"The Peak Oil debate is over: the 'peakists' have won the intellectual argument."
-Dr James Schlesinger, former U.S Sec. of Defense and Sec. of Energy
I have to confess a guilty pleasure. On Monday nights my ten year old daughter and I like to sit and watch Revolution on NBC. It is a silly adventure show based on a serious premise, the failure of the worldwide power-grid. Fifteen years in the past, a cabal of unknown conspirators, disabled the power grid which led to a global collapse. Our heroine Charlie Matheson is on a quest to save her brother Danny from the depredations of the tyrannical Monroe Militia. Following her dying father Ben’s last words, she has reunited with her uncle, the former General Miles Matheson, a defector from the Militia. Aaron Pittman, the ex-Google geek was bequeathed a "techno-magic pendant" that is mysteriously related to the blackout and at Ben’s direction is accompanying her on the quest. Along the way, they pick up Nora Clayton, the stalwart rebel and IED expert, and we are off to the races. Now it is not just about saving Charlie’s wayward brother Danny, but they must discover the secret of the pendant, turn the power back on, restore the good ole’ US of A, and perhaps save humanity in the process. There are plenty of sword fights, homemade pipe-bombs, and swashbuckling archery. It’s like Errol Flynn meets MacGyver in the post-industrial era, with a nod to Katniss Everdeen in the heroine.
Yes there are lots of background and plot details that are easy to pick apart. My teenage daughters and occasionally my wife enjoy pointing out the silly flaws, like why are all their clothes in such fine, fine condition? Or when the global grid failed, what happened when the earth’s 400 nuclear power-plants all went China Syndrome simultaneously as the power was cut to their cooling systems? (think: universal Fukushima) Just how could an internal combustion engine fire up after sitting dormant for fifteen years while the fuel degraded and the cylinders rusted and seized up? And what in the world is up with the heart-shaped pendants that swish-flick magically turn the power back on? But if you can ignore the incessant commercials (thank God the election is over, now all I have to worry about is eTrading, iPhoning, and the latest sloppy Thickburger) and suspend disbelief, it’s just good fun.
But as I reflect on the show, I think it has some pernicious flaws, and they play right into our collective national delusion. In the show, the blackout was intentional, it is reversible, and industrial civilization as exemplified by America is a good thing. As a society, we believe technology will always save us and that America is exceptional and blessed with abundance (growth) in perpetuity. Our cup runneth over because we are such good little capitalists in a free (enterprise) country. Think about this, the power was lost because they turned it off. The main goal, the great hope of the protagonists is to figure out the technology of those magic little pendants and turn the power back on. The creators of the show are unable, or choose not to, believe in a future where technology is unable to fulfill our needs, where when we flip the switch, nothing happens. They are incapable of envisioning a lower-energy future that doesn’t involve dictators or bands of dystopian marauders preying on the populace. They fail to imagine a scenario where circumstance and the demands of reality propel us off the de-industrial cliff, not a cabal of evildoers.
And make no mistake, we are heading off that cliff, although the date of the fall and the speed of our headlong rush are a matter of some debate. You see, although the show is about the loss of the global grid, electricity is not the root of the problem. Oh yes, we are utterly dependent on electricity here at the zenith of industrial civilization, but electric power is generated. It is a derivative of something else, be it wind, solar, flowing water, geo-thermal, uranium, natural gas, coal, and that most magic of substances, crude oil. If fact, I will go so far as to say that all the above forms of industrial energy are in fact derived from oil in some way, shape, or form. It takes oil to power the big earth-movers to build a dam, or mine coal. It takes oil to fire up the frac trucks or construct the wind-farm.
Most of the products we use on a daily basis, in the typical American middle class household are steeped in oil. Think plastic: the children's toys, the housing on the flat screen, the smart phone, the computer, childrens toys, the handles on the bathroom cabinets, the little plug we use to child-proof the electrical outlets, pharmaceuticals, the saran wrap, foam platter, and meat diaper that entombs your nightly dinner. Heck, the ground beef itself is soaked in oil, from the giant CAFO barn where your beef was "grown", to the gigantized GPS equipped combine that harvested the genetically modified feed, all of it is dependent on cheap, abundant oil. The next time you smooch your sweetheart, remember, even the elastic and fake satin in her Victoria’s Secret negligee are made from oil.
Even with the greenest of intentions, our industrial economy is so oil soaked as to make it as black as midnight. We use about 28 billion barrels of oil a year at the global level. That’s about 75 million barrels a day, if you do the math. Think about that for a moment. In order to maintain a lifestyle in which perhaps a quarter of the world’s have a decent standard of living, a tiny minority lives lives of leisure, and the rest live on a few dollars a day, we must consume 75 million barrels of oil a day, each and every day.
Contrary to what the fossil fuel propagandists tell you on their snazzy TV commercials (remember a commercial is designed to sell you something) the stuff is not limitless.
History will vindicate M. King Hubbert who forecast both the US peak and the worldwide peak decades in advance. This is the famous Peak Oil theory, it is the second horse in the running for our Trifecta. The internet abounds with information on the subject, but I would recommend the Post Carbon Institute as a good place to start.
It’s not even running out that is the main issue. Geologists believe we have about 1 trillion of barrels of oil left in the ground. It is the fact that we burned the easiest to extract, highest quality stuff first. They no longer discover giant elephant fields where the oil gushes from the ground, we now must drill in miles of ocean water and squeeze it from fractured shale formations. We must eradicate every trace of the living Earth in the Athabasca Tar Sands to procure that precious sludge. The cheap, easy stuff is gone. Despite all the good news of those snazzy commercials, world oil production has been flat since ’05. But that’s okay, because growth has either been negative or only sluggishly positive since ’08.
And should all the plans of the White House, Congress, and the Fed fall right into place, and economic growth takes off to four or five percent a year, chances are the price of oil will spike once again and kill off our nascent recovery. This sort of instability was exactly what was predicted in the wake of peaking. But surely, you argue, if it were true, they would know, and would implement policy to fix this. They do know, and have known since at least 1972 (the Limits to Growth). Unfortunately, as Guy McPherson puts it, there are no politically viable solutions. The Hirsch Report to Congress concluded peak oil is a reality and we would need to implement adaptive strategies two decades before hitting peak in order to have a smooth transition. But the tactics of corporate America generally, and the fossil fuel companies in particular, are to divide and delay as long as possible in order to maximize the short term return to themselves and their shareholders.
As we continue our bumpy ride down the back side of Hubbert’s peak, more and more of the systems we take for granted will destabilize and fall apart. Just in time delivery, agribusiness, the daily commute to work, all these and more are at risk, and will surely fail. I know, dear reader, you are saying bring in alternatives, technology. Again, alternatives are in fact derived in part from oil. You have to mine the neodymium for the wind turbines, for example. Also, alternatives don’t pack the same punch as good old crude oil (EROEI), and they are mostly about generating electricity. They are not well suited to transport. At the end of the day, it is about the math. You simply cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.
The longer we buy into the memes that are fed to us, oil is limitless, growth is always good, technology can overcome any obstacle; the longer we fail to have an adult conversation about our predicaments. We will fail to put in decentralized mitigation strategies that might allow us to cope. Local public transit, community gardening based in permaculture, passive solar and small scale active solar and small wind turbines are some examples. The Transition Town movement is another template that might be used. But we should have started yesterday. And unfortunately that means rather than being the masters of our destiny, we will be at the mercy of events.
So, if you fancy it, watch Revolution. Like I said it is good clean fun. Just watch it with clear eyes, and understand that no Google-Fairy will deliver a Techno-Magic pendant to make everything run. Understand that we already have a magic pendant, it is just black and gooey and it’s running down.
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Thursday, October 4, 2012
On Money Matters
In the horserace of life, we take it for granted that Economic Growth and Technological Progress will be the winners. In fact, until very recently, this was considered so self evident that only unreformed hippies and anarchic punks, the sort of unsavory misanthropes who frequent anti-globalization or environmental rallies, ever questioned this basic premise. Tomorrow will be better than today. This is morning in America. It is the end of history.
Of course, in late 2008, history came back with a vengeance, and bit us right on the ass. The Great Recession (Depression II) was the result in part of financial chicanery and outright fraud on a massive scale. Should you wish to explore this in detail, the documentary “Inside Job” is a good place to start.
A year ago, September, the rage and frustration boiled over into the street, and we saw something we have not seen since the late sixties and early seventies, mass protest on the streets of America and the world. Occupy Wall Street exploded onto the scene and we couldn't escape the cry of “The banks got bailed out, we got sold out!”, punctuated by the cadence of the drum circle. The Anons came out from behind their proxies, the unions rallied their members, the students organized. All of this was driven by one simple fact. You could work hard and play by the rules and...it didn't matter. Forces entirely beyond your control could eliminate your job, take your house, wipe out your pension. Suddenly it seems that in the blink of an eye, everything could disappear and everyone was at risk. Well everyone that is except for the 1%.
For the first time in 5 generations, the two front runners had stumbled and Financial Chicanery had taken the lead. Oh we've been through downturns before. But with every other recession in recent memory, all it required was a few tweaks to the system, a tax cut here, a bit of deregulation there, and once again we were off to the races. This time the crisis was so great (according to Paulson and Bernanke we were 48 hours away from total collapse of the banking system when Lehman failed) that even our compassionate conservative Dubbya became a Keynesian. TARP, anyone?
With Obama's election, we doubled down on Keynes, yet the economy languished, throwing gasoline of the idiotic fire of the Tea Party, and here we sit, apparently stuck in the doldrums, keeping a weather eye out, waiting for the wind to stir. Some of us pray to the gods of laissez-faire, some to stimulus, each sure that if only that approach was wholly embraced, the sails would catch the wind and growth would return.
Sucks, don't it?
Most Americans don't reflect long, or even often, on what makes our monetary system tick or what happened to us. Before we can really dig into this, we have to answer a basic question. What the hell is money?
In order to answer that question you have to jump into the Tardis and fly back to a time where there was no money. We are told that money emerged because barter was inefficient and well, that seems not to be entirely true. Before the advent of agriculture, before civilization, deep in the paleolithic, we existed in small familial groups, bands, and tribes. Rarely did the size of these bands of human beings exceed 250 people. The archaeologists and anthropologists think 50-100 would have been a much more common number. As well the bands had a much flatter hierarchy. There may have been a chief or a “Big Man” but he was easily accessible to all members of the group. Just try and speak to the governor, or chair of the county board, or the mayor. First you will have to navigate a robotic phone tree, then run the gauntlet of receptionists and minor functionaries, and if your very, very lucky, you might get ten minutes at a “meet the mayor” event. Your best bet is to write a letter, send an email, or post a comment to their Facebook page, which of course will be reviewed by a volunteer or low level staffer, and you will receive a form letter for a reply.
Dear William,
Thank you for your interest in the matter of widgets. I believe the widget industry is a
vital source of jobs and growth for our community. I appreciate your opinion on the
issue and I value feedback for all my constituents. I encourage you to remain engaged in
the political process.
Best Wishes,
Pre-printed Signature
But at the level of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer, the Chief was someone you knew personally, could be related to, have shed blood with. Talking with leadership was as simple as walking to the next shelter over. The reason these bands we so small, relates in part to the circle of trust, the maximum number of individuals we have a connection to in a social setting. The maximum amount we can handle is about 230-250 and is referred to as Dunbar's number. Beyond that, we tend to if not distrust people, at least relate to them at arm's length. Think of the difference between your good friend and the red-smocked clerk wandering the cavernous aisles of the big-box hardware store.
As well, hunter-gatherers often use a consensus approach to making decisions. After all, it would not bode well for the “Big Man” to alienate a significant portion of the group, as they all depend on each other for their very survival.
At any rate, these hunter-gatherers operated without money. They had a gift-economy. Barter, if it was used was between different groups or tribes, people outside their circle of trust. Why worry about trade, when I can give this very fine atlatl I carved to my cousin. My status as a generous and skilled guy is boosted. And when my cousin takes down a plump goose with a dart, he is likely to give me a share of the meat. His status as a generous and skilled hunter is boosted and we both benefit.
And then something weird happens. The Younger Dryas period strikes, resulting in climatic change. The forested areas of the middle east dry out, cool off, and become grassland, and clever humans figure out over hundreds and thousands of years how to domesticate and grow cereal grains, and Voila! Agriculture is born. Then resulting food surpluses lead to larger settlements (cities), division of labor, and trade. It is in this context that we first see money. It is an emergent phenomenon to facilitate trade between and within cities, amongst many thousands of people, a number far beyond our circle of trust. The Sumerians may have initially used shekels, a fixed quantity of barley. Later we see the development of copper, bronze, silver, and gold coinage. And lest you think those people in the Fertile Crescent were unsophisticated, the Sumerians had tablets (cylinder seals) on which they recorded transactions with complex calculations of compound interest. The importance of this cannot be overstated, for money is in fact debt.
So what is money? “Money is a matter of functions four, a medium, a measure, a standard, a store.”
It is a medium of exchange (I can buy a gallon of gas for four dollar bills). It is a unit of account. (my car is blue booked at $5000). It is a standard of deferred payment. (this note is legal tender, for all debts public and private) It is a store of value. (I have $500,000 in my retirement fund, nah...I'm lying on that one.)
I read that modern economics teaches that the third function (standard of deferred payment) is subsumed within the other three. This doesn't surprise me one bit. Good ole' Adam Smith said an economy has three main components, capital, labor, and land. But land has been subsumed by the other two. The neo-liberals however don't want you to think of land as a separate and distinct piece, they assume is is part and parcel of capital, It is this subversion which allows us to see a forest as a sea of dollar bills, as a resource to be exploited and owned and as something limitless and substitutable, as a commodity. Likewise, they don't want us to see money as debt, it opens up a whole can of worms. By the way, I am not convinced that this is necessarily the result of a grand conspiracy. Rather I suspect it is yet another emergent phenomenon birthed of very human failings, such as greed and a lack of long-term thinking. But in my opinion it does expose a certain weakness within the dismal science.
So what happened when the Sumerian landowner had a bad season or two, and defaulted on his loans? Well he became a debt slave. Literally a slave, as were his children and grandchildren. With time, such a large percentage of the populace would become locked into peonage that it destabilized the society. The debt had reached such a level that it could never be repaid. The peasantry began to agitate for land reform and other such heretical ideas. They risked a slave uprising, a rebellion. However, these societies had a safety valve. When a new king was crowned, he would declare Jubilee and wipe the slate clean.
With the development of precious metal coinage, a specie standard became the typical monetary operating system for the civilized world throughout most of recorded history. There were occasional breaks such as tally sticks in England or Continentals in Colonial America, but these were by far the exception, not the rule. Economic growth was very slow and stable. We were still living within a solar budget.
Then two things happened. Columbus discovered the new world and a few hundred years after that, Drake discovered oil. Suddenly we had vast resources and the means to quickly convert them into products and services via machines fired by fossil fuels. Yet the currency could only expand as fast as new gold and silver could be discovered, mined and minted. The fledgling US fared pretty well, as we operated on a bi-metallic standard. Andrew Jackson dismantled the Second Bank of the United States, and silver was plentiful. Greenbacks and “Free Silver” allowed the currency to expand as the US grew. However, in 1873, the Congress bowed to powerful banking interests, and put the US on a hard gold standard. When the virus of a financial crisis took root in Europe, it spread to American and found fertile soil. With the Crime of 1873, currency was removed from circulation (deflation) , there was a huge railroad bubble, and our economy could produce far more goods and services than the public could buy. Enter the Long Depression, which didn't truly end until J.P. Morgan personally bailed out the Federal Government in 1895. Then in 1907 there is another financial crisis and JP Morgan has to bail out the US banking system. This leads to what I view as the Crime of 1913, when Congress cedes its constitutional power to coin money to a private banking cartel we call the Federal Reserve. This was supposed to fix the problem of financial crisis, but in 1929 a giant speculative stock bubble pops and we enter the Great Depression.
One of the things FDR's New Deal did was to take us off a hard gold specie standard, and put us on an exchange standard. All gold currency and bullion was confiscated by the Federal government and sequestered in Fort Knox. It took the massive injection of deficit spending that accompanied WWII and the US transition to the armory of the world to break the cycle of deflation and finally kick-start economic growth. But the worldwide gold exchange standard, formalized by the Bretton-Woods agreement couldn't hold. In 1970, Nixon unilaterally closed the gold window and we entered the realm of fiat currency. Now there was no brake on the uncontrolled growth of debt and the economy. In fact, the economy became dependent on the growth of debt.
Here is the funny thing about the Federal Reserve, as currently structured. If they increase the money supply (printing money) , the Fed loans the money into existence by funneling it to private banks. The banks then loan that money into the economy, at interest. To make matters even worse, the banks are allowed to run a Ponzi scheme through fractional reserve banking. They are only required to have 10% in reserve when they make a loan. So when a bank loans you $100,000.00 for a house, they have created $90,000.00 out of thin air. Each year the debt (public and private) must increase or there is not enough currency flowing through the system to pay off the interest on the previously existing debt.
Another odd thing happened in the seventies. Wages began to stagnate as globalization took hold. Adjusted for inflation, wages remained flat through the early 2000's. Since the Great Recession took hold, wages have declined. Yet 70% of our economy is dependent on consumer spending. So what to do? The once great middle class deployed a number of coping mechanisms. Firstly, women entered the work force. While the women's lib movement may have plowed the soil, I believe it was simple economic need at the family level that led to most American women entering the work force. Then people began to work more hours. When that option was exhausted, they took out credit cards. The national savings rate plummeted. Finally, in a last gasp, people en masse began to use the equity in their houses to prop up consumer spending. And in '08 it all came crashing down.
David Harvey states that crises of capitalism are never solved, they are just moved around geographically. What began as a banking and financial crises has morphed into a debt and growth crises. And the solution being offered up? Austerity. With each spending cut, or government layoff, or sequestration, overall revenue falls, the debt increases, the interest rises, necessitating more cutbacks. Austerity has become a positive feedback loop, driving us deeper into the hole. And all those bailouts, all they did was to prop up the broken banks. They are still sitting on trillions of dollars in bad loans and derivatives. Each new addition of QE is supposed to spur the banks to lend. But with only 1-2% growth and a mountain of defaults they cannot. They are effectively insolvent.
I saw a bumper sticker once about fifteen years ago on a truck in Casper, WY. It said “Lord, give me just one more oil boom, I promise I won't piss it away.” This is the jist of our current economic plans. Please just give us one more bubble of growth, we promise, we won't piss it away.
I would also say that money is subject to a funneling effect, a concentration. Our capitalist system tends by its very nature to wants to consolidate wealth at the top of the pyramid. And just who sits at the top of the pyramid? The financiers. They seem to have a glorious vision is which exponential growth continues ad infinitum and eventually we reach the shores of a utopian paradise where all are rich. Of course they will be deserving of behemoth sized bonuses in return for their innovation. Sadly this flies in the face of the laws of physics and the simple arithmetic of the exponential function. Economic growth and our financial system are unsustainable. As Paul Gilding puts it “When things are unsustainable, they stop.”
Lest I be accused of offering no “solutions”, here are a couple of things that might be done. First of all, implement a Global Debt Jubilee. Wipe the slates clean. If this idea is dismissed as being a remnant of godless communism by uber-conservative pseudo-Christians, just cite Leviticus. Secondly, initiate monetary and currency reform. Dismantle the Federal Reserve and institute a debt-free currency as a public good. Perhaps a bi-metallic standard is an option. Perhaps a fiat currency is better, but the key is that they be debt-free and that they are controlled by the people.
Of course the chances of any of the above happening is about nil. Therefore it may be an awfully good idea for communities to begin experimenting with local alternatives. BerkShares, bit coins, and LETS programs are all examples that could be tried. Heck, Utah made gold and silver legal tender, and they are not exactly a bastion of progressive experimentation. Perhaps people could responsibly stock up on some junk silver coins, and gold Eagles (budget permitting) as a personal currency of last resort. The idea is that communities that have access to a alternative currency will be far more resilient when the next crash comes. And come it will.
In a way, we may be far luckier if it is the financial horse that crosses the line first. After all at it's heart, money is nothing more than a social agreement, and those can be renegotiated. If it is oil or God forbid climate that pulls the trigger on collapse, we will be in far, far worse shape.
Monday, September 10, 2012
On Griffin Woods, Food Deserts, and the Nature of Boys
"Forests greet us and deserts dog our heels."
-Derrick Jensen
I began working on this week's post with the full intention of unpacking the Trifecta of the horse-race, in which we are all spectators and participants. We think we are merely sitting in the grandstand, watching the progress through binoculars, laying out two-dollar bets, according to the best guesses of the odds-makers and the bookies. Rather, we are the owners, trainers, and jockeys, whether we realize it or not. The favorites are Economic Growth and Technological Progress. The underdogs, who have unexpectedly pulled ahead: Financial Chicanery, Peak Oil, and Anthropogenic Climate Change. I promise, we will get there, along with exploring other taboo subjects (at least in polite company), the fate of Pax Americana, protest, politics, religion, and many more. I do not pretend to sway anyone to my point of view. If I can but convince even a small minority to think about the predicaments we all face, well then that alone will be something,
Then my youngest daughter asked me to teach her to ride a bike. After a small mishap, involving tangled feet, the pavement, her skinned knees, and her father's broken nose, she is ready to take the plunge once again. Bless her heart! Learning to ride a bicycle is one of the most terrifying and liberating experiences a child can have. You are expected to coordinate feet, hands, eyes, and body in a dance of incredible dexterity to accomplish...locomotion. Try to explaining it in words, the exact process to maintain control, balance, and forward motion, and I promise you, words will most certainly fail you. Riding a bike is just something you have to do.
And from the child's point of view, this is sheer terror. They are set loose, upon a piece of unfamiliar machinery, that they alone control. Mom and Dad are not there, with them, to make everything OK, to prevent the fall. And fall they will. Try and take yourself back, years ago, when you sat upon that seat for the first time, sure that you would meet the asphalt in short order. It takes grit to learn to ride that bike. But once mastered, it is the child's first real venture into the wider world, it is freedom.
Now, I freely admit that a girl's experience of the bicycle, and yes, even the outdoors in general, may be quite different from a boy's. After over twenty years of marriage, and raising three daughters, I can attest to a few truths. Firstly all-statements about people, generalizations, are often flawed. There are stark differences between my girls. One is an artist, one an accidental naturalist (wading in the slough and collecting tadpoles to raise) and one is my gardener (along with a deep fascination in dollhouses). Secondly, I wouldn't trade my situation for all the gold in El Dorado. At this point I have been swimming in estrogen for two decades. The only other person in the house who stands up to pee is the cat, and he's cut. I wouldn't even know where to begin with a son. And last of all, the ladies in my life are an absolute joy, and an abiding mystery. I am convinced now, that if I know anything about the battle of the sexes, it is this: I know nothing.
But I do know something about boys, since I am one. If fact, Mrs. Fairchild would probably point out that there are innumerable instances where I have proven that I never progressed much beyond the age of twelve. Yes, I still like Spongebob and fart jokes are still funny. As well, I think that the riding of a bike, and the attendant freedom, is fundamental to the state of boyhood.
My first bike was a hand-me-down from my big brother. I no longer remember the brand, but it was red, with deep "longhorn" handlebars, and a banana-seat. I was eight, when I learned to ride, much to the dismay of our neighbor, Delores. After several aborted attempts, Dad sent me down the steep driveway with a chant of pedal, pedal, pedal! That's all it took, from that one trip down the driveway, across the street, and to an abrupt stop facilitated by the Colonel's privacy fence, I was off! Braking and steering, however, took a little longer to master.
This is where Delores entered the picture. She was a big woman and ambled out onto the sidewalk, resplendent in a patterned house dress, right into my path. The nerve of some people. I can still hear my best friend Tim holler out "Billy! Stop!"
"I can't! I don't know how!", I replied in a moment of sheer paralysis and terror, forgetting that most important of instructions from my Dad, you must pedal backwards to brake. I met Delores with a thud reminiscent of the Colonel's fence, and down she went, fainting straightaway. I was pretty sure I'd killed her and had visions of the police leading me off to the "hole" never to be heard from again. I am glad to report that Delores fully recovered, with nothing worse to show for it than a long bruise on her massive shin, upon which the tread pattern of the front wheel was embossed on her pallid flesh in purple relief. Oh, I had to apologize, and I was restricted to riding in front of the house for a week. My dad's insurance had to pay the medical bill. But I had not, in fact, committed criminally negligent homicide, and eventually I was turned loose upon the wider world.
Back in the late seventies, after breakfast, and Saturday morning cartoons, our mothers packed peanut butter and jelly, apples, chips, and a thermos full of Kool-aid into our backpacks, and we boys set off for adventure, with the admonition to be back at home before the sun set, and not get our feet wet. The first condition was doable, the second nigh to impossible. Often, we would ride down the Highline Canal, an old irrigation and drainage ditch that snakes through Aurora, Co. It is a testament to their agrarian past, lined with majestic cottonwood trees and a first rate bike path. But often as not, we would head to the Cottonwood, the boys and I.
That was what we called it, the Cottonwood. It was a copse of plains cottonwood trees situated on a multi-acre parcel of undeveloped land across from the new middle school. There were remnants of the short-grass prairie that had once covered all of eastern Colorado, studded with yucca cactus, prickly pear, and mullein plants dancing above the cheat-grass. The dried stalk of a mullein makes a great wizard's staff for a ten-year old, by the way. There were tracts of swampy wetlands with bulrushes, cattails, and an abandoned, rusted out, late fifties Chevy. And there were the willows and the massive cottonwood trees, ancient, brooding, dark and hoary, and dare I say it, sentient. This was our Fangorn Forest, our Sherwood, our Garroting Deep. Imagine our delight on discovering an old tree-house. She was made of two by fours and plywood, with one by twos secured to the living trunk with railroad spikes as a ladder. A garden-hose was tied to a branch and left dangling, for quick descent, or the escape of one's enemies. In today's world, this represents one word: litigation. But at that time, some kind soul, who understood the nature of boys, left us a priceless treasure, a place for our imagination to run free. In our mind's eyes, surely Elves, Forestals, Merry Men or other travelers of a long lost eldritch world had left this abandoned arboreal fort, for use in defense of the realm of light against the brewing darkness.
It was here that I also learned of the kindness of strangers. Whilst trying to effect my escape from marauding orcs by sliding down the garden hose, I slipped and fell about ten feet, cracking a rib. I made it about a half mile back to my house, by bike, when a kindly construction worker, piled me, my friends, and our bikes into the back of his pickup amd drove us the rest of the way. He carried me gently to the door and presented me to my mother. To her credit, she never scolded, she just took care of me. After all, these things happen, boys will be boys. Six weeks later, I was off again.
Fast forward 35 years, and a controversy is brewing (the way the Brit's pronounce that word, is ever so much cooler). It involves Griffin Woods. For those of you who may not know, this is a patch of approximately 20 acres of undeveloped, forested land, on Springfield, IL's near west side. It sits at the corner of Chatham and Washington. Now before I go further, I must distinguish, there is a clear difference between what we have a legal right to do, and what we ought to do. The Springfield Catholic Arch-Diocese owns the land, and they certainly have to right to sell it to whomever they choose. Schnuck's grocery is a legitimate business (within our standard paradigm) and they certainly have the right to buy and develop it. Schnuck's, to their credit will bring much needed jobs to the area, and will provide an additional source of fresh foods. This is a small beginning in the effort to improve both the economy and the health of the greater Springfield area. You see, much of Springfield, particularly in the central core, and the east-side, can be considered a food-desert. Due to the pioneering work of Mari Gallagher, food-deserts have come into the public eye of late. In a rural area, a food desert is defined as living in an area where the nearest source of fresh food (a grocery store, generally speaking) is more than a ten mile trip for residents. In an urban setting, if you have to travel more than a mile to shop for fresh food, you live in a food desert. Why the concern? It is far more likely that low-income families will face transportation challenges that are not experienced by most Americans. Lack of enough income to support the use of a car (e.g.- purchase price, insurance, licensing, fuel), poor public transportation, and a decidedly non bike-friendly environment are just a few of the obstacles faced by these families. So a daily or weekly trip to a grocery store may be all but impossible.
Particularly in depressed urban centers, grocery stores see blight, high crime, poor infrastructure, and a low income base as impediments to a profitable operation. The rural landscape often fares worse. The tiny farming hamlet, with a small aging population, a decrepit Main St., and a decimated commercial base, is geographically isolated and considered unworthy of investment. The grocery chains are reluctant to locate in the areas that most need their services. This has led to entire generations of youth growing up on fast food such as burgers, or convenience store junk food, mostly made from high fructose corn syrup, corn derivatives, sugar, and salt. Think cheesy-poofs and cola. Not only does a diet like this lead to obesity and its attendant health-problems, in my opinion, it retards the physical and cognitive development of the children. We potentially end up with a large cohort of the population who grow up to be ignorant couch potatoes, more interested in America's Got Talent and the weekly football game than they are in the fate of the nation, in being engaged citizens.
So on its surface, the proposal to raze Griffin Wood's and develop the land would appear to be in the public interest. I say "on the surface" because the economic argument may be quite transient. The much ballyhooed jobs and growth, may in fact be a short term phenomenon, for reasons that I will examine in later posts. The other reason that this proposal is of superficial benefit is that the woodland possesses qualities that are very, very hard to quantify in economic terms. The aesthetic benefits to our human community would be one, think of the colors in autumn, for example. As well, according to Urban Forestry, one acre of woods sequesters 2.7 tons of carbon and emits enough oxygen for one person to breathe on an annual basis. That means that Griffin Woods is a carbon sink for 54 Springfieldians. It produces the oxygen 20 residents depend on for their lives. Doesn't seem like much, does it? But this should begin to drive home the point that these woodlands, throughout the U.S. are critically important, and as each small patch is felled, in the name of growth, jobs, and business, it is death by a thousand cuts.
The woodland also provides habitat for songbirds, for voles and mice and hence raptors such as the red-tailed hawk. It also supports countless populations of pollinators. Remember What Albert Einstein said, "One year with out bees means the next year without people." Finally, the woodland and the wetlands they contain, filter an unimaginable amount of rainwater and runoff, naturally removing toxins and pollutants from the watershed and preventing flooding. All these attributes are lumped under the dry moniker "ecosystem services" by conservation biologists. Boy, that's a slogan to rally behind, ain't it? Viva ecosystem services! Geez, it doesn't work. That is because most people experience a connection to the natural world through the lens of mythos, not logos. It seems nature is best described by the poet, the painter, the singer, and this does not lend itself to the "rational discussion" we like to pretend to in our political deliberations. So on a regular basis, the conservation argument is marginalized and the developers win. More wild areas fall to the bulldozer and more strip malls and parking lots blight our landscapes like a spreading pox.
And this brings me full circle. Back to the Cottonwood. As we succumb to the relentless juggernaut of sprawl and suburbanization, of endless growth, more and more boys (and girls) find themselves cut off from exploring their world. We deprive them of what I believe is a necessary
part of growing up and developing into well rounded adults, the ability to ramble unsupervised in the natural world, to appreciate the fullness of her bounty, and to let the imagination run free. Who wants them crossing a six land road on a bike, much less piddling around unsupervised in a marshland? And so we end up with a legion of boys, isolated in sterile, cloned , cookie-cutter, vinyl clad subdivisions. And they still piddle around. They just do in alone, online, and discover the joys of violent video-games and internet porn. What a colossal mess we have made for ourselves.
There is another way. CSAs, farmer's markets, community gardens and permaculture are offering a new model for food production and distribution. In 1995, developers expressed an interest in a parcel of undeveloped, wasted land, across from the middle school in Aurora, CO. They wanted raze the cottonwood trees and build yet another assembly of tract housing and condominium complexes. Local residents organized, began petition drives, consulted with the city, and eventually TPL acquired the property and preserved it while making a few improvements such as bike paths. The Cottonwood died, but the Jewell Park Wetlands were born. It is perhaps a bit over tame for my taste, but that copse of cottonwood trees still stands and is a wild oasis in the suburbs. Perhaps a similar path can be found for Griffin Woods. If Schnuck's brings another store to Springfield, they can find a more appropriate location. Surely this is what ought to be done. However, as sad as it makes me, I won't hold my breath. It seems that in these hard times, it is indeed "the economy, stupid", even at the cost of a living planet.
-Derrick Jensen
I began working on this week's post with the full intention of unpacking the Trifecta of the horse-race, in which we are all spectators and participants. We think we are merely sitting in the grandstand, watching the progress through binoculars, laying out two-dollar bets, according to the best guesses of the odds-makers and the bookies. Rather, we are the owners, trainers, and jockeys, whether we realize it or not. The favorites are Economic Growth and Technological Progress. The underdogs, who have unexpectedly pulled ahead: Financial Chicanery, Peak Oil, and Anthropogenic Climate Change. I promise, we will get there, along with exploring other taboo subjects (at least in polite company), the fate of Pax Americana, protest, politics, religion, and many more. I do not pretend to sway anyone to my point of view. If I can but convince even a small minority to think about the predicaments we all face, well then that alone will be something,
Then my youngest daughter asked me to teach her to ride a bike. After a small mishap, involving tangled feet, the pavement, her skinned knees, and her father's broken nose, she is ready to take the plunge once again. Bless her heart! Learning to ride a bicycle is one of the most terrifying and liberating experiences a child can have. You are expected to coordinate feet, hands, eyes, and body in a dance of incredible dexterity to accomplish...locomotion. Try to explaining it in words, the exact process to maintain control, balance, and forward motion, and I promise you, words will most certainly fail you. Riding a bike is just something you have to do.
And from the child's point of view, this is sheer terror. They are set loose, upon a piece of unfamiliar machinery, that they alone control. Mom and Dad are not there, with them, to make everything OK, to prevent the fall. And fall they will. Try and take yourself back, years ago, when you sat upon that seat for the first time, sure that you would meet the asphalt in short order. It takes grit to learn to ride that bike. But once mastered, it is the child's first real venture into the wider world, it is freedom.
Now, I freely admit that a girl's experience of the bicycle, and yes, even the outdoors in general, may be quite different from a boy's. After over twenty years of marriage, and raising three daughters, I can attest to a few truths. Firstly all-statements about people, generalizations, are often flawed. There are stark differences between my girls. One is an artist, one an accidental naturalist (wading in the slough and collecting tadpoles to raise) and one is my gardener (along with a deep fascination in dollhouses). Secondly, I wouldn't trade my situation for all the gold in El Dorado. At this point I have been swimming in estrogen for two decades. The only other person in the house who stands up to pee is the cat, and he's cut. I wouldn't even know where to begin with a son. And last of all, the ladies in my life are an absolute joy, and an abiding mystery. I am convinced now, that if I know anything about the battle of the sexes, it is this: I know nothing.
But I do know something about boys, since I am one. If fact, Mrs. Fairchild would probably point out that there are innumerable instances where I have proven that I never progressed much beyond the age of twelve. Yes, I still like Spongebob and fart jokes are still funny. As well, I think that the riding of a bike, and the attendant freedom, is fundamental to the state of boyhood.
My first bike was a hand-me-down from my big brother. I no longer remember the brand, but it was red, with deep "longhorn" handlebars, and a banana-seat. I was eight, when I learned to ride, much to the dismay of our neighbor, Delores. After several aborted attempts, Dad sent me down the steep driveway with a chant of pedal, pedal, pedal! That's all it took, from that one trip down the driveway, across the street, and to an abrupt stop facilitated by the Colonel's privacy fence, I was off! Braking and steering, however, took a little longer to master.
This is where Delores entered the picture. She was a big woman and ambled out onto the sidewalk, resplendent in a patterned house dress, right into my path. The nerve of some people. I can still hear my best friend Tim holler out "Billy! Stop!"
"I can't! I don't know how!", I replied in a moment of sheer paralysis and terror, forgetting that most important of instructions from my Dad, you must pedal backwards to brake. I met Delores with a thud reminiscent of the Colonel's fence, and down she went, fainting straightaway. I was pretty sure I'd killed her and had visions of the police leading me off to the "hole" never to be heard from again. I am glad to report that Delores fully recovered, with nothing worse to show for it than a long bruise on her massive shin, upon which the tread pattern of the front wheel was embossed on her pallid flesh in purple relief. Oh, I had to apologize, and I was restricted to riding in front of the house for a week. My dad's insurance had to pay the medical bill. But I had not, in fact, committed criminally negligent homicide, and eventually I was turned loose upon the wider world.
Back in the late seventies, after breakfast, and Saturday morning cartoons, our mothers packed peanut butter and jelly, apples, chips, and a thermos full of Kool-aid into our backpacks, and we boys set off for adventure, with the admonition to be back at home before the sun set, and not get our feet wet. The first condition was doable, the second nigh to impossible. Often, we would ride down the Highline Canal, an old irrigation and drainage ditch that snakes through Aurora, Co. It is a testament to their agrarian past, lined with majestic cottonwood trees and a first rate bike path. But often as not, we would head to the Cottonwood, the boys and I.
That was what we called it, the Cottonwood. It was a copse of plains cottonwood trees situated on a multi-acre parcel of undeveloped land across from the new middle school. There were remnants of the short-grass prairie that had once covered all of eastern Colorado, studded with yucca cactus, prickly pear, and mullein plants dancing above the cheat-grass. The dried stalk of a mullein makes a great wizard's staff for a ten-year old, by the way. There were tracts of swampy wetlands with bulrushes, cattails, and an abandoned, rusted out, late fifties Chevy. And there were the willows and the massive cottonwood trees, ancient, brooding, dark and hoary, and dare I say it, sentient. This was our Fangorn Forest, our Sherwood, our Garroting Deep. Imagine our delight on discovering an old tree-house. She was made of two by fours and plywood, with one by twos secured to the living trunk with railroad spikes as a ladder. A garden-hose was tied to a branch and left dangling, for quick descent, or the escape of one's enemies. In today's world, this represents one word: litigation. But at that time, some kind soul, who understood the nature of boys, left us a priceless treasure, a place for our imagination to run free. In our mind's eyes, surely Elves, Forestals, Merry Men or other travelers of a long lost eldritch world had left this abandoned arboreal fort, for use in defense of the realm of light against the brewing darkness.
It was here that I also learned of the kindness of strangers. Whilst trying to effect my escape from marauding orcs by sliding down the garden hose, I slipped and fell about ten feet, cracking a rib. I made it about a half mile back to my house, by bike, when a kindly construction worker, piled me, my friends, and our bikes into the back of his pickup amd drove us the rest of the way. He carried me gently to the door and presented me to my mother. To her credit, she never scolded, she just took care of me. After all, these things happen, boys will be boys. Six weeks later, I was off again.
Fast forward 35 years, and a controversy is brewing (the way the Brit's pronounce that word, is ever so much cooler). It involves Griffin Woods. For those of you who may not know, this is a patch of approximately 20 acres of undeveloped, forested land, on Springfield, IL's near west side. It sits at the corner of Chatham and Washington. Now before I go further, I must distinguish, there is a clear difference between what we have a legal right to do, and what we ought to do. The Springfield Catholic Arch-Diocese owns the land, and they certainly have to right to sell it to whomever they choose. Schnuck's grocery is a legitimate business (within our standard paradigm) and they certainly have the right to buy and develop it. Schnuck's, to their credit will bring much needed jobs to the area, and will provide an additional source of fresh foods. This is a small beginning in the effort to improve both the economy and the health of the greater Springfield area. You see, much of Springfield, particularly in the central core, and the east-side, can be considered a food-desert. Due to the pioneering work of Mari Gallagher, food-deserts have come into the public eye of late. In a rural area, a food desert is defined as living in an area where the nearest source of fresh food (a grocery store, generally speaking) is more than a ten mile trip for residents. In an urban setting, if you have to travel more than a mile to shop for fresh food, you live in a food desert. Why the concern? It is far more likely that low-income families will face transportation challenges that are not experienced by most Americans. Lack of enough income to support the use of a car (e.g.- purchase price, insurance, licensing, fuel), poor public transportation, and a decidedly non bike-friendly environment are just a few of the obstacles faced by these families. So a daily or weekly trip to a grocery store may be all but impossible.
Particularly in depressed urban centers, grocery stores see blight, high crime, poor infrastructure, and a low income base as impediments to a profitable operation. The rural landscape often fares worse. The tiny farming hamlet, with a small aging population, a decrepit Main St., and a decimated commercial base, is geographically isolated and considered unworthy of investment. The grocery chains are reluctant to locate in the areas that most need their services. This has led to entire generations of youth growing up on fast food such as burgers, or convenience store junk food, mostly made from high fructose corn syrup, corn derivatives, sugar, and salt. Think cheesy-poofs and cola. Not only does a diet like this lead to obesity and its attendant health-problems, in my opinion, it retards the physical and cognitive development of the children. We potentially end up with a large cohort of the population who grow up to be ignorant couch potatoes, more interested in America's Got Talent and the weekly football game than they are in the fate of the nation, in being engaged citizens.
So on its surface, the proposal to raze Griffin Wood's and develop the land would appear to be in the public interest. I say "on the surface" because the economic argument may be quite transient. The much ballyhooed jobs and growth, may in fact be a short term phenomenon, for reasons that I will examine in later posts. The other reason that this proposal is of superficial benefit is that the woodland possesses qualities that are very, very hard to quantify in economic terms. The aesthetic benefits to our human community would be one, think of the colors in autumn, for example. As well, according to Urban Forestry, one acre of woods sequesters 2.7 tons of carbon and emits enough oxygen for one person to breathe on an annual basis. That means that Griffin Woods is a carbon sink for 54 Springfieldians. It produces the oxygen 20 residents depend on for their lives. Doesn't seem like much, does it? But this should begin to drive home the point that these woodlands, throughout the U.S. are critically important, and as each small patch is felled, in the name of growth, jobs, and business, it is death by a thousand cuts.
The woodland also provides habitat for songbirds, for voles and mice and hence raptors such as the red-tailed hawk. It also supports countless populations of pollinators. Remember What Albert Einstein said, "One year with out bees means the next year without people." Finally, the woodland and the wetlands they contain, filter an unimaginable amount of rainwater and runoff, naturally removing toxins and pollutants from the watershed and preventing flooding. All these attributes are lumped under the dry moniker "ecosystem services" by conservation biologists. Boy, that's a slogan to rally behind, ain't it? Viva ecosystem services! Geez, it doesn't work. That is because most people experience a connection to the natural world through the lens of mythos, not logos. It seems nature is best described by the poet, the painter, the singer, and this does not lend itself to the "rational discussion" we like to pretend to in our political deliberations. So on a regular basis, the conservation argument is marginalized and the developers win. More wild areas fall to the bulldozer and more strip malls and parking lots blight our landscapes like a spreading pox.
And this brings me full circle. Back to the Cottonwood. As we succumb to the relentless juggernaut of sprawl and suburbanization, of endless growth, more and more boys (and girls) find themselves cut off from exploring their world. We deprive them of what I believe is a necessary
part of growing up and developing into well rounded adults, the ability to ramble unsupervised in the natural world, to appreciate the fullness of her bounty, and to let the imagination run free. Who wants them crossing a six land road on a bike, much less piddling around unsupervised in a marshland? And so we end up with a legion of boys, isolated in sterile, cloned , cookie-cutter, vinyl clad subdivisions. And they still piddle around. They just do in alone, online, and discover the joys of violent video-games and internet porn. What a colossal mess we have made for ourselves.
There is another way. CSAs, farmer's markets, community gardens and permaculture are offering a new model for food production and distribution. In 1995, developers expressed an interest in a parcel of undeveloped, wasted land, across from the middle school in Aurora, CO. They wanted raze the cottonwood trees and build yet another assembly of tract housing and condominium complexes. Local residents organized, began petition drives, consulted with the city, and eventually TPL acquired the property and preserved it while making a few improvements such as bike paths. The Cottonwood died, but the Jewell Park Wetlands were born. It is perhaps a bit over tame for my taste, but that copse of cottonwood trees still stands and is a wild oasis in the suburbs. Perhaps a similar path can be found for Griffin Woods. If Schnuck's brings another store to Springfield, they can find a more appropriate location. Surely this is what ought to be done. However, as sad as it makes me, I won't hold my breath. It seems that in these hard times, it is indeed "the economy, stupid", even at the cost of a living planet.
Monday, September 3, 2012
On Travel
"Good help ain't cheap, and cheap help ain't good."
-Anonymous
The subjects I will broach have well documented and written about for years, by a variety of experts, economists, scientists, journalists, and writers and occasionally theologians. What I hope to do is to examine the issues that we collectively face, at the end of an age, from the perspective of a layman, an average Joe, a working stiff.
I am a regular working guy. I make my living off one of the most fossil fuel intensive industries under the sun, the airline business. Crude oil is the life blood of this business. Jet fuel is now the largest expense airlines have, outstripping even labor (including health care). Now, every major legacy carrier has gone bankrupt, resorting to Chapter 11 to abrogate their labor agreements and toss workers and their pay, pensions, and health insurance out the window. Every function that can be subcontracted, has been. Catering, aircraft cleaning, maintenance, passenger check-in, baggage handling and ramp service and even flying. All these functions are now performed by third party vendors, wherever possible.
As a side note, when pension obligations are discharged under Chapter 11, the responsibility for paying pension claims, generally at fifty cents to the dollar, falls to the PBGC. (Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation) Think of it as the FDIC of pensions. That means, dear reader, that this responsibility falls to you, as a taxpayer. Meanwhile the airline execs walk away with golden parachutes, receiving Wall Street accolades for their "turnaround". Yet one more example for socialism for the 1% and capitalism for the 99%. Ain't neo-liberal economics great? Of course the PBGC is grossly underfunded and is effectively insolvent. Perhaps Paul Ryan can come up with a voucher program for that too?
Even the epidemic of airline bankruptcy has not been enough to staunch the bleeding. And so the subcontracting has ratcheted up. Short haul routes that were once flown by the majors in 737 aircraft are now bid out to the regional airlines for 90, 70, or even 50-seat RJ service, yet the fares only increase (note the recent $10 one-way fare increase on short haul routes). Enter the era of nickel and dime-ing and self-service. Want to check a bag? $25.00 please. Want a seat with legroom suitable for someone over five feet tall?, That'll be $69 please. Even Tyrion Lannister would be cramped and uncomfortable in seat 32B. Show up to the airport a little early and want to get a head start? That'll be $75 please. How would you like to pay for that today?
Just as getting a person on the phone is an increasingly rare experience, so is actually interacting with a human being during the booking of your reservation, or check-in. Humans are expensive and electrons are cheap, for now. Most customers have been blithely trained to do their own work. Tickets are purchased via an el-cheapo website (replete with fine print restrictions even an experienced lawyer can't sort out.) When you arrive at the airport, you insert your credit card into a kiosk, or ARD (agent replacement device) as we call it, and out spit your boarding passes, after you navigate a dizzying series of menus, hawking various "travel options" in an effort to separate you from your money. The truly savvy techno-travelers get a bar code sent directly to their smart phone and breeze through security without ever having to mess with the unwashed masses at the ticket counters.
Still, this is just not enough. So the airlines merge. There is simply not enough revenue available for them all. Contraction is the order of the day. When I started in the business over twenty years ago, there were many air carriers. The original Frontier, Eastern, Western, Ozark, Aloha, Western Pacific, Northwest, America West, and TWA and many more have either gone belly-up or been swallowed by competitors. The latest was the marriage between Continental and United. Now US Airways is making noise about merging with American, after they finally succumbed to to pressures of operating with livable wages in a high oil environment and filed chapter 11.
Another side note, I remember when US Airways emerged from Chapter 11 and merged with America West. Their CEO said "US Airways is well positioned to be profitable in an environment with oil priced at $60 per barrel", or something very close to that. I paraphrase. Last time I looked, Brent crude was $113/bbl.
It is easy to peg this as all the fault of the "greedy unions" but that would be wrong. Keep in mind that when my friend George went through an airline bankruptcy in the early 90's, and mainline service was replaced with regional service at his location, he went from $36,000.00/yr as a ticket counter agent (hardly a 1% living) to $8.00/hr. DGS (Delta Global Services) one of the major ground-handling providers is starting their new-hires at $7.50/hr. -part time- in 2012! This is the magic of the market, right? The invisible hand at work. Unfortunately the Adam Smith's hand is crushing the workers into debt-peonage. At $7.50/hr., they are far less likely to finance a car, buy a home, or go shopping (consume) which is where 70% of our GDP is birthed. And so the economy languishes. Meanwhile, instead of professional service at an airport, what we get is akin to a trip to the local burger shack during lunch rush. Airlines have even had to relax their tattoo and piercing policies to accommodate the new caliber of ramp-workers.
I actually do not arrive at this juncture from a place of covetousness or envy. This is just the way is is. This is what a corporation must do to remain competitive in the 21st century. As Wendel Berry put it: "A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance." This pile of money has only one purpose, to become an even bigger pile of money, by whatever means necessary. This is the process of "biggering" that Dr. Seuss wrote so eloquently about the "The Lorax."
So what do we do? Unfortunately, most citizens would see this as an issue to be "fixed" by "policy". Provide grants or stimulus. Cut taxes, relax regulations. Perhaps drill, baby, drill. Build a pipeline direct to the tar-sands. That's great shit up there in Alberta ain't it? Let's raze the entire Canadian boreal forest and poison the watershed of a whole province so we can fly to LAS for $59.00, one-way. Let's put the world's largest freshwater aquifer at risk, while we're at it. And that doesn't even raise the specter of runaway greenhouse, a real risk at this point, by all accounts.
And therein lies the crux of the problem. We cannot see the forest for the trees. We see individual issues within the Global Industrial Economy as problems to be fixed, rather than seeing the economy for what it is, a man-made complex adaptive system that exists as a subset within the biosphere. And like any organism, the Global Industrial Economy depends on abundant nutrients and ample waste sinks. Unfortunately the larder is getting bare and the septic tank is backing up into the yard. We know this. Meals on Wheels ain't gonna show up and the Divine Septic Service is otherwise occupied.
So once again, what are we to do? We can plant a garden and put in a composting toilet, or we can sit back and watch the horse race. More on the looming Trifecta next time.
-Anonymous
The subjects I will broach have well documented and written about for years, by a variety of experts, economists, scientists, journalists, and writers and occasionally theologians. What I hope to do is to examine the issues that we collectively face, at the end of an age, from the perspective of a layman, an average Joe, a working stiff.
I am a regular working guy. I make my living off one of the most fossil fuel intensive industries under the sun, the airline business. Crude oil is the life blood of this business. Jet fuel is now the largest expense airlines have, outstripping even labor (including health care). Now, every major legacy carrier has gone bankrupt, resorting to Chapter 11 to abrogate their labor agreements and toss workers and their pay, pensions, and health insurance out the window. Every function that can be subcontracted, has been. Catering, aircraft cleaning, maintenance, passenger check-in, baggage handling and ramp service and even flying. All these functions are now performed by third party vendors, wherever possible.
As a side note, when pension obligations are discharged under Chapter 11, the responsibility for paying pension claims, generally at fifty cents to the dollar, falls to the PBGC. (Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation) Think of it as the FDIC of pensions. That means, dear reader, that this responsibility falls to you, as a taxpayer. Meanwhile the airline execs walk away with golden parachutes, receiving Wall Street accolades for their "turnaround". Yet one more example for socialism for the 1% and capitalism for the 99%. Ain't neo-liberal economics great? Of course the PBGC is grossly underfunded and is effectively insolvent. Perhaps Paul Ryan can come up with a voucher program for that too?
Even the epidemic of airline bankruptcy has not been enough to staunch the bleeding. And so the subcontracting has ratcheted up. Short haul routes that were once flown by the majors in 737 aircraft are now bid out to the regional airlines for 90, 70, or even 50-seat RJ service, yet the fares only increase (note the recent $10 one-way fare increase on short haul routes). Enter the era of nickel and dime-ing and self-service. Want to check a bag? $25.00 please. Want a seat with legroom suitable for someone over five feet tall?, That'll be $69 please. Even Tyrion Lannister would be cramped and uncomfortable in seat 32B. Show up to the airport a little early and want to get a head start? That'll be $75 please. How would you like to pay for that today?
Just as getting a person on the phone is an increasingly rare experience, so is actually interacting with a human being during the booking of your reservation, or check-in. Humans are expensive and electrons are cheap, for now. Most customers have been blithely trained to do their own work. Tickets are purchased via an el-cheapo website (replete with fine print restrictions even an experienced lawyer can't sort out.) When you arrive at the airport, you insert your credit card into a kiosk, or ARD (agent replacement device) as we call it, and out spit your boarding passes, after you navigate a dizzying series of menus, hawking various "travel options" in an effort to separate you from your money. The truly savvy techno-travelers get a bar code sent directly to their smart phone and breeze through security without ever having to mess with the unwashed masses at the ticket counters.
Still, this is just not enough. So the airlines merge. There is simply not enough revenue available for them all. Contraction is the order of the day. When I started in the business over twenty years ago, there were many air carriers. The original Frontier, Eastern, Western, Ozark, Aloha, Western Pacific, Northwest, America West, and TWA and many more have either gone belly-up or been swallowed by competitors. The latest was the marriage between Continental and United. Now US Airways is making noise about merging with American, after they finally succumbed to to pressures of operating with livable wages in a high oil environment and filed chapter 11.
Another side note, I remember when US Airways emerged from Chapter 11 and merged with America West. Their CEO said "US Airways is well positioned to be profitable in an environment with oil priced at $60 per barrel", or something very close to that. I paraphrase. Last time I looked, Brent crude was $113/bbl.
It is easy to peg this as all the fault of the "greedy unions" but that would be wrong. Keep in mind that when my friend George went through an airline bankruptcy in the early 90's, and mainline service was replaced with regional service at his location, he went from $36,000.00/yr as a ticket counter agent (hardly a 1% living) to $8.00/hr. DGS (Delta Global Services) one of the major ground-handling providers is starting their new-hires at $7.50/hr. -part time- in 2012! This is the magic of the market, right? The invisible hand at work. Unfortunately the Adam Smith's hand is crushing the workers into debt-peonage. At $7.50/hr., they are far less likely to finance a car, buy a home, or go shopping (consume) which is where 70% of our GDP is birthed. And so the economy languishes. Meanwhile, instead of professional service at an airport, what we get is akin to a trip to the local burger shack during lunch rush. Airlines have even had to relax their tattoo and piercing policies to accommodate the new caliber of ramp-workers.
I actually do not arrive at this juncture from a place of covetousness or envy. This is just the way is is. This is what a corporation must do to remain competitive in the 21st century. As Wendel Berry put it: "A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance." This pile of money has only one purpose, to become an even bigger pile of money, by whatever means necessary. This is the process of "biggering" that Dr. Seuss wrote so eloquently about the "The Lorax."
So what do we do? Unfortunately, most citizens would see this as an issue to be "fixed" by "policy". Provide grants or stimulus. Cut taxes, relax regulations. Perhaps drill, baby, drill. Build a pipeline direct to the tar-sands. That's great shit up there in Alberta ain't it? Let's raze the entire Canadian boreal forest and poison the watershed of a whole province so we can fly to LAS for $59.00, one-way. Let's put the world's largest freshwater aquifer at risk, while we're at it. And that doesn't even raise the specter of runaway greenhouse, a real risk at this point, by all accounts.
And therein lies the crux of the problem. We cannot see the forest for the trees. We see individual issues within the Global Industrial Economy as problems to be fixed, rather than seeing the economy for what it is, a man-made complex adaptive system that exists as a subset within the biosphere. And like any organism, the Global Industrial Economy depends on abundant nutrients and ample waste sinks. Unfortunately the larder is getting bare and the septic tank is backing up into the yard. We know this. Meals on Wheels ain't gonna show up and the Divine Septic Service is otherwise occupied.
So once again, what are we to do? We can plant a garden and put in a composting toilet, or we can sit back and watch the horse race. More on the looming Trifecta next time.
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