The occupation in Westlake Park has nearly doubled in size from yesterday. Occupy Seattle expects that occupiers may be arrested tonight. The protest is well organized, from what I saw is completely peaceful, and poses no threat (or even inconvenience, for that matter) to anybody. Clearly, any attempts to evict the occupation will not be based upon any risk or threat to public safety, but are a selective enforcement of the law to attempt to silence those who dare to speak truth to power.
Looking at the links on the Occupy Together website, there are protests/occupations of some sort happening in at least 175 cities worldwide, including events in 46 states plus the District of Columbia. Twenty-eight of these are outside the United States, including 13 different countries. That is an absolutely remarkable demonstration of the level of rage and frustration out there, seeing as this movement has essentially zero resources and organizational base.
Locally, according to this post on Occupy Seattle's website, Occupy Seattle has been asked by the mayor to vacate Westlake Park, but they have decided to stay. More support (and more occupiers) are greatly appreciated.
Occupy Seattle has been camped out in the square in front of Westlake Center for 2 nights now. I saw the above sign today and thought it pretty neatly summed up why resistance is beginning to flower now. The encampment currently consists of about 20 tents (equating, I think, to 30-50 occupiers). It is worth noting that of the people I saw, there appeared to be a pretty wide range of ages, social backgrounds, and political viewpoints. This is a lot broader than just "recent college graduates that are unemployed". Also, it is worth noting that most of the establishment media are talking about how these gatherings are insignificant and nobody seems to care about them. Well, if that's so, then why is everybody talking about it (not least the mainstream media who are so dismissive of it)?
The number one thing that is needed is more occupiers. If people can't do that, everybody is welcome at the general assemblies (occurring about 5:30-6:00 PM daily) and there is a donation box for financial contributions.
Also, on the UW campus, I saw a group promoting Occupy Wall Street in Red Square, but I didn't stop to talk to them.
Occupy Wall Street has published a Declaration; note that it is not a list of demands. The point of this resistance is not to ask the political-financial system for a redress of grievances; it is to point out the basic illegitimacy of said political-financial system. Since the system is illegitimate, it needs to be removed or radically reformed, not negotiated with (unless the negotiations are about how it will be removing itself from ill-gotten power).
When: Saturday, October 1 · 10:00am - 7:00pm
Where: Westlake Center Plaza, outside of LUSH.
Wear dollar bills with the eye of Providence facing out so we can find each other!
Apparently they have been gathering outside the Federal Building as a protest; it would make more sense to me to gather at locations more symbolic of the domination of the financial industry in our public life.
It was my intention to submit an entry for John Michael Greer's peak oil short story writing contest (see Invasion of the Space Bats for details on the contest), but I find my time and energy too sharply limited currently to get anything like that done in a timely manner.
So instead, for your reading pleasure, I am posting this list of peak oil/collapse inspired fiction and writings. If you have a work that you would like included on this list, include a link in the comments section of this post and I will consider adding it. Happy reading!
I just finished reading Eaarth by Bill McKibben, and found it to be fairly good. It wasn't enjoyable reading, as the topics it deals with - global warming, peak oil, etc. - are very distressing, but the book is honest.
Except for the last two-thirds of the last chapter. The last chapter is devoted to what might be done in the face of the impending catastrophes that await us, and it starts out with some fairly sensible ideas about food. After that, it moves on to energy, but the ideas presented are fairly unimaginative (being mostly what environmentally minded liberals have been promoting for decades - more windmills and conservation, less coal burning) and make no serious effort to rethink the basic idea of our modern energy system, which is based on electricity on demand from a plug in the wall. The energy ideas are ultimately unworkable.
What really stuck in my craw though, was the next section, which touted the internet as necessary and desirable to keep at all costs, primarily as a way to deal with the fact that modern Americans feel it is necessary to be continually entertained. Ultimately, McKibben is making an argument that the internet is necessary and therefore must be kept because of his own particular biases about what constitutes a good life and a world he would like to live in. This is in spite of the fact that the internet meshes very poorly with the logical conclusions of the rest of his book. If ever there was a technology that depends on a stable electrical grid, the internet is it, and a stable electrical grid is something we just aren't going to have as the Long Emergency winds on.
Quoting McKibben:
Which is why, if I had my finger on the switch, I'd keep the juice flowing for the Internet even if I had to turn off everything else. We need cultures that work for survival - which means we need once more to pay attention to elders, to think hard about limits, to rein in our own excesses. But we also need cultures that work for everyone, so that women aren't made servants again in our culture, or condemned to languish forever as secondary citizens in other places. The Net is the one solvent we can still afford; jet travel can't be our salvation in an age of climate shock and dwindling oil, so the kind of trip you can take with the click of a mouse will have to substitute. It will need to be the window left ajar in our communities so new ideas can blow in and old prejudices blow out. Before, you had to choose between staying at home in the place you were born, with all its sensible strictures, and "going out in the world" to "make something of yourself." Our society - restless, mobile, wasteful, exciting, and on the brink - is the product of that dynamism. We can't afford to indulge those impulses anymore, but it doesn't mean we need to shut ourselves in.
Ultimately, in book that does such a good job of coming to grips with the future we may end up getting, this last section about the glories of the internet is a rather astonishing failure of imagination.The existence of the internet has no bearing on whether women are equal citizens or whether we have an open or a closed society; remember, most of the significant gains of the women's rights movement were made before the invention of the PC, and the largest curtailment of civil rights that we have endured in our history has all come since 9/11/01, in an era when the internet permeated every aspect of life.
If we can't imagine a culture that can preserve our most cherished values into the future without depending on something as tenuous as the World Wide Web, then we are in a sorry place indeed.
First of all, I would commend to everybody last week's post on the Archdruid Report, Invasion of the Space Bats, and more specifically John Michael Greer's challenge to all writers (or aspiring writers):
I propose that as many of you as are willing write a short story set in the future in the wake of peak oil, and put it on the internet. (If you don’t have a site, Blogspot and Wordpress both offer free blogging space that you can use for the purpose.) When it’s up, post a link to it on the comments page of this post. Meanwhile, I’m going to sound out some publishers, and see if I can find one willing to bring out the world’s first anthology of peak oil-related short stories; if that happens, I’ll pick the best dozen or so stories, add an introduction, and get the collection into print. If any money comes out of it—there probably won’t be much—it will be split between the contributors or, if they agree, donated to a peak oil nonprofit.
Here are the submission requirements for the contest:
Stories should be between 2500 and 7500 words in length;
They should be in English, with correct spelling, grammar and punctuation;
They should be stories—narratives with a plot and characters—and not simply a guided tour of some corner of the future as the author imagines it;
They should be set in our future, not in an alternate history or on some other planet;
They should be works of realistic fiction or science fiction, not fantasy—that is, the setting should follow the laws of nature as those are presently understood;
They should deal directly with the impact of peak oil, and the limits to growth in general, on the future; and...
There must be a complete and utter shortage of alien space bats.
My submission will hopefully be appearing in this space soon, assuming that I can find enough time to write it. Since even finding time to post regularly in this blog is proving somewhat challenging, I make no promises regarding schedule.
Japanese pay top dollar for Ellensburg's timothy hay (Seattle Times) Hay is not a particularly valuable commodity considering its bulk. In net energy terms, it is hard to see how this makes any sense, and it certainly doesn't make sense for Cascadia as we work toward re-localization. Also, it is apparently a Sore topic for horse owners.
Families make up the fastest-growing segment of homeless people in King County. There were 10,695 homeless families in Washington state last year, according to the Washington Low-Income Housing Alliance.
In response, Catholic Housing Services this spring opened Monica's Village Place I, a new, $17 million, low-income apartment building in Seattle's Central District. Fifty families, including Burgess-Price and her three kids, live there. Seventy more families are on the waiting list.
One of the first pieces of advice a number of writers addressing the topics of peak oil and economic collapse offer is that individuals need to get out of debt (for instance, this is listed as the first recommendation on the front page of Seattle Peak Oil Awareness's website). This is the first step in disentangling yourself and your family from the financial economy, which is clearly heading for collapse according to practically anybody who has taken a serious look at our predicament and has been willing to follow the facts to their logical conclusion without flinching.
In this post, I offer some practical advice as one's financial situation can be improved to cope with the challenges of financial collapse. Please keep in mind that I am not a financial planner of any sort, and if one was to look at my own financial situation, I would not exactly be a stellar example of how to manage one's finances - though perhaps I have learned some of the lessons better by learning them through the school of hard knocks. Some of the advice I offer here may contradict the conventional wisdom of financial planners. I try to explain my reasons for why I make my recommendations.
In short, I will claim that this advice is worth no more than you paid for it.
First, most financial planners will emphasize "pay yourself first". That is, before one does anything else with a paycheck, put a certain amount each pay period into savings. Then forget that that savings exists, unless there is a bona fide financial emergency. No matter how bad one's debt situation is, everybody needs to have some kind of emergency savings, because nobody knows what will happen.
After paying yourself first, Saturday Night Live tells us how to avoid getting deeper in debt:
Got that? If not, please watch the video clip again. Repeat until it sinks in.
Next, the debts need to be paid off. Hopefully you can make more than the bare minimum payments on your debts. So after every debt gets the minimum payment, which debts should be paid down first?
This is one point where I diverge from conventional financial planning. Conventional financial planning dictates that the highest interest rate loans should be paid off first, as that will yield the quickest total payoff time. I however, look at the possibility that financial catastrophe (such as losing one's job, and not being able to find another one for a long time (i.e., longer than one's savings will last), a phenomenon which has become increasingly common) could strike at any time, and result in inability to pay any debts down and the possibility of delinquency and/or bankruptcy. With that possibility in mind, I emphasize the necessity to pay off the debts that will cause the most havoc if one becomes delinquent on them in a financial emergency first.
Student loan debt, by my standard, is the most toxic, simply because it cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and if one is delinquent on student loan debt, wages and tax returns may be garnished and all other sorts of methods legally employed to make it a problem that will never go away. Pay student loan debt off as soon as possible.
Getting rid of the mortgage is the next priority. If you have significant equity, then pay it off as soon as possible; if not, sell your house and rent. (For more discussion on renting vs. buying, Seattle Bubble frequently discusses this and related topics.) Do not, under any circumstances, justify your being in debt to own a house as "an investment". Housing is an expense, not an investment, and house-owners have all sorts of financial headaches that renters need never deal with, and even with the current prices having dramatically fallen, renting is usually cheaper than paying a mortgage on an equivalent house. Also, it is much simpler to pick up and leave if you need to. I once listened to a debate between two individuals arguing about whether we are facing severe inflation or severe deflation in the near to medium term (a debate I am agnostic on), and I was struck by how both insisted that owning residential real estate is going to be a losing proposition for the foreseeable future. In short, if you can't own a house free and clear within a reasonable time frame, it is my considered opinion that you are probably better off renting.
Next up are secured loans that have as collateral anything (such as a vehicle) that would be catastrophic to have repossessed if you were unable to pay down your debts. In future posts I will discuss vehicles and how many people truly need.
The last priority to pay off are unsecured debts. Simply put, in the event of financial catastrophe (as described above), the inability to pay off unsecured debts won't matter. So even though these have higher interest rates, they may not be much of a priority.
As with all financial decisions, individuals and families should consider information and advice from more than one source, and make plans that are tailored for their individual situation. My word certainly should not be the last word.
In future posts, I will offer more ideas on ways to save money, definancialize your life, and possibly reap some benefits (expected or otherwise) from depending less on money to meet one's needs.
In this time when discussion of political and economic disorder has gone from being a fringe topic only discussed by doomers to front-page news in the mainstream media outlets, another blog chronicling collapse might seem to be redundant. After all, there already exist a number of well-written and knowledgeable blogs covering aspects of this very same topic (many of which can be found on my blogroll). So why am I doing this?
There are two main reasons. First, I don't know of any blogger in Cascadia who is writing about collapse that is addressing issues particular to our area. Since most of the trends currently affecting us are continent-wide or world-wide in scope rather than being local issues, I imagine that most of my blogging in the near-term will be general in nature rather than local, but I suspect this will change as events progress. In any event, I intend to try and post at least occasionally on topics of local and regional interest.
Secondly, one of many inspirations for this has been The Dark Mountain Project. One of the principles of this project is that story-telling and writing about what is happening to us is important (and in fact "It is through stories that we weave reality", to quote from the Eight Principles of Uncivilisation), and that it is important for as many people as possible to tell the stories of their reality. This is intended to be a portion of my contribution.
I don't have any immediate goals with this blog other than to post something of quality regularly (at least once per week) on it. Hopefully others will find it useful and interesting.
