WEBVTT 00:00:00.170 --> 00:00:05.190 Hey everybody, KMO here. Today is March 24th, 00:00:05.209 --> 00:00:11.570 2026. In the spring of 2010, 16 years ago, I 00:00:11.570 --> 00:00:13.109 was living at the Ecovillage Training Center 00:00:13.109 --> 00:00:16.149 in Summertown, Tennessee, and I decided to turn 00:00:16.149 --> 00:00:18.390 a set of early Sea Realm podcast interviews into 00:00:18.390 --> 00:00:21.649 a book. At the time, that was a pretty ambitious 00:00:21.649 --> 00:00:23.690 self -publishing project compared to what it 00:00:23.690 --> 00:00:26.440 would be today. There was no AI transcription, 00:00:26.640 --> 00:00:28.760 and there weren't the same kinds of turnkey self 00:00:28.760 --> 00:00:31.039 -publishing pipelines that now make that sort 00:00:31.039 --> 00:00:34.399 of thing much easier. But I was briefly seized 00:00:34.399 --> 00:00:37.520 by an ambitious spirit, and I got the project 00:00:37.520 --> 00:00:41.020 done in a matter of weeks. The result was Conversations 00:00:41.020 --> 00:00:44.719 on Collapse, Sea Realm podcast transcripts. And 00:00:44.719 --> 00:00:46.840 what you're about to hear is not something I 00:00:46.840 --> 00:00:49.820 just now assembled. This recording goes back 00:00:49.820 --> 00:00:51.799 to the original creation of Conversations on 00:00:51.799 --> 00:00:54.630 Collapse. I put it together at the time as a 00:00:54.630 --> 00:00:57.329 sampler to send to Doug Lane, whose name is in 00:00:57.329 --> 00:01:00.649 the file name. Doug went on to become a well 00:01:00.649 --> 00:01:02.929 -known podcaster and public intellectual in his 00:01:02.929 --> 00:01:04.810 own right, and he was one of the people who came 00:01:04.810 --> 00:01:07.230 along partly under the influence of the Sea Realm 00:01:07.230 --> 00:01:11.090 podcast. So this audio is also a small artifact 00:01:11.090 --> 00:01:16.049 from that moment. Now, 16 years later, I'm returning 00:01:16.049 --> 00:01:18.909 to that material from a different angle. The 00:01:18.909 --> 00:01:20.750 new project is called Getting Over Collapse. 00:01:21.340 --> 00:01:24.859 It won't be just another collection of transcripts. 00:01:24.980 --> 00:01:27.500 It's shaping up to be a reflection on the worldview 00:01:27.500 --> 00:01:29.719 I was caught up in at the time and an attempt 00:01:29.719 --> 00:01:32.680 to unpack it with the benefit of time and distance. 00:01:33.980 --> 00:01:36.420 I'm not going to try to do all of that here because 00:01:36.420 --> 00:01:38.140 I've got a lot of material I want to share with 00:01:38.140 --> 00:01:40.500 you, but if you'd like to follow the progress 00:01:40.500 --> 00:01:42.840 of Getting Over Collapse, head on over to crome 00:01:42.840 --> 00:01:47.799 .org. That's crome .org, not crome .com. The 00:01:47.799 --> 00:01:51.159 .com website is... what's left of the Sea Realm 00:01:51.159 --> 00:01:55.219 Podcast archive. The newer .org site is one that 00:01:55.219 --> 00:01:57.140 is focused on my current projects, including 00:01:57.140 --> 00:02:03.799 Getting Over Collapse. So once again, sea -realm 00:02:03.799 --> 00:02:09.139 .org. I don't have time to say something about 00:02:09.139 --> 00:02:11.120 each of the people you're about to hear, but 00:02:11.120 --> 00:02:14.120 the first and last voice in this collection of 00:02:14.120 --> 00:02:17.479 excerpts is that of Dmitry Orlov. He played a 00:02:17.479 --> 00:02:19.500 pivotal role in changing the direction of the 00:02:19.500 --> 00:02:21.860 Sea Realm podcast, which is why my first conversation 00:02:21.860 --> 00:02:24.319 with him makes up the first chapter of Conversations 00:02:24.319 --> 00:02:27.740 on Collapse. Since the peak oil scene dissolved, 00:02:28.020 --> 00:02:29.840 and the people who gathered under that banner 00:02:29.840 --> 00:02:32.900 went their different ways, I know many of you 00:02:32.900 --> 00:02:35.699 do not approve, not only of some of the trajectories 00:02:35.699 --> 00:02:39.139 those people have taken, but also of the newer 00:02:39.139 --> 00:02:41.620 narratives they've gravitated toward, Dimitri 00:02:41.620 --> 00:02:44.699 included. I'm not going to get into any of that 00:02:44.699 --> 00:02:47.819 here. What I will say is that Dimitri was my 00:02:47.819 --> 00:02:50.500 introduction to peak oil. I had heard the phrase 00:02:50.500 --> 00:02:52.800 before, but I mostly associated it with people 00:02:52.800 --> 00:02:55.659 I didn't particularly want to hear from. What 00:02:55.659 --> 00:02:58.560 changed that was a slide deck from a PowerPoint 00:02:58.560 --> 00:03:01.159 presentation Dimitri had done called Closing 00:03:01.159 --> 00:03:04.879 the Collapse Gap. This was before he was blogging 00:03:04.879 --> 00:03:07.659 regularly, before any of his books, before he 00:03:07.659 --> 00:03:10.599 had much of a public profile at all. All I had 00:03:10.599 --> 00:03:13.180 seen were those slides. But that was enough to 00:03:13.180 --> 00:03:14.860 make me think, I need to get this guy on the 00:03:14.860 --> 00:03:18.120 podcast. And really, it was Dimitri who put me 00:03:18.120 --> 00:03:22.000 on the peak oil vector. Once I had spoken with 00:03:22.000 --> 00:03:23.979 people like James Howard Kunstler and Albert 00:03:23.979 --> 00:03:26.139 Bates, it became much easier to keep interviewing 00:03:26.139 --> 00:03:28.759 people associated with the peak oil worldview. 00:03:29.300 --> 00:03:32.919 But Dimitri was my point of entry. And what I'll 00:03:32.919 --> 00:03:35.060 say for him, entirely to his credit, is that 00:03:35.060 --> 00:03:38.189 he was always entertaining to interview. He did 00:03:38.189 --> 00:03:41.550 not rely on a set of safe, prepackaged talking 00:03:41.550 --> 00:03:44.770 points. He was willing to take chances. He was 00:03:44.770 --> 00:03:47.409 willing to think out loud. In the next hour, 00:03:47.490 --> 00:03:49.250 you're going to hear at least one person who 00:03:49.250 --> 00:03:52.009 really did sound locked into a fixed set of polished 00:03:52.009 --> 00:03:55.870 lines. Dimitri was not that guy. He was willing 00:03:55.870 --> 00:04:00.129 to perform without a net. So this first excerpt 00:04:00.129 --> 00:04:02.830 comes from Episodes 21 and 22 of the Sea Realm 00:04:02.830 --> 00:04:05.629 podcast. Episode 21 was called Closing the Disinfo 00:04:05.629 --> 00:04:09.550 Gap, and Episode 22 was called Space. They were 00:04:09.550 --> 00:04:12.469 released on February 14th and February 21st, 00:04:12.469 --> 00:04:17.069 2007. You know, in the United States, people 00:04:17.069 --> 00:04:19.149 who stay away from doctors tend to be healthier 00:04:19.149 --> 00:04:21.589 than people who don't. So if you want to live 00:04:21.589 --> 00:04:24.910 long and be healthy, don't go see a doctor. In 00:04:24.910 --> 00:04:26.589 this country. In other countries, you know, it's 00:04:26.589 --> 00:04:29.519 different. in some places. But here, it's basically 00:04:29.519 --> 00:04:32.500 a bunch of people who are there to push pharmaceuticals 00:04:32.500 --> 00:04:38.160 on you. And the more experimental the pharmaceuticals, 00:04:38.160 --> 00:04:39.600 the better. So if you have some really strange 00:04:39.600 --> 00:04:43.220 symptoms, you're a goldmine for a doctor or for 00:04:43.220 --> 00:04:45.839 a pharmaceutical company. And they're not likely 00:04:45.839 --> 00:04:47.420 to help you in any way. They're just going to 00:04:47.420 --> 00:04:50.800 treat you as a lab animal. But in general, you 00:04:50.800 --> 00:04:53.019 can read up on the statistics. People who stay 00:04:53.019 --> 00:04:55.879 away from doctors generally do better in terms 00:04:55.879 --> 00:04:59.110 of health. And, you know, the more general point 00:04:59.110 --> 00:05:02.250 is, okay, well, nobody has a retirement. Everybody 00:05:02.250 --> 00:05:05.089 knows that. Now, why is that? Well, that's because 00:05:05.089 --> 00:05:07.790 everybody has been basically spending money they 00:05:07.790 --> 00:05:10.790 don't have. People in this country can't afford 00:05:10.790 --> 00:05:13.569 to drive cars. They can't afford to live out 00:05:13.569 --> 00:05:16.009 in suburbia. None of these things are things 00:05:16.009 --> 00:05:20.310 that they can afford. And so there are credit 00:05:20.310 --> 00:05:22.949 card companies to take advantage of the fact 00:05:22.949 --> 00:05:25.699 that, you know, they're living beyond their means 00:05:25.699 --> 00:05:29.079 and they don't care that they're basically destroying 00:05:29.079 --> 00:05:32.819 their future. And so I don't know if it's really 00:05:32.819 --> 00:05:35.920 all that immoral to help people destroy their 00:05:35.920 --> 00:05:40.480 future if that's what they want to do. But seeing 00:05:40.480 --> 00:05:42.980 an entire country try to do this is a little, 00:05:43.079 --> 00:05:47.129 you know, disappointing, I would say. Certainly, 00:05:47.149 --> 00:05:49.149 we are all responsible for the situations that 00:05:49.149 --> 00:05:50.990 we create for ourselves, and we are all responsible 00:05:50.990 --> 00:05:54.769 for exercising financial prudence. But at the 00:05:54.769 --> 00:05:59.490 same time, vast fortunes have been made by seducing 00:05:59.490 --> 00:06:03.230 folks with easy credit and with a constant barrage 00:06:03.230 --> 00:06:06.949 of imagery, which describes the lifestyle of 00:06:06.949 --> 00:06:08.790 a happy, successful person in the United States. 00:06:09.110 --> 00:06:12.209 Well, that's another difference between the Soviet 00:06:12.209 --> 00:06:16.199 Union and the United States. turned out to be 00:06:16.199 --> 00:06:20.060 to the advantage of the Soviet Union, which is 00:06:20.060 --> 00:06:23.319 American propaganda is very good. There is all 00:06:23.319 --> 00:06:25.740 this advertising, all this marketing, you know, 00:06:25.759 --> 00:06:27.980 seducing people and doing things that are bad 00:06:27.980 --> 00:06:32.519 for them. Soviet propaganda was heavy -handed, 00:06:32.740 --> 00:06:35.560 it was kind of ugly, and it was not seducing 00:06:35.560 --> 00:06:38.180 people. It was trying to basically harangue and 00:06:38.180 --> 00:06:40.639 browse -beat people into doing things that were 00:06:40.639 --> 00:06:43.019 good for them. Now it turns out that human nature 00:06:43.019 --> 00:06:45.339 is such that people won't respond very well to 00:06:45.339 --> 00:06:49.199 that treatment. Humans like to be seduced. They 00:06:49.199 --> 00:06:51.920 like to be, you know, cajoled, and they like 00:06:51.920 --> 00:06:54.000 to do things that are bad for them if somebody 00:06:54.000 --> 00:06:57.480 tells them that that's okay. So... In terms of 00:06:57.480 --> 00:07:00.379 that, you know, Soviet propaganda pretty much 00:07:00.379 --> 00:07:03.300 made people kind of think for themselves a little 00:07:03.300 --> 00:07:07.439 bit, you know. And American propaganda kills 00:07:07.439 --> 00:07:10.540 that, you know. So you have very few people in 00:07:10.540 --> 00:07:12.379 this country, you know. There's all this talk 00:07:12.379 --> 00:07:15.019 about individualism, but really it's very much 00:07:15.019 --> 00:07:18.360 a, you know, hard mentality kind of country where 00:07:18.360 --> 00:07:20.860 everybody thinks that, you know, it's okay to 00:07:20.860 --> 00:07:23.300 have credit cards. It's okay to, you know, max 00:07:23.300 --> 00:07:26.910 out your credits. It's fine. That's what everybody's 00:07:26.910 --> 00:07:30.550 doing. And the thing is, I've seen a lot of just 00:07:30.550 --> 00:07:34.089 really horrendous suffering, you know, and so 00:07:34.089 --> 00:07:36.269 I can't really be sort of lighthearted about 00:07:36.269 --> 00:07:38.829 it. Oh, you know, capitalism is going to fall 00:07:38.829 --> 00:07:41.149 apart. People are not going to be exploited anymore. 00:07:41.490 --> 00:07:44.829 You know, how wonderful. You know, the fact is 00:07:44.829 --> 00:07:46.470 that, you know, it's going to be really painful 00:07:46.470 --> 00:07:48.870 to watch. You know, and that's the part that 00:07:48.870 --> 00:07:52.589 I don't like about it. That was Dmitry Orlov. 00:07:53.100 --> 00:07:56.019 Next up is Albert K. Bates. And what you're about 00:07:56.019 --> 00:07:59.660 to hear was either in episode 29 of the Sea Realm 00:07:59.660 --> 00:08:02.319 podcast, it was called Corporatized, and that 00:08:02.319 --> 00:08:05.899 was released on April 18th, 2007, or the next 00:08:05.899 --> 00:08:08.300 episode, Vine of the Soul, which was released 00:08:08.300 --> 00:08:14.459 on the 25th of April, 2007. I think that what 00:08:14.459 --> 00:08:18.240 I'm seeing is a race. It's a race between whether 00:08:18.240 --> 00:08:21.959 we will attain a degree of consciousness on this 00:08:21.959 --> 00:08:25.720 planet. And it's a race between whether we're 00:08:25.720 --> 00:08:30.800 going to have a habitable planet or whether we'll 00:08:30.800 --> 00:08:35.100 attain as life forms on this planet some form 00:08:35.100 --> 00:08:39.980 of cosmic consciousness in time. to carry out, 00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:43.039 finish out this experiment that was begun many 00:08:43.039 --> 00:08:45.980 billions of years ago. And I think that what 00:08:45.980 --> 00:08:48.980 I've been seeing in this last few weeks or months 00:08:48.980 --> 00:08:52.840 is some warning signs that we're not winning 00:08:52.840 --> 00:08:56.019 our race, that Gaia is in a lot worse trouble 00:08:56.019 --> 00:08:59.899 than we thought. And I'm seeing all of this, 00:08:59.980 --> 00:09:02.639 and it's sad to say it, but it seems to me that 00:09:02.639 --> 00:09:05.450 history might indeed be ended. And if climate 00:09:05.450 --> 00:09:09.330 change tips us into a desert world and it does 00:09:09.330 --> 00:09:12.169 it in less than a thousand years, maybe even 00:09:12.169 --> 00:09:16.149 a hundred years instead of a billion years, well, 00:09:16.350 --> 00:09:19.009 it's our fault that, you know, blame is pretty 00:09:19.009 --> 00:09:22.970 useless. So what was the end result of the experiment? 00:09:23.149 --> 00:09:25.909 You know, some would say that the purpose of 00:09:25.909 --> 00:09:28.230 the experiment of having life on this planet 00:09:28.230 --> 00:09:31.450 was to lift off consciousness, you know, to transcend 00:09:31.450 --> 00:09:35.649 the corporeal realm. And to start working consciousness 00:09:35.649 --> 00:09:39.129 through various dimensions. And for the past 00:09:39.129 --> 00:09:41.649 many decades, that's what we've been doing. You 00:09:41.649 --> 00:09:46.730 know, Albert Hoffman discovered LSD about the 00:09:46.730 --> 00:09:51.549 end of the 1940s. You had Gordon Wasson going 00:09:51.549 --> 00:09:54.909 down to meet with the curanderos in Mexico in 00:09:54.909 --> 00:09:58.210 the 50s. You had a lot of people who were gaining 00:09:58.210 --> 00:10:00.210 this exploration. And the fact that those numbers 00:10:00.210 --> 00:10:03.399 have been expanding every year. And time is now 00:10:03.399 --> 00:10:06.360 getting very short. And we have to wonder whether 00:10:06.360 --> 00:10:08.379 we're going to make it to the finish line in 00:10:08.379 --> 00:10:12.259 time. That's the race I see underway. And who 00:10:12.259 --> 00:10:14.840 knows how it's going to come out. But I think 00:10:14.840 --> 00:10:17.360 whoever is engaged in this exploration is doing 00:10:17.360 --> 00:10:19.240 the heavy lifting for all life on Earth at this 00:10:19.240 --> 00:10:21.559 point. It's absolutely essential work. And it's 00:10:21.559 --> 00:10:24.320 much more important than sending rockets to Mars 00:10:24.320 --> 00:10:26.899 or building fusion reactors. Consciousness is 00:10:26.899 --> 00:10:28.779 the most important field of scientific endeavor 00:10:28.779 --> 00:10:31.639 we could possibly engage right now. And, you 00:10:31.639 --> 00:10:33.679 know, at the same time, I had to say that I think 00:10:33.679 --> 00:10:35.700 the age of science may soon be ending and giving 00:10:35.700 --> 00:10:38.220 way to an age of art. And it'll be artists, not 00:10:38.220 --> 00:10:41.740 scientists, who save us. I think one of the major 00:10:41.740 --> 00:10:46.700 problems that we face is that we have this set 00:10:46.700 --> 00:10:51.019 of expectations that are part of our education, 00:10:51.240 --> 00:10:54.940 part of our development as individuals when we're 00:10:54.940 --> 00:10:59.250 young. And it comes from our heritage, which 00:10:59.250 --> 00:11:03.789 is out of a kind of war -like evolutionary process 00:11:03.789 --> 00:11:07.250 over the course of many centuries. And we see 00:11:07.250 --> 00:11:12.710 the need to be somehow striving constantly for 00:11:12.710 --> 00:11:16.730 achievement in some way or shape or form. And 00:11:16.730 --> 00:11:19.129 I think that that's one of the big problems that 00:11:19.129 --> 00:11:23.120 we have as... As a society, it's why we're having 00:11:23.120 --> 00:11:25.700 the issues that we're having with climate change, 00:11:26.000 --> 00:11:29.139 because we are overextended. We're overextended 00:11:29.139 --> 00:11:33.039 on our resource. Our demands on Gaia have greatly 00:11:33.039 --> 00:11:36.240 exceeded what Gaia's capabilities are. And I 00:11:36.240 --> 00:11:39.440 think that we have to change that mean. We need 00:11:39.440 --> 00:11:45.200 to shift. We need to go to a much more less consumptive, 00:11:45.200 --> 00:11:49.279 but also easygoing. society. And I think that 00:11:49.279 --> 00:11:51.399 probably that's going to happen through education 00:11:51.399 --> 00:11:54.559 of children more than any other way. Although 00:11:54.559 --> 00:11:57.539 we need to also think about how do adults change 00:11:57.539 --> 00:11:59.480 and what are the ways we change adult thinking. 00:11:59.700 --> 00:12:01.440 And I think arts are one of the ways that we 00:12:01.440 --> 00:12:05.679 do that. But I think that also the change may 00:12:05.679 --> 00:12:08.940 not happen fast enough if we wait generationally 00:12:08.940 --> 00:12:11.299 to make the shifts that we need to make. One 00:12:11.299 --> 00:12:13.299 of the major changes that has to happen has to 00:12:13.299 --> 00:12:17.320 deal with population. We have religious and ethical 00:12:17.320 --> 00:12:20.340 and cultural boundaries that we've placed on 00:12:20.340 --> 00:12:23.000 large families. You know, we say, okay, we should 00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:25.440 have people, a lot of religions want you to have 00:12:25.440 --> 00:12:27.200 more and more kids and prohibit birth control 00:12:27.200 --> 00:12:29.820 and so forth. And what we find is we get into 00:12:29.820 --> 00:12:32.980 the situation now where we are exceeding the 00:12:32.980 --> 00:12:35.779 carrying capacity of the planet with us. sudden 00:12:35.779 --> 00:12:40.320 explosion in the last few hundred years of up 00:12:40.320 --> 00:12:42.820 to six and a half billion of us now headed on 00:12:42.820 --> 00:12:45.240 its way to nine billion, pretty hard to stop 00:12:45.240 --> 00:12:48.279 that. And the question is, how do we bring that 00:12:48.279 --> 00:12:51.019 down? What's the process by which we bring our 00:12:51.019 --> 00:12:54.799 population down? And I think as we go through 00:12:54.799 --> 00:12:57.139 this crisis in coming years and have to shift 00:12:57.139 --> 00:13:00.299 to an agricultural economy, in some ways that 00:13:00.299 --> 00:13:02.399 even gets harder because people will think of, 00:13:02.399 --> 00:13:05.549 you know, They need their kids in order to help 00:13:05.549 --> 00:13:07.990 them grow food and to care for them in old age 00:13:07.990 --> 00:13:10.009 and that sort of thing, which is traditional. 00:13:10.070 --> 00:13:12.990 And a farming economy is an economy that tends 00:13:12.990 --> 00:13:15.509 to have large families. But we really have to 00:13:15.509 --> 00:13:18.669 change. We need to figure out ways to make not 00:13:18.669 --> 00:13:21.990 having kids more fashionable and to begin to 00:13:21.990 --> 00:13:24.090 bring the population down by whatever means we 00:13:24.090 --> 00:13:26.789 can come to. Because if we can't do that in an 00:13:26.789 --> 00:13:29.370 organized, peaceful way, then nature will take 00:13:29.370 --> 00:13:31.289 a hand and do it in a way that's not very pleasant. 00:13:32.240 --> 00:13:35.399 That was Albert Bates. Next up is Thomas Homer 00:13:35.399 --> 00:13:38.580 Dixon. He's the author of a book called The Upside 00:13:38.580 --> 00:13:41.799 of Down. And my one interview with him, and I 00:13:41.799 --> 00:13:45.700 only talked to him once, was really, it was quite 00:13:45.700 --> 00:13:49.580 profound to me in retrospect. And what you're 00:13:49.580 --> 00:13:52.480 about to hear came from episode number 36, Locus 00:13:52.480 --> 00:13:57.700 of Agency, released May 30th, 2007. The most 00:13:57.700 --> 00:14:01.559 adaptive systems in the world tend to solve their 00:14:01.559 --> 00:14:03.700 problems through distributed or decentralized 00:14:03.700 --> 00:14:08.179 action of problem -solving agents. These systems 00:14:08.179 --> 00:14:11.379 would include market economies, immune systems, 00:14:11.620 --> 00:14:15.700 or many kinds of ecological systems. They deal 00:14:15.700 --> 00:14:18.779 with their problems by creating loosely coupled 00:14:18.779 --> 00:14:22.740 networks of relatively autonomous agents. You 00:14:22.740 --> 00:14:24.940 think about a market, for example, relatively 00:14:24.940 --> 00:14:29.960 autonomous firms, each of which can attempt to 00:14:30.320 --> 00:14:33.200 tackle a part of the problem in experimental 00:14:33.200 --> 00:14:38.980 ways. And solutions that turn out to be reasonably 00:14:38.980 --> 00:14:41.899 effective can be communicated across the network 00:14:41.899 --> 00:14:47.019 quite quickly. And also, things that turn out 00:14:47.019 --> 00:14:50.600 not to work, experiments that fail, that information 00:14:50.600 --> 00:14:53.000 can also be communicated across the network. 00:14:53.539 --> 00:14:55.539 Decentralized systems and distributed problem 00:14:55.539 --> 00:15:00.379 solving, those approaches tend to produce solutions 00:15:00.379 --> 00:15:03.440 to complex problems much faster. They may seem 00:15:03.440 --> 00:15:05.460 inefficient because you get a lot of experimentation 00:15:05.460 --> 00:15:08.440 and pursuit of dead ends and a lot of stuff that 00:15:08.440 --> 00:15:10.899 just doesn't work. But the point is that you 00:15:10.899 --> 00:15:13.139 need to do a lot of that experimentation to find 00:15:13.139 --> 00:15:17.580 out what does work. This is fundamentally the 00:15:17.580 --> 00:15:20.039 distinction between, for instance, the old style 00:15:20.039 --> 00:15:23.019 command and control hierarchical Soviet economies 00:15:23.019 --> 00:15:26.259 and the highly adaptive Western economies. And 00:15:26.259 --> 00:15:30.600 we saw ultimately that the Soviet economies were 00:15:30.600 --> 00:15:34.679 incapable of adapting to a rapidly changing global 00:15:34.679 --> 00:15:37.340 economy and a rapidly changing economic environment, 00:15:37.539 --> 00:15:40.379 whereas market economies not only were capable 00:15:40.379 --> 00:15:44.559 of adapting, but in many ways actually defined 00:15:44.559 --> 00:15:49.399 the larger economic environment. And I think 00:15:49.399 --> 00:15:52.620 that lesson of the power of distributed systems 00:15:52.620 --> 00:15:59.200 is one that we need to take to heart. I think 00:15:59.200 --> 00:16:02.019 that it's an interesting ideological twist in 00:16:02.019 --> 00:16:05.500 a way, because you could say that people who 00:16:05.500 --> 00:16:08.240 are progressive, liberal in the American context, 00:16:08.340 --> 00:16:12.179 even on the left, need to understand that there 00:16:12.179 --> 00:16:14.120 are some very important things that we can learn 00:16:14.120 --> 00:16:17.799 from people whom we would have regarded traditionally 00:16:17.799 --> 00:16:20.179 as being conservative and on the right, that 00:16:20.179 --> 00:16:23.340 markets are... very effective problem -solving 00:16:23.340 --> 00:16:25.919 institutions. This is the new kind, I think, 00:16:25.919 --> 00:16:28.320 of liberalism, a new kind of left -of -center 00:16:28.320 --> 00:16:34.100 ideology that understands that distributed problem 00:16:34.100 --> 00:16:36.879 -solving and decentralization is exactly the 00:16:36.879 --> 00:16:38.980 kind of thing that somebody like Adam Smith was 00:16:38.980 --> 00:16:41.279 talking about in The Wealth of Nations. And there's 00:16:41.279 --> 00:16:43.399 a possibility for a constructive dialogue, I 00:16:43.399 --> 00:16:46.259 think, across ideological divides here. What 00:16:46.259 --> 00:16:47.799 we've learned, I think, in the recent decades, 00:16:47.960 --> 00:16:50.080 and this is sort of my point, The point I was 00:16:50.080 --> 00:16:52.460 trying to make about the Soviet command control 00:16:52.460 --> 00:16:55.360 economies is that the top -down hierarchical 00:16:55.360 --> 00:16:59.759 problem -solving approaches tend not to work 00:16:59.759 --> 00:17:05.380 in a very dynamic and complex environment. There's 00:17:05.380 --> 00:17:08.559 a principle derived from complexity theory, the 00:17:08.559 --> 00:17:10.660 study of complex systems. It's called the law 00:17:10.660 --> 00:17:13.440 of requisite variety. And it goes something like 00:17:13.440 --> 00:17:19.339 this, that any... in order to be successfully 00:17:19.339 --> 00:17:23.539 adaptive to its environment has to be as complex 00:17:23.539 --> 00:17:27.299 as its environment. And that's because the complex 00:17:27.299 --> 00:17:30.900 environment will produce a certain range of behaviors. 00:17:31.180 --> 00:17:33.700 If it becomes more complex, it produces a larger 00:17:33.700 --> 00:17:37.579 range of behaviors. A system that's trying to 00:17:37.579 --> 00:17:40.559 survive within that complex environment needs 00:17:40.559 --> 00:17:43.819 to have a repertoire of behaviors that's just 00:17:43.819 --> 00:17:48.059 as broad. as the range of behaviors of its environment. 00:17:48.599 --> 00:17:52.299 And so it needs to be as complex as its environment. 00:17:52.380 --> 00:17:55.279 And it turns out that if we're talking about 00:17:55.279 --> 00:17:57.920 human systems, human decision -making environments 00:17:57.920 --> 00:18:00.480 and human problem -solving systems, the hierarchical 00:18:00.480 --> 00:18:02.880 ones tend to be too simple for what has become 00:18:02.880 --> 00:18:07.079 an enormously complex world. So we see hierarchies 00:18:07.079 --> 00:18:10.700 breaking apart. We see... tightly controlled 00:18:10.700 --> 00:18:14.059 corporation going bankrupt and not adapting to 00:18:14.059 --> 00:18:16.200 their environments. We see social and political 00:18:16.200 --> 00:18:19.480 systems like the Soviet political system finding 00:18:19.480 --> 00:18:23.779 themselves incapable of surviving within our 00:18:23.779 --> 00:18:28.519 new world of recent decades. And I think people 00:18:28.519 --> 00:18:31.700 on the political left need to understand that 00:18:31.700 --> 00:18:35.200 we can't return to state -centric solution to 00:18:35.200 --> 00:18:38.000 the challenges we face. This is why I recommend 00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:41.000 in much of my work, and I'll be pursuing this 00:18:41.000 --> 00:18:44.720 issue further in my future research, that we 00:18:44.720 --> 00:18:47.839 must think a lot more about distributed or decentralized 00:18:47.839 --> 00:18:52.000 problem -solving based electronically on the 00:18:52.000 --> 00:18:56.160 Internet that involves large numbers of people 00:18:56.160 --> 00:19:00.019 incorporated into some kind of open architecture 00:19:00.019 --> 00:19:02.240 decision -making or problem -solving process, 00:19:02.579 --> 00:19:07.730 a kind of wiki process. Next up is Sharon Astic. 00:19:07.950 --> 00:19:10.109 She's the author or co -author of a book called 00:19:10.109 --> 00:19:12.730 Nation of Farmers. And I think she came to my 00:19:12.730 --> 00:19:16.390 attention when she was pushing back against Albert 00:19:16.390 --> 00:19:21.250 Bartlett's metaphor about 20 people having to 00:19:21.250 --> 00:19:25.589 share a single bathroom. It was an anti -overpopulation 00:19:25.589 --> 00:19:30.690 metaphor, and she didn't like it. So that is 00:19:30.690 --> 00:19:32.690 basically the topic of the conversation with 00:19:32.690 --> 00:19:36.539 Sharon Astic. Population control. fertility rates, 00:19:36.740 --> 00:19:40.079 and their trajectories. This is from episode 00:19:40.079 --> 00:19:42.519 number 42, Tragedy of the Bathroom, released 00:19:42.519 --> 00:19:48.140 June 20, 2007. I should be up front and say I 00:19:48.140 --> 00:19:51.180 have four children. Not entirely intentionally, 00:19:51.500 --> 00:19:53.839 but I have four children, and I'm not unhappy 00:19:53.839 --> 00:19:56.460 about that fact. So there certainly are plenty 00:19:56.460 --> 00:19:58.700 of people who will say that I am a major contributor 00:19:58.700 --> 00:20:01.720 to the problem. And honestly, first world children 00:20:01.720 --> 00:20:05.599 are a much bigger problem than third world children. 00:20:05.720 --> 00:20:07.920 I mean, I don't actually deny that what I do 00:20:07.920 --> 00:20:10.400 doesn't meet the requirements of the categorical 00:20:10.400 --> 00:20:12.759 imperative. That is, everybody can't do what 00:20:12.759 --> 00:20:15.559 I do and have a livable world. So I just want 00:20:15.559 --> 00:20:17.400 to get that out of the way up front because, 00:20:17.460 --> 00:20:20.259 you know, people know this and it's appropriate 00:20:20.259 --> 00:20:22.619 that sort of I acknowledge my own complicity 00:20:22.619 --> 00:20:25.200 in this. I think the point at which we have to 00:20:25.200 --> 00:20:26.980 start dealing with the population issue is right 00:20:26.980 --> 00:20:32.380 now. But I don't necessarily believe in dealing 00:20:32.380 --> 00:20:35.660 with it in some of the sort of stronger ways 00:20:35.660 --> 00:20:38.579 that get floated around among people who feel 00:20:38.579 --> 00:20:41.039 very strongly about this. That is, I believe 00:20:41.039 --> 00:20:44.000 that on some level, we are dealing with population 00:20:44.000 --> 00:20:48.400 growth right now. Since 1950, the world TFR, 00:20:48.660 --> 00:20:51.119 that's total fertility rate. has fallen from 00:20:51.119 --> 00:20:54.279 around five children per person to about 2 .7, 00:20:54.319 --> 00:20:56.819 which is just an enormous drop in fertility. 00:20:57.900 --> 00:21:03.180 There is a fertility transition that happened 00:21:03.180 --> 00:21:08.359 after death rates began to fall due to modern 00:21:08.359 --> 00:21:10.759 medicine and vaccines and things in the world, 00:21:10.799 --> 00:21:13.019 is that for a short period of time, people have 00:21:13.019 --> 00:21:15.380 a lot more children because they haven't quite 00:21:15.380 --> 00:21:17.039 adapted to the fact that more of their children 00:21:17.039 --> 00:21:19.279 are going to survive into adulthood. And then 00:21:19.279 --> 00:21:23.259 you begin to see a demographic transition, which 00:21:23.259 --> 00:21:26.059 is what demographers call it, where birth rates 00:21:26.059 --> 00:21:28.380 begin to fall and people start having fewer children. 00:21:28.920 --> 00:21:31.460 And all over the world, that's actually happening. 00:21:31.660 --> 00:21:34.319 Now, it's famously happening in places like Europe 00:21:34.319 --> 00:21:37.099 and Japan, where total fertility rates are, you 00:21:37.099 --> 00:21:39.700 know, one and a half and under. That's also happening 00:21:39.700 --> 00:21:42.140 in poor countries. It's happening in Sri Lanka, 00:21:42.259 --> 00:21:46.119 in Thailand, in Kerala, in the state of Kerala, 00:21:46.119 --> 00:21:50.910 in India. in much of Eastern Europe. And these 00:21:50.910 --> 00:21:55.869 are places that tend to be quite poor, but where 00:21:55.869 --> 00:21:59.210 women have simply managed to get to the point 00:21:59.210 --> 00:22:01.069 where their children are starting to live to 00:22:01.069 --> 00:22:03.789 adulthood, and they're making rational choices. 00:22:03.869 --> 00:22:05.650 That is, they're choosing to have fewer children. 00:22:05.990 --> 00:22:09.869 What seems to help world PFR is good education 00:22:09.869 --> 00:22:14.849 for women. reasonable chances of infant survival 00:22:14.849 --> 00:22:17.730 rates, which is actually something that does 00:22:17.730 --> 00:22:19.410 require some medical infrastructure, but can 00:22:19.410 --> 00:22:22.410 be done quite cheaply and doesn't require a lot 00:22:22.410 --> 00:22:26.710 of medical infrastructure. And the reasonable 00:22:26.710 --> 00:22:28.789 hope that your kid won't be taken off and killed 00:22:28.789 --> 00:22:31.130 in some war or something. Essentially, women, 00:22:31.210 --> 00:22:33.390 you could get to have the kids they do have grow 00:22:33.390 --> 00:22:37.329 up and they have fewer children. We're in the 00:22:37.329 --> 00:22:40.160 process of a vast demographic transition. It 00:22:40.160 --> 00:22:41.920 may not be happening as fast as we like. It may 00:22:41.920 --> 00:22:43.920 not even be happening fast enough. And that's 00:22:43.920 --> 00:22:47.359 another issue. But it's happening around the 00:22:47.359 --> 00:22:52.980 world. And it's so the more coercive methods 00:22:52.980 --> 00:22:55.019 that people advocate, for example, the China 00:22:55.019 --> 00:22:57.779 -style solutions, actually China's birthright 00:22:57.779 --> 00:23:00.000 is still well above a number of poor nations 00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:02.200 where it's happening voluntarily, including, 00:23:02.259 --> 00:23:05.559 again, like Sri Lanka and Thailand. I think a 00:23:05.559 --> 00:23:07.599 lot of people have this vision of agriculture 00:23:07.599 --> 00:23:12.289 as endless drudgery and drudgery um they think 00:23:12.289 --> 00:23:14.750 oh god i'm going to spend the rest of my life 00:23:14.750 --> 00:23:17.509 you know working in the hot sun you know sort 00:23:17.509 --> 00:23:20.069 of you know one of those chain gang movies and 00:23:20.069 --> 00:23:23.950 part i mean one of the things i can say is that 00:23:23.950 --> 00:23:26.869 that it just doesn't have to be that hard um 00:23:26.869 --> 00:23:29.410 one of my favorite poems is a wordsworth poem 00:23:29.410 --> 00:23:31.990 called the solitary reaper and it's about this 00:23:31.990 --> 00:23:35.109 woman out with the sides cut and grain and she's 00:23:35.109 --> 00:23:37.660 singing while she's doing it And, you know, when 00:23:37.660 --> 00:23:39.640 I read it in graduate school, I don't think it 00:23:39.640 --> 00:23:41.940 ever registered on me that if you can sue while 00:23:41.940 --> 00:23:44.660 you're doing something, it's not that hard. You 00:23:44.660 --> 00:23:47.539 know, if you ever try and do it, it's not that 00:23:47.539 --> 00:23:50.400 much work. It's not that farming isn't work. 00:23:50.500 --> 00:23:52.660 It's a lot of, it can be a lot of work, but there 00:23:52.660 --> 00:23:55.200 are a lot of methodologies that make it anything 00:23:55.200 --> 00:23:57.539 but, okay, I'm going to spend the rest of my 00:23:57.539 --> 00:23:59.779 life swinging a mattock at the clods of dirt 00:23:59.779 --> 00:24:02.539 for the rest, for those things. You don't have 00:24:02.539 --> 00:24:06.319 to do that stuff. A lot of our models of agriculture 00:24:06.319 --> 00:24:11.880 have been based on cheap oil. That is, it makes 00:24:11.880 --> 00:24:14.240 a lot of sense to pill up fields with tractors, 00:24:14.259 --> 00:24:16.180 even though that's really bad for the soil and 00:24:16.180 --> 00:24:20.160 things if you have all that horsepower. On the 00:24:20.160 --> 00:24:22.339 other hand, if you have a yard and limited free 00:24:22.339 --> 00:24:24.759 time, it makes a lot of sense to mulch with your 00:24:24.759 --> 00:24:27.140 own grass clipping and with the compost that 00:24:27.140 --> 00:24:29.640 you make on your property and never pill anything 00:24:29.640 --> 00:24:32.269 at all. Just stir it up a little with a fork 00:24:32.269 --> 00:24:34.710 and plant some vegetables into it. I know a lot 00:24:34.710 --> 00:24:36.410 of people who live in neighborhoods and they 00:24:36.410 --> 00:24:38.349 don't know the people on the other side of them 00:24:38.349 --> 00:24:41.529 well enough to talk to. But if you depend on 00:24:41.529 --> 00:24:44.230 other people for help with things that you now 00:24:44.230 --> 00:24:46.890 have sort of electric servants to do for you, 00:24:46.950 --> 00:24:50.430 then you have to know your neighbors. You can't 00:24:50.430 --> 00:24:52.710 get away with that. And that does come with, 00:24:52.910 --> 00:24:55.930 as Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out, with some 00:24:55.930 --> 00:24:58.890 real opportunities for celebration and festivity. 00:24:59.460 --> 00:25:02.160 Helena Norberg -Hodge talks about the Ladakis 00:25:02.160 --> 00:25:05.740 who live in high plain areas around Sedet, who 00:25:05.740 --> 00:25:08.059 said that basically they spend four months working 00:25:08.059 --> 00:25:09.759 really hard to get their food and the rest of 00:25:09.759 --> 00:25:12.779 the year they spend partying. They drink beer 00:25:12.779 --> 00:25:16.539 and socialize and have a really good time. Medieval 00:25:16.539 --> 00:25:19.039 peasants in Britain in the 11th century used 00:25:19.039 --> 00:25:23.180 to work only 176 days a year. The rest were Sabbaths 00:25:23.180 --> 00:25:27.440 and festivals. And there was a hog set of beer 00:25:27.440 --> 00:25:33.000 for every six peasants for every festival. There's 00:25:33.000 --> 00:25:37.380 a real culture of celebration and of joy and 00:25:37.380 --> 00:25:41.559 delight that goes around with strong community 00:25:41.559 --> 00:25:44.420 structures and local economies and local food. 00:25:44.859 --> 00:25:46.460 The other thing is I think that there's a chance 00:25:46.460 --> 00:25:48.079 we could get back some of our political power. 00:25:48.480 --> 00:25:51.819 A lot of people that I know feel very powerless. 00:25:51.920 --> 00:25:54.880 They feel like their world is won by interests 00:25:54.880 --> 00:25:56.920 they don't control. And I think that's absolutely 00:25:56.920 --> 00:26:00.900 true. But when you reduce the scale of your world, 00:26:00.960 --> 00:26:04.880 when you take away power from corporate... corporate 00:26:04.880 --> 00:26:06.779 hands, where you don't depend on corporations 00:26:06.779 --> 00:26:09.859 to feed you and clothe you and shelter you, then 00:26:09.859 --> 00:26:12.740 you can also take that political power. You can 00:26:12.740 --> 00:26:15.099 get a little closer to sort of the democracy 00:26:15.099 --> 00:26:18.019 that was imagined by our founding fathers. And 00:26:18.019 --> 00:26:21.079 I think that alone might be worth an enormous 00:26:21.079 --> 00:26:24.299 amount of change, is to get back the right to 00:26:24.299 --> 00:26:27.079 a kind of self -determination that I think a 00:26:27.079 --> 00:26:31.660 lot of us really have lost. All right. Next up 00:26:31.660 --> 00:26:34.970 is Albert Bartlett. Albert Bartlett was the guest. 00:26:35.150 --> 00:26:39.069 I talked to him a couple times, but the interview 00:26:39.069 --> 00:26:41.769 that provides the segment or the excerpt that 00:26:41.769 --> 00:26:43.609 you're about to hear is either from episode number 00:26:43.609 --> 00:26:47.869 53, important but trivial, or episode 54, Malthusian 00:26:47.869 --> 00:26:51.869 Memes, released August 29th and September 5th, 00:26:51.869 --> 00:26:55.670 2007. Well, we don't have the resources to supply 00:26:55.670 --> 00:26:59.289 the present world population. The world population 00:26:59.289 --> 00:27:04.529 today is unsustainable. reach our conclusion 00:27:04.529 --> 00:27:08.269 by just observing that if any fraction of the 00:27:08.269 --> 00:27:12.130 present global warming is due to the actions 00:27:12.130 --> 00:27:16.150 of humans, then this by itself is proof that 00:27:16.150 --> 00:27:19.069 the human population has exceeded the carrying 00:27:19.069 --> 00:27:23.930 capacity of the Earth. 200 years ago, oil production 00:27:23.930 --> 00:27:26.829 worldwide was zero. 200 years from now, it's 00:27:26.829 --> 00:27:30.309 going to be zero. In between, it rises to one 00:27:30.309 --> 00:27:34.160 or more maxima. and you can approximate that 00:27:34.160 --> 00:27:37.420 by a smooth error curve. And the real question 00:27:37.420 --> 00:27:40.279 is, a lot of reporters ask, well, when are we 00:27:40.279 --> 00:27:41.960 going to run out of oil? And the answer is never. 00:27:42.099 --> 00:27:45.539 We'll never run out of oil. But the question 00:27:45.539 --> 00:27:47.920 that has to be asked and understood is, when 00:27:47.920 --> 00:27:50.539 will oil production peak? When will we pass that 00:27:50.539 --> 00:27:53.559 peak production? And the peak production marks 00:27:53.559 --> 00:27:57.619 the point at which we have consumed half of the 00:27:57.619 --> 00:28:02.460 initial resource. And so after you pass the peak, 00:28:02.500 --> 00:28:05.799 then production declines and approaches zero, 00:28:05.920 --> 00:28:07.960 and it may take another hundred years for it 00:28:07.960 --> 00:28:09.799 to approach zero. It took a hundred years to 00:28:09.799 --> 00:28:13.160 get up to where it is now. But as you have declining 00:28:13.160 --> 00:28:17.079 production and a growing world population and 00:28:17.079 --> 00:28:20.140 a growing world per capita demand for oil, then 00:28:20.140 --> 00:28:23.559 you have all the makings of a real disaster because 00:28:23.559 --> 00:28:26.299 everything in our modern society is dependent 00:28:26.299 --> 00:28:29.359 on oil. And the first thing you think of is a 00:28:29.359 --> 00:28:33.160 food production. And one can observe that modern 00:28:33.160 --> 00:28:37.640 agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum 00:28:37.640 --> 00:28:42.880 into food. And, you know, we can see rapidly 00:28:42.880 --> 00:28:47.380 rising prices of petroleum as we pass over the 00:28:47.380 --> 00:28:50.880 peak. And that'll immediately be reflected in 00:28:50.880 --> 00:28:54.599 very rapid rise in the cost of food and a cost 00:28:54.599 --> 00:28:58.000 of everything else in society. Now, where are 00:28:58.000 --> 00:29:00.880 we with regard to the world peak? The U .S. peaked 00:29:00.880 --> 00:29:04.740 in 1970, and we're well down on the downhill 00:29:04.740 --> 00:29:08.259 side of the curve. World production could peak 00:29:08.259 --> 00:29:10.859 any time now. There are some experts who say 00:29:10.859 --> 00:29:14.200 the peak has already been passed. My own analysis 00:29:14.200 --> 00:29:18.700 says we're very close to the peak, and there 00:29:18.700 --> 00:29:25.099 are the latest I have heard from any practical... 00:29:25.640 --> 00:29:28.279 from any scientist in the field, a geologist, 00:29:28.420 --> 00:29:35.640 is about 2020. But I think most of the consensus 00:29:35.640 --> 00:29:39.480 feeling among people who are really into this 00:29:39.480 --> 00:29:42.599 problem is that it's much earlier than 2020, 00:29:42.960 --> 00:29:46.799 that it's any day now. And unfortunately, we 00:29:46.799 --> 00:29:49.220 won't know when we pass the peak. We could already 00:29:49.220 --> 00:29:52.230 have passed it. You'll have to have... four or 00:29:52.230 --> 00:29:56.049 five or ten years of consistent downturn in world 00:29:56.049 --> 00:29:59.490 production before you can say statistically it's 00:29:59.490 --> 00:30:02.690 clear that back there five years ago or so that 00:30:02.690 --> 00:30:07.069 was the peak. One point being a little bit lower 00:30:07.069 --> 00:30:10.190 than the current trend does not prove that the 00:30:10.190 --> 00:30:12.950 peak has been passed. So we won't know for at 00:30:12.950 --> 00:30:16.130 least five years after the peak that the peak 00:30:16.130 --> 00:30:20.809 has actually been passed. You know, it's in our 00:30:20.809 --> 00:30:23.509 national self -interest to reduce our annual 00:30:23.509 --> 00:30:27.289 consumption of petroleum right now. Now, you 00:30:27.289 --> 00:30:30.210 hear people say, and again, these are people 00:30:30.210 --> 00:30:32.849 who are well -meaning, often well -educated, 00:30:32.869 --> 00:30:35.569 but don't understand the problem, say that all 00:30:35.569 --> 00:30:37.670 American agriculture is the most efficient in 00:30:37.670 --> 00:30:40.509 the world today. That's nonsense. It's the least 00:30:40.509 --> 00:30:43.589 efficient in the world today. It's the least 00:30:43.589 --> 00:30:46.859 efficient because... If you have to use as your 00:30:46.859 --> 00:30:49.299 definition of efficiency, how much energy does 00:30:49.299 --> 00:30:52.539 it take in the form of petroleum, natural gas, 00:30:52.579 --> 00:30:55.619 et cetera, to produce one unit of energy that's 00:30:55.619 --> 00:31:00.539 on your dinner table? And that's about 10 units 00:31:00.539 --> 00:31:03.200 of petroleum energy for one unit of food energy 00:31:03.200 --> 00:31:06.099 on your table. Now, the thing to make people 00:31:06.099 --> 00:31:08.299 say we're more efficient is they use a different 00:31:08.299 --> 00:31:11.990 measure. They say how many person... hours on 00:31:11.990 --> 00:31:15.009 the farm are required to produce one unit of 00:31:15.009 --> 00:31:17.789 food. Well, that number has been going down, 00:31:17.890 --> 00:31:20.509 leading these people, without understanding, 00:31:20.710 --> 00:31:23.089 to say, oh, we're more efficient. We don't use 00:31:23.089 --> 00:31:26.750 as many people farming as we used to. But that's 00:31:26.750 --> 00:31:29.950 not a good measure. That's just a measure of 00:31:29.950 --> 00:31:33.410 we're substituting petroleum for people on the 00:31:33.410 --> 00:31:36.569 farm. And as petroleum peaks and starts down, 00:31:36.789 --> 00:31:39.390 we're not going to be able to continue to do 00:31:39.390 --> 00:31:44.009 that. That was Albert Bartlett. Next up is another 00:31:44.009 --> 00:31:46.609 voice that you probably wouldn't associate with 00:31:46.609 --> 00:31:50.930 the peak oil scene. As far as I know, she didn't 00:31:50.930 --> 00:31:53.410 really have anything to say on the topic of peak 00:31:53.410 --> 00:31:56.970 oil specifically, but somehow she came to my 00:31:56.970 --> 00:31:59.730 attention at a time when I was talking about 00:31:59.730 --> 00:32:03.509 issues related to agriculture and modern life 00:32:03.509 --> 00:32:06.809 and farming and that sort of thing. And I think 00:32:06.809 --> 00:32:09.569 that you'll find what Cornelia Butler Flora had 00:32:09.569 --> 00:32:12.950 to say on the topic of community and human psychological 00:32:12.950 --> 00:32:16.829 needs is very much in place here in this collection 00:32:16.829 --> 00:32:20.950 of interviews. This is from episode 56, Quality 00:32:20.950 --> 00:32:26.349 of Life, released September 19th, 2007. What 00:32:26.349 --> 00:32:30.589 a number of the 9 -11 terrorists have demonstrated 00:32:30.589 --> 00:32:36.089 is that these are people who actually whose standard 00:32:36.089 --> 00:32:39.170 of living was fine, and the folks that are being 00:32:39.170 --> 00:32:43.970 arrested now in England and France and Spain, 00:32:44.190 --> 00:32:47.750 the issue is quality of life. The things that 00:32:47.750 --> 00:32:49.849 we have found as we have done studies of quality 00:32:49.849 --> 00:32:55.109 of life is this. You are respected by the people 00:32:55.109 --> 00:33:00.029 around you. The notion of inclusion, not being 00:33:00.029 --> 00:33:04.859 the same as, But being respected by the people 00:33:04.859 --> 00:33:08.359 around you turns out to be an incredibly important 00:33:08.359 --> 00:33:15.279 part of quality of life. And you're respected 00:33:15.279 --> 00:33:18.599 not for what you have. It's not because of the 00:33:18.599 --> 00:33:21.660 car you drive. This is why we tend to conflate 00:33:21.660 --> 00:33:24.559 quality of life and standard of living. But it's 00:33:24.559 --> 00:33:28.460 based on relationships. And these take time. 00:33:29.609 --> 00:33:32.109 And you can't just drop relationships on people. 00:33:32.269 --> 00:33:36.509 Whereas you can do things to increase income, 00:33:36.670 --> 00:33:41.809 it's much more difficult to increase quality 00:33:41.809 --> 00:33:44.769 of relationships. But we can make investments 00:33:44.769 --> 00:33:49.309 collectively as a society that can greatly increase 00:33:49.309 --> 00:33:53.789 the possibilities of people feeling included, 00:33:54.109 --> 00:33:59.869 respected, and heard. And it seems to me that 00:33:59.869 --> 00:34:04.630 might be a better investment against terrorism 00:34:04.630 --> 00:34:09.869 rather than assuming it's all economics. I mean, 00:34:09.869 --> 00:34:12.190 there has been a really interesting explanation 00:34:12.190 --> 00:34:15.769 by our president and others that somehow people 00:34:15.769 --> 00:34:19.230 are jealous of our stuff. And that's why we're 00:34:19.230 --> 00:34:23.070 having these problems in terms of terrorism. 00:34:23.789 --> 00:34:27.239 I just read an interesting... review of a new 00:34:27.239 --> 00:34:29.780 book called the republic where they're saying 00:34:29.780 --> 00:34:32.239 you know the problem with the internet communities 00:34:32.239 --> 00:34:36.880 is they are incredibly ideologically similar 00:34:36.880 --> 00:34:40.500 so you never talk to anybody who doesn't share 00:34:40.500 --> 00:34:45.039 all your values and beliefs and part of quality 00:34:45.039 --> 00:34:49.159 of life is feeling comfortable around people 00:34:49.159 --> 00:34:52.539 who aren't like you so you don't feel you live 00:34:52.539 --> 00:34:55.929 in some sort of enclave which you can't venture 00:34:55.929 --> 00:34:58.989 out of unless you're totally armed. Interacting 00:34:58.989 --> 00:35:01.909 with and being respected by people who aren't 00:35:01.909 --> 00:35:06.030 exactly like you definitely helps increase your 00:35:06.030 --> 00:35:09.789 quality of life. But even more importantly, it 00:35:09.789 --> 00:35:13.769 really helps create a safer world. It gives you 00:35:13.769 --> 00:35:18.690 the opportunity to examine your own values and 00:35:18.690 --> 00:35:21.389 beliefs and to decide what's really important. 00:35:22.699 --> 00:35:26.219 And what really is important is neither stuff 00:35:26.219 --> 00:35:31.840 nor homogeneity. And right now we're, I think, 00:35:31.840 --> 00:35:35.400 in a crisis of quality of life, not because we 00:35:35.400 --> 00:35:39.519 don't have enough stuff, but because we have 00:35:39.519 --> 00:35:42.980 become very fearful that other people somehow 00:35:42.980 --> 00:35:48.039 want our stuff. And we simply don't understand 00:35:48.039 --> 00:35:50.719 different ways of seeing the world and different 00:35:50.719 --> 00:35:54.719 ways of viewing things that can help us then 00:35:54.719 --> 00:36:01.539 fit ourselves into a very complex and interesting 00:36:01.539 --> 00:36:08.780 puzzle rather than simply being the answer that's 00:36:08.780 --> 00:36:13.369 all clearly black and white That was Cornelia 00:36:13.369 --> 00:36:16.570 Butler Flora, the late Cornelia Butler Flora, 00:36:16.630 --> 00:36:19.210 I'm afraid to say. She is the second of three 00:36:19.210 --> 00:36:21.769 people that I interviewed for the Sea Realm podcast 00:36:21.769 --> 00:36:24.309 and whose words are recorded here in this book, 00:36:24.389 --> 00:36:27.670 who has since passed. The other is Albert Bartlett, 00:36:27.750 --> 00:36:30.969 and then the third is Joe Bajent, who appears 00:36:30.969 --> 00:36:35.010 late in this book. But next up is an interview 00:36:35.010 --> 00:36:37.690 or an excerpt from an interview with Bill McKibben. 00:36:38.489 --> 00:36:41.269 He appeared on episode number 68 of the Sea Realm 00:36:41.269 --> 00:36:43.550 podcast, Durable Communities, released December 00:36:43.550 --> 00:36:49.389 12, 2007. There's polling data in this country. 00:36:49.469 --> 00:36:51.550 They've asked Americans every year since the 00:36:51.550 --> 00:36:55.690 end of World War II, are you happy with your 00:36:55.690 --> 00:36:58.329 life or not? And the number of Americans who 00:36:58.329 --> 00:37:02.530 say, I'm very happy with my life, peaks in 1956 00:37:02.530 --> 00:37:08.500 and goes downhill since. And... That's odd, because 00:37:08.500 --> 00:37:11.340 in that same 50 years, we've trebled our material 00:37:11.340 --> 00:37:14.420 standard of living. If the economy worked the 00:37:14.420 --> 00:37:17.079 way we intuitively think it does, those curves 00:37:17.079 --> 00:37:19.960 shouldn't go that way. It turns out that around 00:37:19.960 --> 00:37:24.239 the world, once you get past a per capita income 00:37:24.239 --> 00:37:28.300 of about $10 ,000 per year, any correlation between 00:37:28.300 --> 00:37:34.239 more and better scatters, the plot goes in all 00:37:34.239 --> 00:37:37.960 different directions. And, you know, that's something 00:37:37.960 --> 00:37:40.880 we need to know. It's a basic fact about human 00:37:40.880 --> 00:37:44.960 beings that's as important as knowing, you know, 00:37:44.980 --> 00:37:48.099 what temperature water freezes at. Because we 00:37:48.099 --> 00:37:51.820 have geared so much of our life as a country 00:37:51.820 --> 00:37:54.820 to endlessly expanding the economy past the point 00:37:54.820 --> 00:37:57.559 where it's producing anything in terms of satisfaction. 00:37:59.340 --> 00:38:03.199 also producing great negative consequences, environmentally 00:38:03.199 --> 00:38:06.000 in particular, it would be good to get a hold 00:38:06.000 --> 00:38:09.619 of that. It would be good to figure out some 00:38:09.619 --> 00:38:11.940 other things to be asking our economy to aim 00:38:11.940 --> 00:38:18.400 for. We've concentrated obsessive interest on 00:38:18.400 --> 00:38:22.460 growth, and hence we've largely ignored durability, 00:38:22.840 --> 00:38:26.420 the idea that we might be building an economy 00:38:26.420 --> 00:38:29.670 and a society that could last. for a long time 00:38:29.670 --> 00:38:33.190 that could survive disruptions. And we've ignored 00:38:33.190 --> 00:38:36.030 this question of whether that growth is producing 00:38:36.030 --> 00:38:40.389 satisfaction or not. If we aimed for those two 00:38:40.389 --> 00:38:43.409 things in addition or instead of just endless 00:38:43.409 --> 00:38:45.869 expansion, I think we'd have more interesting 00:38:45.869 --> 00:38:49.690 possibilities for getting out of some of the 00:38:49.690 --> 00:38:51.750 trouble we've gotten into with things like global 00:38:51.750 --> 00:38:54.750 warming and for building the kind of society 00:38:54.750 --> 00:38:57.320 that people actually want to live in. a kind 00:38:57.320 --> 00:39:00.760 of society that's marked by more connection and 00:39:00.760 --> 00:39:03.639 more community than we have at the moment. That's 00:39:03.639 --> 00:39:06.500 what the data shows people are most missing from 00:39:06.500 --> 00:39:10.900 their lives. Cheap fossil fuel and the affluence 00:39:10.900 --> 00:39:15.139 that it provides have allowed us to become the 00:39:15.139 --> 00:39:17.440 first people in the world who have no need of 00:39:17.440 --> 00:39:20.460 our neighbors. We've taken that to be a good 00:39:20.460 --> 00:39:22.860 thing and talked a lot about independence and 00:39:22.860 --> 00:39:27.710 individualism and all that. But in fact, as the 00:39:27.710 --> 00:39:31.550 descendants of socially evolved primates who 00:39:31.550 --> 00:39:34.210 spent all day sitting around grooming each other, 00:39:34.309 --> 00:39:37.190 it turns out that it's not what we were built 00:39:37.190 --> 00:39:41.050 for and it's not what we like. And, you know, 00:39:41.090 --> 00:39:44.230 one of the benefits of getting away from the 00:39:44.230 --> 00:39:48.570 fossil fuel world we now inhabit will be the 00:39:48.570 --> 00:39:52.389 inevitable resurgence of more community. We see 00:39:52.389 --> 00:39:55.760 it happening already. Farmer's markets are the 00:39:55.760 --> 00:39:58.079 fastest growing part of the food economy in this 00:39:58.079 --> 00:40:00.420 country. And one of the reasons that they're 00:40:00.420 --> 00:40:02.980 going fast is because people like the experience 00:40:02.980 --> 00:40:05.880 of shopping at them. The average shopper at a 00:40:05.880 --> 00:40:10.380 farmer's market has 10 times as many conversations 00:40:10.380 --> 00:40:12.860 as the average shopper at a supermarket. That's 00:40:12.860 --> 00:40:16.840 a lot. That's what we're built for. One of the 00:40:16.840 --> 00:40:19.840 uses of the 20th century was that we found out 00:40:19.840 --> 00:40:24.269 things that don't work. For instance, huge centrally 00:40:24.269 --> 00:40:26.110 planned economies where the government tells 00:40:26.110 --> 00:40:28.750 everybody what to do all the time does prove 00:40:28.750 --> 00:40:32.610 to be a bad idea in a lot of ways. However, that 00:40:32.610 --> 00:40:36.349 doesn't mean that what does work is everybody 00:40:36.349 --> 00:40:38.849 doing exactly what they want to and no one ever 00:40:38.849 --> 00:40:41.329 trying to get together as a community and figure 00:40:41.329 --> 00:40:45.730 out what makes sense. That is ideologically extreme 00:40:45.730 --> 00:40:48.809 and is unlike sort of where human beings have 00:40:48.809 --> 00:40:54.630 come from. Marxist collectivism was. What we 00:40:54.630 --> 00:40:59.690 need are things that sound and are normal. Communities, 00:40:59.789 --> 00:41:03.570 neighbors, people figuring out how to do things 00:41:03.570 --> 00:41:06.869 together. That's what government at its best 00:41:06.869 --> 00:41:10.070 is. And there were some tasks that only government 00:41:10.070 --> 00:41:12.949 can perform. We're going to need to deal with 00:41:12.949 --> 00:41:17.250 climate change. One of the places where I lost 00:41:17.250 --> 00:41:19.449 a lot of respect for libertarians in the last 00:41:19.449 --> 00:41:22.369 decade was the that they became in many ways 00:41:22.369 --> 00:41:25.010 scientific denialists about global warming. All 00:41:25.010 --> 00:41:27.429 you had to do was read the webpage of the Cato 00:41:27.429 --> 00:41:30.730 Institute or Reason magazine or things. And one 00:41:30.730 --> 00:41:34.590 of the reasons was that the chemistry and physics 00:41:34.590 --> 00:41:37.710 conflicted with their ideology. And the syllogism 00:41:37.710 --> 00:41:41.449 became markets solve all problems. Markets aren't 00:41:41.449 --> 00:41:43.690 solving global warming. Therefore, global warming 00:41:43.690 --> 00:41:46.889 isn't a problem. That's poor logic, but it's 00:41:46.889 --> 00:41:49.559 emotionally comforting. If you're the kind of 00:41:49.559 --> 00:41:54.239 person who needs some abstract ideological system, 00:41:54.420 --> 00:41:59.159 you know, Marxism, Leninism, Randian objectivism, 00:41:59.199 --> 00:42:03.340 whatever it is to order your life. For the rest 00:42:03.340 --> 00:42:09.380 of us, what we need is trying to figure out what 00:42:09.380 --> 00:42:12.699 scale to solve what problems at. And some of 00:42:12.699 --> 00:42:15.099 those are solved individually and some of them 00:42:15.099 --> 00:42:17.239 are solved in your neighborhood. and some of 00:42:17.239 --> 00:42:20.119 them are solved internationally, and, you know, 00:42:20.199 --> 00:42:25.760 it's not as comforting as having a one -size 00:42:25.760 --> 00:42:28.280 -fits -all explanation for everything. On the 00:42:28.280 --> 00:42:32.639 other hand, those don't work. The logic of the 00:42:32.639 --> 00:42:37.480 fossil fuel world has been a logic of great globalization, 00:42:37.900 --> 00:42:43.940 of great... disconnection, one from each other, 00:42:44.019 --> 00:42:46.440 because we no longer have a practical need for 00:42:46.440 --> 00:42:50.480 our neighbors. Hence the logic of a world past 00:42:50.480 --> 00:42:53.559 cheap fossil fuel, I think, is one where we begin 00:42:53.559 --> 00:42:57.500 to draw a little closer together again. What 00:42:57.500 --> 00:43:01.059 we know about human satisfaction would lead us 00:43:01.059 --> 00:43:03.239 to believe that that will have at least as many 00:43:03.239 --> 00:43:08.010 benefits as costs. And we'll get better at it 00:43:08.010 --> 00:43:10.010 as we do it. We've lost some of those skills 00:43:10.010 --> 00:43:12.710 in the last 50 years. We're not that good at 00:43:12.710 --> 00:43:15.889 cooperating. We could each other on things, you 00:43:15.889 --> 00:43:19.829 know. We're all obsessed with the idea that we 00:43:19.829 --> 00:43:22.849 should pay less taxes and be left alone and whatever. 00:43:23.210 --> 00:43:26.309 But in fact, the community that survived best, 00:43:26.349 --> 00:43:28.550 the people that survived best in more challenging 00:43:28.550 --> 00:43:31.760 times. are going to be those who live in communities 00:43:31.760 --> 00:43:34.380 that are able to adapt and work with each other 00:43:34.380 --> 00:43:38.059 well. Next up is the name probably most associated 00:43:38.059 --> 00:43:41.579 with the Sea Realm podcast in its entirety, and 00:43:41.579 --> 00:43:43.980 that is James Howard Kunstler. The segment you're 00:43:43.980 --> 00:43:46.300 about to hear comes from either episode number 00:43:46.300 --> 00:43:50.719 72, The Long Emergency, or episode 73, Cui Bono. 00:43:50.800 --> 00:43:54.880 They were released on January 9th and 16th, 2008. 00:43:55.260 --> 00:43:58.260 So this is the first... interview in the book 00:43:58.260 --> 00:44:02.539 that is post -2007. It's from very early, from 00:44:02.539 --> 00:44:07.000 January of 2008. I want to point out that I was 00:44:07.000 --> 00:44:08.960 having all of these conversations, which were 00:44:08.960 --> 00:44:15.179 seemingly academic and speculative in 2007. And 00:44:15.179 --> 00:44:19.460 then in mid to late 2008, it started to feel 00:44:19.460 --> 00:44:24.480 very, very real. Anyway, here are excerpts from 00:44:24.480 --> 00:44:27.079 a C -ROM conversation with James Howard Kunstler. 00:44:28.019 --> 00:44:30.619 You know, I think that the most obvious difficult 00:44:30.619 --> 00:44:37.480 transition for us is going to be what entails 00:44:37.480 --> 00:44:42.420 the destiny of suburbia, you know, and how we're 00:44:42.420 --> 00:44:45.300 going to cope with our inability to live in this 00:44:45.300 --> 00:44:47.300 arrangement that we constructed for ourselves, 00:44:47.360 --> 00:44:49.960 this elaborate suburban arrangement. I really... 00:44:50.619 --> 00:44:53.099 have no idea how we're going to manage that. 00:44:53.159 --> 00:44:57.099 I can only think that it will entail a lot of 00:44:57.099 --> 00:45:04.420 loss, economic loss, and eventually maybe some 00:45:04.420 --> 00:45:09.719 fighting over the cable scraps of the 20th century. 00:45:10.599 --> 00:45:12.739 It's going to be very difficult for us to... 00:45:13.130 --> 00:45:17.530 get back to farming at a scale that is appropriate 00:45:17.530 --> 00:45:20.889 to what our conditions present, because so many 00:45:20.889 --> 00:45:23.630 of those skills have been lost. But perhaps even 00:45:23.630 --> 00:45:28.730 more importantly, the difficulty of reallocating 00:45:28.730 --> 00:45:33.409 land, you know, in smaller parcels to people 00:45:33.409 --> 00:45:35.750 who know what to do with it. I mean, right now, 00:45:35.829 --> 00:45:38.590 an awful lot of the ag land in the heartland 00:45:38.590 --> 00:45:41.489 of America, you know, in the grain belt and... 00:45:41.769 --> 00:45:44.269 you know, in the center of the country, is owned 00:45:44.269 --> 00:45:50.190 in very large chunks, in some cases by corporations. 00:45:51.170 --> 00:45:55.650 And I really don't know how we're going to adapt 00:45:55.650 --> 00:46:01.250 to the need to do this on a smaller scale. I 00:46:01.250 --> 00:46:06.969 have to say, I am not a conspiracy theory aficionado. 00:46:07.050 --> 00:46:10.429 I really don't. I'm allergic to conspiracy theories. 00:46:10.969 --> 00:46:13.190 I think that an awful lot of what's happened 00:46:13.190 --> 00:46:17.210 to us has been a totally consensual thing in 00:46:17.210 --> 00:46:19.269 the sense that the American public went along 00:46:19.269 --> 00:46:23.190 with whatever their leaders or corporate plutocracy 00:46:23.190 --> 00:46:27.550 wanted them to do. So it's been a completely 00:46:27.550 --> 00:46:31.590 consensual trip the whole way. But the American 00:46:31.590 --> 00:46:34.369 public is certainly going to be greatly disappointed. 00:46:35.039 --> 00:46:37.539 When things really don't hold together and they 00:46:37.539 --> 00:46:40.460 discover, well, there aren't going to be hydrogen 00:46:40.460 --> 00:46:44.980 cars and there is no realistic way of putting 00:46:44.980 --> 00:46:47.860 up the hydrogen filling stations all over America. 00:46:47.900 --> 00:46:49.840 And we're probably just not going to be able 00:46:49.840 --> 00:46:53.099 to drive as much as we did, if at all. So these 00:46:53.099 --> 00:46:54.900 things are going to come as huge disappointments 00:46:54.900 --> 00:46:59.969 to the nation. I do think that the restoration 00:46:59.969 --> 00:47:03.989 of public space and indeed the restoration of 00:47:03.989 --> 00:47:08.610 satisfying daily environments in the U .S. is 00:47:08.610 --> 00:47:12.670 liable to follow that kind of socially emergent 00:47:12.670 --> 00:47:19.170 quality that I alluded to earlier. Just as the 00:47:19.170 --> 00:47:23.489 disaggregation of our towns and cities proceeded 00:47:23.489 --> 00:47:26.530 from the conditions of the 20th century, namely... 00:47:26.800 --> 00:47:29.199 You know, this incredible abundance of cheap 00:47:29.199 --> 00:47:33.420 oil. So things are going to, I think, reorganize 00:47:33.420 --> 00:47:36.599 and re -self -organize in the other direction 00:47:36.599 --> 00:47:40.659 as we're forced to downscale. The only real big 00:47:40.659 --> 00:47:43.519 question is how disorderly this process is likely 00:47:43.519 --> 00:47:46.840 to be, because unlike a lot of other people who 00:47:46.840 --> 00:47:50.099 think about these issues, I assume that there 00:47:50.099 --> 00:47:53.090 will be quite a bit of disorder. In the process 00:47:53.090 --> 00:47:57.469 and that it won't be a simple segue or transition 00:47:57.469 --> 00:48:01.909 to the next thing, because we're going to be 00:48:01.909 --> 00:48:05.289 left with an awful lot of liabilities and frankly, 00:48:05.570 --> 00:48:08.110 just a big myth to clean up. You know, a lot 00:48:08.110 --> 00:48:10.050 of the stuff that we've invested in over the 00:48:10.050 --> 00:48:13.030 last 60 years, the shopping malls and the strip 00:48:13.030 --> 00:48:15.070 malls and all of the automobile infrastructure 00:48:15.070 --> 00:48:18.329 and the parking lots, most of this stuff doesn't 00:48:18.329 --> 00:48:21.780 really lend itself to being retrofitted. along 00:48:21.780 --> 00:48:24.420 the lines that a lot of people fantasize about. 00:48:24.780 --> 00:48:28.280 For one thing, we're probably going to be a much 00:48:28.280 --> 00:48:31.679 less affluent society in the coming decades than 00:48:31.679 --> 00:48:34.940 we were in the previous decades. So we're not 00:48:34.940 --> 00:48:38.460 going to have the investment resources to put 00:48:38.460 --> 00:48:41.960 into retrofitting the suburbs and the mall. That's 00:48:41.960 --> 00:48:44.579 why I maintain a lot of those things will end 00:48:44.579 --> 00:48:47.699 up as either ruins, plums, or salvage yards. 00:48:49.289 --> 00:48:53.550 We are probably going to have to return to traditional 00:48:53.550 --> 00:48:58.369 human environments, namely smaller cities, small 00:48:58.369 --> 00:49:02.130 towns that have a meaningful relationship with 00:49:02.130 --> 00:49:06.510 productive agricultural surroundings. And, you 00:49:06.510 --> 00:49:09.010 know, we do have a lot of small towns and small 00:49:09.010 --> 00:49:12.269 cities in America that are suitable for this. 00:49:12.369 --> 00:49:16.349 The fate of our larger cities, I think, is somewhat 00:49:16.349 --> 00:49:20.679 more tragic. because we're not going to be able 00:49:20.679 --> 00:49:24.159 to maintain these so -called metroplexes in their 00:49:24.159 --> 00:49:29.099 current scale. And what happens to them is liable 00:49:29.099 --> 00:49:33.619 to be extremely messy and disorderly, especially 00:49:33.619 --> 00:49:36.820 the ones that are overburdened with skyscrapers, 00:49:36.820 --> 00:49:39.780 although there aren't that many of them, mainly 00:49:39.780 --> 00:49:42.539 New York and Chicago. There are going to be a 00:49:42.539 --> 00:49:46.099 lot of forces in motion. I think that the redevelopment 00:49:46.099 --> 00:49:48.670 that we see in the future... is going to be on 00:49:48.670 --> 00:49:52.409 a much smaller increment and a much finer grain 00:49:52.409 --> 00:49:55.150 than what we've been used to. We're not going 00:49:55.150 --> 00:49:58.710 to be doing 40 -acre redevelopments. We're going 00:49:58.710 --> 00:50:01.369 to be doing the single building lot in a town 00:50:01.369 --> 00:50:05.489 at a time because the investment is simply not 00:50:05.489 --> 00:50:07.949 going to be there to do $50 million projects 00:50:07.949 --> 00:50:10.630 anymore or $300 million projects. We're going 00:50:10.630 --> 00:50:13.190 to have to do it on a much finer scale than that. 00:50:16.139 --> 00:50:20.280 As we also move into an era in which the car 00:50:20.280 --> 00:50:24.880 is a diminishing presence in our lives, we're 00:50:24.880 --> 00:50:28.059 not going to be designing strictly for cars and 00:50:28.059 --> 00:50:30.599 for motoring anymore. And I think we're going 00:50:30.599 --> 00:50:33.260 to naturally return to some of the modes of design 00:50:33.260 --> 00:50:37.260 that can be described as traditional. And when 00:50:37.260 --> 00:50:40.400 we do that, we're going to rediscover that the 00:50:40.400 --> 00:50:44.860 street is the primary public place that we have 00:50:44.860 --> 00:50:47.480 in our... in our world, and that we're going 00:50:47.480 --> 00:50:53.420 to find a way to embellish it and honor it that 00:50:53.420 --> 00:50:58.340 is consistent with a much healthier existence. 00:50:59.219 --> 00:51:03.059 So, you know, a lot of the traditional things 00:51:03.059 --> 00:51:06.619 that we understood how to do in architecture 00:51:06.619 --> 00:51:09.079 and urban design, which we threw in the garbage 00:51:09.079 --> 00:51:12.780 in the mid -20th century, are going to return, 00:51:12.920 --> 00:51:16.590 and indeed they are returning already. That was 00:51:16.590 --> 00:51:19.170 James Howard Kunstler, a name and a voice and 00:51:19.170 --> 00:51:20.909 personality that will be familiar to anybody 00:51:20.909 --> 00:51:23.610 who was following the peak oil scene when it 00:51:23.610 --> 00:51:27.210 was at its most vital. The next person you're 00:51:27.210 --> 00:51:30.289 going to hear from is possibly a name that you 00:51:30.289 --> 00:51:32.590 either don't know, or if you remember it, it's 00:51:32.590 --> 00:51:34.869 only because he was on the Zero -Om podcast once. 00:51:35.289 --> 00:51:38.219 I'm talking about Colin Tudge. who wrote a book 00:51:38.219 --> 00:51:41.579 called Feeding People is Easy. Colin Tudge was 00:51:41.579 --> 00:51:44.639 the guest on Episode 77, Agricultural Intelligence, 00:51:44.900 --> 00:51:49.980 and 78, Fuel vs. Food, Not. Released February 00:51:49.980 --> 00:51:55.139 13th and 20th, 2008. If we are serious about 00:51:55.139 --> 00:51:57.800 wanting to feed people, then we have to start 00:51:57.800 --> 00:51:59.760 from the very beginning, from first principles, 00:51:59.960 --> 00:52:03.400 and say, what do we need to do if we want to 00:52:03.400 --> 00:52:06.340 feed people? And the answer can be provided in 00:52:06.340 --> 00:52:09.260 one simple... sentence which is if you want to 00:52:09.260 --> 00:52:12.219 feed people you have to design agriculture especially 00:52:12.219 --> 00:52:15.639 for that purpose what we need to do is design 00:52:15.639 --> 00:52:19.420 agriculture to feed people now i call that agriculture 00:52:19.420 --> 00:52:22.579 in my book enlightened agriculture and the reason 00:52:22.579 --> 00:52:26.300 i call my book feeding people is easy is that 00:52:26.300 --> 00:52:28.860 i think it really should be possible if we design 00:52:28.860 --> 00:52:31.719 agriculture especially to feed people it should 00:52:31.719 --> 00:52:34.840 be easy to feed or fairly easy to feed everybody 00:52:34.840 --> 00:52:37.320 who is likely to be born onto this earth forever 00:52:37.320 --> 00:52:40.239 and to feed them furthermore to the highest standards 00:52:40.239 --> 00:52:43.900 of nutrition and gastronomy if we continue going 00:52:43.900 --> 00:52:46.219 down the present route then they're heading for 00:52:46.219 --> 00:52:48.519 disaster and i know there are scientists and 00:52:48.519 --> 00:52:50.480 mathematicians who control all sorts of grass 00:52:50.480 --> 00:52:53.920 to show that what they're doing is right but 00:52:53.920 --> 00:52:56.079 actually common sense and what actually happening 00:52:56.079 --> 00:52:58.440 on the ground shows that what they're doing is 00:52:58.440 --> 00:53:01.800 absolutely disastrous I know there are also people 00:53:01.800 --> 00:53:03.960 who say that if you try to design agriculture, 00:53:04.260 --> 00:53:07.019 as it were, to feed people, and you start re 00:53:07.019 --> 00:53:09.300 -using, you know, you start re -invoking the 00:53:09.300 --> 00:53:12.300 kind of methods that people did use 30 years 00:53:12.300 --> 00:53:15.239 ago or 100 years ago, not that I'm talking about 00:53:15.239 --> 00:53:17.059 being old -fashioned, but if you do this, then 00:53:17.059 --> 00:53:18.860 you're simply going backwards. You know, this 00:53:18.860 --> 00:53:21.960 is regressive. And you have to go forward. You 00:53:21.960 --> 00:53:24.139 have to get more industrial life and make more 00:53:24.139 --> 00:53:26.179 money and all that kind of stuff. And to me, 00:53:26.199 --> 00:53:28.769 this is just nonsense. I think... What happened 00:53:28.769 --> 00:53:32.269 over the last 30, 40, 50 years shouldn't be seen 00:53:32.269 --> 00:53:34.530 as progress. It should be seen as a massive diversion 00:53:34.530 --> 00:53:38.269 away from common sense. And I think the world 00:53:38.269 --> 00:53:40.949 has got to come to its senses and say this really 00:53:40.949 --> 00:53:43.389 is just anomalous, what they're doing at the 00:53:43.389 --> 00:53:45.610 moment. We have to move back to first principles. 00:53:46.030 --> 00:53:49.929 In effect, redesign, start again. And then I 00:53:49.929 --> 00:53:52.750 think we're in with a chance. That's basically 00:53:52.750 --> 00:53:56.949 what I think about that. So if you're really 00:53:56.949 --> 00:53:59.409 trying to feed... people well provide maximum 00:53:59.409 --> 00:54:02.550 amount of food easily you finish up focus on 00:54:02.550 --> 00:54:05.070 the arable fit in the horticulture in the best 00:54:05.070 --> 00:54:09.530 places and then just fit in the uh um the the 00:54:09.530 --> 00:54:13.329 the animals well you can if you do that you finish 00:54:13.329 --> 00:54:18.699 up with a lot of plants not much meat and maximum 00:54:18.699 --> 00:54:21.019 variety. The whole thing becomes very, very varied 00:54:21.019 --> 00:54:23.159 if you start doing it in this kind of way, using 00:54:23.159 --> 00:54:25.300 different classes of livestock, different kinds 00:54:25.300 --> 00:54:28.940 of crops, playing one off against another. If 00:54:28.940 --> 00:54:31.500 you then say, well, take this little slogan, 00:54:31.800 --> 00:54:35.860 rock of plants, not much meat, maximum variety. 00:54:36.280 --> 00:54:38.340 This also, this is what you do if you want to 00:54:38.340 --> 00:54:42.000 farm well, but it also summarizes the best of 00:54:42.000 --> 00:54:44.860 the nutritional theory from the last 30 years. 00:54:45.369 --> 00:54:47.550 In other words, farming that's designed simply 00:54:47.550 --> 00:54:51.590 to produce lots of good food will also meet human 00:54:51.590 --> 00:54:54.309 nutritional requirements as well as they can 00:54:54.309 --> 00:54:57.409 be met. If you now look at all the great cooking 00:54:57.409 --> 00:54:59.969 in the world, all the great cuisine, and I'm 00:54:59.969 --> 00:55:02.489 talking about places like India, Turkey, China, 00:55:02.809 --> 00:55:06.670 southern France, Italy, Italy possibly being 00:55:06.670 --> 00:55:09.570 the greatest of all, North Africa, and indeed 00:55:09.570 --> 00:55:11.789 from your own country, you know, Cajun cooking 00:55:11.789 --> 00:55:16.199 and that kind of thing. you find that all great 00:55:16.199 --> 00:55:20.019 cuisines also make use of this fundamental pattern 00:55:20.019 --> 00:55:23.639 of a lot of plants, not much meat and maximum 00:55:23.639 --> 00:55:26.800 variety and what this means is that good farming 00:55:26.800 --> 00:55:30.699 designs and produces lots of good food is perfect 00:55:30.699 --> 00:55:34.079 nutritionally and also supports the greatest 00:55:34.079 --> 00:55:37.340 cuisines that the world has ever produced and 00:55:37.340 --> 00:55:41.260 this is why I'm saying that feeding people is 00:55:41.260 --> 00:55:45.050 easy because actually If you farm reasonably, 00:55:45.210 --> 00:55:47.769 according to a basic good principle, you would... 00:55:47.769 --> 00:55:50.250 Basically, you don't have to ask people even 00:55:50.250 --> 00:55:52.269 to be austere. You don't have to ask them to 00:55:52.269 --> 00:55:54.070 do without. You merely have to ask them to take 00:55:54.070 --> 00:55:56.789 food very, very seriously. And, in fact, to become 00:55:56.789 --> 00:55:59.449 gourmets. And the kind of people who are very 00:55:59.449 --> 00:56:02.250 easy to feed, are people like the Italians who 00:56:02.250 --> 00:56:04.550 really do understand food, and the southern French 00:56:04.550 --> 00:56:07.280 who really do understand food. love their food 00:56:07.280 --> 00:56:09.599 and it's a very high standard they're very easy 00:56:09.599 --> 00:56:11.559 to feed because they like a lot of plants not 00:56:11.559 --> 00:56:14.239 much meat maximum variety so this is the kind 00:56:14.239 --> 00:56:17.099 of route i want to go down now then the other 00:56:17.099 --> 00:56:19.800 thing if you then ask the question but how do 00:56:19.800 --> 00:56:22.059 you farm in this beautiful way lots of plants 00:56:22.059 --> 00:56:24.360 maximum you know not much meat maximum but how 00:56:24.360 --> 00:56:26.599 do you do that the answer is it has to have you 00:56:26.599 --> 00:56:28.460 have to have a very high standard of husbandry 00:56:28.460 --> 00:56:30.800 because this kind of farming is very intricate 00:56:30.800 --> 00:56:33.420 so you have to have lots and lots of farmers 00:56:34.170 --> 00:56:36.050 And if you've got lots and lots of farmers farming 00:56:36.050 --> 00:56:38.090 intricately, then really you're better off with 00:56:38.090 --> 00:56:41.389 lots of small farms, none as farm, family farms, 00:56:41.730 --> 00:56:44.710 than you are by having very big, you know, very 00:56:44.710 --> 00:56:47.670 big places, very big, not, than you are by having 00:56:47.670 --> 00:56:50.130 very big places and just trying to, you know, 00:56:50.130 --> 00:56:53.949 produce monocultures. I admire, in my, enormously, 00:56:54.230 --> 00:56:57.190 you know, and you're one of the great founders 00:56:57.190 --> 00:56:59.940 of your country, Thomas Jefferson. I think they 00:56:59.940 --> 00:57:02.199 got it entirely right in the early 19th century. 00:57:02.300 --> 00:57:04.260 One of the things that Thomas Jefferson said 00:57:04.260 --> 00:57:08.239 was, I envisage America as a country of small 00:57:08.239 --> 00:57:11.199 farmers. And it was a country of small farmers 00:57:11.199 --> 00:57:14.219 until well into the 20th century. And now, as 00:57:14.219 --> 00:57:16.820 I'm sure you know, you have only 1 % of people 00:57:16.820 --> 00:57:19.340 working on the land in your country. In your 00:57:19.340 --> 00:57:21.059 country, you've got more people in jail than 00:57:21.059 --> 00:57:23.039 are working full -time on the land, which I think 00:57:23.039 --> 00:57:25.969 is a pretty foul statistic. The thing is that 00:57:25.969 --> 00:57:28.190 you talk to these big industrial types and they 00:57:28.190 --> 00:57:30.289 say, well, we're interested in farming efficiency. 00:57:30.710 --> 00:57:32.670 Well, it depends what you mean by efficiency. 00:57:32.730 --> 00:57:36.050 If you're interested in money, efficiency defined 00:57:36.050 --> 00:57:38.789 in terms of money, then the system is very efficient 00:57:38.789 --> 00:57:41.210 because they've cut out all the labor, which 00:57:41.210 --> 00:57:43.889 means they've cut out most of the cost, which 00:57:43.889 --> 00:57:46.389 means that they're getting huge and they're putting 00:57:46.389 --> 00:57:48.469 in loads and loads of fertilizer and so on, which 00:57:48.469 --> 00:57:50.909 means they're getting very, very big yield at 00:57:50.909 --> 00:57:53.590 very little cost. And in cash terms, it's very 00:57:53.590 --> 00:57:56.139 efficient. But what we should be talking about, 00:57:56.260 --> 00:57:58.519 if we're interested in seriously in feeding people, 00:57:58.760 --> 00:58:01.119 and if we're talking about the long -term future, 00:58:01.360 --> 00:58:04.119 is biological efficiency. In other words, how 00:58:04.119 --> 00:58:06.159 much energy you're putting in compared with how 00:58:06.159 --> 00:58:08.760 much energy you're getting out. And how sustainability, 00:58:09.139 --> 00:58:11.119 you know, can we really go on farming in this 00:58:11.119 --> 00:58:13.780 kind of way in a hundred years, a thousand years, 00:58:13.900 --> 00:58:15.659 ten thousand years? If the answer to that is 00:58:15.659 --> 00:58:18.800 no, then it's not efficient at all. So you see, 00:58:18.920 --> 00:58:22.250 I just... You see what I mean? I mean, we need 00:58:22.250 --> 00:58:25.210 exactly the kind of farming that the present 00:58:25.210 --> 00:58:28.250 industrialists are doing their best to destroy. 00:58:28.550 --> 00:58:31.230 We need lots of people on the land. We need basically 00:58:31.230 --> 00:58:34.210 agrarian authorities. We need very, very mixed 00:58:34.210 --> 00:58:36.710 agriculture, whereas these people are trying 00:58:36.710 --> 00:58:39.090 to create monocultures. A million agriculture 00:58:39.090 --> 00:58:41.389 is designed to produce food, which is entirely 00:58:41.389 --> 00:58:43.210 different from agriculture that's designed to 00:58:43.210 --> 00:58:46.349 produce money. And that's my non -answer to your 00:58:46.349 --> 00:58:50.260 question. That was Colin Tudge. And now, Joe 00:58:50.260 --> 00:58:53.840 Bajent. Again, unfortunately, the late Joe Bajent. 00:58:54.900 --> 00:58:57.579 This is from Sea Realm Podcast episode number 00:58:57.579 --> 00:59:01.679 149, A Chemical Season of the Mind, released 00:59:01.679 --> 00:59:06.099 April 15, 2009. You know, when I did the book, 00:59:06.159 --> 00:59:09.340 I had to tie it together. The book is about why 00:59:09.340 --> 00:59:11.300 working -class people vote against their own 00:59:11.300 --> 00:59:13.000 interests, and I didn't want to write a political 00:59:13.000 --> 00:59:15.619 book. I wanted to write a human book about... 00:59:15.769 --> 00:59:18.369 people I knew and grew up with. But at the end, 00:59:18.389 --> 00:59:21.670 I had to tie it together some way, and why would 00:59:21.670 --> 00:59:24.269 anybody behave this way against their own interest? 00:59:24.409 --> 00:59:28.929 And so I discussed what I call the American hologram, 00:59:29.050 --> 00:59:32.530 and it's a self -referential bubble in which 00:59:32.530 --> 00:59:36.210 the people inside of it, you know, who directly 00:59:36.210 --> 00:59:38.530 wired particularly to television and movies and 00:59:38.530 --> 00:59:41.349 media, it's like a snow globe, you know, and 00:59:41.349 --> 00:59:46.449 a bloody war killing children. disemboweling 00:59:46.449 --> 00:59:49.289 people and hundreds of thousands of dead is reduced 00:59:49.289 --> 00:59:53.309 to our boys and the flag and america a place 00:59:53.309 --> 00:59:56.449 of church spires and freedom and opportunity 00:59:56.449 --> 01:00:00.820 when the hologram gives us that message as if 01:00:00.820 --> 01:00:03.559 it were we were inside a snow globe and it's 01:00:03.559 --> 01:00:05.960 the only thing we have to refer to is the language 01:00:05.960 --> 01:00:08.659 and the images that were fed practically directly 01:00:08.659 --> 01:00:11.559 to the brain stem from all of our media it's 01:00:11.559 --> 01:00:13.800 the uniform message there's really no big evil 01:00:13.800 --> 01:00:16.559 guy controlling it we manifest it in ourselves 01:00:16.559 --> 01:00:20.579 but the thing about it is is that the system 01:00:20.579 --> 01:00:23.159 that we've created which is a malignant system 01:00:23.159 --> 01:00:25.599 you'd have to call it malignant when you look 01:00:25.599 --> 01:00:28.650 at it in the Total perspective, here we are 6 01:00:28.650 --> 01:00:31.769 % of the world. We use 36 % of its resources. 01:00:31.769 --> 01:00:35.349 I count water and air, by the way. Most of those 01:00:35.349 --> 01:00:39.670 counts don't do that. But everybody is a willing 01:00:39.670 --> 01:00:42.909 prisoner. And that's why I say it's the Stockholm 01:00:42.909 --> 01:00:46.230 Syndrome of the soul. They're willing prisoners. 01:00:46.530 --> 01:00:49.789 They identify with their captors. Capitalism 01:00:49.789 --> 01:00:52.869 is an extractive process. It's a faceless machine 01:00:52.869 --> 01:00:56.039 that exists for one reason. you know, to extract 01:00:56.039 --> 01:01:00.880 from you production and profit, you know. And 01:01:00.880 --> 01:01:05.480 as citizens, well, people have been reduced, 01:01:05.539 --> 01:01:08.639 most people have been reduced to a market demographic. 01:01:09.000 --> 01:01:11.340 They're consumers. They're not citizens, you 01:01:11.340 --> 01:01:14.820 know. In no way are they citizens. You know, 01:01:14.820 --> 01:01:16.900 no matter how active they are within the system, 01:01:16.980 --> 01:01:19.559 the system is the problem. But they're prisoners 01:01:19.559 --> 01:01:22.280 of it. They don't even see that it owns their 01:01:22.280 --> 01:01:24.650 soul. that the very things they see as solutions 01:01:24.650 --> 01:01:28.269 are also part of it buy green do this you know 01:01:28.269 --> 01:01:31.110 capitalism offers you it co -ops everything and 01:01:31.110 --> 01:01:34.630 offers it as a product a consumer identity and 01:01:34.630 --> 01:01:37.250 so on so that's why i say they're prisoners willing 01:01:37.250 --> 01:01:40.329 prisoners of their captors they totally identify 01:01:40.329 --> 01:01:44.260 for instance the bailout of the banks we cannot 01:01:44.260 --> 01:01:47.579 live without corporations corporations feed us 01:01:47.579 --> 01:01:50.699 corporations give us health corporations give 01:01:50.699 --> 01:01:53.980 us transportation we cannot let them die we cannot 01:01:53.980 --> 01:01:56.800 let the banks die and so just like the egyptians 01:01:56.800 --> 01:01:59.139 making their offerings or the aztecs drop the 01:01:59.139 --> 01:02:02.760 temples we get the bailouts the extracted sweat 01:02:02.760 --> 01:02:05.719 of the people is offered up to reserve the vast 01:02:05.719 --> 01:02:08.900 corporations because you know as sole prisoners 01:02:08.900 --> 01:02:12.190 you know They will not die if the corporations 01:02:12.190 --> 01:02:15.909 die, but they believe they will. You know, the 01:02:15.909 --> 01:02:18.929 evidence around them, you know, tells them, oh, 01:02:19.010 --> 01:02:21.789 I will die if the banks fail. I will, you know 01:02:21.789 --> 01:02:23.829 what I mean? The world as I know it will disappear. 01:02:24.190 --> 01:02:27.489 Well, no, 6 % of the world will have their ass 01:02:27.489 --> 01:02:29.469 up the crick real quick, but the rest of the 01:02:29.469 --> 01:02:33.530 world is not as affected. You know, if the banks 01:02:33.530 --> 01:02:36.230 go broke in the third world, gee, what else is 01:02:36.230 --> 01:02:41.340 new? Yes, it causes a lot of pain and inconvenience, 01:02:41.480 --> 01:02:46.659 but life is full of pain and inconvenience. I've 01:02:46.659 --> 01:02:50.500 never made any bones about it. LSD, along with 01:02:50.500 --> 01:02:53.159 Buddhism and psychology, but particularly LSD, 01:02:53.260 --> 01:02:55.780 the other two wouldn't have even happened, was 01:02:55.780 --> 01:02:58.340 the great awakening for me. I was a rural kid 01:02:58.340 --> 01:03:01.239 living in a small town, and I'd read about it 01:03:01.239 --> 01:03:03.099 when I was in the ninth grade and wanted some. 01:03:04.199 --> 01:03:07.769 I'd read about it in Life magazine. This terrifying 01:03:07.769 --> 01:03:09.849 drug, and hell, I never even thought to figure 01:03:09.849 --> 01:03:13.869 it out in my life, but I wanted some. And anyway, 01:03:14.670 --> 01:03:17.510 it finally came along. John Hopkins, a friend 01:03:17.510 --> 01:03:20.070 of mine who was being treated for his homosexuality 01:03:20.070 --> 01:03:22.789 with LSD, went, man, we can take his treatment 01:03:22.789 --> 01:03:25.750 as long as we could possibly push it. I need 01:03:25.750 --> 01:03:28.989 to bring it. And it was legal. It was the first 01:03:28.989 --> 01:03:31.849 three years I took it, it was legal. And from 01:03:31.849 --> 01:03:36.750 the very first time I took it, For once, I saw 01:03:36.750 --> 01:03:39.050 the world, you know, and I saw how malleable 01:03:39.050 --> 01:03:41.909 reality was. And when it was done, I sat and 01:03:41.909 --> 01:03:44.090 cried because I knew life could be this good. 01:03:44.170 --> 01:03:46.570 I knew there was more meaning there. It was more 01:03:46.570 --> 01:03:51.230 to be felt and lived and know and to be, you 01:03:51.230 --> 01:03:54.789 know. And so nothing was ever the same after 01:03:54.789 --> 01:03:57.750 that, but because I had applied myself, like 01:03:57.750 --> 01:04:00.170 so many other people, not because it was LSD. 01:04:00.650 --> 01:04:03.309 Same way with ayahuasca. Until very recently, 01:04:03.329 --> 01:04:06.619 I had a big... refrigerator full of it. I haven't 01:04:06.619 --> 01:04:09.400 taken it in years, but there seems to be a lot 01:04:09.400 --> 01:04:16.059 of interest in it. Anyway, the expansion of consciousness, 01:04:16.219 --> 01:04:20.000 you have to call it that, realizing how malleable 01:04:20.000 --> 01:04:23.380 and that reality is a consensus agreement between 01:04:23.380 --> 01:04:27.039 people. You could also agree on something else 01:04:27.039 --> 01:04:31.280 than capitalism and brutal commuting and murdering 01:04:31.280 --> 01:04:34.760 each other psychologically for jobs. It's possible 01:04:34.760 --> 01:04:37.300 that they agree on something else, and maybe 01:04:37.300 --> 01:04:39.599 that's why I like the third world in my later 01:04:39.599 --> 01:04:42.400 years is that they have agreed on something else. 01:04:43.440 --> 01:04:47.920 I personally think that it was one of the greatest 01:04:47.920 --> 01:04:51.599 threats to the system. I mean, my God, the Republicans 01:04:51.599 --> 01:04:55.019 spent, what was it, $30 million to things like 01:04:55.019 --> 01:04:59.139 the Heritage Foundation erasing the 60s. It was 01:04:59.139 --> 01:05:01.340 a terrible threat, you know, because here you 01:05:01.340 --> 01:05:05.150 had this generation. This baby boom post -war 01:05:05.150 --> 01:05:08.150 generation that was best fed, best educated, 01:05:08.409 --> 01:05:10.809 had every reason to be optimistic. I mean, we 01:05:10.809 --> 01:05:15.969 really believed we were going to win. Now, people 01:05:15.969 --> 01:05:18.510 were told today that we were naive and it was 01:05:18.510 --> 01:05:21.170 all just bell bottoms, pot smoke, beads. Well, 01:05:21.190 --> 01:05:25.570 that's just not so. There was a core of very 01:05:25.570 --> 01:05:29.070 dedicated people who essentially, you have to 01:05:29.070 --> 01:05:32.750 call it spiritual, But anyway, that generation 01:05:32.750 --> 01:05:37.929 was very well equipped. And so the tide of optimism 01:05:37.929 --> 01:05:41.730 was just huge. It wasn't all the war in Vietnam. 01:05:41.769 --> 01:05:45.769 The war in Vietnam was like the war now. But 01:05:45.769 --> 01:05:49.730 it wasn't the catalyst. Everybody wants to politicize 01:05:49.730 --> 01:05:52.630 everything. Yes, yes, yes, yes. There were demonstrations. 01:05:53.050 --> 01:05:56.710 Yes, yes. But the main thing going on was... 01:05:56.889 --> 01:05:58.969 that a generation was becoming consciousness 01:05:58.969 --> 01:06:02.590 mutants, and in a good way, believing an optimistic, 01:06:02.690 --> 01:06:06.110 hopeful message of creativity, love, and peace 01:06:06.110 --> 01:06:10.150 that was a direct threat to the military -industrial 01:06:10.150 --> 01:06:13.050 complex, you know, that was built up particularly 01:06:13.050 --> 01:06:18.409 during World War II. And finally, this was an 01:06:18.409 --> 01:06:20.889 interview that I conducted with both Daniel Pinchbeck 01:06:20.889 --> 01:06:25.010 and Dimitri Orlov. It is from an unnumbered episode 01:06:25.010 --> 01:06:28.190 of the Sea Realm podcast. This is a special Reinventing 01:06:28.190 --> 01:06:31.190 Reality Sea Realm episode, but it is from September 01:06:31.190 --> 01:06:35.570 26th, 2008. Again, the guests are Daniel Pinchbeck 01:06:35.570 --> 01:06:39.090 and Dmitry Orlov. Personally, I feel like probably 01:06:39.090 --> 01:06:41.650 a lot of people at the moment are in this interesting 01:06:41.650 --> 01:06:44.409 paradox where on the one hand I feel anxiety, 01:06:44.809 --> 01:06:48.849 fear, concern that the food supply will go down 01:06:48.849 --> 01:06:51.050 and all that kind of stuff as the financial system 01:06:51.050 --> 01:06:53.639 melts down. On the other hand, I kind of feel 01:06:53.639 --> 01:06:56.420 like popping the champagne cork because, you 01:06:56.420 --> 01:06:58.940 know, I've always hated the Wall Street system 01:06:58.940 --> 01:07:01.739 and, you know, have felt this incredible manipulation 01:07:01.739 --> 01:07:04.699 of artificial value, you know, kind of sucking 01:07:04.699 --> 01:07:08.559 off the, you know, the energy and the life energy 01:07:08.559 --> 01:07:11.760 from the middle class and the, you know, third 01:07:11.760 --> 01:07:14.079 world countries around the world. And the idea 01:07:14.079 --> 01:07:16.320 that that whole system, you know, is now in a 01:07:16.320 --> 01:07:20.489 paraxism. I think, you know, is kind of an exciting 01:07:20.489 --> 01:07:25.690 one. And, you know, so I do think that there's 01:07:25.690 --> 01:07:28.630 obviously the potential for things to become 01:07:28.630 --> 01:07:32.030 very chaotic and dislocated and dangerous and 01:07:32.030 --> 01:07:35.610 for the kind of depressing decline that Dimitri 01:07:35.610 --> 01:07:38.429 outlines to happen. But I also think that there's 01:07:38.429 --> 01:07:41.030 a whole other possibility or set of possibilities 01:07:41.030 --> 01:07:46.079 or set of prospects that are much more... positive 01:07:46.079 --> 01:07:48.699 and much more empowering and equally plausible. 01:07:49.179 --> 01:07:53.860 Even with the stresses on the ecology, we're 01:07:53.860 --> 01:07:58.679 still kind of in a world where we could provide 01:07:58.679 --> 01:08:02.400 for everybody. I mean, if we were to really investigate 01:08:02.400 --> 01:08:04.900 intensive permaculture practices, scale down 01:08:04.900 --> 01:08:07.940 waste of resources, really think about the whole 01:08:07.940 --> 01:08:12.090 planet as a single unified system. we potentially 01:08:12.090 --> 01:08:15.010 could make tremendous progress. So I still feel 01:08:15.010 --> 01:08:19.609 that basically the barrier to a kind of positive 01:08:19.609 --> 01:08:23.170 transformation of human society is our limits 01:08:23.170 --> 01:08:25.670 in our consciousness and our kind of projections 01:08:25.670 --> 01:08:29.289 of shadow and negativity of the system. Yeah, 01:08:29.289 --> 01:08:33.789 well, I don't really have any problem with trying 01:08:33.789 --> 01:08:37.649 these. more optimistic approaches. As far as 01:08:37.649 --> 01:08:39.710 changing the direction of society, we have to 01:08:39.710 --> 01:08:42.829 keep in mind that rational approaches like Buckminster 01:08:42.829 --> 01:08:45.930 Fuller's are almost beside the point because 01:08:45.930 --> 01:08:50.310 we're dealing with an atavistic sort of very 01:08:50.310 --> 01:08:55.109 emotional species that dwells mostly in the realm 01:08:55.109 --> 01:08:59.649 of images as opposed to any sort of rational 01:08:59.649 --> 01:09:02.039 thought. You know, that's why everybody insists 01:09:02.039 --> 01:09:04.420 on having flush toilets and driving cars that 01:09:04.420 --> 01:09:06.939 have four wheels instead of three. You know, 01:09:06.979 --> 01:09:09.239 because that's an image that's embedded in the 01:09:09.239 --> 01:09:11.840 psyche and nothing will dislodge it. You know, 01:09:11.840 --> 01:09:13.779 going back to what Daniel said about the collapse 01:09:13.779 --> 01:09:15.619 of Wall Street, I don't think that it will be 01:09:15.619 --> 01:09:18.479 replaced with anything better. This is basically 01:09:18.479 --> 01:09:21.520 a transfer of wealth to foreigners that will 01:09:21.520 --> 01:09:24.399 be ongoing for quite a while now. And I don't 01:09:24.399 --> 01:09:26.859 think that they'll be nicer to us than we have 01:09:26.859 --> 01:09:29.000 been to ourselves. That would be wishful thinking. 01:09:29.710 --> 01:09:33.829 the basic fundamental way money has been sort 01:09:33.829 --> 01:09:37.890 of constructed. has a deep flaw in that. We created 01:09:37.890 --> 01:09:39.810 the system that's basically debt -based. You 01:09:39.810 --> 01:09:43.109 go to the bank, they check your credit rating 01:09:43.109 --> 01:09:45.670 to see if you can compete aggressively in our 01:09:45.670 --> 01:09:48.390 contemporary society, and then they loan you 01:09:48.390 --> 01:09:50.569 a certain amount of money, but they don't create 01:09:50.569 --> 01:09:52.270 the extra money and interest that you have to 01:09:52.270 --> 01:09:54.010 bring back. So then you have to go into society 01:09:54.010 --> 01:09:56.149 and compete with everybody else in the society 01:09:56.149 --> 01:09:59.149 to bring back that interest, that extra money. 01:09:59.869 --> 01:10:02.989 So that creates a situation where there's this 01:10:02.989 --> 01:10:05.789 constantly expanding bubble of debt. And it also 01:10:05.789 --> 01:10:09.170 creates a mentality of artificial scarcity. And 01:10:09.170 --> 01:10:12.989 I think what's happening now is that the debt 01:10:12.989 --> 01:10:14.890 -based expansion, which is at the basis of the 01:10:14.890 --> 01:10:18.649 capitalist system, is no longer able to function. 01:10:19.130 --> 01:10:21.510 And the reasons for that are, I think, twofold. 01:10:21.569 --> 01:10:24.250 One is that we've seen a globalization of the 01:10:24.250 --> 01:10:27.529 marketplace. earlier analyses of capitalism, 01:10:27.590 --> 01:10:29.369 including like Lenin's and Marx's and so on, 01:10:29.449 --> 01:10:31.729 you know, it requires constant expansion and 01:10:31.729 --> 01:10:34.489 penetration into new markets to survive. And 01:10:34.489 --> 01:10:37.050 so that's reached its limit. And one answer to 01:10:37.050 --> 01:10:39.289 that was like Naomi Klein, the shock doctrine, 01:10:39.350 --> 01:10:41.829 talked about how they began to, you know, capitalists 01:10:41.829 --> 01:10:43.930 began almost like look forward to destruction, 01:10:44.310 --> 01:10:47.010 like hurricanes and terrorist attacks that allowed 01:10:47.010 --> 01:10:49.550 them to rebuild, you know, aspects of their own 01:10:49.550 --> 01:10:52.029 society as if they were new markets, you know, 01:10:52.050 --> 01:10:55.229 but that's really unsustainable. And then the 01:10:55.229 --> 01:10:57.829 other second piece of that is the decline in 01:10:57.829 --> 01:11:00.649 world energy production. So in a way, having 01:11:00.649 --> 01:11:05.430 a debt -fueled expansion model of economics is 01:11:05.430 --> 01:11:07.550 only going to work as there's an increasing abundance 01:11:07.550 --> 01:11:10.550 of cheap oil, cheap energy. And then now that 01:11:10.550 --> 01:11:12.909 that energy is no longer available, there's kind 01:11:12.909 --> 01:11:15.869 of a law of thermodynamics in effect, where the 01:11:15.869 --> 01:11:20.949 debt is just not going to be recoupable. So the 01:11:20.949 --> 01:11:23.229 entire debt -based structure of the system is 01:11:23.229 --> 01:11:27.069 now collapsing. But in a way, I think it's one 01:11:27.069 --> 01:11:28.829 of the best things that could possibly happen 01:11:28.829 --> 01:11:31.890 to us at the moment because, first of all, the 01:11:31.890 --> 01:11:35.090 post -industrial economy is literally destroying 01:11:35.090 --> 01:11:38.170 the ecosystems of the planet and immiserating 01:11:38.170 --> 01:11:43.310 vast populations. So for it to not be able to 01:11:43.310 --> 01:11:46.119 continue... would be a good thing. And for this 01:11:46.119 --> 01:11:48.539 to happen, you know, without, you know, nuclear 01:11:48.539 --> 01:11:52.159 war or, you know, martial law, you know, which, 01:11:52.239 --> 01:11:55.039 you know, it might be on the cards, but it seems 01:11:55.039 --> 01:11:58.399 to be happening in an almost kind of like sudden 01:11:58.399 --> 01:12:02.619 deflation of the whole, you know, hypertrophied 01:12:02.619 --> 01:12:05.680 enterprise. So I think there's a potential here 01:12:05.680 --> 01:12:10.880 for a new proposition of value to sort of enter 01:12:10.880 --> 01:12:14.529 the equation. You know, what I'd like to say 01:12:14.529 --> 01:12:16.970 to Daniel is that, you know, his optimism, I 01:12:16.970 --> 01:12:20.510 hope it's, you know, it's catchy because I'm 01:12:20.510 --> 01:12:23.970 really sick of people telling me that what I'm 01:12:23.970 --> 01:12:27.090 proposing is, you know, doom and gloom or anything 01:12:27.090 --> 01:12:31.430 like that. Because, you know, my point is that 01:12:31.430 --> 01:12:33.609 life goes on no matter what. You just have to 01:12:33.609 --> 01:12:36.170 adjust. You have to get rid of some preconceived 01:12:36.170 --> 01:12:38.609 notions, maybe endure some hardship. But, you 01:12:38.609 --> 01:12:40.750 know, that builds character in some people, at 01:12:40.750 --> 01:12:43.970 least. It's not the end of the world. So I think 01:12:43.970 --> 01:12:47.689 that, you know, I hope that his optimism is helpful. 01:12:48.510 --> 01:12:51.949 And, you know, I enjoyed listening to him and 01:12:51.949 --> 01:12:55.449 responding to him. So thank you, Kimmel. And 01:12:55.449 --> 01:13:04.149 I guess that's it. The last voice you heard there 01:13:04.149 --> 01:13:07.350 was Dmitry Orlov, speaking with me and Daniel 01:13:07.350 --> 01:13:11.159 Pinchbeck. When I decided to revisit this material, 01:13:11.359 --> 01:13:13.619 I expected to approach it mainly as a record 01:13:13.619 --> 01:13:16.720 of failed predictions. Back then, I was deeply 01:13:16.720 --> 01:13:20.439 invested, intellectually, psychologically, emotionally, 01:13:20.739 --> 01:13:23.060 in the idea of a rapid collapse of industrial 01:13:23.060 --> 01:13:26.960 civilization. Sitting here in 2026, with the 01:13:26.960 --> 01:13:29.119 grid still up, the internet still humming, and 01:13:29.119 --> 01:13:32.140 AI embedding itself into everyday life, it is 01:13:32.140 --> 01:13:35.399 impossible not to look back critically on the 01:13:35.399 --> 01:13:38.399 expectations I promoted during that period. But... 01:13:38.720 --> 01:13:41.600 Listening again, I'm reminded that those conversations 01:13:41.600 --> 01:13:43.800 contained more than just failed predictions. 01:13:44.600 --> 01:13:47.800 Again and again, guests returned to a simple 01:13:47.800 --> 01:13:50.920 but profound point. Human flourishing does not 01:13:50.920 --> 01:13:53.659 actually require the scale of energy use, complexity, 01:13:53.859 --> 01:13:56.159 and systemic overhead that industrial society 01:13:56.159 --> 01:14:01.880 demands. Food, shelter, clothing, health, dignity, 01:14:02.260 --> 01:14:06.720 recognition, community. These are basic human 01:14:06.720 --> 01:14:09.710 goods. And we have built a civilization that 01:14:09.710 --> 01:14:12.270 burns staggering quantities of fossil fuel while 01:14:12.270 --> 01:14:15.149 frustrating our yearning to live meaningful lives. 01:14:15.989 --> 01:14:20.710 Feeding people is easy. Community is not thermodynamically 01:14:20.710 --> 01:14:23.810 expensive. Life in industrial society is more 01:14:23.810 --> 01:14:25.909 expensive than we can afford in the long term. 01:14:27.170 --> 01:14:29.310 There was a time when I wanted to build a small 01:14:29.310 --> 01:14:31.890 farmstead for myself and my family and live in 01:14:31.890 --> 01:14:33.550 community with people who shared that vision. 01:14:34.840 --> 01:14:37.539 I don't think preparing for collapse is a workable 01:14:37.539 --> 01:14:39.819 way to create the sort of world I want to live 01:14:39.819 --> 01:14:42.399 in, but I still think the impulse was motivated 01:14:42.399 --> 01:14:46.180 by something true. So, getting over collapse 01:14:46.180 --> 01:14:49.680 is not just an exercise in correcting bad predictions. 01:14:49.899 --> 01:14:52.699 It's also an attempt to recover what was valuable 01:14:52.699 --> 01:14:55.340 in that world. The civilizational criticism. 01:14:55.619 --> 01:14:58.659 The psychological insight. The intuition that 01:14:58.659 --> 01:15:01.920 a viable human life may require much less energy 01:15:01.920 --> 01:15:05.840 throughput. Then the system insists. If you want 01:15:05.840 --> 01:15:07.760 to follow that project, you can sign up for updates 01:15:07.760 --> 01:15:12.680 at crome .org. All right. That's all for now. 01:15:13.760 --> 01:15:14.340 Stay well.