face than to ignore.

This is why the broad insistence to blame the rich, or blame fossil fuel executives, or to blame any other nefarious actor for the mess we’re in, is both false and counterproductive.

Human societies can learn to live reasonably well, warm, comfortable, and well fed lives in small communities without cars, without televisions, without airplanes, without the internet, without personal computers, without most of what we think today is the bare minimum for life.

We don’t have to go back to caves. We don’t have to live in mud huts. We probably will have to return to horse, ox, or donkey drawn transportation, at least for heavy loads, and we will have to learn once again to walk, but none of these things will bring us misery.

We live in a society today where the biggest killers of people from young adulthood to early old age are deaths of depression, suicide, murder, and drugs, or deaths of toxic air, exhaust fumes, brake dust, and tire particles. We happily accept forty or fifty thousand deaths from automobile accidents a year, and ignore two to three hundred thousand people permanently maimed and crippled.

But ultimately none of that matters. Discussions of the relative pleasantness or unpleasantness of various technological parts of our lives are all based on the assumption that we have a choice whether to keep them or not.

We don’t.

When scientists and sciences tell us that we are approaching a tipping point, that our current way of life is not sustainable, they mean it. Earth and the laws of physics massively do not care if we’re happy about their workings. They simply work according to certain immutable laws or principles. “People don’t want to,” isn’t a factor.

I have written many essays on ways and means by which humans could begin a voluntary move away from high energy culture. The typical response has been “people won’t.” And I can’t dispute that. I can see.

All that means is that we won’t do it voluntarily. It specifically does not mean we won’t do it. We will.

It’s not the fossil fuel executives. It’s the system we have developed since the European conquest of the rest of the world.

There exist in the United States almost half a million people who live largely without the energies and systems the rest of us worldwide have used to destroy our ecosystem and our future. They live as they do by choice, a choice which their community does not empower them to make until they reach adulthood. They don’t think they’re miserable. There is no evidence anyone else would have to be to live in similar ways.

They chose to live as they do for religious reasons. I’m not a big fan of religion, but I do have to admit that the rest of us have never been able to figure out any other reason to live in any form of harmony with the world which evolved us. Even though ecological balance wasn’t the point of their decisions, it has been a beneficial unintended consequence.

Others of us could do it too. Just as the various religious old orders slowly expand, buy land, convert regions to horse and buggy, to horse farming, to hand powered tools, others of us could too. But first we’d have to quit blaming the fossil fuel industry. Electric cars are no better than gasoline cars, they’re just farther removed from the fossil fires that power them.

.